Constraints on Solar Wind Acceleration Mechanisms from Ulysses Plasma Observations: The First Polar Pass

The mass flux density and velocity of the solar wind at polar latitudes can provide strong constraints on solar wind acceleration mechanisms. We use plasma observations from the first polar passage of the Ulysses spacecraft to investigate this question. We find that the mass flux density and velocity are too high to reconcile with acceleration of the solar wind by classical thermal conduction alone. Therefore acceleration of the high-speed must involve extended deposition of energy by some other mechanism, either as heat or as a direct effective pressure, due possibly to waves and/or turbulence, or completely non-classical heat transport

Mixed-Grass Prairie Canopy Structure and Spectral Reflectance Vary with Topographic Position

Managers of the nearly 0.5 million ha of public lands in North and South Dakota, USA rely heavily on manual measurements of canopy height in autumn to ensure conservation of grassland structure for wildlife and forage for livestock. However, more comprehensive assessment of vegetation structure could be achieved for mixed-grass prairie by integrating field survey, topographic position (summit, mid and toeslope) and spectral reflectance data. Thus, we examined the variation of mixed-grass prairie structural attributes (canopy leaf area, standing crop mass, canopy height, nitrogen, and water content) and spectral vegetation indices (VIs) with variation in topographic position at the Grand River National Grassland (GRNG), South Dakota. We conducted the study on a 36,000-ha herbaceous area within the GRNG, where randomly selected plots (1 km2 in size) were geolocated and included summit, mid and toeslope positions. We tested for effects of topographic position on measured vegetation attributes and VIs calculated from Landsat TM and Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) data collected in July 2010. Leaf area, standing crop mass, canopy height, nitrogen, and water content were lower at summits than at toeslopes. The simple ratio of Landsat Band 7/Band 1 (SR71) was the VI most highly correlated with canopy standing crop and height at plot and landscape scales. Results suggest field and remote sensing-based grassland assessment techniques could more comprehensively target low structure areas at minimal expense by layering modeled imagery over a landscape stratified into topographic position groups

Mixed-Grass Prairie Canopy Structure and Spectral Reflectance Vary with Topographic Position

Managers of the nearly 0.5 million ha of public lands in North and South Dakota, USA rely heavily on manual measurements of canopy height in autumn to ensure conservation of grassland structure for wildlife and forage for livestock. However, more comprehensive assessment of vegetation structure could be achieved for mixed-grass prairie by integrating field survey, topographic position (summit, mid and toeslope) and spectral reflectance data. Thus, we examined the variation of mixed-grass prairie structural attributes (canopy leaf area, standing crop mass, canopy height, nitrogen, and water content) and spectral vegetation indices (VIs) with variation in topographic position at the Grand River National Grassland (GRNG), South Dakota. We conducted the study on a 36,000-ha herbaceous area within the GRNG, where randomly selected plots (1 km2 in size) were geolocated and included summit, mid and toeslope positions. We tested for effects of topographic position on measured vegetation attributes and VIs calculated from Landsat TM and Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) data collected in July 2010. Leaf area, standing crop mass, canopy height, nitrogen, and water content were lower at summits than at toeslopes. The simple ratio of Landsat Band 7/Band 1 (SR71) was the VI most highly correlated with canopy standing crop and height at plot and landscape scales. Results suggest field and remote sensing-based grassland assessment techniques could more comprehensively target low structure areas at minimal expense by layering modeled imagery over a landscape stratified into topographic position groups

Parity-violating neutron spin rotation in hydrogen and deuterium

We calculate the (parity-violating) spin rotation angle of a polarized neutron beam through hydrogen and deuterium targets, using pionless effective field theory up to next-to-leading order. Our result is part of a program to obtain the five leading independent low-energy parameters that characterize hadronic parity-violation from few-body observables in one systematic and consistent framework. The two spin-rotation angles provide independent constraints on these parameters. Using naive dimensional analysis to estimate the typical size of the couplings, we expect the signal for standard target densities to be 10^-7 to 10^-6 rad/m for both hydrogen and deuterium targets. We find no indication that the nd observable is enhanced compared to the np one. All results are properly renormalized. An estimate of the numerical and systematic uncertainties of our calculations indicates excellent convergence. An appendix contains the relevant partial-wave projectors of the three-nucleon system.Comment: 44 pages, 17 figures; minor corrections; to be published in EPJ

Relativistic Effect on Low-Energy Nucleon-Deuteron Scattering

The relativistic effect on differential cross sections, nucleon-to-nucleon and nucleon-to-deuteron polarization transfer coefficients, and the spin correlation function, of nucleon-deuteron elastic scattering is investigated employing several three-dimensional relativistic three-body equations and several nucleon-nucleon potentials. The polarization transfer coefficients are found to be sensitive to the details of the nucleon-nucleon potentials and the relativistic dynamics employed, and prefer trinucleon models with the correct triton binding energy. (To appear in Phys. Rev. C)Comment: pages: 21, LaTex text + 7 ps-figures at the en

The DEEP2 Galaxy Redshift Survey: The Voronoi-Delaunay Method Catalog of Galaxy Groups

We present a public catalog of galaxy groups constructed from the spectroscopic sample of galaxies in the fourth data release from the Deep Extragalactic Evolutionary Probe 2 (DEEP2) Galaxy Redshift Survey, including the Extended Groth Strip (EGS). The catalog contains 1165 groups with two or more members in the EGS over the redshift range 0 0.6 in the rest of DEEP2. Twenty-five percent of EGS galaxies and fourteen percent of high-z DEEP2 galaxies are assigned to galaxy groups. The groups were detected using the Voronoi-Delaunay method (VDM) after it has been optimized on mock DEEP2 catalogs following similar methods to those employed in Gerke et al. In the optimization effort, we have taken particular care to ensure that the mock catalogs resemble the data as closely as possible, and we have fine-tuned our methods separately on mocks constructed for the EGS and the rest of DEEP2. We have also probed the effect of the assumed cosmology on our inferred group-finding efficiency by performing our optimization on three different mock catalogs with different background cosmologies, finding large differences in the group-finding success we can achieve for these different mocks. Using the mock catalog whose background cosmology is most consistent with current data, we estimate that the DEEP2 group catalog is 72% complete and 61% pure (74% and 67% for the EGS) and that the group finder correctly classifies 70% of galaxies that truly belong to groups, with an additional 46% of interloper galaxies contaminating the catalog (66% and 43% for the EGS). We also confirm that the VDM catalog reconstructs the abundance of galaxy groups with velocity dispersions above ~300 km s^(–1) to an accuracy better than the sample variance, and this successful reconstruction is not strongly dependent on cosmology. This makes the DEEP2 group catalog a promising probe of the growth of cosmic structure that can potentially be used for cosmological tests