"Asiatic" copper in New Kingdom Egypt

This work presents a combination of Lead Isotope Analysis ( LIA ) and ancient Egyptian texts and depictions in order to describe the history of the ox -hide copper ingots presence in Egypt , which w ere called by the Egyptians “Asiatic copper”. Ox-hide ingots in Egypt represent a particular case where the information given by ancient sources and modern chemical analyses might be combined in order to establish the provenance of archaeological objects and the hist ory of a particular m aterial during the Bronze Age. Ox -hide ingots arrived to Egypt where the first kings of the Egyptian New Kingdom developed an impressive building program through the entire country and needed a supply of copper and other materials. The “Asiatic copper” was depicted in different tombs and temples from the 18 th to the 20 th dynasties in Thebes and Amarna. According to depictions and texts, three different regions supplied copper according to ancient Egyptians: Syria, Cyprus and Crete. Howe ver, the LIA of the lead present in mined copper permits to establish that the ingots were made of copper from Apliki mines, in Central Cyprus. The depictions in Egyptian tombs and temples probably represented not only the actual region of provenance but a lso the peoples involved in the trade, because t he ingots were traded by Syrian merchants following a route that passed Syria, Cyprus, Crete and GreecePostprint (published version

Colliding wind binaries and gamma-ray binaries : relativistic version of the RAMSES code

Gamma-ray binaries are colliding wind binaries (CWB) composed of a massive star a non-accreting pulsar with a highly relativistic wind. Particle acceleration at the shocks results in emission going from extended radio emission to the gamma-ray band. The interaction region is expected to show common features with stellar CWB. Performing numerical simulations with the hydrodynamical code RAMSES, we focus on their structure and stability and find that the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability (KHI) can lead to important mixing between the winds and destroy the large scale spiral structure. To investigate the impact of the relativistic nature of the pulsar wind, we extend RAMSES to relativistic hydrodynamics (RHD). Preliminary simulations of the interaction between a pulsar wind and a stellar wind show important similarities with stellar colliding winds with small relativistic corrections.Comment: Proceeding of the 5th International Symposium on High-Energy Gamma-Ray Astronomy (Gamma2012). arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1212.404

A scheme for radiation pressure and photon diffusion with the M1 closure in RAMSES-RT

We describe and test an updated version of radiation-hydrodynamics (RHD) in the RAMSES code, that includes three new features: i) radiation pressure on gas, ii) accurate treatment of radiation diffusion in an unresolved optically thick medium, and iii) relativistic corrections that account for Doppler effects and work done by the radiation to first order in v/c. We validate the implementation in a series of tests, which include a morphological assessment of the M1 closure for the Eddington tensor in an astronomically relevant setting, dust absorption in a optically semi-thick medium, direct pressure on gas from ionising radiation, convergence of our radiation diffusion scheme towards resolved optical depths, correct diffusion of a radiation flash and a constant luminosity radiation, and finally, an experiment from Davis et al. of the competition between gravity and radiation pressure in a dusty atmosphere, and the formation of radiative Rayleigh-Taylor instabilities. With the new features, RAMSES-RT can be used for state-of-the-art simulations of radiation feedback from first principles, on galactic and cosmological scales, including not only direct radiation pressure from ionising photons, but also indirect pressure via dust from multi-scattered IR photons reprocessed from higher-energy radiation, both in the optically thin and thick limits.Comment: 25 pages, 13 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS. Revised to match published versio

Production/maintenance cooperative scheduling using multi-agents and fuzzy logic

Within companies, production is directly concerned with the manufacturing schedule, but other services like sales, maintenance, purchasing or workforce management should also have an influence on this schedule. These services often have together a hierarchical relationship, i.e. the leading function (most of the time sales or production) generates constraints defining the framework within which the other functions have to satisfy their own objectives. We show how the multi-agent paradigm, often used in scheduling for its ability to distribute decision-making, can also provide a framework for making several functions cooperate in the schedule performance. Production and maintenance have been chosen as an example: having common resources (the machines), their activities are actually often conflicting. We show how to use a fuzzy logic in order to model the temporal degrees of freedom of the two functions, and show that this approach may allow one to obtain a schedule that provides a better compromise between the satisfaction of the respective objectives of the two functions

