The Polarized Gamma-ray Observer (PoGOLite) is a balloon-borne instrument that will measure gamma-ray polarization in the energy range 25-80 keV from astronomical sources such as pulsars, accretion discs and jets from active galacticnuclei. The two additional parameters provided by such observations, polarizationangle and degree, will allow these objects to be studied in a new way, providing information about their emission mechanisms and geometries. The instrument measures azimuthal scattering angles of photons within a closepacked array of phoswich detector cells (PDCs) based on coincident detection of Compton scattering and photoelectric absorption. Each PDC comprises three different scintillating components and combines photon detection, active collimation and bottom anticoincidence into one single unit. The three parts are viewed by a photomultiplier tube (PMT) and pulse shape discrimination is used to identify signals from dierent parts. Surrounding the detector array is a segmented side anticoincidence shield (SAS) made of BGO crystals. The detector elements of the instrument (PDCs, SAS units, PMTs) have been characterized, resulting in a placement scheme which details where within the detector array each element should be placed in order to maximize the instrument sensitivity and response uniformity. Suitable operating parameters for flight, suchas threshold settings and PMT voltages, have also been dened. Geant4 Monte Carlo simulations have shown that a polyethylene shield is needed around the detector array in order to sufficiently reduce the background from atmospheric neutrons. To validate these simulations, a simple detector array with four plastic scintillators and three BGO crystals shielded with polyethylene was irradiated with 14 MeV neutrons. Measured results were accurately recreated i nsimulations, demonstrating that the treatment of neutron interactions in Geant4 is reliable. A Pathnder version of the PoGOLite instrument has been constructed and tested with unpolarized and polarized photon beams, and results have been compared with simulations. The Pathnder is being prepared for a maiden flight from northern Sweden in mid-2011. A circumnavigation is foreseen at an altitude of up to 40 km, whereby the instrument travels westwards over Greenland and Canada and returns over Russia after a period of about 20 days. The main observational targets for this flight will be the Crab system and Cygnus X-1. / <p>QC 20110315</p>

This thesis develops techniques of control-methods, optimization, and diagnostics of accelerator equipment and the produced particle beams with emphasis on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) project at CERN. From a solid knowledge of the characteristics of the manufactured accelerator equipment gained from in-depth measurements and analysis of measured data, a link to an enhanced equipment design can be made. These techniques will be demonstrated in applications related to the LHC magnet production and to the LHC upgrade studies. The LHC is a 27 km long superconducting accelerator, which CERN, the European high-energy particle physics research organisation, is presently being commissioned in a tunnel 80 m under ground level in the Geneva region. This machine forms the last link in an interconnected chain of several particle accelerators at CERN. The overall system performance, i.e. the quality of particle beams being accelerated in this accelerator chain is directly related to the control of the quality of the superconducting magnets used in the last link, in the LHC. Different upgrade scenarios to reach the ultimate design luminosity and beyond that, implying major machine changes are presently being studied. These scenarios all pose very challenging design requirements for magnets situated in the beam collision regions where extremely radioactive environments have to be dealt with. The LHC is expected to produce very highly energetic and intense particle beams for a number of physics experiments during the next decades, making the subjects of the thesis both timely and important. The work described has been performed at CERN, which has become the largest high-energy physics laboratory in the world. Here, a number of particle accelerators are connected in series to permit the acceleration of particles to unprecedented high energies to explore the nature of our universe. The accelerators at CERN are assembled of a large number of parts requiring a high level of technological know-how. Control systems and optimization procedures play a natural and necessary role to fulfil the requirements. Diagnostics and control system technology have been used to increase the efficiency of accelerator operation. An extensive analysis of the measured magnetic field have been used to optimize the delicate process of controlling the assembly of superconducting accelerator magnets for the LHC. This paper also describes the control procedures developed, to permit the adjustment of the geometric shape of the 15 m long dipole to optimize the field quality and beam aperture. From a detailed statistical analysis of the collected geometry data from the 1232 LHC main dipole magnets unresolved issues concerning the measurements were explained and corrected, providing more accurate information for the alignment of the main dipoles and quadrupoles. The LHC will start operation in 2008, after a most careful installation of all magnets and a huge volume of other equipment in the accelerator tunnel. In particular, the very specialized welding techniques and the brazing of tubes, bellows and conductors, have posed great challenges. Tenths of thousands of welds that have to withstand temperature changes of 300 K and operation with super-fluid helium at 1.9 K have been made. The magnet systems that create the conditions for particle collisions in the two main experiments, the insertion triplets, will have to be exchanged when upgrading the performance of the machine. The upgrade of the machine’s luminosity is expected after 4 years of LHC operation at nominal luminosity. Unless the new magnets are very carefully designed and well shielded the particle debris from the increased collision rates will perturb their operation. Using a new superconductor technology, limiting the probability of magnet quenches, combined with a new layout of the insertion region can minimize the effect of the impinging debris. The necessary shielding layout to protect the magnet coils will be discussed. The future of accelerators for particle physics is important: the development of accelerator technology to produce neutrino beams from beta decaying ions is one possibility for new physics. This subject will be treated from the aspect of energy deposition from decay products in superconducting magnet coils. / QC 20100921

