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O. Gonzalez

Publications and source records attributed to O. Gonzalez.

11 recordsLinked to original sources

Neutronics Calculations for the Common Shielding Project at ESS

The European Spallation Source ESS is being constructed in Lund, Sweden, to be the world's brightest cold pulsed spallation neutron source. The facility uses a 2GeV proton beam hitting a target to produce neutrons. The neutrons are then thermalized in a moderator. Surrounding the moderator are several beam ports connected to neutron guides that transport the cold neutrons. Due to the long-pulse source nature of the ESS, neutron scattering instruments are significantly longer than at most existing facilities, with approximately half the instruments requiring neutron guides that are 150 meters long and only a few shorter than 50 meters. Therefore the shielding cost is dominated by the guide shielding. To fulfill the shielding requirement, a 'Common Shielding Project' has been initiated to deliver cost-effective and standardized solutions for several instruments. This includes both a consistent design of the shielding blocks, as well as a common approach to neutronics simulations.

physics.ins-det

unVEil the darknesS of The gAlactic buLgE (VESTALE)

The main aim of this experiment is to provide a complete census of old (t > 10 Gyr, RR Lyrae, type II Cepheids, red horizontal branch), intermediate age (red clump, Miras) and young (classical Cepheids) stellar tracers across the Galactic Bulge. To fully exploit the unique photometric quality of LSST images, we plan to perform a Shallow minisurvey (ugrizy, -20 < l < 20 deg, -15 < b < 10 deg) and a Deep minisurvey (izy, -20 < l < 20 deg, -3 < b < 3 deg). The former one is aimed at constraining the 3D structure of the galactic Bulge across the four quadrants, and in particular, the transition between inner and outer Bulge. The u,g,r,i,z,y LSST bands provide fundamental diagnostics to constrain the evolutionary properties of low and intermediate-mass stars when moving from a metal-poor to a metal-rich regime. The deep minisurvey is aimed at tracing RR Lyrae, Red Clump stars, Miras and classical Cepheids in highly reddened regions of the Galactic center. These images will allow us to investigate the role that baryonic mass and dark matter played in the early formation and evolution of the MW.

astro-ph.SR

Chiral transport and electronic correlations in surface states of HfNiSn single crystals

In most topological insulators, the valence and conduction band appear in reverse or inverted order compared to an equivalent insulator with isolated atoms. Here, we explore a different route towards topologically nontrivial states that may arise from metallic states present on the surface of bulk insulators without such band inversion. High-quality single crystals of HfNiSn show surface transport with weak anti-localization, consistent with a two-dimensional metallic state in the presence of strong spin-orbit coupling. Nonlinear I(V) curves indicate electronic correlations related to a chiral, nonlocal transport component that is qualitatively similar to a quantum Hall edge state, yet in the absence of external magnetic fields. The correlations themselves may play a decisive role in creating an apparent topologically nontrivial state on the HfNiSn surface.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci

Operational experience, improvements, and performance of the CDF Run II silicon vertex detector

The Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) pursues a broad physics program at Fermilab's Tevatron collider. Between Run II commissioning in early 2001 and the end of operations in September 2011, the Tevatron delivered 12 fb-1 of integrated luminosity of p-pbar collisions at sqrt(s)=1.96 TeV. Many physics analyses undertaken by CDF require heavy flavor tagging with large charged particle tracking acceptance. To realize these goals, in 2001 CDF installed eight layers of silicon microstrip detectors around its interaction region. These detectors were designed for 2--5 years of operation, radiation doses up to 2 Mrad (0.02 Gy), and were expected to be replaced in 2004. The sensors were not replaced, and the Tevatron run was extended for several years beyond its design, exposing the sensors and electronics to much higher radiation doses than anticipated. In this paper we describe the operational challenges encountered over the past 10 years of running the CDF silicon detectors, the preventive measures undertaken, and the improvements made along the way to ensure their optimal performance for collecting high quality physics data. In addition, we describe the quantities and methods used to monitor radiation damage in the sensors for optimal performance and summarize the detector performance quantities important to CDF's physics program, including vertex resolution, heavy flavor tagging, and silicon vertex trigger performance.

physics.ins-det

Stellar Ages through the Corners of the Boxy Bulge

In some scenarios for the formation of the Milky Way bulge the stellar population at the edges of the boxy bulge may be younger than those on the minor axis, or close to the Galactic center. So far the only bulge region where deep color-magnitude diagrams have been obtained is indeed along the minor axis. To overcome this limitation, we aim at age-dating the bulge stellar populations far away from the bulge minor axis. Color-magnitude diagrams and luminosity functions have been obtained from deep near-IR VLT/HAWK-I images taken at the two Southern corners of the boxy bulge, i.e., near the opposite edges of the Galactic bar. The foreground disk contamination has been statistically removed using a pure disk field observed with the same instrument and located approximately at similar Galactic latitudes of the two bulge fields, and 30deg in longitude away from the Galactic center. For each bulge field, mean reddening and distance are determined using the position of red clump stars, and the metallicity distribution is derived photometrically using the color distribution of stars in the upper red giant branch. The resulting metallicity distribution function of both fields peaks around [Fe/H] -0.1 dex, with the bulk of the stellar population having a metallicity within the range: -1 dex < [Fe/H] <+0.4 dex, quite similar to that of other inner bulge fields. Like for the inner fields previously explored, the color-magnitude diagrams of the two bar fields are consistent with their stellar population being older than ~10 Gyr, with no obvious evidence for the presence of a younger population.

