CF6 High Pressure Compressor and Turbine Clearance Evaluations

In the CF6 Jet Engine Diagnostics Program the causes of performance degradation were determined for each component of revenue service engines. It was found that a significant contribution to performance degradation was caused by increased airfoil tip radial clearances in the high pressure compressor and turbine areas. Since the influence of these clearances on engine performance and fuel consumption is significant, it is important to accurately establish these relatonships. It is equally important to understand the causes of clearance deterioration so that they can be reduced or eliminated. The results of factory engine tests run to enhance the understanding of the high pressure compressor and turbine clearance effects on performance are described. The causes of clearance deterioration are indicated and potential improvements in clearance control are discussed

Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking in General Relativity. Vector Order Parameter

Gravitational properties of a hedge-hog type topological defect in two extra dimensions are considered in General Relativity employing a vector as the order parameter. All previous considerations were done using the order parameter in the form of a multiplet in a target space of scalar fields. The difference of these two approaches is analyzed and demonstrated in detail. Regular solutions of the Einstein equations are studied analytically and numerically. It is shown that the existence of a negative cosmological constant is sufficient for the spontaneous symmetry breaking of the initially plain bulk. Regular configurations have a growing gravitational potential and are able to trap the matter on the brane. If the energy of spontaneous symmetry breaking is high, the gravitational potential has several points of minimum. Identical in the uniform bulk spin-less particles, being trapped within separate minima, acquire different masses and appear to the observer on brane as different particles with integer spins.Comment: 23 pages, 6 figure

Testing for Features in the Primordial Power Spectrum

Well-known causality arguments show that events occurring during or at the end of inflation, associated with reheating or preheating, could contribute a blue component to the spectrum of primordial curvature perturbations, with the dependence k^3. We explore the possibility that they could be observably large in CMB, LSS, and Lyman-alpha data. We find that a k^3 component with a cutoff at some maximum k can modestly improve the fits (Delta chi^2=2.0, 5.4) of the low multipoles (l ~ 10 - 50) or the second peak (l ~ 540) of the CMB angular spectrum when the three-year WMAP data are used. Moreover, the results from WMAP are consistent with the CBI, ACBAR, 2dFGRS, and SDSS data when they are included in the analysis. Including the SDSS galaxy clustering power spectrum, we find weak positive evidence for the k^3 component at the level of Delta chi' = 2.4, with the caveat that the nonlinear evolution of the power spectrum may not be properly treated in the presence of the k^3 distortion. To investigate the high-k regime, we use the Lyman-alpha forest data (LUQAS, Croft et al., and SDSS Lyman-alpha); here we find evidence at the level Delta chi^2' = 3.8. Considering that there are two additional free parameters in the model, the above results do not give a strong evidence for features; however, they show that surprisingly large bumps are not ruled out. We give constraints on the ratio between the k^3 component and the nearly scale-invariant component, r_3 < 1.5, over the range of wave numbers 0.0023/Mpc < k < 8.2/Mpc. We also discuss theoretical models which could lead to the k^3 effect, including ordinary hybrid inflation and double D-term inflation models. We show that the well-motivated k^3 component is also a good representative of the generic spikelike feature in the primordial perturbation power spectrum.Comment: 23 pages, 6 figures; added new section on theoretical motivation for k^3 term, and discussion of double D-term hybrid inflation models; title changed, added a new section discussing the generic spikelike features, published in IJMP

Revegetation of a Waste Disposal Site in the 200 Areas of the Hanford Reservation

