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The growth of nanometer-sized particles in a reactive argon-acetylene plasma is investigated by means of kinetic single-wavelength Mie ellipsometry from the change of the polarization state of scattered light. This requires advanced measurement techniques as well as complex methods for the analysis of the measured data. Today commercial devices reduce the metrological effort, but the data analysis is still a challenging topic. We present a scheme to gain time-resolved information about the size evolution of monodisperse spherical particles and to determine their optical properties, represented by the complex refractive index N, without limiting assumptions concerning the evolution of the particle size or the need for additional ex situ diagnostics. The method is applied on typical particle growth processes at varying optical depth and compared to ex situ SEM measurements. It is shown that more complex processes, including particle etching, can be analyzed. This demonstrates the applicability of the analysis on a strongly non-linear process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We have built a low background detector, a time projection chamber surrounded by an active anti-Compton, to measure the νee− elastic cross section down to the antineutrino energy of 900 keV. With our detector, running at 18 m from the core of a nuclear reactor in Bugey, we could detect reactor antineutrinos by measuring both the energy and the direction of the recoiling electrons. We report here on a first analysis of the data using an automatic scanning procedure. The results we obtain are 1.5σ higher than the ones predicted by the standard model. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]