Lorentz invariance relations and Wandzura-Wilczek approximation

A complete list of the so-called Lorentz invariance relations between parton distribution functions is given and some of their consequences are discussed, such as the Burkhardt-Cottingham sum rule. The violation of these relations is considered in a model independent way. It is shown that several Lorentz invariance relations are not violated in a generalized Wandzura-Wilczek approximation, indicating that numerically their violation may be small.Comment: 10 pages; Proceedings of the workshop "Recent Advances in Perturbative QCD and Hadronic Physics", July 20-24, 2009, at ECT*, Trento (Italy), in honor of Anatoli V. Efremov on the occasion of his 75th birthday; to appear in Mod. Phys. Lett.

Monte-Carlo simulation of events with Drell-Yan lepton pairs from antiproton-proton collisions

The complete knowledge of the nucleon spin structure at leading twist requires also addressing the transverse spin distribution of quarks, or transversity, which is yet unexplored because of its chiral-odd nature. Transversity can be best extracted from single-spin asymmetries in fully polarized Drell-Yan processes with antiprotons, where valence contributions are involved anyway. Alternatively, in single-polarized Drell-Yan the transversity happens convoluted with another chiral-odd function, which is likely to be responsible for the well known (and yet unexplained) violation of the Lam-Tung sum rule in the corresponding unpolarized cross section. We present Monte-Carlo simulations for the unpolarized and single-polarized Drell-Yan $\bar{p} p^{(\uparrow)} \to \mu^+ \mu^- X$ at different center-of-mass energies in both configurations where the antiproton beam hits a fixed proton target or it collides on another proton beam. The goal is to estimate the minimum number of events needed to extract the above chiral-odd distributions from future measurements at the HESR ring at GSI. It is important to study the feasibility of such experiments at HESR in order to demonstrate that interesting spin physics can be explored already using unpolarized antiprotons.Comment: Deeply revised text with improved discussion of kinematics and results; added one table; 12 figures. Accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.

Quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa Willd.) flour as novel and safe ingredient in bread formulation.

Aims of this study were to investigate the protein fraction of quinoa flour and to evaluate its in-vitro digestibility for bread formulation. The chemical composition of quinoa protein isolate and flour were investigated. Quinoa flour showed an excellent nutritional profile, including a high protein (about 14%), lipid (about 7%) and ash (about 2%) content. Proteomic and R5 ELISA analyses showed absence of gluten, confirming quinoa as a naturally gluten-free crop. The microstructure of flour and protein isolate, dough and quinoa bakery product were observed through Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM). Furthermore, we studied the protein fraction of quinoa flour and protein isolate and to evaluate their in-vitro digestibility for a functional bread development using a static in vitro model of protein gastrointestinal digestion Romano et al. (2017). MS/MS analysis of gastrointestinal digests had a high degree of digestibility and survival of only few resistant peptides, none of which recognized by western blotting with sera of individuals allergic to cereals nor by in silico screening on allergenic sequence databases. Bakery product exclusively based on quinoa flour was prepared with valid nutritional properties. Results indicated that quinoa flour had a high degree of digestibility, supporting its excellent nutritional value and the use of quinoa as ingredient in substitutive dough formulations

Q^2 dependence of azimuthal asymmetries in semi-inclusive deep inelastic scattering and in Drell-Yan

We study several azimuthal asymmetries in semi-inclusive deep inelastic scattering and in Drell-Yan, interpreting them in the framework of the formalism of the quark correlator, with a particular reference to T-odd functions. The correlator contains an undetermined energy scale, which we fix on the basis of a simple and rather general argument. We find a different value than the one assumed in previous treatments of T-odd functions. This implies different predictions on the Q^2 dependence of the above mentioned asymmetries. Our result about the azimuthal asymmetry of unpolarized Drell-Yan agrees with presently available data, contrary to the alternative assumption on the scale. Predictions on other azimuthal asymmetries could be tested against data of planned experiments on Drell-Yan and semi-inclusive deep inelastic scattering.Comment: 37 pages, 7 figure

Effects of azimuth-symmetric acceptance cutoffs on the measured asymmetry in unpolarized Drell-Yan fixed target experiments

