Lepton asymmetry and primordial nucleosynthesis in the era of precision cosmology

We calculate and display the primordial light-element abundances as a function of a neutrino degeneracy parameter \xi common to all flavors. It is the only unknown parameter characterizing the thermal medium at the primordial nucleosynthesis epoch. The observed primordial helium abundance Y_p is the most sensitive cosmic ``leptometer.'' Adopting the conservative Y_p error analysis of Olive and Skillman implies -0.04 \alt \xi \alt 0.07 whereas the errors stated by Izotov and Thuan imply \xi=0.0245+-0.0092 (1 sigma). Improved determinations of the baryon abundance have no significant impact on this situation. A determination of Y_p that reliably distinguishes between a vanishing or nonvanishing \xi is a crucial test of the cosmological standard assumption that sphaleron effects equilibrate the cosmic lepton and baryon asymmetries.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures; minor changes, references added, replaced to match the published version in PRD (Brief Reports

Megasonic Enhanced Electrodeposition

A novel way of filling high aspect ratio vertical interconnection (microvias) with an aspect ratio of >2:1 is presented. High frequency acoustic streaming at megasonic frequencies enables the decrease of the Nernst-diffusion layer down to the sub-micron range, allowing thereby conformal electrodeposition in deep grooves. Higher throughput and better control over the deposition properties are possible for the manufacturing of interconnections and metal-based MEMS.Comment: Submitted on behalf of EDA Publishing Association (http://irevues.inist.fr/handle/2042/16838

Self-induced decoherence in dense neutrino gases

Dense neutrino gases exhibit collective oscillations where "self-maintained coherence" is a characteristic feature, i.e., neutrinos of different energies oscillate with the same frequency. In a non-isotropic gas, however, the flux term of the neutrino-neutrino interaction has the opposite effect of causing kinematical decoherence of neutrinos propagating in different directions, an effect that is at the origin of the "multi-angle behavior" of neutrinos streaming off a supernova core. We cast the equations of motion in a form where the role of the flux term is manifest. We study in detail the symmetric case of equal neutrino and antineutrino densities where the evolution consists of collective pair conversions ("bipolar oscillations"). A gas of this sort is unstable in that an infinitesimal anisotropy is enough to trigger a run-away towards flavor equipartition. The "self-maintained coherence" of a perfectly isotropic gas gives way to "self-induced decoherence."Comment: Revtex, 16 pages, 12 figure

Reverse engineering of CAD models via clustering and approximate implicitization

In applications like computer aided design, geometric models are often represented numerically as polynomial splines or NURBS, even when they originate from primitive geometry. For purposes such as redesign and isogeometric analysis, it is of interest to extract information about the underlying geometry through reverse engineering. In this work we develop a novel method to determine these primitive shapes by combining clustering analysis with approximate implicitization. The proposed method is automatic and can recover algebraic hypersurfaces of any degree in any dimension. In exact arithmetic, the algorithm returns exact results. All the required parameters, such as the implicit degree of the patches and the number of clusters of the model, are inferred using numerical approaches in order to obtain an algorithm that requires as little manual input as possible. The effectiveness, efficiency and robustness of the method are shown both in a theoretical analysis and in numerical examples implemented in Python

Room temperature dynamic correlation between methylammonium molecules in lead-iodine based perovskites: An ab-initio molecular dynamics perspective

The high efficiency of lead organo-metal-halide perovskite solar cells has raised many questions about the role of the methylammonium (MA) molecules in the Pb-I framework. Experiments indicate that the MA molecules are able to 'freely' spin around at room temperature even though they carry an intrinsic dipole moment. We have performed large supercell (2592 atoms) finite temperature ab-initio molecular dynamics calculations to study the correlation between the molecules in the framework. An underlying long range anti-ferroelectric ordering of the molecular dipoles is observed. The dynamical correlation between neighboring molecules shows a maximum around room temperature in the mid-temperature phase. In this phase, the rotations are slow enough to (partially) couple to neighbors via the Pb-I cage. This results in a collective motion of neighboring molecules in which the cage acts as the mediator. At lower and higher temperatures the motions are less correlated

Response to Friedman

An abstract for this article is not available.Monetary policy