19,999 research outputs found
The Pierre Auger Observatory: Results on Ultra-High Energy Cosmic Rays
The focus of this article is on recent results on ultra-high energy cosmic
rays obtained with the Pierre Auger Observatory. The world's largest instrument
of this type and its performance are described. The observations presented here
include the energy spectrum, the primary particle composition, limits on the
fluxes of photons and neutrinos and a discussion of the anisotropic
distribution of the arrival directions of the most energetic particles.
Finally, plans for the construction of a Northern Auger Observatory in
Colorado, USA, are discussed.Comment: Proceedings of the International Workshop on Advances in Cosmic Ray
Science, Waseda University, Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan, March 2008; to be
published in the Journal of the Physical Society of Japan (JPSJ) supplemen
Detection of Gravitational Waves from the Coalescence of Population-III Remnants with Advanced LIGO
The comoving mass density of massive black hole (MBH) remnants from
pre-galactic star formation could have been similar in magnitude to the
mass-density of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) in the present-day universe.
We show that the fraction of MBHs that coalesce during the assembly of SMBHs
can be extracted from the rate of ring-down gravitational waves that are
detectable by Advanced LIGO. Based on the SMBH formation history inferred from
the evolution of the quasar luminosity function, we show that an observed event
rate of 1 per year will constrain the SMBH mass fraction that was contributed
by MBHs coalescence down to a level of ~10^-6 for 20 solar mass MBH remnants
(or ~10^-4 for 260 solar mass remnants).Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures. Submitted to ApJ Letter
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Descriptors for terpene esters from chromatographic and partition measurements: Estimation of human odor detection thresholds
We have used gas chromatographic retention data together with other data to obtain Abraham descriptors for 30 terpene esters. These include the air-water partition coefficient, as log Kw, for which no experimental values are available for any terpene ester. The other descriptors are the ester dipolarity, S, the hydrogen bond basicity, B, (the ester hydrogen bond acidity is zero for the esters studied), and L the logarithm of the air-hexadecane partition coefficient. Both S and B are larger than those for simple aliphatic esters, as expected from the terpene ester structures that include ring systems and ethylenic double bonds. These descriptors can then be used to obtain a large number of physicochemical and environmental properties of terpene esters. We have analyzed experimental results on human odor detection thresholds and have constructed another equation for the calculation of these thresholds, to go with a previous equation that we have reported. Then the descriptors for terpene esters can be used to estimate the important odor detection thresholds
Lower Bounds in the Preprocessing and Query Phases of Routing Algorithms
In the last decade, there has been a substantial amount of research in
finding routing algorithms designed specifically to run on real-world graphs.
In 2010, Abraham et al. showed upper bounds on the query time in terms of a
graph's highway dimension and diameter for the current fastest routing
algorithms, including contraction hierarchies, transit node routing, and hub
labeling. In this paper, we show corresponding lower bounds for the same three
algorithms. We also show how to improve a result by Milosavljevic which lower
bounds the number of shortcuts added in the preprocessing stage for contraction
hierarchies. We relax the assumption of an optimal contraction order (which is
NP-hard to compute), allowing the result to be applicable to real-world
instances. Finally, we give a proof that optimal preprocessing for hub labeling
is NP-hard. Hardness of optimal preprocessing is known for most routing
algorithms, and was suspected to be true for hub labeling
Observational evidence of spin-induced precession in active galactic nuclei
We show that it is possible to explain the physical origin of jet precession
in active galactic nuclei (AGNs) through the misalignment between the rotation
axes of the accretion disk and of the Kerr black hole. We apply this scenario
to quasars, Seyfert galaxies and also to the Galactic Center black hole Sgr A*,
for which signatures of either jet or disk precession have been found. The
formalism adopted is parameterized by the ratio of the precession period to the
black hole mass and can be used to put constraints to the physical properties
of the accretion disk as well as to the black hole spin in those systems.Comment: 10 pages, 1 figure, accepted for publication in ApJ Letter
Cosmological Origin of the Stellar Velocity Dispersions in Massive Early-Type Galaxies
We show that the observed upper bound on the line-of-sight velocity
dispersion of the stars in an early-type galaxy, sigma<400km/s, may have a
simple dynamical origin within the LCDM cosmological model, under two main
hypotheses. The first is that most of the stars now in the luminous parts of a
giant elliptical formed at redshift z>6. Subsequently, the stars behaved
dynamically just as an additional component of the dark matter. The second
hypothesis is that the mass distribution characteristic of a newly formed dark
matter halo forgets such details of the initial conditions as the stellar
"collisionless matter" that was added to the dense parts of earlier generations
of halos. We also assume that the stellar velocity dispersion does not evolve
much at z<6, because a massive host halo grows mainly by the addition of
material at large radii well away from the stellar core of the galaxy. These
assumptions lead to a predicted number density of ellipticals as a function of
stellar velocity dispersion that is in promising agreement with the Sloan
Digital Sky Survey data.Comment: ApJ, in press (2003); matches published versio
New two-sided bound on the isotropic Lorentz-violating parameter of modified Maxwell theory
There is a unique Lorentz-violating modification of the Maxwell theory of
photons, which maintains gauge invariance, CPT, and renormalizability.
Restricting the modified-Maxwell theory to the isotropic sector and adding a
standard spin-one-half Dirac particle p^\pm with minimal coupling to the
nonstandard photon \widetilde{\gamma}, the resulting
modified-quantum-electrodynamics model involves a single dimensionless
"deformation parameter," \widetilde{\kappa}_{tr}. The exact tree-level decay
rates for two processes have been calculated: vacuum Cherenkov radiation p^\pm
\to p^\pm \widetilde{\gamma} for the case of positive \widetilde{\kappa}_{tr}
and photon decay \widetilde{\gamma} \to p^+ p^- for the case of negative
\widetilde{\kappa}_{tr}. From the inferred absence of these decays for a
particular high-quality ultrahigh-energy-cosmic-ray event detected at the
Pierre Auger Observatory and an excess of TeV gamma-ray events observed by the
High Energy Stereoscopic System telescopes, a two-sided bound on
\widetilde{\kappa}_{tr} is obtained, which improves by eight orders of
magnitude upon the best direct laboratory bound. The implications of this
result are briefly discussed.Comment: 18 pages, v5: published version in preprint styl
Canonical transformations in three-dimensional phase space
Canonical transformation in a three-dimensional phase space endowed with
Nambu bracket is discussed in a general framework. Definition of the canonical
transformations is constructed as based on canonoid transformations. It is
shown that generating functions, transformed Hamilton functions and the
transformation itself for given generating functions can be determined by
solving Pfaffian differential equations corresponding to that quantities. Types
of the generating functions are introduced and all of them is listed.
Infinitesimal canonical transformations are also discussed. Finally, we show
that decomposition of canonical transformations is also possible in
three-dimensional phase space as in the usual two-dimensional one.Comment: 19 pages, 1 table, no figures. Accepted for publication in Int. J.
Mod. Phys.
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