Tropospheric limitations on the accuracy of phase measurement of coordinates in astronomy

The effect of tropospheric fluctuation on the accuracy of phase measurements of coordinates is discussed. The nature of the averaging of the tropospheric effects, if N coordinate measurements of duration T with period mu are made, is investigated. Various averaging modes depending on the relation of the various time parameters are investigated. Equations taking into account the correlations between individual observations are presented. It is shown that the correlation interval between the individual observations is always greater than the fluctuation period of tropospheric inhomogeneities typical for a given baseline

A method of detecting radio transients

Radio transients are sporadic signals and their detection requires that the backends of radio telescopes be equipped with the appropriate hardware and software to undertake this. Observational programs to detect transients can be dedicated or they can piggy-back on observations made by other programs. It is the single-dish single-transient (non-periodical) mode which is considered in this paper. Because neither the width of a transient nor the time of its arrival is known, a sequential analysis in the form of a cumulative sum (cusum) algorithm is proposed here. Computer simulations and real observation data processing are included to demonstrate the performance of the cusum. The use of the Hough transform is here proposed for the purpose of non-coherent de-dispersion. It is possible that the detected transients could be radio frequency interferences (RFI) and a procedure is proposed here which can distinguish between celestial signals and man-made RFI. This procedure is based on an analysis of the statistical properties of the signals

RFI mitigation with phase-only adaptive beamforming

Connected radio interferometers are sometimes used in the tied-array mode: signals from antenna elements are coherently added and the sum signal applied to a VLBI backend or pulsar processing machine. Usually there is no computer-controlled amplitude weighting in the existing radio interferometer facilities. Radio frequency interference (RFI) mitigation with phase-only adaptive beamforming is proposed for this mode of observation. Small phase perturbations are introduced in each of the antenna's signal. The values of these perturbations are optimized in such a way that the signal from a radio source of interest is preserved and RFI signals suppressed. An evolutionary programming algorithm is used for this task. Computer simulations, made for both one-dimensional and two-dimensional array set-ups, show considerable suppression of RFI and acceptable changes to the main array beam in the radio source direction.Comment: 7 pages, 11 figure

Pressurized rf cavities in ionizing beams

A muon collider or Higgs factory requires significant reduction of the six dimensional emittance of the beam prior to acceleration. One method to accomplish this involves building a cooling channel using high pressure gas filled radio frequency cavities. The performance of such a cavity when subjected to an intense particle beam must be investigated before this technology can be validated. To this end, a high pressure gas filled radio frequency (rf) test cell was built and placed in a 400 MeV beam line from the Fermilab linac to study the plasma evolution and its effect on the cavity. Hydrogen, deuterium, helium and nitrogen gases were studied. Additionally, sulfur hexafluoride and dry air were used as dopants to aid in the removal of plasma electrons. Measurements were made using a variety of beam intensities, gas pressures, dopant concentrations, and cavity rf electric fields, both with and without a 3 T external solenoidal magnetic field. Energy dissipation per electron-ion pair, electron-ion recombination rates, ion-ion recombination rates, and electron attachment times to SF6 and O-2 were measured.ope

Spectral density asymptotics for Gaussian and Laguerre β\beta-ensembles in the exponentially small region

The first two terms in the large $N$ asymptotic expansion of the $\beta$ moment of the characteristic polynomial for the Gaussian and Laguerre $\beta$-ensembles are calculated. This is used to compute the asymptotic expansion of the spectral density in these ensembles, in the exponentially small region outside the leading support, up to terms $o(1)$ . The leading form of the right tail of the distribution of the largest eigenvalue is given by the density in this regime. It is demonstrated that there is a scaling from this, to the right tail asymptotics for the distribution of the largest eigenvalue at the soft edge.Comment: 19 page

Statistically Stable Estimates of Variance in Radioastronomical Observations as Tools for RFI Mitigation

A selection of statistically stable (robust) algorithms for data variance calculating has been made. Their properties have been analyzed via computer simulation. These algorithms would be useful if adopted in radio astronomy observations in the presence of strong sporadic radio frequency interference (RFI). Several observational results have been presented here to demonstrate the effectiveness of these algorithms in RFI mitigation

Guaranteed cost boundary control of the semilinear heat equation

We consider a 1D semilinear reaction-diffusion system with controlled heat flux at one of the boundaries. We design a finite-dimensional state-feedback controller guaranteeing that a given quadratic cost does not exceed a prescribed value for all nonlinearities with a predefined Lipschitz constant. To this end, we perform modal decomposition and truncate the highly damped (residue) modes. To deal with the nonlinearity that couples the residue and dominating modes, we combine the direct Lyapunov approach with the S-procedure and Parseval’s identity. The truncation may lead to spillover: the ignored modes can deteriorate the overall system performance. Our main contribution is spillover avoidance via the L2 separation of the residue. Namely, we calculate the L2 input-to-state gains for the residue modes and add them to the control weight in the quadratic cost used to design a controller for the dominating modes. A numerical example demonstrates that the proposed idea drastically improves both the admissible Lipschitz constants and guaranteed cost bound compared to the recently introduced direct Lyapunov method