3D sensors for the HL-LHC

In order to increase its discovery potential, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) accelerator will be upgraded in the next decade. The high luminosity LHC (HL-LHC) period demands new sensor technologies to cope with increasing radiation fluences and particle rates. The ATLAS experiment will replace the entire inner tracking detector with a completely new silicon-only system. 3D pixel sensors are promising candidates for the innermost layers of the Pixel detector due to their excellent radiation hardness at low operation voltages and low power dissipation at moderate temperatures. Recent developments of 3D sensors for the HL-LHC are presented.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, International Workshops on Radiation Imaging Detectors 201

Accelerating legacy applications with spatial computing devices

Heterogeneous computing is the major driving factor in designing new energy-efficient high-performance computing systems. Despite the broad adoption of GPUs and other specialized architectures, the interest in spatial architectures like field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) has grown. While combining high performance, low power consumption and high adaptability constitute an advantage, these devices still suffer from a weak software ecosystem, which forces application developers to use tools requiring deep knowledge of the underlying system, often leaving legacy code (e.g., Fortran applications) unsupported. By realizing this, we describe a methodology for porting Fortran (legacy) code on modern FPGA architectures, with the target of preserving performance/power ratios. Aimed as an experience report, we considered an industrial computational fluid dynamics application to demonstrate that our methodology produces synthesizable OpenCL codes targeting Intel Arria10 and Stratix10 devices. Although performance gain is not far beyond that of the original CPU code (we obtained a relative speedup of x 0.59 and x 0.63, respectively, for a single optimized main kernel, while only on the Stratix10 we achieved x 2.56 by replicating the main optimized kernel 4 times), our results are quite encouraging to drawn the path for further investigations. This paper also reports some major criticalities in porting Fortran code on FPGA architectures

Preventive Impact of Long-Term Ingestion of Chestnut Honey on Glucose Disorders and Neurodegeneration in Obese Mice

The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the impact of long-term honey ingestion on metabolic disorders and neurodegeneration in mice fed a high-fat diet (HFD). Three groups of mice were fed with a standard diet (STD), HFD or HFD supplemented with honey (HFD-H) for 16 weeks. Biochemical, histological, Western blotting, RT-PCR and Profiler PCR array were performed to assess metabolic parameters, peripheral and central insulin resistance and neurodegeneration. Daily honey intake prevented the HFD-induced glucose dysmetabolism. In fact, it reduced plasma fasting glucose, insulin and leptin concentrations and increased adiponectin levels. It improved glucose tolerance, insulin sensitivity and HOMA index without affecting plasma lipid concentration. HFD mice showed a significantly higher number of apoptotic nuclei in the superficial and deep cerebral cortex, upregulation of Fas-L, Bim and P27 (neuronal pro-apoptotic markers) and downregulation of Bcl-2 and BDNF (anti-apoptotic factors) in comparison with STD- and HFD-H mice, providing evidence for honey neuroprotective effects. PCR-array analysis showed that long-term honey intake increased the expression of genes involved in insulin sensitivity and decreased genes involved in neuroinflammation or lipogenesis, suggesting improvement of central insulin resistance. The expressions of p-AKT and p-GSK3 in HFD-H mice, which were decreased and increased, respectively, in HFD mouse brain, index of central insulin resistance, were similar to STD animals supporting the ability of regular honey intake to protect brain neurons from insulin resistance. In conclusion, the present results provide evidence for the beneficial preventative impact of regular honey ingestion on neuronal damage caused by HFD

A Synergistic Use of a High-Resolution Numerical Weather Prediction Model and High-Resolution Earth Observation Products to Improve Precipitation Forecast

