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One of the techniques adopted by the Pierre Auger Observatory to detect ultra high energy cosmic rays is based on air fluorescence detection. The knowledge of atmospheric properties during data acquisition is of primary importance. Together with other instruments, a system of four steerable elastic LIDARs, currently in operation, and a Raman LIDAR, that has taken data for about one year, provide measurements of the cloud coverage and of the aerosol optical transmission. This paper describes the hardware designs, the operational procedures, and the analyses performed on the collected data: aerosol optical properties and their vertical distributions.

The ARCADE (Atmospheric Research for Climate and Astroparticle DEtection) project is a 3 years project funded by MIUR, that aims to study the aerosol attenuation of UV light in atmosphere using multiple instruments and techniques, as those commonly used in the cosmic rays community: elastic Lidar, Raman Lidar, side-scattering measurements using a distant laser source. All measurements will be acquired on the same air mass at the same time, in a semi-desertic site near Lamar, Colorado (U.S.). For each instrument, multiple analysis techniques will be tested: the target is a better comprehension of the systematics and limits of applicability of each method. The system is composed by a Lidar (elastic+Raman), fully designed and built within this project, and by the Atmospheric Monitoring Telescope (AMT), a telescope for the detection of UV light owned by the Colorado School of Mines. The setup of the two instruments is described in detail here. The project is presently in its third year: the Lidar system has been tested at the University of L'Aquila in February 2014 before shipment to the U.S., and the AMT has been recently reinstalled and tested in Lamar (May 2014). In June/July 2014 the ARCADE group will work out the final setup of the Lidar+AMT system in Lamar and will begin data acquisition.

The characterization of the optical properties of the atmosphere in the near UV, in particular the tropospheric aerosol stratification, clouds optical depth and spatial distribution are common in the field of atmospheric physics, due to aerosol effect on climate, and also in cosmic rays physics, for a correct reconstruction of energy and longitudinal development of showers. The goal of the ARCADE project is the comparison of the aerosol attenuation measurements obtained with the typical techniques used in cosmic ray experiments (side-scattering measurement, elastic LIDAR and Raman LIDAR) in order to assess the systematic errors affecting each method providing simultaneous observations of the same air mass with different techniques. For this purpose we projected a LIDAR that is now under construction: it will use a 355 nm Nd:YAG laser and will collect the elastic and the N2 Raman back-scattered light. For the side-scattering measurement we will use the Atmospheric Monitoring Telescope, a facility owned by the Colorado School of Mines and placed in Lamar (Colorado), the site where our experiment will take place.

The Cherenkov Telescope Array is a world-wide project for a new generation of ground-based Cherenkov telescopes of the Imaging class with the aim of exploring the highest energy region of the electromagnetic spectrum. With two planned arrays, one for each hemisphere, it will guarantee a good sky coverage in the energy range from a few tens of GeV to hundreds of TeV, with improved angular resolution and a sensitivity in the TeV energy region better by one order of magnitude than the currently operating arrays. In order to cover this wide energy range, three different telescope types are envisaged, with different mirror sizes and focal plane features. In particular, for the highest energies a possible design is a dual-mirror Schwarzschild-Couder optical scheme, with a compact focal plane. A silicon photomultiplier (SiPM) based camera is being proposed as a solution to match the dimensions of the pixel (angular size of ~ 0.17 degrees). INFN is developing a camera demonstrator made by 9 Photo Sensor Modules (PSMs, 64 pixels each, with total coverage 1/4 of the focal plane) equipped with FBK (Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy) Near UltraViolet High Fill factor SiPMs and Front-End Electronics (FEE) based on a Target 7 ASIC, a 16 channels fast sampler (up to 2GS/s) with deep buffer, self-trigger and on-demand digitization capabilities specifically developed for this purpose. The pixel dimensions of \\(6\\times6\\) mm\\(^2\\) lead to a very compact design with challenging problems of thermal dissipation. A modular structure, made by copper frames hosting one PSM and the corresponding FEE, has been conceived, with a water cooling system to keep the required working temperature. The actual design, the adopted technical solutions and the achieved results for this demonstrator are presented and discussed.

A 3-day international workshop on atmospheric monitoring and calibration for high-energy astroparticle detectors, with a view towards next-generation facilities. The atmosphere is an integral component of many high-energy astroparticle detectors. Imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes and cosmic-ray extensive air shower detectors are the two instruments driving the rapidly evolving fields of very-high- and ultra-high-energy astrophysics. In these instruments, the atmosphere is used as a giant calorimeter where cosmic rays and gamma rays deposit their energy and initiate EASs; it is also the medium through which the resulting Cherenkov light propagates. Uncertainties in real-time atmospheric conditions and in the fixed atmospheric models typically dominate all other systematic errors. With the improved sensitivity of upgraded IACTs such as H.E.S.S.-II and MAGIC-II and future facilities like the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) and JEM-EUSO, statistical uncertainties are expected to be significantly reduced, leaving the atmosphere as the limiting factor in the determination of astroparticle spectra. Varying weather conditions necessitate the development of suitable atmospheric monitoring to be integrated in the overall instrument calibration, including Monte Carlo simulations. With expertise distributed across multiple collaborations and scientific domains, an interdisciplinary workshop is being convened to advance progress on this critical and timely topic.

