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Modern experiments in antimatter and quantum physics increasingly rely on automation and intelligent orchestration to manage complexity and maximize efficiency. This paper presents several use cases of CIRCUS, the control system developed by the AEḡIS Collaboration at CERN. They include positronium laser cooling, real-time alignment of a humidity-sensitive Alexandrite laser, fully unsupervised antihydrogen beam formation, optimisation of laser energy output across varying wavelengths, and a highly efficient autonomous beam steering routine that more than doubled antiproton capture efficiency. These results illustrate how CIRCUS transforms experimental workflows, enabling high-throughput, reproducible, and safe operations in advanced physics setups.

The AEgIS (Antimatter Experiment: Gravity, Interferometry, Spectroscopy) experiment, located at the Antimatter Factory at CERN, aims to study the asymmetry between matter and antimatter. In particular, its first goal is to measure the effect of gravity on antimatter. The method chosen is to determine the fall of a pulsed beam of anti-hydrogen, caused by the Earth's gravitational field, by mean of a moiré deflectometer. In this contribution the new anti-hydrogen production scheme is presented, together with the improvements that the experimental setup underwent in the last years, deemed necessary in order to reach an antihydrogen flux with the characteristics needed to obtain a precise gravity measurement. Last, the first technical results are described and the future steps outlined.

No experiment can measure an absolute scale: every dimensionfull quantity has to be compared to some fixed unit scale in order to be measured, and thus only dimensionless quantities are really physical. The Einstein and Jordan frame are related by a conformal transformation of the metric, which amounts to rescaling all length scales. Since the absolute scale cannot be measured, both frames describe the same physics, and are equivalent. In this article we make this explicit by rewriting the action in terms of dimensionless variables, which are invariant under a conformal transformation. For definiteness, we concentrate on the action of Higgs inflation, but the results can easily be generalized. In addition, we show that the action for f(R)-gravity, which includes Starobinsky inflation, can be written in a frame-independent form.

A powerful and robust control system is a crucial, often neglected, pillar of any modern, complex physics experiment that requires the management of a multitude of different devices and their precise time synchronisation. The AEgIS collaboration presents CIRCUS, a novel, autonomous control system optimised for time-critical experiments such as those at CERN's Antiproton Decelerator and, more broadly, in atomic and quantum physics research. Its setup is based on Sinara/ARTIQ and TALOS, integrating the ALPACA analysis pipeline, the last two developed entirely in AEgIS. It is suitable for strict synchronicity requirements and repeatable, automated operation of experiments, culminating in autonomous parameter optimisation via feedback from real-time data analysis. CIRCUS has been successfully deployed and tested in AEgIS; being experiment-agnostic and released open-source, other experiments can leverage its capabilities.

The spreading of invasive species in new continents can vary from slow and limited diffusion to fast colonisations over vast new areas. We studied the sacred ibis Threskiornis aethiopicus along a 31-year period, from 1989 to 2019, with particular attention to the first area of release in NW Italy. We collected data on species distribution through observations by citizen science projects, population density by transects with distance method, breeding censuses at colonies, and post breeding censuses at roosts. The birds counted at winter roosts in NW Italy increased from a few tens up to 10,880 individuals in 2019. Sacred ibises started breeding in 1989, with a single nest in north-western Italy. The number of breeders remained very low until 2006, when both overwintering and breeding sacred ibises started to increase exponentially and expand their range throughout northern Italy with isolated breeding cases in central Italy. In 2019, the number of nests had increased to 1249 nests in 31 colonies. In NW Italy, the density of foraging birds averaged 3.9 ind./km 2 in winter and 1.5 ind./km 2 in the breeding period, with a mean size of the foraging groups of 8.9 and 2.1 birds respectively. Direct field observations and species distribution models (SDM) showed that foraging habitats were mainly rice fields and wetlands. A SDM applied to the whole Italian peninsula plus Sardinia and Sicily showed that the variables best related to the SDM were land class (rice fields and wetlands), altitude, and the temperature seasonality. The areas favourable for species expansion encompass all the plains of Northern Italy, and several areas of Tuscany, Latium, Sardinia, and Apulia.

