The Physics of the B Factories

This work is on the Physics of the B Factories. Part A of this book contains a brief description of the SLAC and KEK B Factories as well as their detectors, BaBar and Belle, and data taking related issues. Part B discusses tools and methods used by the experiments in order to obtain results. The results themselves can be found in Part C

Patterns, trends and sex differences in HIV/AIDS reported mortality in Latin American countries: 1996-2007

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>International cohort studies have shown that antiretroviral treatment (ART) has improved survival of HIV-infected individuals. National population based studies of HIV mortality exist in industrialized settings but few have been presented from developing countries. Our objective was to investigate on a population basis, the regional situation regarding HIV mortality and trends in Latin America (LA) in the context of adoption of public ART policies and gender differences.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Cause of death data from vital statistics registries from 1996 to 2007 with "good" or "average" quality of mortality data were examined. Standardized mortality rates and Poisson regression models by country were developed and differences among countries assessed to identify patterns of HIV mortality over time occurring in Latin America.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Standardized HIV mortality following the adoption of public ART policies was highest in Panama and El Salvador and lowest in Chile. During the study period, three overall patterns were identified in HIV mortality trends- following the adoption of the free ART public policies; a remarkable decrement, a remarkable increment and a slight increment. HIV mortality was consistently higher in males compared to females. Mean age of death attributable to HIV increased in the majority of countries over the study period.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Vital statistics registries provide valuable information on HIV mortality in LA. While the introduction of national policies for free ART provision has coincided with declines in population-level HIV mortality and increasing age of death in some countries, in others HIV mortality has increased. Barriers to effective ART implementation and uptake in the context of free ART public provision policies should be further investigated.</p

Global, regional, and national life expectancy, all-cause mortality, and cause-specific mortality for 249 causes of death, 1980–2015: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2015

