NASA refan program status

The objective of the refan program is to demonstrate the technical feasibility of substantially reducing the noise levels of existing JT8D powered aircraft. The program consists of the design, manufacturing and testing of the refan engines and modified nacelles and airplanes. Experimental testing was completed for the refan engine both at sea level and at altitude conditions. Ground testing for the B727 side- and center-engine installations and flight testing of the DC-9 with refan engines and acoustic nacelles were performed. Preliminary results presented show that substantial noise reductions were achieved

Closed String Thermal Torus From Thermo Field Dynamics

In this Letter a topological interpretation for the string thermal vacuum in the Thermo Field Dynamics (TFD) approach is given. As a consequence, the relationship between the Imaginary Time and TFD formalisms is achieved when both are used to study closed strings at finite temperature. The TFD approach starts by duplicating the system's degrees of freedom, defining an auxiliary (tilde) string. In order to lead the system to finite temperature a Bogoliubov transformation is implemented. We show that the effect of this transformation is to glue together the string and the tilde string to obtain a torus. The thermal vacuum appears as the boundary state for this identification. Also, from the thermal state condition, a Kubo-Martin-Schwinger condition for the torus topology is derived.Comment: 14 pages, revtex4, changes in the text and references. Version to be published in Physics Letters

Current Algebra of Super WZNW Models

We derive the current algebra of supersymmetric principal chiral models with a Wess-Zumino term. At the critical point one obtains two commuting super Kac-Moody algebra as expected, but in general there are intertwining fields connecting both right and left sectors, analogously to the bosonic case. Moreover, in the present supersymmetric extension we have a quadratic algebra, rather than an affine Lie algebra, due to the mixing between bosonic and fermionic fields since the purely fermionic sector displays a Lie algebra as well.Comment: 13 page

Plane waves in noncommutative fluids

We study the dynamics of the noncommutative fuid in the Snyder space perturbatively at the first order in powers of the noncommutative parameter. The linearized noncommutative fluid dynamics is described by a system of coupled linear partial differential equations in which the variables are the fluid density and the fluid potentials. We show that these equations admit a set of solutions that are monocromatic plane waves for the fluid density and two of the potentials and a linear function for the third potential. The energy-momentum tensor of the plane waves is calculated.Comment: 11 pages. Version published as a Lette

Scalar field evolution in Gauss-Bonnet black holes

It is presented a thorough analysis of scalar perturbations in the background of Gauss-Bonnet, Gauss-Bonnet-de Sitter and Gauss-Bonnet-anti-de Sitter black hole spacetimes. The perturbations are considered both in frequency and time domain. The dependence of the scalar field evolution on the values of the cosmological constant $\Lambda$ and the Gauss-Bonnet coupling $\alpha$ is investigated. For Gauss-Bonnet and Gauss-Bonnet-de Sitter black holes, at asymptotically late times either power-law or exponential tails dominate, while for Gauss-Bonnet-anti-de Sitter black hole, the quasinormal modes govern the scalar field decay at all times. The power-law tails at asymptotically late times for odd-dimensional Gauss-Bonnet black holes does not depend on $\alpha$, even though the black hole metric contains $\alpha$ as a new parameter. The corrections to quasinormal spectrum due to Gauss-Bonnet coupling is not small and should not be neglected. For the limit of near extremal value of the (positive) cosmological constant and pure de Sitter and anti-de Sitter modes in Gauss-Bonnet gravity we have found analytical expressions.Comment: 10 pages, to be published in Phys. Rev.

Darth Fader: Using wavelets to obtain accurate redshifts of spectra at very low signal-to-noise

We present the DARTH FADER algorithm, a new wavelet-based method for estimating redshifts of galaxy spectra in spectral surveys that is particularly adept in the very low SNR regime. We use a standard cross-correlation method to estimate the redshifts of galaxies, using a template set built using a PCA analysis on a set of simulated, noise-free spectra. Darth Fader employs wavelet filtering to both estimate the continuum & to extract prominent line features in each galaxy spectrum. A simple selection criterion based on the number of features present in the spectrum is then used to clean the catalogue: galaxies with fewer than six total features are removed as we are unlikely to obtain a reliable redshift estimate. Applying our wavelet-based cleaning algorithm to a simulated testing set, we successfully build a clean catalogue including extremely low signal-to-noise data (SNR=2.0), for which we are able to obtain a 5.1% catastrophic failure rate in the redshift estimates (compared with 34.5% prior to cleaning). We also show that for a catalogue with uniformly mixed SNRs between 1.0 & 20.0, with realistic pixel-dependent noise, it is possible to obtain redshifts with a catastrophic failure rate of 3.3% after cleaning (as compared to 22.7% before cleaning). Whilst we do not test this algorithm exhaustively on real data, we present a proof of concept of the applicability of this method to real data, showing that the wavelet filtering techniques perform well when applied to some typical spectra from the SDSS archive. The Darth Fader algorithm provides a robust method for extracting spectral features from very noisy spectra. The resulting clean catalogue gives an extremely low rate of catastrophic failures, even when the spectra have a very low SNR. For very large sky surveys, this technique may offer a significant boost in the number of faint galaxies with accurately determined redshifts.Comment: 22 pages, 15 figures. Accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysic