Major events and minor episodes

Bruno Pontecorvo was a freshly graduated twentyone years old physicist when he joined, in the summer of 1934, the research group led by Enrico Fermi. In October the Panisperna boys would make their most important discovery – radioactivity induced by slow neutrons – and shortly thereafter would be parted by personal and historical events. This paper describes some episodes of those early years and of later periods, sketching a portrait of the team: starting from the extraordinary human and scientific experience of via Panisperna, up to the patent negotiations in USA, to which Pontecorvo’s flight to URSS put an end with unexpected consequences; getting to his first return in Italy, allowed by the sovietic government in 1978, on the occasion of the conference celebrating Edoardo Amaldi’s 70th anniversary. That was the first of several encounters of the author of this paper with Bruno Pontecorvo, which are here briefly recounted, as minor episodes giving a personal perspective on the man

Present challenges in hadrontherapy techniques

Hadrontherapy is a high-precision technique in cancer radiation therapy, which allows obtaining a superior conformal treatment with respect to photons used in conventional radiation therapy. To reach this ambitious goal without reducing the patient throughput needed in a hospital-based environment, the physical and radiobiological properties of charged hadrons, protons and carbon ions in particular, have to be exploited at best, making use of the most modern technologies issued from research in nuclear and particle physics. In the present days, we are assisting to a continuous technological challenge, leading to the conception and to the development of innovative methods and instruments. In this paper, the most relevant challenges in dose delivery systems, gantries, imaging, quality assurance and particle accelerators are reviewe

Conformality and Gauge Coupling Unification

It has been recently proposed to embed the standard model in a conformal gauge theory to resolve the hierarchy problem, and to avoid assuming either grand unification or low-energy supersymmetry. By model building based on string-field duality we show how to maintain the successful prediction of an electroweak mixing angle with $sin^2\theta \simeq 0.231$ in conformal gauge theories with three chiral families.Comment: 8 pages LaTe

The Paths of Unification In The GUST With The G x G Gauge Groups of E(8) x E(8)

In the framework of the four dimensional heterotic superstring with free fermions we discuss the rank eight and/or sixteen Grand Unified String Theories (GUST) which contain the SU(3)_H - gauge family symmetry. We explicitly investigate the paths of the unification in the GUST with gauge symmetry G x G = [SU(5) x U(1) x (SU(3) x U(1))_H]^2. We show that the GUSTs with the G x G gauge group allow to make the scale of unification to be consistent with the string scale M_SU = g_{string} * 5 * 10^17 GeV.Comment: 18 pages, 2 Postscript figures, uses epsf.st

Comment On ``Grand Unification and Supersymmetric Threshold"

Barbieri and Hall have argued that threshold effects at the scale of grand-unification wipe out predictions on the SUSY scale, M_S. Using triviality arguments we give upper bounds on ultraheavy particles, while proton stability gives lower bounds on the mass of the higgs color-triplet. We find no useful lower bound on the $\Sigma$ supermultiplet, but if the strong coupling constant is as large as recent experiments suggest, unification in the minimal SUSY SU(5) model requires that the $Sigma$ masses be $\sim 10^{-7}M_V$ and that the color octet and weak triplet be split in mass by a factor of $\sim$100.Comment: 6 pages (revised

High-power test results of a 3 GHz single-cell cavity

Compact, reliable and little consuming accelerators are required for the treatment of tumours with ions. TERA proposes the "cyclinac", composed of a high-frequency, fast-cycling linac which boosts the energy of the particles previously accelerated in a cyclotron. The dimensions of the linac can be reduced if high gradients are used. TERA initiated a high-gradient test program to understand the operational limit of such structures. The program foresees the design, prototyping and high-power test of several high-gradient structures operating at 3 and 5.7 GHz. The high-power tests of the 3 GHz single-cell cavity were completed in Winter 2012. The maximum BDR threshold measured for Emax of 170 MV/m and RF pulses of 2.5 \mu s was 3 x 10-6 bpp/m

Phenomenological Analysis of pppp and pˉp\bar{p}p Elastic Scattering Data in the Impact Parameter Space

We use an almost model-independent analytical parameterization for $pp$ and $\bar{p}p$ elastic scattering data to analyze the eikonal, profile, and inelastic overlap functions in the impact parameter space. Error propagation in the fit parameters allows estimations of uncertainty regions, improving the geometrical description of the hadron-hadron interaction. Several predictions are shown and, in particular, the prediction for $pp$ inelastic overlap function at $\sqrt{s}=14$ TeV shows the saturation of the Froissart-Martin bound at LHC energies.Comment: 15 pages, 16 figure

Neutrino masses and flavor symmetries

The problem of neutrino masses and mixing angles is analysed in a class of supersymmetric grand unified models, with SO(10) gauge symmetry and global U(2) flavour symmetry. Adopting the seesaw mechanism for the generation of the neutrino masses, one obtains a mass matrix for the left-handed neutrinos which is directly related to the parameters of the charged sector, while the unknown parameters of the right-handed Majorana mass matrix are inglobed in a single factor.Comment: 17 pages, 1 eps figure, uses graphicx.sty, LaTeX 2e, to be published on "Il Nuovo Cimento

Consistency Conditions for AdS/CFT Embeddings

The group embeddings used in orbifolding the AdS/CFT correspondence to arrive at quiver gauge field theories are studied for both supersymmetric and non-supersymmetric cases. For an orbifold $AdS_5 \times S^5/\Gamma$ the conditions for embeddings of the finite group $\Gamma$ in the $SU(4) \sim O(6)$ isotropy of $S^5$ are stated in the form of consistency rules, both for Abelian and Non-Abelian $\Gamma$.Comment: 10 pages LaTe

Development of a fast proton range radiography system for quality assurance in hadrontherapy

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