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R. Vaccarone

Publications and source records attributed to R. Vaccarone.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

Prospects for measuring the gravitational free-fall of antihydrogen with emulsion detectors

The main goal of the AEgIS experiment at CERN is to test the weak equivalence principle for antimatter. AEgIS will measure the free-fall of an antihydrogen beam traversing a moiré deflectometer. The goal is to determine the gravitational acceleration g for antihydrogen with an initial relative accuracy of 1% by using an emulsion detector combined with a silicon micro-strip detector to measure the time of flight. Nuclear emulsions can measure the annihilation vertex of antihydrogen atoms with a precision of about 1 - 2 microns r.m.s. We present here results for emulsion detectors operated in vacuum using low energy antiprotons from the CERN antiproton decelerator. We compare with Monte Carlo simulations, and discuss the impact on the AEgIS project.

physics.ins-det

SAGACE: the Spectroscopic Active Galaxies And Clusters Explorer

The SAGACE experiment consists of a mm/sub-mm telescope with a 3-m diameter primary mirror, coupled to a cryogenic multi-beam differential spectrometer. SAGACE explores the sky in the 100-760 GHz frequency range, using four diffraction-limited bolometer arrays. The instrument is designed to perform spectroscopic surveys of the Sunyaev-Zeldovich effects of thousands of galaxy clusters, of the spectral energy distribution of active galactic nuclei, and of the [CII] line of a thousand galaxies in the redshift desert. In 2008 a full phase-A study for a national small mission was completed and delivered to the Italian Space Agency (ASI). We have shown that taking advantage of the differential operation of the Fourier Transform Spectrometer, this ambitious instrument can operate from a Molniya orbit, and can be built and operated within the tight budget of a small mission.

astro-ph.CO

All-sky search of NAUTILUS data

A search for periodic gravitational-wave signals from isolated neutron stars in the NAUTILUS detector data is presented. We have analyzed half a year of data over the frequency band $<922.2; 923.2>$ Hz, the spindown range $<-1.463\times10^{-8}; 0>$ Hz/s and over the entire sky. We have divided the data into 2 day stretches and we have analyzed each stretch coherently using matched filtering. We have imposed a low threshold for the optimal detection statistic to obtain a set of candidates that are further examined for coincidences among various data stretches. For some candidates we have also investigated the change of the signal-to-noise ratio when we increase the observation time from two to four days. Our analysis has not revealed any gravitational-wave signals. Therefore we have imposed upper limits on the dimensionless gravitational-wave amplitude over the parameter space that we have searched. Depending on frequency, our upper limit ranges from $3.4 \times 10^{-23}$ to $1.3 \times 10^{-22}$. We have attempted a statistical verification of the hypotheses leading to our conclusions. We estimate that our upper limit is accurate to within 18%.

gr-qc

All-sky incoherent search for periodic signals with Explorer 2005 data

The data collected during 2005 by the resonant bar Explorer are divided into segments and incoherently summed in order to perform an all-sky search for periodic gravitational wave signals. The parameter space of the search spanned about 40 Hz in frequency, over 23927 positions in the sky. Neither source orbital corrections nor spindown parameters have been included, with the result that the search was sensible to isolated neutron stars with a frequency drift less than 6 X 10^{-11} Hz/s. No gravitational wave candidates have been found by means of the present analysis, which led to a best upper limit of 3.1 X 10^{-23} for the dimensionless strain amplitude.

gr-qc

Superconducting cavity transducer for resonant gravitational radiation antennas

Parametric transducers, such as superconducting rf cavities, can boost the bandwidth and sensitivity of the next generation resonant antennas, thanks to a readily available technology. We have developed a fully coupled dynamic model of the system "antenna--transducer" and worked out some estimates of signal--to--noise ratio and the stability conditions in various experimental configurations. We also show the design and the prototype of a rf cavity which, together with a suitable read--out electronic, will be used as a test bench for the parametric transducer.

gr-qc