6,413 research outputs found
Damping of capillary waves at the air-sea interface by oceanic surface-active material
The damping rates of capillary waves (wavelength = 0.52 cm) were measured on fresh seawater sampled under various oceanographic conditions. The collected water con tained varying quantities of surface-active organic materials capable of adsorbing at the air-water interface and altering the sea-surface properties...
Social and Economic Impact of Solar Electricity at Schuchuli Village
Schuchuli, a small remote village on the Papago Indian Reservation in southwest Arizona, is 27 kilometers (17 miles) from the nearest available utility power. Its lack of conventional power is due to the prohibitive cost of supplying a small electrical load with a long-distance distribution line. Furthermore, alternate energy sources are expensive and place a burden on the resources of the villagers. On December 16, 1978, as part of a federally funded project, a solar cell power system was put into operation at Schuchuli. The system powers the village water pump, lighting for homes and other village buildings, family refrigerators and a communal washing machine and sewing machine
Bound states of magnons in the S=1/2 quantum spin ladder
We study the excitation spectrum of the two-leg antiferromagnetic S=1/2
Heisenberg ladder. Our approach is based on the description of the excitations
as triplets above a strong-coupling singlet ground state. The quasiparticle
spectrum is calculated by treating the excitations as a dilute Bose gas with
infinite on-site repulsion. We find singlet (S=0) and triplet (S=1)
two-particle bound states of the elementary triplets. We argue that bound
states generally exist in any dimerized quantum spin model.Comment: 4 REVTeX pages, 4 Postscript figure
Boosting jet power in black hole spacetimes
The extraction of rotational energy from a spinning black hole via the
Blandford-Znajek mechanism has long been understood as an important component
in models to explain energetic jets from compact astrophysical sources. Here we
show more generally that the kinetic energy of the black hole, both rotational
and translational, can be tapped, thereby producing even more luminous jets
powered by the interaction of the black hole with its surrounding plasma. We
study the resulting Poynting jet that arises from single boosted black holes
and binary black hole systems. In the latter case, we find that increasing the
orbital angular momenta of the system and/or the spins of the individual black
holes results in an enhanced Poynting flux.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figure
Hybridization gap versus hidden order gap in URuSi as revealed by optical spectroscopy
We present the in-plane optical reflectance measurement on single crystals of
URuAs. The study revealed a strong temperature-dependent spectral
evolution. Above 50 K, the low frequency optical conductivity is rather flat
without a clear Drude-like response, indicating a very short transport life
time of the free carriers. Well below the coherence temperature, there appears
an abrupt spectral weight suppression below 400 cm, yielding evidence
for the formation of a hybridization energy gap arising from the mixing of the
conduction electron and narrow f-electron bands. A small part of the suppressed
spectral weight was transferred to the low frequency side, leading to a narrow
Drude component, while the majority of the suppressed spectral weight was
transferred to the high frequency side centered near 4000 cm. Below the
hidden order temperature, another very prominent energy gap structure was
observed, which leads to the removal of a large part of the Drude component and
a sharp reduction of the carrier scattering rate. The study revealed that the
hybridization gap and the hidden orger gap are distinctly different: they occur
at different energy scales and exhibit completely different spectral
characteristics.Comment: 5 page
A relativistic helical jet in the gamma-ray AGN 1156+295
We present the results of a number of high resolution radio observations of
the AGN 1156+295. These include multi-epoch and multi-frequency VLBI, VSOP,
MERLIN and VLA observations made over a period of 50 months. The 5 GHz MERLIN
images trace a straight jet extending to 2 arcsec at P.A. -18 degrees. Extended
low brightness emission was detected in the MERLIN observation at 1.6 GHz and
the VLA observation at 8.5 GHz with a bend of about 90 degrees at the end of
the 2 arcsecond jet. A region of similar diffuse emission is also seen about 2
arcseconds south of the radio core. The VLBI images of the blazar reveal a
core-jet structure with an oscillating jet on a milli-arcsecond (mas) scale
which aligns with the arcsecond jet at a distance of several tens of
milli-arcseconds from the core. This probably indicates that the orientation of
the jet structure is close to the line of sight, with the northern jet being
relativistically beamed toward us. In this scenario the diffuse emission to the
north and south is not beamed and appears symmetrical. For the northern jet at
the mas scale, proper motions of 13.7 +/-3.5, 10.6 +/- 2.8, and 11.8 +/- 2.8 c
are measured in three distinct components of the jet (q_0=0.5, H_0=65 km /s
/Mpc are used through out this paper). Highly polarised emission is detected on
VLBI scales in the region in which the jet bends sharply to the north-west. The
spectral index distribution of the source shows that the strongest compact
component has a flat spectrum, and the extended jet has a steep spectrum. A
helical trajectory along the surface of a cone was proposed based on the
conservation laws for kinetic energy and momentum to explain the observed
phenomena, which is in a good agreement with the observed results on scales of
1 mas to 1 arcsec.Comment: 19 pages with 18 figures. Accepted for publication in the A&
Strict limit on in-plane ordered magnetic dipole moment in URu2Si2
Neutron diffraction is used to examine the polarization of weak static
antiferromagnetism in high quality single crystalline URu2Si2. As previously
documented, elastic Bragg-like diffraction develops for temperature T<T_{HO}=
17.5 K at q=(100) but not at wave vector transfer q=(001). The peak width
indicates correlation lengths \xi_c=230(12) \AA \ and \xi_a=240(15) \AA. The
integrated intensity of the T-dependent peaks corresponds to a sample averaged
c-oriented staggered moment of \mu_{c}=0.022(1) \mu_B at T=1.7 K. The absence
of T-dependent diffraction at q=(001) places a limit \mu_{\perp}<0.0011 \mu_B
on an f- or d-orbital based in-plane staggered magnetic dipole moment, which is
associated with multipolar orders proposed for URu_2Si_2.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figure
Intraindividual reaction time variability is malleable: feedback- and education-related reductions in variability with age
Intraindividual variability (IIV) in trial-to-trial reaction time (RT) is a robust and stable within-person marker of aging. However, it remains unknown whether IIV can be modulated experimentally. In a sample of healthy younger and older adults, we examined the effects of motivation- and performance-based feedback, age, and education level on IIV in a choice RT task (four blocks over 15 min). We found that IIV was reduced with block-by-block feedback, particularly for highly educated older adults. Notably, the baseline difference in IIV levels between this group and the young adults was reduced by 50% by the final testing block, this advantaged older group had improved such that they were statistically indistinguishable from young adults on two of three preceding testing blocks. Our findings confirmed that response IIV is indeed modifiable, within mere minutes of feedback and testing
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