13,896 research outputs found
Asteroseismology of delta Scuti stars in open clusters: Praesepe
The present paper provides a general overview of the asteroseismic potential
of delta Scuti stars in clusters, in particular focusing on convection
diagnostics. We give a summarise of the last results obtained by the authors
for the Praesepe cluster of which five delta Scuti stars are analysed. In that
work, linear analysis is confronted with observations, using refined
descriptions for the effects of rotation on the determination of the global
stellar parameters and on the adiabatic oscillation frequency computations. A
single, complete, and coherent solution for all the selected stars is found,
which lead the authors to find important restrictions to the convection
description for a certain range of effective temperatures. Furthermore, the
method used allowed to give an estimate of the global parameters of the
selected stars and constrain the cluster.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure. Accepted for publication in Communications in
Asteroseismolog
Lande g-tensor in semiconductor nanostructures
Understanding the electronic structure of semiconductor nanostructures is not
complete without a detailed description of their corresponding spin-related
properties. Here we explore the response of the shell structure of InAs
self-assembled quantum dots to magnetic fields oriented in several directions,
allowing the mapping of the g-tensor modulus for the s and p shells. We found
that the g-tensors for the s and p shells show a very different behavior. The
s-state in being more localized allows the probing of the confining potential
details by sweeping the magnetic field orientation from the growth direction
towards the in-plane direction. As for the p-state, we found that the g-tensor
modulus is closer to that of the surrounding GaAs, consistent with a larger
delocalization. These results reveal further details of the confining
potentials of self-assembled quantum dots that have not yet been probed, in
addition to the assessment of the g-tensor, which is of fundamental importance
for the implementation of spin related applications.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure
Document Retrieval on Repetitive Collections
Document retrieval aims at finding the most important documents where a
pattern appears in a collection of strings. Traditional pattern-matching
techniques yield brute-force document retrieval solutions, which has motivated
the research on tailored indexes that offer near-optimal performance. However,
an experimental study establishing which alternatives are actually better than
brute force, and which perform best depending on the collection
characteristics, has not been carried out. In this paper we address this
shortcoming by exploring the relationship between the nature of the underlying
collection and the performance of current methods. Via extensive experiments we
show that established solutions are often beaten in practice by brute-force
alternatives. We also design new methods that offer superior time/space
trade-offs, particularly on repetitive collections.Comment: Accepted to ESA 2014. Implementation and experiments at
http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/group/suds/rlcsa
The Effect of Hot Gas in WMAP's First Year Data
By cross-correlating templates constructed from the 2 Micron All Sky Survey
(2MASS) Extended Source (XSC) catalogue with WMAP's first year data, we search
for the thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich signature induced by hot gas in the local
Universe. Assuming that galaxies trace the distribution of hot gas, we select
regions on the sky with the largest projected density of galaxies. Under
conservative assumptions on the amplitude of foreground residuals, we find a
temperature decrement of -35 7 K ( detection level,
the highest reported so far) in the 26 square degrees of the sky
containing the largest number of galaxies per solid angle. We show that most of
the reported signal is caused by known galaxy clusters which, when convolved
with the average beam of the WMAP W band channel, subtend a typical angular
size of 20--30 arcmins. Finally, after removing from our analyses all pixels
associated with known optical and X-ray galaxy clusters, we still find a tSZ
decrement of -96 37 K in pixels subtending about 0.8 square
degrees on the sky. Most of this signal is coming from five different cluster
candidates in the Zone of Avoidance (ZoA), present in the Clusters In the ZoA
(CIZA) catalogue. We found no evidence that structures less bound than clusters
contribute to the tSZ signal present in the WMAP data.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, matches accepted version in ApJ Letter
On the Number Density of Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Clusters of Galaxies
If the mean properties of clusters of galaxies are well described by the
entropy-driven model, the distortion induced by the cluster population on the
blackbody spectrum of the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation is proportional
to the total amount of intracluster gas while temperature anisotropies are
dominated by the contribution of clusters of about 10^{14} solar masses. This
result depends marginally on cluster parameters and it can be used to estimate
the number density of clusters with enough hot gas to produce a detectable
Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect. Comparing different cosmological models, the
relation depends mainly on the density parameter Omega_m. If the number density
of clusters could be estimated by a different method, then this dependence
could be used to constrain Omega_m.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures, submitted to ApJ Letter
CLIWOC multilingual meteorological dictionary
This dictionary is the first attempt to express the wealth of archaic logbook wind force terms in a form that is comprehensible to the modern-day reader. Oliver and Kington (1970) and Lamb (1982) have drawn attention to the importance of logbooks in climatic studies, and Lamb (1991) offered a conversion scale for early eighteenth century English wind force terms, but no studies have thus far pursued the matter to any greater depth. This text attempts to make good this deficiency, and is derived from the research undertaken by the CLIWOC project1 in which British, Dutch, French and Spanish naval and merchant logbooks from the period 1750 to 1850 were used to derive a global database of climatic information. At an early stage in the project it was apparent that many of the logbook weather terms, whilst conforming to a conventional vocabulary, possessed meanings that were unclear to twenty-first century readers or had changed over time. This was particularly the case for the important element of wind force; but no special plea is entered for the evolution in nautical vocabulary, which often reflected more wide-ranging changes in the respective native languages.The key objective was to translate the archaic vocabulary of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century mariner into expressions directly comparable with the Beaufort Scale (see Appendix I). Only then could the projects scientific programme be embarked upon. This dictionary is the result of the largest undertaking into logbook studies that has yet been carried out. Several thousand logbooks from British, Dutch, French and Spanish archives were examined, and the exercise offered a unique opportunity to explore the vocabulary of the one hundred year period beginning in 1750. The logbooks from which the raw data have been abstracted range widely across the North and South Atlantic and the Indian Oceans. Only the Pacific, largely in consequence of the paucity of regular naval activity in that area, is not well represented. The range of climates encountered in this otherwise wide geographic domain gives ample opportunity for the full range of the mariners nautical weather vocabulary to be assessed, from the calms of the Equatorial regions, through the gales of the mid-latitude systems to the fearsome storms of the tropical latitudes. The Trade Winds belts, the Doldrums, the unsettled mid-latitudes, even the icy wastes of the high latitudes, are all embraced in this study. It is not here intended to pass any judgements on the climatological record of the logbooks, and this text seeks only to provide a means of understanding archaic wind force terms and, other than to indicate those items that were not commonly used, no information is given on the frequency with which different terms appeared in the logbooks. Attention is, furthermore, confined to Dutch, English, French and Spanish because these once great imperial powers were the only nations able to support wide-ranging ocean-going fleets with their attendant collections of logbooks and documents over this long period of time. The work is offered to the wider academic community in the hope that they will prove to be of as much value as it has been to the CLIWOC team
Universality and Scaling for the Structure Factor in Dynamic Order-Disorder Transitions
The universal form for the average scattering intensity from systems
undergoing order-disorder transitions is found by numerical integration of the
Langevin dynamics. The result is nearly identical for simulations involving two
different forms of the local contribution to the free energy, supporting the
idea that the Model A dynamical universality class includes a wide range of
local free-energy forms. An absolute comparison with no adjustable parameters
is made to the forms predicted by the theories of Ohta-Jasnow-Kawasaki and
Mazenko. The numerical results are well described by the former theory, except
in the cross-over region between scattering dominated by domain geometry and
scattering determined by Porod's law.Comment: 10 pages incl. 3 figures, Revtex. Submitted to PR
Berry Phase of a Resonant State
We derive closed analytical expressions for the complex Berry phase of an
open quantum system in a state which is a superposition of resonant states and
evolves irreversibly due to the spontaneous decay of the metastable states. The
codimension of an accidental degeneracy of resonances and the geometry of the
energy hypersurfaces close to a crossing of resonances differ significantly
from those of bound states. We discuss some of the consequences of these
differences for the geometric phase factors, such as: Instead of a diabolical
point singularity there is a continuous closed line of singularities formally
equivalent to a continuous distribution of `magnetic' charge on a diabolical
circle; different classes of topologically inequivalent non-trivial closed
paths in parameter space, the topological invariant associated to the sum of
the geometric phases, dilations of the wave function due to the imaginary part
of the Berry phase and others.Comment: 28 pages Latex, three uuencoded postcript figure
Nonlinear field theories during homogeneous spatial dilation
The effect of a uniform dilation of space on stochastically driven nonlinear
field theories is examined. This theoretical question serves as a model problem
for examining the properties of nonlinear field theories embedded in expanding
Euclidean Friedmann-Lema\^{\i}tre-Robertson-Walker metrics in the context of
cosmology, as well as different systems in the disciplines of statistical
mechanics and condensed matter physics. Field theories are characterized by the
speed at which they propagate correlations within themselves. We show that for
linear field theories correlations stop propagating if and only if the speed at
which the space dilates is higher than the speed at which correlations
propagate. The situation is in general different for nonlinear field theories.
In this case correlations might stop propagating even if the velocity at which
space dilates is lower than the velocity at which correlations propagate. In
particular, these results imply that it is not possible to characterize the
dynamics of a nonlinear field theory during homogeneous spatial dilation {\it a
priori}. We illustrate our findings with the nonlinear Kardar-Parisi-Zhang
equation
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