The Pierre Auger Observatory in Malargue, Argentina, is designed to study the origin of ultrahigh energy cosmic rays with energies above 10^18 eV. The energy calibration of the detector is based on a system of four air fluorescence detectors. To obtain reliable calorimetric information from the fluorescence stations, the atmospheric conditions at the experiment's site need to be monitored continuously during operation. One of the components of the observatory's atmospheric monitoring system is a set of four elastic backscatter lidar stations, one station at each of the fluorescence detector sites. This paper describes the design, current status, standard operation procedure, and performance of the lidar system of the Pierre Auger Observatory.

The electroencephalogram (EEG) provides a non-invasive, minimally restrictive, and relatively low-cost measure of mesoscale brain dynamics with high temporal resolution. Although signals recorded in parallel by multiple, near-adjacent EEG scalp electrode channels are highly-correlated and combine signals from many different sources, biological and non-biological, independent component analysis (ICA) has been shown to isolate the various source generator processes underlying those recordings. Independent components (IC) found by ICA decomposition can be manually inspected, selected, and interpreted, but doing so requires both time and practice as ICs have no order or intrinsic interpretations and therefore require further study of their properties. Alternatively, sufficiently-accurate automated IC classifiers can be used to classify ICs into broad source categories, speeding the analysis of EEG studies with many subjects and enabling the use of ICA decomposition in near-real-time applications. While many such classifiers have been proposed recently, this work presents the ICLabel project comprised of (1) the ICLabel dataset containing spatiotemporal measures for over 200,000 ICs from more than 6000 EEG recordings and matching component labels for over 6000 of those ICs, all using common average reference, (2) the ICLabel website for collecting crowdsourced IC labels and educating EEG researchers and practitioners about IC interpretation, and (3) the automated ICLabel classifier, freely available for MATLAB. The ICLabel classifier improves upon existing methods in two ways: by improving the accuracy of the computed label estimates and by enhancing its computational efficiency. The classifier outperforms or performs comparably to the previous best publicly available automated IC component classification method for all measured IC categories while computing those labels ten times faster than that classifier as shown by a systematic comparison against other publicly available EEG IC classifiers. •We present ICLabel: an EEG independent component classifier, dataset, and website.•The classifier offers state-of-the-art performance, 13x faster than the next best.•The classifier is trained on crowdsourced labels collected from iclabel.ucsd.edu.•The classifier, website, and dataset are all freely and publicly available.

The air fluorescence detectors (FDs) of the Pierre Auger Observatory are vital for the determination of the air shower energy scale. To compensate for variations in atmospheric conditions that affect the energy measurement, the Observatory operates an array of monitoring instruments to record hourly atmospheric conditions across the detector site, an area exceeding 3,000 square km. This paper presents results from four instruments used to characterize the aerosol component of the atmosphere: the Central Laser Facility (CLF), which provides the FDs with calibrated laser shots; the scanning backscatter lidars, which operate at three FD sites; the Aerosol Phase Function monitors (APFs), which measure the aerosol scattering cross section at two FD locations; and the Horizontal Attenuation Monitor (HAM), which measures the wavelength dependence of aerosol attenuation.

Solar irradiation of 2-butenedial in the lower troposphere mainly produces isomeric ketene-enol (a key intermediate product), furanones, and maleic anhydride, the formation pathways of which were investigated in a previous study. The other main products were carbon monoxide and an experimentally unidentified carbonyl compound. This was the subject of the present study. The oxidative reaction mechanisms were studied using DFT calculations. Water intervention is found essential. Its addition and subsequent water-assisted isomerizations (an ene-gem-diol/enol and a carboxylic acid/enol form), followed by cyclization, lead to an interesting cyclic carbonyl compound, but this pathway appears to be rather energy demanding. An alternative implies water cooperation in a ketene-enol + carboxylic acid/enol addition that gives the relevant anhydride. The anhydride is proposed as a candidate for the experimentally unidentified carbonyl product. Regarding CO and acrolein formation, the role of the triplet states, as defined by the probability of intersystem crossing from the excited singlet state S1 to T2 and T1, is discussed. The T1 photolysis pathway connecting butenedial to propenal + CO was then defined.

Under tropospheric conditions, 2-butenedial is photochemically removed to produce secondary organic aerosol. Upon solar irradiation in the lower troposphere, the main photochemical products are ketene-enol (a key intermediate product), furanones, and maleic anhydride. The oxidative reaction mechanism was studied using the multireference method CASSCF to explore the hypersurface of the two most accessible singlet excited states, and by DFT for the ground state. Photoisomerization of 2-butenedial in the first excited state directly produces ground state ketene-enol upon nonradiative relaxation. From this intermediate, furan-2-ol and successively 3H-furan-2-one and 5H-furan-2-one are formed. The cooperative effect of two water molecules is essential to catalyze the cyclization of ketene-enol to furan-2-ol, followed by hydrogen transfers to furanones. Two water molecules are also necessary to form maleic anhydride from furan-2-ol. For this last reaction, in which one extra oxygen must be acquired, we hypothesize a mechanism with singlet oxygen as the oxidant.