2,775 research outputs found
Blue horizontal branch stars in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey: II. Kinematics of the Galactic halo
We carry out a maximum-likelihood kinematic analysis of a sample of 1170 blue
horizontal branch (BHB) stars from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey presented in
Sirko et al. (2003) (Paper I). Monte Carlo simulations and resampling show that
the results are robust to distance and velocity errors at least as large as the
estimated errors from Paper I. The best-fit velocities of the Sun (circular)
and halo (rotational) are 245.9 +/- 13.5 km/s and 23.8 +/- 20.1 km/s but are
strongly covariant, so that v_0 - v_halo = 222.1 +/- 7.7 km/s. If one adopts
standard values for the local standard of rest and solar motion, then the halo
scarcely rotates. The velocity ellipsoid inferred for our sample is much more
isotropic [(sigma_r,sigma_theta,sigma_phi) = (101.4 +/- 2.8, 97.7 +/- 16.4,
107.4 +/- 16.6) km/s] than that of halo stars in the solar neighborhood, in
agreement with a recent study of the distant halo by Sommer-Larsen et al.
(1997). The line-of-sight velocity distribution of the entire sample, corrected
for the Sun's motion, is accurately gaussian with a dispersion of 101.6 +/- 3.0
km/s.Comment: 23 pages including 4 figures, 1 color; submitted to A
Rods Near Curved Surfaces and in Curved Boxes
We consider an ideal gas of infinitely rigid rods near a perfectly repulsive
wall, and show that the interfacial tension of a surface with rods on one side
is lower when the surface bends towards the rods. Surprisingly we find that
rods on both sides of surfaces also lower the energy when the surface bends. We
compute the partition functions of rods confined to spherical and cylindrical
open shells, and conclude that spherical shells repel rods, whereas cylindrical
shells (for thickness of the shell on the order of the rod-length) attract
them. The role of flexibility is investigated by considering chains composed of
two rigid segments.Comment: 39 pages including figures and tables. 12 eps figures. LaTeX with
REVTe
Tendency of spherically imploding plasma liners formed by merging plasma jets to evolve toward spherical symmetry
Three dimensional hydrodynamic simulations have been performed using smoothed
particle hydrodynamics (SPH) in order to study the effects of discrete jets on
the processes of plasma liner formation, implosion on vacuum, and expansion.
The pressure history of the inner portion of the liner was qualitatively and
quantitatively similar from peak compression through the complete stagnation of
the liner among simulation results from two one dimensional
radiationhydrodynamic codes, 3D SPH with a uniform liner, and 3D SPH with 30
discrete plasma jets. Two dimensional slices of the pressure show that the
discrete jet SPH case evolves towards a profile that is almost
indistinguishable from the SPH case with a uniform liner, showing that
non-uniformities due to discrete jets are smeared out by late stages of the
implosion. Liner formation and implosion on vacuum was also shown to be robust
to Rayleigh-Taylor instability growth. Interparticle mixing for a liner
imploding on vacuum was investigated. The mixing rate was very small until
after peak compression for the 30 jet simulation.Comment: 28 pages, 16 figures, submitted to Physics of Plasmas (2012
Two hard spheres in a pore: Exact Statistical Mechanics for different shaped cavities
The Partition function of two Hard Spheres in a Hard Wall Pore is studied
appealing to a graph representation. The exact evaluation of the canonical
partition function, and the one-body distribution function, in three different
shaped pores are achieved. The analyzed simple geometries are the cuboidal,
cylindrical and ellipsoidal cavities. Results have been compared with two
previously studied geometries, the spherical pore and the spherical pore with a
hard core. The search of common features in the analytic structure of the
partition functions in terms of their length parameters and their volumes,
surface area, edges length and curvatures is addressed too. A general framework
for the exact thermodynamic analysis of systems with few and many particles in
terms of a set of thermodynamic measures is discussed. We found that an exact
thermodynamic description is feasible based in the adoption of an adequate set
of measures and the search of the free energy dependence on the adopted measure
set. A relation similar to the Laplace equation for the fluid-vapor interface
is obtained which express the equilibrium between magnitudes that in extended
systems are intensive variables. This exact description is applied to study the
thermodynamic behavior of the two Hard Spheres in a Hard Wall Pore for the
analyzed different geometries. We obtain analytically the external work, the
pressure on the wall, the pressure in the homogeneous zone, the wall-fluid
surface tension, the line tension and other similar properties
