Discovery of VHE and HE emission from the blazar 1ES 0414+009 with H.E.S.S and Fermi-LAT

The high energy peaked BL Lac (HBL) object 1ES 0414+009 (z=0.287) is a distant very high-energy (VHE, E > 100 GeV) blazars with well-determined redshift. This source was detected with the High Energy Stereoscopic System (H.E.S.S.) between October 2005 and September 2009. It was also detected with the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) in 21 months of data. The combined high energy (HE) and VHE spectra, once corrected for gamma-gamma absorption on the extragalactic background light (EBL), indicate a Compton peak located above few TeV, among the highest in the BL Lac class.Comment: proceeding from the 25th Texas Symposium on Relativistic Astrophysics (Heidelberg, Germany, 2010

Feasibility of high-voltage systems for a very long drift in liquid argon TPCs

Designs of high-voltage (HV) systems for creating a drift electric field in liquid argon TPCs are reviewed. In ongoing experiments systems capable of approx. 100 kV are realised for a drift field of 0.5-1 kV/cm over a length of up to 1.5 m. Two of them having different approaches are presented: (1) the ICARUS-T600 detector having a system consisting of an external power supply, HV feedthroughs and resistive voltage degraders and (2) the ArDM-1t detector having a cryogenic Greinacher HV multiplier inside the liquid argon volume. For a giant scale liquid argon TPC, a system providing 2 MV may be required to attain a drift length of approx. 20 m. Feasibility of such a system is evaluated by extrapolating the existing designs.Comment: 8 pages, 13 figures, to appear in Proc. of 1st International Workshop towards the Giant Liquid Argon Charge Imaging Experiment (GLA2010), Tsukuba (Japan), March 201

Application-specific design of sports equipment from anisotropic fiber-reinforced plastics with stiffness related coupling effect

AbstractFloating sports equipment such as snowboards experience extreme loads during riding it. A common style in riding a freestyle snowboard is to use a handrail to slide sideways on it. During this maneuver the steel edge of a snowboard could easily hook into the handrail, researches worked out. This will lead to an abrupt interruption in the athletes motion. This problematic aspect is eliminated by using an all new anisotropic layer design (ALD)snowboard which was developed and tested by the Professorship of Lightweight Structures and Polymer Technology (SLK) in cooperation with the Competence Center for Structural Lightweight (SLB e. V.)

Socio‐cognitive, expertise‐based and appearance‐based accounts of the other‐‘race’ effect in face perception: A label‐based systematic review of neuroimaging results (advance online)

Two competing theories explain the other-‘race’ effect (ORE) either by greater perceptual expertise to same-‘race’ (SR) faces or by social categorization of other-‘race’ (OR) faces at the expense of individuation. To assess expertise and categorization contributions to the ORE, a promising—yet overlooked—approach is comparing activations for differ-ent other-‘races’. We present a label-based systematic review of neuroimaging studies reporting increased activity in response to OR faces (African, Caucasian, or Asian) when compared with the SR of participants. Hypothetically, while common activations would reflect general aspects of OR perception, ‘race’-preferential ones would represent effects of ‘race’-specific visual appearance. We find that several studies report activation of occipito-temporal and midcingu-late areas in response to faces across different other-‘races’, presumably due to high demand on the visual system and category processing. Another area reported in response to all OR faces, the caudate nucleus, suggests the involvement of socio-affective processes and behavioural regulation. Overall, our results support hybrid models—both expertise and social categorization contribute to the ORE, but they provide little evidence for reduced motivation to process OR faces. Addi-tionally, we identify areas preferentially responding to specific OR faces, reflecting effects of visual appearanc

A Proof Strategy Language and Proof Script Generation for Isabelle/HOL

We introduce a language, PSL, designed to capture high level proof strategies in Isabelle/HOL. Given a strategy and a proof obligation, PSL's runtime system generates and combines various tactics to explore a large search space with low memory usage. Upon success, PSL generates an efficient proof script, which bypasses a large part of the proof search. We also present PSL's monadic interpreter to show that the underlying idea of PSL is transferable to other ITPs.Comment: This paper has been submitted to CADE2

100 Years of BCG Immunization: Past, Present, and Future

The 100th anniversary of the introduction of Bacille–Calmette–Guérin (BCG) as a tuberculosis (TB) vaccine is an occasion warranting further investigation of the early attempts which culminated in the introduction of BCG as a TB vaccine, as well as of subsequent recognition of failures, new findings that broaden its applications, outstanding questions, and approaches towards the development of novel vaccine candidates [...

