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At least 955 records · Page 53

Progress Towards an Expanded Search for Neutral-Current Delta Radiative Decays in MicroBooNE

In this note, we present progress toward an expanded search for neutral current Delta radiative decays (NC $\Delta \rightarrow N\gamma$) in MicroBooNE. We present sensitivities for several tests of the MiniBooNE Low Energy Excess (LEE) under NC $\Delta \rightarrow N\gamma$ scaling hypotheses, with significantly enhanced sensitivity relative to previous tests. These selections can also be used for additional single photon searches in the future, including searches which target more specific hadronic final states and particular regions of shower kinematic phase space.

43 PARTICLE ACCELERATORS↗

Search for anomalous neutral current coherent-like single-photon production in MicroBooNE

MicroBooNE is a liquid argon time projection chamber (TPC) detector which offers excellent spatial and energy resolution and the ability to distinguish electrons from photons. In this note we present preliminary results from a dedicated search for neutral current (NC) single-photon production, with a focus on forward-going photons and no visible hadronic activity, both of which are key characteristics of “coherent-like” electromagnetic shower production. A total efficiency for SM-predicted NC coherent 1γ events of 12.5% is obtained, defined relative to simulated events in the entire MicroBooNE active TPC. Relative to the Pandora-reconstructed single-shower event selection, the analysis achieves a 95% rejection of non-coherent NC 1π 0 background events and a 99.97% rejection of cosmic background events, while maintaining a signal efficiency of approximately 45%.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗

Progress towards an investigation of the MiniBooNE Low Energy Excess using neutral-current Delta-like single photons in MicroBooNE with Wire-Cell 3D reconstruction algorithms

This note presents progress towards a Neutral-Current (NC) Delta-like single photon search in MicroBooNE using Wire-Cell 3D reconstruction and pattern recognition algorithms. This analysis will help address the question of the MiniBooNE Low Energy Excess (LEE). The selections are similar to the previously published Pandora-based single photon selections in many ways, but here we use independent reconstruction and selection tools and examine a larger phase space (including charged pions and multiple protons). In the future, we will significantly reduce systematic uncertainties via the use of constraining sideband observations in order to statistically test specific models of the MiniBooNE LEE.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗

Searches for Heavy Neutral Leptons (HNL) in CMS

The smallness of neutrino masses in conjunction with the observed flavor oscillations in the neutrino sector can be hinting to physics beyond the standard model. These observations can be naturally accommodated by the so-called "seesaw" mechanism, in which new Heavy Neutral Leptons (HNL) are postulated. Additionally, several HNL models provide a DM candidate or include a possible explanation for the observed baryon asymmetry. This talk presents an comprehensive overview of the CMS HNL program with a focus on the new experimental results as shown in a recently published review paper by CMS.The talk will highlight several novel and complementary approaches using both prompt and long-lived signatures using the full Run-II data-set collected at the LHC.

43 PARTICLE ACCELERATORS↗

Technology-Neutral, Accident Containment-Based Path to Reduce Nuclear Power Costs

Cost remains a substantial impediment to nuclear power plant (NPP) deployment. The origin of the multifold cost difference between NPPs and other industrial facilities is in their unique potential for societally disruptive accidents. Consequently, one means to substantially reduce NPP costs would be to provide a transparent means of demonstrating that a plant’s potential for land-contamination accidents is so remote to amount to a practical certainty that no significant quantity of radionuclides would ever reach the public. The necessary confidence can be developed through employing a containment capable of withstanding both a complete internal energy release accident along with credible external events with ample margin. This paper provides an overview of a path forward to develop a technology-neutral, containment-based safety-adequacy demonstration method.

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗

Parylene-N Coatings of Thin Foils for the Mitigation of Neutral Contaminant Desorption and Plasma Formation

Previous experiments utilizing the planar MITL foil platform (T.J. Smith et al. RSI 2021) on the 1-MA, 100-ns Mykonos facility have shown neutral atomic and molecular hydrogen in the gap after rapid heating of the foil surfaces before breakdown. Additionally, previous attempts at using parylene-N as a coating for power flow surfaces on the 1-MA, 100-ns Zebra facility have shown tamping of the electrothermal instability at thicknesses of 50-60 μm (T.M. Hutchinson et al. Phys. Rev. E 2018).

