Quench propagation and detection in the superconducting bus-bars of the ATLAS magnets

The ATLAS superconducting magnet system comprising Barrel (BT) and End-Cap Toroids (ECT) and also Central Solenoid (CS) will store more than 1.5 GJ of magnetic energy. The magnet system will have many superconducting busbars, a few meters long each, running from the current leads to Central Solenoid and Toroids as well as between the coils of each Toroid. Quench development in the busbars, i.e., the normal zone propagation process along the busbar superconductors, is slow and exhibits very low voltages. Therefore, its timely and appropriate detection represents a real challenge. The temperature evolution in the busbars under quench is of primary importance. Conservative calculations of the temperature were performed for all the magnets. Also, a simple and effective method to detect a normal zone in a busbar is presented. A thin superconducting wire, whose normal resistance can be easily detected, is placed in a good thermal contact to busbar. Thus, the wire can operate as straightforward and low-noise quench-detector. (4 refs)

The ATLAS magnet test facility at CERN

The magnet system for the ATLAS detector at CERN consists of a Barrel Toroid (BT), two End-Cap Toroids (ECT) and a Central Solenoid (CS). The overall dimensions of the system are 20 m in diameter by 26 m in length. Before underground installation all coils will be tested on surface in a magnet test facility which is under construction. Moreover two model coils are tested as well as subsystems. In this paper the design and construction of the test facility is presented. (3 refs)

The development of a superconducting undulator for the ILC positron source.

The ILC positron source relies upon a ~200 m long superconducting helical undulator in order to generate the huge flux of gamma photons required. The period is only 11.5 mm but the field strength is ~1 T. The UK is building and testing a full scale 4 m long ILC cryomodule at the moment. It will be completed in 2008 and the results used to demonstrate the feasibility of the full (200 m long) syste

AmrZ is a major determinant of c-di-GMP levels in Pseudomonas fluorescens F113

The transcriptional regulator AmrZ is a global regulatory protein conserved within the pseudomonads. AmrZ can act both as a positive and a negative regulator of gene expression, controlling many genes implicated in environmental adaption. Regulated traits include motility, iron homeostasis, exopolysaccharides production and the ability to form biofilms. In Pseudomonas fluorescens F113, an amrZ mutant presents a pleiotropic phenotype, showing increased swimming motility, decreased biofilm formation and very limited ability for competitive colonization of rhizosphere, its natural habitat. It also shows different colony morphology and binding of the dye Congo Red. The amrZ mutant presents severely reduced levels of the messenger molecule cyclic-di-GMP (c-di-GMP), which is consistent with the motility and biofilm formation phenotypes. Most of the genes encoding proteins with diguanylate cyclase (DGCs) or phosphodiesterase (PDEs) domains, implicated in c-di-GMP turnover in this bacterium, appear to be regulated by AmrZ. Phenotypic analysis of eight mutants in genes shown to be directly regulated by AmrZ and encoding c-di-GMP related enzymes, showed that seven of them were altered in motility and/or biofilm formation. The results presented here show that in P. fluorescens, AmrZ determines c-di-GMP levels through the regulation of a complex network of genes encoding DGCs and PDEs

Analysis of Different Views and Conceptualizations of the Literacy Practices of Pupils, Families, and Teachers in Costa Rican Primary Education

This article is based on a socio-cultural discourse model of literacy, whereby literacy events are regarded as being situated within social practices, creating various formal, informal, and non-formal literacy events that are part of 10multiliteracies. The aim of the research was to analyze primary pupils ’ literacy practices (8–12 years) from the perspectives of 1,354 primary pupils, 1,020 family members, and 96 teachers in Costa Rica, using an ex-post facto design and a survey method. The findings indicate that the three groups of participants (pupils, family members, and teachers) have different views on 15and conceptualizations of literacy practices in school and in the community. The results show that young learners develop their literacy practices according to their different communicative needs inside and outside school. A multimodal literacy is promoted outside school to meet students’ daily communicative needs. However, the school promotes a monomodal lit20eracy, which allows pupils to respond essentially to school needs

Diving deep into digital literacy:emerging methods for research

Literacy studies approaches have tended to adopt a position which enables ethnographic explorations of a wide range of ‘literacies’. An important issue arising is the new challenge required for researchers to capture, manage, and analyse data that highlight the unique character of practices around texts in digital environments. Such inquiries, we argue, require multiple elements of data to be captured and analysed as part of effective literacy ethnographies. These include such things as the unfolding of digital texts, the activities around them, and features of the surrounding social and material environment. This paper addresses these methodological issues drawing from three educationally focused studies, and reporting their experiences and insights within uniquely different contexts. We deal with the issue of adopting new digital methods for literacy research through the notion of a ‘deep dive’ to explore educational tasks in classrooms. Through a discussion of how we approached the capture and analysis of our data, we present methods to better understand digital literacies in education. We then outline challenges posed by our methods, how they can be used more broadly for researching interaction in digital environments, and how they augment transdisciplinary debates and trends in research methods

MICE: The muon ionization cooling experiment. Step I: First measurement of emittance with particle physics detectors

Copyright @ 2011 APSThe Muon Ionization Cooling Experiment (MICE) is a strategic R&D project intended to demonstrate the only practical solution to providing high brilliance beams necessary for a neutrino factory or muon collider. MICE is under development at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) in the United Kingdom. It comprises a dedicated beamline to generate a range of input muon emittances and momenta, with time-of-flight and Cherenkov detectors to ensure a pure muon beam. The emittance of the incoming beam will be measured in the upstream magnetic spectrometer with a scintillating fiber tracker. A cooling cell will then follow, alternating energy loss in Liquid Hydrogen (LH2) absorbers to RF cavity acceleration. A second spectrometer, identical to the first, and a second muon identification system will measure the outgoing emittance. In the 2010 run at RAL the muon beamline and most detectors were fully commissioned and a first measurement of the emittance of the muon beam with particle physics (time-of-flight) detectors was performed. The analysis of these data was recently completed and is discussed in this paper. Future steps for MICE, where beam emittance and emittance reduction (cooling) are to be measured with greater accuracy, are also presented.This work was supported by NSF grant PHY-0842798