Towards Quantitative Simulations of High Power Proton Cyclotrons

PSI operates a cyclotron based high intensity proton accelerator routinely at an average beam power of 1.3MW. With this power the facility is at the worldwide forefront of high intensity proton accelerators. The beam current is practically limited by losses at extraction and the resulting activation of accelerator components. Further intensity upgrades and new projects aiming at an even higher average beam power, are only possible if the relative losses can be lowered in proportion, thus keeping absolute losses at a constant level. Maintaining beam losses at levels allowing hands-on maintenance is a primary challenge in any high power proton machine design and operation. In consequence, predicting beam halo at these levels is a great challenge and will be addressed in this paper. High power hadron driver have being used in many disciplines of science and, a growing interest in the cyclotron technology for high power hadron drivers are being observed very recently. This report will briefly introduce OPAL, a tool for precise beam dynamics simulations including 3D space charge. One of OPAL's flavors (OPAL-cycl) is dedicated to high power cyclotron modeling and is explained in greater detail. We then explain how to obtain initial conditions for our PSI Ring cyclotron which still delivers the world record in beam power of 1.3 MW continuous wave (cw). Several crucial steps are explained necessary to be able to predict tails at the level of 3\sigma ... 4\sigma in the PSI Ring cyclotron. We compare our results at the extraction with measurements, obtained with a 1.18 MW cw production beam. Based on measurement data, we develop a simple linear model to predict beam sizes of the extracted beam as a function of intensities and confirm the model with simulations.Comment: Corrections and new figur

A unique role for Kv3 voltage-gated potassium channels in starburst amacrine cell signaling in mouse retina.

Direction-selective retinal ganglion cells show an increased activity evoked by light stimuli moving in the preferred direction. This selectivity is governed by direction-selective inhibition from starburst amacrine cells occurring during stimulus movement in the opposite or null direction. To understand the intrinsic membrane properties of starburst cells responsible for direction-selective GABA release, we performed whole-cell recordings from starburst cells in mouse retina. Voltage-clamp recordings revealed prominent voltage-dependent K(+) currents. The currents were mostly blocked by 1 mm TEA, activated rapidly at voltages more positive than -20 mV, and deactivated quickly, properties reminiscent of the currents carried by the Kv3 subfamily of K+ channels. Immunoblots confirmed the presence of Kv3.1 and Kv3.2 proteins in retina and immunohistochemistry revealed their expression in starburst cell somata and dendrites. The Kv3-like current in starburst cells was absent in Kv3.1-Kv3.2 knock-out mice. Current-clamp recordings showed that the fast activation of the Kv3 channels provides a voltage-dependent shunt that limits depolarization of the soma to potentials more positive than -20 mV. This provides a mechanism likely to contribute to the electrical isolation of individual starburst cell dendrites, a property thought essential for direction selectivity. This function of Kv3 channels differs from that in other neurons where they facilitate high-frequency repetitive firing. Moreover, we found a gradient in the intensity of Kv3.1b immunolabeling favoring proximal regions of starburst cells. We hypothesize that this Kv3 channel gradient contributes to the preference for centrifugal signal flow in dendrites underlying direction-selective GABA release from starburst amacrine cell

Beam Dynamics in High Intensity Cyclotrons Including Neighboring Bunch Effects: Model, Implementation and Application

Space charge effects, being one of the most significant collective effects, play an important role in high intensity cyclotrons. However, for cyclotrons with small turn separation, other existing effects are of equal importance. Interactions of radially neighboring bunches are also present, but their combined effects has not yet been investigated in any great detail. In this paper, a new particle in cell based self-consistent numerical simulation model is presented for the first time. The model covers neighboring bunch effects and is implemented in the three-dimensional object-oriented parallel code OPAL-cycl, a flavor of the OPAL framework. We discuss this model together with its implementation and validation. Simulation results are presented from the PSI 590 MeV Ring Cyclotron in the context of the ongoing high intensity upgrade program, which aims to provide a beam power of 1.8 MW (CW) at the target destination

Specific functions of synaptically localized potassium channels in synaptic transmission at the neocortical GABAergic fast-spiking cell synapse

Potassium (K+) channel subunits of the Kv3 subfamily (Kv3.1-Kv3.4) display a positively shifted voltage dependence of activation and fast activation/deactivation kinetics when compared with other voltage-gated K+ channels, features that confer on Kv3 channels the ability to accelerate the repolarization of the action potential (AP) efficiently and specifically. In the cortex, the Kv3.1 and Kv3.2 proteins are expressed prominently in a subset of GABAergic interneurons known as fast-spiking (FS) cells and in fact are a significant determinant of the fast-spiking discharge pattern. However, in addition to expression at FS cell somata, Kv3.1 and Kv3.2 proteins also are expressed prominently at FS cell terminals, suggesting roles for Kv3 channels in neurotransmitter release. We investigated the effect of 1.0 mM tetraethylammonium (TEA; which blocks Kv3 channels) on inhibitory synaptic currents recorded in layer II/III neocortical pyramidal cells. Spike-evoked GABA release by FS cells was enhanced nearly twofold by 1.0 mM TEA, with a decrease in the paired pulse ratio (PPR), effects not reproduced by blockade of the non-Kv3 subfamily K+ channels also blocked by low concentrations of TEA. Moreover, in Kv3.1/Kv3.2 double knock-out (DKO) mice, the large effects of TEA were absent, spike-evoked GABA release was larger, and the PPR was lower than in wild-type mice. Together, these results suggest specific roles for Kv3 channels at FS cell terminals that are distinct from those of Kv1 and large-conductance Ca2+-activated K+ channels (also present at the FS cell synapse). We propose that at FS cell terminals synaptically localized Kv3 channels keep APs brief, limiting Ca2+ influx and hence release probability, thereby influencing synaptic depression at a synapse designed for sustained high-frequency synaptic transmission

