1,974 research outputs found
Stellar granulation and interferometry
Stars are not smooth. Their photosphere is covered by a granulation pattern
associated with the heat transport by convection. The convection-related
surface structures have different size, depth, and temporal variations with
respect to the stellar type. The related activity (in addition to other
phenomena such as magnetic spots, rotation, dust, etc.) potentially causes bias
in stellar parameters determination, radial velocity, chemical abundances
determinations, and exoplanet transit detections.
The role of long-baseline interferometric observations in this astrophysical
context is crucial to characterize the stellar surface dynamics and correct the
potential biases. In this Chapter, we present how the granulation pattern is
expected for different kind of stellar types ranging from main sequence to
extremely evolved stars of different masses and how interferometric techniques
help to study their photospheric dynamics.Comment: To appear in the Book of the VLTI School 2013, held 9-21 Sep 2013
Barcelonnette (France), "What the highest angular resolution can bring to
stellar astrophysics?", Ed. Millour, Chiavassa, Bigot, Chesneau, Meilland,
Stee, EAS Publications Series (2015
Anisotropic fluxes and nonlocal interactions in MHD turbulence
We investigate the locality or nonlocality of the energy transfer and of the
spectral interactions involved in the cascade for decaying magnetohydrodynamic
(MHD) flows in the presence of a uniform magnetic field at various
intensities. The results are based on a detailed analysis of three-dimensional
numerical flows at moderate Reynold numbers. The energy transfer functions, as
well as the global and partial fluxes, are examined by means of different
geometrical wavenumber shells. On the one hand, the transfer functions of the
two conserved Els\"asser energies and are found local in both the
directions parallel (-direction) and perpendicular (-direction)
to the magnetic guide-field, whatever the -strength. On the other
hand, from the flux analysis, the interactions between the two
counterpropagating Els\"asser waves become nonlocal. Indeed, as the -intensity is increased, local interactions are strongly decreased and the
interactions with small modes dominate the cascade. Most of the energy
flux in the -direction is due to modes in the plane at , while
the weaker cascade in the -direction is due to the modes with .
The stronger magnetized flows tends thus to get closer to the weak turbulence
limit where the three-wave resonant interactions are dominating. Hence, the
transition from the strong to the weak turbulence regime occurs by reducing the
number of effective modes in the energy cascade.Comment: Submitted to PR
Adaptive Covariance Estimation with model selection
We provide in this paper a fully adaptive penalized procedure to select a
covariance among a collection of models observing i.i.d replications of the
process at fixed observation points. For this we generalize previous results of
Bigot and al. and propose to use a data driven penalty to obtain an oracle
inequality for the estimator. We prove that this method is an extension to the
matricial regression model of the work by Baraud
Simulations for single-dish intensity mapping experiments
HI intensity mapping is an emerging tool to probe dark energy. Observations
of the redshifted HI signal will be contaminated by instrumental noise,
atmospheric and Galactic foregrounds. The latter is expected to be four orders
of magnitude brighter than the HI emission we wish to detect. We present a
simulation of single-dish observations including an instrumental noise model
with 1/f and white noise, and sky emission with a diffuse Galactic foreground
and HI emission. We consider two foreground cleaning methods: spectral
parametric fitting and principal component analysis. For a smooth frequency
spectrum of the foreground and instrumental effects, we find that the
parametric fitting method provides residuals that are still contaminated by
foreground and 1/f noise, but the principal component analysis can remove this
contamination down to the thermal noise level. This method is robust for a
range of different models of foreground and noise, and so constitutes a
promising way to recover the HI signal from the data. However, it induces a
leakage of the cosmological signal into the subtracted foreground of around 5%.
The efficiency of the component separation methods depends heavily on the
smoothness of the frequency spectrum of the foreground and the 1/f noise. We
find that as, long as the spectral variations over the band are slow compared
to the channel width, the foreground cleaning method still works.Comment: 14 pages, 12 figures. Submitted to MNRA
Asteroseismic Theory of Rapidly Oscillating Ap Stars
This paper reviews some of the important advances made over the last decade
concerning theory of roAp stars.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figure
Size-Dependent Surface Plasmon Dynamics in Metal Nanoparticles
We study the effect of Coulomb correlations on the ultrafast optical dynamics
of small metal particles. We demonstrate that a surface-induced dynamical
screening of the electron-electron interactions leads to quasiparticle
scattering with collective surface excitations. In noble-metal nanoparticles,
it results in an interband resonant scattering of d-holes with surface
plasmons. We show that this size-dependent many-body effect manifests itself in
the differential absorption dynamics for frequencies close to the surface
plasmon resonance. In particular, our self-consistent calculations reveal a
strong frequency dependence of the relaxation, in agreement with recent
femtosecond pump-probe experiments.Comment: 8 pages + 4 figures, final version accepted to PR
Isolated Splenic Metastasis from Colorectal Cancer: Report of a Case
The authors report a case of a patient with splenic metastasis with previous history of colorectal cancer. A 69-year-old woman underwent a left hemicolectomy for sigmoid colon cancer. The tumor was staged T3N0M0. Two years after the operation, there was an elevation of CEA and computed tomography (CT) scan revealed a mass in the spleen, considered as an isolated metastasis. The patient underwent splenectomy. Histological diagnosis confirmed a metastatic adenocarcinoma from colorectal carcinoma. Patient was alive without neoplasic recurrence 5 years after splenectomy. Generally, splenic metastasis is uncommon. However, with the case of colorectal cancers, metastasis to the spleen is particularly rare. As with splenic metastasis of all primary tumors, the literature recommends that the treatment, where possible, is surgical
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