12,056 research outputs found
Cherenkov Telescope Array: The next-generation ground-based gamma-ray observatory
High energy gamma-ray astronomy is a newly emerging and very successful
branch of astronomy and astrophysics. Exciting results have been obtained by
the current generation Cherenkov telescope systems such as H.E.S.S., MAGIC,
VERITAS and CANGAROO. The H.E.S.S. survey of the galactic plane has revealed a
large number of sources and addresses issues such as the question about the
origin of cosmic rays. The detection of very high energy emission from
extragalactic sources at large distances has provided insights in the star
formation during the history of the universe and in the understanding of active
galactic nuclei. The development of the very large Cherenkov telescope array
system (CTA) with a sensitivity about an order of magnitude better than current
instruments and significantly improved sensitivity is under intense discussion.
This observatory will reveal an order of magnitude more sources and due to its
higher sensitivity and angular resolution it will be able to detect new classes
of objects and phenomena that have not been visible until now. A combination of
different telescope types will provide the sensitivity needed in different
energy ranges.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, to appear in the proceedings of the 30th
International Cosmic Ray Conference, Merida, July 200
Triggering of Imaging Air Cherenkov Telescopes: PMT trigger rates due to night-sky photons
Imaging air Cherenkov telescopes are usually triggered on a coincidence of
two or sometimes more pixels, with discriminator thresholds in excess of 20
photoelectrons applied for each pixel. These thresholds required to suppress
night-sky background are significantly higher than expected on the basis of a
Poisson distribution in the number of night-sky photoelectrons generated during
the characteristic signal integration time.
We studied noise trigger rates under controlled conditions using an
artificial background light source. Large tails in the PMT amplitude response
to single photoelectrons are identified as a dominant contribution to noise
triggers. The rate of such events is very sensitive to PMT operating
parameters.Comment: 19 pages, latex,epsf, 7 figures appended as uuencoded file, submitted
to Journal of Physics
Analytical design and simulation evaluation of an approach flight director system for a jet STOL aircraft
A program was undertaken to develop design criteria and operational procedures for STOL transport aircraft. As part of that program, a series of flight tests shall be performed in an Augmentor Wing Jet STOL Aircraft. In preparation for the flight test programs, an analytical study was conducted to gain an understanding of the characteristics of the vehicle for manual control, to assess the relative merits of the variety of manual control techniques available with attitude and thrust vector controllers, and to determine what improvements can be made over manual control of the bare airframe by providing the pilot with suitable command guidance information and by augmentation of the bare airframe dynamics. The objective of the study is to apply closed-loop pilot/vehicle analysis techniques to the analysis of manual flight control of powered-lift STOL aircraft in the landing approach and to the design and experimental verification of an advanced flight director display
Nonlinear soil-structure interaction calculations simulating the SIMQUAKE experiment using STEALTH 2D
Transient, nonlinear soil-structure interaction simulations of an Electric Power Research Institute, SIMQUAKE experiment were performed using the large strain, time domain STEALTH 2D code and a cyclic, kinematically hardening cap soil model. Results from the STEALTH simulations were compared to identical simulations performed with the TRANAL code and indicate relatively good agreement between all the STEALTH and TRANAL calculations. The differences that are seen can probably be attributed to: (1) large (STEALTH) vs. small (TRANAL) strain formulation and/or (2) grid discretization differences
Renormalization of the baryon axial vector current in large-N_c chiral perturbation theory
The baryon axial vector current is computed at one-loop order in heavy baryon
chiral perturbation theory in the large-N_c limit, where N_c is the number of
colors. Loop graphs with octet and decuplet intermediate states cancel to
various orders in N_c as a consequence of the large-N_c spin-flavor symmetry of
QCD baryons. These cancellations are explicitly shown for the general case of
N_f flavors of light quarks. In particular, a new generic cancellation is
identified in the renormalization of the baryon axial vector current at
one-loop order. A comparison with conventional heavy baryon chiral perturbation
theory is performed at the physical values N_c=3, N_f=3.Comment: REVTex4, 29 pages, 2 figures, 6 tables. Equations (32) and (81)
corrected. Some typos fixed. Results and conclusions remain unchange
Microscopic Enhancement of Heavy-Element Production
Realistic fusion barriers are calculated in a macroscopic-microscopic model
for several soft-fusion heavy-ion reactions leading to heavy and superheavy
elements. The results obtained in such a realistic picture are very different
from those obtained in a purely macroscopic model. For reactions on 208:Pb
targets, shell effects in the entrance channel result in fusion-barrier
energies at the touching point that are only a few MeV higher than the ground
state for compound systems near Z = 110. The entrance-channel fragment-shell
effects remain far inside the touching point, almost to configurations only
slightly more elongated than the ground-state configuration, where the fusion
barrier has risen to about 10 MeV above the ground-state energy. Calculated
single-particle level diagrams show that few level crossings occur until the
peak in the fusion barrier very close to the ground-state shape is reached,
which indicates that dissipation is negligible until very late in the fusion
process. Whereas the fission valley in a macroscopic picture is several tens of
MeV lower in energy than is the fusion valley, we find in the
macroscopic-microscopic picture that the fission valley is only about 5 MeV
lower than the fusion valley for soft-fusion reactions leading to compound
systems near Z = 110. These results show that no significant
``extra-extra-push'' energy is needed to bring the system inside the fission
saddle point and that the typical reaction energies for maximum cross section
in heavy-element synthesis correspond to only a few MeV above the maximum in
the fusion barrier.Comment: 7 pages. LaTeX. Submitted to Zeitschrift fur Physik A. 5 figures not
included here. Complete preprint, including device-independent (dvi),
PostScript, and LaTeX versions of the text, plus PostScript files of the
figures, available at http://t2.lanl.gov/publications/publications.html or at
ftp://t2.lanl.gov/pub/publications/mehe
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