astro-ph.GA

LHC Results Highlights (CLASHEP 2013)

The good performance of the LHC provided enough data at 7 TeV and 8 TeV to allow the experiments to perform very competitive measurements and to expand the knowledge about the fundamental interaction far beyond that from previous colliders. This report summarizes the highlights of the results obtained with these data samples by the four large experiments, covering all the topics of the physics program and focusing on those exploiting the possibilities of the LHC.

hep-ex

C and N abundances of MS and SGB stars in NGC 1851

We present the first chemical analysis of stars on the double subgiant branch (SGB) of the globular cluster NGC 1851. We obtained 48 Magellan IMACS spectra of subgiants and fainter stars covering the spectral region between 3650-6750Å, to derive C and N abundances from the spectral features at 4300Å(G-band) and at ~ 3883Å(CN). We added to our sample ~ 45 unvevolved stars previously observed with FORS2 at the VLT. These two datasets were homogeneously reduced and analyzed. We derived abundances of C and N for a total of 64 stars and found considerable star-to-star variations in both [C/H] and [N/H] at all luminosities extending to the red giant branch (RGB) base (V~18.9). These abundances appear to be strongly anticorrelated, as would be expected from the CN-cycle enrichment, but we did not detect any bimodality in the C or N content. We used HST and ground-based photometry to select two groups of faint- and bright-SGB stars from the visual and Strömgren color-magnitude diagrams. Significant variations in the carbon and nitrogen abundances are present among stars of each group, which indicates that each SGB hosts multiple subgenerations of stars. Bright- and faint-SGB stars differ in the total C+N content, where the fainter SGB have about 2.5 times the C+N content of the brighter ones. Coupling our results with literature photometric data and abundance determinations from high-resolution studies, we identify the fainter SGB with the red-RGB population, which also should be richer on average in Ba and other s-process elements, as well as in Na and N, when compared to brighter SGB and the blue-RGB population.

astro-ph.GA

Self-interactions of strands and sheets

Physical strands or sheets that can be modelled as curves or surfaces embedded in three dimensions are ubiquitous in nature, and are of fundamental importance in mathematics, physics, biology and engineering. Often the physical interpretation dictates that self-avoidance should be enforced in the continuum model, i.e. finite energy configurations should not self-intersect. Current continuum models with self-avoidance frequently employ pairwise repulsive potentials, which are of necessity singular. Moreover the potentials do not have an intrinsic length scale appropriate for modelling the finite thickness of the physical systems. Here we develop a framework for modelling self-avoiding strands and sheets which avoids singularities, and which provides a way to introduce a thickness length scale. In our approach pairwise interaction potentials are replaced by many-body potentials involving three or more points, and the radii of certain associated circles or spheres. Self-interaction energies based on these many-body potentials can be used to describe the statistical mechanics of self-interacting strands and sheets of finite thickness.

cond-mat.stat-mech

Jet Physics at HERA

Analyses of jet production at HERA have become precise enough to perform QCD studies which are both competitive and complementary to those at e+e- and p-pbar colliders. This report summarises some of the latest results on jet physics from the H1 and ZEUS Collaborations.

hep-ex

Two Quantum Cluster Approximations

We provide microscopic diagrammatic derivations of the Molecular Coherent Potential Approximation (MCA) and Dynamical Cluster Approximation (DCA) and show that both are Phi-derivable. The MCA (DCA) maps the lattice onto a self-consistently embedded cluster with open (periodic) boundary conditions, and therefore violates (preserves) the translational symmetry of the original lattice. As a consequence of the boundary conditions, the MCA (DCA) converges slowly (quickly) with corrections O(1/Lc) (O(1/Lc^2)), where Lc is the linear size of the cluster. However, local quantities, when measured in the center of the MCA cluster, converge more quickly than the DCA result. These results are demonstrated numerically for the one-dimensional symmetric Falicov-Kimball model.

cond-mat.str-el

Determination of the strong coupling constant using subjet multiplicities in Neutral Current Deep Inelastic Scattering

The internal structure of the jets produced in neutral current interactions for Q^2>125 GeV^2 has been studied using the subjet multiplicity with the ZEUS detector at HERA. Jets are identified in the laboratory frame by applying the longitudinally invariant k_T-cluster algorithm. Next-to-leading order QCD calculations have been obtained and compared to the data; a good agreement has been observed in the region where hadron-to-parton corrections are small, E_{T,jet}> 25 GeV. In this region, the strong coupling constant is extracted and the resulting value is alpha_s (M_Z)=0.1185 +/- 0.0016 (stat.) ^{+0.0067}_{-0.0048} (syst.) ^{+0.0089}_{-0.0071} (th.).

hep-ex