123051492
The velocity filter ship, a separator of unslowed heavy ion fusion products
The velocity filter SHIP installed at the UNILAC (GSI Darmstadt) is described. It is used for the investigation of neutron deficient nuclei generated by heavy ion induced fusion. The two stage filter separates unretarded reaction products emerging from a thin target with high efficiency and low background of primary beam particles. For reaction products covering an angular range of 3° in horizontal and vertical directions and a velocity range of 10% the transmission is between 30% and 60%. The separation time is of the order of 10−6s. High suppression of primary particles by factors of 107-1011 permits the investigation of reaction products in the direction of the primary beam. α-active reaction products have been implanted into a surface barrier detector and identified by their decay. 
 
A description of the ion optical principles, technical details and the performance of SHIP is given.
172282907
Production and stability of new elements
120335892
Study of SHE at the GSI-SHIP
Abstract An overview of present experimental investigation of superheavy elements is given. Using cold fusion reactions which are based on lead and bismuth targets, relatively neutron deficient isotopes of the elements from 107 to 113 were synthesized at GSI in Darmstadt, Germany, and/or at RIKEN in Wako, Japan. In hot fusion reactions of 48 Ca projectiles with actinide targets more neutron rich isotopes of the elements from 112 to 116 and even 118 were produced at FLNR in Dubna, Russia. Recently, part of these data, which represent the first identification of nuclei located on the predicted island of SHEs, were confirmed in two independent experiments. The data are compared with theoretical descriptions.
43354809
Kaon effective mass and energy from a novel chiral SU(3)-symmetric Lagrangian
A new chiral SU(3) Lagrangian is proposed to describe the properties of kaons and antikaons in the nuclear medium, the ground state of dense matter, and the kaon-nuclear interactions consistently. The saturation properties of nuclear matter are reproduced as well as the results of Dirac-Br\"uckner theory. Our numerical results show that the kaon effective mass might be changed only moderately in the nuclear medium due to highly nonlinear density effects. After taking into account the coupling between the omega meson and the kaon, we obtain similar results for the effective kaon and antikaon energies as calculated in the one-boson-exchange model while in our model the parameters of the kaon-nuclear interactions are constrained by the SU(3) chiral symmetry.
123598883
alpha-decay of the new isotope Po-187: Probing prolate structures beyond the neutron mid-shell at N=104
The new neutron-deficient isotope {sup 187}Po has been identified in the complete fusion reaction {sup 46}Ti+{sup 144}Sm{yields}{sup 187}Po+3n at the velocity filter SHIP. Striking features of the {sup 187}Po {alpha} decay are the strongly-hindered decay to the spherical ground state and unhindered decay to a surprisingly low-lying deformed excited state at 286 keV in the daughter nucleus {sup 183}Pb. Based on the potential energy surface calculations, the {sup 187}Po ground state and the 286 keV excited state in {sup 183}Pb were interpreted as being of prolate origin. The systematic deviation of the {alpha}-decay properties in the lightest odd-A Po isotopes relative to the smooth behavior in the even-A neighbors is discussed. Improved data for the decay of {sup 187}Bi{sup m,g} were also obtained.
122536153
Formation of superheavy elements in cold fusion reactions
The process of the synthesis of superheavy elements ~SHEs! is not yet understood completely. In the presented work we make an attempt to describe the cold fusion reactions of the type X1(Pb,Bi)→SHE 11n at subbarrier energies. The process of the formation of SHEs is subdivided into three steps. ~1! The capture of two spherical nuclei and the formation of a common shape of the two touching nuclei. Low-energy surface vibrations and transfer of few nucleons are taken into account in the first step of the reaction. ~2! The formation of a spherical or near spherical compound nucleus. ~3! The survival of the excited compound nucleus due to evaporation of neutrons and g-ray emission in competition with fission. A lowering of the fission barrier was taken into account, which arises from a reduction of shell effects at increasing excitation energy of the compound nucleus. The following reactions were analyzed in detail: (Fe, Ni, Zn, Ge)1Pb, (Ti, Cr, Fe, Co, Ni, Cu, Zn, Ga, Ge, As, Se)1Pb, (Fe, Ni, Zn, Ge) 1Pb, and (Ti, Cr, Fe, Ni, Zn, Ge)1Bi. The presented model describes well the available experimental cross-section data and allows for predicting cross-section values for the synthesis of so-far unknown heavier elements.
118359212
Generic inference of inflation models by non-Gaussianity and primordial power spectrum reconstruction
We present a generic inference method for inflation models from observational data by the usage of higher-order statistics of the curvature perturbation on uniform density hypersurfaces. This method is based on the calculation of the posterior for the primordial non-Gaussianity parameters fNL and gNL, which in general depend on specific parameters of inflation and reheating models, and enables to discriminate among the still viable inflation models. To keep analyticity as far as possible to dispense with numerically expensive sampling techniques a saddle-point approximation is introduced, whose precision is validated for a numerical toy example. The mathematical formulation is done in a generic way so that the approach remains applicable to cosmic microwave background data as well as to large scale structure data. Additionally, we review a few currently interesting inflation models and present numerical toy examples thereof in two and three dimensions to demonstrate the efficiency of the higher-order statistics method. A second quantity of interest is the primordial power spectrum. Here, we present two Bayesian methods to infer it from observational data, the so called critical filter and an extension thereof with smoothness prior, both allowing for a non-parametric spectrum reconstruction. These methods are able to reconstruct the spectra of the observed perturbations and the primordial ones of curvature perturbation even in case of non-Gaussianity and partial sky coverage. We argue that observables like T- and B-modes permit to measure both spectra. This also allows to infer the level of non-Gaussianity generated since inflation.
209999169
Black Hole Production in Large Extra Dimensions at the Tevatron: New Limit on the Fundamental Scale of Gravity
119090594
Lorentz-invariant ensembles of vector backgrounds
We consider gauge field theories in the presence of ensembles of vector backgrounds. While Lorentz invariance is explicitly broken in the presence of any single background, here, the Lorentz invariance of the theory is restored by averaging over a Lorentz-invariant ensemble of backgrounds, i.e., a set of background vectors that is mapped onto itself under Lorentz transformations. This framework is used to study the effects of a non-trivial but Lorentz-invariant vacuum structure or mass dimension two vector condensates by identifying the background with a shift of the gauge field. Up to now, the ensembles used in the literature comprise configurations corresponding to non-zero field tensors together with such with vanishing field strength. We find that even when constraining the ensembles to pure gauge configurations, the usual high-energy degrees of freedom are removed from the spectrum of asymptotic states in the presence of said backgrounds in Euclidean and in Minkowski space. We establish this result not only for the propagators to all orders in the background and otherwise at tree level but for the full propagator.
118543996
On nonrelativistic diffeomorphism invariance
We study certain aspects of the recently proposed notion of nonrelativistic diffeomorphism invariance. In particular, we consider specific examples of invariant actions, extended gauge symmetry as well as an application to the theory of quantum Hall effect. We also discuss an alternative approach based on Horava-Lifshitz gravity.
37247936
Degravitation of the cosmological constant and graviton width
We study the possibility of decoupling gravity from the vacuum energy. This is effectively equivalent to promoting Newton's constant to a high-pass filter that degravitates sources of characteristic wavelength larger than a certain macroscopic (super) horizon scale L. We study the underlying physics and the consistency of this phenomenon. In particular, the absence of ghosts, already at the linear level, implies that in any such theory the graviton should either have a mass 1/L, or be a resonance of similar width. This has profound physical implications for the degravitation idea.