This thesis is devoted to ANTARES, the first underwater neutrino telescope in the Mediterranean sea. As the main scientific analysis, a search for high-energy neutrino emission from the region of the Fermi bubbles has been performed using data from the ANTARES detector. A method for the background estimation using off-zones has been developed specially for this measurement. A new likelihood for the limits calculation which treats both observations in the on-zone and in the off-zone in the similar way and also includes different systematic uncertainties has been constructed. The analysis of 2008–2011 ANTARES data yielded a 1.2 σ  excess of events in the Fermi bubble regions, compatible with the no-signal hypothesis. For the optimistic case of no energy cutoff in the flux, the upper limit is within a factor of three of the prediction of the purely hadronic model based on the measured gamma-ray flux. The sensitivity improves as more data are accumulated (more than 65% gain in the sensitivity is expected once 2012–2016 data are added to the analysis).

The main goal of the book is to provide a systematic and didactic approach to the physics and technology of free-electron lasers. Numerous figures are used for illustrating the underlying ideas and concepts and links to other fields of physics are provided. After an introduction to undulator radiation and the low-gain FEL, the one-dimensional theory of the high-gain FEL is developed in a systematic way. Particular emphasis is put on explaining and justifying the various assumptions and approximations that are needed to obtain the differential and integral equations governing the FEL dynamics. Analytical and numerical solutions are presented and important FEL parameters are defined, such as gain length, FEL bandwidth and saturation power. One of the most important features of a high-gain FEL, the formation of microbunches, is studied at length. The increase of gain length due to beam energy spread, space charge forces, and three-dimensional effects such as betatron oscillations and optical diffraction is analyzed. The mechanism of Self-Amplified Spontaneous Emission is described theoretically and illustrated with numerous experimental results. Various methods of FEL seeding by coherent external radiation are introduced, together with experimental results. The world’s first soft X-ray FEL, the user facility FLASH at DESY, is described in some detail to give an impression of the complexity of such an accelerator-based light source. The last chapter is devoted to the new hard X-ray FELs which generate extremely intense radiation in the Angstrøm regime. The appendices contain supplementary material and more involved calculations.

The research presented here includes important contributions on the commissioning of the ATLAS experiment and the discovery of the Higgs boson. The thesis describes essential work on the alignment of the inner tracker during the commissioning of the experiment and development of the electron identification algorithm. The subsequent analysis focuses on the search for the Higgs boson in the WW channel, including the development of a method to model the critical W+jet background. In addition, the thesis provides excellent introductions, suitable for non-specialists, to Higgs physics, to the LHC, and to the ATLAS experiment.

Housed by a 4 m diameter tunnel of 27 km circumference, with huge underground labs and numerous surface facilities, and set up with a precision of 0.1 mm per kilometer, the Large Electron-Positron Collider (LEP) was not only the largest but also one of the most sophisticated scientific research instruments ever created by Man. Located at CERN, near Geneva, LEP was built during the years 1983 - 1989, was operational until 2000, and corroborated the standard model of particle physics through continuous high precision measurements. The Author, director-general of CERN during the crucial period of the construction of LEP, recounts vividly the convoluted decision-making and technical implementation processes - the tunnel alone being a highly challenging geo- and civil engineering project - and the subsequent extremely fruitful period of scientific research. Finally he describes the difficult decision to close down LEP, at a time when the discovery of the Higgs boson seemed within reach. LEP was eventually dismantled in 2000, enabling the tunnel to be reused for building the next generation machine, the much more powerful Large Hadron Collider (LHC), an upgrade then called LEP3 and foreseen from the beginning. It became operational just as this account was being completed. Written by the main protagonist responsible for making LEP a reality, this is the definitive inside story of a remarkable machine and the many thousands of scientists and engineers from around the world, whose efforts contributed to the new knowledge it produced.