The ATLAS experiment – situated at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva – took its first collsion data in 2010. Physics topics include finding the Higgs boson, heavy quark physics, and looking for extensions of the Standard Model of Particle Physics such as supersymmetry. In this thesis, inclusive multi-jet production has been studied with the ATLAS detector in proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 7 TeV, using an integrated luminosity of 17 nb−1. The anti-kt algorithm with distance parameter ℝ = 0.6 is used to identify jets. The inclusive multi-jet cross section is measured, as well as the ratio ofcross sections for inclusive production of n − 1 and n jets for n ≤ 6. The differential cross sections of the first, second, third and fourth leading jets as a function of transverse momentum, and the differential cross section as a function of the scalar sum of the pT of selected jets, HT, for different jet multiplicities are presented. The ratio of the differential cross section as a function of HT for 3-jet and 2-jet events is also measured. The results are compared to expectations based on leading order QCD, which agree with the data. In addition, a new method for calibrating the hadron response of a segmented calorim-ter is developed and successfully applied to 2004 ATLAS combined beam test data. It is based on a principal component analysis of the calorimeter layer energy deposits, exploiting longitudinal shower development information to improve the measured energyresolution. For pion beams with energies between 20 and 180 GeV, the particle energy is reconstructed within 3% and the energy resolution is improved by 11% to 25% comparedto the response at the electromagnetic scale. Multi-mode optical readout cables for the ATLAS liquid argon calorimeters, about one hundred meters in length, were installed between the main ATLAS cavern and the counting room in the USA15 cavern. Patch cables were spliced onto the ribbons and the fiber attenuation was measured. For 1296 fiber pairs in 54 cables, the average attenuation was 0.69 dB. Only five fibers were found to have losses exceeding 4 dB, resulting in a failure rate of less than 2 per mill. In the ATLAS liquid argon barrel presampler, short circuits consisting of small pieces of dust, metal, etc. can be burned away in situ by discharging a capacitor over the high voltage lines. In a burning campaign in November 2006, seventeen existing short circuits were successfully removed. An investigation on how to implement saturation effects in liquid argon due to high ionization densities resulted in the implementation of the effect in the ATLAS Monte Carlo code, improving agreement with beam test data. The timing structure of hadronic showers was investigated using a Geant4 Monte Carlo. The expected behavior as described in the literature was reproduced, with the exception that some sets of physics models gave unphysical gamma energies from nuclear neutron capture. / QC 20110125

