Characterization of the CBC2 readout ASIC for the CMS strip-tracker high-luminosity upgrade

The CMS Binary Chip 2 (CBC2) is a full-scale prototype ASIC developed for the front-end readout of the high-luminosity upgrade of the CMS silicon strip tracker. The 254-channel, 130 nm CMOS ASIC is designed for the binary readout of double-layer modules, and features cluster-width discrimination and coincidence logic for detecting high-PT track candidates. The chip was delivered in January 2013 and has since been bump-bonded to a dual-chip hybrid and extensively tested. The CBC2 is fully functional and working to specification: we present the result of electrical characterization of the chip, including gain, noise, threshold scan and power consumption, together with the performance of the stub finding logic. Finally we will outline the plan for future developments towards the production version

Monitoring snow avalanches with seismic stations in north-eastern Italy: a test case

The Regional Agency for the Environmental Prevention and Protection of Veneto (Agenzia Regionale per la Prevenzione e Protezione Ambientale del Veneto, ARPAV) was established in October 2007 to monitor and prevent environmental risks in the Veneto region, in north-eastern Italy. The Italian National Institute for Oceanography and Experimental Geophysics (Istituto Nazionale di Oceanografia e di Geofisica Sperimentale, OGS), after the strong earthquake (magnitude M=6.4) occurred in 1976 in the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region, started to operate the North- East Italy (NI) seismic network: it currently consists of 11 very sensitive broad band seismic stations and 21 more simple short period seismic stations, all acquired in real time. OGS also exchanges seismic data with other Italian, Austrian and Slovenian agencies in the surrounding areas, which gives a total number of 73 stations acquired in real time. This makes the OGS the reference agency for the monitoring of the seismic activity in north-eastern Italy. Detecting avalanches by means of seismic stations is indeed a difficult job because of the poor snow-to-earth coupling and the high dumping of the snow. In June 2007 OGS installed in cooperation with the Italian National Institute for Geophysics and Volcanology (Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia, INGV) a broad band seismic station in Agordo, a site located on the Dolomites mountains in Veneto. In the first half of December 2008, the Southern Alps have been affected by 2 episodes of intense snowfall: in the whole Dolomites, above the altitude of 1200 m, between 250 and 350 cm of fresh snow have fallen: similar snowfall events occurred in the last 80 years only in December 1979, 1960, 1959 and 1951. The large amount of snow fell in the 2 episodes, on November 28th - December 6th and on December 10th-17th, failed to consolidate and for several days over a large part of the Alps the danger of avalanches was high (grade 4 out of 5 of the European level system). In the Dolomites, the area of interest of this work, the spontaneous avalanche phenomena was very intense, both during the snowfalls and subsequently. During the 2 periods several large avalanches have fallen reaching the bottom of the valley and were detected by the seismic stations: avalanches of such characteristics were not observed since 1987 (January) and 1977 (February). Given the intensity of the snowfalls, it has not been possible to date all the big avalanches, but only those closest to the towns. In this work we analyze the seismic recordings and relate them to the main characteristics of the avalanches

Testing the global capabilities of the Antelope software suite: fast location and Mb determination of teleseismic events using the ASAIN and GSN seismic networks

The Italian National Institute for Oceanography and Experimental Geophysics (Istituto Nazionale di Oceanografia e di Geofisica Sperimentale, OGS) is running the Antarctic Seismographic Argentinean Italian Network (ASAIN), made of 5 seismic stations located in the Scotia Sea region in Antarctica and in Argentina: data from these stations are transferred in real time to the OGS headquarters in Trieste (Italy) via satellite links. OGS is also running, in close cooperation with the Friuli-Venezia Giulia Civil Defense, the North East (NI) Italy seismic network, making use of the Antelope commercial software suite from BRTT as the main acquisition system. As a test to check the global capabilities of Antelope, we set up an instance of Antelope acquiring data in real time from both the regional ASAIN seismic network in Antarctica and a subset of the Global Seismic Network (GSN) funded by the Incorporated Research Institution for Seismology (IRIS). The facilities of the IRIS Data Management System, and specifically the IRIS Data Management Center, were used for real time access to waveform required in this study. Preliminary results over 1 month period indicated that about 82% of the earthquakes with magnitude M>5.0 listed in the PDE catalogue of the National Earthquake Information Center (NEIC) of the United States Geological Survey (USGS) were also correctly detected by Antelope, with an average location error of 0.05 degrees and average body wave magnitude Mb estimation error below 0.1. The average time difference between event origin time and the actual time of event determination by Antelope was of about 45’: the comparison with 20’, the IASPEI91 P-wave travel time for 180 degrees distance, and 25’, the estimate of our test system data latency, indicate that Antelope is a serious candidate for regional and global early warning systems. Updated figures calculated over a longer period of time will be presented and discussed

