G. Grella

Strangeness enhancement at mid-rapidity in Pb Pb collisions at 158-A-GeV/c

We study the influence of lexical subsumption on the semantic proximity of terms. By studying the semantic relation between lexically subsumed terms in an existing controlled vocabulary and those in a corpus, we formulate hypotheses on the underlying specific relations. These hypotheses enable us to propose an ordering of term variants found in the corpus, by probability of decreasing semantic proximity. Results from our experiment show that surface indices like the presence of proper names, compounds and the number of added words in a term variant are criteria for ordering the variants of the same term. The ranking obtained will enable us to form more semantically-cohesive clusters. Applications targeted are text mining, question-answering and science and technology watch.

Hardware performance of a scanning system for high speed analysis of nuclear emulsions

The use of nuclear emulsions in very large physics experiments is now possible thanks to the recent improvements in the industrial production of emulsions and to the development of fast automated microscopes. In this paper the hardware performances of the European Scanning System (ESS) are described. The ESS is a very fast automatic system developed for the mass scanning of the emulsions of the OPERA experiment, which requires microscopes with scanning speeds of � 20 cm 2 =h in an emulsion volume of 44mm thickness.

Measurement of charm production in neutrino charged-current interactions

The nuclear emulsion target of the CHORUS detector was exposed to the wide-band neutrino beam of the CERN SPS of 27 GeV average neutrino energy from 1994 to 1997. In total, about 100 000 charged-current (CC) neutrino interactions with at least one identified muon were located in the emulsion target and fully reconstructed, using newly developed automated scanning systems. Charmed particles were searched for by a program recognizing particle decays. The observation of the decay in nuclear emulsion makes it possible to select a sample with very low background and minimal kinematical bias. In all, 2013 CC interactions with a charmed hadron candidate in the final state were selected and confirmed through visual inspection. The charm production rate induced by neutrinos relative to the CC cross-section is measured to be σ(νμN→μ−CX)/σ(CC)=(5.75 ± 0.32(stat)±0.30(syst))%. The charm production cross-section as a function of neutrino energy is also obtained. The results are in good agreement with previous measurements. The charm-quark hadronization produces the following charmed hadrons with relative fractions (in %): fD0=43.7±4.5, fΛc+=19.2±4.2, fD+=25.3±4.2 and fDs+=11.8±4.7.

Enhancement of hyperon production at central rapidity in 158 A GeV/c Pb–Pb collisions

Results are presented on hyperon and antihyperon production in Pb–Pb, pPb and pBe collisions at 158 GeV/c per nucleon. Λ, Ξ and Ω yields have been measured at central rapidity and medium transverse momentum as functions of the centrality of the collision. Comparing the yields in Pb–Pb to those in pBe interactions, strangeness enhancement is observed. The enhancement increases with the centrality and with the strangeness content of the hyperons, reaching a factor of about 20 for the Ω in the central Pb–Pb collisions.

Energy dependence of hyperon production in nucleus–nucleus collisions at SPS

A measurement of strange baryon and antibaryon production in Pb-Pb collisions has been carried out by the NA57 experiment at the CERN SPS, with 40 and 158 A GeV/c beam momentum. Results on

Automatic analysis of digitized TV-images by a computer-driven optical microscope

\Lambda

Production of strange and multistrange hadrons in nucleus—nucleus collisions at the SPS

,

Electromagnetic dissociation of 200 GeV/nucleon 16O and 32s ions in nuclear emulsions

\Xi

Track reconstruction in the emulsion-lead target of the OPERA experiment using the ESS microscope

and

Strangeness enhancements at central rapidity in 40 A GeV/c Pb-Pb collisions

\Omega