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Sleep is known to support memory consolidation through a complex interplay of neural dynamics across multiple timescales. Using intracranial EEG (iEEG) recordings from patients undergoing clinical monitoring, we characterize spectral activity, neuronal avalanche dynamics, and temporal correlations across sleep-wake states, with a focus on their spatial distribution and potential functional relevance. We observe increased low-frequency power, larger avalanches, and enhanced long-range temporal correlations—quantified via Detrended Fluctuation Analysis—during N2 and N3 sleep. In contrast, REM sleep and wakefulness show reduced temporal persistence and fewer large-scale cascades, suggesting a shift toward more fragmented and flexible dynamics. These signatures vary across cortical regions, with distinctive patterns emerging in medial temporal and frontal areas—regions implicated in memory processing. Rather than providing direct evidence of consolidation, our results point to a functional neural landscape that may favor both stabilization and reconfiguration of internal representations during sleep. Overall, our findings highlight the utility of iEEG in revealing the multiscale spatio-temporal structure of sleep-related brain dynamics, offering insights into the physiological conditions that support memory-related processing.

Chronic pain (CP) prevalence estimates addressing a wide phenotype are still quite fragmented and may vary widely due to the lack of standardized tools of investigation. There is an urgent need to update general population CP estimates. For this purpose, the Brief Five-item Chronic Pain Questionnaire was developed through experts' consultations for design and content validity assessment; literature analysis of measures used to investigate CP for general population surveys; understandability evaluation through a survey on a convenience sample of affected and non-affected individuals; reliability assessment by means of two double-wave online surveys carried out by the Italian Twin Registry; criterion and construct validity assessment through the third wave of the 2019 European Health Interview Survey (Ehis). Key dimensions were defined to describe CP main aspects from a public health perspective. Literature analysis showed that validated questionnaires were rarely used to address important public health CP aspects. Understandability of the measure was good. Test-retest analyses showed adequate reliability of the measure: k values were at least \"moderate\" with highest values regarding CP \"occurrence\" and \"intensity\". Correlations of CP with well-known comorbidities (cancer, depression), and specific traits (age, education) as well as of CP and its intensity with \"physical pain occurrence and intensity\" detected in the Ehis 2019, confirmed, respectively, a good construct and criterion validity. Construct validity was also evaluated through the correlation between \"perceived treatment effectiveness\" and \"interference of pain in daily life activities\" as recorded in the Ehis 2019. The designed questionnaire is a brief self-administered measure, particularly suitable to detect persistent states of pain and related intensity in large-scale general population surveys by means of a first filtering item followed by four further items. It is, in fact, designed to detect CP possible underlying causes/triggers, drugs/treatments taking and frequency, and self-perceived effectiveness among CP sufferers. Further validation of the measure in different social and cultural contexts is desirable.

Euclid is an ESA mission designed to understand why the expansion of the Universe is accelerating and what is the nature of the dark energy responsible for this acceleration. By measuring two cosmological probes simultaneously, the Weak Gravitational Lensing and the Galaxy Clustering (BAO and Redshift-Space distorsions), Euclid will constrain dark energy, general relativity, dark matter and the initial conditions of the Universe with unprecedented accuracy. Euclid will be equipped with a 1.2 m diameter SiC mirror telescope feeding 2 instruments: the visible imager and the Near-Infrared Spectro-Photometer. Here the Euclid's observation probes and main aims are recalled, and the NISP instrument and expected performances are presented.

