Table of contents

The main objectives of the KM3NeT Collaboration are (i) the discovery and subsequent observation of high-energy neutrino sources in the Universe and (ii) the determination of the mass hierarchy of neutrinos. These objectives are strongly motivated by two recent important discoveries, namely: (1) the high-energy astrophysical neutrino signal reported by IceCube and (2) the sizable contribution of electron neutrinos to the third neutrino mass eigenstate as reported by Daya Bay, Reno and others. To meet these objectives, the KM3NeT Collaboration plans to build a new Research Infrastructure consisting of a network of deep-sea neutrino telescopes in the Mediterranean Sea. A phased and distributed implementation is pursued which maximises the access to regional funds, the availability of human resources and the synergistic opportunities for the Earth and sea sciences community. Three suitable deep-sea sites are selected, namely off-shore Toulon (France), Capo Passero (Sicily, Italy) and Pylos (Peloponnese, Greece). The infrastructure will consist of three so-called building blocks. A building block comprises 115 strings, each string comprises 18 optical modules and each optical module comprises 31 photo-multiplier tubes. Each building block thus constitutes a three-dimensional array of photo sensors that can be used to detect the Cherenkov light produced by relativistic particles emerging from neutrino interactions. Two building blocks will be sparsely configured to fully explore the IceCube signal with similar instrumented volume, different methodology, improved resolution and complementary field of view, including the galactic plane. One building block will be densely configured to precisely measure atmospheric neutrino oscillations.

Nuclei in the Z = 50 region provide excellent examples of shape coexistence, the establishment of which occurred through the use of detailed spectroscopy, based not only on γ-ray spectroscopy but also conversion electron, particle transfer, Coulomb excitation, and lifetime measurements. The evidence to date strongly suggests that the presence of coexisting shapes arises from the promotion of protons across the Z = 50 closed shell and the strong correlations arising from interplay of the pairing and quadrupole interactions. The evidence for the presence of shape coexistence in the Z = 50 region, at low spin and low excitation energies, will be presented and clues for the microscopic origin explored.

We describe a new hit-based b-tagging technique for high energy jets and study its performance with a Geant4-based simulation. The technique uses the fact that at sufficiently high energy a B meson or baryon can live long enough to traverse the inner layers of pixel detectors such as those in the ATLAS, ALICE, or CMS experiments prior to decay. By first defining a 'jet' via the calorimeter, and then counting hits within that jet between pixel layers at increasing radii, we show it is possible to identify jets that contain b quarks by detecting a jump in the number of hits without tracking requirements. We show that the technique maintains fiducial efficiency at TeV scale B hadron energies, far beyond the range of existing algorithms, and improves upon conventional b-taggers.

Composite dark matter (DM) comprised of electrically charged constituents can interact with the electromagnetic field via the particle's dipole moment. This interaction results in a dispersive optical index of refraction for the DM medium. We compute this refractive index for atomic DM and more strongly bound systems, modeled via a harmonic oscillator potential. The dispersive nature of the index will result in a time lag between high and low energy photons simultaneously emitted from a distant astrophysical observable. This time lag, due to matter dispersion, could confound potential claims of Lorentz invariance violation (LIV) which can also result in such time lags. We compare the relative size of the two effects and determine that the dispersion due to DM is dwarfed by potential LIV effects for energies below the Planck scale.

Spin–orbit coupling characterizes quantum systems such as atoms, nuclei, hypernuclei, quarkonia, etc, and is essential for understanding their spectroscopic properties. Depending on the system, the effect of spin–orbit coupling on shell structure is large in nuclei, small in quarkonia and perturbative in atoms. In the standard non-relativistic reduction of the single-particle Dirac equation, we derive a universal rule for the relative magnitude of the spin–orbit effect that applies to very different quantum systems, regardless of whether the spin–orbit coupling originates from the strong or electromagnetic interaction. It is shown that in nuclei the near equality of the mass of the nucleon and the difference between the large repulsive and attractive potentials explain the fact that spin–orbit splittings are comparable to the energy spacing between major shells. For a specific ratio between the particle mass and the effective potential whose gradient determines the spin–orbit force, we predict the occurrence of giant spin–orbit energy splittings that dominate the single-particle excitation spectrum.

Multiplicity distributions of charged particles and their event-by-event fluctuations have been compiled for relativistic heavy-ion collisions from the available experimental data at Brookhaven National Laboratory and CERN and also by the use of an event generator. Multiplicity fluctuations are sensitive to QCD phase transition and to the presence of a critical point in the QCD phase diagram. In addition, multiplicity fluctuations provide baselines for other event-by-event measurements. Multiplicity fluctuation expressed in terms of the scaled variance of the multiplicity distribution is an intensive quantity, but is sensitive to the volume fluctuation of the system. The importance of the choice of narrow centrality bins and the corrections of the centrality bin-width effect for controlling volume fluctuations have been discussed. It is observed that the mean and width of the multiplicity distributions monotonically increase as functions of increasing centrality at all collision energies, whereas the multiplicity fluctuations show minimal variations with centrality. The beam-energy dependence shows that the multiplicity fluctuations have a slow rise at lower collision energies and remain constant at higher energies.

The Bardeen–Cooper–Schrieffer (BCS) formalism is extended by including the single-particle continuum in order to analyse the evolution of pairing in an isotopic chain from stability up to the drip-line. We propose a continuum discretised generalised BCS based on single-particle pseudostates (PS). These PS are generated from the diagonalisation of the single-particle Hamiltonian within a transformed harmonic oscillator basis. The consistency of the results versus the size of the basis is studied. The method is applied to neutron rich oxygen and carbon isotopes and compared with similar previous works and available experimental data. We make use of the flexibility of the proposed model in order to study the evolution of the occupation of the low-energy continuum when the system becomes weakly bound. We find an increasing influence of the non-resonant continuum as long as the Fermi level approaches the neutron separation threshold.

After recapitulating the procedure to find the bands and the states occurring in the ${{ \mathcal D }}_{3h}$ alpha-cluster model of ¹²C in which the clusters are placed at the vertexes of an equilateral triangle, we obtain the selection rules for electromagnetic transitions. While the alpha-cluster structure leads to the cancellation of E1 transitions, the approximations carried out in deriving the rotational-vibrational Hamiltonian lead to the disappearance of M1 transitions. Furthermore, although in general the lowest active modes are E2, E3, ... and M2, M3, ..., the cancellation of M2, M3 and M5 transitions between certain bands also occur as a result of the application of group theoretical techniques drawn from molecular physics. These implications can be very relevant for the spectroscopic analysis of γ-ray spectra of ¹²C.

A search for various double electron capture modes of ⁷⁴Se has been performed using an ultralow background Ge-detector in the Felsenkeller laboratory, Germany. Especially for the potentially resonant transition into the 1204.2 keV excited state of ⁷⁴Ge a lower half-life limit of $0.70\times {10}^{19}$ yr (90% credibility) has been obtained. Serious concerns are raised about the validity of obtained ⁷⁴Se limits in some recent publications.