Quark coalescence in the mid rapidity region at RHIC

We utilize the ALCOR model for mid-rapidity hadron number predictions at AGS, SPS and RHIC energies. We present simple fits for the energy dependence of stopping and quark production.Comment: Talk given at SQM2001, Frankfurt, (LaTeX 8 pages, 5 .ps figs

Data-Driven Distributed Optical Vibration Sensors: A Review

Distributed optical vibration sensors (DOVS) have attracted much attention recently since it can be used to monitor mechanical vibrations or acoustic waves with long reach and high sensitivity. Phase-sensitive optical time domain reflectometry (Φ-OTDR) is one of the most commonly used DOVS schemes. For Φ-OTDR, the whole length of fiber under test (FUT) works as the sensing instrument and continuously generates sensing data during measurement. Researchers have made great efforts to try to extract external intrusions from the redundant data. High signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is necessary in order to accurately locate and identify external intrusions in Φ-OTDR systems. Improvement in SNR is normally limited by the properties of light source, photodetector and FUT. But this limitation can also be overcome by post-processing of the received optical signals. In this context, detailed methodologies of SNR enhancement post-processing algorithms in Φ-OTDR systems have been described in this paper. Furthermore, after successfully locating the external vibrations, it is also important to identify the types of source of the vibrations. Pattern classification is a powerful tool in recognizing the intrusion types from the vibration signals in practical applications. Recent reports of Φ-OTDR systems employed with pattern classification algorithms are subsequently reviewed and discussed. This thorough review will provide a design pathway for improving the performance of Φ-OTDR while maintaining the cost of the system as no additional hardware is required

Evidence of inverted-gravity driven variation in predictive sensorimotor function.

We move our eyes to place the fovea into the part of a viewed scene currently of interest. Recent evidence suggests that each human has signature patterns of eye movements like handwriting which depend on their sensitivity, allocation of attention and experience. Use of implicit knowledge of how earth's gravity influences object motion has been shown to aid dynamic perception. We used a projected ball tracking task with a plain background offering no context cues to probe the effect of acquired experience about physical laws of gravitation on performance differences of 44 participants under a simulated gravity and an atypical (upward) antigravity condition. Performance measured by the unsigned difference between instantaneous eye and stimulus positions (RMSE) was consistently worse in the antigravity condition. In the vertical RMSE, participants took about 200ms longer to improve to the best performance for antigravity compared to gravity trials. The antigravity condition produced a divergence of individual performance which was correlated with levels of questionnaire based quantified traits of schizotypy but not control traits. Grouping participants by high or low traits revealed a negative relationship between schizotypy traits level and both initiation and maintenance of tracking, a result consistent with trait related impoverished sensory prediction. The findings confirm for the first time that where cues enabling exact estimation of acceleration are unavailable, knowledge of gravity contributes to dynamic prediction improving motion processing. With acceleration expectations violated, we demonstrate that antigravity tracking could act as a multivariate diagnostic window into predictive brain function

An Assay for Systematically Quantifying the Vestibulo-Ocular Reflex to Assess Vestibular Function in Zebrafish Larvae

Zebrafish (Danio rerio) larvae are widely used to study otic functions because they possess all five typical vertebrate senses including hearing and balance. Powerful genetic tools and the transparent body of the embryo and larva also make zebrafish a unique vertebrate model to study otic development. Due to its small larval size and moisture requirement during experiments, accurately acquiring the vestibulo-ocular reflex (VOR) of zebrafish larva is challenging. In this report, a new VOR testing device has been developed for quantifying linear VOR (LVOR) in zebrafish larva, evoked by the head motion about the earth horizontal axis. The system has a newly designed larva-shaped chamber, by which live fish can be steadily held without anesthesia, and the system is more compact and easier to use than its predecessors. To demonstrate the efficacy of the system, the LVORs in wild-type (WT), dlx3b and dlx4b morphant zebrafish larvae were measured and the results showed that LVOR amplitudes were consistent with the morphological changes of otoliths induced by morpholino oligonucleotides (MO). Our study represents an important advance to obtain VOR and predict the vestibular conditions in zebrafish

High rate, fast timing Glass RPC for the high {\eta} CMS muon detectors

The HL-LHC phase is designed to increase by an order of magnitude the amount of data to be collected by the LHC experiments. To achieve this goal in a reasonable time scale the instantaneous luminosity would also increase by an order of magnitude up to $6.10^{34} cm^{-2} s^{-1}$ . The region of the forward muon spectrometer ($|{\eta}| > 1.6$) is not equipped with RPC stations. The increase of the expected particles rate up to $2 kHz/cm^{2}$ (including a safety factor 3) motivates the installation of RPC chambers to guarantee redundancy with the CSC chambers already present. The actual RPC technology of CMS cannot sustain the expected background level. The new technology that will be chosen should have a high rate capability and provides a good spatial and timing resolution. A new generation of Glass-RPC (GRPC) using low-resistivity (LR) glass is proposed to equip at least the two most far away of the four high ${\eta}$ muon stations of CMS. First the design of small size prototypes and studies of their performance in high-rate particles flux is presented. Then the proposed designs for large size chambers and their fast-timing electronic readout are examined and preliminary results are provided.Comment: 14 pages, 11 figures, Conference proceeding for the 2016 Resistive Plate Chambers and Related Detector

Web-based monitoring tools for Resistive Plate Chambers in the CMS experiment at CERN

The Resistive Plate Chambers (RPC) are used in the CMS experiment at the trigger level and also in the standard offline muon reconstruction. In order to guarantee the quality of the data collected and to monitor online the detector performance, a set of tools has been developed in CMS which is heavily used in the RPC system. The Web-based monitoring (WBM) is a set of java servlets that allows users to check the performance of the hardware during data taking, providing distributions and history plots of all the parameters. The functionalities of the RPC WBM monitoring tools are presented along with studies of the detector performance as a function of growing luminosity and environmental conditions that are tracked over time