Comparison of 30 THz impulsive burst time development to microwaves, H-alpha, EUV, and GOES soft X-rays

The recent discovery of impulsive solar burst emission in the 30 THz band is raising new interpretation challenges. One event associated with a GOES M2 class flare has been observed simultaneously in microwaves, H-alpha, EUV, and soft X-ray bands. Although these new observations confirm some features found in the two prior known events, they exhibit time profile structure discrepancies between 30 THz, microwaves, and hard X-rays (as inferred from the Neupert effect). These results suggest a more complex relationship between 30 THz emission and radiation produced at other wavelength ranges. The multiple frequency emissions in the impulsive phase are likely to be produced at a common flaring site lower in the chromosphere. The 30 THz burst emission may be either part of a nonthermal radiation mechanism or due to the rapid thermal response to a beam of high-energy particles bombarding the dense solar atmosphere.Comment: accepted to Astronomy and Astrophysic

Evolution on a Rugged Landscape:Pinning and Aging

Population dynamics on a rugged landscape is studied analytically and numerically within a simple discrete model for evolution of N individuals in one-dimensional fitness space. We reduce the set of master equations to a single Fokker-Plank equation which allows us to describe the dynamics of the population in terms of thermo-activated Langevin diffusion of a single particle in a specific random potential. We found that the randomness in the mutation rate leads to pinning of the population and on average to a logarithmic slowdown of the evolution, resembling aging phenomenon in spin glass systems. In contrast, the randomness in the replication rate turns out to be irrelevant for evolution in the long-time limit as it is smoothed out by increasing ``evolution temperature''. The analytic results are in a good agreement with numerical simulations.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, submitted to Phys. Rev. Let

A bright impulsive solar burst detected at 30 THz

Ground- and space-based observations of solar flares from radio wavelengths to gamma-rays have produced considerable insights but raised several unsolved controversies. The last unexplored wavelength frontier for solar flares is in the range of submillimeter and infrared wavelengths. Here we report the detection of an intense impulsive burst at 30 THz using a new imaging system. The 30 THz emission exhibited remarkable time coincidence with peaks observed at microwave, mm/submm, visible, EUV and hard X-ray wavelengths. The emission location coincides with a very weak white-light feature, and is consistent with heating below the temperature minimum in the atmosphere. However, there are problems in attributing the heating to accelerated electrons. The peak 30 THz flux is several times larger than the usual microwave peak near 9 GHz, attributed to non-thermal electrons in the corona. The 30 THz emission could be consistent with an optically thick spectrum increasing from low to high frequencies. It might be part of the same spectral component found at sub-THz frequencies whose nature remains mysterious. Further observations at these wavelengths will provide a new window for flare studies.Comment: 9 pages, 11 figures, accepted by Astrophysical Journal, March 23, 201

TB biomarkers, TB correlates and human challenge models: New tools for improving assessment of new TB vaccines

SummaryThe 4th Global Forum on TB Vaccines, convened in Shanghai, China, from 21 – 24 April 2015, brought together a wide and diverse community involved in tuberculosis vaccine research and development to discuss the current status of, and future directions for this critical effort. This paper summarizes the sessions on Biomarkers and Correlates, and Human Challenge Models. Summaries of all sessions from the 4th Global Forum are compiled in a special supplement of Tuberculosis. [August 2016, Vol 99, Supp S1, S1–S30]