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STRASSE (Silicon Tracker for RAdioactive nuclei Studies at SAMURAI Experiments) is a new detection system under construction for quasi-free scattering (QFS) measurements at 200-250 MeV/nucleon at the RIBF facility of the RIKEN Nishina Center. It consists of a charged-particle silicon tracker coupled with a dedicated thick liquid hydrogen target (up to 150-mm long) in a compact geometry to fit inside large scintillator or germanium arrays. Its design was optimized for two types of studies using QFS: missing-mass measurements and in-flight prompt $\gamma$-ray spectroscopy. This article describes (i) the resolution requirements needed to go beyond the sensitivity of existing systems for these two types of measurements, (ii) the conceptual design of the system using detailed simulations of the setup and (iii) its complete technical implementation and challenges. The final tracker aims at a sub-mm reaction vertex resolution and is expected to reach a missing-mass resolution below 2 MeV in $\sigma$ for $(p,2p)$ reactions when combined with the CsI(Na) CATANA array., Comment: 25 pages, 29 figures

We apply the independent component analysis (ICA) to the real data from a gravitational wave detector for the first time. Specifically we use the iKAGRA data taken in April 2016, and calculate the correlations between the gravitational wave strain channel and 35 physical environmental channels. Using a couple of seismic channels which are found to be strongly correlated with the strain, we perform ICA. Injecting a sinusoidal continuous signal in the strain channel, we find that ICA recovers correct parameters with enhanced signal-to-noise ratio, which demonstrates usefulness of this method. Among the two implementations of ICA used here, we find the correlation method yields the optimal result for the case environmental noises act on the strain channel linearly., Comment: 27 pages, 12 figures : published in PTEP with added discussion about the relation between ICA and Wiener filtering

KAGRA is a second-generation interferometric gravitational-wave detector with 3-km arms constructed at Kamioka, Gifu in Japan. It is now in its final installation phase, which we call bKAGRA (baseline KAGRA), with scientific observations expected to begin in late 2019. One of the advantages of KAGRA is its underground location of at least 200 m below the ground surface, which brings small seismic motion at low frequencies and high stability of the detector. Another advantage is that it cools down the sapphire test mass mirrors to cryogenic temperatures to reduce thermal noise. In April-May 2018, we have operated a 3-km Michelson interferometer with a cryogenic test mass for 10 days, which was the first time that km-scale interferometer was operated at cryogenic temperatures. In this article, we report the results of this "bKAGRA Phase 1" operation. We have demonstrated the feasibility of 3-km interferometer alignment and control with cryogenic mirrors., Comment: 23 pages, 11 figures

A vibration isolation system called Type-Bp system used for power recycling mirrors has been developed for KAGRA, the interferometric gravitational-wave observatory in Japan. A suspension of the Type-Bp system passively isolates an optic from seismic vibration using three main pendulum stages equipped with two vertical vibration isolation systems. A compact reaction mass around each of the main stages allows for achieving sufficient damping performance with a simple feedback as well as vibration isolation ratio. Three Type-Bp systems were installed in KAGRA, and were proved to satisfy the requirements on the damping performance, and also on estimated residual displacement of the optics.

The recent detections of gravitational waves (GWs) reported by LIGO/Virgo collaborations have made significant impact on physics and astronomy. A global network of GW detectors will play a key role to solve the unknown nature of the sources in coordinated observations with astronomical telescopes and detectors. Here we introduce KAGRA (former name LCGT; Large-scale Cryogenic Gravitational wave Telescope), a new GW detector with two 3-km baseline arms arranged in the shape of an "L", located inside the Mt. Ikenoyama, Kamioka, Gifu, Japan. KAGRA's design is similar to those of the second generations such as Advanced LIGO/Virgo, but it will be operating at the cryogenic temperature with sapphire mirrors. This low temperature feature is advantageous for improving the sensitivity around 100 Hz and is considered as an important feature for the third generation GW detector concept (e.g. Einstein Telescope of Europe or Cosmic Explorer of USA). Hence, KAGRA is often called as a 2.5 generation GW detector based on laser interferometry. The installation and commissioning of KAGRA is underway and its cryogenic systems have been successfully tested in May, 2018. KAGRA's first observation run is scheduled in late 2019, aiming to join the third observation run (O3) of the advanced LIGO/Virgo network. In this work, we describe a brief history of KAGRA and highlights of main feature. We also discuss the prospects of GW observation with KAGRA in the era of O3. When operating along with the existing GW detectors, KAGRA will be helpful to locate a GW source more accurately and to determine the source parameters with higher precision, providing information for follow-up observations of a GW trigger candidate., Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures (quality of some figures has been reduced)

