Burst Production by Mesotrons

Assuming that, under great absorbing thicknesses, cosmic-ray bursts are cascade showers from high energy soft secondaries produced in the shielding matter by mesotron-electron collisions and by mesotron bremsstrahlung, we have calculated the frequency of burst production as a function of burst size. For the mesotron of spin 1 and moment eℏ/2μc, we have used the previously calculated knock-on formulae, supplemented by our own calculations of the bremsstrahlung; for the latter, the cross section has terms, significant for our work, in E, ln2 E, and ln E. Up to energies close to 10^11 ev, only slight modifications are introduced by omitting altogether those processes which cannot be treated by the Born approximation, and the minimum cross sections we used differ little from those given directly by the Born approximation. Using these cross sections, the cascade theory of showers, and a modified form of the Furry model to take into account the fluctuations, the frequency of burst production was calculated. The sea-level data of Schein and Gill give for the number of bursts of size greater than S, NS∼S^-γ, with γ=1.8. Our calculations give for spin 1, γ∼1.5 and numerically too many by a factor of 20. Similar calculations for the mesotron of spin 0 give γ∼1.8 and the same in number as the observations within an uncertainty of about a factor 1.5. For spin ½ and moment eℏ/2μc, the bursts are approximately twice as numerous as for spin 0. This evidence thus favors spin 0, or possibly spin ½, but tends to exclude spin 1

Octet and Decuplet Baryons in a Confining and Covariant Diquark-Quark Model

We treat baryons as bound states of scalar or axialvector diquarks and a constituent quark which interact through quark exchange. We obtain fully four-dimensional wave functions for both octet and decuplet baryons as solutions of the corresponding Bethe-Salpeter equation. Applications currently under investigation are: electromagnetic and strong form factors and strangeness production processes.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure; talk given by R. Alkofer at PANIC 9

Does the effective Lagrangian for low-energy QCD scale?

QCD is not an approximately scale invariant theory. Hence a dilaton field is not expected to provide a good description of the low-energy dynamics associated with the gluon condensate. Even if such a field is introduced, it remains almost unchanged in hadronic matter at normal densities. This is because the large glueball mass together with the size of the phenomenological gluon condensate ensure that changes to that condensate are very small at such densities. Any changes in hadronic masses and decay constants in matter generated by that condensate will be much smaller that those produced directly by changes in the quark condensate. Hence masses and decay constants are not expected to display a universal scaling.Comment: 7 pages (RevTeX), MC/TH 94/0

Application of transparent microperforated panels to acrylic partitions for desktop use: A case study by prototyping

There are various measures currently in place to prevent the spread of coronavirus (COVID-19); however, in some cases, these can have an adverse effect on the acoustic environment in buildings. For example, transparent acrylic partitions are often used in eating establishments, meeting rooms, offices, etc., to prevent droplet infection. However, acrylic partitions are acoustically reflective; therefore, reflected sounds may cause acoustic problems such as difficulties in conversation or the leakage of conversation. In this study, we performed a prototyping of transparent acrylic partitions to which a microperforated panel (MPP) was applied for sound absorption while maintaining transparency. The proposed partition is a triple-leaf acrylic partition with a single acrylic sheet without holes between two MPP sheets, as including a hole-free panel is important to prevent possible droplet penetration. The sound absorption characteristics were investigated by measuring the sound absorption in a reverberation room. As the original prototype showed sound absorption characteristics with a gentle peak and low values due to the openings on the periphery, it was modified by closing the openings on the top and sides. The sound absorption performance was improved to some extent when the top and sides were closed, although there remains the possibility of further improvement. For this study, only the sound absorption characteristics were examined in the prototype experiments. The effects during actual use will be the subject of future study

Systematic effects from an ambient-temperature, continuously-rotating half-wave plate

