29,287 research outputs found
A nanoradian differential VLBI tracking demonstration
The shift due to Jovian gravitational deflection in the apparent angular position of the radio source P 0201+113 was measured with very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) to demonstrate a differential angular tracking technique with nanoradian accuracy. The raypath of the radio source P 0201+113 passed within 1 mrad of Jupiter (approximately 10 Jovian radii) on 21 Mar. 1988. Its angular position was measured 10 times over 4 hours on that date, with a similar measurement set on 2 Apr. 1988, to track the differential angular gravitational deflection of the raypath. According to general relativity, the expected gravitational bend of the raypath averaged over the duration of the March experiment was approximately 1.45 nrad projected onto the two California-Australia baselines over which it was measured. Measurement accuracies on the order of 0.78 nrad were obtained for each of the ten differential measurements. The chi(exp 2) per degree of freedom of the data for the hypothesis of general relativity was 0.6, which suggests that the modeled dominant errors due to system noise and tropospheric fluctuations fully accounted for the scatter in the measured angular deflections. The chi(exp 2) per degree of freedom for the hypothesis of no gravitational deflection by Jupiter was 4.1, which rejects the no-deflection hypothesis with greater than 99.999 percent confidence. The system noise contributed about 0.34 nrad per combined-baseline differential measurement and tropospheric fluctuations contributed about 0.70 nrad. Unmodeled errors were assessed, which could potentially increase the 0.78 nrad error by about 8 percent. The above chi(exp 2) values, which result from the full accounting of errors, suggest that the nanoradian gravitational deflection signature was successfully tracked
Fast, scalable, Bayesian spike identification for multi-electrode arrays
We present an algorithm to identify individual neural spikes observed on
high-density multi-electrode arrays (MEAs). Our method can distinguish large
numbers of distinct neural units, even when spikes overlap, and accounts for
intrinsic variability of spikes from each unit. As MEAs grow larger, it is
important to find spike-identification methods that are scalable, that is, the
computational cost of spike fitting should scale well with the number of units
observed. Our algorithm accomplishes this goal, and is fast, because it
exploits the spatial locality of each unit and the basic biophysics of
extracellular signal propagation. Human intervention is minimized and
streamlined via a graphical interface. We illustrate our method on data from a
mammalian retina preparation and document its performance on simulated data
consisting of spikes added to experimentally measured background noise. The
algorithm is highly accurate
Massive MIMO Systems with Non-Ideal Hardware: Energy Efficiency, Estimation, and Capacity Limits
The use of large-scale antenna arrays can bring substantial improvements in
energy and/or spectral efficiency to wireless systems due to the greatly
improved spatial resolution and array gain. Recent works in the field of
massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) show that the user channels
decorrelate when the number of antennas at the base stations (BSs) increases,
thus strong signal gains are achievable with little inter-user interference.
Since these results rely on asymptotics, it is important to investigate whether
the conventional system models are reasonable in this asymptotic regime. This
paper considers a new system model that incorporates general transceiver
hardware impairments at both the BSs (equipped with large antenna arrays) and
the single-antenna user equipments (UEs). As opposed to the conventional case
of ideal hardware, we show that hardware impairments create finite ceilings on
the channel estimation accuracy and on the downlink/uplink capacity of each UE.
Surprisingly, the capacity is mainly limited by the hardware at the UE, while
the impact of impairments in the large-scale arrays vanishes asymptotically and
inter-user interference (in particular, pilot contamination) becomes
negligible. Furthermore, we prove that the huge degrees of freedom offered by
massive MIMO can be used to reduce the transmit power and/or to tolerate larger
hardware impairments, which allows for the use of inexpensive and
energy-efficient antenna elements.Comment: To appear in IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 28 pages, 15
figures. The results can be reproduced using the following Matlab code:
https://github.com/emilbjornson/massive-MIMO-hardware-impairment
Bayesian Methods for Exoplanet Science
Exoplanet research is carried out at the limits of the capabilities of
current telescopes and instruments. The studied signals are weak, and often
embedded in complex systematics from instrumental, telluric, and astrophysical
sources. Combining repeated observations of periodic events, simultaneous
observations with multiple telescopes, different observation techniques, and
existing information from theory and prior research can help to disentangle the
systematics from the planetary signals, and offers synergistic advantages over
analysing observations separately. Bayesian inference provides a
self-consistent statistical framework that addresses both the necessity for
complex systematics models, and the need to combine prior information and
heterogeneous observations. This chapter offers a brief introduction to
Bayesian inference in the context of exoplanet research, with focus on time
series analysis, and finishes with an overview of a set of freely available
programming libraries.Comment: Invited revie
Regional variations in the diffusion of triggered seismicity
[1] We determine the spatiotemporal characteristics of interearthquake triggering in the International Seismological Centre catalogue on regional and global scales. We pose a null hypothesis of spatially clustered, temporally random seismicity, and determine a residual pair correlation function for triggered events against this background. We compare results from the eastern Mediterranean, 25 Flinn-Engdahl seismic regions, and the global data set. The null hypothesis cannot be rejected for distances greater than 150 km, providing an upper limit to triggering distances that can be distinguished from temporally uncorrelated seismicity in the stacked data at present. Correlation lengths L andmean distances between triggered events hri are on the order of 10–50 km, but can be as high as 100 km in subduction zones. These values are not strongly affected by magnitude threshold, but are comparable to seismogenic thicknesses, implying a strong thermal control on correlation lengths. The temporal evolution of L and hri is well fitted by a power law, with an exponent H 0.1 ± 0.05. This is much lower than the value H = 0.5 expected for Gaussian diffusion in a homogenous medium. We observe clear regional variations in L, hri and H that appear to depend on tectonic setting. A detectable transition to a more rapid diffusion regime occurs in some cases at times greater than 100–200 days, possibly due to viscoelastic processes in the ductile lower crust
Universal features of correlated bursty behaviour
Inhomogeneous temporal processes, like those appearing in human
communications, neuron spike trains, and seismic signals, consist of
high-activity bursty intervals alternating with long low-activity periods. In
recent studies such bursty behavior has been characterized by a fat-tailed
inter-event time distribution, while temporal correlations were measured by the
autocorrelation function. However, these characteristic functions are not
capable to fully characterize temporally correlated heterogenous behavior. Here
we show that the distribution of the number of events in a bursty period serves
as a good indicator of the dependencies, leading to the universal observation
of power-law distribution in a broad class of phenomena. We find that the
correlations in these quite different systems can be commonly interpreted by
memory effects and described by a simple phenomenological model, which displays
temporal behavior qualitatively similar to that in real systems
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