Testing the Antelope software suite to realize a distributed seismic database among Austria, Northeastern Italy and Slovenia

Since 2002 the Zentralanstalt für Meteorologie und Geodynamik (ZAMG, http://www.zamg.ac.at/), the Centro di Ricerche Sismologiche (CRS, http://www.crs.inogs.it) of the Istituto Nazionale di Oceanografia e di Geofisica Sperimentale (OGS), the Dipartimento di Scienze della Terra (DST, http://www.dst.univ.trieste.it/) of the Università di Trieste and the Agencija Republike Slovenije Za Okolje (ARSO, http://www.arso.gov.si/) are involved in the EU INTERREG IIIA project “Trans-national seismological networks in the South-Eastern Alps”. The Antelope software suite has been chosen as the common basis for real time data exchange, rapid location of earthquakes and alerting. The Antelope software suite has the capability to exchange data in real time among data centres: for this purpose the standard “orb2orb” software module is used. It uses a proprietary protocol and a point-to-point client/server architecture to exchange data. The last release of the Antelope software suite contains a more sophisticated version of this data exchange module: it is named “orbxchange”. “orbxchange” is a multithreaded version of “orb2orb” which supervises multiple “orb2orb” copies specified in a parameter file; it has the option of switching to alternate servers when no data is being copied from the primary. A distributed real time seismic database has been so established by connecting ZAMG, CRS/OGS, DST/UTS and ARSO Antelope servers with “orbxchange” modules. A test of the above described “orbxchange” features has been conducted artificially shutting down the Antelope servers and/or the data links between them: the results in the data coverage of the multiple copies of the distributed database will be shown. The expected improvement in data availability not only will be very useful for the institutional activities (like rapid earthquake location with magnitude estimation) of the four institutions involved in this test, but moreover its natural extension will be in more mission critical applications, like in public civil protection applications and rapid notification of inherent authorities

Performance measures for object detection evaluation

Cataloged from PDF version of article.We propose a new procedure for quantitative evaluation of object detection algorithms. The procedure consists of a matching stage for finding correspondences between reference and output objects, an accuracy score that is sensitive to object shapes as well as boundary and fragmentation errors, and a ranking step for final ordering of the algorithms using multiple performance indicators. The procedure is illustrated on a building detection task where the resulting rankings are consistent with the visual inspection of the detection maps. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

The Antarctic Seismographic Argentinean Italian Network - ASAIN Improving the instrumental coverage in Antarctica

