1,990 research outputs found
Trajectory and propulsion characteristics of comet rendezvous opportunities
Trajectory and propulsion characteristics of spacecraft rendezvous mission opportunities to comets during 1975 to 199
Multipole structure of current vectors in curved spacetime
A method is presented which allows the exact construction of conserved (i.e.
divergence-free) current vectors from appropriate sets of multipole moments.
Physically, such objects may be taken to represent the flux of particles or
electric charge inside some classical extended body. Several applications are
discussed. In particular, it is shown how to easily write down the class of all
smooth and spatially-bounded currents with a given total charge. This
implicitly provides restrictions on the moments arising from the smoothness of
physically reasonable vector fields. We also show that requiring all of the
moments to be constant in an appropriate sense is often impossible; likely
limiting the applicability of the Ehlers-Rudolph-Dixon notion of quasirigid
motion. A simple condition is also derived that allows currents to exist in two
different spacetimes with identical sets of multipole moments (in a natural
sense).Comment: 13 pages, minor changes, accepted to J. Math. Phy
An inviscid dyadic model of turbulence: the fixed point and Onsager's conjecture
Properties of an infinite system of nonlinearly coupled ordinary differential
equations are discussed. This system models some properties present in the
equations of motion for an inviscid fluid such as the skew symmetry and the
3-dimensional scaling of the quadratic nonlinearity. It is proved that the
system with forcing has a unique equilibrium and that every solution blows up
in finite time in -norm. Onsager's conjecture is confirmed for the
model system
Nova Dust Nucleation: Kinetics and Photodissociation
Dust is observed to form in nova ejecta. The grain temperature is determined
by the diluted nova radiation field rather than the gas kinetic temperature,
making classical nucleation theory inapplicable. We used kinetic equations to
calculate the growth of carbon nuclei in these ejecta. For expected values of
the parameters too many clusters grew, despite the small sticking probability
of atoms to small clusters, and the clusters only reached radii of about
100\AA\ when the carbon vapor was depleted. We then included the effects of
cluster photodissociation by ultraviolet radiation from the nova. This
suppresses nucleation, but too well, and no grains form at all. Finally we
suggest that a few growing carbon nuclei may be protected from
photodissociation by a sacrificial surface layer of hydrogen.Comment: 29 page
Emergence of fractal behavior in condensation-driven aggregation
We investigate a model in which an ensemble of chemically identical Brownian
particles are continuously growing by condensation and at the same time undergo
irreversible aggregation whenever two particles come into contact upon
collision. We solved the model exactly by using scaling theory for the case
whereby a particle, say of size , grows by an amount over the
time it takes to collide with another particle of any size. It is shown that
the particle size spectra of such system exhibit transition to dynamic scaling
accompanied by the emergence of fractal of
dimension . One of the remarkable feature of this
model is that it is governed by a non-trivial conservation law, namely, the
moment of is time invariant regardless of the choice of the
initial conditions. The reason why it remains conserved is explained by using a
simple dimensional analysis. We show that the scaling exponents and
are locked with the fractal dimension via a generalized scaling relation
.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, to appear in Phys. Rev.
Mechanics of extended masses in general relativity
The "external" or "bulk" motion of extended bodies is studied in general
relativity. Compact material objects of essentially arbitrary shape, spin,
internal composition, and velocity are allowed as long as there is no direct
(non-gravitational) contact with other sources of stress-energy. Physically
reasonable linear and angular momenta are proposed for such bodies and exact
equations describing their evolution are derived. Changes in the momenta depend
on a certain "effective metric" that is closely related to a non-perturbative
generalization of the Detweiler-Whiting R-field originally introduced in the
self-force literature. If the effective metric inside a self-gravitating body
can be adequately approximated by an appropriate power series, the
instantaneous gravitational force and torque exerted on it is shown to be
identical to the force and torque exerted on an appropriate test body moving in
the effective metric. This result holds to all multipole orders. The only
instantaneous effect of a body's self-field is to finitely renormalize the
"bare" multipole moments of its stress-energy tensor. The MiSaTaQuWa expression
for the gravitational self-force is recovered as a simple application. A
gravitational self-torque is obtained as well. Lastly, it is shown that the
effective metric in which objects appear to move is approximately a solution to
the vacuum Einstein equation if the physical metric is an approximate solution
to Einstein's equation linearized about a vacuum background.Comment: 39 pages, 2 figures; fixed equation satisfied by the Green function
used to construct the effective metri
Quasi-local contribution to the scalar self-force: Non-geodesic Motion
We extend our previous calculation of the quasi-local contribution to the
self-force on a scalar particle to general (not necessarily geodesic) motion in
a general spacetime. In addition to the general case and the case of a particle
at rest in a stationary spacetime, we consider as examples a particle held at
rest in Reissner-Nordstrom and Kerr-Newman space-times. This allows us to most
easily analyse the effect of non-geodesic motion on our previous results and
also allows for comparison to existing results for Schwarzschild spacetime.Comment: 11 pages, 1 figure, corrected typo in Eq. 2.
Gravitational waves about curved backgrounds: a consistency analysis in de Sitter spacetime
Gravitational waves are considered as metric perturbations about a curved
background metric, rather than the flat Minkowski metric since several
situations of physical interest can be discussed by this generalization. In
this case, when the de Donder gauge is imposed, its preservation under
infinitesimal spacetime diffeomorphisms is guaranteed if and only if the
associated covector is ruled by a second-order hyperbolic operator which is the
classical counterpart of the ghost operator in quantum gravity. In such a wave
equation, the Ricci term has opposite sign with respect to the wave equation
for Maxwell theory in the Lorenz gauge. We are, nevertheless, able to relate
the solutions of the two problems, and the algorithm is applied to the case
when the curved background geometry is the de Sitter spacetime. Such vector
wave equations are studied in two different ways: i) an integral
representation, ii) through a solution by factorization of the hyperbolic
equation. The latter method is extended to the wave equation of metric
perturbations in the de Sitter spacetime. This approach is a step towards a
general discussion of gravitational waves in the de Sitter spacetime and might
assume relevance in cosmology in order to study the stochastic background
emerging from inflation.Comment: 17 pages. Misprints amended in Eqs. 50, 54, 55, 75, 7
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