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The primary goal of the AEgIS collaboration at CERN is to measure the gravitational acceleration on neutral antimatter. Positronium (Ps), the bound state of an electron and a positron, is a suitable candidate for a force-sensitive inertial measurement by means of deflectometry/interferometry. In order to conduct such an experiment, the impact position and time of arrival of Ps atoms at the detector must be detected simultaneously. The detection of a low-velocity Ps beam with a spatial resolution of (88 ± 5) μm was previously demonstrated [1]. Based on the methodology employed in [1] and [2], a hybrid imaging/timing detector with increased spatial resolution of about 10 μm was developed. The performance of a prototype was tested with a positron beam. The concept of the detector and first results are presented.

ments which provide the most precise data on the strong interaction between protons and antiprotons and of the neutron skin of many nuclei thanks to the clean annihilation signal. In most of these experiments, the capture process of low energy antiprotons was done in a dense target leading to a significant suppression of specific transitions between deeply bound levels that are of particular interest. In particular, precise measurements of specific transitions in antiprotonic atoms with Z>2 are sparse. We propose to use the pulsed production scheme developed for antihydrogen and protonium for the formation of cold antiprotonic atoms. This technique has been recently achieved experimentally for the production of antihydrogen at AE$\overline{\rm g}$IS. The proposed experiments will have sub-ns synchronization thanks to an improved control and acquisition system. The formation in vacuum guarantees the absence of Stark mixing or annihilation from high n states and together with the sub-ns synchronization would resolve the previous experimental limitations. It will be possible to access the whole chain of the evolution of the system from its formation until annihilation with significantly improved signal-to-background ratio.

Cold antihydrogen atoms are a powerful tool to probe the validity of fundamental physics laws, and it's clear that colder atoms, generally speaking, allow an increased level of precision. After the first production of cold antihydrogen ($\bar{H}$) in 2002, experimental efforts have progressed continuously (trapping, beam formation, spectroscopy), with competitive results already achieved by adapting to cold antiatoms techniques previously well developed for ordinary atoms. Unfortunately, the number of $\bar{H}$ atoms that can be produced in dedicated experiments is many orders of magnitude smaller than available hydrogen atoms, which are at hand in large amount, so the development of novel techniques that allow the production of $\bar{H}$ with well defined conditions (and possibly control its formation time and energy levels) is essential to improve the sensitivity of the methods applied by the different experiments. We present here the first experimental results concerning the production of $\bar{H}$ in a pulsed mode where the time when 90\% of the atoms are produced is known with an uncertainty of around 250~ns. The pulsed $\bar{H}$ source is generated by the charge-exchange reaction between Rydberg positronium atoms ($Ps$) and trapped antiprotons ($\bar{p}$), cooled and manipulated in an electromagnetic trap: $$ \bar{ p}+Ps^* \rightarrow \bar{H}^* + e^- $$ where Rydberg positronium atoms, in turn, are produced through the implantation of a pulsed positron beam into a mesoporous silica target, and are excited by two subsequent laser pulses, the first to $n=3$, the second to the needed Rydberg level ($n \simeq 17$). The pulsed production allows the control of the antihydrogen temperature, and facilitates the tunability of the Rydberg states, their de-excitation by pulsed lasers and the manipulation through electric field gradients. In fact, the production of pulsed antihydrogen is a major milestone in the AEgIS experiment to perform direct measurements of the validity of the Weak Equivalence Principle for antimatter.

International audience; The AEḡIS collaboration’s main goal is to measure the acceleration of antihydrogen it ($\textit{H}$) due to gravity. The experimental scheme is to form a pulsed beam whose vertical deflection is then measured by means of a moiré deflectometer [1]. Creating pulsed $\textit{H}$is crucial since it allows a velocity measurement of the antiatoms via time of flight ($\mathrm{ToF}$) necessary to deduce the gravitational acceleration ḡ from the vertical deflection $\Delta\mathit{s}$. The aim of this article is to outline the experimental protocol leading up to pulsed antihydrogen production in the AEḡIS experiment.

Background: Drinking water of acceptable quality is supposed to be free from faecal coliform and chemical substances that may be hazardous to human health. Water treatment and safe storage at the household level has been advocated as effective means of ensuring safe drinking water. This study was undertaken to determine the microbiological quality of the drinking water at household level in the squatter settlements in the city of Mwanza, Tanzania. Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted between June 2014 and September 2014. A total of 15 randomly selected water sources (tap) and 207 households’ drinking water samples from these sources were studied to ascertain level of water contamination using Membrane Filtration Method. Pre-tested questionnaire was used to collect demographic and other data regarding water treatment and storage. Data were entered, cleaned and analysed using STATA Version 11. Results: All 15 samples from tap used as water sources were found to be free of indicator organism ( Escherichia coli) while 109 (52.66%) of drinking water samples from 207 households were found to be contaminated with E. coli. All contaminated drinking water samples were from containers with no cover and spigot . Conclusions: There is a significant level of deterioration of water quality from the source to the drinking cup. Efforts to ensure quality storage methods for drinking water should be addressed at household level.

Medical countermeasures to treat biothreat agent infections require broad-spectrum therapeutics that do not induce agent resistance. A cell-based high-throughput screen (HTS) against ricin toxin combined with hit optimization allowed selection of a family of compounds that meet these requirements. The hit compound Retro-2 and its derivatives have been demonstrated to be safe in vivo in mice even at high doses. Moreover, Retro-2 is an inhibitor of retrograde transport that affects syntaxin-5-dependent toxins and pathogens. As a consequence, it has a broad-spectrum activity that has been demonstrated both in vitro and in vivo against ricin, Shiga toxin-producing O104:H4 entero-hemorrhagic E. coli and Leishmania sp. and in vitro against Ebola, Marburg and poxviruses and Chlamydiales. An effect is anticipated on other toxins or pathogens that use retrograde trafficking and syntaxin-5. Since Retro-2 targets cell components of the host and not directly the pathogen, no selection of resistant pathogens is expected. These lead compounds need now to be developed as drugs for human use.

