University of Ioannina

About: University of Ioannina is a education organization based out in Ioannina, Greece. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Large Hadron Collider. The organization has 7654 authors who have published 20594 publications receiving 671560 citations. The organization is also known as: Panepistimio Ioanninon.

Photocatalytic transformation of pesticides in aqueous titanium dioxide suspensions using artificial and solar light: intermediates and degradation pathways

Abstract: It has been shown that a wide range of organic compounds in aqueous solutions is photocatalytically oxidized to carbon dioxide in the presence of titanium dioxide with artificial and solar light. The photocatalytic mineralization of the most important classes of pesticides in water by illuminated TiO2 has been reviewed. The study focuses on the determination of the nature of the principal organic intermediates and the evolution of the mineralization as well as on the degradation pathways followed during the process. The photocatalyzed degradation of pesticides does not occur instantaneously to form carbon dioxide, but through the formation of long-lived intermediate species. Their detection and identification are required in order to determine which kind of chemical structures are left at the end of the process. Various analytical techniques such as liquid–liquid extraction and solid phase extraction followed by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC–MS), liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry (LC–MS) or 1 H-NMR were used for the determination of organic intermediates. Gas chromatography, ion chromatography, spectrophotometry, titration and other techniques were used for the monitoring of the so-called end-products such as CO2 ,C l − ,S O 4 2− ,N H 4 + ,N O 3 − , etc. The main intermediates of pesticide degradation are of five types: (a) hydroxylated products and derivatives usually after dehalogenation of the parent pesticide, if halogen substituents are present (b) products of oxidation of the side chain, if present (c) ring opening products for aromatic pesticides (d) decarboxylation products and (e) isomerization and cyclization products. The identification of possible formation of highly toxic compounds even at low concentrations is essential for the assessment of treated water. Therefore, toxicity tests for the irradiated samples are also important to be conducted in combination with the identification of the intermediates. © 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

Performance of CMS muon reconstruction in pp collision events at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV

Abstract: The performance of muon reconstruction, identification, and triggering in CMS has been studied using 40 inverse picobarns of data collected in pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV at the LHC in 2010. A few benchmark sets of selection criteria covering a wide range of physics analysis needs have been examined. For all considered selections, the efficiency to reconstruct and identify a muon with a transverse momentum pT larger than a few GeV is above 95% over the whole region of pseudorapidity covered by the CMS muon system, abs(eta)<2.4, while the probability to misidentify a hadron as a muon is well below 1%. The efficiency to trigger on single muons with pT above a few GeV is higher than 90% over the full eta range, and typically substantially better. The overall momentum scale is measured to a precision of 0.2% with muons from Z decays. The transverse momentum resolution varies from 1% to 6% depending on pseudorapidity for muons with pT below 100 GeV and, using cosmic rays, it is shown to be better than 10% in the central region up to pT = 1 TeV. Observed distributions of all quantities are well reproduced by the Monte Carlo simulation.

Description and performance of track and primary-vertex reconstruction with the CMS tracker

Abstract: A description is provided of the software algorithms developed for the CMS tracker both for reconstructing charged-particle trajectories in proton-proton interactions and for using the resulting tracks to estimate the positions of the LHC luminous region and individual primary-interaction vertices. Despite the very hostile environment at the LHC, the performance obtained with these algorithms is found to be excellent. For tt events under typical 2011 pileup conditions, the average track-reconstruction efficiency for promptly-produced charged particles with transverse momenta of p_T > 0.9GeV is 94% for pseudorapidities of |η| < 0.9 and 85% for 0.9 < |η| < 2.5. The inefficiency is caused mainly by hadrons that undergo nuclear interactions in the tracker material. For isolated muons, the corresponding efficiencies are essentially 100%. For isolated muons of p_T = 100GeV emitted at |η| < 1.4, the resolutions are approximately 2.8% in p_T, and respectively, 10μm and 30μm in the transverse and longitudinal impact parameters. The position resolution achieved for reconstructed primary vertices that correspond to interesting pp collisions is 10–12μm in each of the three spatial dimensions. The tracking and vertexing software is fast and flexible, and easily adaptable to other functions, such as fast tracking for the trigger, or dedicated tracking for electrons that takes into account bremsstrahlung.