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The beta decay of the free neutron provides several probes to test the Standard Model of particle physics as well as to search for extensions thereof. Hence, multiple experiments investigating the decay have already been performed, are under way or are being prepared. These measure the mean lifetime, angular correlation coefficients or various spectra of the charged decay products (proton and electron). NoMoS, the Neutron decay prOducts MOmentum Spectrometer, presents a novel method of momentum spectroscopy: it utilizes the $R \times B$ drift effect to disperse charged particles dependent on their momentum in an uniformly curved magnetic field. This spectrometer is designed to precisely measure momentum spectra and angular correlation coefficients in free neutron beta decay to test the Standard Model and to search for new physics beyond. With NoMoS, we aim to measure inter alia the electron-antineutrino correlation coefficient $a$ and the Fierz interference term $b$ with an ultimate precision of $\Delta a/a < 0.3\%$ and $\Delta b < 10^{-3}$ respectively. In this paper, we present the measurement principles, discuss measurement uncertainties and systematics, and give a status update. Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures, accepted to the Proceedings of the International Workshop on Particle Physics at Neutron Sources PPNS 2018, Grenoble, France, May 24-26, 2018

International audience; Sliced Inverse Regression (SIR) has been extensively used to reduce the dimension of the predictor space before performing regression. SIR is originally a model free method but it has been shown to actually correspond to the maximum likelihood of an inverse regression model with Gaussian errors. This intrinsic Gaussianity of standard SIR may explain its high sensitivity to outliers as observed in a number of studies. To improve robustness, the inverse regression formulation of SIR is therefore extended to non-Gaussian errors with heavy-tailed distributions. Considering Student distributed errors it is shown that the inverse regression remains tractable via an Expectation- Maximization (EM) algorithm. The algorithm is outlined and tested in the presence of outliers, both in simulated and real data, showing improved results in comparison to a number of other existing approaches.

The emergence of electronic health records has highlighted the need for semantic standards for representation of observations in laboratory medicine. Two such standards are LOINC, with a focus on detailed encoding of lab tests, and SNOMED CT, which is more general, including the representation of qualitative and ordinal test results. In this paper we will discuss how lab observation entries can be represented using SNOMED CT. We use resources provided by the Regenstrief Institute and SNOMED International collaboration, which formalize LOINC terms as SNOMED CT post-coordinated expressions. We demonstrate the benefits brought by SNOMED CT to classify lab tests. We then propose a SNOMED CT based model for lab observation entries aligned with the BioTopLite2 (BTL2) upper level ontology. We provide examples showing how a model designed with no ontological foundation can produce misleading interpretations of inferred observation results. Our solution based on a BTL2 conformant formal interpretation of SNOMED CT concepts allows representing lab test without creating unintended models. We argue in favour of an ontologically explicit bridge between compositional clinical terminologies, in order to safely use their formal representations in intelligent systems.

Inferring probabilistic networks from data is a notoriously difficult task. Under various goodness-of-fit measures, finding an optimal network is NP-hard, even if restricted to polytrees of bounded in-degree. Polynomial-time algorithms are known only for rare special cases, perhaps most notably for branchings, that is, polytrees in which the in-degree of every node is at most one. Here, we study the complexity of finding an optimal polytree that can be turned into a branching by deleting some number of arcs or nodes, treated as a parameter. We show that the problem can be solved via a matroid intersection formulation in polynomial time if the number of deleted arcs is bounded by a constant. The order of the polynomial time bound depends on this constant, hence the algorithm does not establish fixed-parameter tractability when parameterized by the number of deleted arcs. We show that a restricted version of the problem allows fixed-parameter tractability and hence scales well with the parameter. We contrast this positive result by showing that if we parameterize by the number of deleted nodes, a somewhat more powerful parameter, the problem is not fixed-parameter tractable, subject to a complexity-theoretic assumption. Comment: (author's self-archived copy)

Part 6: Game Understanding; International audience; This paper intends to develop a scale to measure a videogame player’s emotional, sensory, and imaginal experiences in digital gaming. We first define the construct of playful-consumption experience in videogame playing and accordingly, develop a scale for measuring playful experiences in videogames. We collected the data of 225 valid respondents which were further analyzed through exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and reliability analysis. The results of EFA and reliability analysis reported that the loaded items were emerged into a seven factor solution and all constructs have good reliability. This study is unique in the videogame literature as it uses the theoretical definition of playful-consumption experience to define and measure the player’s experiences in videogame playing as playful-consumption experience of videogame play.