<p>The Stockholm Educational Air Shower Array (SEASA) project is deploying an array of plastic scintillator detector stations on school roofs in the Stockholm area. Signals from GPS satellites are used to time synchronise signals from the widely separated detector stations, allowing cosmic ray air showers to be identified and studied. A low-cost and highly scalable data acquisition system has been produced using embedded Linux processors which communicate station data to a central server. Air shower data can be visualised in real-time using a Java-applet client.</p><p>The design and performance of the first three detector stations located at the AlbaNova University Centre are presented. The detectors have been running since the beginning of October 2005 and the data from this period is analysed to assess the stability and performance of the detector array. A total of 503 showers with a primary particle energy above 10¹⁶eV, hitting all three detector stations simultaneously, have been detected during this period. The read out and data-base system used to collect the data are described together with a quicklook tool for ensuring the integrity of the data.</p><p>A preliminary study of the acceptance of the detector array as a function of weather conditions, to be used in future studies of cosmic ray anisotropy, is presented. The acceptance of the single detector stations is found to decrease with increasing atmospheric pressure and to stay constant over a large range of temperatures. The acceptance of the entire array of detector stations is found to have a stronger continuous dependence on temperature than single stations. The dependence of the array acceptance on pressure is inconclusive.</p><p>The ability of the array to reconstruct the primary cosmic ray direction is assessed with simulations. A critical feature for the reconstruction is the time resolution of the system. The performance of the GPS system is therefore tested, and the time resolution is found to be better than 15 ns for all tested GPS units. The angular resolution of the array for this time resolution is found to be (7.0\pm0.3)^{\circ}. As the time resolution is expected to decrease for a larger array of detectors, the dependency of the time resolution on the angular resolution is derived.</p><p>The measured distribution of the primary cosmic ray arrival direction is derived and compared to the expected distribution to check the performance of the system. The agreement between the distributions is good and the GPS timing system can therefore be concluded to work well. The simulations also show that the energy threshold of the array is slightly above 10¹⁶ eV.</p><p>A preliminary study of the cosmic ray anisotropy is presented. The hypothesis of an isotropic flux of cosmic rays was tested using a two point correlation function. The probability that the observed flux is a random sampling from an isotropic flux was checked with a Kolmogorov test and it was found to be 82%. The hypothesis of an isotropic flux is therefore supported.</p>

<p>There is by now compelling evidence that most of the matter in the universe is in the form of dark matter, a form of matter quite different from the matter we experience in every day life. The gravitational effects of this dark matter have been observed in many different ways but its true nature is still unknown. In most models dark matter particles can annihilate with each other into standard model particles. The direct or indirect observation of such annihilation products could give important clues for the dark matter puzzle. For signals from dark matter annihilations to be detectable, typically high dark matter densities are required. Massive objects, such as stars, can increase the local dark matter density both via scattering off nucleons and by pulling in dark matter gravitationally as the star forms. Dark matter annihilations outside the star would give rise to gamma rays and this is discussed in the first paper. Furthermore dark matter annihilations inside the star would deposit energy inside the star which, if abundant enough, could alter the stellar evolution. Aspects of this are investigated in the second paper. Finally, local dark matter overdensities formed in the early universe could still be around today; prospects of detecting gamma rays from such clumps are discussed in the third paper.</p> / Introduktionsdelen till en sammanläggningsavhandling

QC 20100420

Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are brief and sudden explosions radiating most of their energy in the soft γ-ray band ( 100 keV). In the context of multimessenger astroparticle physics recent observations of GRBs provide an excellent benchmark for testing theoretical models of high energy emission mechanisms. Acceleration of hadrons in the engine is expected to produce high energy neutrinos and gamma-rays simultaneously via π±/π0 decays, thus reinforcing the motivation for coincident searches in km3 neutrino telescopes. The Waxman-Bachall spectra and the corresponding expected neutrino rates in IceCube are derived here for GRB090510 amd GRB090902B recently detected by the Fermi Large Area Telescope. The implications of the significant detection of deviations from the Band function fit in photon spectra and a model that explains these extra-components in terms of π0-decay photons are presented here and the relevance to neutrino astronomy is shown.