Chronic pain is nowadays used as an umbrella term referring to a wide range of clinical conditions, such as fibromyalgia, migraine, or long-standing pain states without actual known causes. However, labeling a patient's clinical condition with the term \"chronic pain\", when dealing with pain lasting longer than 3 months, might be misleading. This paper aims at analyzing the possible pitfalls related to the use of the term \"chronic pain\" in the clinical field. It appears, indeed, that the term \"chronic pain\" shows a semantic inaccuracy on the basis of emerging scientific evidences on the pathogenesis of different long-standing pain states. The major pitfalls in using this label emerge in clinical settings, especially with patients having a biomedical perspective on pain or from different cultures, or with healthcare providers of other medical specialties or different disciplines. A label solely emphasizing temporal features does not help to discern the multifaceted complexity of long-standing pain states, whose onset, maintenance and exacerbation are influenced by a complex and interdependent set of bio-psycho-social factors. Thus, finding a more meaningful name might be important. We call upon the necessity of bringing awareness and implementing educational activities for healthcare providers, as well as for the public, on the biopsychosocial approach to assess, prevent and care of chronic pain. Further research on the etiopathogenetic processes of chronic pain states is also required, together with examinative diagnostic methods, to individuate the most appropriate label(s) representing the complex long-standing pain states and to avoid adopting the term \"chronic pain\" inappropriately.

Electrically charged particles can be created by the decay of strong enough electric fields, a phenomenon known as the Schwinger mechanism 1 . By electromagnetic duality, a sufficiently strong magnetic field would similarly produce magnetic monopoles, if they exist 2 . Magnetic monopoles are hypothetical fundamental particles that are predicted by several theories beyond the standard model 3 – 7 but have never been experimentally detected. Searching for the existence of magnetic monopoles via the Schwinger mechanism has not yet been attempted, but it is advantageous, owing to the possibility of calculating its rate through semi-classical techniques without perturbation theory, as well as that the production of the magnetic monopoles should be enhanced by their finite size 8 , 9 and strong coupling to photons 2 , 10 . Here we present a search for magnetic monopole production by the Schwinger mechanism in Pb–Pb heavy ion collisions at the Large Hadron Collider, producing the strongest known magnetic fields in the current Universe 11 . It was conducted by the MoEDAL experiment, whose trapping detectors were exposed to 0.235 per nanobarn, or approximately 1.8 × 10 9 , of Pb–Pb collisions with 5.02-teraelectronvolt center-of-mass energy per collision in November 2018. A superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID) magnetometer scanned the trapping detectors of MoEDAL for the presence of magnetic charge, which would induce a persistent current in the SQUID. Magnetic monopoles with integer Dirac charges of 1, 2 and 3 and masses up to 75 gigaelectronvolts per speed of light squared were excluded by the analysis at the 95% confidence level. This provides a lower mass limit for finite-size magnetic monopoles from a collider search and greatly extends previous mass bounds. At the Large Hadron Collider, the MoEDAL experiment shows no evidence for magnetic monopoles generated via the Schwinger mechanism at integer Dirac charges below 3, and suggests a lower mass limit of 75 GeV/ c 2 .

The ICARUS collaboration employed the 760-ton T600 detector in a successful 3-year physics run at the underground LNGS laboratory, performing a sensitive search for LSND-like anomalous ν e appearance in the CERN Neutrino to Gran Sasso beam, which contributed to the constraints on the allowed neutrino oscillation parameters to a narrow region around 1 eV 2 . After a significant overhaul at CERN, the T600 detector has been installed at Fermilab. In 2020 the cryogenic commissioning began with detector cool down, liquid argon filling and recirculation. ICARUS then started its operations collecting the first neutrino events from the booster neutrino beam (BNB) and the Neutrinos at the Main Injector (NuMI) beam off-axis, which were used to test the ICARUS event selection, reconstruction and analysis algorithms. ICARUS successfully completed its commissioning phase in June 2022. The first goal of the ICARUS data taking will be a study to either confirm or refute the claim by Neutrino-4 short-baseline reactor experiment. ICARUS will also perform measurement of neutrino cross sections with the NuMI beam and several Beyond Standard Model searches. After the first year of operations, ICARUS will search for evidence of sterile neutrinos jointly with the Short-Baseline Near Detector, within the Short-Baseline Neutrino program. In this paper, the main activities carried out during the overhauling and installation phases are highlighted. Preliminary technical results from the ICARUS commissioning data with the BNB and NuMI beams are presented both in terms of performance of all ICARUS subsystems and of capability to select and reconstruct neutrino events.

