1,249 research outputs found
Outer Regions of the Milky Way
With the start of the Gaia era, the time has come to address the major
challenge of deriving the star formation history and evolution of the disk of
our MilkyWay. Here we review our present knowledge of the outer regions of the
Milky Way disk population. Its stellar content, its structure and its dynamical
and chemical evolution are summarized, focussing on our lack of understanding
both from an observational and a theoretical viewpoint. We describe the
unprecedented data that Gaia and the upcoming ground-based spectroscopic
surveys will provide in the next decade. More in detail, we quantify the expect
accuracy in position, velocity and astrophysical parameters of some of the key
tracers of the stellar populations in the outer Galactic disk. Some insights on
the future capability of these surveys to answer crucial and fundamental issues
are discussed, such as the mechanisms driving the spiral arms and the warp
formation. Our Galaxy, theMilkyWay, is our cosmological laboratory for
understanding the process of formation and evolution of disk galaxies. What we
learn in the next decades will be naturally transferred to the extragalactic
domain.Comment: 22 pages, 10 figures, Invited review, Book chapter in "Outskirts of
Galaxies", Eds. J. H. Knapen, J. C. Lee and A. Gil de Paz, Astrophysics and
Space Science Library, Springer, in pres
Actors that Unify Threads and Events
There is an impedance mismatch between message-passing concurrency and virtual machines, such as the JVM. VMs usually map their threads to heavyweight OS processes. Without a lightweight process abstraction, users are often forced to write parts of concurrent applications in an event-driven style which obscures control flow, and increases the burden on the programmer. In this paper we show how thread-based and event-based programming can be unified under a single actor abstraction. Using advanced abstraction mechanisms of the Scala programming language, we implemented our approach on unmodified JVMs. Our programming model integrates well with the threading model of the underlying VM
Transverse Fresnel-Fizeau drag effects in strongly dispersive media
A light beam normally incident upon an uniformly moving dielectric medium is
in general subject to bendings due to a transverse Fresnel-Fizeau light drag
effect. In conventional dielectrics, the magnitude of this bending effect is
very small and hard to detect. Yet, it can be dramatically enhanced in strongly
dispersive media where slow group velocities in the m/s range have been
recently observed taking advantage of the electromagnetically induced
transparency (EIT) effect. In addition to the usual downstream drag that takes
place for positive group velocities, we predict a significant anomalous
upstream drag to occur for small and negative group velocities. Furthermore,
for sufficiently fast speeds of the medium, higher order dispersion terms are
found to play an important role and to be responsible for peculiar effects such
as light propagation along curved paths and the restoration of the spatial
coherence of an incident noisy beam. The physics underlying this new class of
slow-light effects is thoroughly discussed
Longitudinal trajectories of brain age in young individuals at familial risk of mood disorder from the Scottish Bipolar Family Study
The runaway binary LP 400-22 is leaving the Galaxy
We present optical spectroscopy, astrometry, radio and X-ray observations of the runaway binary LP 400-22. We refine the orbital parameters of the system based on our new radial velocity observations. Our parallax data indicate that LP 400-22 is significantly more distant (3Ï lower limit of 840pc) than initially predicted. LP 400-22 has a tangential velocity in excessof 830 km s-1; it is unbound to the Galaxy. Our radio and X-ray observations fail to detect a recycled millisecond pulsar companion, indicating that LP 400-22 is a double white dwarf system. This essentially rules out a supernova runaway ejection mechanism. Based on its orbit, a Galactic Centre origin is also unlikely. However, its orbit intersects the locations of several globular clusters; dynamical interactions between LP 400-22 and other binary stars or a central black hole in a dense cluster could explain the origin of this unusual binary.Instituto de AstrofĂsica de La Plat
Decay of the metastable phase in d=1 and d=2 Ising models
We calculate perturbatively the tunneling decay rate of the
metastable phase in the quantum d=1 Ising model in a skew magnetic field near
the coexistence line at T=0. It is shown that
oscillates in the magnetic field due to discreteness of the excitation
energy spectrum. After mapping of the obtained results onto the extreme
anisotropic d=2 Ising model at , we verify in the latter model the
droplet theory predictions for the free energy analytically continued to the
metastable phase. We find also evidence for the discrete-lattice corrections in
this metastable phase free energy.Comment: 4 pages, REVTe
Destabilization of dark states and optical spectroscopy in Zeeman-degenerate atomic systems
We present a general discussion of the techniques of destabilizing dark
states in laser-driven atoms with either a magnetic field or modulated laser
polarization. We show that the photon scattering rate is maximized at a
particular evolution rate of the dark state. We also find that the atomic
resonance curve is significantly broadened when the evolution rate is far from
this optimum value. These results are illustrated with detailed examples of
destabilizing dark states in some commonly-trapped ions and supported by
insights derived from numerical calculations and simple theoretical models.Comment: 14 pages, 10 figure
Pulsed Magnetic Field Measurements of the Composite Fermion Effective Mass
Magnetotransport measurements of Composite Fermions (CF) are reported in 50 T
pulsed magnetic fields. The CF effective mass is found to increase
approximately linearly with the effective field , in agreement with our
earlier work at lower fields. For a of 14 T it reaches , over 20
times the band edge electron mass. Data from all fractions are unified by the
single parameter for all the samples studied over a wide range of
electron densities. The energy gap is found to increase like at
high fields.Comment: Has final table, will LaTeX without error
New York: the animated city
The urban landscape of New York City is one that is familiar to many, but, through the medium of animation, this familiarity has been consistently challenged. Often metamorphic, and always meticulously constructed, animated imagery encourages reflective thinking. Focusing on the themes of construction, destruction, and interactivity, this article seeks to cast critical light upon the animated double life that New York City has lived through the following moving image texts: Disneyâs Fantasia 2000 (1999), Patrick Jeanâs computer-generated short Pixels (2009), and Rockstar Gamesâ open-world blockbuster Grand Theft Auto IV (2008)
Transverse phase-locking in fully frustrated Josephson junction arrays: a new type of fractional giant steps
We study, analytically and numerically, phase locking of driven vortex
lattices in fully-frustrated Josephson junction arrays at zero temperature. We
consider the case when an ac current is applied {\it perpendicular} to a dc
current. We observe phase locking, steps in the current-voltage
characteristics, with a dependence on external ac-drive amplitude and frequency
qualitatively different from the Shapiro steps, observed when the ac and dc
currents are applied in parallel. Further, the critical current increases with
increasing transverse ac-drive amplitude, while it decreases for longitudinal
ac-drive. The critical current and the phase-locked current step width,
increase quadratically with (small) amplitudes of the ac-drive. For larger
amplitudes of the transverse ac-signal, we find windows where the critical
current is hysteretic, and windows where phase locking is suppressed due to
dynamical instabilities. We characterize the dynamical states around the
phase-locking interference condition in the curve with voltage noise,
Lyapunov exponents and Poincar\'e sections. We find that zero temperature
phase-locking behavior in large fully frustrated arrays is well described by an
effective four plaquette model.Comment: 12 pages, 11 figure
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