33,492 research outputs found
Observing the Galaxy's massive black hole with gravitational wave bursts
An extreme-mass-ratio burst (EMRB) is a gravitational wave signal emitted
when a compact object passes through periapsis on a highly eccentric orbit
about a much more massive object, in our case a stellar mass object about a
10^6 M_sol black hole. EMRBs are a relatively unexplored means of probing the
spacetime of massive black holes (MBHs). We conduct an investigation of the
properties of EMRBs and how they could allow us to constrain the parameters,
such as spin, of the Galaxy's MBH. We find that if an EMRB event occurs in the
Galaxy, it should be detectable for periapse distances r_p < 65 r_g for a \mu =
10 M_sol orbiting object, where r_g = GM/c^2 is the gravitational radius. The
signal-to-noise ratio scales as \rho ~ -2.7 log(r_p/r_g) + log(\mu/M_sol) +
4.9. For periapses r_p < 10 r_g, EMRBs can be informative, and provide good
constraints on both the MBH's mass and spin. Closer orbits provide better
constraints, with the best giving accuracies of better than one part in 10^4
for both the mass and spin parameter.Comment: 25 pages, 17 figures, 1 appendix. One more typo fixe
Expectations for extreme-mass-ratio bursts from the Galactic Centre
When a compact object on a highly eccentric orbit about a much more massive
body passes through periapsis it emits a short gravitational wave signal known
as an extreme-mass-ratio burst (EMRB). We consider stellar mass objects
orbiting the massive black hole (MBH) found in the Galactic Centre. EMRBs
provide a novel means of extracting information about the MBH; an EMRB from the
Galactic MBH could be highly informative regarding the MBH's mass and spin if
the orbital periapsis is small enough. However, to be a useful astronomical
tool EMRBs must be both informative and sufficiently common to be detectable
with a space-based interferometer. We construct a simple model to predict the
event rate for Galactic EMRBs. We estimate there could be on average ~2 bursts
in a two year mission lifetime for LISA. Stellar mass black holes dominate the
event rate. Creating a sample of 100 mission realisations, we calculate what we
could learn about the MBH. On average, we expect to be able to determine the
MBH mass to ~1% and the spin to ~0.1 using EMRBs.Comment: 22 pages, 5 figures, 2 appendices. Minor changes to reflect published
versio
A polyphonic acoustic vortex and its complementary chords
Using an annular phased array of eight loudspeakers, we generate sound beams that simultaneously contain phase singularities at a number of different frequencies. These frequencies correspond to different musical notes and the singularities can be set to overlap along the beam axis, creating a polyphonic acoustic vortex. Perturbing the drive amplitudes of the speakers means that the singularities no longer overlap, each note being nulled at a slightly different lateral position, where the volume of the other notes is now nonzero. The remaining notes form a tri-note chord. We contrast this acoustic phenomenon to the optical case where the perturbation of a white light vortex leads to a spectral spatial distribution
Geometric phases and anholonomy for a class of chaotic classical systems
Berry's phase may be viewed as arising from the parallel transport of a
quantal state around a loop in parameter space. In this Letter, the classical
limit of this transport is obtained for a particular class of chaotic systems.
It is shown that this ``classical parallel transport'' is anholonomic ---
transport around a closed curve in parameter space does not bring a point in
phase space back to itself --- and is intimately related to the Robbins-Berry
classical two-form.Comment: Revtex, 11 pages, no figures
Decimation and Harmonic Inversion of Periodic Orbit Signals
We present and compare three generically applicable signal processing methods
for periodic orbit quantization via harmonic inversion of semiclassical
recurrence functions. In a first step of each method, a band-limited decimated
periodic orbit signal is obtained by analytical frequency windowing of the
periodic orbit sum. In a second step, the frequencies and amplitudes of the
decimated signal are determined by either Decimated Linear Predictor, Decimated
Pade Approximant, or Decimated Signal Diagonalization. These techniques, which
would have been numerically unstable without the windowing, provide numerically
more accurate semiclassical spectra than does the filter-diagonalization
method.Comment: 22 pages, 3 figures, submitted to J. Phys.
Phase Space Evolution and Discontinuous Schr\"odinger Waves
The problem of Schr\"odinger propagation of a discontinuous wavefunction
-diffraction in time- is studied under a new light. It is shown that the
evolution map in phase space induces a set of affine transformations on
discontinuous wavepackets, generating expansions similar to those of wavelet
analysis. Such transformations are identified as the cause for the
infinitesimal details in diffraction patterns. A simple case of an evolution
map, such as SL(2) in a two-dimensional phase space, is shown to produce an
infinite set of space-time trajectories of constant probability. The
trajectories emerge from a breaking point of the initial wave.Comment: Presented at the conference QTS7, Prague 2011. 12 pages, 7 figure
- …