Status and prospects for the LHCb upgrade

High-precision measurements performed by the LHCb collaboration have opened a new era in charm physics. Several crucial measurements, particularly in spectroscopy, rare decays and CP violation, can benefit from the increased statistical power of an upgraded LHCb detector. The upgrade of LHCb detector, its software infrastructure, and the impact on charm physics are discussed in detail.Comment: to appear in the proceedings of The 6th International Workshop on Charm Physics (CHARM 2013

Involving medical students in re-orienting health services: a photovoice study.

Abstract Introduction. Health promotion healthcare reorientation aims for health services focused not exclusively on diseases but also on prevention and health promotion. The implementation depends strongly on professionals’ willingness to actively participate in the reorientation. An effective strategy to boost reorientation is to reorient education and role definition of future professionals. This paper examines whether photovoice, a qualitative research method, can be suitable to i) increase future health professionals’ awareness of users’ needs and expectations; and ii) enable a process of critical reflection on role definition and health services organisation. Methods. One hundred and seventy-two medical students participated in the photovoice project. Participants were asked to produce one photo combined with an accompanying caption, responding to a pre-identified question: “What is, in your opinion, the main aspect affecting users' satisfaction/dissatisfaction in a healthcare facility?”. Participants discussed their photos in group discussions (n=16) and participated in data analysis sessions (n=4). Results. Participants' contributions revolved around how services were delivered (e.g., kindness, accessibility, attention to additional needs) rather than the service provided. The students showed their empathic side and proposed smart and inclusive solutions to improve users' overall experience. The proposals often implied a change in behaviour of professionals -their future selves- towards patients and low-cost improvements of organisational practices. Conclusions. This study demonstrated the value of using photovoice to reach medical students to integrate health promotion into their professional identities. The photovoice process, teamwork, and discussions opened a breach into traditional thinking about healthcare aspects often taken for granted or overlooked.  Our results confirm that a mix of advanced education and community-based participatory research activities has the potential to produce medical doctors responsive to users’ needs. This low-cost strategy should be considered for future interventions aimed at reorienting healthcare

Medusa, a multithread 4-body decay fitting and simulation software

We present a new C++14 compliant application to perform physics data analyses of generic 4-body decays in massively parallel platforms. Medusa is highly based on Hydra, a header-only library which hides most of the complexities of writing parallel code for different architectures. Medusa has been tested through the measurement of the CP-violating phase ϕsin b-hadron decays exploiting the data collected by the LHCb experiment. Medusa executes the optimization of the full model, running over 500000 events, until 330 times faster than a non-parallelized program. Medusa is freely available on GitHub under GPL v.3.0 license

Demonstration of track reconstruction with FPGAs on live data at LHCb

The LHCb experiment is currently taking data with a completely renewed DAQ system, capable for the first time of performing a full real-time reconstruction of all collision events occurring at LHC point 8. The Collaboration is now pursuing a further upgrade (“LHCb Upgrade-II”), to enable the experiment to retain the same capability at luminosities an order of magnitude larger than the maximum planned for the current Run3. To this purpose, a vigorous R&D program is ongoing to boost the real-time processing capability of LHCb, needed to cope both with the luminosity increase and the adoption of correspondingly more granular and complex detectors. New heterogeneous computing solutions are being explored, with the aim of moving reconstruction and data reduction to the earliest possible stages of processing. In this talk, we describe the results obtained from a realistic demonstrator for a high-throughput reconstruction of tracking detectors, operating parasitically on real LHCb data from Run3 in a purposely-built testbed facility. This demonstrator is based on a extremely parallel, “Artificial Retina” architecture, implemented in commercial, PCIe-hosted FPGA cards interconnected by fast optical links, and encompasses a sizeable fraction of the LHCb VELO pixel detector. The implications of the results in view of potential applications in HEP are discussed

Correlated 0.01Hz-40Hz seismic and Newtonian noise and its impact on future gravitational-wave detectors