Neutrino astronomy has the potential to greatly improve our understanding of the high-energy universe. An unresolved, diffuse, flux of neutrinos is sensitive to the properties of the population of cosmic accelerators in the universe. Data from 2008 and 2009 collected with the IceCube in-ice detector in a 40-string configuration were searched for an all-flavor ultra high-energy diffuse flux of astrophysical neutrinos. Data were divided into three streams based on signal and background event topology. Robustness was prioritized and a good agreement between real and simulated background data was observed. The search was optimized to give a high sensitivity to a neutrino flux with energy spectrum E-2 and energy greater than 1 PeV. The data sample used in the search for signal had a live time of 345.7 days and the estimated background was 1.2 ± 0.5 events. Taking systematic and statistical uncertainties into account, the sensitivity ΦS was estimated at E2 ΦS = 1.15 · 10-8 GeV cm-2 s-1 sr-1 assuming a 1:1:1 ratio between neutrino flavors at Earth. The full data sample was unblinded once the analysis procedure was fixed and approved by the IceCube collaboration. Three events survived the final filter level. The surviving events look like reasonable neutrino candidate events. Assuming a background only hypothesis, the probability of seeing three or more events is 10%. The resulting 90% confidence level upper limit ΦUL is the most strict to date with E2 ΦUL = 2.32 · 10-8 GeV cm-2 s-1 sr-1. The central 90% signal energy interval is 282 TeV to 214 PeV, and signal acceptance is distributed as 32% muon neutrinos, 39% electron neutrinos and 29% tau neutrinos. Several models for a diffuse extragalactic neutrino flux were excluded.

Dark matter particles in the form of supersymmetric Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) could accumulate in the centre of the Sun because of gravitational trapping. Pair-wise annihilations of WIMPs could create standard model particles out of which neutrinos could reach the Earth. Data from the IceCube 22-string neutrino telescope have been searched for signals from dark matter annihilations in the Sun. Highly sophisticated analysis methods have been developed to discern signal neutrinos from the severe background of atmospheric particle showers. No signal has been found in a dataset of 104 days livetime taken in 2007, and an upper limit has been placed on the muon flux in the South Pole ice induced by neutrinos from the Sun, reaching down to 330 km-2y-1. The flux limit has been converted into an upper limit on the neutralino scattering cross-section, which reaches down to 2.8*10-40 cm2 for spin-dependent interactions. / Four articles are appended to the thesis:I. G. Wikström for the IceCube collaboration, Proc. of the 30th ICRC,arXiv/0711.0353 [astro-ph] (2007) 135.II. A. Gross, C. Ha, C. Rott, M. Tluczykont, E. Resconi, T. DeYoung and G. Wikström for the IceCube Collaboration, Proc. of the 30th ICRC,arXiv/0711.0353 [astro-ph] (2007) 11.III. G. Wikström and J. Edsjö, JCAP 04 (2009) 009.IV. R. Abbasi et al. (IceCube collaboration), accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. Lett., arXiv/0902.2460v3 [astro-ph.CO] (2009). / IceCube

PoGOLite is a balloon-borne experiment, which will study polarized soft γ-ray emissionfrom astrophysical targets in the 25-80 keV energy range by applying well-typephoswich detector technology. Polarized γ-rays are expected from a wide variety of sources including rotation-powered pulsars, accreting black holes and neutron stars,and jet-dominated active galaxies. Polarization measurements provide a powerfulprobe of the γ-ray emission mechanism and the distribution of magnetic and radiation fields around the source. The polarization is determined using Compton scattering and photoelectric absorption in an array of 217 plastic scintillators. The sensitive detector is surrounded by a segmented Bismuth Germanium Oxide (BGO) anticoincidence shield. The function of this shield is to reduce backgrounds from charged cosmic rays, primary and atmospheric γ-rays, and atmospheric and instrumenta lneutrons. The anticoincidence shield consists of 427 BGO crystals with three different geometries. The characteristics of the BGO crystals of the bottom anticoincidence shield have been studied with particular focus on the light yield.The maiden flight of PoGOLite will be with a reduced detector volume “pathfinder” instrument. The flight, lasting about 24 hours, is foreseen from Esrange, Sweden in August 2010. The performance of the pathfinder has been studied using computer simulations. The effect of atmospheric attenuation, both on the signal of theastronomical target and on the background, are studied. These allow an observationstrategy to be developed for the forthcoming flight. A polarization analysis method is described and applied to an observation example. The method sets anupper limit on the accuracy with which the polarimeter will be able to detect polarization the angle and degree. The PoGOLite polarimeter has a relatively small field of view (2.4◦×2.4◦) which must be kept aligned to objects of interest on the sky. A star tracker forms part of the attitude control system. The star trackersystem comprises a CCD camera, a lens, and a baffle system. Preliminary studiesof the star identification performance are presented and are found to be compatible with the environment around the Crab, which is the main observational target for the first flight. / QC20100629