Merging of a CO WD and a He-rich white dwarf to produce a type Ia supernovae

Context: Although type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) play a key role in astrophysics, the companions of the exploding carbon-oxygen white dwarfs (CO WDs) are still not completely identified. It has been suggested recently that a He-rich WD (a He WD or a hybrid HeCO WD) merges with a CO WD may produce an SN Ia. This theory was based on the double-detonation model, in which the shock compression in the CO core caused by the surface explosion of the He-rich shell might lead to the explosion of the whole CO WD. However, so far, very few binary population synthesis (BPS) studies have been made on the merger scenario of a CO WD and a He-rich WD in the context of SNe Ia. Aims: We aim to systematically study the Galactic birthrates and delay-time distributions of SNe Ia based on the merger scenario of a CO WD and a He-rich WD. Methods: We performed a series of Monte Carlo BPS simulations to investigate the properties of SNe Ia from the merging of a CO WD and a He-rich WD based on the Hurley rapid binary evolution code. We also considered the influence of different metallicities on the final results. Results: From our simulations, we found that no more than 15% of all SNe Ia stem from the merger scenario of a CO WD and a He-rich WD, and their delay times range from ~110 Myr to the Hubble time. This scenario mainly contributes to SN Ia explosions with intermediate and long delay times. The present work indicates that the merger scenario of a CO WD and a He-rich WD can roughly reproduce the birthrates of SN 1991bg-like events, and cover the range of their delay times. We also found that SN Ia birthrates from this scenario would be higher for the cases with low metallicities.Comment: 8 pages, 8 figures, accepted for publication in A&

Crossing Generative Adversarial Networks for Cross-View Person Re-identification

Person re-identification (\textit{re-id}) refers to matching pedestrians across disjoint yet non-overlapping camera views. The most effective way to match these pedestrians undertaking significant visual variations is to seek reliably invariant features that can describe the person of interest faithfully. Most of existing methods are presented in a supervised manner to produce discriminative features by relying on labeled paired images in correspondence. However, annotating pair-wise images is prohibitively expensive in labors, and thus not practical in large-scale networked cameras. Moreover, seeking comparable representations across camera views demands a flexible model to address the complex distributions of images. In this work, we study the co-occurrence statistic patterns between pairs of images, and propose to crossing Generative Adversarial Network (Cross-GAN) for learning a joint distribution for cross-image representations in a unsupervised manner. Given a pair of person images, the proposed model consists of the variational auto-encoder to encode the pair into respective latent variables, a proposed cross-view alignment to reduce the view disparity, and an adversarial layer to seek the joint distribution of latent representations. The learned latent representations are well-aligned to reflect the co-occurrence patterns of paired images. We empirically evaluate the proposed model against challenging datasets, and our results show the importance of joint invariant features in improving matching rates of person re-id with comparison to semi/unsupervised state-of-the-arts.Comment: 12 pages. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1702.03431 by other author

Three-dimensional transverse vibration of microtubules

A three-dimensional (3D) transverse vibration was reported based on the molecular structural mechanics model for microtubules (MTs), where the bending axis of the cross section rotates in an anticlockwise direction and the adjacent half-waves oscillate in different planes. Herein, efforts were invested to capturing the physics behind the observed phenomenon and identifying the important factors that influence the rotation angle between two adjacent half waves. A close correlation was confirmed between the rotation of the oscillation planes and the helical structures of the MTs, showing that the 3D mode is a result of the helicity found in the MTs. Subsequently, the wave length-dependence and the boundary condition effects were also investigated for the 3D transverse vibration of the MTs. In addition, the vibration frequency was found to remain the same in the presence or absence of the bending axis rotation. This infers that the unique vibration mode is merely due to the bending axis rotation of the cross section, but no significant torsion occurs for the MTs

A super-Eddington wind scenario for the progenitors of type Ia supernovae: binary population synthesis calculations

