Astronomical instrumentation

Abstract:

© 2013 CERN. This Letter reports a measurement of the high-mass Drell-Yan differential cross-section in proton-proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 7 TeV at the LHC. Based on an integrated luminosity of 4.9fb -1 , the differential cross-section in the Z/γ * →e + e - channel is measured with the ATLAS detector as a function of the invariant mass, m ee , in the range 116 < m ee < 1500GeV, for a fiducial region in which both the electron and the positron have transverse momentum p T > 25GeV and pseudorapidity |η| < 2.5. A comparison is made to various event generators and to the predictions of perturbative QCD calculations at next-to-next-to-leading order.

Abstract:

A search is presented for microscopic black holes in a like-sign dimuon final state in proton-proton collisions at √s=8 TeV. The data were collected with the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider in 2012 and correspond to an integrated luminosity of 20.3 fb-1. Using a high track multiplicity requirement, 0.6±0.2 background events from Standard Model processes are predicted and none observed. This result is interpreted in the context of low-scale gravity models and 95% C.L. lower limits on microscopic black hole masses are set for different model assumptions. © 2013 CERN. Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.

Abstract:

We report results of a direct imaging survey for giant planets around 80 members of the Beta Pic, TW Hya, Tucana-Horologium, AB Dor, and Hercules-Lyra moving groups, observed as part of the Gemini NICI Planet-Finding Campaign. For this sample, we obtained median contrasts of ΔH=13.9 mag at 1" in combined CH4 narrowband ADI+SDI mode and median contrasts of ΔH=15.1 mag at 2" in H-band ADI mode. We found numerous (>70) candidate companions in our survey images. Some of these candidates were rejected as common-proper motion companions using archival data; we reobserved with NICI all other candidates that lay within 400 AU of the star and were not in dense stellar fields. The vast majority of candidate companions were confirmed as background objects from archival observations and/or dedicated NICI campaign followup. Four co-moving companions of brown dwarf or stellar mass were discovered in this moving group sample: PZ Tel B (36+-6 MJup, 16.4+-1.0 AU, Biller et al. 2010), CD -35 2722B (31+-8 MJup, 67+-4 AU, Wahhaj et al. 2011), HD 12894B (0.46+-0.08 MSun, 15.7+-1.0 AU), and BD+07 1919C (0.20+-0.03 MSun, 12.5+-1.4 AU). From a Bayesian analysis of the achieved H band ADI and ASDI contrasts, using power-law models of planet distributions and hot-start evolutionary models, we restrict the frequency of 1--20 MJup companions at semi-major axes from 10--150 AU to <18% at a 95.4% confidence level using DUSTY models and to <6% at a 95.4% using COND models.