No Arabic abstract
Photon-induced reactions play a key role in the nucleosynthesis of rare neutron-deficient p-nuclei. The paper focuses on (gamma,alpha), (gamma,p), and (gamma,n) reactions which define the corresponding p-process path. The relation between stellar reaction rates and laboratory cross sections is analyzed for photon-induced reactions and their inverse capture reactions to evaluate various experimental approaches. An improved version S_C(E) of the astrophysical S-factor is suggested which is based on the Coulomb wave functions. S_C(E) avoids the apparent energy dependence which is otherwise obtained for capture reactions on heavy nuclei. It is found that a special type of synchrotron radiation available at SPring-8 that mimics stellar blackbody radiation at billions of Kelvin is a promising tool for future experiments. By using the blackbody synchrotron radiation, sufficient event rates for (gamma,alpha) and (gamma,p) reactions in the p-process path can be expected. These experiments will provide data to improve the nuclear parameters involved in the statistical model and thus reduce the uncertainties of nucleosynthesis calculations.
We review the literature on possible violations of the superposition principle for electromagnetic fields in vacuum from the earliest studies until the emergence of renormalized QED at the end of the 1940s. The exposition covers experimental work on photon-photon scattering and the propagation of light in external electromagnetic fields and relevant theoretical work on nonlinear electrodynamic theories (Born-Infeld theory and QED) until the year 1949. To enrich the picture, pieces of reminiscences from a number of (theoretical) physicists on their work in this field are collected and included or appended.
We review our theoretical approach to neutral current photon emission on nucleons and nuclei in the few-GeV energy region, relevant for neutrino oscillation experiments. These reactions are dominated by the weak excitation of the $Delta(1232)$ resonance but there are also important non-resonant contributions. We have also included terms mediated by nucleon excitations from the second resonance region. On nuclei, Pauli blocking, Fermi motion and the in-medium $Delta$ resonance broadening have been taken into account for both incoherent and coherent reaction channels. With this model, the number and distributions of photon events at the MiniBooNE and T2K experiments have been obtained. We have also compared to the NOMAD upper limit at higher energies. The implications of our findings and future perspectives are discussed.
A review is given on photon-hadron and photon-photon collisions in the ALICE experiment. The physics motivation for studying such reactions is outlined, and the results obtained in proton-lead and lead-lead collisions in Run 1 of the LHC are discussed. The improvement in detector rapidity coverage due to a newly added detector system is presented. The ALICE perspectives for data taking in LHC Run II are summarised.
Experiments built to search for neutrinoless double beta-decay are limited in their sensitivity not only by the exposure but also by the amount of background encountered. Radioactive isotopes in the surrounding of the detectors which emit gamma-radiation are expected to be a significant source of background in the GERmanium Detector Array, GERDA. Methods to select electron induced events and discriminate against photon induced events inside a germanium detector are presented in this paper. The methods are based on the analysis of the time structure of the detector response. Data were taken with a segmented GERDA prototype detector. It is shown that the analysis of the time response of the detector can be used to distinguish multiply scattered photons from electrons.
Neutrino neutral-current induced single photon production is a sub-leading order process for accelerator-based neutrino beam experiments including T2K. It is, however, an important process to understand because it is a background for electron (anti)neutrino appearance oscillation experiments. Here, we performed the first search of this process below 1 GeV using the fine-grained detector at the T2K ND280 off-axis near detector. By reconstructing single photon kinematics from electron-positron pairs, we achieved 95% pure gamma ray sample from 5.738$times 10^{20}$ protons-on-targets neutrino mode data. We do not find positive evidence of neutral current induced single photon production in this sample. We set the model-dependent upper limit on the cross-section for this process, at 0.114$times 10^{-38}$ cm$^2$ (90% C.L.) per nucleon, using the J-PARC off-axis neutrino beam with an average energy of $left<E_ uright>sim 0.6$ GeV. This is the first limit on this process below 1 GeV which is important for current and future oscillation experiments looking for electron neutrino appearance oscillation signals.