10,883 research outputs found
Quantitative mapping of rainfall rates over the oceans utilizing Nimbus-5 ESMR data
The electrically scanning microwave radiometer (ESMR) data from the Nimbus 5 satellite was used to deduce estimates of precipitation amount over the oceans. An atlas of the global oceanic rainfall was prepared and the global rainfall maps analyzed and related to available ground truth information as well as to large scale processes in the atmosphere. It was concluded that the ESMR system provides the most reliable and direct approach yet known for the estimation of rainfall over sparsely documented, wide oceanic regions
QED in external fields, a functional point of view
A functional partial differential equation is set for the proper graphs
generating functional of QED in external electromagnetic fields. This equation
leads to the evolution of the proper graphs with the external field amplitude
and the external field gauge dependence of the complete fermion propagator and
vertex is derived non-perturbativally.Comment: 8 pages, published versio
Statistical Mechanics of Charged Black Holes in Induced Einstein-Maxwell Gravity
The statistical origin of the entropy of charged black holes in models of
induced Einstein-Maxwell gravity is investigated. The constituents inducing the
Einstein-Maxwell action are charged and interact with an external gauge
potential. This new feature, however, does not change divergences of the
statistical-mechanical entropy of the constituents near the horizon. It is
demonstrated that the mechanism of generation of the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy
in induced gravity is universal and it is basically the same for charged and
neutral black holes. The concrete computations are carried out for induced
Einstein-Maxwell gravity with a negative cosmological constant in three
space-time dimensions.Comment: 16 pages, latex, no figure
Joint LIGO and TAMA300 Search for Gravitational Waves from Inspiralling Neutron Star Binaries
We search for coincident gravitational wave signals from inspiralling neutron star binaries using LIGO and TAMA300 data taken during early 2003. Using a simple trigger exchange method, we perform an intercollaboration coincidence search during times when TAMA300 and only one of the LIGO sites were operational. We find no evidence of any gravitational wave signals. We place an observational upper limit on the rate of binary neutron star coalescence with component masses between 1 and 3M⊙ of 49 per year per Milky Way equivalent galaxy at a 90% confidence level. The methods developed during this search will find application in future network inspiral analyses
Upper limits from the LIGO and TAMA detectors on the rate of gravitational-wave bursts
We report on the first joint search for gravitational waves by the TAMA and LIGO collaborations. We looked for millisecond-duration unmodeled gravitational-wave bursts in 473 hr of coincident data collected during early 2003. No candidate signals were found. We set an upper limit of 0.12 events per day on the rate of detectable gravitational-wave bursts, at 90% confidence level. From software simulations, we estimate that our detector network was sensitive to bursts with root-sum-square strain amplitude above approximately 1–3×10−19 Hz−1/2 in the frequency band 700-2000 Hz. We describe the details of this collaborative search, with particular emphasis on its advantages and disadvantages compared to searches by LIGO and TAMA separately using the same data. Benefits include a lower background and longer observation time, at some cost in sensitivity and bandwidth. We also demonstrate techniques for performing coincidence searches with a heterogeneous network of detectors with different noise spectra and orientations. These techniques include using coordinated software signal injections to estimate the network sensitivity, and tuning the analysis to maximize the sensitivity and the livetime, subject to constraints on the background
Femtolensing and Picolensing by Axion Miniclusters
Non-linear effects in the evolution of the axion field in the early Universe
may lead to the formation of gravitationally bound clumps of axions, known as
``miniclusters.'' Minicluster masses and radii should be in the range and cm, and in plausible
early-Universe scenarios a significant fraction of the mass density of the
Universe may be in the form of axion miniclusters. If such axion miniclusters
exist, they would have the physical properties required to be detected by
``femtolensing.''Comment: 7 pages plus 2 figures (Fig.1 avalible upon request), LaTe
A Horizon Ratio Bound for Inflationary Fluctuations
We demonstrate that the gravity wave background amplitude implies a robust
upper bound on the ratio: \lambda / H^{-1} < e^60, where \lambda is the proper
wavelength of fluctuations of interest and H^{-1} is the horizon at the end of
inflation. The bound holds as long as the energy density of the universe does
not drop faster than radiation subsequent to inflation. This limit implies that
the amount of expansion between the time the scales of interest leave the
horizon and the end of inflation, denoted by e^N, is also bounded from above,
by about e^60 times a factor that involves an integral over the first slow-roll
parameter. In other words, the bound on N is model dependent -- we show that
for vast classes of slow-roll models, N < 67. The quantities, \lambda / H^{-1}
or N, play an important role in determining the nature of inflationary scalar
and tensor fluctuations. We suggest ways to incorporate the above bounds when
confronting inflation models with observations. As an example, this bound
solidifies the tension between observations of cosmic microwave background
(CMB) anisotropies and chaotic inflation with a \phi^4 potential by closing the
escape hatch of large N (< 62).Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure; revised to close a loophole in the earlier version
and clarify our assumption
Search for gravitational waves from binary black hole inspirals in LIGO data
We report on a search for gravitational waves from binary black hole inspirals in the data from the second science run of the LIGO interferometers. The search focused on binary systems with component masses between 3 and 20M⊙. Optimally oriented binaries with distances up to 1 Mpc could be detected with efficiency of at least 90%. We found no events that could be identified as gravitational waves in the 385.6 hours of data that we searched
Upper limits on gravitational wave bursts in LIGO’s second science run
We perform a search for gravitational wave bursts using data from the second science run of the LIGO detectors, using a method based on a wavelet time-frequency decomposition. This search is sensitive to bursts of duration much less than a second and with frequency content in the 100–1100 Hz range. It features significant improvements in the instrument sensitivity and in the analysis pipeline with respect to the burst search previously reported by LIGO. Improvements in the search method allow exploring weaker signals, relative to the detector noise floor, while maintaining a low false alarm rate, O ( 0.1 ) μ Hz . The sensitivity in terms of the root-sum-square (rss) strain amplitude lies in the range of h rss ∼ 10 − 20 − 10 − 19 Hz − 1 / 2 . No gravitational wave signals were detected in 9.98 days of analyzed data. We interpret the search result in terms of a frequentist upper limit on the rate of detectable gravitational wave bursts at the level of 0.26 events per day at 90% confidence level. We combine this limit with measurements of the detection efficiency for selected waveform morphologies in order to yield rate versus strength exclusion curves as well as to establish order-of-magnitude distance sensitivity to certain modeled astrophysical sources. Both the rate upper limit and its applicability to signal strengths improve our previously reported limits and reflect the most sensitive broad-band search for untriggered and unmodeled gravitational wave bursts to date
First all-sky upper limits from LIGO on the strength of periodic gravitational waves using the Hough transform
We perform a wide parameter-space search for continuous gravitational waves over the whole sky and over a large range of values of the frequency and the first spin-down parameter. Our search method is based on the Hough transform, which is a semicoherent, computationally efficient, and robust pattern recognition technique. We apply this technique to data from the second science run of the LIGO detectors and our final results are all-sky upper limits on the strength of gravitational waves emitted by unknown isolated spinning neutron stars on a set of narrow frequency bands in the range 200–400 Hz. The best upper limit on the gravitational-wave strain amplitude that we obtain in this frequency range is 4.43×10−23
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