ALICE experience with GEANT4

Since its release in 1999, the LHC experiments have been evaluating GEANT4 in view of adopting it as a replacement for the obsolescent GEANT3 transport MonteCarlo. The ALICE collaboration has decided to perform a detailed physics validation of elementary hadronic processes against experimental data already used in international benchmarks. In one test, proton interactions on different nuclear targets have been simulated, and the distribution of outgoing particles has been compared to data. In a second test, penetration of quasi-monoenergetic low energy neutrons through a thick shielding has been simulated and again compared to experimental data. In parallel, an effort has been put on the integration of GEANT4 in the AliRoot framework. An overview of the present status of ALICE GEANT4 simulation and the remaining problems will be presented. This document will describe in detail the results of these tests, together with the improvements that the GEANT4 team has made to the program as a result of the feedback received from the ALICE collaboration. We will also describe the remaining problems that have been communicated to GEANT4 but not yet addressed.Comment: 8 pages, 12 figures, for the CHEP03 conference proceeding

The Queering of Cuban History: Carmelita Tropicana and Memories of the Revolution

Through the persona Carmelita Tropicana, Alina Troyano explores her Cuban, American, and queer identities by re-writing Cuban history in Memories of the Revolution. Here Troyano queers the heteronormative interpretation of her communities’ past by including alternative sexual and gender representations. Through this political process, Troyano ultimately writes a space for herself within these culture(s). (ICC

Superscaling and Charge-changing Neutrino Cross Sections

The superscaling function extracted from inclusive electron scattering data is used to predict high energy charge-changing neutrino cross sections in the quasi-elastic and $\Delta$ regions.Comment: 3 pages, 2 figures, to appear in the Proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Neutrino Factories and Superbeams, Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati, Frascati (Rome), June 21 - 26, 200

The Virtual Monte Carlo

The concept of Virtual Monte Carlo (VMC) has been developed by the ALICE Software Project to allow different Monte Carlo simulation programs to run without changing the user code, such as the geometry definition, the detector response simulation or input and output formats. Recently, the VMC classes have been integrated into the ROOT framework, and the other relevant packages have been separated from the AliRoot framework and can be used individually by any other HEP project. The general concept of the VMC and its set of base classes provided in ROOT will be presented. Existing implementations for Geant3, Geant4 and FLUKA and simple examples of usage will be described.Comment: Talk from the 2003 Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP03), La Jolla, Ca, USA, March 2003, 8 pages, LaTeX, 6 eps figures. PSN THJT006. See http://root.cern.ch/root/vmc/VirtualMC.htm