Large mass bolometers are used in particle physics experiments to search for rare processes, like neutrinoless double beta decay and dark matter interactions. In the next years the CUORE experiment (a 1 Ton detector composed by 1000 crystals of TeO2 operated as bolometers in a large cryostat at 10mK) will be the particle physics experiment with the highest chance of discovering the Majorana neutrino, a long standing and yet fundamental question of particle physics. The study presented in this book was performed on the bolometers of the CUORE experiment. The response function of these detectors is not linear in the energy range of interest, and it changes with the operating temperature, worsening the performances. The nonlinearity appeared to be dominated by the thermistor and the biasing circuit used to read the bolometer, and was modeled using few measurable parameters. A method to obtain a linear response is the result of this work. It allows a great improvement of the detector operation and data analysis. With a foreword by Fernando Ferroni.

In this book, the anomaly mediated supersymmetry breaking (AMSB) model is explored by searching for charged winos with their subsequent decays collected with the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The author develops a new method, called "re-tracking," to detect charged winos that decay before reaching the Semiconductor Tracker (SCT) detector. Because the nominal tracking algorithm at the ATLAS experiment requires at least seven successive hits in the inner tracking system, the sensitivity to charged winos having a fraction of a nanosecond in the past analysis was therefore limited. However, re-tracking requires a minimum of three pixel hits and provides a fully efficient tracking capability for charged winos traversing the pixel detector, resulting in around about 100 times greater efficiency for charged winos with a lifetime ~0.2 ns longer than that in past searches. Signal topology is characterized by a jet with large transverse momentum (pT), large missing transverse energy, and a high-pT disappearing track. There are three types of back ground tracks: interacting hadron tracks, charged leptons, and tracks with mismeasured pT. A background estimation based on the Monte Carlo (MC) simulation suffers from large uncertainties due to poor statistics and has difficulty simulating the properties of background tracks. Therefore, a data-driven approach has been developed by the author of the book to estimate the background track-pT spectrum. No significant excess above the background expectation is observed for candidate tracks with large transverse momentum, and constraints on the AMSB model are obtained. The author shows that in the AMSB model, a charged wino mass below 270 GeV is excluded at 95 % confidence level, which also directly constrains the mass of wino dark matter.

This thesis reports on the first studies of Standard Model photon production at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) using the ATLAS detector. Standard Model photon production is a large background in the search for Higgs bosons decaying into photon pairs, and is thus critical to understand. The thesis explains the techniques used to reconstruct and identify photon candidates using the ATLAS detector, and describes a measurement of the production cross section for isolated prompt photons. The thesis also describes a search for the Higgs boson in which the analysis techniques used in the measurement are exploited to reduce and estimate non-prompt backgrounds in diphoton events.

These pages present a collection of recent papers primarily documenting the nascent science of neutrino geophysics. Most of the papers followed from talks given at Neutrino Sciences 2005: Neutrino Geophysics held at the University of Hawaii in December 2005. Several papers were solicited later in an effort to make the collection as comprehensive as possible. Every paper was scrutinized by an external reviewer to assure the quality of scientific content.

With contributions from leading scientists in the field, and edited by two of the most prominent astronomers of our time, this is a totally authoritative volume on X-ray astronomy that will be essential reading for everyone interested - from students to astrophysicists and physicists. All the aspects of this exciting area of study are covered, from astronomical instrumentation to extragalactic X-ray astronomy.

This revised edition of the author's classic 2006 text offers a comprehensively updated review of the field of relativistic nonlinear electrodynamics. It explores the interaction of strong and super-strong electromagnetic/laser radiation with the electromagnetic quantum vacuum and diverse types of matter - including free charged particles and antiparticles, acceleration beams, plasma and plasmous media. The appearance of laser sources of relativistic and ultra-relativistic intensities over the last decade has stimulated investigation of a large class of processes under such super-strong radiation fields. Revisions for this second edition reflect these developments and the book includes new chapters on Bremsstrahlung and nonlinear absorption of superintense radiation in plasmas, the nonlinear interaction of relativistic atoms with intense laser radiation, nonlinear interaction of strong laser radiation with Graphene, and relativistic nonlinear phenomena in solid-plasma targets under supershort laser pulses of ultrarelativistic intensities. The only book devoted to the subject of relativistic nonlinear electrodynamics, this second edition will be a valuable resource for graduate students and researchers involved in any aspect of the field, including those working with intense x-ray - gamma-ray lasers, the new generation of small size laser-plasma accelerators of superhigh energies and high-brightness particle beams.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of the operating principles and technology of electron lenses in supercolliders. Electron lenses are a novel instrument for high energy particle accelerators, particularly for the energy-frontier superconducting hadron colliders, including the Tevatron, RHIC, LHC and future very large hadron colliders. After reviewing the issues surrounding beam dynamics in supercolliders, the book offers an introduction to the electron lens method and its application. Further chapters describe the technology behind the electron lenses which have recently been proposed, built and employed for compensation of beam-beam effects and for collimation of high-energy high-intensity beams, for compensation of space-charge effects and several other applications in accelerators. The book will be an invaluable resource for those involved in the design, construction and operation of the next generation of hadron colliders.