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗

Reinventing wastewater treatment plants: energy neutral treatment and enhanced fertilizer production through a novel resource recovery center

Wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) are typically energy intensive, mainly due to the secondary treatment processes such as activated sludge (AS) for treatment of organics as well as nutrients like nitrogen. Nitrogen removal presents a big problem for WWTPs. The main form of nitrogen in wastewater is ammonium, and an AS process uses oxygen to convert ammonium into nitrite and nitrate which is then converted to nitrogen through denitrification process. During anaerobic digestion (AD), organic nitrogen gets degraded, resulting in an effluent stream (centrate) with a high nitrogen content, mostly in the form of ammonium. This contributes 15-30% of total nitrogen to the wastewater influent which further increases energy consumption for aeration. The project aims to transform this conventional municipal WWTPs into energy-neutral, resource-recovering facilities by integrating three core technologies: • Cloth Media Filtration (CMF) to replace conventional primary sedimentation (CPS) and increase the diversion of organics from the energy intensive secondary treatment to AD. This results in reduced energy demand for aeration in the secondary process while simultaneously increasing the biogas production in the anaerobic digesters. • Anerobic Digester to increase biogas and ammonia production. • Membrane Evaporation (ME) to recover ammonia from AD centrate and produce marketable fertilizer. The benefits of proposed WWTP process modifications were evaluated using techno economic analysis (TEA) and life cycle assessment (LCA). For CMF portion of the research a statistical analysis was employed to develop data-driven tools that could be used to enhance and optimize its performance in terms of energy savings and effluent quality. The main objective of this project is to reduce the energy demand for secondary treatment at municipal WWTPs by at least 50%, increase anaerobic digester (AD) biogas and ammonia production by 100% and 120%, respectively, and recover 90% of ammonia from the AD. Integrated CMF, AD, and ME was shown to work synergistically toward achieving these decarbonization targets through energy-positive treatment and fertilizer recovery techniques.

42 ENGINEERING↗

Neutral beams for the burning plasma era: Simulations and modeling of deuterium ion beams for plasma heating (CRADA Final Report)

Together with Realta Fusion, we set up several simulation scenarios and ran simulations using the WarpX code which is developed by LBNL and especially by members of the LBNL team. We investigated beam transport and beam neutralization and ran optimization and benchmark simulations. To achieve this, several new features were added to the warpX code. These code additions will also be beneficial to other users of warpX including several fusion companies and researchers at National Laboratories. Furthermore, we supported Realta Fusion in setting up their own instances of WarpX. We presented our results at the American Physical Society Division of Plasma Physics meeting and are in the process of writing a publication that will be submitted to a peer-reviewed journal to share our results with the broader community.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗

Towards searches for heavy neutral leptons with the Short-Baseline Near Detector experiment

Heavy Neutral Leptons (HNLs) are hypothetical long-lived particles that extend the Standard Model and provide a natural explanation for the origin of neutrino masses, the generation of the baryon asymmetry through leptogenesis, and the nature of dark matter. The Short-Baseline Near Detector (SBND) is a 112-ton liquid argon time projection chamber located 110 m away from the Booster Neutrino Beam (BNB) target at Fermilab (Illinois, USA). The close location to the BNB origin makes the experiment sensitive to HNLs produced from meson decays in the beam. These heavy particles arrive at the detector later than neutrinos and decay into observable final states such as 𝜈e+e- or 𝜈π0, generating isolated electromagnetic showers. Thanks to SBND’s advanced scintillation light detection system, a timing resolution at the nanosecond level further boosts the experiment capabilities. In this poster, we present ongoing reconstruction efforts towards HNLs as well as expected sensitivities factoring in the reconstruction improvements.

Romeo Araujo, Jorge [Madrid, CIEMAT]↗

Near Detector Selection for Neutral Current Disappearance Search at the Short-Baseline Neutrino Program

