Since the initial data taking of the CERN LHC, the CMS experiment has undergone substantial upgrades and improvements. This paper discusses the CMS detector as it is configured for the third data-taking period of the CERN LHC, Run 3, which started in 2022. The entire silicon pixel tracking detector was replaced. A new powering system for the superconducting solenoid was installed. The electronics of the hadron calorimeter was upgraded. All the muon electronic systems were upgraded, and new muon detector stations were added, including a gas electron multiplier detector. The precision proton spectrometer was upgraded. The dedicated luminosity detectors and the beam loss monitor were refurbished. Substantial improvements to the trigger, data acquisition, software, and computing systems were also implemented, including a new hybrid CPU/GPU farm for the high-level trigger.

A low power wireless sensor network based on LoRaWAN protocol was designed with a focus on the IoT low-cost Precision Agriculture applications, such as greenhouse sensing and actuation. All subsystems used in this research are designed by using commercial components and free or open-source software libraries. The whole system was implemented to demonstrate the feasibility of a modular system built with cheap off-the-shelf components, including sensors. The experimental outputs were collected and stored in a database managed by a virtual machine running in a cloud service. The collected data can be visualized in real time by the user with a graphical interface. The reliability of the whole system was proven during a continued experiment with two natural soils, Loamy Sand and Silty Loam. Regarding soil parameters, the system performance has been compared with that of a reference sensor from Sentek. Measurements highlighted a good agreement for the temperature within the supposed accuracy of the adopted sensors and a non-constant sensitivity for the low-cost volumetric water contents (VWC) sensor. Finally, for the low-cost VWC sensor we implemented a novel procedure to optimize the parameters of the non-linear fitting equation correlating its analog voltage output with the reference VWC.

The rapid development and wide application of the IoT (Internet of Things) has pushed toward the improvement of current practices in greenhouse technology and agriculture in general, through automation and informatization. The experimental and accurate determination of soil moisture is a matter of great importance in different scientific fields, such as agronomy, soil physics, geology, hydraulics, and soil mechanics. This paper focuses on the experimental characterization of a commercial low-cost “capacitive” coplanar soil moisture sensor that can be housed in distributed nodes for IoT applications. It is shown that at least for a well-defined type of soil with a constant solid matter to volume ratio, this type of capacitive sensor yields a reliable relationship between output voltage and gravimetric water content.

Volume 1 of the FCC Feasibility Report presents an overview of the physics case, experimental programme, and detector concepts for the Future Circular Collider (FCC). This volume outlines how FCC would address some of the most profound open questions in particle physics, from precision studies of the Higgs and EW bosons and of the top quark, to the exploration of physics beyond the Standard Model. The report reviews the experimental opportunities offered by the staged implementation of FCC, beginning with an electron-positron collider (FCC-ee), operating at several centre-of-mass energies, followed by a hadron collider (FCC-hh). Benchmark examples are given of the expected physics performance, in terms of precision and sensitivity to new phenomena, of each collider stage. Detector requirements and conceptual designs for FCC-ee experiments are discussed, as are the specific demands that the physics programme imposes on the accelerator in the domains of the calibration of the collision energy, and the interface region between the accelerator and the detector. The report also highlights advances in detector, software and computing technologies, as well as the theoretical tools/reconstruction techniques that will enable the precision measurements and discovery potential of the FCC experimental programme. The content and structure of this report are guided by the scope and priorities defined in the mandate of the FCC Feasibility Study. It is therefore not intended to serve as an exhaustive review of the full physics potential of FCC. Several topics, already covered in earlier reports such as the FCC CDR, are not reiterated here or are addressed only briefly, in alignment with the study’s focus. This volume reflects the outcome of a global collaborative effort involving hundreds of scientists and institutions, aided by a dedicated community-building coordination, and provides a targeted assessment of the scientific opportunities and experimental foundations of the FCC programme.

The use of low-cost embedded devices with ubiquitous connectivity systems is a possible strategy to monitor the consumption of water used in agriculture even in countries that do not have good economic resources. In this paper, we propose a low-cost system based on a measuring approach of capacitive soil water content sensors never explored previously. This solution takes advantage of the sensor properties to respond to the need to measure at the same time salinity and soil volumetric water content. For this purpose, a bi-functional system based on a modified commercial capacitive sensor and an AD5933 impedance converter integrated circuit is described. The considered frequency range for impedance measurements is 10-100 kHz, which is a “low-frequency” range compared with typical operating frequencies of professional systems devoted to water content measurements. Measurements are carried out to check the system accuracy and to characterize the impedance of the sensor both in the air and in water, which represent the two boundaries of possible operating conditions in physical soils in terms of the real part of the electrical permittivity. Variations of the imaginary part of the electrical permittivity are taken into account using water with conductivity between 1 and 2300 μS/cm. Experimental results are compared with the measurements obtained by using a laboratory LCR meter and a maximum error of +6.12% for the capacitance and +5.6% for the conductance is obtained. The proposed system is also employed to characterize silica sandy soil with different water contents and conductivities showing quite promising results useful to overcome the well-known limits of low-cost soil water content sensors.

Wireless sensor networks are an important technology for large-scale monitoring, providing sensor measurements at high temporal and spatial resolution. In healthcare applications, a variety of system prototypes and commercial products have been designed and manufactured with the aim to provide an alternative and more efficient method for realtime operator monitoring during medical procedures. In the framework of the Real-Time Active Pixel Dosimetry project, the attention has been focused on dose monitoring of interventional radiology (IRad) operators. A sensor network has been developed, which consists of several personal sensor nodes (PSNs), monitoring the absorbed dose in different positions of the operator body (e.g., on the head or arms) and providing a measurement of the absorbed dose for each medical procedure. In this paper, we describe the first characterization of the final version of a system by measuring the radiation diagram and exposing the system to a direct X-ray beam showing a linearity of the response up to 3.3 mGy/s of dose rate. The system has been characterized during several IRad procedures when two PSNs have been simultaneously used in the network. The packet error rate of the network has been measured and the absorbed dose has been evaluated for each medical procedure, showing an uncertainty on the dose measurement lower than 10% with respect to the reference dosimetric devices.