Magnetic monopole searches in the cosmic radiation

There has been a big effort in the past twenty years with at least a couple of generations of experiments which searched for supermassive GUT magnetic monopoles in the cosmic radiation. Here a short review of these searches is given, together with a brief description of the theoretical framework and of the detection techniques

Nuclear re-interaction effects in quasi-elastic neutrino nucleus scattering

The quasi-elastic neutrino-nucleus cross section has been calculated by using a Fermi gas model corrected to consider the re-scattering between the emitted nucleon and the rest nucleus. As an example of the relevance of this effect we show results for the muon production cross section on 16O target.Comment: 7 pages, 4 Postscript figures, Contribution to NuInt01 Workshop, KEK, Tsukuba, Japa

Multiscale image analysis applied to gamma/hadron discrimination for VHE gamma-ray astronomy with ARGO-YBJ

Intrinsic differences in the processes involved in the development of electromagnetic and hadronic showers in the atmosphere have been evidenced by means of a careful analysis of the event image given by the ARGO-YBJ detector. The images have been analyzed at different length scales and their multifractal nature has been studied. The use of the multiscale approach together with a properly designed and trained Artificial Neural Network, allowed us to obtain a good gamma/hadron discrimination power. If confirmed by further studies on different event cathegories, this result would allow to nearly double the detector sensitivity to gamma ray sources.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, Presented at the "Incontro Nazionale di Astrofisica delle Alte Energie", Rome 15-16 May 200

Interactions of Cosmic Rays in the primary energy range (0.1-1) PeV studied by the ARGO-YBJ Experiment

The ARGO-YBJ detector layout, features and location offer a unique possibility for a detailed study of several characteristics of the hadronic component of the cosmic ray flux in an energy range hardly accessed by direct measurements. The proton-air cross section has already been measured by ARGO-YBJ in an energy region up to ~ 100 TeV where the primary cosmic ray composition is sufficiently well known for that measure to be unbiased. The analog readout of the RPC signals now provides new tools to measure the lateral distribution of particle density (LDF) as close as a few meters from the core and to investigate with unprecedented resolution the shower time structure. This allows to extend the hadronic interaction and mass composition studies up to ~PeV energies in the laboratory rest frame. Moreover, it is shown that the LDF of detected showers can be properly described, even very close to the shower axis, by a NKG-like function, whose shape parameter is clearly related to the shower age and can be used for studying the mass composition of cosmic rays

Very High Energy Gamma-Ray Astronomy and Cosmic Ray Physics with ARGO-YBJ

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CORAM (COsmic RAy Mission): An outreach program one century after Pacini and Hess works

Abstract CORAM (COsmic RAy Mission) is an outreach program carried out by INFN and the University of Salento in close collaboration with high schools. Students and their teachers are involved in the design, construction, test and operation of detectors for the measurement of several properties of the cosmic ray flux. The results of a set of measurements, made with a first detector prototype at different altitudes and underground, will be described

Multi-scale analysis of lung computed tomography images

A computer-aided detection (CAD) system for the identification of lung internal nodules in low-dose multi-detector helical Computed Tomography (CT) images was developed in the framework of the MAGIC-5 project. The three modules of our lung CAD system, a segmentation algorithm for lung internal region identification, a multi-scale dot-enhancement filter for nodule candidate selection and a multi-scale neural technique for false positive finding reduction, are described. The results obtained on a dataset of low-dose and thin-slice CT scans are shown in terms of free response receiver operating characteristic (FROC) curves and discussed.Comment: 18 pages, 12 low-resolution figure

Pythia 8 as hadronic interaction model in air shower simulations

Hadronic interaction models are a core ingredient of simulations of extensive air showers and pose the major source of uncertainties of predictions of air shower observables. Recently, Pythia 8, a hadronic interaction model popular in accelerator-based high-energy physics, became usable in air shower simulations as well. We have integrated Pythia 8 with its new capabilities into the air shower simulation framework CORSIKA 8. First results show significantly shallower shower development, which we attribute to higher cross-section predictions by the new simplified nuclear model of Pythia