Various short baseline neutrino experiments observe anomalies that challenge the three-flavor neutrino oscillation model, consistent with a hypothetical “sterile” neutrino that does not interact via the weak force. This poster presents a near detector event selection at the Short-Baseline Near Detector (SBND), developed for the first search for neutral current (NC) disappearance at short-baseline experiments. NC disappearance provides ``smoking gun” insight into the sterile neutrino question because NC interactions are equally sensitive to all three active neutrinos, meaning any change in the NC interaction rate between near and far detectors cannot be explained by oscillations among known flavor states. This analysis focuses on the NC1p topology, the most common NC interaction type at the Short-Baseline Neutrino (SBN) Program. NC topologies are inherently challenging due to their low light yield and the absence of an outgoing charged lepton, which complicates identification and leads to poor energy reconstruction as the outgoing neutrino carries away a large portion of the neutrino’s initial energy. This work presents an NC1p event selection at the near detector, highlighting SBND’s impressive detector capabilities, including trigger efficiency studies. Combined with a novel kinematic energy reconstruction technique leveraging the detector’s outstanding hadronic detail, this analysis establishes a robust near detector foundation to target an NC disappearance measurement consistent with the 3$+$1 sterile neutrino model. This SBND selection will soon be combined with the far detector to conduct an NC disappearance search, providing unique insight and complementary information to traditional charged current searches and advancing the SBN Program’s goal to resolve the sterile neutrino question, including 3$+$1 searches and beyond.

Nicole Pallat, Nicole Pallat [Minnesota U.] (ORCID↗

A Vertical GaN-Based Neutral-Pointless Three-Level Inverter for High-Performance Automotive Traction Applications

Silicon Carbide (SiC) MOSFETs have emerged as a dominant solution for electric vehicle traction inverters because of their superior power density and efficiency compared to Silicon (Si) counterparts. However, SiC devices possess inherent switching speed limitations that constrain the maximum switching frequency and hinder further power density and efficiency improvements. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a vertical Gallium Nitride (vGaN) based X-type Neutral-Pointless (NPL.X) three-level (3L) inverter for an 800V, 200 kW traction system. Integrating 700V vGaN technology within the NPL.X 3L topology enables improved drive efficiency and higher switching frequencies, resulting in enhanced power density and output power quality. To evaluate the performance benefits, this work conducts a comprehensive loss characterization of the vGaN￾based NPL.X topology, providing a direct comparison with a SiC￾based two level (2L) inverter. The results show that the proposed vGaN-based inverter achieves superior efficiency, particularly within the low-torque regions that dominate standard automotive drive cycles. The proposed vGaN-based inverter represents a critical advancement toward high-power-density and high efficiency traction drives

Halawa, Ali [Purdue Univ., West Lafayette, IN (Uni↗

Charged and neutral Higgs bosons in final states with 6 bottom quarks

In extensions of two Higgs doublet models with vectorlike quarks, the decays of vectorlike quarks may be easily dominated by cascade decays through charged or neutral Higgs bosons leading to signatures with 6 top or bottom quarks. Since top quark decays also contain bottom quarks, the 6 bottom quarks in final states is a common signature to a large class of possible decay chains. We present a search strategy focusing on this final state and find the mass ranges of vectorlike quarks and Higgs bosons that can be explored at the Large Hadron Collider. Among other results the sensitivity to the charged Higgs boson, extending above 2 TeV, stands out when compared to models without vectorlike matter.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗

Compiling Quantum Circuits for Dynamically Field-Programmable Neutral Atoms Array Processors

Dynamically field-programmable qubit arrays (DPQA) have recently emerged as a promising platform for quantum information processing. In DPQA, atomic qubits are selectively loaded into arrays of optical traps that can be reconfigured during the computation itself. Leveraging qubit transport and parallel, entangling quantum operations, different pairs of qubits, even those initially far away, can be entangled at different stages of the quantum program execution. Such reconfigurability and non-local connectivity present new challenges for compilation, especially in the layout synthesis step which places and routes the qubits and schedules the gates. In this paper, we consider a DPQA architecture that contains multiple arrays and supports 2D array movements, representing cutting-edge experimental platforms. Within this architecture, we discretize the state space and formulate layout synthesis as a satisfiability modulo theories problem, which can be solved by existing solvers optimally in terms of circuit depth. For a set of benchmark circuits generated by random graphs with complex connectivities, our compiler OLSQ-DPQA reduces the number of two-qubit entangling gates on small problem instances by 1.7x compared to optimal compilation results on a fixed planar architecture. To further improve scalability and practicality of the method, we introduce a greedy heuristic inspired by the iterative peeling approach in classical integrated circuit routing. Using a hybrid approach that combined the greedy and optimal methods, we demonstrate that our DPQA-based compiled circuits feature reduced scaling overhead compared to a grid fixed architecture, resulting in 5.1X less two-qubit gates for 90 qubit quantum circuits. These methods enable programmable, complex quantum circuits with neutral atom quantum computers, as well as informing both future compilers and future hardware choices.

