Calibration of a shock wave position sensor using artificial neural networks

This report discusses the calibration of a shock wave position sensor. The position sensor works by using artificial neural networks to map cropped CCD frames of the shadows of the shock wave into the value of the shock wave position. This project was done as a tutorial demonstration of method and feasibility. It used a laboratory shadowgraph, nozzle, and commercial neural network package. The results were quite good, indicating that artificial neural networks can be used efficiently to automate the semi-quantitative applications of flow visualization

Imprints of massive inverse seesaw model neutrinos in lepton flavor violating Higgs boson decays

In this paper we consider a Higgs boson with mass and other properties compatible with those of the recently discovered Higgs particle at the LHC, and explore the possibility of new Higgs leptonic decays, beyond the standard model, with the singular feature of being lepton flavor violating (LFV). We study these LFV Higgs decays, $H \to l_k\bar l_m$, within the context of the inverse seesaw model (ISS) and consider the most generic case where three additional pairs of massive right-handed singlet neutrinos are added to the standard model particle content. We require in addition that the input parameters of this ISS model are compatible with the present neutrino data and other constraints, like perturbativity of the neutrino Yukawa couplings. We present a full one-loop computation of the BR($H \to l_k\bar l_m$) rates for the three possible channels, $l_k\bar l_m=\mu \bar \tau,\, e \bar \tau,\, e \bar \mu$, and analyze in full detail the predictions as functions of the various relevant ISS parameters. We study in parallel the correlated one-loop predictions for the radiative decays, $l_m \to l_k \gamma$, within this same ISS context, and require full compatibility of our predictions with the present experimental bounds for the three radiative decays, $\mu \to e \gamma$, $\tau \to \mu \gamma$, and $\tau \to e \gamma$. After exploring the ISS parameter space we conclude on the maximum allowed LFV Higgs decay rates within the ISS.Comment: 29 pages, 13 figures, 1 table, 1 appendix: v4 matches the manuscript published in PR

Lepton flavor violation in low-scale seesaw models: SUSY and non-SUSY contributions

Taking the supersymmetric inverse seesaw mechanism as the explanation for neutrino oscillation data, we investigate charged lepton flavor violation in radiative and 3-body lepton decays as well as in neutrinoless $\mu-e$ conversion in muonic atoms. In contrast to former studies, we take into account all possible contributions: supersymmetric as well as non-supersymmetric. We take CMSSM-like boundary conditions for the soft supersymmetry breaking parameters. We find several regions where cancellations between various contributions exist, reducing the lepton flavor violating rates by an order of magnitude compared to the case where only the dominant contribution is taken into account. This is in particular important for the correct interpretation of existing data as well as for estimating the reach of near future experiments where the sensitivity will be improved by one to two orders of magnitude. Moreover, we demonstrate that ratios like BR($\tau\to 3 \mu$)/BR($\tau\to \mu e^+ e^-$) can be used to determine whether the supersymmetric contributions dominate over the $W^\pm$ and $H^\pm$ contributions or vice versa.Comment: 75 pages, 7 figures. v3: references and comments added. Matches published versio

The Impact of Line Misidentification on Cosmological Constraints from Euclid and other Spectroscopic Galaxy Surveys

We perform forecasts for how baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) scale and redshift-space distortion (RSD) measurements from future spectroscopic emission line galaxy (ELG) surveys such as Euclid are degraded in the presence of spectral line misidentification. Using analytic calculations verified with mock galaxy catalogs from log-normal simulations we find that constraints are degraded in two ways, even when the interloper power spectrum is modeled correctly in the likelihood. Firstly, there is a loss of signal-to-noise ratio for the power spectrum of the target galaxies, which propagates to all cosmological constraints and increases with contamination fraction, $f_c$. Secondly, degeneracies can open up between $f_c$ and cosmological parameters. In our calculations this typically increases BAO scale uncertainties at the 10-20% level when marginalizing over parameters determining the broadband power spectrum shape. External constraints on $f_c$, or parameters determining the shape of the power spectrum, for example from cosmic microwave background (CMB) measurements, can remove this effect. There is a near-perfect degeneracy between $f_c$ and the power spectrum amplitude for low $f_c$ values, where $f_c$ is not well determined from the contaminated sample alone. This has the potential to strongly degrade RSD constraints. The degeneracy can be broken with an external constraint on $f_c$, for example from cross-correlation with a separate galaxy sample containing the misidentified line, or deeper sub-surveys.Comment: 18 pages, 7 figures, updated to match version accepted by ApJ (extra paragraph added at the end of Section 4.3, minor text edits