Scientific investigations of the Scotia Sea region are crucial to understand the history of the Antarctic continent tectonic evolution and the influence of the aperture of the Drake passage in establishing the Circumpolar Antarctic Current, as stressed by many authors (e.g. Lodolo, 2008). The Scotia Sea occupies a roughly rectangular area of about 900.000 km . This area is limited on three sides by the Scotia Arc, formed by islands and oceanic ridges, which is a remnant of the mountain chain that joined the South American Andes to the Antarctic Peninsula. The western border is represented by the about 1000 km wide Drake passage, that separates today the Tierra del Fuego in South America from the Antarctic continent. A review of the tectonics and evolution of the Scotia Sea can be found in Barker, 2001. The start of the geophysical studies in this area dates back to several decades ago, but only after 1990 instrumental passive seismology started to be widely applied to investigate the crustal properties and the properties of the seismic sources responsible for the strong seismicity level observed along the Scotia plate boundaries. ASAIN started operation in 1992 when a temporary seismograph was installed at the Argentinean Base Esperanza. It grew quickly during the nineties and today five stations are operated in Antarctica and two in Tierra del Fuego. All the Antarctic stations transmit real-time data to the OGS and to the Instituto Antartico Argentino. Esperanza (ESPZ), Jubany (JUBA), San Martin (SMAI) and Orcadas(ORCD) stations also participate in the Virtual European Seismographic Broadband Network (VEBSN) transmitting real time data to the Orfeus Data Centre. On January 16 , 2009 BELA station was added to the network. It is operated at the southernmost Argentinean Base Belgrano II (77° 52' S, 34° 37' W ) located on a rocky outcrop (Nunatak Bertrab) on the Filchner barrier. Its inclusion in the VEBSN is also planned. ASAIN data real-time acquisition is performed using SCREAM software, but also Earthworm and Antelope software are being tested at the OGS Seismological Research Centre

Results on Multiple Coulomb Scattering from 12 and 20 GeV electrons on Carbon targets

Multiple scattering effects of 12 and 20 GeV electrons on 8 and 20 mm thickness carbon targets have been studied with high-resolution silicon microstrip detectors of the UA9 apparatus at the H8 line at CERN. Comparison of the scattering angle between data and GEANT4 simulation shows excellent agreement in the core of the distributions leaving some residual disagreement in the tails.Comment: 14 pages, 16 figures. Updated to match published versio

Plant communities of Italy. The vegetation prodrome

The Vegetation Prodrome of Italy was promoted in 2012 by the Italian "Ministry of Environment, Land and Sea Protection", in collaboration with the "Italian Society of Botany", to provide a comprehensive and systematic catalogue and description of Italian plant communities. The Prodrome that is presented in this paper is the first full organic synthesis of the vegetation of Italy at the alliance syntaxonomic level. It fulfils several needs, the main one being a unified and comprehensive national framework that may make an important contribution to the definition of the European Vegetation Prodrome. Syntaxonomy, as well as taxonomy, is sometimes based on considerations that may in part diverge: several authors tend to favour models that are divisive or aggregative to a greater or lesser extent in terms of flora, biogeography and ecology. These different points of view stimulate the scientific debate and allow the adoption of a framework that is more widely supported. The Prodrome includes 75 classes, 2 subclasses, 175 orders, 6 suborders and 393 alliances. The classes were grouped into nine broad categories according to structural, physiognomic and synecological elements rather than to syntaxonomic criteria. The rank, full valid name, any synonymies and incorrect names are provided for each syntaxon. The short declaration highlights the physiognomy, synecology, syndynamics and distribution of the plant communities that belong to the syntaxon. The Prodrome of the Italian Vegetation is linked to the European Strategy for Biodiversity, the European Habitats Directive and the European Working Groups related to the ecosystems and their services. In addition to basic applications, the Prodrome can be used as a framework for scientific research related to the investigation of the relationships between plant communities and the environmental factors that influence their composition and distribution

Epilepsy and phenylketonuria: a case description and EEG-fMRI findings.

Phenylketonuria (PKU) is characterized by phenylalanine accumulation due to phenylalanine hydroxylase deficiency. Up to 50% of PKU patients experience seizures. We evaluated an adult PKU patient who suffered from absences and primarily generalized tonicclonic seizures, associated with generalized spikeand-wave discharges (GSWs) on EEG. An analysis of blood oxygenation level-dependent (BOLD) signal changes during interictal epileptiform discharges showed early activation of the left perirolandic cortex followed by a BOLD signal decrease within cortical regions belonging to the default mode network and left frontoparietal cortex. Moreover, deactivation of the head of the right caudate nucleus and the left thalamus was observed. The fMRI pattern observed in our patient during GSWs is similar but not identical to that observed in idiopathic generalized epilepsy, suggesting different neurophysiological mechanisms. This is the first description of BOLD-fMRI patterns in a PKU patient with epilepsy. Similar studies in more patients might help to uncover the pathophysiology of seizures in this disease