Daniele Ruini

Background Fluctuating asymmetry (FA) is widely defined as the deviation from perfect bilateral symmetry and is considered an epigenetic measure of environmental stress. Rinaldi and Fontani hypothesized that the FA morpho-functional changes originate from an adaptive motor behavior determined by functional alterations in the cerebellum and neural circuits, not caused by a lesion, but induced by environmental stress. They called this phenomenon functional dysmetria (FD). On this premise, they developed the radio electric asymmetric conveyer (REAC) technology, a neuromodulation technology aimed at optimizing the best neuro-psycho-motor strategies in relation to environmental interaction. Aims Previous studies showed that specific REAC neuro postural optimization (NPO) treatment can induce stable FD recovery. This study aimed to verify the duration of the NPO effect in inducing the stable FD recovery over time. Materials and methods Data were retrospectively collected from a population of 29,794 subjects who underwent a specific semiological FD assessment and received the NPO treatment, regardless of the pathology referred. Results The analysis of the data collected by the various participants in the study led us to ascertain the disappearance of FD in 100% of the cases treated, with a stability of the result detected up to 18 years after the single administration of the REAC NPO treatment. Conclusions The REAC NPO neurobiological modulation treatment consisting of a single administration surprisingly maintains a very long efficacy in the correction of FD. This effect can be explained as the long-lasting capacity of the NPO treatment to induce greater functional efficiency of the brain dynamics as proven in previous studies.

The observation of Higgs boson production in association with a top quark-antiquark pair is reported, based on a combined analysis of proton-proton collision data at center-of-mass energies of √s = 7, 8, and 13 TeV, corresponding to integrated luminosities of up to 5.1, 19.7, and 35.9  fb^(-1), respectively. The data were collected with the CMS detector at the CERN LHC. The results of statistically independent searches for Higgs bosons produced in conjunction with a top quark-antiquark pair and decaying to pairs of W bosons, Z bosons, photons, τ leptons, or bottom quark jets are combined to maximize sensitivity. An excess of events is observed, with a significance of 5.2 standard deviations, over the expectation from the background-only hypothesis. The corresponding expected significance from the standard model for a Higgs boson mass of 125.09 GeV is 4.2 standard deviations. The combined best fit signal strength normalized to the standard model prediction is 1.26^(+0.31)_(−0.26).

Serial powering is the baseline choice for low mass power distribution for the CMS and ATLAS HL-LHC pixel detectors.Two 2.0 A Shunt-LDO regulators are integrated in a prototype pixel chip implemented in 65-nm CMOS technology and used to provide constant supply voltages to its power domains from a constant input current.Performance results from testing prototype Shunt-LDO regulators are shown, including their behaviour after x-ray irradiation.The system level simulation studies, which had been performed with a detailed regulator design in a serially powered topology, have been validated.

A serially powered pixel detector is the baseline choice for the High Luminosity upgrade of the inner tracker of the CMS experiment. A serial power distribution scheme, compared to parallel powering, requires less cable mass, offers higher power efficiency and is less susceptible to voltage transients. A prototype pixel readout chip has been designed for serial powering in 65 nm CMOS technology by the RD53 collaboration. Performance results from testing the prototype chip, called RD53A, are reported. The performance of RD53A operating in a chain consisting of four chips powered in series is compared with the performance under a conventional powering scheme. Additionally, the readout efficiency of RD53A in a high hit rate environment in different operation modes is presented for the first time. The results indicate that serial powering is a robust and reliable power distribution scheme.

This paper briefly discusses the design and the main test results relevant to the analog front-end processor, referred to as the Linear front-end, integrated in the CROCv1 chip. CROCv1 is the full-scale ASIC (featuring an area close to 4 cm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> ) developed by the RD53 Collaboration for the pixel readout at the high-luminosity upgrade of the CMS experiment, and is expected to be the last stage before the submission of the production chip for the actual experiment. The chip includes a matrix of 432x336 analog front-end channels, each featuring a low-noise charge sensitive amplifier driving a current-mode comparator, which is exploited, together with a digital counter, for Time-over-Threshold conversion of the sensor signal. The test results discussed in the paper are focused on the main analog performance parameters of the Linear front-end, including noise, threshold dispersion and time-walk.

At HEP experiments, processing billions of records of structured numerical data can be a bottleneck in the analysis pipeline.This step is typically more complex than current query languages allow, such that numerical codes are used.As highly parallel computing architectures are increasingly important in the computing ecosystem, it may be useful to consider how accelerators such as GPUs can be used for data analysis.Using CMS and ATLAS Open Data, we implement a benchmark physics analysis with GPU acceleration directly in Python based on efficient computational kernels using Numba/LLVM, resulting in an order of magnitude throughput increase over a pure CPUbased approach.We discuss the implementation and performance benchmarks of the physics kernels on CPU and GPU targets.We demonstrate how these kernels are combined to a modern ML-intensive workflow to enable efficient data analysis on high-performance servers and remark on possible operational considerations.