The OPERA experiment

OPERA is a neutrino oscillation experiment designed to perform a nu\_tau appearance search at long distance in the future CNGS beam from CERN to Gran Sasso. It is based on the nuclear emulsion technique to distinguish among the neutrino interaction products the track of a tau produced by a nu\_tau and its decay tracks. The OPERA detector is presently under construction in the Gran Sasso underground laboratory, 730 km from CERN, and will receive its first neutrinos in 2006. The experimental technique is reviewed and the development of the project described. Foreseen performances in measuring nu\_tau appearance and also in searching for nu\_e appearance are discussed

The neutrino velocity anomaly as an explanation of the missing observation of neutrinos in coincidence with GRB

The search for neutrinos emitted in coincidence with Gamma-Bay Burst has been so far unsuccessfully. In this paper we show that the recent result reported by the OPERA Collaboration on an early arrival time of muon neutrinos with respect to the one computed assuming the speed of light in vacuum could explain the null search for neutrinos in coincidence with Gamma-Ray Burst

Prospero's death: modernism, anti-humanism and Un re in ascolto

In his own comments, Luciano Berio has consistently rejected the term ‘opera’ for his Un re in ascolto (‘A King, listening’, 1979-84), instead insisting on calling it a ‘musical action’ (azione musicale). This dismissal of opera as a genre contrasts with most other commentators’ views, according to which the work represents the closest engagement with the conventions and traditions of opera in Berio’s oeuvre. In this chapter, I discuss the reasons behind and sources for Berio’s negative appraisal of opera and proceed to analyse the work’s musical dramaturgy on that basis, focussing particularly on the palimpsest of texts, by Shakespeare, W. H. Auden and Italo Calvino among others, that the composer employed. My conclusion is that, despite Berio’s criticism of the genre, Un re derives its fascination and attraction from the pleasures of formalised spectacle that opera uniquely provides. While the work and Berio’s stance are thus somewhat contradictory, this may in itself be characteristic of the aporias of a genre that has become inherently problematic. If the work represents one of the most substantial and successful attempts at reinvigorating opera, this is therefore arguably because of, not despite of, its critical interrogation of the genre

Opera Highlights

The OPERA experiment is a long baseline neutrino oscillation experiment aimed at observing the $\nu_{\mu} \rightarrow \nu_{\tau}$ neutrino oscillation in the CERN neutrino to Gran Sasso beamline in the appearance mode by detecting the $\tau$ - decay. Here I will summarize the results from the run years 2008-10 with an update on observed rare decay topologies and the results of the neutrino velocity measurements.Comment: Proceedings of the 2012 Volcano Workshop: Frontier Objects in Astrophysics and Particle Physic

The Struggle to Create Soviet Opera

It is opera, and opera alone that brings you close to the people, that endears your music to the real public and makes your names popular not only with individual small circles but, under favourable conditions, with the whole people. – Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, premier composer of symphonies, ballets, and operas in Imperial Russia in the mid- to late 1800s. Tchaikovsky made this remark while living under a tsarist regime, but the pervasive, democratic, and uniting qualities of opera that he so vividly described appealed to an entirely different party: the Bolsheviks. Rather than discard the “bourgeois” remains of the Russian empire, the newly-anointed Soviet Union and its first leader, Vladimir Lenin, kept in place many artistic institutions such as opera theaters. However, it was not until Joseph Stalin, leader of the Soviet Union from about 1925 to 1953, seized the reins of power that any attempt was made to control the artistic content of opera. Realizing, as Tchaikovsky had many years earlier, that the populist nature of opera could more effectively spread cultural and political propaganda to the masses, Stalin embarked on a massive Soviet opera experiment that would last from 1936 until his death. In this experiment, Stalin used opera to both further enhance his growing cult of personality and to attempt to throw off remaining Western influences on Soviet musical development. Despite his best efforts, the brutality and repression of Stalin‘s reign had the effect of crushing promising new composers while propping up banal and obedient musicians whose operas have long since been forgotten. Instead of the massive cultural movement he desired, Stalin‘s operatic experiment failed to deliver even on its most basic promise: the birth of Soviet opera

Relativity accommodates superluminal mean velocities

Contrary to a widespread belief, measures of velocity can yield a value larger than $c$, the instantaneous light speed in vacuum, without contradicting Einstein's relativity. Nevertheless, the effect turns out to be too small to explain the recently claimed superluminal velocity by the OPERA collaboration. Several other general relativistic effects acting on the OPERA neutrinos are also analyzed. All of them are unable to explain the OPERA result.Comment: 5 pages; Latex source, 2 eps figures (expanded discussion, a few typos corrected, some refs. added

Dallas with balls: televized sport, soap opera and male and female pleasures

Two of the most popular of television genres, soap opera and sports coverage have been very much differentiated along gender lines in terms of their audiences. Soap opera has been regarded very much as a 'gynocentric' genre with a large female viewing audience while the audiences for television sport have been predominantly male. Gender differentiation between the genres has had implications for the popular image of each. Soap opera has been perceived as inferior; as mere fantasy and escapism for women while television sports has been perceived as a legitimate, even edifying experience for men. In this article the authors challenge the view that soap opera and television sport are radically different and argue that they are, in fact, very similar in a number of significant ways. They suggest that both genres invoke similar structures of feeling and sensibility in their respective audiences and that television sport is a 'male soap opera'. They consider the ways in which the viewing context of each genre is related to domestic life and leisure, the ways in which the textual structure and conventions of each genre invoke emotional identification, and finally, the ways in which both genres re-affirm gender identities

Someone Who Speaks Their Language: How a Nontraditional Partner Brought New Audiences to Minnesota Opera

Arts organizations of all kinds recognize that their futures depend on cultivating new audiences who will form long-lasting relationships with them. Perhaps no art form faces a bigger challenge in doing so than opera. Many people who've never been to the opera believe it's stuffy and elitist, and certainly not a place they'd like to spend a Saturday night. They think they'll feel like ignorant outsiders who can't possibly understand, let alone appreciate, what's happening on stage. Minnesota Opera set out to dispel those preconceived notions among women ages 35 to 60 through an unlikely partnership with a local talk-radio host who had a knack for relating to this demographic. An opera buff himself, he made the art form relatable and exciting to women who had never been to a performance, so much so that they jammed the phone lines when he announced ticket giveaways to Minnesota Opera on his radio show. After four seasons of the partnership, 1,114 households new to Minnesota Opera had redeemed their free tickets to attend a performance, and 18 percent had paid to come back. The company found that perceptions of opera as elitist were not insurmountable, but also discovered that one or two positive experiences were not necessarily enough to turn most of these new audience members into frequent attendees. Follow-up research identified barriers to that elusive return purchase, and the company has used these insights to adjust its marketing strategy to bring a number of those new audience members back