Magnetic topology and surface differential rotation on the K1 subgiant of the RS CVn system HR 1099

We present here spectropolarimetric observations of the RS CVn system HR 1099 (V711 Tau) secured from 1998 February to 2002 January with the spectropolarimeter MuSiCoS at the Telescope Bernard Lyot (Observatoire du Pic du Midi, France). We apply Zeeman-Doppler Imaging and reconstruct brightness and magnetic surface topologies of the K1 primary subgiant of the system, at five different epochs. We confirm the presence of large, axisymmetric regions where the magnetic field is mainly azimuthal, providing further support to the hypothesis that dynamo processes may be distributed throughout the whole convective zone in this star. We study the short-term evolution of surface structures from a comparison of our images with observations secured at close-by epochs by Donati et al. (2003) at the Anglo-Australian Telescope. We conclude that the small-scale brightness and magnetic patterns undergo major changes within a timescale of 4 to 6 weeks, while the largest structures remain stable over several years. We report the detection of a weak surface differential rotation (both from brightness and magnetic tracers) indicating that the equator rotates faster than the pole with a difference in rotation rate between the pole and the equator about 4 times smaller than that of the Sun. This result suggests that tidal forces also impact the global dynamic equilibrium of convective zones in cool active stars.Comment: accepted by MNRA

Magnetic field, differential rotation and activity of the hot-Jupiter hosting star HD 179949

HD 179949 is an F8V star, orbited by a giant planet at ~8 R* every 3.092514 days. The system was reported to undergo episodes of stellar activity enhancement modulated by the orbital period, interpreted as caused by Star-Planet Interactions (SPIs). One possible cause of SPIs is the large-scale magnetic field of the host star in which the close-in giant planet orbits. In this paper we present spectropolarimetric observations of HD 179949 during two observing campaigns (2009 September and 2007 June). We detect a weak large-scale magnetic field of a few Gauss at the surface of the star. The field configuration is mainly poloidal at both observing epochs. The star is found to rotate differentially, with a surface rotation shear of dOmega=0.216\pm0.061 rad/d, corresponding to equatorial and polar rotation periods of 7.62\pm0.07 and 10.3\pm0.8 d respectively. The coronal field estimated by extrapolating the surface maps resembles a dipole tilted at ~70 degrees. We also find that the chromospheric activity of HD 179949 is mainly modulated by the rotation of the star, with two clear maxima per rotation period as expected from a highly tilted magnetosphere. In September 2009, we find that the activity of HD 179949 shows hints of low amplitude fluctuations with a period close to the beat period of the system.Comment: Accepted for publication in Monthly Notices of The Royal Astronomical Societ

“I KNOW WHAT NOTHING MEANS”: NOSTALGIA, HOPE, AND THE POSTMODERN SEARCH FOR THE SUBLIME

Amid simultaneous crises of self, nation, digital citizenship, global health, climate change, and socio-political polarization, to name but a few of the catastrophes that seem to define life in the global West in the twenty-first century, where do we find hope? Do we find it at all? Is there any hope to be found? These are the questions that serve as the genesis for this undertaking in which I locate the origin of these crises far before the events of the 2016 and 2020 elections, far before even the panic of Y2K. I begin my examination of hope in contemporary American society in the literature of the 1970s and conclude with an examination of hyper-contemporary fiction, tracing essential threads of postmodernism, transhumanism and posthumanism, nostalgia and—via my coining of a new application of the term—post-nostalgia through the work of writers including Joan Didion, Toni Morrison, Jeanette Winterson, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jennifer Egan, and Don DeLillo. Postmodernism has long been accused of creating without feeling or emotion, an accusation that tends to stagnate within specifically aesthetic applications of the term. I, instead, ground my argument in material applications of postmodernism, primarily to resist the common “hierarchy of value,” as Amy Hungerford terms it, created by the traditional valorization of primarily white, male thinkers that occurs in postmodern discourse. My investigation is divided into two parts that straddle the divide between nostalgia and post-nostalgia, which I argue are the two central forces that have impacted the experience of hope in Western society over the past fifty years, and I employ frameworks outlined by Sianne Ngai, Legacy Russell, Christina Sharpe, and O’neil Van Horn, among others, in determining how we can find hope as resistance and, ultimately, as surrender