Although Escherichia coli K1 strains are benign commensals in adults, their acquisition at birth by the newborn may result in life-threatening systemic infections, most commonly sepsis and meningitis. Key features of these infections, including stable gastrointestinal (GI) colonization and age-dependent invasion of the bloodstream, can be replicated in the neonatal rat. We previously increased the capacity of a septicemia isolate of E. coli K1 to elicit systemic infection following colonization of the small intestine by serial passage through two-day-old (P2) rat pups. The passaged strain, A192PP (belonging to sequence type 95), induces lethal infection in all pups fed 2–6 x 106 CFU. Here we use whole-genome sequencing to identify mutations responsible for the threefold increase in lethality between the initial clinical isolate and the passaged derivative. Only four single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), in genes (gloB, yjgV, tdcE) or promoters (thrA) involved in metabolic functions, were found: no changes were detected in genes encoding virulence determinants associated with the invasive potential of E. coli K1. The passaged strain differed in carbon source utilization in comparison to the clinical isolate, most notably its inability to metabolize glucose for growth. Deletion of each of the four genes from the E. coli A192PP chromosome altered the proteome, reduced the number of colonizing bacteria in the small intestine and increased the number of P2 survivors. This work indicates that changes in metabolic potential lead to increased colonization of the neonatal GI tract, increasing the potential for translocation across the GI epithelium into the systemic circulation.

This paper presents a new shape for ordinary elliptic curves over fields of characteristic 2. Using the new shape, this paper presents the first complete addition formulas for binary elliptic curves, i.e., addition formulas that work for all pairs of input points, with no exceptional cases. If ni¾? 3 then the complete curves cover all isomorphism classes of ordinary elliptic curves over . This paper also presents dedicated doubling formulas for these curves using 2 M + 6 S + 3 D , where M is the cost of a field multiplication, S is the cost of a field squaring, and D is the cost of multiplying by a curve parameter. These doubling formulas are also the first complete doubling formulas in the literature, with no exceptions for the neutral element, points of order 2, etc. Finally, this paper presents complete formulas for differential addition, i.e., addition of points with known difference. A differential addition and doubling, the basic step in a Montgomery ladder, uses 5 M + 4 S + 2 D when the known difference is given in affine form.

The main bottleneck affecting the efficiency of all known fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) schemes is Gentry’s bootstrapping procedure, which is required to refresh noisy ciphertexts and keep computing on encrypted data. Bootstrapping in the latest implementation of FHE, the HElib library of Halevi and Shoup (Crypto 2014), requires about six minutes per batch. We present a new method to homomorphically compute simple bit operations, and refresh (bootstrap) the resulting output, which runs on a personal computer in just about half a second. We present a detailed technical analysis of the scheme (based on the worst-case hardness of standard lattice problems) and report on the performance of our prototype implementation.

International audience; Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli (STEC) are food-borne pathogens that may be responsible for severe human infections. Only a limited number of serotypes, including O26:H11, are involved in the majority of serious cases and outbreaks. The main virulence factors, Shiga-toxins (Stx), are encoded by bacteriophages. Seventy four STEC O26:H11 strains of various origins (including human, dairy and cattle) were characterized for their stx subtypes and Stx phage chromosomal insertion sites. The majority of food and cattle strains possessed the stx1a subtype, while human strains mainly carried either stx1a or stx2a. The wrbA and yehV genes were the main Stx phage insertion sites in STEC O26:H11, followed distantly by yecE and sbcB. Interestingly, the occurrence of Stx phages inserted into the yecE gene was low in dairy strains. In most of 29 stx-negative E. coli O26:H11 strains also studied here, these bacterial insertion sites were vacant. Multilocus sequence typing of 20 stx-positive or stx-negative E. coli O26:H11 showed that they were distributed into two phylogenetic groups defined by sequence type (ST) 21 and ST29. Finally, an EspK-carrying phage was found inserted into the ssrA gene in the majority of STEC O26:H11 but only in a minority of stx-negative E. coli O26:H11. The differences of stx subtypes and Stx phage insertion sites observed in STEC O26:H11 according to their origin might reflect that strains circulating in cattle and foods are clonally distinct from those isolated from human patients.

In a recent work, Mangard et al. showed that under certain assumptions, the (so-called) standard univariate side-channel attacks using a distance-of-means test, correlation analysis and Gaussian templates are essentially equivalent. In this paper, we show that in the context of multivariate attacks against masked implementations, this conclusion does not hold anymore. While a single distinguisher can be used to compare the susceptibility of different unprotected devices to first-order DPA, understanding second-order attacks requires to carefully investigate the information leakages and the adversaries exploiting these leakages, separately. Using a framework put forward by Standaert et al. at Eurocrypt 2009, we provide the first analysis that explores these two topics in the case of a masked implementation exhibiting a Hamming weight leakage model. Our results lead to refined intuitions regarding the efficiency of various practically-relevant distinguishers. Further, we also investigate the case of second- and third-order masking (i.e. using three and four shares to represent one value). This evaluation confirms that higher-order masking only leads to significant security improvements if the secret sharing is combined with a sufficient amount of noise. Eventually, we show that an information theoretic analysis allows determining this necessary noise level, for different masking schemes and target security levels, with high accuracy and smaller data complexity than previous methods.