Tracker Operation and Performance at the Magnet Test and Cosmic Challenge

During summer 2006 a fraction of the CMS silicon strip tracker was operated in a comprehensive slice test called the Magnet Test and Cosmic Challenge (MTCC). At the MTCC, cosmic rays detected in the muon chambers were used to trigger the readout of all CMS sub-detectors in the general data acquisition system and in the presence of the 4 T magnetic field produced by the CMS superconducting solenoid. This document describes the operation of the Tracker hardware and software prior, during and after data taking. The performance of the detector as resulting from the MTCC data analysis is also presented

Proton-Antiproton Annihilation and Meson Spectroscopy with the Crystal Barrel

This report reviews the achievements of the Crystal Barrel experiment at the Low Energy Antiproton Ring (LEAR) at CERN. During seven years of operation Crystal Barrel has collected very large statistical samples in pbarp annihilation, especially at rest and with emphasis on final states with high neutral multiplicity. The measured rates for annihilation into various two-body channels and for electromagnetic processes have been used to test simple models for the annihilation mechanism based on the quark internal structure of hadrons. From three-body annihilations three scalar mesons, a0(1450), f0(1370) and f0(1500) have been established in various decay modes. One of them, f0(1500), may be identified with the expected ground state scalar glueball.Comment: 64 pages, LATEX file, 36 figures are available as ps files at http://afuz01.cern.ch/claude/ Submitted to Reviews of Modern Physic

CMS physics technical design report : Addendum on high density QCD with heavy ions

Peer reviewe

Commissioning and performance of the CMS silicon strip tracker with cosmic ray muons

This is the Pre-print version of the Article. The official published version of the Paper can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2010 IOPDuring autumn 2008, the Silicon Strip Tracker was operated with the full CMS experiment in a comprehensive test, in the presence of the 3.8 T magnetic field produced by the CMS superconducting solenoid. Cosmic ray muons were detected in the muon chambers and used to trigger the readout of all CMS sub-detectors. About 15 million events with a muon in the tracker were collected. The efficiency of hit and track reconstruction were measured to be higher than 99% and consistent with expectations from Monte Carlo simulation. This article details the commissioning and performance of the Silicon Strip Tracker with cosmic ray muons.This work is supported by FMSR (Austria); FNRS and FWO (Belgium); CNPq, CAPES, FAPERJ, and FAPESP (Brazil); MES (Bulgaria); CERN; CAS, MoST, and NSFC (China); COLCIENCIAS (Colombia); MSES (Croatia); RPF (Cyprus); Academy of Sciences and NICPB (Estonia); Academy of Finland, ME, and HIP (Finland); CEA and CNRS/IN2P3 (France); BMBF, DFG, and HGF (Germany); GSRT (Greece); OTKA and NKTH (Hungary); DAE and DST (India); IPM (Iran); SFI (Ireland); INFN (Italy); NRF (Korea); LAS (Lithuania); CINVESTAV, CONACYT, SEP, and UASLP-FAI (Mexico); PAEC (Pakistan); SCSR (Poland); FCT (Portugal); JINR (Armenia, Belarus, Georgia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan); MST and MAE (Russia); MSTDS (Serbia); MICINN and CPAN (Spain); Swiss Funding Agencies (Switzerland); NSC (Taipei); TUBITAK and TAEK (Turkey); STFC (United Kingdom); DOE and NSF (USA)

Modeling, Design and Simulation of a Reconfigurable Aquatic Habitat for Life Support Control Research

Presented at the 41st AIAA International Conference on Environmental Systems (ICES), 17-21 July 2011, Portland, Oregon.This paper presents the design, modeling, and simulation of a reconfigurable aquatic habitat for experiments in regenerative life support automation; it supports the use of aquatic habitats as a small-scale approach to automation experiments relevant to larger- scale regenerative life support systems. The habitat consists of a ten-gallon tank with four compartments, containing animal and botanical elements. The water volume serves as the medium through which life-support compounds, like oxygen, are transferred between organisms. A motorized hatch allows reconfiguration of the system to allow or prevent the exchange of gases with the atmosphere, and enables the study of fail-safe automation mechanisms. Sensors and actuators measure and intervene to regulate life support variables in the water. The model serves as an analytical reference for future tests in hardware settings, and to test advanced control architectures and policies that enable the system to operate safely and with increasing levels of autonomy, allowing for human intervention if necessary. The goal of the aquatic habitat is to enable life support control concepts that may be challenging to test in larger-scale life support systems. The mathematical description of the dynamic model of the system is presented in this paper with results from simulations of a distributed control approach applied to the habitat

Educational Potential of Experiments on Life Support Systems with Ground-Based Aquatic Habitats

Presented at the 2012 Global Space Exploration Conference, 22-24 May 2012, Washington DC, USA.On April 10th 2010, at the Kennedy Space Center, President Barack Obama pronounced his “Remarks on Space Exploration in the 21st Century.” In his speech, the President included life support systems as a technology that “can help improve daily lives of people here on Earth, as well as testing and improving upon capabilities in space.” One of challenges to enable students to conduct research on life support systems is the need for educational capabilities that open up opportunities to learn and experiment with small-scale versions of these systems. Such is the case in higher-education institutions with programs that include courses chemistry, biology, electronics and computer science. These institutions may have educational platforms in their labs to study attributes of robustness or optimality of controllers driving servomechanisms and electric motors, but there is not one that may allow the study of ecophysiological performance of higher plants in closed-loop life support systems, for example. This paper presents aquatic habitats as educational platforms for experiments in life support systems, and the lessons learned while working with undergraduate students at the Human-Automation Systems Lab of the Georgia Institute of Technology. It presents the challenges that these systems pose to students in engineering and sciences, and highlights the opportunities to support higher-education-level teaching and learning of concepts in mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology

The Role of the Registry in Cancer Control

Presented at the 41st AIAA International Conference on Environmental Systems (ICES), 17-21 July 2011, Portland, Oregon.The automation of bioregenerative life support systems poses challenges for the development of model-based approaches given the varying characteristic of the biological processes that constitute them. Switching control paradigms offer an alternative for the management of such uncertainty by introducing flexibility into the control path and allowing for different control modes depending on the operational conditions of the system. This paper presents a perception-based switching control strategy that makes use of sensor information to define and act upon those conditions. Abundant sensor information gives rise to sensing spaces in which the operational conditions of the system are found. A decomposition of the sensing spaces into perceptual elements allows for automation and integration strategies, and for the implementation of fail-safe and fail-operational mechanisms. This paper proposes the use of agents based on fuzzy associative memories to decompose sensing spaces into granular structures composed of n-dimensional non-interactive fuzzy sets. The granular structures allow for the incremental development and automation of the system by associating a control task to each granule. The method presented in this paper is applied to the dynamic model of a reconfigurable aquatic habitat. The habitat serves as a small-scale bioregenerative test bed for life support control research. The method used in this paper may also enable cognitive resources to enhance human interaction with the system