Kepler super-flare stars: what are they?

The Kepler mission has led to the serendipitous discovery of a significant number of `super flares' - white light flares with energies between 10^33 erg and 10^36 erg - on solar-type stars. It has been speculated that these could be `freak' events that might happen on the Sun, too. We have started a programme to study the nature of the stars on which these super flares have been observed. Here we present high-resolution spectroscopy of 11 of these stars and discuss our results. We find that several of these stars are very young, fast-rotating stars where high levels of stellar activity can be expected, but for some other stars we do not find a straightforward explanation for the occurrence of super flares.Comment: Accepted for publication in A&A, 9 pages, 4 figure

Construction and application of a questionnaire for the social scientific investigation of environmental noise effects

A social psychological questionnair has been developed to study the effects of environmental noise and was applied to 636 people living in 19 different areas of Hamburg. The theoretical foundations and the statistical means employed in its development are described. Four main reactions to noise are isolated statistically, and it is determined that these are moderated by several intervening variables, chief of which are coping capacity for noise, the perceived dangerousness of the noise souce, other daily loads and the individual's liability

Disorder induced Coulomb gaps in graphene constrictions with different aspect ratios

We present electron transport measurements on lithographically defined and etched graphene nanoconstrictions with different aspect ratios including different lengths (L) and widths (W). A roughly length-independent disorder induced effective energy gap can be observed around the charge neutrality point. This energy gap scales inversely with the width even in regimes where the length of the constriction is smaller than its width (L<W). In very short constrictions, we observe both resonances due to localized states or charged islands and an elevated overall conductance level (0.1-1e2/h), which is strongly length-dependent in the gap region. This makes very short graphene constrictions interesting for highly transparent graphene tunneling barriers.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

Flows, Fragmentation, and Star Formation. I. Low-mass Stars in Taurus

The remarkably filamentary spatial distribution of young stars in the Taurus molecular cloud has significant implications for understanding low-mass star formation in relatively quiescent conditions. The large scale and regular spacing of the filaments suggests that small-scale turbulence is of limited importance, which could be consistent with driving on large scales by flows which produced the cloud. The small spatial dispersion of stars from gaseous filaments indicates that the low-mass stars are generally born with small velocity dispersions relative to their natal gas, of order the sound speed or less. The spatial distribution of the stars exhibits a mean separation of about 0.25 pc, comparable to the estimated Jeans length in the densest gaseous filaments, and is consistent with roughly uniform density along the filaments. The efficiency of star formation in filaments is much higher than elsewhere, with an associated higher frequency of protostars and accreting T Tauri stars. The protostellar cores generally are aligned with the filaments, suggesting that they are produced by gravitational fragmentation, resulting in initially quasi-prolate cores. Given the absence of massive stars which could strongly dominate cloud dynamics, Taurus provides important tests of theories of dispersed low-mass star formation and numerical simulations of molecular cloud structure and evolution.Comment: 32 pages, 9 figures: to appear in Ap

Investigation into the limits of perturbation theory at low Q^2 using HERA deep inelastic scattering data

A phenomenological study of the final combined HERA data on inclusive deep inelastic scattering (DIS) has been performed. The data are presented and investigated for a kinematic range extending from values of the four-momentum transfer, $Q^2$, above 10$^4$ GeV$^2$ down to the lowest values observable at HERA of $Q^2$ = 0.045 GeV$^2$ and Bjorken $x$, $x_{\rm Bj}$ = 6 $\cdot$ 10$^{-7}$. The data are well described by fits based on perturbative quantum chromodynamics (QCD) using collinear factorisation and evolution of the parton densities encompassed in the DGLAP formalism from the highest $Q^2$ down to $Q^2$ of a few GeV$^2$. The Regge formalism can describe the data up to $Q^2 \approx$ 0.65 GeV$^2$. The complete data set can be described by a new fit using the ALLM parameterisation. The region between the Regge and the perturbative QCD regimes is of particular interest.Comment: 38 pages, 13 figure

Surface differential rotation and prominences of the Lupus post T Tauri star RX J1508.6-4423