We report correlations in underground seismic measurements with horizontal separations of several hundreds of meters to a few kilometers in the frequency range 0.01Hz to 40Hz. These seismic correlations could threaten science goals of planned interferometric gravitational-wave detectors such as the Einstein Telescope as well as atom interferometers such as MIGA and ELGAR. We use seismic measurements from four different sites, i.e. the former Homestake mine (USA) as well as two candidate sites for the Einstein Telescope, Sos Enattos (IT) and Euregio Maas-Rhein (NL-BE-DE) and the site housing the MIGA detector, LSBB (FR). At all sites, we observe significant coherence for at least 50% of the time in the majority of the frequency region of interest. Based on the observed correlations in the seismic fields, we predict levels of correlated Newtonian noise from body waves. We project the effect of correlated Newtonian noise from body waves on the capabilities of the triangular design of the Einstein Telescope's to observe an isotropic gravitational-wave background (GWB) and find that, even in case of the most quiet site, its sensitivity will be affected up to $\sim$20Hz. The resolvable amplitude of a GWB signal with a negatively sloped power-law behaviour would be reduced by several orders of magnitude. However, the resolvability of a power-law signal with a slope of e.g. $\alpha=0$ ($\alpha=2/3$) would be more moderately affected by a factor $\sim$ 6-9 ($\sim$3-4) in case of a low noise environment. Furthermore, we bolster confidence in our results by showing that transient noise features have a limited impact on the presented results

Active elderly and health-can moderate exercise improve health and wellbeing in older adults? Protocol for a randomized controlled trial

Abstract Background: Aging is marked by a progressive rise in chronic diseases with an impact on social and healthcare costs. Physical activity (PA) may soothe the inconveniences related to chronic diseases, has positive effects on the quality of life and biological rhythms, and can prevent the decline in motor functions and the consequent falls, which are associated with early death and disability in older adults. Methods: We randomized 120 over-65 males and females into groups of similar size and timing and will give each either moderate physical activity or cultural and recreational activities. Being younger than 65 years, inability to participate in physical activity for any medical reason, and involvement in a massive program of physical exercise are the exclusion criteria. The primary outcome measures are quality of life, walking speed, and postural sway. Participants are tested at baseline, post-treatment, and 6-month (24 weeks) and 12-month (48 weeks) follow-ups. Discussion: This study aims at improving the quality of life, wellness, and cognitive functioning in the elderly through a low-cost affordable program of moderate physical activity. Given the growing aging of the world population and the social and economic burden of disability in the elderly, our results might have a major impact on future practices

Array analysis of seismic noise at the Sos Enattos mine, the Italian candidate site for the Einstein Telescope

The area surrounding the dismissed mine of Sos Enattos (Sardinia, Italy) is the Italian candidate site for hosting Einstein Telescope (ET), the third-generation gravitational wave (GW) observatory. One of the goals of ET is to extend the sensitivity down to frequencies well below those currently achieved by GW detectors, i.e. down to 2 Hz. In the bandwidth [1,10] Hz, the seismic noise of anthropogenic origin is expected to represent the major perturbation to the operation of the infrastructure, and the site that will host the future detector must fulfill stringent requirements on seismic disturbances. In this paper we describe the operation of a temporary, 15-element, seismic array deployed in close proximity to the mine. Signals of anthropogenic origin have a transient nature, and their spectra are characterized by a wide spectral lobe spanning the [3,20] Hz frequency interval. Superimposed to this wide lobe are narrow spectral peaks within the [3,8] Hz frequency range. Results from slowness analyses suggest that the origin of these peaks is related to vehicle traffic along the main road running east of the mine. Exploiting the correlation properties of seismic noise, we derive a dispersion curve for Rayleigh waves, which is then inverted for a shallow velocity structure down to depths of ≈≈ 150 m. This data, which is consistent with that derived from analysis of a quarry blast, provide a first assessment of the elastic properties of the rock materials at the site candidate to hosting ET

High Differentiation among Eight Villages in a Secluded Area of Sardinia Revealed by Genome-Wide High Density SNPs Analysis

To better design association studies for complex traits in isolated populations it's important to understand how history and isolation moulded the genetic features of different communities. Population isolates should not “a priori” be considered homogeneous, even if the communities are not distant and part of a small region. We studied a particular area of Sardinia called Ogliastra, characterized by the presence of several distinct villages that display different history, immigration events and population size. Cultural and geographic isolation characterized the history of these communities. We determined LD parameters in 8 villages and defined population structure through high density SNPs (about 360 K) on 360 unrelated people (45 selected samples from each village). These isolates showed differences in LD values and LD map length. Five of these villages show high LD values probably due to their reduced population size and extreme isolation. High genetic differentiation among villages was detected. Moreover population structure analysis revealed a high correlation between genetic and geographic distances. Our study indicates that history, geography and biodemography have influenced the genetic features of Ogliastra communities producing differences in LD and population structure. All these data demonstrate that we can consider each village an isolate with specific characteristics. We suggest that, in order to optimize the study design of complex traits, a thorough characterization of genetic features is useful to identify the presence of sub-populations and stratification within genetic isolates