37,763 research outputs found
X-rays from the Eclipsing Millisecond Pulsar PSR J1740-5340 in the Globular Cluster NGC 6397
The millisecond pulsar PSR J1740-5340 in the globular cluster NGC 6397 shows
radio eclipses over ~40% of its binary orbit. A first Chandra observation
revealed indications for the X-ray flux being orbit dependent as well. In this
work we analysed five data sets of archival Chandra data taken between 2000 and
2007 in order to investigate the emission across the pulsar's binary orbit.
Utilizing archival Chandra observations of PSR J1740-5340, we have performed a
systematic timing and spectral analysis of this binary system. Using a
chi-square-test the significance for intra-binary orbital modulation is found
to be between 88.5% and 99.6%, depending on the number of phase bins used to
construct the light curve. Applying the unbiased statistical Kolmogorov-Smirnov
(KS) test did not indicate any significant intra-binary orbital modulation,
though. However, comparing the counting rates observed at different epochs a
flux variability on times scales of days to years is indicated. The possible
origin of the X-ray emission is discussed in a number of different scenarios.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures. Accepted for publication in Astronomy and
Astrophysic
ROSAT HRI Observations of the Crab Pulsar: An Improved Temperature upper limit for PSR 0531+21
ROSAT HRI observations have been used to determine an upper limit of the Crab
pulsar surface temperature from the off-pulse count rate. For a neutron star
mass of 1.4 \Mo and a radius of 10 km as well as the standard distance and
interstellar column density, the redshifted temperature upper limit is\/
K . This is the lowest temperature
upper limit obtained for the Crab pulsar so far. Slightly different values for
are computed for the various neutron star models available in the
literature, reflecting the difference in the equation of state.Comment: 5 pages, uuencoded postscript, to be published in the Proceedings of
the NATO Advanced Study Insitute on "Lives of the Neutron Stars", ed. A.
Alpar, U. Kiziloglu and J. van Paradijs ( Kluwer, Dordrecht, 1995 )
Interference effects in above-threshold ionization from diatomic molecules: determining the internuclear separation
We calculate angle-resolved above-threshold ionization spectra for diatomic
molecules in linearly polarized laser fields, employing the strong-field
approximation. The interference structure resulting from the individual
contributions of the different scattering scenarios is discussed in detail,
with respect to the dependence on the internuclear distance and molecular
orientation. We show that, in general, the contributions from the processes in
which the electron is freed at one center and rescatters off the other obscure
the interference maxima and minima obtained from single-center processes.
However, around the boundary of the energy regions for which rescattering has a
classical counterpart, such processes play a negligible role and very clear
interference patterns are observed. In such energy regions, one is able to
infer the internuclear distance from the energy difference between adjacent
interference minima.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures; discussions slightly modified and an additional
figure inserted for clarit
Clustering Memes in Social Media
The increasing pervasiveness of social media creates new opportunities to
study human social behavior, while challenging our capability to analyze their
massive data streams. One of the emerging tasks is to distinguish between
different kinds of activities, for example engineered misinformation campaigns
versus spontaneous communication. Such detection problems require a formal
definition of meme, or unit of information that can spread from person to
person through the social network. Once a meme is identified, supervised
learning methods can be applied to classify different types of communication.
The appropriate granularity of a meme, however, is hardly captured from
existing entities such as tags and keywords. Here we present a framework for
the novel task of detecting memes by clustering messages from large streams of
social data. We evaluate various similarity measures that leverage content,
metadata, network features, and their combinations. We also explore the idea of
pre-clustering on the basis of existing entities. A systematic evaluation is
carried out using a manually curated dataset as ground truth. Our analysis
shows that pre-clustering and a combination of heterogeneous features yield the
best trade-off between number of clusters and their quality, demonstrating that
a simple combination based on pairwise maximization of similarity is as
effective as a non-trivial optimization of parameters. Our approach is fully
automatic, unsupervised, and scalable for real-time detection of memes in
streaming data.Comment: Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances
in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM'13), 201
Comment on "Observation of neutronless fusion reactions in picosecond laser plasmas"
The paper by Belyaev et al. [Phys. Rev. E {\bf 72}, 026406 (2005)] reported
the first experimental observation of alpha particles produced in the
thermonuclear reaction B()Be induced by
laser-irradiation on a B polyethylene (CH) composite target. The
laser used in the experiment is characterized by a picosecond pulse duration
and a peak of intensity of 2 W/cm. We suggest that both the
background-reduction method adopted in their detection system and the choice of
the detection energy region of the reaction products are possibly inadequate.
Consequently the total yield reported underestimates the true yield. Based on
their observation, we give an estimation of the total yield to be higher than
their conclusion, i.e., of the order of 10 per shot.Comment: 3 figures, accepted for publication in the Comment section of
Physical Review
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