Chromospheric explosions

Three issues relative to chromospheric explosions were debated. (1) Resolved: The blue-shifted components of x-ray spectral lines are signatures of chromospheric evaporation. It was concluded that the plasma rising with the corona is indeed the primary source of thermal plasma observed in the corona during flares. (2) Resolved: The excess line broading of UV and X-ray lines is accounted for by a convective velocity distribution in evaporation. It is concluded that the hypothesis that convective evaporation produces the observed X-ray line widths in flares is no more than a hypothesis. It is not supported by any self-consistent physical theory. (3) Resolved: Most chromospheric heating is driven by electron beams. Although it is possible to cast doubt on many lines of evidence for electron beams in the chromosphere, a balanced view that debaters on both sides of the question might agree to is that electron beams probably heat the low corona and upper chromosphere, but their direct impact on evaporating the chromosphere is energetically unimportant when compared to conduction. This represents a major departure from the thick-target flare models that were popular before the Workshop

Do you want to bet? The prevalence of problem gambling amongst athletes in the UK

This presentation was given as part of the 2011 London Workshop on Problem Gambling: Theory and (Best) Practice by Dr Daniel Rhind from the Sports Sciences subject area at Brunel University. The workshop was organised by Professor Fernand Gobet and Dr Marvin Schiller and hosted by Brunel University on the 13th September 2011

Thermodynamic Properties of the Piecewise Uniform String

The thermodynamic free energy F is calculated for a gas whose particles are the quantum excitations of a piecewise uniform bosonic string. The string consists of two parts of length L_I and L_II, endowed with different tensions and mass densities, adjusted in such a way that the velocity of sound always equals the velocity of light. The explicit calculation is done under the restrictive condition that the tension ratio x = T_I/T_II approaches zero. Also, the length ratio s = L_II/L_I is assumed to be an integer. The expression for F is given on an integral form, in which s is present as a parameter. For large values of s, the Hagedorn temperature becomes proportional to the square root of s.Comment: 32 pages, latex, no figure

Thermal Operators in Ising Percolation

We discuss a new cluster representation for the internal energy and the specific heat of the d-dimensional Ising model, obtained by studying the percolation mapping of an Ising model with an arbitrary set of antiferromagnetic links. Such a representation relates the thermal operators to the topological properties of the Fortuin-Kasteleyn clusters of Ising percolation and is a powerful tool to get new exact relations on the topological structure of FK clusters of the Ising model defined on an arbitrary graph.Comment: 17 pages, 2 figures. Improved version. Major changes in the text and in the notations. A missing term added in the specific heat representatio

Tuning magnetic chirality by dipolar interactions

Chiral magnetism has gained enormous interest in recent years because of the anticipated wealth of applications in nanoelectronics. The demonstrated stabilization of chiral magnetic domain walls and skyrmions has been attributed to the actively investigated Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction. Recently, however, predictions were made that suggest dipolar interactions can also stabilize chiral domain walls and skyrmions, but direct experimental evidence has been lacking. Here we show that dipolar interactions can indeed stabilize chiral domain walls by directly imaging the magnetic domain walls using scanning electron microscopy with polarization analysis. We further show that the competition between the Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya and dipolar interactions can reverse the domain-wall chirality. Finally, we suggest that this competition can be tailored by a Ruderman-Kittel-Kasuya-Yosida interaction. Our work therefore reveals that dipolar interactions play a key role in the stabilization of chiral spin textures. This insight will open up new routes towards balancing interactions for the stabilization of chiral magnetism

Soft gluon resummation for squark and gluino pair-production at hadron colliders

We report on the study of soft gluon effects in the production of squarks and gluinos at hadron colliders. Close to production threshold, the emission of soft gluon results in the appearence of large logarithmic corrections in the theoretical expressions. In order to resum these corrections at next-to-leading-logarithmic accuracy appropriate one-loop anomalous dimensions have to be calculated. We present the calculation of the anomalous dimensions for all production channels of squarks and gluinos and provide numerical predictions for the Tevatron and the LHC.Comment: 6 pages, talk given at RADCOR 2009 - 9th International Symposium on Radiative Corrections (Applications of Quantum Field Theory to Phenomenology) October 25-30 2009, Ascona, Switzerlan

Asymmetric magnetic bubble expansion under in-plane field in Pt/Co/Pt: effect of interface engineering

We analyse the impact of growth conditions on asymmetric magnetic bubble expansion under in-plane field in ultrathin Pt / Co / Pt films. Specifically, using sputter deposition we vary the Ar pressure during the growth of the top Pt layer. This induces a large change in the interfacial structure as evidenced by a factor three change in the effective perpendicular magnetic anisotropy. Strikingly, a discrepancy between the current theory for domain-wall propagation based on a simple domain-wall energy density and our experimental results is found. This calls for further theoretical development of domain-wall creep under in-plane fields and varying structural asymmetry.Comment: 16 pages, 3 figure

A direct probe of cosmological power spectra of the peculiar velocity field and the gravitational lensing magnification from photometric redshift surveys

The cosmological peculiar velocity field (deviations from the pure Hubble flow) of matter carries significant information on dark energy, dark matter and the underlying theory of gravity on large scales. Peculiar motions of galaxies introduce systematic deviations between the observed galaxy redshifts z and the corresponding cosmological redshifts z_cos. A novel method for estimating the angular power spectrum of the peculiar velocity field based on observations of galaxy redshifts and apparent magnitudes m (or equivalently fluxes) is presented. This method exploits the fact that a mean relation between z_cos and m of galaxies can be derived from all galaxies in a redshift-magnitude survey. Given a galaxy magnitude, it is shown that the z_cos(m) relation yields its cosmological redshift with a 1-sigma error of sigma_z~0.3 for a survey like Euclid (~10^9 galaxies at z<~2), and can be used to constrain the angular power spectrum of z-z_cos(m) with a high signal-to-noise ratio. At large angular separations corresponding to l<~15, we obtain significant constraints on the power spectrum of the peculiar velocity field. At 15<~l<~60, magnitude shifts in the z_cos(m) relation caused by gravitational lensing magnification dominate, allowing us to probe the line-of-sight integral of the gravitational potential. Effects related to the environmental dependence in the luminosity function can easily be computed and their contamination removed from the estimated power spectra. The amplitude of the combined velocity and lensing power spectra at z~1 can be measured with <~5% accuracy.Comment: 22 pages, 3 figures; added a discussion of systematic errors, accepted for publication in JCA