Neutron stars are the most compact astronomical objects in the universe which are accessible by direct observation. Studying neutron stars means studying physics in regimes unattainable in any terrestrial laboratory. Understanding their observed complex phenomena requires a wide range of scientific disciplines, including the nuclear and condensed matter physics of very dense matter in neutron star interiors, plasma physics and quantum electrodynamics of magnetospheres, and the relativistic magneto-hydrodynamics of electron-positron pulsar winds interacting with some ambient medium. Not to mention the test bed neutron stars provide for general relativity theories, and their importance as potential sources of gravitational waves. It is this variety of disciplines which, among others, makes neutron star research so fascinating, not only for those who have been working in the field for many years but also for students and young scientists. The aim of this book is to serve as a reference work which not only reviews the progress made since the early days of pulsar astronomy, but especially focuses on questions such as: "What have we learned about the subject and how did we learn it?", "What are the most important open questions in this area?" and "What new tools, telescopes, observations, and calculations are needed to answer these questions?". All authors who have contributed to this book have devoted a significant part of their scientific careers to exploring the nature of neutron stars and understanding pulsars. Everyone has paid special attention to writing educational comprehensive review articles with the needs of beginners, students and young scientists as potential readers in mind. This book will be a valuable source of information for these groups.

These proceedings collect the selected contributions of participants of the First Karl Schwarzschild Meeting on Gravitational Physics, held in Frankfurt, Germany to celebrate the 140th anniversary of Schwarzschild's birth. They are grouped into 4 main themes: I. The Life and Work of Karl Schwarzschild; II. Black Holes in Classical General Relativity, Numerical Relativity, Astrophysics, Cosmology, and Alternative Theories of Gravity; III. Black Holes in Quantum Gravity and String Theory; IV. Other Topics in Contemporary Gravitation. Inspired by the foundational principle ``By acknowledging the past, we open a route to the future", the week-long meeting, envisioned as a forum for exchange between scientists from all locations and levels of education, drew participants from 15 countries across 4 continents. In addition to plenary talks from leading researchers, a special focus on young talent was provided, a feature underlined by the Springer Prize for the best student and junior presentations.

The sine-Gordon model is a ubiquitous model of Mathematical Physics with a wide range of applications extending from coupled torsion pendula and Josephson junction arrays to gravitational and high-energy physics models. The purpose of this book is to present a summary of recent developments in this field, incorporating both introductory background material, but also with a strong view towards modern applications, recent experiments, developments regarding the existence, stability, dynamics and asymptotics of nonlinear waves that arise in the model. This book is of particular interest to a wide range of researchers in this field, but serves as an introductory text for young researchers and students interested in the topic. The book consists of well-selected thematic chapters on diverse mathematical and physical aspects of the equation carefully chosen and assigned.

This exhaustive survey is the result of a four year effort by many leading researchers in the field to produce both a readable introduction and a yardstick for the many upcoming experiments using heavy ion collisions to examine the properties of nuclear matter. The books falls naturally into five large parts, first examining the bulk properties of strongly interacting matter, including its equation of state and phase structure. Part II discusses elementary hadronic excitations of nuclear matter, Part III addresses the concepts and models regarding the space-time dynamics of nuclear collision experiments, Part IV collects the observables from past and current high-energy heavy-ion facilities in the context of the theoretical predictions specific to compressed baryonic matter. Part V finally gives a brief description of the experimental concepts. The book explicitly addresses everyone working or planning to enter the field of high-energy nuclear physics.

