2,522 research outputs found

    Submillimetre point sources from the Archeops experiment: Very Cold Clumps in the Galactic Plane

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    Archeops is a balloon-borne experiment, mainly designed to measure the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) temperature anisotropies at high angular resolution (~ 12 arcminutes). By-products of the mission are shallow sensitivity maps over a large fraction of the sky (about 30 %) in the millimetre and submillimetre range at 143, 217, 353 and 545 GHz. From these maps, we produce a catalog of bright submillimetre point sources. We present in this paper the processing and analysis of the Archeops point sources. Redundancy across detectors is the key factor allowing to sort out glitches from genuine point sources in the 20 independent maps. We look at the properties of the most reliable point sources, totalling 304. Fluxes range from 1 to 10,000 Jy (at the frequencies covering 143 to 545 GHz). All sources are either planets (2) or of galactic origin. Longitude range is from 75 to 198 degrees. Some of the sources are associated with well-known Lynds Nebulae and HII compact regions in the galactic plane. A large fraction of the sources have an IRAS counterpart. Except for Jupiter, Saturn, the Crab and Cas A, all sources show a dust-emission-like modified blackbody emission spectrum. Temperatures cover a range from 7 to 27 K. For the coldest sources (T<10 K), a steep nu^beta emissivity law is found with a surprising beta ~ 3 to 4. An inverse relationship between T and beta is observed. The number density of sources at 353 GHz with flux brighter than 100 Jy is of the order of 1 per degree of Galactic longitude. These sources will provide a strong check for the calibration of the Planck HFI focal plane geometry as a complement to planets. These very cold sources observed by Archeops should be prime targets for mapping observations by the Akari and Herschel space missions and ground--based observatories.Comment: Version matching the published article (English improved). Published in Astron. Astrophys, 21 pages, 13 figures, 4 tables Full article (with complete tables) can be retrieved at http://www.archeops.org/Archeops_Publicatio

    Synthetic magnetic fluxes on the honeycomb lattice

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    We devise experimental schemes able to mimic uniform and staggered magnetic fluxes acting on ultracold two-electron atoms, such as ytterbium atoms, propagating in a honeycomb lattice. The atoms are first trapped into two independent state-selective triangular lattices and are further exposed to a suitable configuration of resonant Raman laser beams. These beams induce hops between the two triangular lattices and make atoms move in a honeycomb lattice. Atoms traveling around each unit cell of this honeycomb lattice pick up a nonzero phase. In the uniform case, the artificial magnetic flux sustained by each cell can reach about two flux quanta, thereby realizing a cold atom analogue of the Harper model with its notorious Hofstadter's butterfly structure. Different condensed-matter phenomena such as the relativistic integer and fractional quantum Hall effects, as observed in graphene samples, could be targeted with this scheme.Comment: 12 pages, 14 figure
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