Effects of curvature and interactions on the dynamics of the deconfinement phase transition

We study the dynamics of first-order cofinement-deconfinement phase transition through nucleation of hadronic bubbles in an expanding quark gluon plasma in the context of heavy ion collisions for interacting quark and hadron gas and by incorporating the effects of curvature energy. We find that the interactions reduce the delay in the phase transition whereas the curvature energy has a mixed behavior. In contrast to the case of early Universe phase transition, here lower values of surface tension increase the supercooling and slow down the hadronization process. Higher values of bag pressure tend to speed up the transition. Another interesting feature is the start of the hadronization process as soon as the QGP is created.Comment: LaTeX, 17 pages including 14 postscript figure

Yarkovsky Drift Detections for 247 Near-Earth Asteroids

The Yarkovsky effect is a thermal process acting upon the orbits of small celestial bodies, which can cause these orbits to slowly expand or contract with time. The effect is subtle (da/dt ~ 10^-4 au/My for a 1 km diameter object) and is thus generally difficult to measure. We analyzed both optical and radar astrometry for 600 near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) for the purpose of detecting and quantifying the Yarkovsky effect. We present 247 NEAs with measured drift rates, which is the largest published set of Yarkovsky detections. This large sample size provides an opportunity to examine the Yarkovsky effect in a statistical manner. In particular, we describe two independent population-based tests that verify the measurement of Yarkovsky orbital drift. First, we provide observational confirmation for the Yarkovsky effect's theoretical size dependence of 1/D, where D is diameter. Second, we find that the observed ratio of negative to positive drift rates in our sample is 2.34, which, accounting for bias and sampling uncertainty, implies an actual ratio of $2.7^{+0.3}_{-0.7}$. This ratio has a vanishingly small probability of occurring due to chance or statistical noise. The observed ratio of retrograde to prograde rotators is two times lower than the ratio expected from numerical predictions from NEA population studies and traditional assumptions about the sense of rotation of NEAs originating from various main belt escape routes. We also examine the efficiency with which solar energy is converted into orbital energy and find a median efficiency in our sample of 12%. We interpret this efficiency in terms of NEA spin and thermal properties.Comment: 27 pages, 9 figures, published in the Astronomical Journal, 159, 92, 202

Near-IR studies of recurrent nova V745 Scorpii during its 2014 outburst

The recurrent nova (RN) V745 Scorpii underwent its third known outburst on 2014 February 6. Infrared monitoring of the eruption on an almost daily basis, starting from 1.3d after discovery, shows the emergence of a powerful blast wave generated by the high velocity nova ejecta exceeding 4000 kms$^{-1}$ plowing into its surrounding environment. The temperature of the shocked gas is raised to a high value exceeding 10$^{8}$K immediately after outburst commencement. The energetics of the outburst clearly surpass those of similar symbiotic systems like RS Oph and V407 Cyg which have giant secondaries. The shock does not show a free-expansion stage but rather shows a decelerative Sedov-Taylor phase from the beginning. Such strong shockfronts are known to be sites for $\gamma$ ray generation. V745 Sco is the latest nova, apart from five other known novae, to show $\gamma$ ray emission. It may be an important testbed to resolve the crucial question whether all novae are generically $\gamma$ ray emitters by virtue of having a circumbinary reservoir of material that is shocked by the ejecta rather than $\gamma$ ray generation being restricted to only symbiotic systems with a shocked red giant (RG) wind. The lack of a free-expansion stage favors V745 Sco to have a density enhancement around the white dwarf (WD), above that contributed by a RG wind. Our analysis also suggests that the WD in V745 Sco is very massive and a potential progenitor for a future SN Ia explosion.Comment: To appear in ApJ (Letters

Anomalous change in leakage and displacement currents after electrical poling on lead-free ferroelectric ceramics

We report the polarization, displacement current and leakage current behavior of a trivalent nonpolar cation Al cation substituted lead free ferroelectric NBT-BT electroceramics with tetragonal phase and P4mm space group symmetry. Nearly three orders of magnitude decrease in leakage current were observed under electrical poling, which significantly improves microstructure, polarization, and displacement current. Effective poling neutralizes the domain pinning, traps charges at grain boundaries and fills oxygen vacancies with free charge carriers in matrix, thus saturated macroscopic polarization in contrast to that in upoled samples. E-poling changes bananas type polarization loops to real ferroelectric loops.Comment: 18 pages, 5 figure

Path Integral Approach to Residual Gauge Fixing

In this paper we study the question of residual gauge fixing in the path integral approach for a general class of axial-type gauges including the light-cone gauge. We show that the two cases -- axial-type gauges and the light-cone gauge -- lead to very different structures for the explicit forms of the propagator. In the case of the axial-type gauges, fixing the residual symmetry determines the propagator of the theory completely. On the other hand, in the light-cone gauge there is still a prescription dependence even after fixing the residual gauge symmetry, which is related to the existence of an underlying global symmetry.Comment: revtex 13pages, slightly expanded discussion, version to be published in Physical Review

THERMAL EFFECTS ON THE CATALYSIS BY A MAGNETIC FIELD

We show that the formation of condensates in the presence of a constant magnetic field in 2+1 dimensions is extremely unstable. It disappears as soon as a heat bath is introduced with or without a chemical potential. We point out some new nonanalytic behavior that develops in this system at finite temperature.Comment: 10 pages, plain Te

Monodromy Matrix in the PP-Wave Limit

We construct the monodromy matrix for a class of gauged WZWN models in the plane wave limit and discuss various properties of such systems.Comment: 16 page

Quantization in a General Light-front Frame

In this paper, we study the question of quantization of quantum field theories in a general light-front frame. We quantize scalar, fermion as well as gauge field theories in a systematic manner carrying out the Hamiltonian analysis carefully. The decomposition of the fields into positive and negative frequency terms needs to be done carefully after which we show that the (anti) commutation relations for the quantum operators become frame independent. The frame dependence is completely contained in the functions multiplying these operators in the field decomposition. We derive the propagators from the vacuum expectation values of the time ordered products of the fields.Comment: 14 pages, revtex, version to be published in Phys. Rev. D with the discussion of Abelian field quantization replaced by the non-Abelian field and some comments added on the Mandelstam-Liebbrandt prescriptio

Light-front Schwinger Model at Finite Temperature

We study the light-front Schwinger model at finite temperature following the recent proposal in \cite{alves}. We show that the calculations are carried out efficiently by working with the full propagator for the fermion, which also avoids subtleties that arise with light-front regularizations. We demonstrate this with the calculation of the zero temperature anomaly. We show that temperature dependent corrections to the anomaly vanish, consistent with the results from the calculations in the conventional quantization. The gauge self-energy is seen to have the expected non-analytic behavior at finite temperature, but does not quite coincide with the conventional results. However, the two structures are exactly the same on-shell. We show that temperature does not modify the bound state equations and that the fermion condensate has the same behavior at finite temperature as that obtained in the conventional quantization.Comment: 10 pages, one figure, version to be published in Phys. Rev.

Hybrid Stars

Recently there have been important developments in the determination of neutron star masses which put severe constraints on the composition and equation of state (EOS) of the neutron star matter. Here we study the effect of quark and nuclear matter mixed phase on mass radius relationship of neutron stars employing recent models from two classes of EOS's and discuss their implications.Comment: 3 pages LaTeX including 2 figures, macros included, Talk presented at the IX International Symposium on Particles, Strings and Cosmology (PASCOS'03), TIFR, Mumbai, India, January 3-8,2003. To appear in their proceeding