120313903
Air shower front geometry and its interpretation
Abstract A method is suggested whereby the curvature of a shower front may be deduced from the fast-timing data of cosmic ray air shower arrays.
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.
62238242
Data stream handling in the LHCb experiment
This paper presents the event data handling in the LHCb experiment, starting from the acceptance of events by the software trigger farm to making the data available for offline reprocessing. In the data acquisition system, events accepted by the High Level Trigger farm are assembled into streams according to their type. Each stream will be written to disk as a 2 GB file for optimal storage and ease of reconstruction. Under nominal conditions about 2 such files will be produced per minute. The life cycle and state transitions of each file are managed by means of a dedicated database. These files must be copied to the tape storage and simultaneously be made available online to various calibration and monitoring tasks. Additionally, to initiate the start of the offline re-processing all file parameters must be propagated to the offline Grid data analysis system. This system has been designed for extreme robustness and reliability with redundancy in almost every component and supports various fail-over mechanisms. The software, hardware, and protocols designed for this purpose will be discussed in detail. Performance figures of data-challenges done in 2007 will be shown.
120919376
The Durham air shower array - III: Evaluation of the array's response to showers
Abstract A Monte Carlo investigation of the Durham air shower array is described in which the systematic biases introduced into air shower data recorded by the experiment are evaluated.
129617632
The Durham Extensive Air Shower Array
31995433
Data Handling and Transfer in the LHCb Experiment
This paper focuses on the management of raw event data files containing the electronic response to particle collisions in the LHCb detector at the LHC storage ring at CERN. The typical file life cycle is presented, starting from writing of raw event streams into files to transfer to the CERN tape storage system and to the offline GRID distributed processing infrastructure. A distributed solution centered on a dedicated database is implemented to address the raw event data management needs. The solution is integrated with the data acquisition system software chain and with the experiment control system. The software architecture and hardware configurations are explained together with the testing methods, current development status and future plans.
18104149
Galaxy Zoo 2: detailed morphological classifications for 304 122 galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
We present the data release for Galaxy Zoo 2 (GZ2), a citizen science project with more than 16 million morphological classifications of 304 122 galaxies drawn from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). Morphology is a powerful probe for quantifying a galaxy's dynamical history; however, automatic classifications of morphology (either by computer analysis of images or by using other physical parameters as proxies) still have drawbacks when compared to visual inspection. The large number of images available in current surveys makes visual inspection of each galaxy impractical for individual astronomers. GZ2 uses classifications from volunteer citizen scientists to measure morphologies for all galaxies in the DR7 Legacy survey with mr > 17, in addition to deeper images from SDSS Stripe 82. While the original GZ2 project identified galaxies as early-types, late-types or mergers, GZ2 measures finer morphological features. These include bars, bulges and the shapes of edge-on disks, as well as quantifying the relative strengths of galactic bulges and spiral arms. This paper presents the full public data release for the project, including measures of accuracy and bias. The majority (≳90 per cent) of GZ2 classifications agree with those made by professional astronomers, especially for morphological T-types, strong bars and arm curvature. Both the raw and reduced data products can be obtained in electronic format at http://data.galaxyzoo.org.
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.
119221732
The Impact of Assuming Flatness in the Determination of Neutrino Properties from Cosmological Data
Cosmological data have provided new constraints on the number of neutrino species and the neutrino mass. However these constraints depend on assumptions related to the underlying cosmology. Since a correlation is expected between the number of effective neutrinos N_{eff}, the neutrino mass \sum m_\nu, and the curvature of the universe \Omega_k, it is useful to investigate the current constraints in the framework of a non-flat universe. In this paper we update the constraints on neutrino parameters by making use of the latest cosmic microwave background (CMB) data from the ACT and SPT experiments and consider the possibility of a universe with non-zero curvature. We first place new constraints on N_{eff} and \Omega_k, with N_{eff} = 4.03 +/- 0.45 and 10^3 \Omega_k = -4.46 +/- 5.24. Thus, even when \Omega_k is allowed to vary, N_{eff} = 3 is still disfavored with 95% confidence. We then investigate the correlation between neutrino mass and curvature that shifts the 95% upper limit of \sum m_\nu < 0.45 eV to \sum m_\nu < 0.95 eV. Thus, the impact of assuming flatness in neutrino cosmology is significant and an essential consideration with future experiments.
120200157
Unusual production features of isoscalar mesons in proton diffractive dissociation at the CERN-ISR
Abstract D(1285) and E/iota(1422) are observed in the diffractive dissociation process, pp→(pK 0 K +- π ± )p, with √ s =63Gev. The D(1285) is produced with dominant ±1 helicity. Several unusual features of the data suggest that the mesonic states result from gluonic interactions in the collision.
120328133
Evidence for pomeron single-quark interactions in proton diffraction at the ISR
Abstract Measurements are presented of two exclusive diffractive reactions, pp → (Λ 0 φ 0 K + ) p and pp → (Λ 0 Λ 0 p)p , at √ s = 63 GeV . Pronounced correlations with the beam direction are observed (in the rest frame of the forward-going bracketed system) for those outgoing particles which contain the beam valence quarks. In each case there is a forward-Λ0 in correlation with a backward K+ or p, respectively. No such behavior is seen for the particles which do not contain beam valence quarks (φ 0 and Λ 0 , respectively) . Interpreted as examples of pomeron-proton scattering, these results constitute evidence that, for these final states, the pomeron interacts with a single valence quark and apparently back-scatters it. The subsequent hadronization leads to a longitudinal event structure.