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Many slopes in the Alps are prone to rockfall and forests play a vital role in protecting objects such as (rail) roads and infrastructure against rockfall. Decision support tools are required to assess rockfall processes and to quantify the rockfall protection effect of forest stands. This paper presents results of an iterative sequence of tests and improvements of a coupled rockfall and forest dynamics model with focus on the rockfall module. As evaluation data a real-size rockfall experiment in the French Alps and two 2-D rockfall trajectories from Austria and Switzerland were used. Modification of the rebound algorithm and the inclusion of an algorithm accounting for the sudden halt of falling rocks due to surface roughness greatly improved the correspondence between simulated and observed key rockfall variables like run-out distances, rebound heights and jump lengths for the real-size rockfall experiment. Moreover, the observed jump lengths and run-out distances of the 2-D trajectories were well within the stochastic range of variation yielded by the simulations. Based on evaluation results it is concluded that the rockfall model can be employed to assess the protective effect of forest vegetation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Top tagging is a recent approach to identifying boosted hadronic top quarks. It avoids reconstructing individual top decay products and instead uses a jet algorithm to reconstruct the entire top decay. Quite generally, geometrically large jets including heavy particles (fat jets) can be analyzed on the level of their subjet constituents. LHC data will soon allow us to establish this new analysis method. We discuss different tagging algorithms, their critical QCD aspects, and currently available experimental results. For the development of taggers and their different applications this review should provide a firm theoretical and algorithmic background. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]