Magneto-acoustic waves in sunspots from observations and numerical simulations

We study the propagation of waves from the photosphere to the chromosphere of sunspots. From time series of cospatial Ca II H (including its line blends) intensity spectra and polarimetric spectra of Si I 1082.7 nm and He I 1083.0 nm we retrieve the line-of-sight velocity at several heights. The analysis of the phase difference and amplification spectra shows standing waves for frequencies below 4 mHz and propagating waves for higher frequencies, and allows us to infer the temperature and height where the lines are formed. Using these observational data, we have constructed a model of sunspot, and we have introduced the velocity measured with the photospheric Si I 1082.7 nm line as a driver. The numerically propagated wave pattern fits reasonably well with the observed using the lines formed at higher layers, and the simulations reproduce many of the observed features. The observed waves are slow MHD waves propagating longitudinally along field lines.Comment: proceedings of GONG 2010/SOHO 24 meeting, June 27 - July 2, 2010, Aix-en-Provence, Franc

Value sets of sparse polynomials

We obtain a new lower bound on the size of value set f(F_p) of a sparse polynomial f in F_p[X] over a finite field of p elements when p is prime. This bound is uniform with respect of the degree and depends on some natural arithmetic properties of the degrees of the monomial terms of f and the number of these terms. Our result is stronger than those which canted be extracted from the bounds on multiplicities of individual values in f(F_p)

Synthetic observations of wave propagation in a sunspot umbra

Spectropolarimetric temporal series from Fe I $\lambda$ 6301.5 \AA\ and Ca II infrared triplet lines are obtained by applying the Stokes synthesis code NICOLE to a numerical simulation of wave propagation in a sunspot umbra from MANCHA code. The analysis of the phase difference between Doppler velocity and intensity core oscillations of the Fe I $\lambda$ 6301.5 \AA\ line reveals that variations in the intensity are produced by opacity fluctuations rather than intrinsic temperature oscillations, except for frequencies between 5 and 6.5 mHz. On the other hand, the photospheric magnetic field retrieved from the weak field approximation provides the intrinsic magnetic field oscillations associated to wave propagation. Our results suggest that this is due to the low magnetic field gradient of our sunspot model. The Stokes parameters of the chromospheric Ca II infrared triplet lines show striking variations as shock waves travel through the formation height of the lines, including emission self-reversals in the line core and highly abnormal Stokes V profiles. Magnetic field oscillations inferred from the Ca II infrared lines using the weak field approximation appear to be related with the magnetic field strength variation between the photosphere and the chromosphere.Comment: Accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journa

Is the Theta+ a K pi N bound state?

Following a recent suggestion that the $\Theta ^+$ could be a $K \pi N$ bound state we perform an investigation under the light of the meson meson and meson baryon dynamics provided by the chiral Lagrangians and using methods currently employed to dynamically generate meson and baryon resonances by means of unitary extensions of chiral perturbation theory. We consider two body and three body forces and examine the possibility of a bound state below the three particle pion-kaon-nucleon and above the kaon-nucleon thresholds. Although we find indeed an attractive interaction in the case of isospin I=0 and spin-parity $1/2^+$, the interaction is too weak to bind the system. If we arbitrarily add to the physically motivated potential the needed strength to bind the system and with such strong attraction evaluate the decay width into $K N$, this turns out to be small. A discussion on further work in this direction is done.Comment: Change of title and few sentences, size of two graphs. References adde

Hermite polynomials, linear flows on the torus, and an uncertainty principle for roots

We study a recent result of Bourgain, Clozel and Kahane, a version of which states that a sufficiently nice function $f:\mathbb{R} \rightarrow \mathbb{R}$ that coincides with its Fourier transform and vanishes at the origin has a root in the interval $(c, \infty)$, where the optimal $c$ satisfies $0.41 \leq c \leq 0.64$. A similar result holds in higher dimensions. We improve the one-dimensional result to $0.45 \leq c \leq 0.594$, and the lower bound in higher dimensions. We also prove that extremizers exist, and have infinitely many double roots. With this purpose in mind, we establish a new structure statement about Hermite polynomials which relates their pointwise evaluation to linear flows on the torus, and applies to other families of orthogonal polynomials as well.Comment: 26 pages, 4 figure

Multiplicative Order of Gauss Periods

We obtain a lower bound on the multiplicative order of Gauss periods which generate normal bases over finite fields. This bound improves the previous bound of J. von zur Gathen and I. E. Shparlinski.Comment: 9 page

Extracting Information from Qubit-Environment Correlations

Most works on open quantum systems generally focus on the reduced physical system by tracing out the environment degrees of freedom. Here we show that the qubit distributions with the environment are essential for a thorough analysis, and demonstrate that the way that quantum correlations are distributed in a quantum register is constrained by the way in which each subsystem gets correlated with the environment. For a two-qubit system coupled to a common dissipative environment $\mathcal{E}$, we show how to optimise interqubit correlations and entanglement via a quantification of the qubit-environment information flow, in a process that, perhaps surprisingly, does not rely on the knowledge of the state of the environment. To illustrate our findings, we consider an optically-driven bipartite interacting qubit $AB$ system under the action of $\mathcal{E}$. By tailoring the light-matter interaction, a relationship between the qubits early stage disentanglement and the qubit-environment entanglement distribution is found. We also show that, under suitable initial conditions, the qubits energy asymmetry allows the identification of physical scenarios whereby qubit-qubit entanglement minima coincide with the extrema of the $A\mathcal{E}$ and $B\mathcal{E}$ entanglement oscillations.Comment: 4 figures, 9 page