Phase Transformation in the Ball Milled Fe_(31)Co_(31)Nb_(8)B_(30) Powders

The mechanical alloying process has been used to prepare nanostructured Fe31Co31Nb8B30 (wt%) alloy from pure elemental powders in a high energy planetary ball-mill Retsch PM400. Microstructural changes, phase transformation and kinetics were studied by X-ray diffraction, differential scanning calorimetry and M?ssbauer spectrometry. The crystallite size reduction down the nanometer scale (~8 nm) is accompanied by the introduction of internal strains up to 1.8% (root-mean square strain, rms). Further milling time leads to the formation of partially paramagnetic amorphous structure in which bcc FeCo nanograins are embedded. The kinetics of amorphization during the milling process can be described by two regimes characterized by different values of the Avrami parameter n1 = 1.41 and n2 = 0.34. The excess enthalpy due to the high density of defects is released at temperatures below 300°C. The glass transition temperature increases with increasing milling time.

R&D of back-end electronics for improved resistive plate chambers for the phase 2 upgrade of the CMS end-capmuon system

Purpose The Large Hadron Collider(LHC)at European Organization for Nuclear Research is planned to be upgraded to the high luminosity LHC.Increasing the luminosity makes muon triggering reliable and offline reconstruction very challenging.To enhance the redundancy of the Compact Muon Solenoid(CMS)Muon system and resolve the ambiguity of track reconstruction in the forward region,an improved Resistive Plate Chamber(iRPC)with excellent time resolution will be installed in the Phase-2 CMS upgrade.The iRPC will be equipped with Front-End Electronics(FEE),which can perform high-precision time measurements of signals from both ends of the strip.New Back-End Electronics(BEE)need to be researched and developed to provide sophisticated functionalities such as interacting with FEE with shared links for fast,slow control(SC)and data,in addition to trigger primitives(TPs)generation and data acquisition(DAQ).Method The BEE prototype uses a homemade hardware board compatible with the MTCA standard,the back-end board(BEB).BEE interacts with FEE via a bidirectional 4.8 Gbps optical paired-link that integrates clock,data,and control information.The clock and fast/slow control commands are distributed from BEB to the FEE via the downlink.The uplink is used for BEB to receive the time information of the iRPC’sfired strips and the responses to the fast/slow control commands.To have a pipelined detector data for clusterfinding operation,recover(DeMux)the time relationship of which is changed due to the transmission protocol for the continuous incoming MUXed data from FEE.Then at each bunch crossing(BX),clusteringfired strips that satisfy time and spatial constraints to generate TPs.Both incoming raw MUXed detector data and TPs in a time window and latency based on the trigger signal are read out to the DAQ system.Gigabit Ethernet(GbE)of SiTCP and commercial 10-GbE are used as link standards for SC and DAQ,respectively,for the BEB to interact with the server.Results The joint test results of the BEB with iRPC and Front-End Board(FEB)show a Bit Error Rate of the transmission links less than 1×10-16,a time resolution of the FEB Time-to-Digital Converter of 16 ps,and the resolution of the time difference between both ends of 160 ps which corresponding a spatial resolution of the iRPC of approximately 1.5 cm.Conclusion Test results showed the correctness and stable running of the BEB prototype,of which the functionalities fulfill the iRPC requirements.

Central nucleus-nucleus collisions at relativistic energies with a new method based on Random Matrix Theory

Using the method based on Random Matrix Theory （RMT）, the results for the nearest-neighbor distributions obtained from the experimental data on ^12C-C collisions at 4.2 AGeV/c have been discussed and compared with the simulated data on ^12C-C collisions at 4.2 AGeV/c produced with the aid of the Dubna Cascade Model. The results show that the correlation of secondary particles decreases with an increasing number of charged particles Nch. These observed changes in the nearest-neighbor distributions of charged particles could be associated with the centrality variation of the collisions.