Fixed-target unpolarized Drell-Yan experiments often feature an acceptance depending on the polar angle of the lepton tracks in the laboratory frame. Typically leptons are detected in a defined angular range, with a dead zone in the forward region. If the cutoffs imposed by the angular acceptance are independent of the azimuth, at first sight they do not appear dangerous for a measurement of the cos(2\phi)-asymmetry, relevant because of its association with the violation of the Lam-Tung rule and with the Boer-Mulders function. On the contrary, direct simulations show that up to 10 percent asymmetries are produced by these cutoffs. These artificial asymmetries present qualitative features that allow them to mimic the physical ones. They introduce some model-dependence in the measurements of the cos(2\phi)-asymmetry, since a precise reconstruction of the acceptance in the Collins-Soper frame requires a Monte Carlo simulation, that in turn requires some detailed physical input to generate event distributions. Although experiments in the eighties seem to have been aware of this problem, the possibility of using the Boer-Mulders function as an input parameter in the extraction of Transversity has much increased the requirements of precision on this measurement. Our simulations show that the safest approach to these measurements is a strong cutoff on the Collins-Soper polar angle. This reduces statistics, but does not necessarily decrease the precision in a measurement of the Boer-Mulders function.Comment: 13 pages, 14 figure

Assessing Vegetation Decline Due to Pollution from Solid Waste Management by a Multitemporal Remote Sensing Approach

Nowadays, the huge production of Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) is one of the most strongly felt environmental issues. Consequently, the European Union (EU) delivers laws and regulations for better waste management, identifying the essential requirements for waste disposal operations and the characteristics that make waste hazardous to human health and the envi-ronment. In Italy, environmental regulations define, among other things, the characteristics of sites to be classified as “potentially contaminated”. From this perspective, the Basilicata region is cur-rently one of the Italian regions with the highest number of potentially polluted sites in proportion to the number of inhabitants. This research aimed to identify the possible effects of potentially toxic element (PTE) pollution due to waste disposal activities in three “potentially contaminated” sites in southern Italy. The area was affected by a release of inorganic pollutants with values over the thresholds ruled by national/European legislation. Potential physiological efficiency variations of vegetation were analyzed through the multitemporal processing of satellite images. Landsat 5 Thematic Mapper (TM) and Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) images were used to calcu-late the trend in the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) over the years. The mul-titemporal trends were analyzed using the median of the non-parametric Theil–Sen estimator. Fi-nally, the Mann–Kendall test was applied to evaluate trend significance featuring areas according to the contamination effects on investigated vegetation. The applied procedure led to the exclu-sion of significant effects on vegetation due to PTEs. Thus, waste disposal activities during previ-ous years do not seem to have significantly affected vegetation around targeted sites

Extraction of the pion distribution amplitude from polarized muon pair production

We consider the production of muon pairs from the scattering of pions on longitudinally polarized protons. We calculate the cross section and the single spin asymmetry for this process, taking into account pion bound state effects. We work in the kinematic region where the photon has a large longitudinal momentum fraction, which allows us to treat the bound state problem perturbatively. Our predictions are directly proportional to the pion distribution amplitude. A measurement of the polarized Drell-Yan cross section thus allows the determination of the shape of the pion distribution amplitude.Comment: 13 pages, using revtex, two figures added separately as one uuencoded Z-compressed fil

Effective role of unpolarized nonvalence partons in Drell-Yan single spin asymmetries

We perform numerical simulations of the Sivers effect from single spin asymmetries in Drell-Yan processes on transversely polarized protons. We consider colliding antiprotons and pions at different kinematic conditions of interest for the future planned experiments. We conventionally name "framework I" the results obtained when properly accounting for the various flavor dependent polarized valence contributions in the numerator of the asymmetry, and for the unpolarized nonvalence contribution in its denominator. We name "framework II" the results obtained when taking a suitable flavor average of the valence contributions and neglecting the nonvalence ones. We compare the two methods, also with respect to the input parametrization of the Sivers function which is extracted from data with approximations sometimes intermediate between frameworks I and II. Deviations between the two approaches are found to be small except for dilepton masses below 3 GeV. The Sivers effect is used as a test case; the arguments can be generalized to other interesting azimuthal asymmetries in Drell-Yan processes, such as the Boer-Mulders effect.Comment: 13 pages, 9 figures in eps forma

The first level muon trigger in the central toroid of the ATLAS experiment

We present the design of the first level muon trigger in the central toroid of the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). A trigger is foreseen based on fast, finely segmented gaseous detectors, Resistive Plate Chambers (RPC), to unambiguously identify the interaction bunch crossing. We describe the detectors and the logic scheme of the trigger. © 1995