The study area is located on a portion of a former 17-acre cooling water pond. It was used from October 1951 to April 1954 to receive process vessel cooling water and steam condensate arising from operation of the Redox plant. The pond was taken out of service when an inadvertent release of fission products caused the radionuclide concentrations in the pond sediments to exceed prescribed disposal limits. At that time the pipeline to the pond was plugged and the pond allowed to dry out. The pond was covered with non-contaminated soil fill to prevent the spread of contamination by wind. Russian thistles and bursage became self-established in the area and their roots penetrated to the contaminated area. The fall of 1974 additional soil fill was added and 0.9 ha of this clean soil fill was used to establish a revegetation test area. The soil fill was wetted and compacted to reduce erosion and settling and to provide a moist environment to encourage seed germination. Four soil treatments were chosen for the experiment: a control, and soil amendments of bentonite clay, straw, and a straw/clay mixture. The degree of success of revegetation of various species under the different conditions is discussed

Radion Induced Spontaneous Baryogenesis

We describe a possible scenario for the baryogenesis arising when matter is added on the branes of a Randall-Sundrum model with a radion stabilizing potential. We show that the radion field can naturally induce spontaneous baryogenesis when the cosmological evolution for the matter on the branes is taken into account.Comment: LaTeX 2e, 8 pages and no figures, minor corrections to match version to appear in MPL

Status of Electroweak Phase Transition and Baryogenesis

I review recent progress on the electroweak phase transition and baryogenesis, focusing on the minimal supersymmetric standard model as the source of new physics.Comment: 10 pp, 6 figures; plenary talk given at 6th Workshop on High Energy Physics Phenomenology, 4 Jan. 2000, Chennai, India. v.2: added reference

Strange Quarks Nuggets in Space: Charges in Seven Settings

We have computed the charge that develops on an SQN in space as a result of balance between the rates of ionization by ambient gammas and capture of ambient electrons. We have also computed the times for achieving that equilibrium and binding energy of the least bound SQN electrons. We have done this for seven different settings. We sketch the calculations here and give their results in the Figure and Table II; details are in the Physical Review D.79.023513 (2009).Comment: Six pages, one figure. To appear in proceedings of the 2008 UCLA coference on dark matter and dark energ

Cosmic Parallax in Ellipsoidal Universe

The detection of a time variation of the angle between two distant sources would reveal an anisotropic expansion of the Universe. We study this effect of "cosmic parallax" within the "ellipsoidal universe" model, namely a particular homogeneous anisotropic cosmological model of Bianchi type I, whose attractive feature is the potentiality to account for the observed lack of power of the large-scale cosmic microwave background anisotropy. The preferred direction in the sky, singled out by the axis of symmetry inherent to planar symmetry of ellipsoidal universe, could in principle be constrained by future cosmic parallax data. However, that will be a real possibility if and when the experimental accuracy will be enhanced at least by two orders of magnitude.Comment: 9 pages, 2 figures, 1 table. Revised version to match published version. References adde

Interesting consequences of brane cosmology

We discuss cosmology in four dimensions within a context of brane-world scenario.Such models can predict chaotic inflation with very low reheat temperature depending on the brane tension. We notice that the gravitino abundance is different in the brane-world cosmology and by tuning the brane tension it is possible to get extremely low abundance. We also study Affleck-Dine baryogenesis in our toy model.Comment: 5 pages, Trivial changes to match the published versio

Effect of the length of inflation on angular TT and TE power spectra in power-law inflation

The effect of the length of inflation on the power spectra of scalar and tensor perturbations is estimated using the power-law inflation model with a scale factor of a(t) = t^q. Considering various pre-inflation models with radiation-dominated or scalar matter-dominated periods before inflation in combination with two matching conditions, the temperature angular power spectrum (TT) and temperature-polarization cross-power spectrum (TE) are calculated and a likelihood analysis is performed. It is shown that the discrepancies between the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) data and the LCDM model, such as suppression of the spectrum at l = 2,3 and oscillatory behavior, may be explained by the finite length of inflation model if the length of inflation is near 60 e-folds and q > 300. The proposed models retain similar values of chi^2 to that achieved by the LCDM model with respect to fit to the WMAP data, but display different characteristics of the angular TE power spectra at l < 20.Comment: 41 pages, 11 figure