The AWAKE collaboration has reached a major milestone; in the final week of CERN's accelerator operations for 2016, it has observed strong modulation of high-energy proton bunches in plasma, signaling the generation of very strong electromagnetic fields. This is a significant step towards the goal of using the proton-driven plasma wakefield technique to accelerate electrons.
"The use of proton bunches to drive wakefields is of particular interest because of the large energy carried by the proton bunches from the CERN SPS and LHC accelerators," says the AWAKE spokesperson, Allen Caldwell, from the Max Planck Institute of Physics in Munich. "It allows for much longer acceleration stages than for other techniques," he points out.
The use of plasma to accelerate particles is a potential alternative to traditional accelerating methods that rely on radiofrequency electromagnetic cavities. It has long been known that plasmas are capable of supporting very strong electric fields. The challenge for researchers is to understand the best way to take advantage of this capability in order to create future compact and powerful particle accelerators at reasonable costs. The fields generated by plasma wakefields driven by proton beams could be up to two orders of magnitude higher than fields achievable using conventional radio-frequency cavities.
To have observed indications for the first time of proton bunch self-modulation, after just a few days of tests is an excellent achievement. It's down to a very motivated and dedicated team," grins Edda Gschwendtner, AWAKE technical coordinator and CERN AWAKE project leader.
In the movie Batman vs Superman, at the end of the first nightmare we see him have, Bruce Wayne wakes up in his bed and there is a girl sleeping besides him. There was no reference to her before or after that scene. I thought the only people that stay in the house are Bruce Wayne and Alfred. Who is this girl/lady Bruce Wayne slept with?
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Objective/background: It has been shown that actigraphy may have a discriminant function (DS) for the diagnosis of narcolepsy type 1 patients (NT1), based on a combination of nighttime and daytime parameters. Here, we aimed to test those findings using another actigraph model with a different clinical sample as control (ie, primary insomniacs, PI), carrying out a secondary analysis of previously collected data.
Results: Significant differences between groups were observed with a higher number of episodes of wakefulness (wake bouts, WB) in PI than HC, a higher fragmentation index (FI) in NT1 than HC and PI, a higher duration of the longest nap (LNAP) in NT1 than HC and PI and higher DS in PI and NT1 than HC. A new DS (NDS), with LNAP and FI as independent variables, was proposed; which was higher in NT1 than HC and PI.
Conclusions: The present study confirms that actigraphy discriminates NT1 from HC. However, considering PI, a new discriminant function NDS which takes into account LNAP and FI is better for this actigraph model.