Pixelated Lenses and H_0 from Time-delay QSOs

Observed time delays between images of a lensed QSO lead to the determination of the Hubble constant by Refsdal's method, provided the mass distribution in the lensing galaxy is reasonably well known. Since the two or four QSO images usually observed are woefully inadequate by themselves to provide a unique reconstruction of the galaxy mass, most previous reconstructions have been limited to simple parameterized models, which may lead to large systematic errors in the derived H_0 by failing to consider enough possibilities for the mass distribution of the lens. We use non-parametric modeling of galaxy lenses to better explore physically plausible but not overly constrained galaxy mass maps, all of which reproduce the lensing observables exactly, and derive the corresponding distribution of H_0's. Blind tests - where one of us simulated galaxy lenses, lensing observables, and a value for H_0, and the other applied our modeling technique to estimate H_0 indicate that our procedure is reliable. For four simulated lensed QSOs the distribution of inferred H_0 have an uncertainty of \simeq 10% at 90% confidence. Application to published observations of the two best constrained time-delay lenses, PG1115+080 and B1608+656, yields H_0=61 +/- 11 km/s/Mpc at 68% confidence and 61 +/- 18 km/s/Mpc at 90% confidence.Comment: 27 pages, including 17 figs, LaTeX; accepted to A

New magic number for neutron rich Sn isotopes

The variation of E(2+_1) of (134-140)Sn calculated with empirical SMPN interaction has striking similarity with that of experimental E(2+_1) of even-even (18-22)O and (42-48)Ca, showing clearly that N=84-88 spectra exhibit the effect of gradual filling up of \nu(2f_{7/2}) orbital which finally culminates in a new shell closure at N=90. Realistic two-body interaction CWG does not show this feature. Spin-tensor decomposition of SMPN and CWG interactions and variation of their components with valence neutron number reveals that the origin of the shell closure at 140Sn lies in the three body effects. Calculations with CWG3, which is obtained by including a simple three-body monopole term in the CWG interaction, predict decreasing E(2+_1) for (134-138)Sn and a shell closure at 140Sn.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figure

Study of Dissipative Collisions of 20^{20}Ne (∼\sim7-11 MeV/nucleon) + 27^{27}Al

The inclusive energy distributions of complex fragments (3 $\leq$Z $\leq$ 9) emitted in the reactions $^{20}$Ne (145, 158, 200, 218 MeV) + $^{27}$Al have been measured in the angular range 10$^{o}$ - 50$^{o}$. The fusion-fission and the deep-inelastic components of the fragment yield have been extracted using multiple Gaussian functions from the experimental fragment energy spectra. The elemental yields of the fusion-fission component have been found to be fairly well exlained in the framework of standard statistical model. It is found that there is strong competition between the fusion-fission and the deep-inelastic processes at these energies. The time scale of the deep-inelastic process was estimated to be typically in the range of $\sim$ 10$^{-21}$ - 10$^{-22}$ sec., and it was found to decrease with increasing fragment mass. The angular momentum dissipations in fully energy damped deep-inelastic process have been estimated from the average energies of the deep-inelastic components of the fragment energy spectra. It has been found that, the estimated angular momentum dissipations, for lighter fragments in particular, are more than those predicted by the empirical sticking limit.Comment: 16 pages, 9 figure

Answering Complex Questions by Joining Multi-Document Evidence with Quasi Knowledge Graphs

Direct answering of questions that involve multiple entities and relations is a challenge for text-based QA. This problem is most pronounced when answers can be found only by joining evidence from multiple documents. Curated knowledge graphs (KGs) may yield good answers, but are limited by their inherent incompleteness and potential staleness. This paper presents QUEST, a method that can answer complex questions directly from textual sources on-the-fly, by computing similarity joins over partial results from different documents. Our method is completely unsupervised, avoiding training-data bottlenecks and being able to cope with rapidly evolving ad hoc topics and formulation style in user questions. QUEST builds a noisy quasi KG with node and edge weights, consisting of dynamically retrieved entity names and relational phrases. It augments this graph with types and semantic alignments, and computes the best answers by an algorithm for Group Steiner Trees. We evaluate QUEST on benchmarks of complex questions, and show that it substantially outperforms state-of-the-art baselines

Radial density profiles of time-delay lensing galaxies

We present non-parametric radial mass profiles for ten QSO strong lensing galaxies. Five of the galaxies have profiles close to $\rho(r)\propto r^{-2}$, while the rest are closer to r^{-1}, consistent with an NFW profile. The former are all relatively isolated early-types and dominated by their stellar light. The latter --though the modeling code did not know this-- are either in clusters, or have very high mass-to-light, suggesting dark-matter dominant lenses (one is a actually pair of merging galaxies). The same models give H_0^{-1} = 15.2_{-1.7}^{+2.5}\Gyr (H_0 = 64_{-9}^{+8} \legacy), consistent with a previous determination. When tested on simulated lenses taken from a cosmological hydrodynamical simulation, our modeling pipeline recovers both H_0 and $\rho(r)$ within estimated uncertainties. Our result is contrary to some recent claims that lensing time delays imply either a low H_0 or galaxy profiles much steeper than r^{-2}. We diagnose these claims as resulting from an invalid modeling approximation: that small deviations from a power-law profile have a small effect on lensing time-delays. In fact, as we show using using both perturbation theory and numerical computation from a galaxy-formation simulation, a first-order perturbation of an isothermal lens can produce a zeroth-order change in the time delays.Comment: Replaced with final version accepted for publication in ApJ; very minor changes to text; high resolution figures may be obtained at justinread.ne