Note: When clicking on a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) number, you will be taken to an external site maintained by the publisher.
Some full text articles may not yet be available without a charge during the embargo (administrative interval).
What is a DOI Number?
Some links on this page may take you to non-federal websites. Their policies may differ from this site.
-
Asymptotic giant branch stars are responsible for the production of most of the heavy isotopes beyond Sr observed in the solar system. Among them, isotopes shielded from the -process contribution by their stable isobars are defined as -only nuclei. For a long time the abundance of , the heaviest -only isotope, has been a topic of debate because state-of-the-art stellar models appeared to systematically underestimate its solar abundance. Besides the impact of uncertainties from stellar models and galactic chemical evolution simulations, this discrepancy was further obscured by rather divergent theoretical estimates for the neutron capture cross section of its radioactive precursor in the neutron-capture flow, ( ), and by the lack of experimental data on this reaction. We present the first ever neutron capture measurement on , conducted at the CERN neutron time-of-flight facility n_TOF, employing a sample of only 9 mg of produced at the Institute Laue Langevin high flux reactor. By complementing our new results with semiempirical calculations we obtained, at the -process temperatures of and , Maxwellian-averaged cross sections (MACS) of 580(168) mb and 260(90) mb, respectively. These figures are about 3% lower and 20% higher than the corresponding values widely used in astrophysical calculations, which were based only on theoretical calculations. By using the new MACS, the uncertainty arising from the cross section on the -process abundance of has been reduced from down to , and the -process calculations are in agreement with the latest solar system abundance of reported by K. Lodders in 2021. Published by the American Physical Society2024more » « less
-
The LHCb upgrade represents a major change of the experiment. The detectors have been almost completely renewed to allow running at an instantaneous luminosity five times larger than that of the previous running periods. Readout of all detectors into an all-software trigger is central to the new design, facilitating the reconstruction of events at the maximum LHC interaction rate, and their selection in real time. The experiment's tracking system has been completely upgraded with a new pixel vertex detector, a silicon tracker upstream of the dipole magnet and three scintillating fibre tracking stations downstream of the magnet. The whole photon detection system of the RICH detectors has been renewed and the readout electronics of the calorimeter and muon systems have been fully overhauled. The first stage of the all-software trigger is implemented on a GPU farm. The output of the trigger provides a combination of totally reconstructed physics objects, such as tracks and vertices, ready for final analysis, and of entire events which need further offline reprocessing. This scheme required a complete revision of the computing model and rewriting of the experiment's software.more » « less
An official website of the United States government
