European Synchrotron Users Unified

The landscape of synchrotron radiation facilities in Europe is diverse. In addition to the flagship ESRF, several national facilities exist or came into operation recently. In contrast to ESRF, which is financed for use by member countries, access of foreign users to national facilities is not easy. Even if their proposals pass the review process, they can only perform the experiments if funding is allocated to cover not only travel expenses, board and lodging of the experimenters, but also some compensation for the facility's operational costs; this is because national facilities are primarily funded for the home-country's users at that nation's costs.     

Auxiliary field loop expansion of the effective action for a class of stochastic partial differential equations

We present an alternative to the perturbative (in coupling constant) diagrammatic approach for studying stochastic dynamics of a class of reaction diffusion systems. Our approach is based on an auxiliary field loop expansion for the path integral representation for the generating functional of the noise induced correlation functions of the fields describing these systems. The systems we consider include Langevin systems describable by the set of self interacting classical fields ?_i(x,t)${?}_i(x,t)$ in the presence of external noise η_i(x,t)${\eta }_i(x,t)$, namely (∂_t−ν∇²)?−F[?]=η$({\partial }_t-\nu {\nabla }^2)?-F\left[?\right]=\eta$, as well as chemical reaction annihilation processes obtained by applying the many-body approach of Doi–Peliti to the Master Equation formulation of these problems. We consider two different effective actions, one based on the Onsager–Machlup (OM) approach, and the other due to Janssen–deGenneris based on the Martin–Siggia–Rose (MSR) response function approach. For the simple models we consider, we determine an analytic expression for the Energy landscape (effective potential) in both formalisms and show how to obtain the more physical effective potential of the Onsager–Machlup approach from the MSR effective potential in leading order in the auxiliary field loop expansion. For the KPZ equation we find that our approximation, which is non-perturbative and obeys broken symmetry Ward identities, does not lead to the appearance of a fluctuation induced symmetry breakdown. This contradicts the results of earlier studies.     

Scale size of magnetic turbulence in tokamaks probed with 30-MeV electrons

Measurements of synchrotron radiation emitted by 30-MeV runaway electrons in the TEXTOR-94 tokamak show that the runaway population decays after switching on neutral beam injection (NBI). The decay starts only with a significant delay, which decreases with increasing NBI heating power. This delay provides direct evidence of the energy dependence of runaway confinement, which is expected if magnetic modes govern the loss of runaways. Application of the theory by Mynick and Strachan [Phys. Fluids 24, 695 (1981)] yields estimates for the "mode width" (delta) of magnetic perturbations: delta<0.5 cm in Ohmic discharges, increasing to delta = 4.4 cm for 0. 6 MW NBI.     

Experimental determination of the branching ratiosp\bar p \to 2\pi ^0 ,\pi ^0 \gamma,and 2γ at rest

The branching ratios of \(p\bar p\) annihilations into the neutral final states 2π⁰, π⁰γ, and 2γ are measured by stopping antiprotons in liquid hydrogen. They are \(B_{2\pi ^0 } = \left( {2.06 \pm 0.14} \right) \times 10^{ - 4} \) , \(B_{\pi ^0 \gamma } = \left( {1.74 \pm 0.22} \right) \times 10^{ - 5} \) , andB _γγ<1.7×10^?6 (95% c.l.).     

First observation of the doubly charmed baryon Xi(+)(cc)

We observe a signal for the doubly charmed baryon Xi(+)(cc) in the charged decay mode Xi(+)(cc)-->Lambda(+)(c)K-pi(+) in data from SELEX, the charm hadroproduction experiment at Fermilab. We observe an excess of 15.9 events over an expected background of 6.1+/-0.5 events, a statistical significance of 6.3sigma. The observed mass of this state is 3519+/-1 MeV/c(2). The Gaussian mass width of this state is 3 MeV/c(2), consistent with resolution; its lifetime is less than 33 fs at 90% confidence.