Major construction and initial-phase operation of a second-generation gravitational-wave detector KAGRA has been completed. The entire 3-km detector is installed underground in a mine in order to be isolated from background seismic vibrations on the surface. This allows us to achieve a good sensitivity at low frequencies and high stability of the detector. Bare-bones equipment for the interferometer operation has been installed and the first test run was accomplished in March and April of 2016 with a rather simple configuration. The initial configuration of KAGRA is named {\it iKAGRA}. In this paper, we summarize the construction of KAGRA, including the study of the advantages and challenges of building an underground detector and the operation of the iKAGRA interferometer together with the geophysics interferometer that has been constructed in the same tunnel., Comment: Resolution of some figures has been decreased from its original version submitted to a journal

KAGRA is a 3-km interferometric gravitational wave telescope located in the Kamioka mine in Japan. It is the first km-class gravitational wave telescope constructed underground to reduce seismic noise, and the first km-class telescope to use cryogenic cooling of test masses to reduce thermal noise. The construction of the infrastructure to house the interferometer in the tunnel, and the initial phase operation of the interferometer with a simple 3-km Michelson configuration have been completed. The first cryogenic operation is expected in 2018, and the observing runs with a full interferometer are expected in 2020s. The basic interferometer configuration and the current status of KAGRA are described., Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures. Proceedings for XV International Conference on Topics in Astroparticle and Underground Physics (TAUP2017), Sudbury, July 24-28, 2017

We study, in the PNJL model, how the entropy of interacting quarks reflects the change in the effective degrees of freedom as the temperature increases through the quark-hadron phase transition. With inclusion of mesonic correlations, the effective degrees of freedom change from those of pi and sigma mesons at low temperatures to those of free quarks at high temperatures, with a resultant second order phase deconfinement transition in the chiral limit., Comment: 7 pages, 1 figure

The second-layer phase diagrams of $^4$He and $^3$He adsorbed on graphite are investigated. Intrinsically rounded specific-heat anomalies are observed at 1.4 and 0.9 K, respectively, over extended density regions in between the liquid and incommensurate solid phases. They are identified to anomalies associated with the Kosterlitz-Thouless-Halperin-Nelson-Young type two-dimensional melting. The prospected low temperature phase (C2 phase) is a commensurate phase or a $\textit{quantum hexatic}$ phase with quasi-bond-orientational order, both containing $\textit{zero}$-$\textit{point}$ defectons. In either case, this would be the first atomic realization of the $\textit{quantum liquid crystal}$, a new state of matter. From the large enhancement of the melting temperature over $^3$He, we propose to assign the observed anomaly of $^4$He-C2 phase at 1.4 K to the hypothetical supersolid or superhexatic transition., Comment: 12 pages, 3 figures, 1 table

We extend our previous study of the quark-hadron phase transition at finite temperatures with zero net baryon density by two flavor Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model with Polyakov loop to the three flavor case in a scheme which incorporates flavor nonet pseudo scalar and scalar mesonic correlations on equal footing. The role of the axial U(1) breaking Kobayashi-Maskawa-'t Hooft interaction on the low-lying thermal excitations is examined. At low temperatures, only mesonic correlations, mainly due to low mass mesonic collective excitations, pions and kaons, dominate the pressure while thermal excitations of quarks are suppressed by the Polyakov loop. As temperature increases, kaons and pions melt into the continuum of quark and anti-quark excitations successively so that hadronic phase changes continuously to the quark phase where quark excitations dominate pressure together with gluon pressure coming from the effective potential for the Polyakov loop. Since we introduce mesons as not elementary fields but auxiliary fields made from quarks, we can describe the phase transition between hadronic phase and quark phase in a unified fashion., Comment: 32 pages, 10 figures

