1,868 research outputs found
Tropical surface singularities
In this paper, we study tropicalisations of singular surfaces in toric
threefolds. We completely classify singular tropical surfaces of
maximal-dimensional type, show that they can generically have only finitely
many singular points, and describe all possible locations of singular points.
More precisely, we show that singular points must be either vertices, or
generalized midpoints and baricenters of certain faces of singular tropical
surfaces, and, in some cases, there may be additional metric restrictions to
faces of singular tropical surfaces.Comment: A gap in the classification was closed. 37 pages, 29 figure
Scheme and Scale Dependence of Charm Production in Neutrino Scattering
We discuss some theoretical uncertainties in the calculation of the cross
section for charm production in charged current deep inelastic neutrino
scattering related to ambiguities in the treatment of terms which are singular
in the limit of a vanishing charm mass. In particular we compare the so-called
variable flavour scheme where these terms are absorbed in the parton
distribution functions containing the charm as an active flavour, with the
so-called fixed flavour scheme with no charm mass subtraction where the charm
appears only in the final state of fixed-order scattering matrix elements.
Using available parametrizations of parton distribution functions we find that
the two schemes lead to largely differing results for separate structure
functions whereas the differences cancel to a large extent in the total cross
section in that kinematical region which has been measured so far.Comment: 20pages, uuencoded postscript, figures include
Photometric Observations Constraining the Size, Shape, and Albedo of 2003 El61, a Rapidly Rotating, Pluto-Sized Object in the Kuiper Belt
We present measurements at optical wavelengths of the spectral reflectance,
rotational light curve, and solar phase curve of 2003 EL61. With apparent
visual magnitude 17.5 at 51 AU from the sun, this newly discovered member of
the classical Kuiper Belt is now the third brightest KBO after Pluto and 2005
FY9. Our observations reveal an unambiguous, double-peaked rotational light
curve with period 3.9154 +/- 0.0002 hours and peak to peak amplitude 0.28 +/-
0.04 mag. This is the fastest rotation period reliably determined for any body
in the solar system larger than 100 km. Assuming the body has relaxed over time
to the shape taken by a homogenous fluid body, our observations tightly
constrain the shape and density. Given the mass we recently determined for 2003
EL61 from the orbit of a small satellite, we also constrain the size and
albedo. We find a total length of 1960 to 2500 km, a mean density of 2600 to
3340 kg m-3, and a visual albedo greater than 0.6. We also measure a neutral
reflectance at visible wavelengths and a linear phase curve with slope varying
from 0.09 mag deg-1 in the B band to 0.13 mag deg-1 in the I band. The absolute
V-band magnitude is 0.444+/-0.021.Comment: 27 pages, six figure
Successful use of axonal transport for drug delivery by synthetic molecular vehicles
We report the use of axonal transport to achieve intraneural drug delivery. We constructed a novel tripartite complex of an axonal transport facilitator conjugated to a linker molecule bearing up to a hundred reversibly attached drug molecules. The complex efficiently enters nerve terminals after intramuscular or intradermal administration and travels within axonal processes to neuron cell bodies. The tripartite agent provided 100-fold amplification of saturable neural uptake events, delivering multiple drug molecules per complex. _In vivo_, analgesic drug delivery to systemic and to non-targeted neural tissues was greatly reduced compared to existing routes of administration, thus exemplifying the possibility of specific nerve root targeting and effectively increasing the potency of the candidate drug gabapentin 300-fold relative to oral administration
Time Domain Explorations With Digital Sky Surveys
One of the new frontiers of astronomical research is the exploration of time
variability on the sky at different wavelengths and flux levels. We have
carried out a pilot project using DPOSS data to study strong variables and
transients, and are now extending it to the new Palomar-QUEST synoptic sky
survey. We report on our early findings and outline the methodology to be
implemented in preparation for a real-time transient detection pipeline. In
addition to large numbers of known types of highly variable sources (e.g., SNe,
CVs, OVV QSOs, etc.), we expect to find numerous transients whose nature may be
established by a rapid follow-up. Whereas we will make all detected variables
publicly available through the web, we anticipate that email alerts would be
issued in the real time for a subset of events deemed to be the most
