Arrival time and magnitude of airborne fission products from the Fukushima, Japan, reactor incident as measured in Seattle, WA, USA

We report results of air monitoring started due to the recent natural catastrophe on 11 March 2011 in Japan and the severe ensuing damage to the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear reactor complex. On 17-18 March 2011, we registered the first arrival of the airborne fission products 131-I, 132-I, 132-Te, 134-Cs, and 137-Cs in Seattle, WA, USA, by identifying their characteristic gamma rays using a germanium detector. We measured the evolution of the activities over a period of 23 days at the end of which the activities had mostly fallen below our detection limit. The highest detected activity amounted to 4.4 +/- 1.3 mBq/m^3 of 131-I on 19-20 March.

Deep-Elastic pp Scattering at LHC from Low-x Gluons

Deep-elastic pp scattering at c.m. energy 14 TeV at LHC in the momentum transfer range 4 GeV*2 < |t| < 10 GeV*2 is planned to be measured by the TOTEM group. We study this process in a model where the deep-elastic scattering is due to a single hard collision of a valence quark from one proton with a valence quark from the other proton. The hard collision originates from the low-x gluon cloud around one valence quark interacting with that of the other. The low-x gluon cloud can be identified as color glass condensate and has size ~0.3 F. Our prediction is that pp differential cross section in the large |t| region decreases smoothly as momentum transfer increases. This is in contrast to the prediction of pp differential cross section with visible oscillations and smaller cross sections by a large number of other models.

Long term stability of the energy of conversion electrons emitted from solid 83Rb/83mKr source

The mono-energetic conversion electrons from the decay of 83mKr represent a unique tool for the energy calibration, energy scale monitoring and systematic studies of the tritium beta spectrum measurement in the neutrino mass experiment KATRIN. For this reason, the long term stability of energy of the 7.5 keV and 17.8 keV conversion electrons populated in the decay of solid 83Rb/83mKr vacuum evaporated sources was examined by means of two electron spectrometers.

pp Elastic Scattering at LHC in a Nucleon-Structure Model

We predict pp elastic differential cross sections at LHC at c.m. energy 14 TeV and momentum transfer range |t| = 0 - 10 GeV*2 in a nucleon-structure model. In this model, the nucleon has an outer cloud of quark-antiquark condensed ground state, an inner shell of topological baryonic charge (r ~ 0.44F) probed by the vector meson omega, and a central quark-bag (r ~ 0.2F) containing valence quarks. We also predict elastic differential cross section in the Coulomb-hadronic interference region. Large |t| elastic scattering in this model arises from valence quark-quark scattering, which is taken to be due to the hard-pomeron (BFKL pomeron with next to leading order corrections). We present results of taking into account multiple hard-pomeron exchanges, i.e. unitarity corrections. Finally, we compare our prediction of pp elastic differential cross section at LHC with the predictions of various other models. Precise measurement of pp elastic differential cross section at LHC by the TOTEM group in the |t| region 0 - 5 GeV*2 will be able to distinguish between these models.