595 research outputs found
Eta Car: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Nebular and Stellar Confusion
Observations in the far-UV provide a unique opportunity to investigate the very massive star Eta Car and its hot binary companion, Eta Car B. Eta Car was observed with FUSE over a large portion of the 5.54 year spectroscopic period before and after the 2003.5 minimum. The observed spectrum is defined by strong stellar wind signatures, primarily from Eta Car A, complicated by the strong absorptions of the ejecta surrounding Eta Car plus interstellar absorption. The Homunculus and Little Homunculus are massive bipolar ejecta historically associable with LBV outbursts in the 1840s and the 1890s and are linked to absorptions at -513 and -146 km/s, respectively. The FUSE spectra are confused by the extended nebulosity and thermal drifting of the FUSE co-pointed instruments. Interpretation is further complicated by two B-stars sufficiently close to h Car to be included most of the time in the large FUSE aperture. Followup observations partially succeeded in obtaining spectra of at least one of these B-stars through the smaller apertures, allowing potential separation of the B-star contributions and h Car. A complete analysis of all available spectra is currently underway. Our ultimate goals are to directly detect the hot secondary star if possible with FUSE and to identify the absorption contributions to the overall spectrum especially of the stellar members and the massive ejecta
Proximity effect and strong coupling superconductivity in nanostructures built with an STM
We present high resolution tunneling spectroscopy data at very low
temperatures on superconducting nanostructures of lead built with an STM. By
applying magnetic fields, superconductivity is restricted to length scales of
the order of the coherence length. We measure the tunneling conductance and
analyze the phonon structure and the low energy DOS. We demonstrate the
influence of the geometry of the system on the magnetic field dependence of the
tunneling density of states, which is gapless in a large range of fields. The
behavior of the features in the tunneling conductance associated to phonon
modes are explained within current models.Comment: 4 figures, 4 page
Naturalness and theoretical constraints on the Higgs boson mass
Arbitrary regularization dependent parameters in Quantum Field Theory are
usually fixed on symmetry or phenomenology grounds. We verify that the
quadratically divergent behavior responsible for the lack of naturalness in the
Standard Model (SM) is intrinsically arbitrary and regularization dependent.
While quadratic divergences are welcome for instance in effective models of low
energy QCD, they pose a problem in the SM treated as an effective theory in the
Higgs sector. Being the very existence of quadratic divergences a matter of
debate, a plausible scenario is to search for a symmetry requirement that could
fix the arbitrary coefficient of the leading quadratic behavior to the Higgs
boson mass to zero. We show that this is possible employing consistency of
scale symmetry breaking by quantum corrections. Besides eliminating a
fine-tuning problem and restoring validity of perturbation theory, this
requirement allows to construct bounds for the Higgs boson mass in terms of
(where is the renormalized Higgs mass and
is the 1-loop Higgs mass correction). Whereas
(perturbative regime) in this scenario allows the Higgs boson mass around the
current accepted value, the inclusion of the quadratic divergence demands
arbitrarily large to reach that experimental value.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figure
Localized Intersections of Non-Extremal p-branes and S-branes
A class of solutions to Supergravity in 10 or 11 dimensions is presented
which extends the non-standard or semi-local intersections of Dp-branes to the
case of non-extremal p-branes. The type of non-extremal solutions involved in
the intersection is free and we provide two examples involving black-branes
and/or D-\bar{D} systems. After a rotation among the time coordinate and a
relatively transverse radial direction the solutions admit the interpretation
of an intersection among D-branes and S-branes. We speculate on the relevance
of these configurations both to study time dependent phenomena in the AdS/CFT
correspondence as well as to construct cosmological brane-world scenarios
within String Theory admitting accelerating expansion of the Universe.Comment: 31 pages, latex file; v2: typos corrected and references adde
Comparative lengths of digestive tracts of seven didelphid marsupials (Mammalia) in relation to diet
- âŠ