The super-Eddington wind scenario has been proposed as an alternative way for producing type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia). The super-Eddington wind can naturally prevent the carbon--oxygen white dwarfs (CO WDs) with high mass-accretion rates from becoming red-giant-like stars. Furthermore, it works in low-metallicity environments, which may explain SNe Ia observed at high redshifts. In this article, we systematically investigated the most prominent single-degenerate WD+MS channel based on the super-Eddington wind scenario. We combined the Eggleton stellar evolution code with a rapid binary population synthesis (BPS) approach to predict SN Ia birthrates for the WD+MS channel by adopting the super-Eddington wind scenario and detailed mass-accumulation efficiencies of H-shell flashes on the WDs. Our BPS calculations found that the estimated SN Ia birthrates for the WD+MS channel are ~0.009-0.315*10^{-3}{yr}^{-1} if we adopt the Eddington accretion rate as the critical accretion rate, which are much lower than that of the observations (<10% of the observed SN Ia birthrates). This indicates that the WD+MS channel only contributes a small proportion of all SNe Ia. The birthrates in this simulation are lower than previous studies, the main reason of which is that new mass-accumulation efficiencies of H-shell flashes are adopted. We also found that the critical mass-accretion rate has a significant influence on the birthrates of SNe Ia. Meanwhile, the results of our BPS calculations are sensitive to the values of the common-envelope ejection efficiency.Comment: 14 pages, 9 figures, 1 table, accepted for publication in Astronomy and Astrophysic

Extended main-sequence turnoffs in the double cluster hh and χ\chi Persei: The complex role of stellar rotation

Using {\sl Gaia} Data Release 2 photometry, we report the detection of extended main-sequence turnoff (eMSTO) regions in the color--magnitude diagrams (CMDs) of the $\sim 14$ Myr-old double clusters $h$ and $\chi$ Persei (NGC 869 and NGC 884). We find that stars with masses below $\sim$1.3 $M_{\odot}$ in both $h$ and $\chi$ Persei populate narrow main sequences (MSs), while more massive stars define the eMSTO, closely mimicking observations of young Galactic and Magellanic Cloud clusters (with ages older than $\sim$30 Myr). Previous studies based on clusters older than $\sim$30 Myr find that rapidly rotating MS stars are redder than slow rotators of similar luminosity, suggesting that stellar rotation may be the main driver of the eMSTO. By combining photometry and projected rotational velocities from the literature of stars in $h$ and $\chi$ Persei, we find no obvious relation between the rotational velocities and colors of non-emission-line eMSTO stars, in contrast with what is observed in older clusters. Similarly to what is observed in Magellanic Cloud clusters, most of the extremely rapidly rotating stars, identified by their strong H$\alpha$ emission lines, are located in the red part of the eMSTOs. This indicates that stellar rotation plays a role in the color and magnitude distribution of MSTO stars. By comparing the observations with simulated CMDs, we find that a simple population composed of coeval stars that span a wide range of rotation rates is unable to reproduce the color spread of the clusters' MSs. We suggest that variable stars, binary interactions, and stellar rotation affect the eMSTO morphology of these very young clusters.Comment: 14 pages, 12 figures, ApJ accepte

Vibration of Piezoelectric ZnO-SWCNT Nanowires

A hybrid nanowire (HNW) was constructed by coating a single-wall carbon nanotube (SWCNT) with piezoelectric zinc oxide (ZnO). The two components of the HNW interact with each other via the van der Waals (vdW) force. This paper aims to study the effect of the piezoelectricity in the ZnO layer and the inter-phase vdW interaction on the fundamental vibration of the HNWs. In doing this, a new model was developed where the two components of the HNWs were modeled as Euler beams coupled via the interphase vdW interaction. Based on the model, the dependence of the frequency on an applied electrical voltage was calculated for HNWs of different geometric sizes to reveal the voltage effect. The results were then compared with those calculated without considering the inter-phase vdW interaction. It was found that the interphase vdW interaction can substantially decrease the structural stiffness, leading to a greatly enhanced piezoelectric effect but a lower frequency for the vibration of the HNWs