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We present an innovative charge detector with high resolution and wide dynamic range designed to fulfill the requirements of a monitoring system for a high energy ion beam. The detector prototype, constructed using Si photodiodes and a custom readout electronics, underwent extensive testing during HERD and AMS beam tests at CERN SPS facilities. Initial testing showcased the detector's exceptional performance, emphasizing both high resolution and a dynamic range capable of measuring nuclei with atomic numbers ranging from 1 to 80. The prototype's compatibility with fast, quasi real-time data analysis qualifies it as an ideal candidate for online applications. This article presents the results from the testing phase of the prototype, highlighting its capabilities and performance. Ongoing detector development, potential applications, and future developments aimed at enhancing the detector's functionality and versatility are also discussed., Comment: 13 pages, 9 figures

The measurement of cosmic rays at energies exceeding 100 TeV per nucleon is crucial for enhancing the understanding of high-energy particle propagation and acceleration models in the Galaxy. HERD is a space-borne calorimetric experiment that aims to extend the current direct measurements of cosmic rays to unexplored energies. The payload is scheduled to be installed on the Chinese Space Station in 2027. The primary peculiarity of the instrument is its capability to measure particles coming from all directions, with the main detector being a deep, homogeneous, 3D calorimeter. The active elements are read out using two independent systems: one based on wavelength shifter fibers coupled to CMOS cameras, and the other based on photo-diodes read-out with custom front-end electronics. A large calorimeter prototype was tested in 2023 during an extensive beam test campaign at CERN. In this paper, the performance of the calorimeter for high-energy electron beams, as obtained from the photo-diode system data, is presented. The prototype demonstrated excellent performance, e.g., an energy resolution better than 1% for electrons at 250 GeV. A comparison between beam test data and Monte Carlo simulation data is also presented.

A definable choice is a semialgebraic selection of one point in every fiber of the projection of a semialgebraic set. Definable choices exist by semialgebraic triviality, but their complexity depends exponentially on the number of variables. By allowing the selection to be approximate (in the Hausdorff sense), we quantitatively improve this result. In particular, we construct an approximate selection with degree that is linear in the complexity of the original set, and independent on the number of variables. This work is motivated by infinite-dimensional applications, in particular to the Sard conjecture in sub-Riemannian geometry. To prove these results, we develop a general quantitative theory for Hausdorff approximations in semialgebraic geometry, which has independent interest.

Sard's theorem asserts that the set of critical values of a smooth map from one Euclidean space to another one has measure zero. A version of this result for infinite-dimensional Banach manifolds was proven by Smale for maps with Fredholm differential. It is well-known, however, that when the domain is infinite dimensional and the range is finite dimensional, the result is not true -- even under the assumption that the map is ``polynomial'' -- and a general theory is still lacking. Addressing this issue, in this paper, we provide sharp quantitative criteria for the validity of Sard's theorem in this setting. Our motivation comes from sub-Riemannian geometry and, as an application of our results, we prove the sub-Riemannian Sard conjecture for the restriction of the Endpoint map of Carnot groups to the set of piece-wise real-analytic controls with large enough radius of convergence, and the strong Sard conjecture for the restriction to the set of piece-wise entire controls., Comment: 39 pages. V2: improved presentation, some of the main results have been tweaked

We introduce infinite dimensional Hilbertian H-type groups equipped with weak, graded, left invariant Riemannian metrics. For these Lie groups, we show that the vanishing of the geodesic distance and the local unboundedness of the sectional curvature coexist. The result validates a deep phenomenon conjectured in an influential 2005 paper by Michor and Mumford, namely, the vanishing of the geodesic distance is linked to the local unboundedness of the sectional curvature. We prove that degenerate geodesic distances appear for a large class of weak, left invariant Riemannian metrics. Their vanishing is rather surprisingly related to the infinite dimensional sub-Riemannian structure of Hilbertian H-type groups. The same class of weak Riemannian metrics yields the nonexistence of the Levi-Civita covariant derivative., Comment: 18 pages

Compilation of papers presented by the GAPS Collaboration at the 38th International Cosmic Ray Conference (ICRC), held July 26 through August 3, 2023 in Nagoya, Japan.

Given the recent advances in multimodal image pretraining where visual models trained with semantically dense textual supervision tend to have better generalization capabilities than those trained using categorical attributes or through unsupervised techniques, in this work we investigate how recent CLIP model can be applied in several tasks in artwork domain. We perform exhaustive experiments on the NoisyArt dataset which is a dataset of artwork images crawled from public resources on the web. On such dataset CLIP achieves impressive results on (zero-shot) classification and promising results in both artwork-to-artwork and description-to-artwork domain., Comment: Proc. of Florence Heri-Tech 2022: The Future of Heritage Science and Technologies: ICT and Digital Heritage, 2022

In this paper we carry out a detailed analysis of the static spherically symmetric solutions of a sixth-derivative Lee--Wick gravity model in the effective delta source approximation. Previous studies of these solutions have only considered the particular case in which the real and the imaginary part of the Lee--Wick mass $\mu=a +i b$ are equal. However, as we show here, the solutions exhibit an interesting structure when the full parameter space is considered, owing to the oscillations of the metric that depend on the ratio $b/a$. Such oscillations can generate a rich structure of horizons, a sequence of mass gaps and the existence of multiple regimes for black hole sizes (horizon position gaps). In what concerns the thermodynamics of these objects, the oscillation of the Hawking temperature determines the presence of multiple mass scales for the remnants of the evaporation process and may permit the existence of cold black holes with zero Hawking temperature~$T$ and quasi-stable intermediate configurations with $T \approx 0$ and a long evaporation lifetime. For the sake of generality, we consider two families of solutions, one with a trivial shift function and the other with a non-trivial one (dirty black hole). The latter solution has the advantage of reproducing the modified Newtonian-limit metric of Lee--Wick gravity for small and large values of~$r$., Comment: 23 pages, 10 figures, 4 tables

In this work we study static spherically symmetric solutions of effective field equations related to local and nonlocal higher-derivative gravity models, based on their associated effective delta sources. This procedure has been applied to generate modifications of the Schwarzschild geometry in several contexts (e.g., modified gravity, string theory, noncommutative geometry, generalized uncertainty principle scenarios), but a general analysis of the possible equations of state and their influence on the solutions was still lacking. Here, we aim to fill this gap in the literature and investigate whether these metrics might be able to reproduce features of the solutions of higher-derivative gravity models. In particular, we present an equation of state such that the solution matches the Newtonian-limit one in both regimes of large and small $r$. A significant part of the work is dedicated to studying the curvature regularity of the solutions and the comparison with the linearized solutions. Explicit metrics are presented for effective sources originating from local and nonlocal models. The results obtained here might be regarded as possible links between the previous research on linearized higher-derivative gravity and the solutions of the nonlinear complete field equations, which remain unknown at the moment., Comment: 33 pages, 8 figures. Extended discussion, references added; matches the published version

Given a query composed of a reference image and a relative caption, the Composed Image Retrieval goal is to retrieve images visually similar to the reference one that integrates the modifications expressed by the caption. Given that recent research has demonstrated the efficacy of large-scale vision and language pre-trained (VLP) models in various tasks, we rely on features from the OpenAI CLIP model to tackle the considered task. We initially perform a task-oriented fine-tuning of both CLIP encoders using the element-wise sum of visual and textual features. Then, in the second stage, we train a Combiner network that learns to combine the image-text features integrating the bimodal information and providing combined features used to perform the retrieval. We use contrastive learning in both stages of training. Starting from the bare CLIP features as a baseline, experimental results show that the task-oriented fine-tuning and the carefully crafted Combiner network are highly effective and outperform more complex state-of-the-art approaches on FashionIQ and CIRR, two popular and challenging datasets for composed image retrieval. Code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/ABaldrati/CLIP4Cir, Comment: Accepted in ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing Communications and Applications (TOMM)