Background Improving survival and extending the longevity of life for all populations requires timely, robust evidence on local mortality levels and trends. The Global Burden of Disease 2015 Study (GBD 2015) provides a comprehensive assessment of all-cause and cause-specific mortality for 249 causes in 195 countries and territories from 1980 to 2015. These results informed an in-depth investigation of observed and expected mortality patterns based on sociodemographic measures. Methods We estimated all-cause mortality by age, sex, geography, and year using an improved analytical approach originally developed for GBD 2013 and GBD 2010. Improvements included refinements to the estimation of child and adult mortality and corresponding uncertainty, parameter selection for under-5 mortality synthesis by spatiotemporal Gaussian process regression, and sibling history data processing. We also expanded the database of vital registration, survey, and census data to 14 294 geography–year datapoints. For GBD 2015, eight causes, including Ebola virus disease, were added to the previous GBD cause list for mortality. We used six modelling approaches to assess cause-specific mortality, with the Cause of Death Ensemble Model (CODEm) generating estimates for most causes. We used a series of novel analyses to systematically quantify the drivers of trends in mortality across geographies. First, we assessed observed and expected levels and trends of cause-specific mortality as they relate to the Socio-demographic Index (SDI), a summary indicator derived from measures of income per capita, educational attainment, and fertility. Second, we examined factors affecting total mortality patterns through a series of counterfactual scenarios, testing the magnitude by which population growth, population age structures, and epidemiological changes contributed to shifts in mortality. Finally, we attributed changes in life expectancy to changes in cause of death. We documented each step of the GBD 2015 estimation processes, as well as data sources, in accordance with Guidelines for Accurate and Transparent Health Estimates Reporting (GATHER). Findings Globally, life expectancy from birth increased from 61·7 years (95% uncertainty interval 61·4–61·9) in 1980 to 71·8 years (71·5–72·2) in 2015. Several countries in sub-Saharan Africa had very large gains in life expectancy from 2005 to 2015, rebounding from an era of exceedingly high loss of life due to HIV/AIDS. At the same time, many geographies saw life expectancy stagnate or decline, particularly for men and in countries with rising mortality from war or interpersonal violence. From 2005 to 2015, male life expectancy in Syria dropped by 11·3 years (3·7–17·4), to 62·6 years (56·5–70·2). Total deaths increased by 4·1% (2·6–5·6) from 2005 to 2015, rising to 55·8 million (54·9 million to 56·6 million) in 2015, but age-standardised death rates fell by 17·0% (15·8–18·1) during this time, underscoring changes in population growth and shifts in global age structures. The result was similar for non-communicable diseases (NCDs), with total deaths from these causes increasing by 14·1% (12·6–16·0) to 39·8 million (39·2 million to 40·5 million) in 2015, whereas age-standardised rates decreased by 13·1% (11·9–14·3). Globally, this mortality pattern emerged for several NCDs, including several types of cancer, ischaemic heart disease, cirrhosis, and Alzheimer's disease and other dementias. By contrast, both total deaths and age-standardised death rates due to communicable, maternal, neonatal, and nutritional conditions significantly declined from 2005 to 2015, gains largely attributable to decreases in mortality rates due to HIV/AIDS (42·1%, 39·1–44·6), malaria (43·1%, 34·7–51·8), neonatal preterm birth complications (29·8%, 24·8–34·9), and maternal disorders (29·1%, 19·3–37·1). Progress was slower for several causes, such as lower respiratory infections and nutritional deficiencies, whereas deaths increased for others, including dengue and drug use disorders. Age-standardised death rates due to injuries significantly declined from 2005 to 2015, yet interpersonal violence and war claimed increasingly more lives in some regions, particularly in the Middle East. In 2015, rotaviral enteritis (rotavirus) was the leading cause of under-5 deaths due to diarrhoea (146 000 deaths, 118 000–183 000) and pneumococcal pneumonia was the leading cause of under-5 deaths due to lower respiratory infections (393 000 deaths, 228 000–532 000), although pathogen-specific mortality varied by region. Globally, the effects of population growth, ageing, and changes in age-standardised death rates substantially differed by cause. Our analyses on the expected associations between cause-specific mortality and SDI show the regular shifts in cause of death composition and population age structure with rising SDI. Country patterns of premature mortality (measured as years of life lost [YLLs]) and how they differ from the level expected on the basis of SDI alone revealed distinct but highly heterogeneous patterns by region and country or territory. Ischaemic heart disease, stroke, and diabetes were among the leading causes of YLLs in most regions, but in many cases, intraregional results sharply diverged for ratios of observed and expected YLLs based on SDI. Communicable, maternal, neonatal, and nutritional diseases caused the most YLLs throughout sub-Saharan Africa, with observed YLLs far exceeding expected YLLs for countries in which malaria or HIV/AIDS remained the leading causes of early death. Interpretation At the global scale, age-specific mortality has steadily improved over the past 35 years; this pattern of general progress continued in the past decade. Progress has been faster in most countries than expected on the basis of development measured by the SDI. Against this background of progress, some countries have seen falls in life expectancy, and age-standardised death rates for some causes are increasing. Despite progress in reducing age-standardised death rates, population growth and ageing mean that the number of deaths from most non-communicable causes are increasing in most countries, putting increased demands on health systems. Funding Bill &amp; Melinda Gates Foundation

A search for new physics in central exclusive production using the missing mass technique with the CMS detector and the CMS-TOTEM precision proton spectrometer

A generic search is presented for the associated production of a Z boson or a photon with an additional unspecified massive particle X, pp → pp + Z/γ + X, in proton-tagged events from proton–proton collisions at √s = 13 TeV, recorded in 2017 with the CMS detector and the CMS-TOTEM precision proton spectrometer. The missing mass spectrum is analysed in the 600–1600 GeV range and a fit is performed to search for possible deviations from the background expectation. No significant excess in data with respect to the background predictions has been observed. odelindependent upper limits on the visible production cross section of pp → pp + Z/γ + X are set

