.....................................................................................................iii List of Figures...............................................................................................vi List of Tables................................................................................................vii Chapter

Monodisperse polystyrene nanospheres with a mean diameter of 102 nm are photofragmented with 193 nm light in N2 at laser fluences from 1 to 20 J/cm2. Carbon atom fluorescence at 248 nm from the disintegration of the particles is used as a signature of the polystyrene. The normalized fluorescence signals are self-similar with an exponential decay lifetime of approximately 10 ns. At fluences abov...

Three recent OPAL studies are presented in which the fragmentation process in quark and gluon jets and in identified up, down and strange flavour jets is studied. The first is a measurement is of charged particle, π, η and K multiplicities in quark and gluon jets. No evidence is found for a particle species dependent multiplicity enhancement in gluon jets. In another study leading π, K, K S , p...

The HERMES experiment has studied for more than a decade deep-inelastic scattering of electrons/positrons from longitudinally and transversely polarised and also unpolarised atomic gas targets internal to the electron storage ring of HERA. The collected semi-inclusive data allowed to extract informations about various quark distribution and fragmentation functions. Examples presented in this co...

We present preliminary results of a new measurement of the inclusive b quark fragmentation function in Z 0 decays using a novel kinematic B hadron energy reconstruction technique. The measurement is performed using 150,000 hadronic Z 0 events recorded in the SLD experiment at SLAC between 1996 and 1997. The small and stable SLC beam spot and the CCD-based vertex detector are used to reconstruct...

We present a measurement of the b-quark inclusive fragmentation function in Z 0 decays using a novel kinematic B-hadron energy reconstruction technique. The measurement was performed using 350,000 hadronic Z 0 events recorded in the SLD experiment at SLAC between 1997 and 1998. The small and stable SLC beam spot and the CCD-based vertex detector were used to reconstruct B-decay vertices with hi...

Recent heavy flavour results from the LEP experiments are presented. These include a search for new physics in rare B decays, a new model-independent measurement of the b-quark fragmentation function at the Z peak, updated measurements of |V cb |, results on ∆Γs, searches for B 0 s oscillations, as well as a new measurement of sin(2β). Many combined results, obtained by dedicated working groups...

In recent years, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) technology has been introduced into the mining industry to conduct terrain surveying. This work investigates the application of UAVs with artificial lighting for measurement of rock fragmentation under poor lighting conditions, representing night shifts in surface mines or working conditions in underground mines. The study relies on indoor and outd...

We report the measurement of the fragmentation cross sections in high-energy nucleus-nucleus collisions using the 158 A GeV Pb82+ beam from the CERN-SPS. The fragments have charges changed from that of the incident projectile nucleus by ∆Z = ZPb − Zfrag, with 8 ≤ ∆Z < 75. The targets range from polyethylene to lead. Charge identification is made with CR39 nuclear track detectors, measured with ...

BACKGROUND This is the first study to investigate spermatozoal cell death-inducing DNA fragmentation factor-α-like effector A (CIDEA) gene expression and DNA fragmentations in the spermatozoa of men diagnosed with metabolic syndrome (MS) who have normal seminograms with unexplained infertility, and to correlate these parameters with seminal glucose concentration. METHODS This study included 1...