A search for highly electrically charged objects (HECOs) and magnetic monopoles is presented using 2.2 fb-1 of p-p collision data taken at a centre of mass energy (ECM) of 8 TeV by the MoEDAL detector during LHC’s Run-1. The data were collected using MoEDAL’s prototype Nuclear Track Detectord array and the Trapping Detector array. The results are interpreted in terms of Drell–Yan pair production of stable HECO and monopole pairs with three spin hypotheses (0, 1/2 and 1). The search provides constraints on the direct production of magnetic monopoles carrying one to four Dirac magnetic charges and with mass limits ranging from 590 GeV/c2 to 1 TeV/c2. Additionally, mass limits are placed on HECOs with charge in the range 10e to 180e, where e is the charge of an electron, for masses between 30 GeV/c2 and 1 TeV/c2.

The ENUBET project is aimed at designing and experimentally demonstrating the concept of monitored neutrino beams. These novel beams are enhanced by an instrumented decay tunnel, whose detectors reconstruct large-angle charged leptons produced in the tunnel and give a direct estimate of the neutrino flux at the source. These facilities are thus the ideal tool for high-precision neutrino cross-section measurements at the GeV scale because they offer superior control of beam systematics with respect to existing facilities. In this paper, we present the first end-to-end design of a monitored neutrino beam capable of monitoring lepton production at the single particle level. This goal is achieved by a new focusing system without magnetic horns, a 20 m normal-conducting transfer line for charge and momentum selection, and a 40 m tunnel instrumented with cost-effective particle detectors. Employing such a design, we show that percent precision in cross-section measurements can be achieved at the CERN SPS complex with existing neutrino detectors.

A bstract The MoEDAL experiment is designed to search for magnetic monopoles and other highly-ionising particles produced in high-energy collisions at the LHC. The largely passive MoEDAL detector, deployed at Interaction Point 8 on the LHC ring, relies on two dedicated direct detection techniques. The first technique is based on stacks of nucleartrack detectors with surface area ~18m 2 , sensitive to particle ionisation exceeding a high threshold. These detectors are analysed offline by optical scanning microscopes. The second technique is based on the trapping of charged particles in an array of roughly 800 kg of aluminium samples. These samples are monitored offline for the presence of trapped magnetic charge at a remote superconducting magnetometer facility. We present here the results of a search for magnetic monopoles using a 160 kg prototype MoEDAL trapping detector exposed to 8TeV proton-proton collisions at the LHC, for an integrated luminosity of 0.75 fb –1 . No magnetic charge exceeding 0:5 g D (where g D is the Dirac magnetic charge) is measured in any of the exposed samples, allowing limits to be placed on monopole production in the mass range 100 GeV≤ m ≤ 3500 GeV. Model-independent cross-section limits are presented in fiducial regions of monopole energy and direction for 1 g D  ≤ | g | ≤ 6 g D , and model-dependent cross-section limits are obtained for Drell-Yan pair production of spin-1/2 and spin-0 monopoles for 1 g D  ≤ | g | ≤ 4 g D . Under the assumption of Drell-Yan cross sections, mass limits are derived for | g | = 2 g D and | g | = 3 g D for the first time at the LHC, surpassing the results from previous collider experiments.

The capture of scintillation light emitted by liquid Argon and Xenon under molecular excitations by charged particles is still a challenging task. Here we present a first attempt to design a device able to have a sufficiently high photon detection efficiency, in order to reconstruct the path of ionizing particles. The study is based on the use of masks to encode the light signal combined with single-photon detectors, showing the capability to detect tracks over focal distances of about tens of centimeters. From numerical simulations it emerges that it is possible to successfully decode and recognize signals, even of rather complex topology, with a relatively limited number of acquisition channels. Thus, the main aim is to elucidate a proof of principle of a technology developed in very different contexts, but which has potential applications in liquid argon detectors that require a fast reading. The findings support us to think that such innovative technique could be very fruitful in a new generation of detectors devoted to neutrino physics.