5729393
High-Speed Data-Injection for Data-Flow Verification at LHCb
The High Level Trigger (HLT) and Data Acquisition System select about 2 kHz of events out of the 40 MHz of beam crossings. The selected events are consolidated into files in onsite storage and then sent to permanent storage for subsequent analysis on the Grid. For local and full-chain tests a method to exercise the data-flow through the High Level Trigger is needed in the absence of real data. In order to test the system as much as possible under identical conditions as for data-taking, the solution would be to inject data at the input of the HLT at a minimum rate of 2 kHz. This is done via a software implementation of the trigger system which sends data to the HLT. The application has to simulate that the data it sends come from real LHCb readout-boards. Data can come from several input streams, which are selected according to probabilities or frequencies. Therefore the emulator offers runs which are not only identical data-flows coming from a sequence on tape, but physics-like pseudo-indeterministic data-flow, including lumi events and candidate b-quark events. Both simulation data and previously recorded real data can be re-played through the system in this manner. As the data rate is high (100 MB/s), care has been taken to optimize the emulator for throughput from the Storage Area Network. The emulator can be run in stand-alone mode, but even more interesting is that it can emulate any partition of LHCb in parallel with the real hardware partition. In this mode it is fully integrated into the standard run-control. The architecture, implementation, and performance results of the emulator and full tests will be presented. This emulator is a crucial part of the ongoing data-challenges in LHCb. Results from these Full System Integration Tests (FEST) will be presented, which helped to verify and benchmark the entire LHCb data-flow.
58846599
DIRAC data management: consistency, integrity and coherence of data
The DIRAC Data Management System (DMS) relies on both WLCG (Worldwide LHC Computing Grid Project) Data Management services (LCG File Catalogues, Storage Resource Managers and File Transfer System (FTS)) and LHCb specific components (Bookkeeping database). The complexity of both the DMS and its interactions with numerous WLCG components as well as the instability of facilities concerned, has frequently turned into unexpected problems in data moving and/or data registration, preventing a coherent picture of datasets. Several developments in LHCb have been made in order to avoid data corruptions, missing data incoherence and inconsistences among Catalogues and physical storage both through safety measures at data management level (failover mechanism, check sums, roll back mechanism) and extensive background checks. In this paper all the tools developed for checking data integrity and consistency will be presented as well as a Storage Usage agent, whose aim is to produce an up-to-date accounting of all LHCb storage usage using the LFC mirror database. The goal of this activity is the development of a generic tool suite able to categorize, analyze and systematically cure the disparate problems affecting the DMS in order to maintain a consistent picture of the main catalogues (Bookkeeping and LFC) and the Storage Elements.
178787319
Determining the Arrival Directions of Extensive Air Showers from Fast Timing Measurements
5719579
DIRAC: A Community Grid Solution
The DIRAC system was developed in order to provide a complete solution for using the distributed computing resources of the LHCb experiment at CERN for data production and analysis. It allows a concurrent use of over 10K CPUs and 10M file replicas distributed over many tens of sites. The sites can be part of a Computing Grid such as WLCG or standalone computing clusters all integrated in a single management structure. DIRAC is a generic system with the LHCb specific functionality incorporated through a number of plug-in modules. It can be easily adapted to the needs of other communities. Special attention is paid to the resilience of the DIRAC components to allow an efficient use of non-reliable resources. The DIRAC production management components provide a framework for building highly automated data production systems including data distribution and data driven workload scheduling. In this paper we give an overview of the DIRAC system architecture and design choices. We show how different components are put together to compose an integrated data processing system including all the aspects of the LHCb experiment - from the MC production and raw data reconstruction to the final user analysis.
129617632
The Durham Extensive Air Shower Array
121598426
High-energy muons in extensive air showers
SummaryA study has been made of the density of high-energy muons (10<Eμ<300 GeV) as a function of the distance from the axis of extensive air showers in the size range 2·105<Ne<3·106,i.e. showers produced by primary cosmic rays in a decade of energy centered on 5·1015 eV. The results for muons above 50 GeV agree with those from the Lodz-Moscow group, but those for muons above 200 GeV are a little different from the only other experimental results: those of Acharyaet al. Comparison with predictions favours a CKP-type model with a «normal» comparison. The simple scaling model with any composition does not give a good fit to the data, but no doubt modifications could be made, principally an increase in the mean transverse momentum, which would restore agreement.RiassuntoSi è effettuato uno studio della densità dei muoni (10<Eμ<300 GeV) in funzione della distanza dall’asse di sciami d’aria estesi nell’intervallo di grandezza 2·105<Ne<<3·106, cioè sciami prodotti da raggi cosmici del primario in un decadimento di energia centrato su 5 · 1015 eV. I risultati per muoni al di sopra di 50 GeV sono in accordo con quelli del gruppo di Lodz-Moscow, ma quelle per muoni al di sopra di 200 GeV sono un po’ differenti dagli unici altri risultati sperimentali: quelli di Acharyaet al. Confronti con produzioni sono a favore del modello del tipo CKP con una composizione « normale ». Il modello a variazione di scala semplice con qualsiasi composizione non dà un buon adattamento ai dati, ma, senza dubbio, modificazioni potrebbero essere fatte, principalmente un aumento nell’impulso trasversale medio, che ripristinerebbero l’accordo.
