X-ray emission from the PSR B1259--63 system near apastron

The PSR B1259--63 system contains a 47 ms radio pulsar in a highly eccentric binary with a Be-star companion. Strongly time variable X-ray emission was reported from this system as the pulsar was near apastron in 1992-early 1993. The variability was primarily deduced from an apparent non-detection of the \psr system during a first pre-apastron \ros observation in February~1992. We have re-analyzed the \ros observations of the \psr system. Contrary to the results of a previous analysis, we find that the \psr system was detected by \ros during the first off-axis February~1992 observation. The intensity of the soft X-ray emission of the \psr system before and after the 1992 apastron appears to vary at most by a factor $\sim 2$. Our results sensibly constrain theoretical models of X-ray emission from the \psr system.Comment: LATEX, Accepted for publ. in ApJ

Thermalization of Hadrons via Hagedorn States

Hagedorn states are characterized by being very massive hadron-like resonances and by not being limited to quantum numbers of known hadrons. To generate such a zoo of different Hagedorn states, a covariantly formulated bootstrap equation is solved by ensuring energy conservation and conservation of baryon number $B$, strangeness $S$ and electric charge $Q$. The numerical solution of this equation provides Hagedorn spectra, which enable to obtain the decay width for Hagedorn states needed in cascading decay simulations. A single (heavy) Hagedorn state cascades by various two-body decay channels subsequently into final stable hadrons. All final hadronic observables like masses, spectral functions and decay branching ratios for hadronic feed down are taken from the hadronic transport model UrQMD. Strikingly, the final energy spectra of resulting hadrons are exponential showing a thermal-like distribution with the characteristic Hagedorn temperature

Exit polling and racial bloc voting: Combining individual-level and R×\timesC ecological data

Despite its shortcomings, cross-level or ecological inference remains a necessary part of some areas of quantitative inference, including in United States voting rights litigation. Ecological inference suffers from a lack of identification that, most agree, is best addressed by incorporating individual-level data into the model. In this paper we test the limits of such an incorporation by attempting it in the context of drawing inferences about racial voting patterns using a combination of an exit poll and precinct-level ecological data; accurate information about racial voting patterns is needed to assess triggers in voting rights laws that can determine the composition of United States legislative bodies. Specifically, we extend and study a hybrid model that addresses two-way tables of arbitrary dimension. We apply the hybrid model to an exit poll we administered in the City of Boston in 2008. Using the resulting data as well as simulation, we compare the performance of a pure ecological estimator, pure survey estimators using various sampling schemes and our hybrid. We conclude that the hybrid estimator offers substantial benefits by enabling substantive inferences about voting patterns not practicably available without its use.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/10-AOAS353 the Annals of Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Phase Transition in Hot Pion Matter

The equation of state for the pion gas is analyzed within the third virial approximation. The second virial coefficient is found from the pion-pion- scattering data, while the third one is considered as a free parameter. The proposed model leads to a first-order phase transition from the pion gas to a more dense phase at the temperature T_pt < 136 MeV. Due to relatively low temperature this phase transition cannot be related to the deconfinement. This suggests that a new phase of hadron matter - 'hot pion liquid' - may exist.Comment: 11 pages, Latex, 4 PS-figures. V2: A few misprints are corrected. Acknowledgments are adde