Exploiting Sentinel-1 amplitude data for glacier surface velocity field measurements. Feasibility demonstration on baltoro glacier

The leading idea of this work is to continuously retrieve glaciers surface velocity through SAR imagery, in particular using the amplitude data from the new ESA satellite sensor Sentinel-1 imagery. These imagery key aspects are the free access policy, the very short revisit time (down to 6 days with the launch of the Sentinel-1B satellite) and the high amplitude resolution (up to 5 m). In order to verify the reliability of the proposed approach, a first experiment has been performed using Sentinel-1 imagery acquired over the Karakoram mountain range (North Pakistan) and Baltoro and other three glaciers have been investigated. During this study, a stack of 11 images acquired in the period from October 2014 to September 2015 has been used in order to investigate the potentialities of the Sentinel-1 SAR sensor to retrieve the glacier surface velocity every month. The aim of this test was to measure the glacier surface velocity between each subsequent pair, in order to produce a time series of the surface velocity fields along the investigated period. The necessary co-registration procedure between the images has been performed and subsequently the glaciers areas have been sampled using a regular grid with a 250 × 250 meters posting. Finally the surface velocity field has been estimated, for each image pair, using a template matching procedure, and an outlier filtering procedure based on the signal to noise ratio values has been applied, in order to exclude from the analysis unreliable points. The achieved velocity values range from 10 to 25 meters/month and they are coherent to those obtained in previous studies carried out on the same glaciers and the results highlight that it is possible to have a continuous update of the glacier surface velocity field through free Sentinel-1 imagery, that could be very useful to investigate the seasonal effects on the glaciers fluid-dynamics

Dust tracking techniques applied to the STARDUST facility: First results

An important issue related to future nuclear fusion reactors fueled with deuterium and tritium is the creation of large amounts of dust due to several mechanisms (disruptions, ELMs and VDEs). The dust size expected in nuclear fusion experiments (such as ITER) is in the order of microns (between 0.1 and 1000 μm). Almost the total amount of this dust remains in the vacuum vessel (VV). This radiological dust can re-suspend in case of LOVA (loss of vacuum accident) and these phenomena can cause explosions and serious damages to the health of the operators and to the integrity of the device. The authors have developed a facility, STARDUST, in order to reproduce the thermo fluid-dynamic conditions comparable to those expected inside the VV of the next generation of experiments such as ITER in case of LOVA. The dust used inside the STARDUST facility presents particle sizes and physical characteristics comparable with those that created inside the VV of nuclear fusion experiments. In this facility an experimental campaign has been conducted with the purpose of tracking the dust re-suspended at low pressurization rates (comparable to those expected in case of LOVA in ITER and suggested by the General Safety and Security Report ITER-GSSR) using a fast camera with a frame rate from 1000 to 10,000 images per second. The velocity fields of the mobilized dust are derived from the imaging of a two-dimensional slice of the flow illuminated by optically adapted laser beam. The aim of this work is to demonstrate the possibility of dust tracking by means of image processing with the objective of determining the velocity field values of dust re-suspended during a LOVA

Search for dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks in √s = 13 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector

A search for weakly interacting massive particle dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks is presented. Final states containing third-generation quarks and miss- ing transverse momentum are considered. The analysis uses 36.1 fb−1 of proton–proton collision data recorded by the ATLAS experiment at √s = 13 TeV in 2015 and 2016. No significant excess of events above the estimated backgrounds is observed. The results are in- terpreted in the framework of simplified models of spin-0 dark-matter mediators. For colour- neutral spin-0 mediators produced in association with top quarks and decaying into a pair of dark-matter particles, mediator masses below 50 GeV are excluded assuming a dark-matter candidate mass of 1 GeV and unitary couplings. For scalar and pseudoscalar mediators produced in association with bottom quarks, the search sets limits on the production cross- section of 300 times the predicted rate for mediators with masses between 10 and 50 GeV and assuming a dark-matter mass of 1 GeV and unitary coupling. Constraints on colour- charged scalar simplified models are also presented. Assuming a dark-matter particle mass of 35 GeV, mediator particles with mass below 1.1 TeV are excluded for couplings yielding a dark-matter relic density consistent with measurements