T. Kobayashi

The energy dependence of the relative production rate of three-jet events is studied in hadronic e+e− annihilation events at center of mass energies between 22 and 46.7 GeV. Three-jet events are defined by a jet finding algorithm which is closely related to the definition of resolvable jets used in O(αs2) perturbative QCD calculations, where the relative production rate of three-jet events is roughly proportional to the size of the strong coupling strength. The production rates of three-jet events in the data decrease significantly with increasing centre of mass energy. The experimental rates, which are independent of fragmentation model calculations, can be directly compared to theoretically calculated jet production rates and are in good agreement with the QCD expectations of a running coupling strength. The hypothesis of an energy independent coupling constant can be excluded with a significance of four standard derivations.

NA61/SHINE (SPS Heavy Ion and Neutrino Experiment) is a multi-purpose experimental facility to study hadron production in hadron-proton, hadron-nucleus and nucleus-nucleus collisions at the CERN Super Proton Synchrotron. It recorded the first physics data with hadron beams in 2009 and with ion beams (secondary 7Be beams) in 2011.
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\nNA61/SHINE has greatly profited from the long development of the CERN proton and ion sources and the accelerator chain as well as the H2 beamline of the CERN North Area. The latter has recently been modified to also serve as a fragment separator as needed to produce the Be beams for NA61/SHINE. Numerous components of the NA61/SHINE set-up were inherited from its predecessors, in particular, the last one, the NA49 experiment. Important new detectors and upgrades of the legacy equipment were introduced by the NA61/SHINE Collaboration.
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\nThis paper describes the state of the NA61/SHINE facility – the beams and the detector system – before the CERN Long Shutdown I, which started in March 2013.

We propose and demonstrate sensitive interferometry that permits the separation of the real and imaginary parts of the nonlinear susceptibility with a femtosecond time resolution by a single measurement. A special reference interferometer compensates for any fluctuations of the fringe and provides high sensitivity to detect a fringe shift as small as 0.025 rad (lambda/250) by averaging only 100 shots with a low-repetition-rate laser. This method can be applied to materials with optical anisotropy and/or absorption with high sensitivity. We apply the method to two materials, CS(2) and CdS(x)Se(1-x) microcrystallite-doped glass.

The ground state hyperfine splitting of positronium ΔHFS is sensitive to high order corrections of quantum electrodynamics (QED) in bound state. The theoretical prediction and the averaged experimental value for ΔHFS have a discrepancy of 15 ppm, which is equivalent to 3.9 standard deviations (s.d.). A new precision measurement which reduces the systematic uncertainty from the positronium thermalization effect was performed, in which the non-thermalization effect was measured to be as large as 10±2ppm in a timing window we used. When this effect is taken into account, our new result becomes ΔHFS=203.3942±0.0016(stat.,8.0ppm)±0.0013(sys.,6.4ppm)GHz, which favors the QED prediction within 1.2 s.d. and disfavors the previous experimental average by 2.6 s.d.