open20siThe Mediterranean region is frequently struck by severe rainfall events causing numerous casualties and several million euros of damages every year. Thus, improving the forecast accuracy is a fundamental goal to limit social and economic damages. Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) models are currently able to produce forecasts at the km scale grid spacing but unreliable surface information and a poor knowledge of the initial state of the atmosphere may produce inaccurate simulations of weather phenomena. The STEAM (SaTellite Earth observation for Atmospheric Modelling) project aims to investigate whether Sentinel satellites constellation weather observation data, in combination with Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) observations, can be used to better understand and predict with a higher spatio-temporal resolution the atmospheric phenomena resulting in severe weather events. Two heavy rainfall events that occurred in Italy in the autumn of 2017 are studied—a localized and short-lived event and a long-lived one. By assimilating a wide range of Sentinel and GNSS observations in a state-of-the-art NWP model, it is found that the forecasts benefit the most when the model is provided with information on the wind field and/or the water vapor content.openLagasio, Martina; Parodi, Antonio; Pulvirenti, Luca; Meroni, Agostino N.; Boni, Giorgio; Pierdicca, Nazzareno; Marzano, Frank S.; Luini, Lorenzo; Venuti, Giovanna; Realini, Eugenio; Gatti, Andrea; Tagliaferro, Giulio; Barindelli, Stefano; Monti Guarnieri, Andrea; Goga, Klodiana; Terzo, Olivier; Rucci, Alessio; Passera, Emanuele; Kranzlmueller, Dieter; Rommen, BjornLagasio, Martina; Parodi, Antonio; Pulvirenti, Luca; Meroni, Agostino N.; Boni, Giorgio; Pierdicca, Nazzareno; Marzano, Frank S.; Luini, Lorenzo; Venuti, Giovanna; Realini, Eugenio; Gatti, Andrea; Tagliaferro, Giulio; Barindelli, Stefano; Monti Guarnieri, Andrea; Goga, Klodiana; Terzo, Olivier; Rucci, Alessio; Passera, Emanuele; Kranzlmueller, Dieter; Rommen, Bjor

Search for direct stau production in events with two hadronic tau-leptons in root s=13 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector

A search for the direct production of the supersymmetric partners ofτ-leptons (staus) in final stateswith two hadronically decayingτ-leptons is presented. The analysis uses a dataset of pp collisions corresponding to an integrated luminosity of139fb−1, recorded with the ATLAS detector at the LargeHadron Collider at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV. No significant deviation from the expected StandardModel background is observed. Limits are derived in scenarios of direct production of stau pairs with eachstau decaying into the stable lightest neutralino and oneτ-lepton in simplified models where the two staumass eigenstates are degenerate. Stau masses from 120 GeV to 390 GeV are excluded at 95% confidencelevel for a massless lightest neutralino

Measurement of the cross-section and charge asymmetry of WW bosons produced in proton-proton collisions at s=8\sqrt{s}=8 TeV with the ATLAS detector

This paper presents measurements of the $W^+ \rightarrow \mu^+\nu$ and $W^- \rightarrow \mu^-\nu$ cross-sections and the associated charge asymmetry as a function of the absolute pseudorapidity of the decay muon. The data were collected in proton--proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 8 TeV with the ATLAS experiment at the LHC and correspond to a total integrated luminosity of 20.2~\mbox{fb^{-1}}. The precision of the cross-section measurements varies between 0.8% to 1.5% as a function of the pseudorapidity, excluding the 1.9% uncertainty on the integrated luminosity. The charge asymmetry is measured with an uncertainty between 0.002 and 0.003. The results are compared with predictions based on next-to-next-to-leading-order calculations with various parton distribution functions and have the sensitivity to discriminate between them.Comment: 38 pages in total, author list starting page 22, 5 figures, 4 tables, submitted to EPJC. All figures including auxiliary figures are available at https://atlas.web.cern.ch/Atlas/GROUPS/PHYSICS/PAPERS/STDM-2017-13

Search for chargino-neutralino production with mass splittings near the electroweak scale in three-lepton final states in √s=13 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector

A search for supersymmetry through the pair production of electroweakinos with mass splittings near the electroweak scale and decaying via on-shell W and Z bosons is presented for a three-lepton final state. The analyzed proton-proton collision data taken at a center-of-mass energy of √s=13  TeV were collected between 2015 and 2018 by the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 139  fb−1. A search, emulating the recursive jigsaw reconstruction technique with easily reproducible laboratory-frame variables, is performed. The two excesses observed in the 2015–2016 data recursive jigsaw analysis in the low-mass three-lepton phase space are reproduced. Results with the full data set are in agreement with the Standard Model expectations. They are interpreted to set exclusion limits at the 95% confidence level on simplified models of chargino-neutralino pair production for masses up to 345 GeV