interesting. This real-time process entails many challenges, in an effort to
maintain a high completeness while keeping the contamination low. We will
utilize distributed Grid services developed by the GRIST project, and implement
a variety of advanced statistical and machine learning techniques.Comment: 5 pages, 2 postscript figures, uses adassconf.sty. To be published
in: "ADASS XIV (2004)", Eds. Patrick Shopbell, Matthew Britton and Rick
Ebert, ASP Conference Serie
Experimental Evidence for Simple Relations between Unpolarized and Polarized Parton Distributions
The Pauli exclusion principle is advocated for constructing the proton and
neutron deep inelastic structure functions in terms of Fermi-Dirac
distributions that we parametrize with very few parameters. It allows a fair
description of the recent NMC data on and at
, as well as the CCFR neutrino data at and . We
also make some reasonable and simple assumptions to relate unpolarized and
polarized quark parton distributions and we obtain, with no additional free
parameters, the spin dependent structure functions and
. Using the correct evolution, we have checked that they
are in excellent agreement with the very recent SMC proton data at and the SLAC neutron data at .Comment: 17 pages,CPT-94/P.3032,latex,6 fig available on cpt.univ-mrs.fr
directory pub/preprints/94/fundamental-interactions /94-P.303
Heavy Quark Initiated Contributions to Deep Inelastic Structure Functions
We present O(alpha_s^1) corrections to deep inelastic scattering amplitudes
on massive quarks obtained within the scheme of Aivazis, Collins, Olness and
Tung (ACOT). After identifying the correct subtraction term the convergence of
these contributions towards the analogous coefficient functions for massless
quarks, obtained within the modified minimal subtraction scheme (MSbar), is
demonstrated. Furthermore, the quantitative relevance of the contributions to
neutral current (NC) and charged current (CC) structure functions is
investigated for several choices of the factorization scale.Comment: 29 pages, 6 figures; uses epsfig.sty, amssymb.sty, axodraw.sty; minor
changes for publication in Phys. Rev.
Standardizing Type Ia Supernova Absolute Magnitudes Using Gaussian Process Data Regression
We present a novel class of models for Type Ia supernova time-evolving
spectral energy distributions (SED) and absolute magnitudes: they are each
modeled as stochastic functions described by Gaussian processes. The values of
the SED and absolute magnitudes are defined through well-defined regression
prescriptions, so that data directly inform the models. As a proof of concept,
we implement a model for synthetic photometry built from the spectrophotometric
time series from the Nearby Supernova Factory. Absolute magnitudes at peak
brightness are calibrated to 0.13 mag in the -band and to as low as 0.09 mag
in the blueshifted -band, where the dispersion includes
contributions from measurement uncertainties and peculiar velocities. The
methodology can be applied to spectrophotometric time series of supernovae that
span a range of redshifts to simultaneously standardize supernovae together
with fitting cosmological parameters.Comment: 47 pages, 15 figures, accepted for publication by Astrophysical
Journa
Improving Cosmological Distance Measurements Using Twin Type Ia Supernovae
We introduce a method for identifying "twin" Type Ia supernovae, and using
them to improve distance measurements. This novel approach to Type Ia supernova
standardization is made possible by spectrophotometric time series observations
from the Nearby Supernova Factory (SNfactory). We begin with a well-measured
set of supernovae, find pairs whose spectra match well across the entire
optical window, and then test whether this leads to a smaller dispersion in
their absolute brightnesses. This analysis is completed in a blinded fashion,
ensuring that decisions made in implementing the method do not inadvertently
bias the result. We find that pairs of supernovae with more closely matched
spectra indeed have reduced brightness dispersion. We are able to standardize
this initial set of SNfactory supernovae to 0.083 +/- 0.012 magnitudes,
implying a dispersion of 0.072 +/- 0.010 magnitudes in the absence of peculiar
velocities. We estimate that with larger numbers of comparison SNe, e.g, using
the final SNfactory spectrophotometric dataset as a reference, this method will
be capable of standardizing high-redshift supernovae to within 0.06-0.07
magnitudes. These results imply that at least 3/4 of the variance in Hubble
residuals in current supernova cosmology analyses is due to previously
unaccounted-for astrophysical differences among the supernovaeComment: 37 pages, 9 figures, 5 tables. Accepted for publication in ApJ. Fixed
typo in arXiv abstrac
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