17,874 research outputs found
Asteroseismology and Magnetic Cycles
Small cyclic variations in the frequencies of acoustic modes are expected to
be a common phenomenon in solar-like pulsators, as a result of stellar magnetic
activity cycles. The frequency variations observed throughout the solar and
stellar cycles contain information about structural changes that take place
inside the stars as well as about variations in magnetic field structure and
intensity. The task of inferring and disentangling that information is,
however, not a trivial one. In the sun and solar-like pulsators, the direct
effect of the magnetic field on the oscillations might be significantly
important in regions of strong magnetic field (such as solar- / stellar-spots),
where the Lorentz force can be comparable to the gas-pressure gradient. Our aim
is to determine the sun- / stellar-spots effect on the oscillation frequencies
and attempt to understand if this effect contributes strongly to the frequency
changes observed along the magnetic cycle. The total contribution of the spots
to the frequency shifts results from a combination of direct and indirect
effects of the magnetic field on the oscillations. In this first work we
considered only the indirect effect associated with changes in the
stratification within the starspot. Based on the solution of the wave equation
and the variational principle we estimated the impact of these stratification
changes on the oscillation frequencies of global modes in the sun and found
that the induced frequency shifts are about two orders of magnitude smaller
than the frequency shifts observed over the solar cycle.Comment: 4 pages, 6 figures, ESF Conference: The Modern Era of Helio- and
Asteroseismology, to be published on 3 December 2012 at Astronomische
Nachrichten 333, No. 10, 1032-103
Household liquidity and incremental financing decisions:theory and evidence
In this paper we develop a stochastic model for household liquidity. In the model, the optimal liquidity policy takes the form of a liquidity range. Subsequently, we use the model to calibrate the upper bound of the predicted liquidity range. Equipped with knowledge about the relevant control barriers, we run a series of empirical tests on a panel data set of Dutch households covering the period 1992-2007. The results broadly validate our theoretical predictions that households (i) exhaust most of their short-term liquid assets prior to increasing net debt, and (ii) reduce outstanding net debt at the optimally selected upper liquidity barrier. However, a small minority of households appear to act sub-optimally. Poor and vulnerable households rely too frequently on expensive forms of credit (such as overdrafts) hereby incurring substantial amounts of fees and fixed borrowing costs. Elderly households and people on social benefits tend to accumulate too much liquidity. Finally, some households take on expensive short-term credit while having substantial amounts of low-yielding liquid assets
On Effective Spacetime Dimension in the Ho\v{r}ava-Lifshitz Gravity
In this manuscript we explicitly compute the effective dimension of spacetime
in some backgrounds of Ho\v{r}ava-Lifshitz (H-L) gravity. For all the cases
considered, the results are compatible with a dimensional reduction of the
spacetime to , at high energies (ultraviolet limit), which is confirmed
by other quantum gravity approaches, as well as to , at low energies
(infrared limit). This is obtained by computing the free energy of massless
scalar and gauge fields. We find that the only effect of the background is to
change the proportionality constant between the internal energy and
temperature. Firstly, we consider both the non-perturbative and perturbative
models involving the matter action, without gravitational sources but with
manifest time and space symmetry breaking, in order to calculate modifications
in the Stephan-Boltzmann law. When gravity is taken into account, we assume a
scenario in which there is a spherical source with mass and radius in
thermal equilibrium with radiation, and consider the static and spherically
symmetric solution of the H-L theory found by Kehagias-Sfetsos (K-S), in the
weak and strong field approximations. As byproducts, for the weak field regime,
we used the current uncertainty of the solar radiance measurements to establish
a constraint on the free parameter of the K-S solution. We also
calculate the corrections, due to gravity, to the recently predicted attractive
force that black bodies exert on nearby neutral atoms and molecules.Comment: references adde
Impact of stellar companions on precise radial velocities
Context: With the announced arrival of instruments such as ESPRESSO one can
expect that several systematic noise sources on the measurement of precise
radial velocity will become the limiting factor instead of photon noise. A
stellar companion within the fiber is such a possible noise source. Aims: With
this work we aim at characterizing the impact of a stellar companion within the
fiber to radial velocity measurements made by fiber-fed spectrographs. We
consider the contaminant star either to be part of a binary system whose
primary star is the target star, or as a background/foreground star. Methods:
To carry out our study, we used HARPS spectra, co-added the target with
contaminant spectra, and then compared the resulting radial velocity with that
obtained from the original target spectrum. We repeated this procedure and used
different tunable knobs to reproduce the previously mentioned scenarios.
Results: We find that the impact on the radial velocity calculation is a
function of the difference between individual radial velocities, of the
difference between target and contaminant magnitude, and also of their spectral
types. For the worst-case scenario in which both target and contaminant star
are well centered on the fiber, the maximum contamination for a G or K star may
be higher than 10 cm/s, on average, if the difference between target and
contaminant magnitude is < 10, and higher than 1 m/s if <
8. If the target star is of spectral type M, < 8 produces the same
contamination of 10 cm/s, and a contamination may be higher than 1 m/sComment: Accepted for publication in A&A on 29/12/2019 - 14 page
Quasi-Topological Field Theories in Two Dimensions as Soluble Models
We study a class of lattice field theories in two dimensions that includes
gauge theories. Given a two dimensional orientable surface of genus , the
partition function is defined for a triangulation consisting of
triangles of area . The reason these models are called
quasi-topological is that depends on , and but not on the
details of the triangulation. They are also soluble in the sense that the
computation of their partition functions can be reduced to a soluble one
dimensional problem. We show that the continuum limit is well defined if the
model approaches a topological field theory in the zero area limit, i.e.,
with finite . We also show that the universality classes of
such quasi-topological lattice field theories can be easily classified.
Yang-Mills and generalized Yang-Mills theories appear as particular examples of
such continuum limits.Comment: 23 pages, 16 figures, uses psbox.te
Informações meteorológicas de Passo Fundo, RS: setembro de 2006.
bitstream/CNPT-2010/40562/1/p-co197.pd
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