Differential rotation of main-sequence dwarfs and its dynamo-efficiency

A new version of a numerical model of stellar differential rotation based on mean-field hydrodynamics is presented and tested by computing the differential rotation of the Sun. The model is then applied to four individual stars including two moderate and two fast rotators to reproduce their observed differential rotation quite closely. A series of models for rapidly rotating ($P_{rot} = 1$ day) stars of different masses and compositions is generated. The effective temperature is found convenient to parameterize the differential rotation: variations with metallicity, that are quite pronounced when the differential rotation is considered as a function of the stellar mass, almost disappear in the dependence of differential rotation on temperature. The differential rotation increases steadily with surface temperature to exceed the largest differential rotation observed to date for the hottest F-stars we considered. This strong differential rotation is, however, found not to be efficient for dynamos when the efficiency is estimated with the standard $C_\Omega$-parameter of dynamo models. On the contrary, the small differential rotation of M-stars is the most dynamo-efficient. The meridional flow near the bottom of the convection zone is not small compared to the flow at the top in all our computations. The flow is distributed over the entire convection zone in slow rotators but retreats to the convection zone boundaries with increasing rotation rate, to consist of two near-boundary jets in rapid rotators. The implications of the change of the flow structure for stellar dynamos are briefly discussed.Comment: 9 pages, 11 figures, submitted to MNRA

Girsanov reweighting for metadynamics simulations

Metadynamics is a computational method to explore the phase space of a molecular system. Gaussian functions are added along relevant coordinates on the fly during a molecular-dynamics simulation to force the system to escape from minima in the potential energy function. The dynamics in the resulting trajectory are however unphysical and cannot be used directly to estimate dynamical prop- erties of the system. Girsanov reweighting is a recent method used to construct the Markov State Model (MSM) of a system subjected to an external perturbation. With the combination of these two techniques—metadynamics/Girsanov-reweighting—the unphysical dynamics in a metadynam- ics simulation can be reweighted to obtain the MSM of the unbiased system. We demonstrate the method on a one-dimensional diffusion process, alanine dipeptide, and the hexapeptide Val-Gly- Val-Ala-Pro-Gly (VGVAPG). The results are in excellent agreement with the MSMs obtained from direct unbiased simulations of these systems. We also apply metadynamics/Girsanov-reweighting to a β-hairpin peptide, whose dynamics is too slow to efficiently explore its phase space by direct simulation

On the Response Function Technique for Calculating the Random-Phase Approximation Correlation Energy

We develop a scheme to exactly evaluate the correlation energy in the random-phase approximation, based on linear response theory. It is demonstrated that our formula is completely equivalent to a contour integral representation recently proposed by Donau et al. being numerically more efficient for realistic calculations. Numerical examples are presented for pairing correlations in rapidly rotating nuclei.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

