Exploring the Variable Sky with LINEAR. I. Photometric Recalibration with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

We describe photometric recalibration of data obtained by the asteroid survey LINEAR. Although LINEAR was designed for astrometric discovery of moving objects, the data set described here contains over 5 billion photometric measurements for about 25 million objects, mostly stars. We use Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) data from the overlapping ~10,000 deg^2 of sky to recalibrate LINEAR photometry and achieve errors of 0.03 mag for sources not limited by photon statistics with errors of 0.2 mag at r ~ 18. With its 200 observations per object on average, LINEAR data provide time domain information for the brightest four magnitudes of the SDSS survey. At the same time, LINEAR extends the deepest similar wide-area variability survey, the Northern Sky Variability Survey, by 3 mag. We briefly discuss the properties of about 7000 visually confirmed periodic variables, dominated by roughly equal fractions of RR Lyrae stars and eclipsing binary stars, and analyze their distribution in optical and infrared color-color diagrams. The LINEAR data set is publicly available from the SkyDOT Web site

SDSSJ14584479+3720215: A Benchmark JHK Blazar Light Curve from the 2MASS Calibration Scans

Active galactic nuclei (AGNs) are well-known to exhibit flux variability across a wide range of wavelength regimes, but the precise origin of the variability at different wavelengths remains unclear. To investigate the relatively unexplored near-IR variability of the most luminous AGNs, we conduct a search for variability using well sampled JHKs-band light curves from the 2MASS survey calibration fields. Our sample includes 27 known quasars with an average of 924 epochs of observation over three years, as well as one spectroscopically confirmed blazar (SDSSJ14584479+3720215) with 1972 epochs of data. This is the best-sampled NIR photometric blazar light curve to date, and it exhibits correlated, stochastic variability that we characterize with continuous auto-regressive moving average (CARMA) models. None of the other 26 known quasars had detectable variability in the 2MASS bands above the photometric uncertainty. A blind search of the 2MASS calibration field light curves for AGN candidates based on fitting CARMA(1,0) models (damped-random walk) uncovered only 7 candidates. All 7 were young stellar objects within the {\rho} Ophiuchus star forming region, five with previous X-ray detections. A significant {\gamma}-ray detection (5{\sigma}) for the known blazar using 4.5 years of Fermi photon data is also found. We suggest that strong NIR variability of blazars, such as seen for SDSSJ14584479+3720215, can be used as an efficient method of identifying previously-unidentified {\gamma}-ray blazars, with low contamination from other AGN.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, ApJ Accepte

Isolation of highly selective IgNAR variable single-domains against a human therapeutic Fc scaffold and their application as tailor-made bioprocessing reagents

Funding This work was supported by the Industrial Biotechnology Innovation Centre, and Merck KGaA. Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank Iris Willenbücher and Kerstin Hallstein for the BIAcore™ analysis and Nadine Barron for the bio-layer interferometry work.Peer reviewedPostprin

Switchable ErSc2N rotor within a C80 fullerene cage: An EPR and photoluminescence excitation study

Systems exhibiting both spin and orbital degrees of freedom, of which Er3+ is one, can offer mechanisms for manipulating and measuring spin states via optical excitations. Motivated by the possibility of observing photoluminescence and electron paramagnetic resonance from the same species located within a fullerene molecule, we initiated an EPR study of Er3+ in ErSc2N@C80. Two orientations of the ErSc2N rotor within the C80 fullerene are observed in EPR, consistent with earlier studies using photoluminescence excitation (PLE) spectroscopy. For some crystal field orientations, electron spin relaxation is driven by an Orbach process via the first excited electronic state of the 4I_15/2 multiplet. We observe a change in the relative populations of the two ErSc2N configurations upon the application of 532 nm illuminations, and are thus able to switch the majority cage symmetry. This photoisomerisation, observable by both EPR and PLE, is metastable, lasting many hours at 20 K.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

Three-Dimensional Supergravity and the Cosmological Constant

Witten has argued that in $2+1$ dimensions local supersymmetry can ensure the vanishing of the cosmological constant without requiring the equality of bose and fermi masses. We find that this mechanism is implemented in a novel fashion in the (2+1)-dimensional supersymmetric abelian Higgs model coupled to supergravity. The vortex solitons are annihilated by half of the supersymmetry transformations. The covariantly constant spinors required to define these supersymmetries exist by virtue of a surprising cancellation between the Aharonov-Bohm phase and the phase associated with the holonomy of the spin connection. However the other half of the supersymmetry transformations, whose actions ordinarily generate the soliton supermultiplet, are not well-defined and bose-fermi degeneracy is consequently absent in the soliton spectrum.Comment: 12 pages, phyzz

The Large-Scale Extinction Map of the Galactic Bulge from the MACHO Project Photometry

We present a (V-R)-based reddening map of about 43 square degrees of the Galactic bulge/bar. The map is constructed using template image photometry from the MACHO microlensing survey, contains 9717 resolution elements, and is based on (V-R)-color averages of the entire color-magnitude diagrams (CMDs) in 4 by 4 arc-minute tiles. The conversion from the observed color to the reddening follows from an assumption that CMDs of all bulge fields would look similar in the absence of extinction. Consequently, the difference in observed color between various fields originates from varying contribution of the disk extinction summed along different lines of sight. We check that our (V-R) colors correlate very well with infrared and optical reddening maps. We show that a dusty disk obeying a cosec|b| extinction law, E(V-R) = 0.0274 cosec|b|, provides a good approximation to the extinction toward the MACHO bulge/bar fields. The large-scale (V-R)-color and visual extinction map presented here is publicly available in the electronic edition of the Journal and on the World Wide Web.Comment: 24 pages, 3 tables, 7 figures (6 in color), version accepted to AJ, added comparisons with Schlegel et al. (1998) and Dutra et al. (2003) reddening map

Photometric Confirmation of MACHO Large Magellanic Cloud Microlensing Events

We present previously unpublished photometry of three Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) microlensing events and show that the new photometry confirms the microlensing interpretation of these events. These events were discovered by the MACHO Project alert system and were also recovered by the analysis of the 5.7 year MACHO data set. This new photometry provides a substantial increase in the signal-to-noise ratio over the previously published photometry and in all three cases, the gravitational microlensing interpretation of these events is strengthened. The new data consist of MACHO-Global Microlensing Alert Network (GMAN) follow-up images from the CTIO 0.9 telescope plus difference imaging photometry of the original MACHO data from the 1.3m "Great Melbourne" telescope at Mt. Stromlo. We also combine microlensing light curve fitting with photometry from high resolution HST images of the source stars to provide further confirmation of these events and to show that the microlensing interpretation of event MACHO-LMC-23 is questionable. Finally, we compare our results with the analysis of Belokurov, Evans & Le Du who have attempted to classify candidate microlensing events with a neural network method, and we find that their results are contradicted by the new data and more powerful light curve fitting analysis for each of the four events considered in this paper. The failure of the Belokurov, Evans & Le Du method is likely to be due to their use of a set of insensitive statistics to feed their neural networks.Comment: 29 pages with 8 included postscript figures, accepted by the Astrophysical Journa