[en] Presented here is study of cosmic ray momentum and charge asymmetry spectra. Data were collected using India-based Neutrino Observatory prototype Iron Calorimeter (ICAL) working at VECC in Kolkata. Results presented in this article are drawn from the data taken during initial phase of the data taking

[en] Glass Resistive Plate Chamber (RPC) detector has a long history dating back to 1970s. For large area coverage, RPC detector array is a key component of muon detection and tracking. RPCs find use as the active elements in the tracking (iron) calorimeter which can simultaneously measure the energy as well as the direction of the charged particle. RPC detector is preferred over scintillation detector because of important reasons such as high position resolution and detection efficiency, has large area but at minimal material cost, easy to assemble and possesses simple read-out electronics and exhibits better time resolution (than scintillators) along with long-term stability. There are initially two types of RPCs in use, i.e. glass and Bakelite electrode RPCs. The glass RPCs have been proposed as the active element in the iron calorimeter detector for the India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO)

[en] Prototype glass Resistive Plate Chamber (RPC) detectors are under fabrication at Banaras Hindu University. The RPC shown is made of two parallel float glass sheets of thickness 2.0 mm each and a gas gap of 2 mm. The dimension of the RPC is 50×50 cm². Two Mylar sheets of same size have been placed just above the glass plate to provide better isolation. Pickup strips are placed over the Mylar sheet one set along X-axis another over Y-axis. The width of the pickup strip is 2.5 cm each

[en] Depending on energy, many processes can contribute to neutrino interaction such as elastic scattering, Quasi Elastic Scattering (QES), interaction via Resonance Production (RES) and Deep Inelastic Scattering (DIS). QES is dominant process in the low and intermediate energy range. The interaction of neutrinos with matter at this energy involves many processes. We study the contributions of these processes for free nucleon as well as nuclei

[en] Nuclear reactors are very intense sources of electron anti-neutrinos produced on an average 6 per fission. Some of the most important goals of neutrino physics such as study of short baseline reactor anti-neutrino anomaly, measurement of neutrino cross section on different targets, measuring neutrino magnetic moment with high precision, detecting sterile neutrinos could be carried out with nuclear reactors. A detector for neutrinos must have a large volume with very low noise and background rejection capabilities. It must be cost effective, modular and easy in operation. Spherical Gaseous Chamber Detector (SGCD) is one such detector that meets all above requirements. It is designed to have a small sphere (1-5 mm diameter) of solid pure copper as anode inside a very large sphere (0.5-1 meter diameter) of pure copper working as cathode. The gas to be filled in the chamber must have a stable drift velocity and minimum diffusion over the entire range of electric field. These properties can be controlled by a suitable gas mixture such as Ar:He: N₂ in the ratio 200:50:1.5. When a neutrino interacts with the molecules of the filled gas, it creates electron ion pairs. The created electron will move towards the anode at the center of the sphere and will gain sufficient energy to create an avalanche that will make single peak strong signal. Other charged and neutral background particles entering the chamber will interact multiple times and hence the shape of signal will have multiple peaked. This difference in peak shapes will enable us to separate background from the signal using pulse shape discrimination (PSD) techniques. The sphere will be surrounded by a hexagonal shaped half cm thick boron loaded polyethylene (BLP) to provide stable structure

[en] In the ultimate conditions of energy density and temperature, nuclear matter undergoes a transition to a new phase of matter, which is governed by partonic degrees of freedom. This phase is known as Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP). The study of hadrons production has a long history in nuclear and particle physics. The most basic physical observables in high energy hadron-hadron collisions are the absolute yields as well as the transverse momentum (p_T) spectra of identified hadrons. Present study is focused on the various fitting parameters using Tsallis distribution function for Pb+Pb collision at center of mass energy (√s) 2.76 TeV using ALICE collaboration data. The p_T-spectra in Pb+Pb collisions follow an equilibrium Boltzmann-Gibbs statistics, giving information about, particle yield, kinetic freeze-out temperature and radial flow

[en] Quantum chromodynamics (QCD), the theory of strong interactions, predicts a phase transition from the hadronic matter to the deconfined states of quarks and gluons at very high temperature or very high baryon density. This deconfined states is known as Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP). QGP can be created by the heavy ion collisions at relativistic energies. The heavy ion collisions at Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are performed to study strongly interacting matter at high energy density. The particle production in proton-proton (pp) collisions are used as the baseline for the heavy ion collisions. The particle transverse momentum spectra in the hadronic collisions are widely used for perturbative QCD (pQCD) calculations and phenomenological studies. In the present work, we studied the ALICE measured transverse momentum spectra of identified charged particles in pp collisions at √s = 13 TeV using the Tsallis distribution functions. We obtained the Tsallis parameters for pions, kaons and protons

[en] In this article we are reporting lower and upper simulated threshold values of VECC prototype INO ICAL RPC detectors. These values are very useful in calibrating the final muons momentum spectrum observed by this detector. (author)

[en] Taiwan EXperiment On NeutrinO (TEXONO) is among the leading experiments in the searches of low energy reactor neutrino and dark matter (DM) physics. It is located in the Kuo-Sheng Nuclear Power Plant (KSNPP) Core-II near Jinshan District in Taiwan’s northern coast. The nuclear power plants are suitable venues for the study of low energy neutrino physics because of their capacity to provide intense fluxes of neutrinos (ν¯e) having maximum energy up to ∼10 MeV. In the KSNPP, there are two boiling water reactor cores, and each core produces an average thermal output of 2.9 GW. The Kuo-Sheng reactor Neutrino Laboratory (KSNL) is 28 m away from the center of core-I and 10² m from core-II and is exposed to an ν¯e flux of 6.35×10¹²cm⁻² sec⁻¹. Under 30 m.w.e. of overburden, it is located on the first floor of a seven-storey reactor building (12 m below the sea level). It is explicit that by measurement only, contamination of sub-keV region from the Compton edge of reactor ON associated ¹³⁵Xe (249.8 keV) γ-line can be well subtracted using the calibration shown in the article. Fluctuations in the intensity and correspondingly flat background, however, lead to increased uncertainty in the subtracted spectrum. As part of our ongoing efforts, we are using simulation to implement exactly the complementary prediction in order to minimize this uncertainty

[en] There is compelling evidence from cosmological and astrophysical observations that about one quarter of the energy density of the universe can be attributed to cold dark matter (CDM), whose nature and properties are still unknown. Weakly interacting massive particles (WIMP) are the leading candidates for CDM. The popular SUSY models prefer WIMP mass in the range of >100 GeV, though light neutralinos remain a possibility. Most experimental programs optimize their design in the high-mass region and exhibit diminishing sensitivities for m_ν <10 GeV