Historical family systems and the great European divide: the invention of the Slavic East

In 1940, almost two years into World War II, the book, “Agrarverfassung und Bevölkerung in Litauen und Weißrussland”(Agrarian constitution and population in Lithuania and Belarus), was published. The habilitation thesis of the young German historian Werner Conze, the book was an extensive study of premodern family patterns of the peasant serf population in Lithuania from the 16th to the 18th centuries. In an approach that was innovative for its time, Conze used a type of historical source which, up to that point, had not yet received a lot of interest, namely, quantitative data derived from original inventory lists of historic estates. The analysis of the data led Conze to detect a difference between West and East. The comparison emphasised the cultural divide between the Germans and the Slavs to the East by postulating smaller family sizes throughout the western or German-influenced part of historic Lithuania, and larger families with more complex structures throughout the Slavic parts of the country. Thus, Conze also suggested that population growth in the Lithuanian west had been restrained, while the Lithuanian east had experienced abundant population growth. Conze’s scientific insights remain present in today’s historical-demographic literature, and have become an essential building block of any argument in support of the validity and persistence of East-West differentials in family systems in East-Central Europe. Because of this study’s continued importance, it may prove useful to re-examine “Agrarverfassung und Bevölkerung,” looking at its auctorial and ideological context, its methodological procedures, and its empirical content. Our critical assessment of some of Conze’s basic assumptions reveals serious shortcomings in his analysis, which resulted from his tendency to make unwarranted inferences from non-representative and circumstantial evidence, and from his underlying motivation to search for German-Slavic differences. We will discuss the extent to which the pervading notion of the East-West divide in historical East-Central Europe must be revised in response to these shortcomings. By uncovering the inadequacies of Conze’s contribution, we hope to pave the way for a truly scientific understanding of familial characteristics of Eastern Europe, and to end the perpetuation of certain stereotypes of Slavic populations.Belarus, Germany, Lithuania, demographers, family forms, historical demography

The very forward CASTOR calorimeter of the CMS experiment

International audienceThe physics motivation, detector design, triggers, calibration, alignment, simulation, and overall performance of the very forward CASTOR calorimeter of the CMS experiment are reviewed. The CASTOR Cherenkov sampling calorimeter is located very close to the LHC beam line, at a radial distance of about 1 cm from the beam pipe, and at 14.4 m from the CMS interaction point, covering the pseudorapidity range of $-$6.6 $\lt\eta\lt$ $-$5.2. It was designed to withstand high ambient radiation and strong magnetic fields. The performance of the detector in measurements of forward energy density, jets, and processes characterized by rapidity gaps, is reviewed using data collected in proton and nuclear collisions at the LHC

Precision measurement of the structure of the CMS inner tracking system using nuclear interactions

The structure of the CMS inner tracking system has been studied using nuclear interactions of hadrons striking its material. Data from proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV recorded in 2015 at the LHC are used to reconstruct millions of secondary vertices from these nuclear interactions. Precise positions of the beam pipe and the inner tracking system elements, such as the pixel detector support tube, and barrel pixel detector inner shield and support rails, are determined using these vertices. These measurements are important for detector simulations, detector upgrades, and to identify any changes in the positions of inactive elements

Precision measurement of the structure of the CMS inner tracking system using nuclear interactions

The structure of the CMS inner tracking system has been studied using nuclear interactions of hadrons striking its material. Data from proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV recorded in 2015 at the LHC are used to reconstruct millions of secondary vertices from these nuclear interactions. Precise positions of the beam pipe and the inner tracking system elements, such as the pixel detector support tube, and barrel pixel detector inner shield and support rails, are determined using these vertices. These measurements are important for detector simulations, detector upgrades, and to identify any changes in the positions of inactive elements

Description and performance of track and primary-vertex reconstruction with the CMS tracker

A description is provided of the software algorithms developed for the CMS tracker both for reconstructing charged-particle trajectories in proton-proton interactions and for using the resulting tracks to estimate the positions of the LHC luminous region and individual primary-interaction vertices. Despite the very hostile environment at the LHC, the performance obtained with these algorithms is found to be excellent. For tbar t events under typical 2011 pileup conditions, the average track-reconstruction efficiency for promptly-produced charged particles with transverse momenta of p(T) > 0.9GeV is 94% for pseudorapidities of |η| < 0.9 and 85% for 0.9 < |η| < 2.5. The inefficiency is caused mainly by hadrons that undergo nuclear interactions in the tracker material. For isolated muons, the corresponding efficiencies are essentially 100%. For isolated muons of p(T) = 100GeV emitted at |η| < 1.4, the resolutions are approximately 2.8% in p(T), and respectively, 10μm and 30μm in the transverse and longitudinal impact parameters. The position resolution achieved for reconstructed primary vertices that correspond to interesting pp collisions is 10–12μm in each of the three spatial dimensions. The tracking and vertexing software is fast and flexible, and easily adaptable to other functions, such as fast tracking for the trigger, or dedicated tracking for electrons that takes into account bremsstrahlung