7,285 research outputs found
Determination of Cosmological Parameters
Rapid progress has been made recently toward the measurement of cosmological parameters. Still, there are areas remaining where future progress will be relatively slow and difficult, and where further attention is needed. In this review, the status of measurements of the matter density, the vacuum energy density or cosmological constant, the Hubble constant, and ages of the oldest measured objects are summarized. Many recent, independent dynamical measurements are yielding a low value for the matter density of about 1/3 the critical density. New evidence from type Ia supernovae suggests that the vacuum energy density may be non-zero. Many recent Hubble constant measurements appear to be converging in the range of 65-75 km/sec/Mpc. Eliminating systematic errors lies at the heart of accurate measurements for all of these parameters; as a result, a wide range of cosmological parameter space is currently still open. Fortunately, the prospects for accurately measuring cosmological parameters continue to increase
Measuring the Hubble Constant with the Hubble Space Telescope
Ten years ago our team completed the Hubble Space Telescope Key Project on
the extragalactic distance scale. Cepheids were detected in some 25 galaxies
and used to calibrate four secondary distance indicators that reach out into
the expansion field beyond the noise of galaxy peculiar velocities. The result
was H_0 = 72 +/- 8 km/sec/Mpc and put an end to galaxy distances uncertain by a
factor of two. This work has been awarded the Gruber Prize in Cosmology for
2009.Comment: Gruber Prize Lecture to be published in Transactions of the IA
The Measure of Cosmological Parameters
New, large, ground and space telescopes are contributing to an exciting and
rapid period of growth in observational cosmology. The subject is now far from
its earlier days of being data-starved and unconstrained, and new data are
fueling a healthy interplay between observations and experiment and theory. I
briefly review here the status of measurements of a number of quantities of
interest in cosmology: the Hubble constant, the total mass-energy density, the
matter density, the cosmological constant or dark energy component, and the
total optical background light.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figures, to be published in "2001: A Spacetime Odyssey:
Proceedings of the Inaugural Conference of the Michigan Center for
Theoretical Physics", Michael J. Duff & James T. Liu, eds., (World
Scientific, Singapore), in pres
Exact Topological Quantum Order in D=3 and Beyond: Branyons and Brane-Net Condensates
We construct an exactly solvable Hamiltonian acting on a 3-dimensional
lattice of spin- systems that exhibits topological quantum order.
The ground state is a string-net and a membrane-net condensate. Excitations
appear in the form of quasiparticles and fluxes, as the boundaries of strings
and membranes, respectively. The degeneracy of the ground state depends upon
the homology of the 3-manifold. We generalize the system to , were
different topological phases may occur. The whole construction is based on
certain special complexes that we call colexes.Comment: Revtex4 file, color figures, minor correction
An extended Hubbard model with ring exchange: a route to a non-Abelian topological phase
We propose an extended Hubbard model on a 2D Kagome lattice with an
additional ring-exchange term. The particles can be either bosons or spinless
fermions . At a special filling fraction of 1/6 the model is analyzed in the
lowest non-vanishing order of perturbation theory. Such ``undoped'' model is
closely related to the Quantum Dimer Model. We show how to arrive at an exactly
soluble point whose ground state manifold is the extensively degenerate
``d-isotopy space'', a necessary precondition for for a certain type of
non-Abelian topological order. Near the ``special'' values, , this space is expected to collapse to a stable topological phase
with anyonic excitations closely related to SU(2) Chern-Simons theory at level
k.Comment: 4 pages, 2 colour figures, submitted to PRL. For an extended
treatment of a more general family of models see cond-mat/030912
Neutrino mass constraint from CMB and its degeneracy with other cosmological parameters
We show that the cosmic microwave background (CMB) data of WMAP can give
subelectronvolt limit on the neutrino mass: m_nu < 0.63 eV (95% CL). We also
investigate its degeneracy with other cosmological parameters. In particular,
we show the Hubble constant derived from the WMAP data decreases considerably
when the neutrino mass is a few times 0.1 eV.Comment: 3 pages, 2 figures, prepared for the TAUP2007 Proceeding
Continuous star cluster formation in the spiral NGC 45
We determined ages for 52 star clusters with masses < 10^6 solar masses in
the low surface brightness spiral galaxy NGC 45. Four of these candidates are
old globular clusters located in the bulge. The remaining ones span a large age
range. The cluster ages suggest a continuous star/cluster formation history
without evidence for bursts, consistent with the galaxy being located in a
relatively unperturbed environment in the outskirts of the Sculptor group.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures. To appear in "Island Universes - Structure and
Evolution of Disk Galaxies", Terschelling (Netherlands), July 200
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