Bulletin /

v. 37:1-2 (1966

A Staged Muon-Based Neutrino and Collider Physics Program

We sketch a staged plan for a series of muon-based facilities that can do compelling physics at each stage. Such a plan is unique in its ability to span both the Intensity and Energy Frontiers as defined by the P5 sub-panel of the US High Energy Physics Advisory Committee. This unique physics reach places a muon-based facility in an unequaled position to address critical questions about the nature of the Universe.Comment: Contribution to the CERN Council Open Symposium on European Strategy for Particle Physics, 10-12 Sept. 2012, Krakow, Polan

Non-Cyanide Silver as a Substitute for Cyanide Processes

Since the mid 1800s, silver has been deposited from a cyanide-based formulation on a commercial basis. Commercial non-cyanide silver plating solutions were first made generally available in the late 1970s, and yet today the vast majority, and nearly all commercial silver plating is conducted in formulations that contain cyanide. This study was conducted to determine if non-cyanide silver plating processes that have been developed in the last few years would be suitable replacements for cyanide based formulations.published or submitted for publicatio

Top Quark Production Cross Section at the Tevatron

An overview of the preliminary results of the top quark pair production cross section measurements at a center-of-mass energy of 1.96 TeV carried out by the CDF and D0 collaborations is presented. The data samples used for the analyses are collected in the current Tevatron run and correspond to an integrated luminosity from 360 pb-1 up to 760 pb-1.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figures, Proceedings of 41th Rencontres De Moriond: QCD And Hadronic Interactions, 18-25 Mar 2006, La Thuile, Ital

Top Quark Mass Measurements at CDF

The mass of the top quark M_top is interesting both as a fundamental parameter of the standard model and as an important input to precision electroweak tests. The Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) has a robust program of top quark mass analyses, including the most precise single measurement, M_top = 173.4 +/- 2.8 GeV/c^2, using 680 pb^-1 of ppbar collision data. A combination of current results from CDF gives M_top = 172.0 +/- 2.7 GeV/c^2, surpassing the stated goal of 3 GeV/c^2 precision using 2 fb^-1 of data. Finally, a combination with current D0 results gives a world average top quark mass of 172.5 +/- 2.3 GeV/c^2.Comment: 8 pages, Contribution to Proceedings of the 41st Rencontres de Moriond: Electroweak Interactions and Unified Theories, La Thuile, Italy, 11-18 March 200

Building Brains for Bodies

We describe a project to capitalize on newly available levels of computational resources in order to understand human cognition. We will build an integrated physical system including vision, sound input and output, and dextrous manipulation, all controlled by a continuously operating large scale parallel MIMD computer. The resulting system will learn to "think'' by building on its bodily experiences to accomplish progressively more abstract tasks. Past experience suggests that in attempting to build such an integrated system we will have to fundamentally change the way artificial intelligence, cognitive science, linguistics, and philosophy think about the organization of intelligence. We expect to be able to better reconcile the theories that will be developed with current work in neuroscience

Stacked Weak Lensing Mass Calibration: Estimators, Systematics, and Impact on Cosmological Parameter Constraints

When extracting the weak lensing shear signal, one may employ either locally normalized or globally normalized shear estimators. The former is the standard approach when estimating cluster masses, while the latter is the more common method among peak finding efforts. While both approaches have identical signal-to-noise in the weak lensing limit, it is possible that higher order corrections or systematics considerations make one estimator preferable over the other. In this paper, we consider the efficacy of both estimators within the context of stacked weak lensing mass estimation in the Dark Energy Survey (DES). We find the two estimators have nearly identical statistical precision, even after including higher order corrections, but that these corrections must be incorporated into the analysis to avoid observationally relevant biases in the recovered masses. We also demonstrate that finite bin-width effects may be significant if not properly accounted for, and that the two estimators exhibit different systematics, particularly with respect to contamination of the source catalog by foreground galaxies. Thus, the two estimators may be employed as a systematics cross-check of each other. Stacked weak lensing in the DES should allow for the mean mass of galaxy clusters to be calibrated to about 2% precision (statistical only), which can improve the figure of merit of the DES cluster abundance experiment by a factor of ~3 relative to the self-calibration expectation. A companion paper (Schmidt & Rozo, 2010) investigates how the two types of estimators considered here impact weak lensing peak finding efforts.Comment: 14 pages, 9 figures; comments welcom