Cosmic-ray induced background intercomparison with actively shielded HPGe detectors at underground locations

The main background above 3\,MeV for in-beam nuclear astrophysics studies with $\gamma$-ray detectors is caused by cosmic-ray induced secondaries. The two commonly used suppression methods, active and passive shielding, against this kind of background were formerly considered only as alternatives in nuclear astrophysics experiments. In this work the study of the effects of active shielding against cosmic-ray induced events at a medium deep location is performed. Background spectra were recorded with two actively shielded HPGe detectors. The experiment was located at 148\,m below the surface of the Earth in the Reiche Zeche mine in Freiberg, Germany. The results are compared to data with the same detectors at the Earth's surface, and at depths of 45\,m and 1400\,m, respectively.Comment: Minor errors corrected; final versio

Information on the structure of the a1 from tau decay

The decay $\tau\to \pi\pi\pi\nu$ is analysed using different methods to account for the resonance structure, which is usually ascribed to the a1. One scenario is based on the recently developed techniques to generate axial-vector resonances dynamically, whereas in a second calculation the a1 is introduced as an explicit resonance. We investigate the influence of different assumptions on the result. In the molecule scenario the spectral function is described surprisingly well by adjusting only one free parameter. This result can be systematically improved by adding higher order corrections to the iterated Weinberg-Tomozawa interaction. Treating the a1 as an explicit resonance on the other hand leads to peculiar properties

From real materials to model Hamiltonians with density matrix downfolding

Due to advances in computer hardware and new algorithms, it is now possible to perform highly accurate many-body simulations of realistic materials with all their intrinsic complications. The success of these simulations leaves us with a conundrum: how do we extract useful physical models and insight from these simulations? In this article, we present a formal theory of downfolding--extracting an effective Hamiltonian from first-principles calculations. The theory maps the downfolding problem into fitting information derived from wave functions sampled from a low-energy subspace of the full Hilbert space. Since this fitting process most commonly uses reduced density matrices, we term it density matrix downfolding (DMD).Comment: 24 pages, 12 figures; Huihuo Zheng and Hitesh J. Changlani contributed equally to this wor