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We introduce the LUNA neutron detector array developed for the investigation of the 13C(a,n)16O reaction towards its astrophysical s-process Gamow peak in the low-background environment of the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso (LNGS). Eighteen 3He counters are arranged in two different configurations (in a vertical and a horizontal orientation) to optimize neutron detection effciency, target handling and target cooling over the investigated energy range Ea;lab = 300 - 400 keV (En = 2.2 - 2.6 MeV in emitted neutron energy). As a result of the deep underground location, the passive shielding of the setup and active background suppression using pulse shape discrimination, we reached a total background rate of 1.23 +- 0.12 counts/hour. This resulted in an improvement of two orders of magnitude over the state of the art allowing a direct measurement of the 13C(a,n)16O cross-section down to Ea;lab = 300 keV. The absolute neutron detection efficiency of the setup was determined using the 51V(p,n)51Cr reaction and an AmBe radioactive source, and completed with a Geant4 simulation. We determined a (34+-3) % and (38+-3) % detection efficiency for the vertical and horizontal configurations, respectively, for En = 2.4 MeV neutrons., Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, to be published in NIMA

Motivated by the duality theory between Hermitian symmetric spaces of noncompact and compact types, we introduce and examine the concept of K\"ahler duality between domains of $\mathbb C^n$., Comment: 33 pages

The elusive presence of an anomalously increasing screening length at high ionic concentrations hampers a complete picture of interactions in electrolytes. Theories which extend the diluted Debye-Huckel framework to higher concentrations predict, in addition to the expected decreasing Debye length, an increasing significant scale of the order of at most a few ionic diameters. More recent surface force balance experiments with different materials succeeded in measuring increasing length scales which, however, turn out to extend over tenths or even hundreds of ionic diameters. While simulation work has managed to characterize the former, the latter still avoid detection, generating doubts about its true origin. Here we provide a step forward in the clarification of such a conundrum. We have studied by extensive Molecular Dynamics simulation the properties of a generic model of electrolyte, lithium tetrafluoroborate dissolved in ethylene-carbonate, in a vast range of salt concentrations continuously joining the Debye non-interacting limit to the opposite over-charged ionic liquid-like states. On one side, we have accurately determined the macroscopic concentration-induced structural, dielectric and transport modifications, on the other we have quantified the resulting nano-scale ions organization. Based only on the simulation data, without resorting to any uncontrolled hypothesis or phenomenological parameter, we identify a convincing candidate for the measured anomalously increasing length, whose origin has been possibly misinterpreted.

The Circle of Willis (CoW) is an important network of arteries connecting major circulations of the brain. Its vascular architecture is believed to affect the risk, severity, and clinical outcome of serious neuro-vascular diseases. However, characterizing the highly variable CoW anatomy is still a manual and time-consuming expert task. The CoW is usually imaged by two angiographic imaging modalities, magnetic resonance angiography (MRA) and computed tomography angiography (CTA), but there exist limited public datasets with annotations on CoW anatomy, especially for CTA. Therefore we organized the TopCoW Challenge in 2023 with the release of an annotated CoW dataset. The TopCoW dataset was the first public dataset with voxel-level annotations for thirteen possible CoW vessel components, enabled by virtual-reality (VR) technology. It was also the first large dataset with paired MRA and CTA from the same patients. TopCoW challenge formalized the CoW characterization problem as a multiclass anatomical segmentation task with an emphasis on topological metrics. We invited submissions worldwide for the CoW segmentation task, which attracted over 140 registered participants from four continents. The top performing teams managed to segment many CoW components to Dice scores around 90%, but with lower scores for communicating arteries and rare variants. There were also topological mistakes for predictions with high Dice scores. Additional topological analysis revealed further areas for improvement in detecting certain CoW components and matching CoW variant topology accurately. TopCoW represented a first attempt at benchmarking the CoW anatomical segmentation task for MRA and CTA, both morphologically and topologically., Comment: 24 pages, 11 figures, 9 tables. Summary Paper for the MICCAI TopCoW 2023 Challenge

The question of if silica nanoparticles can enhance the ionic conductivity of a polymer electrolyte above its crystallization temperature has remained unclear for the two decades following the first experiments on these systems. We use Molecular Dynamics simulations to decipher the atomic scale mechanisms affecting the properties of LiTFSI-poly(ethylene oxide) electrolytes upon the addition of silica nanoparticles. At any ionic concentration, adding nanoparticles significantly decreases the conductivity. Most of this reduction can be simply accounted for by the diffusion equation, resulting from the fact that the space occupied by the nanoparticles is made inactive and unable to sustain ionic diffusion. We identify two distinct regimes, above and below a concentration threshold, corresponding to very different ionic distributions and coordination features of the various species. The lack of conductivity enhancement observed in the simulations supports the conclusions of some recent measurements, and disagrees with the earliest experimental reports on hybrid silica/polyethylene-oxide electrolytes.

