70,792 research outputs found
Superfluid Phase Stability of He in Axially Anisotropic Aerogel
Measurements of superfluid He in 98% aerogel demonstrate the existence of
a metastable \emph{A}-like phase and a stable \emph{B}-like phase. It has been
suggested that the relative stability of these two phases is controlled by
anisotropic quasiparticle scattering in the aerogel. Anisotropic scattering
produced by axial compression of the aerogel has been predicted to stabilize
the axial state of superfluid He. To explore this possiblity, we used
transverse acoustic impedance to map out the phase diagram of superfluid He
in a % porous silica aerogel subjected to 17% axial compression. We
have previously shown that axial anisotropy in aerogel leads to optical
birefringence and that optical cross-polarization studies can be used to
characterize such anisotropy. Consequently, we have performed optical
cross-polarization experiments to verify the presence and uniformity of the
axial anisotropy in our aerogel sample. We find that uniform axial anisotropy
introduced by 17% compression does not stabilize the \emph{A}-like phase. We
also find an increase in the supercooling of the \emph{A}-like phase at lower
pressure, indicating a modification to \emph{B}-like phase nucleation in
\emph{globally} anisotropic aerogels.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, submitted to LT25 (25th International Conference
on Low Temperature Physics
Coherent coupling between surface plasmons and excitons in semiconductor nanocrystals
We present an experimental demonstration of strong coupling between a surface
plasmon propagating on a planar silver substrate, and the lowest excited state
of CdSe nanocrystals. Variable-angle spectroscopic ellipsometry measurements
demonstrated the formation of plasmon-exciton mixed states, characterized by a
Rabi splitting of 82 meV at room temperature. Such a coherent
interaction has the potential for the development of plasmonic non-linear
devices, and furthermore, this system is akin to those studied in cavity
quantum electrodynamics, thus offering the possibility to study the regime of
strong light-matter coupling in semiconductor nanocrystals at easily accessible
experimental conditions.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figure
Type Ia supernova diversity: Standardizing the candles
Future use of type Ia supernovae for cosmology aims not only to determine the
equation of state of dark energy, but also to constrain possible variations in
its value. To achieve this goal, supernovae need to become better calibrated
standard candles - not only to improve the precision of the measurement, but
more importantly to gain better control over systematic uncertainties in order
to ensure the accuracy of the result.
Here we report on a project to quantify the diversity in type Ia supernovae,
and to look for trends and/or sub-types that can be used to improve their
calibration as standard candles. We implement a version of principal component
analysis on type Ia supernova spectra. Although the quantity of data is not
sufficient to draw any firm conclusions we show that this method holds promise
for, at the very least, effectively separating peculiar supernovae. Whether it
can be further used to improve the calibration of normal type Ia's remains a
project for future study.Comment: Conference Proceedings. Cefalu 2006, The multicoloured landscape of
compact objects and their explosive origins. Six pages, three figure
Small Structures via Thermal Instability of Partially Ionized Plasma. I. Condensation Mode
(Shortened) Thermal instability of partially ionized plasma is investigated
by linear perturbation analysis. According to the previous studies under the
one fluid approach, the thermal instability is suppressed due to the magnetic
pressure. However, the previous studies did not precisely consider the effect
of the ion-neutral friction, since they did not treat the flow as two fluid
which is composed of ions and neutrals. Then, we revisit the effect of the
ion-neutral friction of the two fluid to the growth of the thermal instability.
According to our study, (1) The instability which is characterized by the mean
molecular weight of neutrals is suppressed via the ion-neutral friction only
when the magnetic field and the friction are sufficiently strong. The
suppression owing to the friction occurs even along the field line. If the
magnetic field and the friction are not so strong, the instability is not
stabilized. (2) The effect of the friction and the magnetic field is mainly
reduction of the growth rate of the thermal instability of weakly ionized
plasma. (3) The effect of friction does not affect the critical wavelength
lambdaF for the thermal instability. This yields that lambdaF of the weakly
ionized plasma is not enlarged even when the magnetic field exists. We insist
that the thermal instability of the weakly ionized plasma in the magnetic field
can grow up even at the small length scale where the instability under the
assumption of the one fluid plasma can not grow owing to the stabilization by
the magnetic field. (4) The wavelength of the maximum growth rate of the
instability shifts shortward according to the decrement of the growth rate,
because the friction is effective at rather larger scale. Therefore, smaller
structures are expected to appear than those without the ion-neutral friction.Comment: To appear in Ap
Universal Behavior in Large-scale Aggregation of Independent Noisy Observations
Aggregation of noisy observations involves a difficult tradeoff between
observation quality, which can be increased by increasing the number of
observations, and aggregation quality which decreases if the number of
observations is too large. We clarify this behavior for a protypical system in
which arbitrarily large numbers of observations exceeding the system capacity
can be aggregated using lossy data compression. We show the existence of a
scaling relation between the collective error and the system capacity, and show
that large scale lossy aggregation can outperform lossless aggregation above a
critical level of observation noise. Further, we show that universal results
for scaling and critical value of noise which are independent of system
capacity can be obtained by considering asymptotic behavior when the system
capacity increases toward infinity.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figure
Observations of Small Scale ISM Structure in Dense Atomic Gas
We present high resolution (R~170,000) Kitt Peak National Observatory Co'ude
Feed telescope observations of the interstellar KI 7698 angstrom line towards 5
multiple star systems with saturated NaI components. We compare the KI
absorption line profiles in each of the two (or three) lines of sight in these
systems, and find significant differences between the sight-lines in 3 out of
the 5 cases. We infer that the small scale structure traced by previous NaI
observations is also present in at least some of the components with saturated
NaI absorption lines, and thus the small scale structures traced by the neutral
species are occurring at some level in clouds of all column densities. We
discuss the implications of that conclusion and a potential explanation by
density inhomogeneities
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