We study the quark-hadron phase transition by using a three flavor Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model with the Polyakov loop at zero chemical potential, extending our previous work with two flavor model. We show that the equation of state at low temperatures is dominated by pions and kaons as collective modes of quarks and anti-quarks. As temperature increases, mesonic collective modes melt into the continuum of quark and anti-quark so that hadronic phase changes continuously to the quark phase where quark excitations dominate pressure., Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, proceedings of Strangeness in Quark Matter 2013, July 22-27, 2013, Birmingham, UK

We study quark-hadron phase transition at finite temperature with zero net baryon density by the Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model for interacting quarks in uniform background temporal color gauge fields. At low temperatures, unphysical thermal quark-antiquark excitations which would appear in the mean field approximation, are eliminated by en- forcing vanishing expectation value of the Polyakov-loop of the background gauge field, while at high temperatures this expectation value is taken as unity allowing thermal excitations of free quarks and antiquarks. Mesonic excitations in the low temperature phase appear in the correlation energy as contributions of collective excitations. We describe them in terms of thermal fluctuations of auxiliary fields in one-loop (Gaus- sian) approximation, where pions appear as Nambu-Goldstone modes associated with dynamical symmetry breaking of the chiral symmetry in the limit of vanishing bare quark masses. We show that at low temperatures the equations of state reduces to that of free meson gas with small corrections arising from the composite nature of mesons. At high temperatures, all these collective mesonic excitations melt into continuum of quark anti-quark excitations and mesonic correlations gives only small contributions the pressure of the system., Comment: 33 pages, 11 figures. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1206.4921

Spin-spin relaxation time ($T_2$) and magnetic susceptibility ($\chi$) of the second layer $^3$He adsorbed on Grafoil, exfoliated graphite, preplated with a monolayer $^4$He are studied by pulsed-NMR in a density range of $0.68 \leq \rho \leq 5.28$ nm$^{-2}$. The temperature dependence of $\chi(T)$ and $\chi(T = 0)$ show Fermi fluid behaviour and no evidence of self-condensation are found even at the lowest density $\rho = 0.68$ nm$^{-2}$. Density dependence of $T_2$ at $f = 5.5$ MHz shows a broad maximum of 5.7 ms around $\rho = 3$ nm$^{-2}$. Since the decrease of $T_2$ in dilute side can not be expected in the ideal 2D fluid, it can be understood as the relaxation caused by a small amount of solid $^3$He at heterogeneity of the substrate. We also measured the Larmor frequency dependence of $T_2$ at $\rho = 5.28$ nm$^{-2}$. $1/T_2$ has a $f$-linear dependence similarly to the earlier study on a first layer solid $^3$He. From a comparison between our result and the earlier one, this linearity is almost independent of the particle motion. Now, it could be caused by a microscopic magnetic field inhomogeneity arisen from the mosaic angle spread and diamagnetism of the graphite substrate., Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, LT26 proceedings, accepted for publication in Journal of Physics: Conference Series

A low-energy electron diffraction (LEED) apparatus which works at temperatures down to about 100 mK is designed to obtain structural information of 2D helium on graphite. This very low temperature system can be realized by reducing the thermal inflow from the LEED optics to the sample which is cooled by cryogen-free dilution refrigerator. The atomic scattering factor of He is also estimated using a kinematical model, which suggests that the diffraction signal from He atom can well be obtained by using a delay-line detector instead of a fluorescent screen., Comment: to be published in Journal of Physics: Conference Series as a proceeding of 26th International Conference on Low Temperature Physics (LT26)