We discuss local Sasakian immersion of Sasaki-Ricci solitons (SRS) into fiber products of homogeneous Sasakian manifolds. In particular, we prove that SRS locally induced by a large class of fiber products of homogeneous Sasakian manifolds are, in fact, $\eta$-Einstein. The results are stronger for immersions into Sasakian space forms. Moreover, we show an example of a K\"ahler-Ricci soliton on $\mathbb C^n$ which admits no local holomorphic isometry into products of homogeneous bounded domains with flat K\"ahler manifolds and generalized flag manifolds.

Intracranial aneurysms are a commonly occurring and life-threatening condition, affecting approximately 3.2% of the general population. Consequently, detecting these aneurysms plays a crucial role in their management. Lesion detection involves the simultaneous localization and categorization of abnormalities within medical images. In this study, we employed the nnDetection framework, a self-configuring framework specifically designed for 3D medical object detection, to detect and localize the 3D coordinates of aneurysms effectively. To capture and extract diverse features associated with aneurysms, we utilized TOF-MRA and structural MRI, both obtained from the ADAM dataset. The performance of our proposed deep learning model was assessed through the utilization of free-response receiver operative characteristics for evaluation purposes. The model's weights and 3D prediction of the bounding box of TOF-MRA are publicly available at https://github.com/orouskhani/AneurysmDetection., Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures

We prove two rigidity results on holomorphic isometries into homogeneous K\"{a}hler manifolds. The first shows that a K\"{a}hler-Ricci soliton induced by the homogeneous metric of the K\"{a}hler product of a special flag manifold (i.e. a flag of classical type or integral type) with a bounded homogeneous domain is trivial, i.e. K\"{a}hler-Einstein. In the second one we prove that: (i) a flat space is not relative to the K\"{a}hler product of a special flag manifold with a homogeneous bounded domain, (ii) a special flag manifold is not relative to the K\"{a}hler product of a flat space with a homogeneous bounded domain and (iii) a homogeneous bounded domain is not relative to the K\"{a}hler product of a flat space with a special flag manifold. Our theorems strongly extend the results in [4], [5], [12], [13] and [22]., Comment: 14 pages

Next-generation high-efficiency Li-ion batteries require an electrolyte that is both safe and thermally stable. A possible choice for high performance all-solid-state Li-ion batteries is a liquid crystal, which possesses properties in-between crystalline solids and isotropic liquids. By employing molecular dynamics simulations together with various experimental techniques, we have designed and analyzed a novel liquid crystal electrolyte composed of rigid naphthalene-based moieties as mesogenic units, grafted to flexible alkyl chains of different lengths. We have synthesized novel highly ordered lamellar phase liquid crystal electrolytes at 99% purity and have evaluated the effect of alkyl chain length variation on ionic conduction. We find that the conductivity of the liquid crystal electrolytes is directly dependent on the extent of the nanochannels formed by molecule self-organization, which itself depends non-monotonously on the size of the alkyl chains. In addition, we show that the ion pair interaction between the anionic center of the liquid crystal molecules and the Li+ ions plays a crucial role in the overall conductivity. Based on our results, we suggest that further improvement of the ionic conductivity performance is possible, making this novel family of liquid crystal electrolytes a promising option for the design of entirely solid-state Li+ ion batteries.

The concept of vibrational density of states in glasses has been mirrored in liquids by the instantaneous-normal-mode spectrum. While in glasses instantaneous configurations correspond to minima of the potential-energy hypersurface and all eigenvalues of the associated Hessian matrix are therefore positive, in liquids this is no longer true, and modes corresponding to both positive and negative eigenvalues exist. The instantaneous-normal-mode spectrum has been numerically investigated in the past, and it has been demonstrated to bring important information on the liquid dynamics. A systematic deeper theoretical understanding is now needed. Heterogeneous-elasticity theory has proven to be successful in explaining many details of the low-frequency excitations in glasses, ranging from the thoroughly studied boson peak, down to the more elusive non-phononic excitations observed in numerical simulations at the lowest frequencies. Here we present an extension of heterogeneous-elasticity theory to the liquid state, and show that the outcome of the theory agrees well to the results of extensive molecular-dynamics simulations of a model liquid at different temperatures. We show that the spectral shape strongly depends on temperature, being symmetric at high temperatures and becoming rather asymmetric at low temperatures, close to the dynamical critical temperature. Most importantly, we demonstrate that the theory naturally reproduces a surprising phenomenon, a zero-energy spectral singularity with a cusp-like character developing in the vibrational spectra upon cooling. This feature, known from a few previous numerical studies, has been generally overlooked in the past due to a misleading representation of the data. We provide a thorough analysis of this issue, based on both very accurate predictions of our theory, and computational studies of model liquid systems with extended size.

