Investigation of Single Boron Acceptors at the Cleaved Si:B (111) Surface

The cleaved and (2 x 1) reconstructed (111) surface of p-type Si is investigated by scanning tunneling microscopy (STM). Single B acceptors are identified due to their characteristic voltage-dependent contrast which is explained by a local energetic shift of the electronic density of states caused by the Coulomb potential of the negatively charged acceptor. In addition, detailed analysis of the STM images shows that apparently one orbital is missing at the B site at sample voltages of 0.4 - 0.6 V, corresponding to the absence of a localized dangling-bond state. Scanning tunneling spectroscopy confirms a strongly altered density of states at the B atom due to the different electronic structure of B compared to Si.Comment: 6 pages, 7 figure

Moduli Stabilisation and de Sitter String Vacua from Magnetised D7 Branes

Anomalous U(1)'s are ubiquitous in 4D chiral string models. Their presence crucially affects the process of moduli stabilisation and cannot be neglected in realistic set-ups. Their net effect in the 4D effective action is to induce a matter field dependence in the non-perturbative superpotential and a Fayet-Iliopoulos D-term. We study flux compactifications of IIB string theory in the presence of magnetised D7 branes. These give rise to anomalous U(1)'s that modify the standard moduli stabilisation procedure. We consider simple orientifold models to determine the matter field spectrum and the form of the effective field theory. We apply our results to one-modulus KKLT and multi-moduli large volume scenarios, in particular to the Calabi-Yau P^4_{[1,1,1,6,9]}. After stabilising the matter fields, the effective action for the Kahler moduli can acquire an extra positive term that can be used for de Sitter lifting with non-vanishing F- and D-terms. This provides an explicit realization of the D-term lifting proposal of hep-th/0309187.Comment: 35 pages, 1 figure. v2: Minor changes, references adde

Linear Paul trap design for an optical clock with Coulomb crystals

We report on the design of a segmented linear Paul trap for optical clock applications using trapped ion Coulomb crystals. For an optical clock with an improved short-term stability and a fractional frequency uncertainty of 10^-18, we propose 115In+ ions sympathetically cooled by 172Yb+. We discuss the systematic frequency shifts of such a frequency standard. In particular, we elaborate on high precision calculations of the electric radiofrequency field of the ion trap using the finite element method. These calculations are used to find a scalable design with minimized excess micromotion of the ions at a level at which the corresponding second- order Doppler shift contributes less than 10^-18 to the relative uncertainty of the frequency standard

Building MSSM Flux Vacua

We construct N=1 and N=0 chiral four-dimensional vacua of flux compactification in Type IIB string theory. These vacua have the common features that they are free of tadpole instabilities (both NSNS and RR) even for models with N=0 supersymmetry. In addition, the dilaton/complex structure moduli are stabilised and the supergravity background metric is warped. We present an example in which the low energy spectrum contains the MSSM spectrum with three generations of chiral matter. In the N=0 models, the background fluxes which stabilise the moduli also induce soft supersymmetry breaking terms in the gauge and chiral sectors of the theory, while satisfying the equation of motion. We also discuss some phenomenological features of these three generation MSSM flux vacua. Our techniques apply to other closed string backgrounds as well and, in fact, also allow to find new N=1 D-brane models which were believed not to exist. Finally, we discuss in detail the consistency conditions of these flux compactifications. Cancellation of K-theory charges puts additional constraints on the consistency of the models, which render some chiral D-brane models in the literature inconsistent.Comment: 33 pages, 1 figure. Minor correction

Pre - Inflationary Clues from String Theory ?

"Brane supersymmetry breaking" occurs in String Theory when the only available combinations of D-branes and orientifolds are not mutually BPS and yet do not introduce tree-level tachyon instabilities. It is characterized by the emergence of a steep exponential potential, and thus by the absence of maximally symmetric vacua. The corresponding low-energy supergravity admits intriguing spatially-flat cosmological solutions where a scalar field is forced to climb up toward the steep potential after an initial singularity, and additional milder terms can inject an inflationary phase during the ensuing descent. We show that, in the resulting power spectra of scalar perturbations, an infrared suppression is typically followed by a pre-inflationary peak that reflects the end of the climbing phase and can lie well apart from the approximately scale invariant profile. A first look at WMAP9 raw data shows that, while the chi^2 fits for the low-l CMB angular power spectrum are clearly compatible with an almost scale invariant behavior, they display nonetheless an eye-catching preference for this type of setting within a perturbative string regime.Comment: 34 pages, LaTeX, 16 eps figures. Relative displacement in fig. 14 and some typos corrected, references and acknowledgments updated. To appear in JCA