We embark on systematic explorations of the behaviour of tetraquark mesons (colour-singlet bound states of two quarks and two antiquarks) in the (idealized) limit of a large number $N_c$ of colour degrees of freedom of quantum chromodynamics. Considering the scattering of two ordinary mesons into two ordinary mesons, we start off with formulating a set of selection criteria that should enable us to unambiguously single out precisely those contributions to all encountered scattering amplitudes that potentially will develop tetraquark poles. Assuming that tetraquark mesons do exist and, if so, emerge in the contributions compatible with our criteria at largest admissible order of $N_c$, we deduce, for the categories of tetraquarks that exhibit either four or only two different open quark flavours, that the decay rates of these tetraquark types are, at least, of order $1/N_c^2$ and that internal consistency requires all the members of the first species to exist pairwise, distinguishable by their favoured two-ordinary-meson decay channels. Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, talk presented at "QUARKS-2018 - XXth International Seminar on High Energy Physics" (27 May - 2 June 2018, Valday, Russia)

International audience; Since 2011, Euro 5b European standard limits the particle number (PN) emissions in addition to the particulate matter (PM) emissions. New thermal engines equipped vehicles have to auto-diagnose their own Diesel particulate filter (DPF) using on-board diagnostic (OBD) sensors. Accumulative resistive soot sensors seem to be good candidates for PM measurements. The aim of this study is to bring more comprehension about soot micro-structures construction in order to link the response of such a sensor to particle size and PN concentration. The sensor sensitivity to the particlesize has been studied using successively an electrostatic and an aerodynamic classification, showing the same trend.

International audience; Dense integration and high operating frequencies associated with increased number of I/O buffers of FPGAs are factors contributing to electromagnetic emission (EME) increase. Consequently the radiation issue that used to be discussed at PCB level has shifted to component level. Thus it is of high interest and challenging to investigate chip electromagnetic performance. This paper presents a preliminary analysis about the impact of the placement and routing (P&R) process of logic inside the FPGA on the chip EME level. With this purpose, a softcore processor was placed and routed based on three different strategies in the configurable logic block (CLB) array of a commercial FPGA and executed an application code running over an operating system (OS). Three experiments based on farand near-field emission measurements have been performed. The obtained results indicate that the EME level can be affected up to 21.8% by the way the processor is placed and routed inside the FPGA.

International audience; Positronium (Ps), the unstable bound state of electron and positron, is a valuable system for neutral antimatter spectroscopic studies and for antihydrogen production. Forming a pulsed beam cold antihydrogen using charge-exchange with the Rydberg Ps is the goal of the AEgIS Collaboration, which aims to measure gravity on neutral antimatter. Recent results achieved in producing, manipulating and studying Ps are summarized. Ps has been first produced with mesoporous silica targets in a reflection geometry. Spectroscopy of Ps n = 3 state has been conducted, yielding as a byproduct an independent estimate of the produced Ps temperature. Efficient laser excitation to the Rydberg levels was then achieved, validating the proof-of-concept of AEgIS. Subsequently, production of Ps from a new class of transmission targets was also achieved, opening the possibility for future experiments.

Besides cryptographic secrets, software-based side-channel attacks also leak sensitive user input. The most accurate attacks exploit cache timings or interrupt information to monitor keystroke timings and subsequently infer typed words and sentences. These attacks have also been demonstrated in JavaScript embedded in websites by a remote attacker. We extend the state-of-the-art with a new interrupt-based attack and the first Prime+Probe attack on kernel interrupt handlers. Previously proposed countermeasures fail to prevent software-based keystroke timing attacks as they do not protect keystroke processing through the entire software stack. We close this gap with KeyDrown, a new defense mechanism against software-based keystroke timing attacks. KeyDrown injects a large number of fake keystrokes in the kernel, making the keystroke interrupt density uniform over time, i.e., independent of the real keystrokes. All keystrokes, including fake keystrokes, are carefully propagated through the shared library to make them indistinguishable by exploiting the specific properties of software-based side channels. We show that attackers cannot distinguish fake keystrokes from real keystrokes anymore and we evaluate KeyDrown on a commodity notebook as well as on Android smartphones. We show that KeyDrown eliminates any advantage an attacker can gain from using software-based side-channel attacks.