We have developed a new heat-capacity measuring system with ZYX graphite that is known to have much better crystallinity than Grafoil and started data collection. We report preliminary data as well as a detailed description of instrumentation including a mechanical heat-switch operated by hydraulic pressure of superfluid helium-4., Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, LT26 proceedings, accepted for publication in Journal of Physics: Conference Series

We report clear experimental signatures of the theoretically unexpected gas-liquid transition in the first three monolayers of $^3$He adsorbed on graphite. The transition is inferred from the linear density dependence of the $\gamma$-coefficient of the heat capacity measured in the degenerate region (2 $\le T \le$80 mK) below a critical liquid density ($\rho_{c0}$). Surprisingly, the measured $\rho_{c0}$ values (0.6$\sim$0.9 nm$^{-2}$) are nearly the same for all these monolayers in spite of their quite different environments. We conclude that the ground-state of $^3$He in strict two dimensions is not a dilute quantum gas but a self-bound quantum liquid with the lowest density ever found., Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures

We report preliminary heat capacity and vapor pressure measurements of the first and second layers of 4He adsorbed on ZYX graphite. ZYX is known to have much better crystallinity than Grafoil, the most commonly-used exfoliated graphite substrate, such as a ten-times larger platelet size. This allows us to distinguish different phases in 2D helium-4 much more clearly and may provide qualitatively different insights into this system. We found a significantly asymmetric density-dependence of the heat-capacity peak associated with the 1/3 phase formation comparing with that obtained with Grafoil. The 2nd-layer promotion density is determined as 11.8+-0.3 nm-2 from the heat-capacity measurement of low density samples in the 2nd layer and vapor pressure measurement., Comment: 7 pages, 7 figures, accepted for publication in JLTP - QFS2012

We study the three-dimensional bosonic t-J model, i.e., the t-J model of "bosonic electrons", at finite temperatures. This model describes the $s={1 \over 2}$ Heisenberg spin model with the anisotropic exchange coupling $J_{\bot}=-\alpha J_z$ and doped {\it bosonic} holes, which is an effective system of the Bose-Hubbard model with strong repulsions. The bosonic "electron" operator $B_{r\sigma}$ at the site $r$ with a two-component (pseudo-)spin $\sigma (=1,2)$ is treated as a hard-core boson operator, and represented by a composite of two slave particles; a "spinon" described by a Schwinger boson (CP$^1$ boson) $z_{r\sigma}$ and a "holon" described by a hard-core-boson field $\phi_r$ as $B_{r\sigma}=\phi^\dag_r z_{r\sigma}$. By means of Monte Carlo simulations, we study its finite-temperature phase structure including the $\alpha$ dependence, the possible phenomena like appearance of checkerboard long-range order, super-counterflow, superfluid, and phase separation, etc. The obtained results may be taken as predictions about experiments of two-component cold bosonic atoms in the cubic optical lattice., Comment: 8 pages, 14 figures, Size of figures has been adjusted

We calculate the relative abundance of the radioactive isotopes Iodine-131 and Cesium-137 produced by nuclear fission in reactors and compare it with data taken at the troubled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant. The ratio of radioactivities of these two isotopes can be used to obtain information about when the nuclear reactions terminated., Comment: 12 pages, 6 figures. Updated version of the article with the same title uploaded on this arXiv on May 2, 2011; To appear in Progress of Theoretical Physics 126

We made heat-capacity measurements of two dimensional (2D) $^3$He adsorbed on graphite preplated with monolayer $^4$He in a wide temperature range (0.1 $\leq T \leq$ 80 mK) at densities higher than that for the 4/7 phase (= 6.8 nm$^{-2}$). In the density range of 6.8 $\leq \rho \leq$ 8.1 nm$^{-2}$, the 4/7 phase is stable against additional $^3$He atoms up to 20% and they are promoted into the third layer. We found evidence that such promoted atoms form a self-bound 2D Fermi liquid with an approximate density of 1 nm$^{-2}$ from the measured density dependence of the $\gamma$-coefficient of heat capacity. We also show evidence for the first-order transition between the commensurate 4/7 phase and the ferromagnetic incommensurate phase in the second layer in the density range of 8.1 $\leq \rho \leq$ 9.5 nm$^{-2}$., Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures

We study the effects of mesonic final state interactions on the Hanbury Brown and Twiss (HBT) intensity interferometry for mesons in ultra-relativistic heavy ion collisions. Modification of the one-body amplitude of emitted mesons while going through a cloud of other mesons is estimated in the semiclassical approximation with a mesonic optical potential which incorporates both coherent forward scattering with other mesons and the absorption due to the incoherent scattering in the meson clouds. We show how these effects results in the distortion of the HBT images., Comment: 12 pages, 3 figures

We develop a quantum kinetic theory of the chiral condensate and meson quasi-particle excitations using the O(N) linear sigma model which describe the chiral phase transition both in and out of equilibrium in a unified way. A mean field approximation is formulated in the presence of mesonic quasi-particle excitations which are described by generalized Wigner functions. It is shown that in equilibrium our kinetic equations reduce to the gap equations which determine the equilibrium condensate amplitude and the effective masses of the quasi-particle excitations, while linearization of transport equations, near such equilibrium, determine the dispersion relations of the collective mesonic excitations at finite temperatures. Although all mass parameters for the meson excitations become at finite temperature, apparently violating the Goldstone theorem, the missing Nambu-Goldstone modes are retrieved in the collective excitations of the system as three degenerate phonon-like modes in the symmetry-broken phase. We show that the temperature dependence of the pole masses of the collective pion excitations has non-analytic kink behavior at the threshold of the quasi-particle excitations in the presence of explicit symmetry breaking interaction., Comment: 50 Pages, 13 figures

Previous heat-capacity measurements of our group had shown the possible existence of an anomalous quantum phase containing the zero-point vacancies (ZPVs) in 2D $^{3}$He. The system is monolayer $^{3}$He adsorbed on graphite preplated with monolayer $^{4}$He at densities ($\rho$) just below the 4/7 commensurate phase ($0.8\leq \rho /\rho_{4/7}\leq 1$). We carried out pulsed-NMR measurements in order to examine the microscopic and dynamical nature of this phase. The measured decay of spin echo signals shows the non-exponential behaviour. The decay curve can be fitted with the double exponential function, but the relative intensity of the component with a longer time constant is small (5%) and does not depend on density and temperature, which contradicts the macroscopic fluid and 4/7 phase coexistence model. This slowdown is likely due to the mosaic angle spread of Grafoil substrate and the anisotropic spin-spin relaxation time $T_{2}$ in 2D systems with respect to the magnetic field direction. The inverse $T_2$ value deduced from the major echo signal with a shorter time constant, which obeys the single exponential function, decreases linearly with decreasing density from $n=1$, supporting the ZPV model., Comment: 4 pages, 6 figures

We formulate a kinetic theory of self-interacting meson fields with an aim to describe the freezeout stage of the space-time evolution of matter in ultrarelativistic nuclear collisions. Kinetic equations are obtained from the Heisenberg equation of motion for a single component real scalar quantum field taking the mean field approximation for the non-linear interaction. The mesonic mean field obeys the classical non-linear Klein-Gordon equation with a modification due to the coupling to mesonic quasi-particle excitations which are expressed in terms of the Wigner functions of the quantum fluctuations of the meson field, namely the statistical average of the bilinear forms of the meson creation and annihilation operators. In the long wavelength limit, the equations of motion of the diagonal components of the Wigner functions take a form of Vlasov equation with a particle source and sink which arises due to the non-vanishing off-diagonal components of the Wigner function expressing coherent pair-creation and pair-annihilation process in the presence of non-uniform condensate. We show that in the static homogeneous system, these kinetic equations reduce to the well-known gap equation in the Hartree approximation, and hence they may be considered as a generalization of the Hartree approximation method to non-equilibrium systems. As an application of these kinetic equations, we compute the dispersion relations of the collective mesonic excitations in the system near equilibrium., Comment: 45 pages, 9 figurs