University of Mons

About: University of Mons is a education organization based out in Mons, Belgium. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Large Hadron Collider & Standard Model. The organization has 3073 authors who have published 9465 publications receiving 294776 citations.

Electrospinning of a functional perfluorinated block copolymer as a powerful route for imparting superhydrophobicity and corrosion resistance to aluminum substrates.

Abstract: Superhydrophobic aluminum surfaces with excellent corrosion resistance were successfully prepared by electrospinning of a novel fluorinated diblock copolymer solution. Micro- and nanostructuration of the diblock copolymer coating was obtained by electrospinning which proved to be an easy and cheap electrospinning technology to fabricate superhydrophobic coating. The diblock copolymer is made of poly(heptadecafluorodecylacrylate-co-acrylic acid) (PFDA-co-AA) random copolymer as the first block and polyacrylonitrile (PAN) as the second one. The fluorinated block promotes hydrophobicity to the surface by reducing the surface tension, while its carboxylic acid functions anchor the polymer film onto the aluminum surface after annealing at 130 °C. The PAN block of this copolymer insures the stability of the structuration of the surface during annealing, thanks to the infusible character of PAN. It is also demonstrated that the so-formed superhydrophobic coating shows good adhesion to aluminum surfaces, resulting in excellent corrosion resistance.

Search for Flavor-Changing Neutral Currents in Top-Quark Decays $t \to Zq$ in $pp$ Collisions at $\sqrt{s}=8$ TeV

Abstract: A search for flavor-changing neutral currents in top-quark decays t to Zq is performed in events produced from the decay chain t t-bar to Zq+Wb, where both vector bosons decay leptonically, producing a final state with three leptons (electrons or muons). A dataset collected with the CMS detector at the LHC is used, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 19.7 inverse femtobarns of proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 8 TeV. No excess is seen in the observed number of events relative to the standard model prediction; thus no evidence for flavor-changing neutral currents in top-quark decays is found. A combination with a previous search at 7 TeV excludes a t to Zq branching fraction greater than 0.05% at the 95% confidence level.

Spin three gauge theory revisited

Abstract: We study the problem of consistent interactions for spin-3 gauge fields in flat spacetime of arbitrary dimension 3$>n>3. Under the sole assumptions of Poincar? and parity invariance, local and perturbative deformation of the free theory, we determine all nontrivial consistent deformations of the abelian gauge algebra and classify the corresponding deformations of the quadratic action, at first order in the deformation parameter. We prove that all such vertices are cubic, contain a total of either three or five derivatives and are uniquely characterized by a rank-three constant tensor (an internal algebra structure constant). The covariant cubic vertex containing three derivatives is the vertex discovered by Berends, Burgers and van Dam, which however leads to inconsistencies at second order in the deformation parameter. In dimensions 4$>n>4 and for a completely antisymmetric structure constant tensor, another covariant cubic vertex exists, which contains five derivatives and passes the consistency test where the previous vertex failed.

Memorability of natural scenes: The role of attention

Abstract: The image memorability consists in the faculty of an image to be recalled after a period of time. Recently, the memorability of an image database was measured and some factors responsible for this memorability were highlighted. In this paper, we investigate the role of visual attention in image memorability around two axis. The first one is experimental and uses results of eye-tracking performed on a set of images of different memorability scores. The second investigation axis is predictive and we show that attention-related features can advantageously replace low-level features in image memorability prediction. From our work it appears that the role of visual attention is important and should be more taken into account along with other low-level features.

Search for the standard model Higgs boson produced in association with a top-quark pair in pp collisions at the LHC

Abstract: A search for the standard model Higgs boson produced in association with a top-quark pair is presented using data samples corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 5.0 fb−1 (5.1 fb−1) collected in pp collisions at the center-of-mass energy of 7 TeV (8 TeV). Events are considered where the top-quark pair decays to either one lepton+jets (tt−→lνqq−′bb−) or dileptons (tt−→l+νl−ν−bb−) , l being an electron or a muon. The search is optimized for the decay mode H→bb− . The largest background to the tt−H signal is top-quark pair production with additional jets. Artificial neural networks are used to discriminate between signal and background events. Combining the results from the 7 TeV and 8 TeV samples, the observed (expected) limit on the cross section for Higgs boson production in association with top-quark pairs for a Higgs boson mass of 125 GeV is 5.8 (5.2) times the standard model expectation.