Synthetic horizontal branch morphology for different metallicities and ages under tidally enhanced stellar wind

It is believed that, except for metallicity, some other parameters are needed to explain the horizontal branch (HB) morphology of globular clusters (GCs). Furthermore, these parameters are considered to be correlated with the mass loss of the red giant branch (RGB) stars. In our previous work, we proposed that tidally enhanced stellar wind during binary evolution may affect the HB morphology by enhancing the mass loss of the red giant primary. As a further study, we now investigate the effects of metallicity and age on HB morphology by considering tidally enhanced stellar winds during binary evolution. We incorporated the tidally enhanced-stellar-wind model into Eggleton's stellar evolution code to study the binary evolution. To study the effects of metallicity and age on our final results, we conducted two sets of model calculations: (i) for a fixed age, we used three metallicities, namely Z=0.0001, 0.001, and 0.02. (ii) For a fixed metallicity, Z=0.001, we used five ages in our model calculations: 14, 13, 12, 10, and 7 Gyr. We found that HB morphology of GCs becomes bluer with decreasing metallicity, and old GCs present bluer HB morphology than young ones. These results are consistent with previous work. Although the envelope-mass distributions of zero-age HB stars produced by tidally enhanced stellar wind are similar for different metallicities, the synthetic HB under tidally enhanced stellar wind for Z=0.02 presented a distinct gap between red and blue HB. However, this feature was not seen clearly in the synthetic HB for Z=0.001 and 0.0001. We also found that higher binary fractions may make HB morphology become bluer, and we discussed the results with recent observations.Comment: 16 pages, 6 figures, 3 tables, accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysic

Subdwarf B stars from the common envelope ejection channel

From the canonical binary scenario, the majority of sdBs are produced from low-mass stars with degenerate cores where helium is ignited in a way of flashes. Due to numerical difficulties, the models of produced sdBs are generally constructed from more massive stars with non-degenerate cores, leaving several uncertainties on the exact characteristics of sdB stars. Employing MESA, we systematically studied the characteristics of sdBs produced from the common envelope (CE) ejection channel, and found that the sdB stars produced from the CE ejection channel appear to form two distinct groups on the effective temperature-gravity diagram. One group (the flash-mixing model) almost has no H-rich envelope and crows at the hottest temperature end of the extremely horizontal branch (EHB), while the other group has significant H-rich envelope and spreads over the whole canonical EHB region. The key factor for the dichotomy of the sdB properties is the development of convection during the first helium flash, which is determined by the interior structure of the star after the CE ejection. For a given initial stellar mass and a given core mass at the onset of the CE, if the CE ejection stops early, the star has a relatively massive H-rich envelope, resulting in a canonical sdB generally. The fact of only a few short-orbital-period sdB binaries being in the flash-mixing sdB region and the lack of He-rich sdBs in short-orbital-period binaries indicate that the flash mixing is not very often in the products of the CE ejection. A falling back process after the CE ejection, similar to that happened in nova, is an appropriate way of increasing the envelope mass, then prevents the flash mixing.Comment: accepted by A&A 12 pages, 11 figure

Parallel processing architecture for computing inverse differential kinematic equations of the PUMA arm

In advanced robot control problems, on-line computation of inverse Jacobian solution is frequently required. Parallel processing architecture is an effective way to reduce computation time. A parallel processing architecture is developed for the inverse Jacobian (inverse differential kinematic equation) of the PUMA arm. The proposed pipeline/parallel algorithm can be inplemented on an IC chip using systolic linear arrays. This implementation requires 27 processing cells and 25 time units. Computation time is thus significantly reduced

Cooperative Secure Transmission by Exploiting Social Ties in Random Networks

Social awareness and social ties are becoming increasingly popular with emerging mobile and handheld devices. Social trust degree describing the strength of the social ties has drawn lots of research interests in many fields in wireless communications, such as resource sharing, cooperative communication and so on. In this paper, we propose a hybrid cooperative beamforming and jamming scheme to secure communication based on the social trust degree under a stochastic geometry framework. The friendly nodes are categorized into relays and jammers according to their locations and social trust degrees with the source node. We aim to analyze the involved connection outage probability (COP) and secrecy outage probability (SOP) of the performance in the networks. To achieve this target, we propose a double Gamma ratio (DGR) approach through Gamma approximation. Based on this, the COP and SOP are tractably obtained in closed-form. We further consider the SOP in the presence of Poisson Point Process (PPP) distributed eavesdroppers and derive an upper bound. The simulation results verify our theoretical findings, and validate that the social trust degree has dramatic influences on the security performance in the networks.Comment: 30 pages, 11 figures, to be published in IEEE Transactions on Communication