Can the jet steepen the light curves of GRB afterglow?

Beaming of relativistic ejecta in GRBs has been postulated by many authors in order to reduce the total GRB energy, thus it is very important to look for the observational evidence of beaming. Rhoads (1999) has pointed out that the dynamics of the blast wave, which is formed when the beamed ejecta sweeping the external medium, will be significantly modified by the sideways expansion due to the increased swept up matter. He claimed that shortly after the bulk Lorentz factor ($\Gamma$) of the blast wave drops below the inverse of the initial opening angle ($\theta_{0}$) of the beamed ejecta, there will be a sharp break in the afterglow light curves. However, some other authors have performed numerical calculations and shown that the break of the light curve is weaker and much smoother than the one analytically predicted. In this paper we reanalyse the dynamical evolution of the jet blast wave, calculate the jet emission analytically, we find that the sharp break predicted by Rhoads will actually not exist, and for most cases the afterglow light curve will almost not be affected by sideways expansion unless the beaming angle is extremely small. We demonstrate that only when $\theta_{0}<0.1$, the afterglow light curves may be steepened by sideways expansion, and in fact there cannot be two breaks as claimed before. We have also constructed a simple numerical code to verify our conclusion.Comment: 12 pages, 2 figures, accepted by ApJ, added numerical calculation

Correlations and fluctuations measured by the CMS experiment in pp and PbPb

Measurements of charged dihadron angular correlations are presented in proton-proton (pp) and Lead-Lead (PbPb) collisions, over a broad range of pseudorapidity and azimuthal angle, using the CMS detector at the LHC. In very high multiplicity pp events at center-of-mass energy of 7 TeV, a striking "ridge"-like structure emerges in the two-dimensional correlation function for particle pairs with intermediate pt of 1-3 GeVc, in the kinematic region 2.0<|\Delta\eta|<4.8 and small \Delta\phi, which is similar to observations in heavy-ion collisions. Studies of this new effect as a function of particle transverse momentum are discussed. The long-range and short-range dihadron correlations are also studied in PbPb collision at a nucleon-nucleon center-of-mass energy of 2.76 TeV, as a function of transverse momentum and collision centrality. A Fourier analysis of the long-range dihadron correlations is presented and discussed in the context of CMS measurements of higher order flow coefficients.Comment: 8 pages, 8 figures, proceedings for Quark Matter 2011, Annecy, France, May 23-28, 201

Flavor-twisted boundary condition for simulations of quantum many-body systems

We present an approximative simulation method for quantum many-body systems based on coarse graining the space of the momentum transferred between interacting particles, which leads to effective Hamiltonians of reduced size with the flavor-twisted boundary condition. A rapid, accurate, and fast convergent computation of the ground-state energy is demonstrated on the spin-1/2 quantum antiferromagnet of any dimension by employing only two sites. The method is expected to be useful for future simulations and quick estimates on other strongly correlated systems.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figure

Tunable one-dimensional microwave emissions from cyclic-transition three-level atoms

By strongly driving a cyclic-transition three-level artificial atom, demonstrated by such as a flux-based superconducting circuit, we show that coherent microwave signals can be excited along a coupled one-dimensional transmission line. Typically, the intensity of the generated microwave is tunable via properly adjusting the Rabi frequencies of the applied strong-driving fields or introducing a probe field with the same frequency. In practice, the system proposed here could work as an on-chip quantum device with controllable atom-photon interaction to implement a total-reflecting mirror or switch for the propagating probe field.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figure