Constraints from orbital motions around the Earth of the environmental fifth-force hypothesis for the OPERA superluminal neutrino phenomenology

It has been recently suggested by Dvali and Vikman that the superluminal neutrino phenomenology of the OPERA experiment may be due to an environmental feature of the Earth, naturally yielding a long-range fifth force of gravitational origin whose coupling with the neutrino is set by the scale M_*, in units of reduced Planck mass. Its characteristic length lambda should not be smaller than one Earth's radius R_e, while its upper bound is expected to be slightly smaller than the Earth-Moon distance (60 R_e). We analytically work out some orbital effects of a Yukawa-type fifth force for a test particle moving in the modified field of a central body. Our results are quite general since they are not restricted to any particular size of lambda; moreover, they are valid for an arbitrary orbital configuration of the particle, i.e. for any value of its eccentricity $e$. We find that the dimensionless strength coupling parameter alpha is constrained to |alpha| <= 1 10^-10-4 10^-9 for 1 R_e <= lambda <= 10 R_e by the laser data of the Earth's artificial satellite LAGEOS II, corresponding to M_* >= 4 10^9 -1.6 10^10. The Moon perigee allows to obtain |alpha| <= 3 10^-11 for the Earth-Moon pair in the range 15 R_e <= lambda = 3 10^10 - 4.5 10^10. Our results are neither necessarily limited to the superluminal OPERA scenario nor to the Dvali-Vikman model, in which it is M_* = 10^-6 at lambda = 1 R_e, in contrast with our bounds: they generally extend to any theoretical scenario implying a fifth-force of Yukawa-type.Comment: LaTex2e, 18 pages, 4 figures, 1 table, 81 reference

Gastropopulism: a sociosemiotic analysis of politicians posing as “the everyday man” via food posts on social media

Scholars have highlighted the bond between contemporary right-wing populism and social media. They have also shown how populist features such as anti-elitism, nationalism and people-centrism are manifested through the exhibition of the leaders’ private lives and everyday habits on social media. This paper contributes to this scholarship by looking at how two of these leaders–Matteo Salvini and Jair Bolsonaro–use one everyday feature of life on their social media accounts: food. Combining discursive semiotics and multimodal critical discourse analysis, I investigate how Salvini and Bolsonaro’s food posts uphold their image of right-wing populist leaders. I argue that food images allow them to strategically communicate features such as being close to the common people, nationalism and the “us versus them” rhetoric, humbleness and authenticity. I also claim that these values are built both by the food represented in the images and their framing, lights, colours, shapes and textures, which allude to the amateur aesthetic of everyday social media use. As much as other features of the everyday social media use, food posts appear to be an ideological tool through which right-wing populism is communicated as a soft, safe and worthwhile political ideology

La leadership di Matteo Renzi. Il leader “televisivo” alla prova delle primarie del Partito democratico

The following article aims to study the 2013 primaries organized by the PD (Partito Democratico) for the election of the National Secretary of the Party. The outcome of said primaries (leader selection), that sees Matteo Renzi as the winner only a few weeks before his appointment to the presidency of the Council of Ministers, is compared to that obtained by the same party in 2007 and in 2009, respectively with Veltroni and Bersani as Secretaries. In this specific case study, the paper aims to analyse the peculiarities that distinguish Renzi’s leadership from that exercised by his predecessors. Within this framework our objective is to comprehend the role played by the mass media, and how Renzi used it in the internal battle for the party’s Secretariat. Our interest lies in understanding whether (and eventually why) television has been the informative tool most used by the people that, in the 2013 primaries, voted for Renzi. The results of our research, conducted using data provided by C&LS (Candidate & Leader Selection - www.cals.it), Standing Group of the Societá Italiana di Scienza Politica, highlight a close correlation between the candidate of choice and the communication tool used to access information regarding the primaries

Cosmogenic-neutron activation of TeO2 and implications for neutrinoless double- β decay experiments

Flux-averaged cross sections for cosmogenic-neutron activation of natural tellurium were measured using a neutron beam containing neutrons of kinetic energies up to ∼800 MeV and having an energy spectrum similar to that of cosmic-ray neutrons at sea level. Analysis of the radioisotopes produced reveals that Ag110m will be a dominant contributor to the cosmogenic-activation background in experiments searching for neutrinoless double-β decay of Te130, such as the Cryogenic Underground Observatory for Rare Events (CUORE) and the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory Plus (SNO+). An estimate of the cosmogenic-activation background in the CUORE experiment has been obtained using the results of this measurement and cross-section measurements of proton activation of tellurium. Additionally, the measured cross sections in this work are also compared with results from semiempirical cross-section calculations

Underground operation of the ICARUS T600 LAr-TPC: first results

Open questions are still present in fundamental Physics and Cosmology, like the nature of Dark Matter, the matter-antimatter asymmetry and the validity of the particle interaction Standard Model. Addressing these questions requires a new generation of massive particle detectors exploring the subatomic and astrophysical worlds. ICARUS T600 is the first large mass (760 ton) example of a novel detector generation able to combine the imaging capabilities of the old famous "bubble chamber" with an excellent energy measurement in huge electronic detectors. ICARUS T600 now operates at the Gran Sasso underground laboratory, studying cosmic rays, neutrino oscillation and proton decay. Physical potentialities of this novel telescope are presented through few examples of neutrino interactions reconstructed with unprecedented details. Detector design and early operation are also reported.Comment: 14 pages, 8 figures, 2 tables. Submitted to Jins

Un anno di elezioni verso le Politiche 2013

Tre importanti eventi vanno analizzati per poter inquadrare al meglio le elezioni politiche del 24 e 25 febbraio 2013. Le elezioni politiche in Spagna, Francia, Grecia e Olanda che si sono svolte tra la fine del 2011 e la fine del 2012 hanno fatto registrare importanti cambiamenti politici nei singoli contesti locali con inevitabili ripercussioni a livello europeo. Le elezioni regionali in Sicilia sono state una fondamentale tappa di avvicinamento alle elezioni politiche italiane, segnando di fatto \u2013 con la sconfitta del centrodestra e il grande successo del Movimento Cinque Stelle \u2013 l\u2019inizio della campagna elettorale. Infine le elezioni primarie e le parlamentarie del centrosinistra hanno contribuito a rendere pi\uf9 chiaro il quadro dell\u2019offerta politica, nonch\ue9 a rimobilitare una quota consistente dell\u2019elettorato italiano in vista delle prossime elezioni. L\u2019analisi di questi tre gruppi di consultazioni permette quindi di delineare il contesto \u2013 nazionale ed internazionale \u2013 di interpretazione per le imminenti elezioni politiche del 24 e 25 febbraio. \uc8 quanto cerca di fare questo Terzo Dossier CISE che raccoglie tutte le analisi, gi\ue0 pubblicate sul sito web CISE tra la fine del 2011 e l\u2019inizio del 2013, di questi tre gruppi di consultazioni. Analisi basate su dati aggregati, stime di flussi elettorali e indagini demoscopiche dell\u2019Osservatorio Politico CISE, con la finalit\ue0 di fornire strumenti utili per interpretare correttamente il contesto di avvicinamento ad un voto cruciale per il nostro paese

Populism and anti-liberal thought: Lega and M5S in the Italian context

Representation, according to the populist rationale and the way how the relationship between démos and power is established, is the core issue of this article. ~us, it discusses how the populist challenge can a|ect, directly and indirectly, the way the representative and liberal democracy works. ~at is, the focus lies on how the populists build their own audience and on the institutional reshu e they propose to enforce the people’s will.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio