45,903 research outputs found
Alternative Restart Strategies for CMA-ES
This paper focuses on the restart strategy of CMA-ES on multi-modal
functions. A first alternative strategy proceeds by decreasing the initial
step-size of the mutation while doubling the population size at each restart. A
second strategy adaptively allocates the computational budget among the restart
settings in the BIPOP scheme. Both restart strategies are validated on the BBOB
benchmark; their generality is also demonstrated on an independent real-world
problem suite related to spacecraft trajectory optimization
Thermo electronic laser energy conversion
The thermo electronic laser energy converter (TELEC) is described and compared to the Waymouth converter and the conventional thermionic converter. The electrical output characteristics and efficiency of TELEC operation are calculated for a variety of design variables. Calculations and results are briefly outlined. It is shown that the TELEC concept can potentially convert 25 to 50 percent of incident laser radiation into electric power at high power densities and high waste heat rejection temperatures
Optimization and performance of Space Station Freedom solar cells
High efficiency, large area and low cost solar cells are the drivers for Space Station solar array designs. The manufacturing throughput, process complexity, yield of the cells, and array manufacturing technique determine the economics of the solar array design. The cell efficiency optimization of large area (8 x 8 m), dielectric wrapthrough contact solar cells are described. The results of the optimization are reported and the solar cell performance of limited production runs is reported
On the frequency and remnants of Hypernovae
Under the hypothesis that some fraction of massive stellar core collapses
give rise to unusually energetic events, termed hypernovae, I examine the
required rates assuming some fraction of such events yield gamma ray bursts. I
then discuss evidence from studies of pulsars and r-process nucleosynthesis
that independently suggests the existence of a class of unusually energetic
events. Finally I describe a scenario which links these different lines of
evidence as supporting the hypernova hypothesis.Comment: TeX, To appear in ApJ Letter
The plasmatron: Advanced mode thermionic energy conversion
A theory of the plasmatron was developed. Also, a wide range of measurements were obtained with two versatile, research devices. To gain insight into plasmatron performance, the experimental results are compared with calculations based on the theoretical model of plasmatron operation. Results are presented which show that the plasma arc drop of the conventional arc (ignited) mode converter can be suppressed by use of an auxiliary ion source. The improved performance, however, is presently limited to low current densities because of voltage losses due to plasma resistance. This resistance loss could be suppressed by an increase in the plasma electron temperature or a decrease in spacing. Plasmatron performance characteristics for both argon and cesium are reported. The argon plasmatron has superior performance. Results are also presented for magnetic cutoff effects and for current distributing effects. These are shown to be important factors for the design of practical devices
What it takes to measure a fundamental difference between dark matter and baryons: the halo velocity anisotropy
Numerous ongoing experiments aim at detecting WIMP dark matter particles from
the galactic halo directly through WIMP-nucleon interactions. Once such a
detection is established a confirmation of the galactic origin of the signal is
needed. This requires a direction-sensitive detector. We show that such a
detector can measure the velocity anisotropy beta of the galactic halo.
Cosmological N-body simulations predict the dark matter anisotropy to be
nonzero, beta~0.2. Baryonic matter has beta=0 and therefore a detection of a
nonzero beta would be strong proof of the fundamental difference between dark
and baryonic matter. We estimate the sensitivity for various detector
configurations using Monte Carlo methods and we show that the strongest signal
is found in the relatively few high recoil energy events. Measuring beta to the
precision of ~0.03 will require detecting more than 10^4 WIMP events with
nuclear recoil energies greater than 100 keV for a WIMP mass of 100 GeV and a
32S target. This number corresponds to ~10^6 events at all energies. We discuss
variations with respect to input parameters and we show that our method is
robust to the presence of backgrounds and discuss the possible improved
sensitivity for an energy-sensitive detector.Comment: 15 pages, 8 figures, accepted by JCAP. Matches accepted versio
Real-Time Data Processing in the Muon System of the D0 Detector
This paper presents a real-time application of the 16-bit fixed point Digital
Signal Processors (DSPs), in the Muon System of the D0 detector located at the
Fermilab Tevatron, presently the world's highest-energy hadron collider. As
part of the Upgrade for a run beginning in the year 2000, the system is
required to process data at an input event rate of 10 KHz without incurring
significant deadtime in readout. The ADSP21csp01 processor has high I/O
bandwidth, single cycle instruction execution and fast task switching support
to provide efficient multisignal processing. The processor's internal memory
consists of 4K words of Program Memory and 4K words of Data Memory. In addition
there is an external memory of 32K words for general event buffering and 16K
words of Dual Port Memory for input data queuing. This DSP fulfills the
requirement of the Muon subdetector systems for data readout. All error
handling, buffering, formatting and transferring of the data to the various
trigger levels of the data acquisition system is done in software. The
algorithms developed for the system complete these tasks in about 20
microseconds per event.Comment: 4 pages, Presented and published at the 11th IEEE NPSS Real Time
Conference, held at Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA, from June 14-18, 199
Practical dispersion relations for strongly coupled plasma fluids
Very simple explicit analytical expressions are discussed, which are able to
describe the dispersion relations of longitudinal waves in strongly coupled
plasma systems such as one-component plasma and weakly screened Yukawa fluids
with a very good accuracy. Applications to other systems with soft pairwise
interactions are briefly discussed.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figures; Related to arXiv:1711.0615
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