Spoken term detection ALBAYZIN 2014 evaluation: overview, systems, results, and discussion

The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s13636-015-0063-8Spoken term detection (STD) aims at retrieving data from a speech repository given a textual representation of the search term. Nowadays, it is receiving much interest due to the large volume of multimedia information. STD differs from automatic speech recognition (ASR) in that ASR is interested in all the terms/words that appear in the speech data, whereas STD focuses on a selected list of search terms that must be detected within the speech data. This paper presents the systems submitted to the STD ALBAYZIN 2014 evaluation, held as a part of the ALBAYZIN 2014 evaluation campaign within the context of the IberSPEECH 2014 conference. This is the first STD evaluation that deals with Spanish language. The evaluation consists of retrieving the speech files that contain the search terms, indicating their start and end times within the appropriate speech file, along with a score value that reflects the confidence given to the detection of the search term. The evaluation is conducted on a Spanish spontaneous speech database, which comprises a set of talks from workshops and amounts to about 7 h of speech. We present the database, the evaluation metrics, the systems submitted to the evaluation, the results, and a detailed discussion. Four different research groups took part in the evaluation. Evaluation results show reasonable performance for moderate out-of-vocabulary term rate. This paper compares the systems submitted to the evaluation and makes a deep analysis based on some search term properties (term length, in-vocabulary/out-of-vocabulary terms, single-word/multi-word terms, and in-language/foreign terms).This work has been partly supported by project CMC-V2 (TEC2012-37585-C02-01) from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness. This research was also funded by the European Regional Development Fund, the Galician Regional Government (GRC2014/024, “Consolidation of Research Units: AtlantTIC Project” CN2012/160)

Overview of the NTCIR-14 Lifelog-3 task

Lifelog-3 was the third instance of the lifelog task at NTCIR. At NTCIR-14, the Lifelog-3 task explored three different lifelog data access related challenges, the search challenge, the annotation challenge and the insights challenge. In this paper we review the activities of participating teams who took part in the challenges and we suggest next steps for the community

Report on the future conversations workshop at CHIIR 2021

The Future Conversations workshop at CHIIR’21 looked to the future of search, recommen- dation, and information interaction to ask: where are the opportunities for conversational interactions? What do we need to do to get there? Furthermore, who stands to benefit?The workshop was hands-on and interactive. Rather than a series of technical talks, we solicited position statements on opportunities, problems, and solutions in conversational search in all modalities (written, spoken, or multimodal). This paper –co-authored by the organisers and participants of the workshop– summarises the submitted statements and the discussions we had during the two sessions of the workshop. Statements discussed during the workshop are available at https://bit.ly/FutureConversations2021Statements

Embellishing Text Search Queries to Protect User Privacy

Users of text search engines are increasingly wary that their activities may disclose confidential information about their business or personal profiles. It would be desirable for a search engine to perform document retrieval for users while protecting their intent. In this paper, we identify the privacy risks arising from semantically related search terms within a query, and from recurring highspecificity query terms in a search session. To counter the risks, we propose a solution for a similarity text retrieval system to offer anonymity and plausible deniability for the query terms, and hence the user intent, without degrading the system’s precision-recall performance. The solution comprises a mechanism that embellishes each user query with decoy terms that exhibit similar specificity spread as the genuine terms, but point to plausible alternative topics. We also provide an accompanying retrieval scheme that enables the search engine to compute the encrypted document relevance scores from only the genuine search terms, yet remain oblivious to their distinction from the decoys. Empirical evaluation results are presented to substantiate the effectiveness of our solution. 1

Role of Homer Proteins in the Maintenance of Sleep-Wake States

Sleep is an evolutionarily conserved process that is linked to diurnal cycles and normal daytime wakefulness. Healthy sleep and wakefulness are integral to a healthy lifestyle; this occurs when an organism is able to maintain long bouts of both sleep and wake. Homer proteins, which function as adaptors for group 1 metabotropic glutamate receptors, have been implicated in genetic studies of sleep in both Drosophila and mouse. Drosophila express a single Homer gene product that is upregulated during sleep. By contrast, vertebrates express Homer as both constitutive and immediate early gene (H1a) forms, and H1a is up-regulated during wakefulness. Genetic deletion of Homer in Drosophila results in fragmented sleep and in failure to sustain long bouts of sleep, even under increased sleep drive. However, deletion of Homer1a in mouse results in failure to sustain long bouts of wakefulness. Further evidence for the role of Homer1a in the maintenance of wake comes from the CREB alpha delta mutant mouse, which displays a reduced wake phenotype similar to the Homer1a knockout and fails to up-regulate Homer1a upon sleep loss. Homer1a is a gene whose expression is induced by CREB. Sustained behaviors of the sleep/wake cycle are created by molecular pathways that are distinct from those for arousal or short bouts, and implicate an evolutionarily-conserved role for Homer in sustaining these behaviors