Aims. We present the first public release of high-quality data products (DR1) from Hi-GAL, the Herschel infrared Galactic Plane Survey. Hi-GAL is the keystone of a suite of continuum Galactic plane surveys from the near-IR to the radio and covers five wavebands at 70, 160, 250, 350 and 500 µm, encompassing the peak of the spectral energy distribution of cold dust for 8 < ∼ T < ∼ 50 K. This first Hi-GAL data release covers the inner Milky Way in the longitude range 68 • > ∼ > ∼ −70 • in a |b| ≤ 1 • latitude strip. Methods. Photometric maps have been produced with the ROMAGAL pipeline, which optimally capitalizes on the excellent sensitivity and stability of the bolometer arrays of the Herschel PACS and SPIRE photometric cameras. It delivers images of exquisite quality and dynamical range, absolutely calibrated with Planck and IRAS, and recovers extended emission at all wavelengths and all spatial scales, from the point-spread function to the size of an entire 2 • × 2 • "tile" that is the unit observing block of the survey. The compact source catalogues were generated with the CuTEx algorithm, which was specifically developed to optimise source detection and extraction in the extreme conditions of intense and spatially varying background that are found in the Galactic plane in the thermal infrared. Results. Hi-GAL DR1 images are cirrus noise limited and reach the 1σ-rms predicted by the Herschel Time Estimators for parallel-mode observations at 60 s −1 scanning speed in relatively low cirrus emission regions. Hi-GAL DR1 images will be accessible through a dedicated web-based image cutout service. The DR1 Compact Source Catalogues are delivered as single-band photometric lists containing, in addition to source position, peak, and integrated flux and source sizes, a variety of parameters useful to assess the quality and reliability of the extracted sources. Caveats and hints to help in this assessment are provided. Flux completeness limits in all bands are determined from extensive synthetic source experiments and greatly depend on the specific line of sight along the Galactic plane because the background strongly varies as a function of Galactic longitude. Hi-GAL DR1 catalogues contain 123210, 308509, 280685, 160972, and 85460 compact sources in the five bands.

Abstract:In this paper, new upper limits on the parameters of the Continuous Spontaneous Localization (CSL) collapse model are extracted. To this end, the X-ray emission data collected by the IGEX collaboration are analyzed and compared with the spectrum of the spontaneous photon emission process predicted by collapse models. This study allows the obtainment of the most stringent limits within a relevant range of the CSL model parameters, with respect to any other method. The collapse rate λ and the correlation length r C are mapped, thus allowing the exclusion of a broad range of the parameter space.Keywords: quantum mechanics; the measurement problem; collapse models; X-rays The CSL Collapse ModelCollapse models are phenomenological models introduced to solve the measurement problem of quantum mechanics and explain the quantum-to-classical transition [1][2][3][4][5][6]. According to these models, the linear and unitary evolution given by the Schrödinger equation is modified by adding a non-linear term and the interaction with a stochastic noise field. These modifications have two very important consequences: (i) they lead to the collapse of the wave function of the system in space (localization mechanism) and (ii) the collapse effects get amplified with the mass of the system (amplification mechanism). The combination of these two properties guarantees that macroscopic objects always have well defined positions, explaining why we do not observe quantum behaviour at the macroscopic level. On the other hand, for microscopic systems, the effect of the non-linear interaction with the noise field is very small and their dynamics is dominated by the Schrödinger evolution. Due to the presence of the non-linear interaction with the noise field, collapse models predict slight deviations from the standard quantum mechanics predictions [7].The analysis discussed in this work sets limits on the characteristic parameters of the Continuous Spontaneous Localization (CSL) model [8][9][10], which is one of the most relevant and well-studied collapse models in the literature. In the CSL model, the state vector evolution is described by a modified Schrödinger equation which contains, besides the standard Hamiltonian, non-linear and stochastic terms, characterized by the interaction with a continuous set of independent noises w(x, t) (one for each point of the space, which is why this set is often referred to as "noise field") having zero average and white correlation in time, i.e., E[w(x, t)] = 0 and E[w(x, t)w(y, s)] = δ(x − y)δ(t − s) where E[...] denotes the average over the noises. Two phenomenological parameters (λ and r C ) are introduced in

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