Preembryo Personhood: An Assessment of the President’s Council Arguments

The President’s Council on Bioethics has addressed the moral status of human preembryos in its reports on stem cell research and human therapeutic cloning. Although the Council has been criticized for being hand-picked to favor the right-to-life viewpoint concerning human preembryos, it has embraced the idea that the right-to-life position should be defended in secular terms. This is an important feature of the Council’s work, and it demonstrates a recognition of the need for genuine engagement between opposing sides in the debate over stem cell research. To promote this engagement, the Council has stated in secular terms several arguments for the personhood of human preembryos. This essay presents and critiques those arguments, and it concludes that they are unsuccessful. If the best arguments in support of the personhood of human preembryos have been presented by the Council, then there are no reasonable secular arguments in support of that view

High-time Resolution Astrophysics and Pulsars

The discovery of pulsars in 1968 heralded an era where the temporal characteristics of detectors had to be reassessed. Up to this point detector integration times would normally be measured in minutes rather seconds and definitely not on sub-second time scales. At the start of the 21st century pulsar observations are still pushing the limits of detector telescope capabilities. Flux variations on times scales less than 1 nsec have been observed during giant radio pulses. Pulsar studies over the next 10 to 20 years will require instruments with time resolutions down to microseconds and below, high-quantum quantum efficiency, reasonable energy resolution and sensitive to circular and linear polarisation of stochastic signals. This chapter is review of temporally resolved optical observations of pulsars. It concludes with estimates of the observability of pulsars with both existing telescopes and into the ELT era.Comment: Review; 21 pages, 5 figures, 86 references. Book chapter to appear in: D.Phelan, O.Ryan & A.Shearer, eds.: High Time Resolution Astrophysics (Astrophysics and Space Science Library, Springer, 2007). The original publication will be available at http://www.springerlink.co

Evidence for a mixed mass composition at the `ankle' in the cosmic-ray spectrum

We report a first measurement for ultra-high energy cosmic rays of the correlation between the depth of shower maximum and the signal in the water Cherenkov stations of air-showers registered simultaneously by the fluorescence and the surface detectors of the Pierre Auger Observatory. Such a correlation measurement is a unique feature of a hybrid air-shower observatory with sensitivity to both the electromagnetic and muonic components. It allows an accurate determination of the spread of primary masses in the cosmic-ray flux. Up till now, constraints on the spread of primary masses have been dominated by systematic uncertainties. The present correlation measurement is not affected by systematics in the measurement of the depth of shower maximum or the signal in the water Cherenkov stations. The analysis relies on general characteristics of air showers and is thus robust also with respect to uncertainties in hadronic event generators. The observed correlation in the energy range around the `ankle' at $\lg(E/{\rm eV})=18.5-19.0$ differs significantly from expectations for pure primary cosmic-ray compositions. A light composition made up of proton and helium only is equally inconsistent with observations. The data are explained well by a mixed composition including nuclei with mass $A > 4$. Scenarios such as the proton dip model, with almost pure compositions, are thus disfavoured as the sole explanation of the ultrahigh-energy cosmic-ray flux at Earth.Comment: Published version. Added journal reference and DOI. Added Report Numbe

Search for direct production of charginos and neutralinos in events with three leptons and missing transverse momentum in √s = 7 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector

A search for the direct production of charginos and neutralinos in final states with three electrons or muons and missing transverse momentum is presented. The analysis is based on 4.7 fb−1 of proton–proton collision data delivered by the Large Hadron Collider and recorded with the ATLAS detector. Observations are consistent with Standard Model expectations in three signal regions that are either depleted or enriched in Z-boson decays. Upper limits at 95% confidence level are set in R-parity conserving phenomenological minimal supersymmetric models and in simplified models, significantly extending previous results

Jet size dependence of single jet suppression in lead-lead collisions at sqrt(s(NN)) = 2.76 TeV with the ATLAS detector at the LHC

Measurements of inclusive jet suppression in heavy ion collisions at the LHC provide direct sensitivity to the physics of jet quenching. In a sample of lead-lead collisions at sqrt(s) = 2.76 TeV corresponding to an integrated luminosity of approximately 7 inverse microbarns, ATLAS has measured jets with a calorimeter over the pseudorapidity interval |eta| < 2.1 and over the transverse momentum range 38 < pT < 210 GeV. Jets were reconstructed using the anti-kt algorithm with values for the distance parameter that determines the nominal jet radius of R = 0.2, 0.3, 0.4 and 0.5. The centrality dependence of the jet yield is characterized by the jet "central-to-peripheral ratio," Rcp. Jet production is found to be suppressed by approximately a factor of two in the 10% most central collisions relative to peripheral collisions. Rcp varies smoothly with centrality as characterized by the number of participating nucleons. The observed suppression is only weakly dependent on jet radius and transverse momentum. These results provide the first direct measurement of inclusive jet suppression in heavy ion collisions and complement previous measurements of dijet transverse energy imbalance at the LHC.Comment: 15 pages plus author list (30 pages total), 8 figures, 2 tables, submitted to Physics Letters B. All figures including auxiliary figures are available at http://atlas.web.cern.ch/Atlas/GROUPS/PHYSICS/PAPERS/HION-2011-02