We present in this paper a spectroscopic monitoring of the Lupus post T Tauri star RX J1508.6-4423 carried out at two closely separated epochs (1998 May 06 and 10) with the UCL Echelle Spectrograph on the 3.9-m Anglo-Australian Telescope. Applying least-squares convolution and maximum entropy image reconstruction techniques to our sets of spectra, we demonstrate that this star features on its surface a large cool polar cap with several appendages extending to lower latitudes, as well as one spot close to the equator. The images reconstructed at both epochs are in good overall agreement, except for a photospheric shear that we interpret in terms of latitudinal differential rotation. Given the spot distribution at the epoch of our observations, differential rotation could only be investigated between latitudes 15° and 60°. We find in particular that the observed differential rotation is compatible with a solar-like law (i.e., with rotation rate decreasing towards high latitudes proportionally to sin 2l, where l denotes the latitude) in this particular latitude range. Assuming that such a law can be extrapolated to all latitudes, we find that the equator of RX J1508.6-4423 does one more rotational cycle than the pole every 50 ±10 d, implying a photospheric shear 2 to 3 times stronger than that of the Sun. We also discover that the Hα emission profile of RX J1508.6-4423 is most of the time double-peaked and strongly modulated with the rotation period of the star. We interpret this rotationally modulated emission as being caused by a dense and complex prominence system, the circumstellar distribution of which is obtained through maximum entropy Doppler tomography. These maps show in particular that prominences form a complete and inhomogeneous ring around the star, precisely at the corotation radius. We use the total Hα and Hβ emission flux to estimate that the mass of the whole prominence system is about 10 20g. From our observation that the whole cloud system surrounding the star is regenerated in less than 4 d, we conclude that the braking time-scale of RX J1508.6-4423 is shorter than 1 Gyr, and that prominence expulsion is thus likely to contribute significantly to the rotational spindown of young low-mass stars

About the Triangle Inequality in Perceptual Spaces

Perceptual similarity is often formalized as a metric in a multi-dimensional space. Stimuli are points in the space and stimuli that are similar are close to each other in this space. A large distance separates stimuli that are very different from each other. This conception of similarity prevails in studies from color perception and face perception to studies of categorization. While this notion of similarity is intuitively plausible there has been an intense debate in cognitive psychology whether perceived dissimilarity satisfies the metric axioms. In a seminal series of papers, Tversky and colleagues have challenged all of the metric axioms [1,2,3]. The triangle inequality has been the hardest of the metric axioms to test experimentally. The reason for this is that measurements of perceived dissimilarity are usually only on an ordinal scale, on an interval scale at most. Hence, the triangle inequality on a finite set of points can always be satisfied, trivially, by adding a big enough constant to the measurements. Tversky and Gati [3] found a way to test the triangle inequality in conjunction with a second, very common assumption. This assumption is segmental additivity [1]: The distance from A to C equals the distance from A to B plus the distance from B to C, if B is “on the way”. All of the metrics that had been suggested to model similarity also had this assumption of segmental additivity, be it the Euclidean metric, the Lp-metric, or any Riemannian geometry. Tversky and Gati collected a substantial amount of data using many different stimulus sets, ranging from perceptual to cognitive, and found strong evidence that many human similarity judgments cannot be accounted for by the usual models of similarity. This led them to the conclusion that either the triangle inequality has to be given up or one has to use metric models with subadditive metrics. They favored the first solution. Here, we present a principled subadditive metric based on Shepard’s universal law of generalization [4]. Instead of representing each stimulus as a point in a multi-dimensional space our subadditive metric stems from representing each stimulus by its similarity to all other stimuli in the space. This similarity function, as for example given by Shepard’s law, will usually be a radial basis function and also a positive definite kernel. Hence, there is a natural inner product defined by the kernel and a metric that is induced by the inner product. This metric is subadditive. In addition, this metric has the psychologically desirable property that the distance between stimuli is bounded

Parametric grinding wheel model for material removal simulation of tool grinding processes

Tool grinding is an essential process for the production of cemented carbide tools. In that context, the investigation of specific effects like the resulting surface profile and the fluid dynamic processes is of great interest, but requires microscopic modeling of the grinding wheel including its individual grains and bonding material. This paper introduces an approach for a parametric grinding wheel model, which provides a topography on microscopic scale depending on the grinding wheel specification and dressing conditions for subsequent use in material removal simulations. Scalable abrasive grains and variable distributions embedded in a shiftable bond layer are applied. Optical laser scans are used to derive surface parameters for an adaption and evaluation of the model. The prediction quality in terms of surface roughness is evaluated in surface grinding reference experiments

Transport in coupled graphene-nanotube quantum devices

We report on the fabrication and characterization of all-carbon hybrid quantum devices based on graphene and single-walled carbon nanotubes. We discuss both, carbon nanotube quantum dot devices with graphene charge detectors and nanotube quantum dots with graphene leads. The devices are fabricated by chemical vapor deposition growth of carbon nanotubes and subsequent structuring of mechanically exfoliated graphene. We study the detection of individual charging events in the carbon nanotube quantum dot by a nearby graphene nanoribbon and show that they lead to changes of up to 20% of the conductance maxima in the graphene nanoribbon acting as a good performing charge detector. Moreover, we discuss an electrically coupled graphene-nanotube junction, which exhibits a tunneling barrier with tunneling rates in the low GHz regime. This allows to observe Coulomb blockade on a carbon nanotube quantum dot with graphene source and drain leads