Helping readers understand the complicated laws of nature, Advanced Particle Physics Volume II: The Standard Model and Beyond explains the calculations, experimental procedures, and measuring methods of particle physics, particularly quantum chromodynamics (QCD). It also discusses extensions to the Standard Model and the physics of massive neutrinos. Divided into three parts, this volume begins with QCD. It explains the quantization scheme using functional integrals and investigates renormalization problems. The book also calculates cross sections of basic hard processes and covers nonperturbative methods, such as the lattice approach and QCD vacuum. The next part focuses on electroweak interactions, in which the author describes the Glashow-Weinberg-Salam theory and presents composite models and a left-right symmetric model as extensions to the Standard Model. The book concludes with chapters on massive neutrino physics that cover neutrino properties, neutrino oscillation in vacuum and matter, and solar and atmospheric neutrinos.

In this thesis, the measurement of double-spin asymmetry for electron production from heavy flavor decays was performed in a Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) in the PHENIX experiment at Brookhaven National Laboratory to measure the polarized parton distribution function of gluon in the small Bjorken x region (x~0.01).   For this experiment, for the first time a Hadron Blind Detector (HBD), which is a position-sensitive gas Cherenkov counter with Gas Electron Multiplier whose surface is evaporated by CsI, was employed. This HBD contributes to reducing the background from electron pairs produced by real and virtual photon conversion. Furthermore, the author develops a new analysis method for the background reduction, and the signal-to-background ratio is improved by a factor of roughly 2.0. Using the combination of the HBD and a new analysis method, the double-spin asymmetry of the electron production with transverse momentum ranging 0.5 < pT < 3.0 GeV/c is measured and confirmed to be zero-consistent within the limit of the statistical uncertainty of about 1%. This result identifies the constraint of the gluon polarization in the small Bjorken x region, a worldwide first.

These proceedings provide the latest results on dark matter and dark energy research. The UCLA Department of Physics and Astronomy hosted its tenth Dark Matter and Dark Energy conference in Marina del Rey and brought together all the leaders in the field. The symposium provided a scientific forum for the latest discussions in the field.  Topics covered at the symposium:  •Status of measurements of the equation of state of dark energy and new experiments •The search for missing energy events at the LHC and implications for dark matter search •Theoretical calculations on all forms of dark matter (SUSY, axions, sterile neutrinos, etc.) •Status of the indirect search for dark matter •Status of the direct search for dark matter in detectors around the world •The low-mass wimp search region •The next generation of very large dark matter detectors •New underground laboratories for dark matter search  

This textbook provides an introduction to radiation, the principles of interaction between radiation and matter, and the exploitation of those principles in the design of modern radiation detectors. Both radiation and detectors are given equal attention and their interplay is carefully laid out with few assumptions made about the prior knowledge of the student. Part I is dedicated to radiation, broadly interpreted in terms of energy and type, starting with an overview of particles and forces, an extended review of common natural and man-made sources of radiation, and an introduction to particle accelerators. Particular attention is paid to real life examples, which place the types of radiation and their energy in context. Dosimetry is presented from a modern, user-led point of view, and relativistic kinematics is introduced to give the basic knowledge needed to handle the more formal aspects of radiation dynamics and interaction. The explanation of the physics principles of interaction between radiation and matter is given significant space to allow a deeper understanding of the various technologies based on those principles. Following an introduction to the ionisation mechanism, detectors are introduced in Part II, grouped according to the physical principle that underpins their functionality, with chapters covering gaseous detectors, semiconductor detectors, the scintillation process and light detectors. The final two chapters describe the phenomenology of showers and the design of calorimeters, and cover additional phenomena including Cherenkov and transition radiation and the detection of neutrinos. An appendix offers the reader a useful review of statistics and probability distributions. The mathematical formalism is kept to a minimum throughout and simple derivations are presented to guide the reasoning and facilitate understanding of the working principles. The book is unique in its wide scope and introductory level, and is suitable for undergraduate and graduate students in physics and engineering. The reader will acquire an awareness of how radiation and its exploitation are becoming increasingly relevant in the modern world, with over 140 experimental figures, detector schematics and photographs helping to relate the material to a broader research context.