Physics↗

Ionization of HCCI Neutral and Cations by Strong Laser Fields Simulated With Time Dependent Configuration Interaction

Strong field ionization of neutral iodoacetylene (HCCI) can produce a coherent superposition of the X and A cations. This superposition results in charge migration between the CC π orbital and the iodine π-type lone pair which can be monitored by strong field ionization with short, intense probe pulses. Strong field ionization of the X and A states of HCCI cation was simulated with time-dependent configuration interaction using singly ionized configurations and singly excited, singly ionized configurations (TD-CISD-IP) and an absorbing boundary. Studies with static fields were used to obtain the 3-dimensional angular dependence of instantaneous ionization rates by strong fields and the orbitals involved in producing the cations and dications. The frequency of charge oscillation is determined by the energy separation of the X and A states; this separation can change depending on the direction and strength of the field. Furthermore, fields along the molecular axis can cause extensive mixing between the field-free X and A configurations. For coherent superpositions of the X and A states, the charge oscillations are characterized by two frequencies–the driving frequency of the laser field of the probe pulse and the intrinsic frequency due to the energy separation between the X and A states. For linear and circularly polarized pulses, the ionization rates show marked differences that depend on the polarization direction of the pulse, the carrier envelope phase and initial phase of the superposition. Varying the initial phase of the superposition at the beginning of the probe pulse is analogous to changing the delay between the pump and probe pulses. The charge oscillation in the coherent superposition of the X and A states results in maxima and minima in the ionization yield as a function of the superposition phase

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗

Multimerization of Ebola GPΔmucin on protein nanoparticle vaccines has minimal effect on elicitation of neutralizing antibodies

Ebola virus (EBOV), a member of the Filoviridae family of viruses and a causative agent of Ebola Virus Disease (EVD), is a highly pathogenic virus that has caused over twenty outbreaks in Central and West Africa since its formal discovery in 1976. The only FDA-licensed vaccine against Ebola virus, rVSV-ZEBOV-GP (Ervebo®), is efficacious against infection following just one dose. However, since this vaccine contains a replicating virus, it requires ultra-low temperature storage which imparts considerable logistical challenges for distribution and access. Additional vaccine candidates could provide expanded protection to mitigate current and future outbreaks. Here, we designed and characterized two multimeric protein nanoparticle subunit vaccines displaying 8 or 20 copies of GPΔmucin, a truncated form of the EBOV surface protein GP. Single-dose immunization of mice with GPΔmucin nanoparticles revealed that neutralizing antibody levels were roughly equivalent to those observed in mice immunized with non-multimerized GPΔmucin trimers. These results suggest that some protein subunit antigens do not elicit enhanced antibody responses when displayed on multivalent scaffolds and can inform next-generation design of stable Ebola virus vaccine candidates.

60 APPLIED LIFE SCIENCES↗

Neutralizing epitopes on Clostridioides difficile toxin A revealed by the structures of two camelid VHH antibodies

Toxin A (TcdA) and toxin B (TcdB) are two key virulence factors secreted by Clostridioides difficile, which is listed as an urgent threat by the CDC. These two large homologous exotoxins are mainly responsible for diseases associated with C. difficile infection (CDI) with symptoms ranging from diarrhea to life threatening pseudomembranous colitis. Single-domain camelid antibodies (VHHs) AH3 and AA6 are two potent antitoxins against TcdA, which when combined with two TcdB-targeting VHHs showed effective protection against both primary and recurrent CDI in animal models. Here, we report the co-crystal structures of AH3 and AA6 when they form complexes with the glucosyltransferase domain (GTD) and a fragment of the delivery and receptor-binding domain (DRBD) of TcdA, respectively. Based on these structures, we find that AH3 binding enhances the overall stability of the GTD and interferes with its unfolding at acidic pH, and AA6 may inhibit the pH-dependent conformational changes in the DRBD that is necessary for pore formation of TcdA. These studies reveal two functionally critical epitopes on TcdA and shed new insights into neutralizing mechanisms and potential development of epitope-focused vaccines against TcdA.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