Inattention can negatively impact several aspects of a child’s life, including at home and school. Cognitive and physical interventions are two promising non-pharmaceutical approaches used to enhance attention abilities, with combined approaches often being marketed to teachers, therapists, and parents typically without research validation. Here, we assessed the feasibility of incorporating an integrated, cognitive-physical, closed-loop video game (body-brain trainer or ‘BBT’) as an after-school program, and also evaluated if there were attention benefits following its use. Twenty-two children (7–12 years of age) with a range of attention abilities were recruited to participate in this proof of concept, single-arm, longitudinal study (24 sessions over 8 weeks, ~30 min/day). We interrogated attention abilities through a parent survey of their child’s behaviors, in addition to objective performance-based and neural measures of attention. Here we observed 95% compliance as well as, significant improvements on the parent-based reports of inattention and on cognitive tests and neural measures of attention that were comparable in scale to previous work. Exploratory measures of other cognitive control abilities and physical fitness also showed similar improvement, with exploratory evaluation of retained benefits on the primary attention-related outcomes being present 1-year later. Lastly, there was no correlation between the baseline parent-rated inattention score and the improvement on the primary task-based measures of attention, suggesting that intervention-based benefits were not solely attained by those who stood the most to gain. These pilot findings warrant future research to replicate and extend these findings.

Background Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most common cardiac arrhythmia. Some evidence shows that gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) may be a trigger for paroxysmal AF (PAF). Most of the previous studies that correlated GERD and AF used questionnaires to diagnose GERD, not an objective evaluation. This study aims to evaluate in patients with PAF: (a) accuracy of symptoms to diagnose GERD; (b) prevalence of GERD; and (c) temporal correlation between cardiac arrhythmia and reflux. Methods Twenty-two patients (59% females, mean age 68 years) with PAF underwent esophageal manometry followed by ambulatory pH monitoring and concurrent Holter. Eight (36%) patients had GERD symptoms. Patients were grouped as GERD+ or GERD− based on the DeMeester score. Temporal correlation between arrhythmia and reflux was recorded. Results Six (27%) patients were GERD+. Symptoms had sensitivity and specificity of 50 and 70%, respectively, for the diagnosis of GERD. Episodic AF occurred in one patient only (GERD−). There were 23 episodes of AF during the test with 14% correlation with reflux. Persistent AF during the period of the test was found in five patients (60% GERD+). Conclusions Our results show: (a) Symptoms have a low accuracy for the diagnosis of GERD; (b) the prevalence of GERD in patients with PAF is low; and (c) temporal correlation between episodes of reflux and cardiac arrhythmia is low.

Avian botulism is a paralytic disease due to the ingestion of botulinum neurotoxins (BoNT) produced by anaerobic, sporigenic bacteria (notably, Clostridium botulinum). Wild waterbirds worldwide are affected with variable recurrence and severity, and organic material decaying in wetland habitats may constitute a suitable substrate for the replication of clostridia strains producing BoNT in conditions of high temperatures and the absence of oxygen. Here, we describe a large outbreak of avian botulism that occurred in the Valle Mandriole protected area of northeastern Italy (VM). After the recovery in late summer of a few duck carcasses that molecularly tested positive for BoNT-producing clostridia, in October 2019, the avian botulism escalation led to a total of 2367 birds being recovered (2158 carcasses and 209 sick birds). Among these, 2365/2367 were waterbirds, with ducks accounting for 91.8% of the total (2173/2367) and green-winged teals representing 93.5% of the ducks. After the quick collection of dead and sick birds (from 4 to 11 October 2019) and the flooding of the VM wetland (from 5 to 12 October 2019), the 2019 botulism emergency apparently ended. Following two water inputs in May and July 2020, only one pooled sample obtained from 16 bird carcasses found that year in VM tested positive for clostridia type C by real-time PCR, whereas, after to the implementation of measures deterring the bird’s presence, new avian botulism cases—due to clostridia type C and C/D, according to molecular and animal-model tests of confirmation—led to the collection of 176 waterbirds (82 carcasses and 94 sick ducks) and 16 waterbirds (9 carcasses and 7 sick ducks) in the summers 2021 and 2022, respectively. In conclusion, the prevention, management, and control of the disease rely on habitat management, the quick and careful collection/removal of animal carcasses, and the regular monitoring and surveillance of live and dead birds.