Portable Acceleration of CMS Computing Workflows with Coprocessors as a Service

A preprint version of the article is available at: arXiv:2402.15366v2 [physics.ins-det], https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.15366 . Comments: Replaced with the published version. Added the journal reference and the DOI. All the figures and tables can be found at https://cms-results.web.cern.ch/cms-results/public-results/publications/MLG-23-001 (CMS Public Pages). Report numbers: CMS-MLG-23-001, CERN-EP-2023-303.Data Availability: No datasets were generated or analyzed during the current study.Computing demands for large scientific experiments, such as the CMS experiment at the CERN LHC, will increase dramatically in the next decades. To complement the future performance increases of software running on central processing units (CPUs), explorations of coprocessor usage in data processing hold great potential and interest. Coprocessors are a class of computer processors that supplement CPUs, often improving the execution of certain functions due to architectural design choices. We explore the approach of Services for Optimized Network Inference on Coprocessors (SONIC) and study the deployment of this as-a-service approach in large-scale data processing. In the studies, we take a data processing workflow of the CMS experiment and run the main workflow on CPUs, while offloading several machine learning (ML) inference tasks onto either remote or local coprocessors, specifically graphics processing units (GPUs). With experiments performed at Google Cloud, the Purdue Tier-2 computing center, and combinations of the two, we demonstrate the acceleration of these ML algorithms individually on coprocessors and the corresponding throughput improvement for the entire workflow. This approach can be easily generalized to different types of coprocessors and deployed on local CPUs without decreasing the throughput performance. We emphasize that the SONIC approach enables high coprocessor usage and enables the portability to run workflows on different types of coprocessors.SCOAP3. Open access funding provided by CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research

{Search for direct production of GeV-scale resonances decaying to a pair of muons in proton-proton collisions at s \sqrt{s} = 13 TeV}

A search for direct production of low-mass dimuon resonances is performed using = 13 TeV proton-proton collision data collected by the CMS experiment during the 2017–2018 operation of the CERN LHC with an integrated luminosity of 96.6 fb−1. The search exploits a dedicated high-rate trigger stream that records events with two muons with transverse momenta as low as 3 GeV but does not include the full event information. The search is performed by looking for narrow peaks in the dimuon mass spectrum in the ranges of 1.1–2.6 GeV and 4.2–7.9 GeV. No significant excess of events above the expectation from the standard model background is observed. Model-independent limits on production rates of dimuon resonances within the experimental fiducial acceptance are set. Competitive or world’s best limits are set at 90% confidence level for a minimal dark photon model and for a scenario with two Higgs doublets and an extra complex scalar singlet (2HDM+S). Values of the squared kinetic mixing coefficient ε2 in the dark photon model above 10−6 are excluded over most of the mass range of the search. In the 2HDM+S, values of the mixing angle sin(θH) above 0.08 are excluded over most of the mass range of the search with a fixed ratio of the Higgs doublets vacuum expectation tan β = 0.5

What do children observe and learn from televised sports betting advertisements? A qualitative study among Australian children

Objective: To explore children's awareness of sports betting advertising and how this advertising may influence children's attitudes, product knowledge and desire to try sports betting. Methods: Semi-structured qualitative interviews were conducted with 48 children (8-16 years) from Melbourne, Victoria. The interview schedule explored children's recall and interpretations of sports betting advertising, strategies within advertisements that may appeal to children, children's product knowledge and understanding of betting terminology, and factors that may encourage gambling. Interviews were transcribed and thematic analysis was conducted. Results: Children recalled in detail sports betting advertisements that they had seen, with humour the most engaging appeal strategy. They were also able to describe other specific appeal strategies and link these strategies to betting brands. Many children described how advertisements demonstrated how someone would place a bet, with some children recalling the detailed technical language associated with betting. Conclusions: Children had detailed recall of sports betting advertisements and an extensive knowledge of sports betting products and terminology. Implications for public health: To protect children from the potential harms associated with sports betting, governments should consider changing regulations and implementing evidence-based education campaigns to counter the positive messages children receive from the sports betting industry