SPH with the multiple boundary tangent method
In this article, we present an improved solid boundary treatment formulation for the smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) method. Benchmark simulations using previously reported boundary treatments can suffer from particle penetration and may produce results that numerically blow up near solid boundaries. As well, current SPH boundary approaches do not properly treat curved boundaries in complicated flow domains. These drawbacks have been remedied in a new boundary treatment method presented in this article, called the multiple boundary tangent (MBT) approach. In this article we present two important benchmark problems to validate the developed algorithm and show that the multiple boundary tangent
treatment produces results that agree with known numerical and experimental solutions. The two benchmark problems chosen are the lid-driven cavity problem, and flow over a cylinder. The SPH solutions using the MBT approach and the results from literature are in very good agreement. These solutions involved
solid boundaries, but the approach presented herein should be extendable to time-evolving, free-surface boundaries
Applying Schwarzschild's orbit superposition method to barred or non-barred disc galaxies
We present an implementation of the Schwarzschild orbit superposition method
which can be used for constructing self-consistent equilibrium models of barred
or non-barred disc galaxies, or of elliptical galaxies with figure rotation.
This is a further development of the publicly available code SMILE; its main
improvements include a new efficient representation of an arbitrary
gravitational potential using two-dimensional spline interpolation of Fourier
coefficients in the meridional plane, as well as the ability to deal with
rotation of the density profile and with multicomponent mass models. We compare
several published methods for constructing composite axisymmetric
disc--bulge--halo models and demonstrate that our code produces the models that
are closest to equilibrium. We also apply it to create models of triaxial
elliptical galaxies with cuspy density profiles and figure rotation, and find
that such models can be found and are stable over many dynamical times in a
wide range of pattern speeds and angular momenta, covering both slow- and
fast-rotator classes. We then attempt to create models of strongly barred disc
galaxies, using an analytic three-component potential, and find that it is not
possible to make a stable dynamically self-consistent model for this density
profile. Finally, we take snapshots of two N-body simulations of barred disc
galaxies embedded in nearly-spherical haloes, and construct equilibrium models
using only information on the density profile of the snapshots. We demonstrate
that such reconstructed models are in near-stationary state, in contrast with
the original N-body simulations, one of which displayed significant secular
evolution.Comment: 15 pages, 9 figures; MNRAS, 450, 2842. The software is available at
http://td.lpi.ru/~eugvas/smile
Curvature effects on the surface thickness and tension at the free interface of He systems
The thickness and the surface energy at the free interface of
superfluid He are studied. Results of calculations carried out by using
density functionals for cylindrical and spherical systems are presented in a
unified way, including a comparison with the behavior of planar slabs. It is
found that for large species is independent of the geometry. The obtained
values of are compared with prior theoretical results and experimental
data. Experimental data favor results evaluated by adopting finite range
approaches. The behavior of and exhibit overshoots
similar to that found previously for the central density, the trend of these
observables towards their asymptotic values is examined.Comment: 35 pages, TeX, 5 figures, definitive versio
Dynamical bunching and density peaks in expanding Coulomb clouds
Expansion dynamics of single-species, non-neutral clouds, such as electron
bunches used in ultrafast electron microscopy, show novel behavior due to high
acceleration of particles in the cloud interior. This often leads to electron
bunching and dynamical formation of a density shock in the outer regions of the
bunch. We develop analytic fluid models to capture these effects, and the
analytic predictions are validated by PIC and N-particle simulations. In the
space-charge dominated regime, two and three dimensional systems with Gaussian
initial densities show bunching and a strong shock response, while one
dimensional systems do not; moreover these effects can be tuned using the
initial particle density profile and velocity chirp.Comment: 16 pages, 6 figures(spread over 18 png files); No changes to the text
--- however I had mis-spelled Chong-Yu Ruan's first name in the metadata. (It
was originally Chung-Yu). This typo has been addresse
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