We present an evaluation of systematic effects associated with a continuously-rotating, ambient-temperature half-wave plate (HWP) based on two seasons of data from the Atacama B-Mode Search (ABS) experiment located in the Atacama Desert of Chile. The ABS experiment is a microwave telescope sensitive at 145 GHz. Here we present our in-field evaluation of celestial (CMB plus galactic foreground) temperature-to-polarization leakage. We decompose the leakage into scalar, dipole, and quadrupole leakage terms. We report a scalar leakage of ~0.01%, consistent with model expectations and an order of magnitude smaller than other CMB experiments have reported. No significant dipole or quadrupole terms are detected; we constrain each to be <0.07% (95% confidence), limited by statistical uncertainty in our measurement. Dipole and quadrupole leakage at this level lead to systematic error on r<0.01 before any mitigation due to scan cross-linking or boresight rotation. The measured scalar leakage and the theoretical level of dipole and quadrupole leakage produce systematic error of r<0.001 for the ABS survey and focal-plane layout before any data correction such as so-called deprojection. This demonstrates that ABS achieves significant beam systematic error mitigation from its HWP and shows the promise of continuously-rotating HWPs for future experiments.Comment: 11 pages, 8 figures; revision to submitted version, Fig. 5 and Eqs. (14) and (15) corrected; added Fig. 9 and description, text revisions for clarification, Fig. 5 revised for better calibration, corrected labeling errors and plotting bugs in Fig. 3, 4, and Eq. (14) and (15

A Data-Driven Analysis of Robust Automatic Piano Transcription

Algorithms for automatic piano transcription have improved dramatically in recent years due to new datasets and modeling techniques. Recent developments have focused primarily on adapting new neural network architectures, such as the Transformer and Perceiver, in order to yield more accurate systems. In this work, we study transcription systems from the perspective of their training data. By measuring their performance on out-of-distribution annotated piano data, we show how these models can severely overfit to acoustic properties of the training data. We create a new set of audio for the MAESTRO dataset, captured automatically in a professional studio recording environment via Yamaha Disklavier playback. Using various data augmentation techniques when training with the original and re-performed versions of the MAESTRO dataset, we achieve state-of-the-art note-onset accuracy of 88.4 F1-score on the MAPS dataset, without seeing any of its training data. We subsequently analyze these data augmentation techniques in a series of ablation studies to better understand their influence on the resulting models

Characterizing Atacama B-mode Search Detectors with a Half-Wave Plate

The Atacama B-Mode Search (ABS) instrument is a cryogenic ($\sim$10 K) crossed-Dragone telescope located at an elevation of 5190 m in the Atacama Desert in Chile that observed for three seasons between February 2012 and October 2014. ABS observed the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) at large angular scales ($40<\ell<500$) to limit the B-mode polarization spectrum around the primordial B-mode peak from inflationary gravity waves at $\ell \sim100$. The ABS focal plane consists of 480 transition-edge sensor (TES) bolometers. They are coupled to orthogonal polarizations from a planar ortho-mode transducer (OMT) and observe at 145 GHz. ABS employs an ambient-temperature, rapidly rotating half-wave plate (HWP) to mitigate systematic effects and move the signal band away from atmospheric $1/f$ noise, allowing for the recovery of large angular scales. We discuss how the signal at the second harmonic of the HWP rotation frequency can be used for data selection and for monitoring the detector responsivities.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures, conference proceedings submitted to the Journal of Low Temperature Detector

Modulation of CMB polarization with a warm rapidly-rotating half-wave plate on the Atacama B-Mode Search (ABS) instrument

We evaluate the modulation of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) polarization using a rapidly-rotating, half-wave plate (HWP) on the Atacama B-Mode Search (ABS). After demodulating the time-ordered-data (TOD), we find a significant reduction of atmospheric fluctuations. The demodulated TOD is stable on time scales of 500-1000 seconds, corresponding to frequencies of 1-2 mHz. This facilitates recovery of cosmological information at large angular scales, which are typically available only from balloon-borne or satellite experiments. This technique also achieves a sensitive measurement of celestial polarization without differencing the TOD of paired detectors sensitive to two orthogonal linear polarizations. This is the first demonstration of the ability to remove atmospheric contamination at these levels from a ground-based platform using a rapidly-rotating HWP.Comment: 8 pages, 8 figures, Published in RSI under the title "Modulation of cosmic microwave background polarization with a warm rapidly rotating half-wave plate on the Atacama B-Mode Search instrument.