Developing public awareness for climate change: Support from international research programs

Developing regional and local public awareness and interest in global climate change has been mandated as an important step for increasing the ability for setting policy and managing the response to climate change. Research programs frequently have resources that could help reach regional or national goals for increasing the capacity for responding to climate change. To obtain these resources and target recipients appropriately, research investigators need clear statements of national and regional strategies or priorities as a guide. One such program, the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Program, has a requirement to develop local or regional education enrichment programs at their observational sites in the central US, the tropical western Pacific (TWP), and on the north slope of alaska. ARM's scientific goals will result in a flow of technical data and as well as technical expertise that can assist with regional needs to increase the technical resources needed to address climate change issues. Details of the ARM education program in the Pacific will be presented

New Non-Diagonal Singularity-Free Cosmological Perfect-Fluid Solution

We present a new non-diagonal G2 inhomogeneous perfect-fluid solution with barotropic equation of state p=rho and positive density everywhere. It satisfies the global hyperbolicity condition and has no curvature singularity anywhere. This solution is very simple in form and has two arbitrary constants.Comment: Latex, no figure

Measurement of hybrid content of heavy quarkonia using lattice NRQCD

Using lowest-order lattice NRQCD to create heavy meson propagators and applying the spin-dependent interaction, $c_B^{} \frac{-g}{2m_q}\vec\sigma\cdot\vec{B}$, at varying intermediate time slices, we compute the off-diagonal matrix element of the Hamiltonian for the quarkonium-hybrid two-state system. Thus far, we have results for one set of quenched lattices with an interpolation in quark mass to match the bottomonium spectrum. After diagonalization of the two-state Hamiltonian, we find the ground state of the $\Upsilon$ to show a $0.0035(1)c_B^2$ (with $c_B^2 \sim 1.5-3.1$) probability admixture of hybrid, $|b\bar{b}g>$.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figures, to appear in Phys Rev

Coulomb gauge approach to (qqg)over-bar hybrid mesons

An effective Coulomb gauge Hamiltonian, H-eff, is used to calculate the light ( u (u) over barg), strange ( s (s) over barg) and charmed (c (c) over barg) hybrid meson spectra. For the same two parameter H-eff providing glueball masses consistent with lattice results and a good description of the observed u, d, s and c quark mesons, a large-scale variational treatment predicts that the lightest hybrid has J(PC) = 0(++) and mass 2.1 GeV. The lightest exotic 1(-+) state is just above 2.2 GeV, near the upper limit of lattice and flux tube predictions. These theoretical formulations all indicate that the observed 1(-+) pi(1)(1600) and, more clearly, pi(1)(1400) are not hybrid states. The Coulomb gauge approach further predicts that in the strange and charmed sectors, respectively, the ground state hybrids have 1(+-) with masses 2.1 and 3.8 GeV, while the. rst exotic 1( +) states are at 2.4 and 4.0 GeV. Finally, using our hybrid wavefunctions and the Franck-Condon principle, a novel experimental signature is presented to assist heavy hybrid meson searches

Hybrid configuration content of heavy S-wave mesons

We use the non-relativistic expansion of QCD (NRQCD) on the lattice to study the lowest hybrid configuration contribution to the ground state of heavy S-wave mesons. Using lowest-order lattice NRQCD to create the heavy-quark propagators, we form a basis of ``unperturbed'' S-wave and hybrid states. We then apply the lowest-order coupling of the quark spin and chromomagnetic field at an intermediate time slice to create ``mixed'' correlators between the S-wave and hybrid states. From the resulting amplitudes, we extract the off-diagonal element of our two-state Hamiltonian. Diagonalizing this Hamiltonian gives us the admixture of hybrid configuration within the meson ground state. The present effort represents a continuation of previous work: the analysis has been extended to include lattices of varying spacings, source operators having better overlap with the ground states, and the pseudoscalar (along with the vector) channel. Results are presented for bottomonium ($\Upsilon$, $\eta_b^{}$) using three different sets of quenched lattices. We also show results for charmonium ($J/\psi$, $\eta_c^{}$) from one lattice set, although we note that the non-relativistic approximation is not expected to be very good in this case.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures, version to appear in Phys Rev

Tidal Venuses: Triggering a Climate Catastrophe via Tidal Heating

Traditionally stellar radiation has been the only heat source considered capable of determining global climate on long timescales. Here we show that terrestrial exoplanets orbiting low-mass stars may be tidally heated at high enough levels to induce a runaway greenhouse for a long enough duration for all the hydrogen to escape. Without hydrogen, the planet no longer has water and cannot support life. We call these planets "Tidal Venuses," and the phenomenon a "tidal greenhouse." Tidal effects also circularize the orbit, which decreases tidal heating. Hence, some planets may form with large eccentricity, with its accompanying large tidal heating, and lose their water, but eventually settle into nearly circular orbits (i.e. with negligible tidal heating) in the habitable zone (HZ). However, these planets are not habitable as past tidal heating desiccated them, and hence should not be ranked highly for detailed follow-up observations aimed at detecting biosignatures. Planets orbiting stars with masses <0.3 solar masses may be in danger of desiccation via tidal heating. We apply these concepts to Gl 667C c, a ~4.5 Earth-mass planet orbiting a 0.3 solar mass star at 0.12 AU. We find that it probably did not lose its water via tidal heating as orbital stability is unlikely for the high eccentricities required for the tidal greenhouse. As the inner edge of the HZ is defined by the onset of a runaway or moist greenhouse powered by radiation, our results represent a fundamental revision to the HZ for non-circular orbits. In the appendices we review a) the moist and runaway greenhouses, b) hydrogen escape, c) stellar mass-radius and mass-luminosity relations, d) terrestrial planet mass-radius relations, and e) linear tidal theories. [abridged]Comment: 59 pages, 11 figures, accepted to Astrobiology. New version includes an appendix on the water loss timescal

YREC: The Yale Rotating Stellar Evolution Code

The stellar evolution code YREC is outlined with emphasis on its applications to helio- and asteroseismology. The procedure for calculating calibrated solar and stellar models is described. Other features of the code such as a non-local treatment of convective core overshoot, and the implementation of a parametrized description of turbulence in stellar models, are considered in some detail. The code has been extensively used for other astrophysical applications, some of which are briefly mentioned at the end of the paper.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figures, ApSS accepte

Level-Spacing Distributions and the Bessel Kernel

The level spacing distributions which arise when one rescales the Laguerre or Jacobi ensembles of hermitian matrices is studied. These distributions are expressible in terms of a Fredholm determinant of an integral operator whose kernel is expressible in terms of Bessel functions of order $\alpha$. We derive a system of partial differential equations associated with the logarithmic derivative of this Fredholm determinant when the underlying domain is a union of intervals. In the case of a single interval this Fredholm determinant is a Painleve tau function.Comment: 18 pages, resubmitted to make postscript compatible, no changes to manuscript conten

Finite size and temperature effects in the AF Heisenberg model

The low temperature and large volume effects in the d=2+1 antiferromagnetic quantum Heisenberg model are dominated by magnon excitations. The leading and next-to-leading corrections are fully controlled by three physical constants, the spin stiffness, the spin wave velocity and the staggered magnetization. Among others, the free energy, the ground state energy, the low lying excitations, staggered magnetization, staggered and uniform susceptibilities are studied here. The special limits of very low temperature and infinite volume are considered also.Comment: 44 pages, LATEX, no figure