The complete census of molecular hydrogen in a simulated disc galaxy

We present a multi-scale analysis of molecular hydrogen in a Milky Way-like simulated galaxy. Our census covers the gas content of the entire disc, to radial profiles and the Kennicutt-Schmidt relation, to a study of its molecular clouds, and finally down to a cell-by-cell analysis of the gas phases. Where observations are available we find agreement. A significant fraction of the H2 gas is in low-density regions mixed with atomic hydrogen and would therefore be difficult to observe. We use the molecular addition to ramses-rt, an adaptive mesh refinement grid code with the hydrodynamics coupled to moment-based radiative transfer. Three resolutions of the same galaxy detail the effects it has on H2 formation, with grid cells sized 97, 24, and 6.1 pc. Only the highest resolution yields gas densities high enough to host significant H2 fractions, and resolution is therefore key to simulating H2. Apart our pieces of galactic analysis are disparate, but assembled they provide a cohesive portrait of H2 in the interstellar medium. H2 chemistry on the atomic scale is sufficient to generate its dynamics throughout an entire galaxy.Comment: 20 pages, 14 figures, submitted to MNRAS, comments welcom

Properties and stability of freely propagating nonlinear density waves in accretion disks

In this paper, we study the propagation and stability of nonlinear sound waves in accretion disks. Using the shearing box approximation, we derive the form of these waves using a semi-analytic approach and go on to study their stability. The results are compared to those of numerical simulations performed using finite difference approaches such as employed by ZEUS as well as Godunov methods. When the wave frequency is between Omega and two Omega (where Omega is the disk orbital angular velocity), it can couple resonantly with a pair of linear inertial waves and thus undergo a parametric instability. Neglecting the disk vertical stratification, we derive an expression for the growth rate when the amplitude of the background wave is small. Good agreement is found with the results of numerical simulations performed both with finite difference and Godunov codes. During the nonlinear phase of the instability, the flow remains well organised if the amplitude of the background wave is small. However, strongly nonlinear waves break down into turbulence. In both cases, the background wave is damped and the disk eventually returns to a stationary state. Finally, we demonstrate that the instability also develops when density stratification is taken into account and so is robust. This destabilisation of freely propagating nonlinear sound waves may be important for understanding the complicated behaviour of density waves in disks that are unstable through the effects of self-gravity or magnetic fields and is likely to affect the propagation of waves that are tidally excited by objects such as a protoplanet or companion perturbing a protoplanetary disk. The nonlinear wave solutions described here as well as their stability properties were also found to be useful for testing and comparing the performance of different numerical codes.Comment: 21 pages, 15 figures, accepted in Astronomy & Astrophysic

Growing massive black holes through super-critical accretion of stellar-mass seeds

The rapid assembly of the massive black holes that power the luminous quasars observed at $z \sim 6-7$ remains a puzzle. Various direct collapse models have been proposed to head-start black hole growth from initial seeds with masses $\sim 10^5\,\rm M_\odot$, which can then reach a billion solar mass while accreting at the Eddington limit. Here we propose an alternative scenario based on radiatively inefficient super-critical accretion of stellar-mass holes embedded in the gaseous circum-nuclear discs (CNDs) expected to exist in the cores of high redshift galaxies. Our sub-pc resolution hydrodynamical simulations show that stellar-mass holes orbiting within the central 100 pc of the CND bind to very high density gas clumps that arise from the fragmentation of the surrounding gas. Owing to the large reservoir of dense cold gas available, a stellar-mass black hole allowed to grow at super-Eddington rates according to the "slim disc" solution can increase its mass by 3 orders of magnitudes within a few million years. These findings are supported by simulations run with two different hydro codes, RAMSES based on the Adaptive Mesh Refinement technique and GIZMO based on a new Lagrangian Godunov-type method, and with similar, but not identical, sub-grid recipes for star formation, supernova feedback, black hole accretion and feedback. The low radiative efficiency of super-critical accretion flows are instrumental to the rapid mass growth of our black holes, as they imply modest radiative heating of the surrounding nuclear environment.Comment: 12 pages, 8 figures, 2 tables. Accepted for publication in MNRA