Related papers: Reducing the background in X-ray imaging detectors…
Hard X-ray detectors in space are prone to background signals due to the ubiquitous cosmic rays and cosmic diffuse background radiation that continuously bombards the satellites which carry the detectors. In general, the background…
The fraction of the hard X-ray background (XRB) resolved into individual sources by the deep Chandra and XMM-Newton surveys strongly depends on the adopted energy range and decreases with increasing energy. As a consequence, the nature of…
Sub-MeV cold dark-matter particles are unable to produce electronic recoil in conventional dark-matter direct detection experiments such as XENONnT and LUX-ZEPLIN above the detector threshold. The mechanism of boosted dark matter comes into…
Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) photons can undergo resonant conversion into axions in the presence of magnetized plasma distributed inside non-linear large-scale structure (LSS). This process leads to axion-induced patchy screening:…
The cosmic neutrino background is a key prediction of Big Bang cosmology which has not been observed yet. The movement of the earth through this neutrino bath creates a force on a pendulum, as if it was exposed to a cosmic wind. We revise…
Our understanding of the background of the EPIC/pn camera onboard XMM-Newton is incomplete. This affects the study of extended sources and can influence the predictions of the background of future X-ray missions. We provide new results…
This thesis comprises the first three chapters dedicated to providing an overview of Gamma Ray-Bursts (GRBs), their properties, the instrumentation used to detect them, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications in the context of GRBs,…
Light bending due to strong gravity has recently been invoked to explain variability and flux correlations between different bands in some accreting black holes. A characteristic feature of light bending is reflection-dominated spectra,…
The next generation of observatories will facilitate the discovery of new types of astrophysical transients. The detection of such phenomena, whose characteristics are presently poorly constrained, will hinge on the ability to perform blind…
A low background Micromegas detector has been operating on the CAST experiment at CERN for the search of solar axions during the first phase of the experiment (2002-2004). The detector operated efficiently and achieved a very low level of…
The next generation of ground-based gravitational-wave detectors will look much deeper into the Universe and have unprecedented sensitivities and low-frequency capabilities. Especially alluring is the possibility of detecting an…
The CMS muon system at the LHC is built of different detector technologies. The measurement of the background hit rates in the different muon detectors during the LHC Run-2 is of prime importance for an assessment of the longevity of the…
Rayleigh scattering of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) by neutral hydrogen shortly after recombination leaves frequency-dependent imprints on intensity and polarization fluctuations. High signal-to-noise observations of CMB Rayleigh…
The current inventory of recent (fresh) impacts on Mars shows a strong bias towards areas of low thermal inertia. These areas are generally visually bright, and impacts create dark scours and rays that make them easier to detect. It is…
Object detection in aerial images is an important task in environmental, economic, and infrastructure-related tasks. One of the most prominent applications is the detection of vehicles, for which deep learning approaches are increasingly…
Several large volume, high energy neutrino detectors are in operation or in the design stage. Upward going signal neutrino events must be separated from large backgrounds of downgoing cosmic ray induced atmospheric muons. To this end, a…
Gamma-ray telescopes in space are bombarded by large fluxes of charged particles, photons and secondary neutrons. These particles and radiation pose a threat to the nominal operation of satellites and limit the detection sensitivity of…
We present a convolution-based algorithm for finding cosmic rays in single well-sampled astronomical images. The spatial filter used is the point spread function (approximated by a Gaussian) minus a scaled delta function, and cosmic rays…
Detectors for gamma-ray astronomy are complex: they often comprise multiple sub-systems and utilize new and/or custom-developed detector components and readout electronics. Gamma rays are typically not detected directly: ground-based…
We assess the tendency of state-of-the-art object recognition models to depend on signals from image backgrounds. We create a toolkit for disentangling foreground and background signal on ImageNet images, and find that (a) models can…