Certain approaches to quantum gravity and classical modified gravity theories result in effective field equations in which the original source is substituted by an effective one. In these cases, the occurrence of regular spacetime configurations may be related to the regularity of the effective source, regardless of the specific mechanism behind the regularization. In this chapter, we make an introduction to the effective source formalism applied to higher-derivative gravity. The results presented here, however, can be easily transposed to other frameworks that use similar sources. The generality obtained is also because we consider a general higher-derivative gravity model instead of restricting the analysis to some specific theories. In the first part, we discuss the model in the Newtonian limit, which offers a natural context for introducing effective sources. We show how the regularity properties of the effective sources depend on the behavior of the action's form factor in the ultraviolet regime, which leads to results valid for large families of models (or for families of modified delta sources). Subsequently, we use the general results on the effective sources to construct regular black hole metrics. One of our concerns is the higher-order regularity of the solutions, i.e., the possibility that not only the invariants built with curvature tensors but also the ones with covariant derivatives are regular. In this regard, we present some theorems relating the regularity of sets of curvature-derivative invariants with the regularity properties of the effective sources., Comment: 41 pages, 3 figures. Preprint of the invited chapter for the book "Regular Black Holes: Towards a New Paradigm of the Gravitational Collapse" (Ed. C. Bambi, Springer Singapore, 2023). The final authenticated version is available online at http://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-1596-5_4

We extensively study the ultraviolet quantum properties of a nonlocal action for gravity nonminimally coupled to matter. The theory unifies matter and gravity in an action principle such that all the classical solutions of Einstein's theory coupled to matter are also solutions of the nonlocal theory. At the quantum level, we show that the theory is power-counting super-renormalizable in even dimensions and finite in odd dimensions. A simple extension of the model compatible with the above properties is finite also in even dimensions., Comment: 52 pages. v2: abstract simplified, terminology denoting the extremals changed, some parts clarified, new section 6.4 added, conclusions unchanged. Accepted for publication in JHEP

In this paper, we introduced the novel concept of advisor network to address the problem of noisy labels in image classification. Deep neural networks (DNN) are prone to performance reduction and overfitting problems on training data with noisy annotations. Weighting loss methods aim to mitigate the influence of noisy labels during the training, completely removing their contribution. This discarding process prevents DNNs from learning wrong associations between images and their correct labels but reduces the amount of data used, especially when most of the samples have noisy labels. Differently, our method weighs the feature extracted directly from the classifier without altering the loss value of each data. The advisor helps to focus only on some part of the information present in mislabeled examples, allowing the classifier to leverage that data as well. We trained it with a meta-learning strategy so that it can adapt throughout the training of the main model. We tested our method on CIFAR10 and CIFAR100 with synthetic noise, and on Clothing1M which contains real-world noise, reporting state-of-the-art results., Comment: Paper published as Poster at ICIAP21

In this chapter we present a status report of black hole-like solutions in non-local theories of gravity in which the Lagrangians are at least quadratic in curvature and contain specific non-polynomial (i.e., non-local) operators. In the absence of exact black hole solutions valid in the whole spacetime, most of the literature on this topic focus on approximate and simplified equations of motion, which could provide insights on the full non-linear solutions. Therefore, the largest part of this chapter is devoted to the linear approximation. We present results on stationary metric solutions (including both static and rotating cases) and dynamical spacetimes describing the formation of non-rotating mini black holes by the collapse of null shells. Non-local effects can regularize the curvature singularities in both scenarios and, in the dynamical case, there exists a mass gap below which the formation of an apparent horizon can be avoided. In the final part we discuss interesting attempts towards finding non-linear black hole solutions in non-local gravity. Throughout this chapter, instead of focusing on a particular non-local model, we present results valid for large classes of theories (to a feasible extent). This more general approach allows the comparison of similarities and differences of the various types of non-local gravity models., Comment: Invited chapter for the Section "Nonlocal Quantum Gravity" of the "Handbook of Quantum Gravity" (Eds. C. Bambi, L. Modesto and I.L. Shapiro, Springer Singapore, expected in 2023). 29 pages

Numerical Relativity has been of fundamental importance for studying compact binary coalescence dynamics, waveform modelling, and eventually for gravitational waves observations. As the sensitivity of the detector network improves, more precise template modelling will be necessary to guarantee a more accurate estimation of astrophysical parameters. To help improve the accuracy of numerical relativity catalogs, we developed a deep learning model capable of detecting anomalous waveforms. We analyzed 1341 binary black hole simulations from the SXS catalog with various mass-ratios and spins, considering waveform dominant and higher modes. In the set of waveform analyzed, we found and categorised seven types of anomalies appearing in the coalescence phases., Comment: 15 pages, 16 figures