Above the Law: The Prosecutor\u27s Duty to Seek Justice and the Performance of Substantial Assistance Agreements

We study the gravitational-wave (GW) signatures of clouds of ultralight bosons around black holes (BHs) in binary inspirals. These clouds, which are formed via superradiance instabilities for rapidly rotating BHs, produce distinct effects in the population of BH masses and spins, and, for real fields, a continuous monochromatic GW signal. We show that the presence of a binary companion greatly enriches the dynamical evolution of the system, most remarkably through the existence of resonant transitions between the growing and decaying modes of the cloud (analogous to Rabi oscillations in atomic physics). These resonances have rich phenomenological implications for current and future GW detectors. Notably, the amplitude of the GW signal from the clouds may be reduced, and in many cases terminated, much before the binary merger. The presence of a boson cloud can also be revealed in the GW signal from the binary through the imprint of finite-size effects, such as spin-induced multipole moments and tidal Love numbers. The time dependence of the cloud's energy density during the resonance leads to a sharp feature, or at least attenuation, in the contribution from the finite-size terms to the waveforms. The observation of these effects would constrain the properties of putative ultralight bosons through precision GW data, offering new probes of physics beyond the Standard Model

The German Bight (North Sea) is a nursery area for both locally and externally produced sprat juveniles

To better understand the role of the German Bight (GB) as a nursery area for juvenile North Sea sprat Sprattus sprattus we sought to determine whether the area may receive only locally or also externally produced offspring. We sampled juveniles during 3 trawl surveys in the GB in August, September, and October 2004 and applied otolith microstructure analysis in order to reconstruct their distributions of the day-of-first-increment-formation (dif). These were contrasted with spatial and seasonal patterns of sprat egg abundance in the GB and its adjacent areas, observed during 6 monthly plankton surveys. It was found that the majority of juveniles originated mainly from April/May 2004, coinciding with high spawning activity west of the GB, whereas spawning and larval production inside the GB peaked notably later, in May/June. This indicated that a large proportion of juveniles was produced outside the GB and transported subsequently into it through passive and/or active migration. Shifts to later mean difs from one survey to the next and length distributions indicative of the simultaneous presence of multiple cohorts, supported the notion that the GB is a complex retention and nursery area for sprat offspring from different North Sea spawning grounds and times. Later born juveniles had significantly faster initial growth rates than earlier born conspecifics, which was likely temperature-mediated, given the strong correlation between back-calculated growth histories and sea surface temperature as a proxy for thermal histories of juveniles (r(2) = 0.52). (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Probing hairpin structures of small DNAs by nondenaturing polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis.

The influence of temperature on the electrophoretic mobility of small DNAs, capable of forming hairpin structures, is investigated under nondenaturing conditions. Three series of hairpin-forming DNAs containing different numbers of thymidine, deoxyadenosine, and deoxyguanosine residues in their loop, and an identical sequence in the helical region, are analyzed. All show enhanced electrophoretic mobility if they adopt the hairpin conformation. The same quantitative relationship between hairpin formation and increase in electrophoretic mobility is observed for all of the three series. The constancy of this increase suggests a dependence of electrophoretic acceleration on the length of the helical region. A possible application of nondenaturing electrophoresis is monitoring the hairpin/coil transition. Another possible application is the detection of dimers formed by partially self-complementary sequences. This dimer formation is detected for completely complementary DNAs, whereas sequences which might form imperfect double helices, especially those with three bulged-out nucleotides, prefer hairpin formation. The possible applications are experimentally approached and discussed

Ageing in disordered magnets and local scale-invariance

The ageing of the bond-disordered two-dimensional Ising model quenched to below its critical point is studied through the two-time autocorrelator and thermoremanent magnetization (TRM). The corresponding ageing exponents are determined. The form of the scaling function of the TRM is well described by the theory of local scale-invariance.Comment: Latex2e, with epl macros, 7 pages, final for

Universality in D-brane Inflation

We study the six-field dynamics of D3-brane inflation for a general scalar potential on the conifold, finding simple, universal behavior. We numerically evolve the equations of motion for an ensemble of more than 7 \times 10^7 realizations, drawing the coefficients in the scalar potential from statistical distributions whose detailed properties have demonstrably small effects on our results. When prolonged inflation occurs, it has a characteristic form: the D3-brane initially moves rapidly in the angular directions, spirals down to an inflection point in the potential, and settles into single-field inflation. The probability of N_{e} e-folds of inflation is a power law, P(N_{e}) \propto N_{e}^{-3}, and we derive the same exponent from a simple analytical model. The success of inflation is relatively insensitive to the initial conditions: we find attractor behavior in the angular directions, and the D3-brane can begin far above the inflection point without overshooting. In favorable regions of the parameter space, models yielding 60 e-folds of expansion arise approximately once in 10^3 trials. Realizations that are effectively single-field and give rise to a primordial spectrum of fluctuations consistent with WMAP, for which at least 120 e-folds are required, arise approximately once in 10^5 trials. The emergence of robust predictions from a six-field potential with hundreds of terms invites an analytic approach to multifield inflation.Comment: 28 pages, 9 figure

Atmospheric frontal zone studies

The research supported by this contract and directed Activities in the inversion and interpretation of data produced by the Nimbus-7 scanning multichannel microwave radiometer (SMMR) are reported. There were five principal subjects: (1) modeling of the emissivity of foam patches on the ocean surface; (2) inversion of radiometric data by a multidimensional algorithm; (3) an operational water vapor retrieval algorithm; (4) inference of Antarctic firm accumulation rates; and (5) inference of water vapor over the Arctic sea ice