This Letter reports the observation of WWW production and a measurement of its cross section using 139  fb^{-1} of proton-proton collision data recorded at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV by the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider. Events with two same-sign leptons (electrons or muons) and at least two jets, as well as events with three charged leptons, are selected. A multivariate technique is then used to discriminate between signal and background events. Events from WWW production are observed with a significance of 8.0 standard deviations, where the expectation is 5.4 standard deviations. The inclusive WWW production cross section is measured to be 820±100 (stat)±80 (syst)  fb, approximately 2.6 standard deviations from the predicted cross section of 511±18  fb calculated at next-to-leading-order QCD and leading-order electroweak accuracy.

This paper deals with the design of a novel spectrometer of fast neutrons in nuclear safeguards applications based on the liquid organic scintillator EJ-309 with materials of different thickness surrounding the detector. The investigation was performed on the simulated data obtained by the MCNPX-PoliMi numerical code based on the Monte Carlo method. Among the various materials (polyethylene, iron, aluminum, and graphite) investigated as layers around the scintillator, polyethylene and iron have shown the most promising characteristics for evaluation of fast neutron energy spectra. The simulated pulse height distributions were summed up for each energy bin in the neutron energy range between 1 MeV and 15 MeV in order to obtain better counting statistics. The unfolded results for monoenergetic neutron sources obtained by a first order of Tikhonov regularization and non-linear neural network show very good agreement with the reference data while the evaluated spectra of neutron sources continuous in energy follow the trend of the reference spectra. The possible advantages of a novel spectrometer include a less number of input data for processing and a less sensitivity to the noise compared to the scintillation detector without surrounding materials.