In stars, the fusion of $^{22}$Ne and $^4$He may produce either $^{25}$Mg, with the emission of a neutron, or $^{26}$Mg and a $\gamma$ ray. At high temperature, the ($\alpha,n$) channel dominates, while at low temperature, it is energetically hampered. The rate of its competitor, the $^{22}$Ne($\alpha$,$\gamma$)$^{26}$Mg reaction, and, hence, the minimum temperature for the ($\alpha,n$) dominance, are controlled by many nuclear resonances. The strengths of these resonances have hitherto been studied only indirectly. The present work aims to directly measure the total strength of the resonance at $E$_{r}$\,=\,$334$\,$keV (corresponding to $E$_{x}$\,=\,$10949$\,$keV in $^{26}$Mg). The data reported here have been obtained using high intensity $^4$He$^+$ beam from the INFN LUNA 400 kV underground accelerator, a windowless, recirculating, 99.9% isotopically enriched $^{22}$Ne gas target, and a 4$\pi$ bismuth germanate summing $\gamma$-ray detector. The ultra-low background rate of less than 0.5 counts/day was determined using 67 days of no-beam data and 7 days of $^4$He$^+$ beam on an inert argon target. The new high-sensitivity setup allowed to determine the first direct upper limit of 4.0$\,\times\,$10$^{-11}$ eV (at 90% confidence level) for the resonance strength. Finally, the sensitivity of this setup paves the way to study further $^{22}$Ne($\alpha$,$\gamma$)$^{26}$Mg resonances at higher energy., Comment: Submitted to Eur. Phys. J. A

The local intermolecular structure and related dynamics in the liquid cis-trans N-methylformamide mixture at ambient temperature and density conditions have been systematically studied by employing Born-Oppenheimer molecular dynamics simulation techniques. Particular attention has been paid to the local structure around the cis- and trans- conformers and the formation and dynamics of hydrogen bonds with their closest neighbors. The calculated atom-atom radial distribution functions are in very good agreement with available experimental data and reveal the existence of different types of hydrogen bonding intermolecular interactions. The average number of hydrogen bonds formed by the cis-conformers is higher in comparison with the one corresponding to the trans-conformers. Moreover, the lifetimes of the hydrogen bonds formed in the liquid are longer when the cis-conformers participate in the bond formation, either as donors or acceptors. These findings clearly indicate that the local structural network around the cis-conformers in the liquid is more cohesive. The latter finding is also reflected in the slower reorientational dynamics of the cis-conformers and the low- and high-frequency region of the spectral densities of the atomic velocity time correlation functions. Finally, the calculated average dipole moments of the trans- and cis- conformers are significantly higher than their corresponding gas-phase values, signifying the importance of polarization effects in this particular polar liquid solvent.

We study the K\"ahler-Einstein manifolds which admits a holomorphic isometry into either the generalized Burns-Simanca manifold $(\tilde {\mathbb C}^n, g_S)$ or the Eguchi-Hanson manifold $(\tilde {\mathbb C}^2, g_{EH})$. Moreover, we prove that $(\tilde {\mathbb C}^n, g_S)$ and $(\tilde {\mathbb C}^2, g_{EH})$ are not relatives to any homogeneous bounded domain.

We prove two rigidity theorems on holomorphic isometries into homogeneous bounded domains. The first shows that a K\"ahler-Ricci soliton induced by the homogeneous metric of a homogeneous bounded domain is trivial, i.e. K\"ahler-Einstein. In the second one we prove that a homogeneous bounded domain and the flat (definite or indefinite) complex Euclidean space are not relatives, i.e. they do not share a common K\"ahler submanifold (of positive dimension). Our theorems extend the results proved in [A. Loi, R. Mossa, Proc. Amer. Math. Soc. 149 (2021), no. 11, 4931-4941] and [X. Cheng, Y. Hao, Ann. Global Anal. Geom. 60 (2021), no. 1, 167-180] respectively., Comment: 11 pages. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2003.00841