SN 2009ip at late times – an interacting transient at +2 years

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Oxford University Press (OUP) 453:4 (2015) 3886-3905

Authors:

Morgan Fraser, Rubina Kotak, Andrea Pastorello, Anders Jerkstrand, Stephen J Smartt, Ting-Wan Chen, Michael Childress, Gerard Gilmore, Cosimo Inserra, Erkki Kankare, Steve Margheim, Seppo Mattila, Stefano Valenti, Christopher Ashall, Stefano Benetti, Maria Teresa Botticella, Franz Erik Bauer, Heather Campbell, Nancy Elias-Rosa, Mathilde Fleury, Avishay Gal-Yam, Stephan Hachinger, D Andrew Howell, Laurent Le Guillou, Pierre-François Léget, Antonia Morales-Garoffolo, Joe Polshaw, Susanna Spiro, Mark Sullivan, Stefan Taubenberger, Massimo Turatto, Emma S Walker, David R Young, Bonnie Zhang

Seeing double: the frequency and detectability of double-peaked superluminous supernova light curves

(2015)

Authors:

M Nicholl, SJ Smartt

Space Warps II. New gravitational lens candidates from the CFHTLS discovered through citizen science

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Oxford University Press 455:2 (2015) 1191-1210

Authors:

Anupreeta More, Aprajita Verma, Philip J Marshall, Surhud More, Elisabeth Baeten, Julianne Wilcox, Christine Macmillan, Claude Cornen, Amit Kapadia, Michael Parrish, Chris Snyder, Christopher P Davis, Raphael Gavazzi, Chris J Lintott, Robert Simpson, David Miller, Arfon M Smith, Edward Paget, Prasenjit Saha, Rafael Küng, Thomas E Collett

Abstract:

We report the discovery of 29 promising (and 59 total) new lens candidates from the CFHT Legacy Survey (CFHTLS) based on about 11 million classifications performed by citizen scientists as part of the first Space Warps lens search. The goal of the blind lens search was to identify lens candidates missed by robots (the RingFinder on galaxy scales and ArcFinder on group/cluster scales) which had been previously used to mine the CFHTLS for lenses. We compare some properties of the samples detected by these algorithms to the Space Warps sample and find them to be broadly similar. The image separation distribution calculated from the Space Warps sample shows that previous constraints on the average density profile of lens galaxies are robust. SpaceWarps recovers about 65% of known lenses, while the new candidates show a richer variety compared to those found by the two robots. This detection rate could be increased to 80% by only using classifications performed by expert volunteers (albeit at the cost of a lower purity), indicating that the training and performance calibration of the citizen scientists is very important for the success of Space Warps. In this work we present the SIMCT pipeline, used for generating in situ a sample of realistic simulated lensed images. This training sample, along with the false positives identified during the search, has a legacy value for testing future lens finding algorithms. We make the pipeline and the training set publicly available.

LSQ13fn: A type II-Plateau supernova with a possibly low metallicity progenitor that breaks the standardised candle relation

(2015)

Authors:

J Polshaw, R Kotak, L Dessart, M Fraser, A Gal-Yam, C Inserra, SA Sim, SJ Smartt, J Sollerman, C Baltay, D Rabinowitz, S Benetti, MT Botticella, H Campbell, T-W Chen, L Galbany, R McKinnon, M Nicholl, KW Smith, M Sullivan, K Takats, S Valenti, DR Young

Searches for Higgs boson pair production in the hh -> bb tau tau, gamma gamma WW*, gamma gamma bb, bbbb channels with the ATLAS detector

Physical Review D American Physical Society 92:9 (2015)

Authors:

G Aad, B Abbott, J Abdallah, Cigdem Issever

Abstract:

Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.Searches for both resonant and nonresonant Higgs boson pair production are performed in the hh→bbττ, γγWW∗ final states using 20.3 fb-1 of pp collision data at a center-of-mass energy of 8 TeV recorded with the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider. No evidence of their production is observed and 95% confidence-level upper limits on the production cross sections are set. These results are then combined with the published results of the hh→γγbb, bbbb analyses. An upper limit of 0.69 (0.47) pb on the nonresonant hh production is observed (expected), corresponding to 70 (48) times the SM gg→hh cross section. For production via narrow resonances, cross-section limits of hh production from a heavy Higgs boson decay are set as a function of the heavy Higgs boson mass. The observed (expected) limits range from 2.1 (1.1) pb at 260 GeV to 0.011 (0.018) pb at 1000 GeV. These results are interpreted in the context of two simplified scenarios of the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model.