Construction of the Soudan 2 detector

Progress in the construction of the Soudan 2 nucleon decay detector which is being built at the Soudan iron mine in Minnesota is discussed. The expected event rate and characteristics of low energy neutrino events, muon events, multiple muon events, and other cosmic ray phenomena are discussed

A mobile data acquisition system

A mobile data aquisition (MobiDAQ) was developed for the ATLAS central hadronic calorimeter (TileCal). MobiDAQ has been designed in order to test the functionalities of the TileCal front-end electronics and to acquire calibration data before the final back-end electronics were built and tested. MobiDAQ was also used to record the first cosmic ray events acquired by an ATLAS subdetector in the underground experimental area

Experimental study of the reactions e(+)e(-)→e(+)e(-) and e(+)e(-)→γγ at 29 GeV

This is the publisher's version, also available electronically from http://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevD.34.3286.This paper reports measurements of the differential cross sections for the reactions e(+)e(-)→e(+)e(-) (Bhabha scattering) and e(+)e(-)→γγ (γ-pair production). The reactions are studied at a center-of-mass energy of 29 GeV and in the polar-angular region ‖costheta‖154 GeV and Λ->220 GeV for Bhabha scattering, and Λ+>59 GeV and Λ->59 GeV for γ-pair production

Soudan 2 data acquisition and trigger electronics

The 1.1 kton Soudan 2 calorimetric drift-chamber detector is read out by 16K anode wires and 32K cathode strips. Preamps from each wire or strip are bussed together in groups of 8 to reduce the number of ADC channels. The resulting 6144 channels of ionization signal are flash-digitized every 200 ns and stored in RAM. The raw data hit patterns are continually compared with programmable trigger multiplicity and adjacency conditions. The data acquisition process is managed in a system of 24 parallel crates each containing an Intel 80C86 microprocessor, which supervises a pipe-lined data compactor, and allows transfer of the compacted data via CAMAC to the host computer. The 80C86's also manage the local trigger conditions and can perform some parallel processing of the data. Due to the scale of the system and multiplicity of identical channels, semi-custom gate array chips are used for much of the logic, utilizing 2.5 micron CMOS technology

Glucocorticoid Receptor and Sequential P53 Activation by Dexamethasone Mediates Apoptosis and Cell Cycle Arrest of Osteoblastic MC3T3-E1 Cells

Glucocorticoids play a pivotal role in the proliferation of osteoblasts, but the underlying mechanism has not been successfully elucidated. In this report, we have investigated the molecular mechanism which elucidates the inhibitory effects of dexamethasone on murine osteoblastic MC3T3-E1 cells. It was found that the inhibitory effects were largely attributed to apoptosis and G1 phase arrest. Both the cell cycle arrest and apoptosis were dependent on glucocorticoid receptor (GR), as they were abolished by GR blocker RU486 pre-treatment and GR interference. G1 phase arrest and apoptosis were accompanied with a p53-dependent up-regulation of p21 and pro-apoptotic genes NOXA and PUMA. We also proved that dexamethasone can’t induce apoptosis and cell cycle arrest when p53 was inhibited by p53 RNA interference. These data demonstrate that proliferation of MC3T3-E1 cell was significantly and directly inhibited by dexamethasone treatment via aberrant GR activation and subsequently P53 activation

Shower development of particles with momenta from 15 GeV to 150 GeV in the CALICE scintillator-tungsten hadronic calorimeter

We present a study of showers initiated by electrons, pions, kaons, and protons with momenta from 15 GeV to 150 GeV in the highly granular CALICE scintillator-tungsten analogue hadronic calorimeter. The data were recorded at the CERN Super Proton Synchrotron in 2011. The analysis includes measurements of the calorimeter response to each particle type as well as measurements of the energy resolution and studies of the longitudinal and radial shower development for selected particles. The results are compared to Geant4 simulations (version 9.6.p02). In the study of the energy resolution we include previously published data with beam momenta from 1 GeV to 10 GeV recorded at the CERN Proton Synchrotron in 2010.Comment: 35 pages, 21 figures, 8 table

Performance of the first prototype of the CALICE scintillator strip electromagnetic calorimeter

A first prototype of a scintillator strip-based electromagnetic calorimeter was built, consisting of 26 layers of tungsten absorber plates interleaved with planes of 45x10x3 mm3 plastic scintillator strips. Data were collected using a positron test beam at DESY with momenta between 1 and 6 GeV/c. The prototype's performance is presented in terms of the linearity and resolution of the energy measurement. These results represent an important milestone in the development of highly granular calorimeters using scintillator strip technology. This technology is being developed for a future linear collider experiment, aiming at the precise measurement of jet energies using particle flow techniques

Uses and Abuses of Effective Lagrangians

Motivated by past and recent analyses we critically re-examine the use of effective lagrangians in the literature to constrain new physics and to determine the `physics reach' of future experiments. We demonstrate that many calculations, such as those involving anomalous trilinear gauge-boson couplings, either considerably overestimate loop-induced effects, or give ambiguous answers. The source of these problems is the use of cutoffs to evaluate the size of such operators in loop diagrams. In contrast to other critics of these loop estimates, we prove that the inclusion of nonlinearly-realized gauge invariance into the low-energy lagrangian is irrelevant to this conclusion. We use an explicit example using known multi-Higgs physics above the weak scale to underline these points. We show how to draw conclusions regarding the nature of the unknown high-energy physics without making reference to low-energy cutoffs.Comment: 36 page

The Time Structure of Hadronic Showers in highly granular Calorimeters with Tungsten and Steel Absorbers

The intrinsic time structure of hadronic showers influences the timing capability and the required integration time of hadronic calorimeters in particle physics experiments, and depends on the active medium and on the absorber of the calorimeter. With the CALICE T3B experiment, a setup of 15 small plastic scintillator tiles read out with Silicon Photomultipliers, the time structure of showers is measured on a statistical basis with high spatial and temporal resolution in sampling calorimeters with tungsten and steel absorbers. The results are compared to GEANT4 (version 9.4 patch 03) simulations with different hadronic physics models. These comparisons demonstrate the importance of using high precision treatment of low-energy neutrons for tungsten absorbers, while an overall good agreement between data and simulations for all considered models is observed for steel.Comment: 24 pages including author list, 9 figures, published in JINS