On the physical interpretation of the delta=2 Tomimatsu-Sato solution

The physical properties of the Tomimatsu-Sato delta=2 spacetime are analyzed, with emphasis on the issues of the negative mass distribution in this spacetime and the origin of a massless ring singularity which are treated with the aid of an equatorially asymmetric two-body configuration arising within the framework of the analytically extended double-Kerr solution. As a by-product of this analysis it is proved analytically that the Kerr spacetime with negative mass always has a massless naked ring singularity off the symmetry axis accompanied by a region with closed timelike curves, and it is also pointed out that the Boyer-Lindquist coordinates in that case should be introduced in a different manner than in the case of the Kerr solution with positive mass.Comment: 13 pages, 6 figures, submitted to Prog. Theor. Phy

General Relativistic Thermoelectric Effects in Superconductors

We discuss the general-relativistic contributions to occur in the electromagnetic properties of a superconductor with a heat flow. The appearance of general-relativistic contribution to the magnetic flux through a superconducting thermoelectric bimetallic circuit is shown. A response of the Josephson junctions to a heat flow is investigated in the general-relativistic framework. Some gravitothermoelectric effects which are observable in the superconducting state in the Earth's gravitational field are considered.Comment: 13 pages, 2 figure

Path Planning for Cooperative Routing of Air-Ground Vehicles

We consider a cooperative vehicle routing problem for surveillance and reconnaissance missions with communication constraints between the vehicles. We propose a framework which involves a ground vehicle and an aerial vehicle; the vehicles travel cooperatively satisfying the communication limits, and visit a set of targets. We present a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) formulation and develop a branch-and-cut algorithm to solve the path planning problem for the ground and air vehicles. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is corroborated through extensive computational experiments on several randomly generated instances

On some points-and-lines problems and configurations

We apply an old method for constructing points-and-lines configurations in the plane to study some recent questions in incidence geometry.Comment: 14 pages, numerous figures of point-and-line configurations; to appear in the Bezdek-50 special issue of Periodica Mathematica Hungaric

Kernel-phases for high-contrast detection beyond the resolution limit

The detection of high contrast companions at small angular separation appears feasible in conventional direct images using the self-calibration properties of interferometric observable quantities. In the high-Strehl regime, available from space borne observatories and using AO in the mid-infrared, quantities comparable to the closure-phase that are used with great success in non-redundant masking inteferometry, can be extracted from direct images, even taken with a redundant aperture. These new phase-noise immune observable quantities, called Kernel-phases, are determined a-priori from the knowledge of the geometry of the pupil only. Re-analysis of HST/NICMOS archive and other ground based AO images, using this new Kernel-phase algorithm, demonstrates the power of the method, and its ability to detect companions at the resolution limit and beyond.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures, 2011 SPIE conference proceeding