Abundances and kinematics for ten anticentre open clusters

Open clusters are distributed all across the disk and are convenient tracers of its properties. In particular, outer disk clusters bear a key role for the investigation of the chemical evolution of the Galactic disk. The goal of this study is to derive homogeneous elemental abundances for a sample of ten outer disk OCs, and investigate possible links with disk structures such as the Galactic Anticenter Stellar Structure. We analyse high-resolution spectra of red giants, obtained from the HIRES@Keck and UVES@VLT archives. We derive elemental abundances and stellar atmosphere parameters by means of the classical equivalent width method. We also performed orbit integrations using proper motions. The Fe abundances we derive trace a shallow negative radial metallicity gradient of slope -0.027+/-0.007 dex.kpc-1 in the outer 12 kpc of the disk. The [alpha/Fe] gradient appears flat, with a slope of 0.006+/-0.007 dex.kpc-1 . The two outermost clusters (Be 29 and Sau 1) appear to follow elliptical orbits. Be 20 also exhibits a peculiar orbit with a large excursion above the plane. The irregular orbits of the three most metal-poor clusters (of which two are located at the edge of the Galactic disk), if confirmed by more robust astrometric measurements such as those of the Gaia mission, are compatible with an inside-out formation scenario for the Milky Way, in which extragalactic material is accreted onto the outer disk. We cannot determine if Be 20, Be 29,and Sau 1 are of extragalactic origin, as they may be old genuine Galactic clusters whose orbits were perturbed by accretion events or minor mergers in the past 5 Gyr, or they may be representants of the thick disk population. The nature of these objects is intriguing and deserves further investigations in the near future.Comment: 17 pages, 9 figures; accepted for publication in A&

Components Qualification for a Possible use in the Mu2e Calorimeter Waveform Digitizers

The Mu2e experiment at Fermilab searches for the charged flavor violating conversion of a muon into an electron in the Coulomb field of a nucleus. The detector consists of a straw tube tracker and a CSI crystal electromagnetic calorimeter, both housed in a superconducting solenoid. Both the front-end and the digital electronics, located inside the cryostat, will be operated in vacuum under a 1 T magnetic field, having to sustain the high flux of neutrons and ionizing particles coming from the muons stopping target. These harsh experimental conditions make the design of the calorimeter waveform digitizer quite challenging. All the selected commercial devices must be tested individually and qualified for radiation hardness and operation in high magnetic field. At the moment the expected particles flux and spectra at the digitizers location are not completely simulated and we are using initial rough estimates to select the components for the first prototype. We are gaining experience in the qualification procedures using the selected components but the choice will be frozen only when dose and neutron flux simulations will be completed. The experimental results of the first qualification campaign are presented.Comment: TWEPP 2016 - Topical Workshop on Electronics for Particle Physics, 26-30 September 2016, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT

Girsanov reweighting for path ensembles and Markov state models

The sensitivity of molecular dynamics on changes in the potential energy function plays an important role in understanding the dynamics and function of complex molecules. We present a method to obtain path ensemble averages of a perturbed dynamics from a set of paths generated by a reference dynamics. It is based on the concept of path probability measure and the Girsanov theorem, a result from stochastic analysis to estimate a change of measure of a path ensemble. Since Markov state models (MSM) of the molecular dynamics can be formulated as a combined phasespace and path ensemble average, the method can be extended to reweight MSMs by combining it with a reweighting of the Boltzmann distribution. We demonstrate how to efficiently implement the Girsanov reweighting in a molecular dynamics simulation program by calculating parts of the reweighting factor "on the fly" during the simulation, and we benchmark the method on test systems ranging from a two-dimensional diffusion process to an artificial many-body system and alanine dipeptide and valine dipeptide in implicit and explicit water. The method can be used to study the sensitivity of molecular dynamics on external perturbations as well as to reweight trajectories generated by enhanced sampling schemes to the original dynamics

THE INFLUENCE OF SLOPE DAMAGE ON THE KINEMATICS OF LANDSLIDES

The stability of large rock slopes is controlled by geological, structural, geomorphic, and environmental factors, which define the location, size, and failure mechanism of landslides. However, the stability of a slope can change with time, as a result of the formation and accumulation of slope damage, which weakens the rock mass forming the slope or the rupture surface of the incipient landslide. In this paper, we review three landslide sites, analysing the characteristics of the slope damage, and highlighting its effects on the kinematics of the slope and the evolution of the landslide. We note that, despite the importance of slope damage in controlling the timing and evolution of a slope failure, no frameworks or guidelines currently exist for performing a consistent and systematic analysis. We also emphasize that interdisciplinary approaches should be developed to assist in the quantification and characterization of rock slope damage