3689707
Galaxy Zoo: dust and molecular gas in early-type galaxies with prominent dust lanes
We explore the properties of dust and associated molecular gas in 352 nearby (0.01 < z < 0.07) early-type galaxies (ETGs) with prominent dust lanes, drawn from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). Two-thirds of these ‘dusty ETGs’ (D-ETGs) are morphologically disturbed, which suggests a merger origin, making these galaxies ideal test beds for studying the merger process at low redshift. The D-ETGs preferentially reside in lower density environments, compared to a control sample drawn from the general ETG population. Around 80 per cent of D-ETGs inhabit the field (compared to 60 per cent of the control ETGs) and less than 2 per cent inhabit clusters (compared to 10 per cent of the control ETGs). Compared to their control-sample counterparts, D-ETGs exhibit bluer ultraviolet–optical colours (indicating enhanced levels of star formation) and an active galactic nucleus fraction that is more than an order of magnitude greater (indicating a strikingly higher incidence of nuclear activity). The mass of clumpy dust residing in large-scale dust features is estimated, using the SDSS r-band images, to be in the range 104.5–106.5 M⊙. A comparison to the total (clumpy + diffuse) dust masses – calculated using the far-infrared fluxes of 15 per cent of the D-ETGs that are detected by the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS) – indicates that only 20 per cent of the dust is typically contained in these large-scale dust features. The dust masses are several times larger than the maximum value expected from stellar mass loss, ruling out an internal origin. The dust content shows no correlation with the blue luminosity, indicating that it is not related to a galactic scale cooling flow. Furthermore, no correlation is found with the age of the recent starburst, suggesting that the dust is accreted directly in the merger rather than being produced in situ by the triggered star formation. Using molecular gas-to-dust ratios of ETGs in the literature, we estimate that the median current molecular gas fraction in the IRAS-detected ETGs is ∼1.3 per cent. Adopting reasonable values for gas depletion time-scales and starburst ages, the median initial gas fraction in these D-ETGs is ∼4 per cent. Recent work has suggested that the merger activity in nearby ETGs largely involves minor mergers (dry ETG + gas-rich dwarf), with mass ratios between 1:10 and 1:4. If the IRAS-detected D-ETGs have formed via this channel, then the original gas fractions of the accreted satellites are between 20 and 44 per cent.
16404024
Star-planet interactions
Much effort has been invested in recent years, both observationally and theoretically, to understand the interacting processes taking place in planetary systems consisting of a hot Jupiter orbiting its star within 10 stellar radii. Several independent studies have converged on the same scenario: that a short‐period planet can induce activity on the photosphere and upper atmosphere of its host star. The growing body of evidence for such magnetic star‐planet interactions includes a diverse array of photometric, spectroscopic and spectropolarimetric studies. The nature of which is modeled to be strongly affected by both the stellar and planetary magnetic fields, possibly influencing the magnetic activity of both bodies, as well as affecting irradiation and non‐thermal and dynamical processes. Tidal interactions are responsible for the circularization of the planet orbit, for the synchronization of the planet rotation with the orbital period, and may also synchronize the outer convective envelope of the star ...
123077055
Results on large transverse momentum phenomena
Preliminary results of an experiment on large transverse momentum phenomena performed at the CERN‐ISR at centre‐of‐mass energies of 52.7 and 44.8 GeV are presented. The topics studied were the inclusive reaction p+p⇒πo+ “anything”, where the πo was emitted around 90° in the centre‐of‐mass system, (πoπo) correlations, and the charged multiplicity associated with large transverse momentum πo's. In addition, results of a search for electrons and electron pairs are included.
59140821
Planet Hunters: Assessing the Kepler Inventory of Short Period Planets
We present the results from a search of data from the first 33.5 days of the Kepler science mission (Quarter 1) for exoplanet transits by the Planet Hunters citizen science project. Planet Hunters enlists members of the general public to visually identify transits in the publicly released Kepler light curves via the World Wide Web. Over 24,000 volunteers reviewed the Kepler Quarter 1 data set. We examine the abundance of ≥2 R ⊕ planets on short-period (<15 days) orbits based on Planet Hunters detections. We present these results along with an analysis of the detection efficiency of human classifiers to identify planetary transits including a comparison to the Kepler inventory of planet candidates. Although performance drops rapidly for smaller radii, ≥4 R ⊕ Planet Hunters ≥85% efficient at identifying transit signals for planets with periods less than 15 days for the Kepler sample of target stars. Our high efficiency rate for simulated transits along with recovery of the majority of Kepler ≥4 R ⊕ planets suggests that the Kepler inventory of ≥4 R ⊕ short-period planets is nearly complete.
120272757
A System of Cylindrical Drift Chambers in a Superconducting Solenoid
Abstract A superconducting solenoid at the CERN ISR has been equipped with a system of high accuracy cylindrical drift chambers. This detector consists of eight layers of field shaped drift cells with a delay line opposite each sense wire to provide coupled two dimensional readout. The design, construction, and operation of this system are discussed. The resolution and performance of the delay lines and sense wires under ISR running conditions are shown.