Dark Energy and Dark Matter are among the greatest mysteries in modern cosmology. The present work explores in depth how large cosmic structures can help us unveil the nature of these components of the Universe. One the one hand, it focuses on a signature that Dark Energy imprints on the Cosmic Microwave Background through its impact on the time-evolution of gravitational potentials: the integrated Sachs-Wolfe (iSW) effect. Another cosmological background, the Cosmic Infrared Background, is considered for the first time in the study of the iSW effect and demonstrated to be a highly efficient and promising tracer. Changing the perspective on the problem, the use of superstructures for iSW detection is then extensively reviewed: using precise solutions to Einstein's general relativity equations, the full iSW effect is computed, especially due to the cosmic voids predicted by the theory. Using measurements from the most recent data, it is subsequently shown how the iSW probes the solidity of the cosmological standard model. On the topic of Dark Matter, an original study is presented, showing that temperature measurements of the intergalactic medium shed light on the nature of Dark Matter particles, providing the tightest constraints on their decay properties.

Quantum physics may appear complicated, especially if one forgets the "big picture" and gets lost in the details. However, it can become clearer and less tangled if one applies a few fundamental concepts so that simplified approaches can emerge and estimated orders of magnitude become clear. Povh and Rosina's Scattering and Structures presents the properties of quantum systems (elementary particles, nucleons, atoms, molecules, quantum gases, quantum liquids, stars, and early universe) with the help of elementary concepts and analogies between these seemingly different systems. In this new edition, sections on quantum gases and an up to date overview of elementary particles have been added.

A dense sheet of electrons accelerated to close to the speed of light can act as a tuneable mirror that can generate bright bursts of laser-like radiation in the short wavelength range simply via the reflection of a counter-propagating laser pulse. This thesis investigates the generation of such a relativistic electron mirror structure in a series of experiments accompanied by computer simulations. It is shown that such relativistic mirror can indeed be created from the interaction of a high-intensity laser pulse with a nanometer-scale, ultrathin foil. The reported work gives a intriguing insight into the complex dynamics of high-intensity laser-nanofoil interactions and constitutes a major step towards the development of a relativistic mirror, which could potentially generate bright burst of X-rays on a micro-scale.

State-of-the-art survey by leading experts in the field. Major foci are superheavy nuclei and neutron-rich exotic nuclei. In addition new developments in nuclear fission and nuclear cluster decay are shown. Finally developments in relativistic heavy ion collisions and the physics of supercritical fields are detailed.

Chapter 1 briefly describes the main properties of space plasmas and primary CR. Chapter 2 considers the problem of CR propagation in space plasmas described by the kinetic equation and different types of diffusion approximations. Chapter 3 is devoted to CR non-linear effects in space plasmas caused by CR pressure and CR kinetic stream instabilities with the generation of Alfven turbulence. In Chapter 4 different processes of CR acceleration in space plasmas are considered. The book ends with a list providing more than 1,300 full references, a discussion on future developments and unsolved problems, as well as Object and Author indexes.

This book is based on the author's work in the T2K long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiment, in which neutrinos are generated by a proton beam and are detected by near and far neutrino detectors. In order to achieve the precise measurement of the neutrino oscillation, an accurate understanding of the neutrino beam and the neutrino interaction is essential. Thus, the author measured the neutrino beam properties and the neutrino interaction cross sections using a near neutrino detector called INGRID and promoted a better understanding of them. Then, the author performed a neutrino oscillation analysis using the neutrino beam and neutrino interaction models verified by the INGRID measurements. As a result, some values of the neutrino CP phase are disfavored at the 90% confidence level. If the measurement precision is further improved, we may be able to discover the finite CP phase which involves the CP violation. Thus, this result is an important step towards the discovery of CP violation in the lepton sector, which may be the key to understanding the origin of the matter-antimatter asymmetry in the universe.