Search results for "background"
showing 10 items of 556 documents
CONTRIBUTION OF PSEUDO-FOCUSED SOFT PROTONS TO THE BACKGROUND OF ATHENA
2021
This PhD thesis explores the role of low energy protons, the so-called ‘soft protons', as a component of the background in view of the future ESA's X-ray mission Athena. As a matter of fact, a high level of soft proton flux at the focal plane of Athena can adversely affect the scientific goals of the mission. To prevent this, a correct estimate of the soft proton flux expected at the focal plane of the satellite is fundamental. Such an estimate can be achieved only if the reflectivity of soft protons from the optics is well understood, with efforts on both the experimental and the theoretical sides. To this aim, I applied the model of reflectivity of particles at grazing incidence proposed …
First Dark Matter Search Results from the XENON1T Experiment
2017
We report the first dark matter search results from XENON1T, a ∼2000-kg-target-mass dual-phase (liquid-gas) xenon time projection chamber in operation at the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso in Italy and the first ton-scale detector of this kind. The blinded search used 34.2 live days of data acquired between November 2016 and January 2017. Inside the (1042±12)-kg fiducial mass and in the [5,40] keVnr energy range of interest for weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) dark matter searches, the electronic recoil background was (1.93±0.25)×10-4 events/(kg×day×keVee), the lowest ever achieved in such a dark matter detector. A profile likelihood analysis shows that the data are consisten…
Decreasing Phanerozoic extinction intensity as a consequence of Earth surface oxygenation and metazoan ecophysiology
2021
The decline in background extinction rates of marine animals through geologic time is an established but unexplained feature of the Phanerozoic fossil record. There is also growing consensus that the ocean and atmosphere did not become oxygenated to near-modern levels until the mid-Paleozoic, coinciding with the onset of generally lower extinction rates. Physiological theory provides us with a possible causal link between these two observations-predicting that the synergistic impacts of oxygen and temperature on aerobic respiration would have made marine animals more vulnerable to ocean warming events during periods of limited surface oxygenation. Here, we evaluate the hypothesis that chang…
Correlation of the highest-energy cosmic rays with the positions of nearby active galactic nuclei
2008
Data collected by the Pierre Auger Observatory provide evidence for anisotropy in the arrival directions of the cosmic rays with the ighest-energies, which are correlated with the positions of relatively nearby active galactic nuclei (AGN) [Pierre Auger Collaboration, Science 318 (2007) 938]. The correlation has maximum significance for cosmic rays with energy greater than ~6 x 1019 eV and AGN at a distance less than ~75 Mpc. We have confirmed the anisotropy at a confidence level of more than 99% through a test with parameters specified a priori, using an independent data set. The observed correlation is compatible with the hypothesis that cosmic rays with the highest-energies originate fro…
Phase-Noise and Amplitude-Noise Measurement of DACs and DDSs
2019
This article proposes a method for the measurement of Phase Noise (PN, or PM noise) and Amplitude Noise (AN, or AM noise) of Digital-to-Analog Converters (DAC) and Direct Digital Synthesizers (DDS) based on modulation-index amplification. The carrier is first reduced by a controlled amount (30-40 dB) by adding a reference signal of nearly equal amplitude and opposite in phase. Then, residual carrier and noise sidebands are amplified and sent to a conventional PN analyzer. The main virtues of our method are: (i) the noise specs of the PN analyzer are relaxed by a factor equal to the carrier suppression ratio; and, (ii) the capability to measure the AN using a PN analyzer, with no need for th…
Frequency Stability Measurement of Cryogenic Sapphire Oscillators with a Multichannel Tracking DDS and the Two-Sample Covariance
2018
This article shows the first measurement of three 100 MHz signals exhibiting fluctuations from 2E-16 to parts in 1E-15 for integration time tau between 1 s and 1 day. Such stable signals are provided by three Cryogenic Sapphire Oscillators (CSOs) operating at about 10 GHz, also delivering the 100 MHz output via a dedicated synthesizer. The measurement is made possible by a 6-channel Tracking DDS (TDDS) and the two-sample covariance tool, used to estimate the Allan variance. The use of two TDDS channels per CSO enables high rejection of the instrument background noise. The covariance outperforms the Three-Cornered Hat (TCH) method in that the background converges to zero "out of the box," wi…
Evaluation Metric for Rate of Background Detection
2016
International audience; This paper proposes an evaluation metric which derive the effectiveness of background modeling algorithms. Background modeling is a key process on developing visual surveillance systems. The requirement of adapting to dynamic environments has motivated researchers to modify existing background modeling algorithms and develop new algorithms with better adaptability. Having the algorithms developed, credentials of each of the algorithms have to be assessed to exploit their effectiveness. Various evaluation metrics have been used for evaluating the rate of foreground extraction, foreground detection, and overall accuracy. However, the rate of background detection has no…
Search for low-energy neutrinos from astrophysical sources with Borexino
2019
We report on searches for neutrinos and antineutrinos from astrophysical sources performed with the Borexino detector at the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso in Italy. Electron antineutrinos ($\bar{\nu}_e$) are detected in an organic liquid scintillator through the inverse $\beta$-decay reaction. In the present work we set model-independent upper limits in the energy range 1.8-16.8 MeV on neutrino fluxes from unknown sources that improve our previous results, on average, by a factor 2.5. Using the same data set, we first obtain experimental constraints on the diffuse supernova $\bar{\nu}_e$ fluxes in the previously unexplored region below 8 MeV. A search for $\bar{\nu}_e$ in the solar ne…
Borexino’s search for low-energy neutrino and antineutrino signals correlated with gamma-ray bursts
2017
International audience; A search for neutrino and antineutrino events correlated with 2350 gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) is performed with Borexino data collected between December 2007 and November 2015. No statistically significant excess over background is observed. We look for electron antineutrinos ( ν¯e ) that inverse beta decay on protons with energies from 1.8 MeV to 15 MeV and set the best limit on the neutrino fluence from GRBs below 8 MeV. The signals from neutrinos and antineutrinos from GRBs that scatter on electrons are also searched for, a detection channel made possible by the particularly radio-pure scintillator of Borexino. We obtain currently the best limits on the neutrino f…
Time-integrated Neutrino Source Searches with 10 years of IceCube Data
2020
Physical review letters 124(5), 051103 (1-9) (2020). doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.124.051103