897 research outputs found
A Cross-Cultural Comparison Study: The Effectiveness of Schema Training Modules Among Hispanic Students
Previous studies indicated that misconceptions related to heat transfer, fluid mechanics, and thermodynamics, persist among engineering juniors and seniors even after they completed college-level courses in these subjects. Researchers have proposed an innovative instructional approach, the ontological schema training method, which helps students develop appropriate schemas or conceptual frameworks for learning difficult science concepts. Three online training modules were designed to help engineering students develop appropriate schemas in heat transfer, diffusion and microfluidics. The effectiveness of these modules was examined with two different student populations from two different universities (US and Hispanic). At each institution, participants were assigned randomly to a control or experimental group. The treatment for each group at both institutions was exactly the same. Preliminary results indicated a mixed effectiveness of the training modules among these populations
Persistent Transport Barrier on the West Florida Shelf
Analysis of drifter trajectories in the Gulf of Mexico has revealed the
existence of a region on the southern portion of the West Florida Shelf (WFS)
that is not visited by drifters that are released outside of the region. This
so-called ``forbidden zone'' (FZ) suggests the existence of a persistent
cross-shelf transport barrier on the southern portion of the WFS. In this
letter a year-long record of surface currents produced by a Hybrid-Coordinate
Ocean Model simulation of the WFS is used to identify Lagrangian coherent
structures (LCSs), which reveal the presence of a robust and persistent
cross-shelf transport barrier in approximately the same location as the
boundary of the FZ. The location of the cross-shelf transport barrier undergoes
a seasonal oscillation, being closer to the coast in the summer than in the
winter. A month-long record of surface currents inferred from high-frequency
(HF) radar measurements in a roughly 60 km 80 km region on the WFS off
Tampa Bay is also used to identify LCSs, which reveal the presence of robust
transient transport barriers. While the HF-radar-derived transport barriers
cannot be unambiguously linked to the boundary of the FZ, this analysis does
demonstrate the feasibility of monitoring transport barriers on the WFS using a
HF-radar-based measurement system. The implications of a persistent cross-shelf
transport barrier on the WFS for the development of harmful algal blooms on the
shoreward side of the barrier are considered.Comment: Submitted to Geophysical Research Letter
Consistent reduction of charged D3-D7 systems
We provide a consistent reduction to five dimensions of the system of
D3-branes at Calabi-Yau singularities coupled to D7-branes with world-volume
gauge flux. The D3-branes source the dual to would-be conformal quiver
theories. The D7-branes, which are homogeneously distributed in their
transverse directions, are dual to massless matter in the fundamental
representation at finite (baryon) density. We provide the five-dimensional
action and equations of motion, and discuss a few sub-truncations. The
reduction can be used in the study of transport properties and stability of
D3-D7 charged systems.Comment: 23 pages. v2: references added and minor change
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Defining the microbial effluxome in the content of the host-microbiome interaction
5 page(s
Back-reaction of Non-supersymmetric Probes: Phase Transition and Stability
We consider back-reaction by non-supersymmetric D7/anti-D7 probe branes in
the Kuperstein-Sonnenschein model at finite temperature. Using the smearing
technique, we obtain an analytical solution for the back-reacted background to
leading order in N_f/N_c. This back-reaction explicitly breaks the conformal
invariance and introduces a dimension 6 operator in the dual field theory which
is an irrelevant deformation of the original conformal field theory. We further
probe this back-reacted background by introducing an additional set of probe
brane/anti-brane. This additional probe sector undergoes a chiral phase
transition at finite temperature, which is absent when the back-reaction
vanishes. We investigate the corresponding phase diagram and the thermodynamics
associated with this phase transition. We also argue that additional probes do
not suffer from any instability caused by the back-reaction, which suggests
that this system is stable beyond the probe limit.Comment: 56 pages, 8 figures. References updated, improved discussion on
dimension eight operato
A Cryogenic Silicon Interferometer for Gravitational-wave Detection
The detection of gravitational waves from compact binary mergers by LIGO has opened the era of gravitational wave astronomy, revealing a previously hidden side of the cosmos. To maximize the reach of the existing LIGO observatory facilities, we have designed a new instrument that will have 5 times the range of Advanced LIGO, or greater than 100 times the event rate. Observations with this new instrument will make possible dramatic steps toward understanding the physics of the nearby universe, as well as observing the universe out to cosmological distances by the detection of binary black hole coalescences. This article presents the instrument design and a quantitative analysis of the anticipated noise floor
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We present the first measurements of the differential cross section d sigma/dp(T)(gamma) for the production of an isolated photon in association with at least two b-quark jets. The measurements consider photons with rapidities vertical bar y(gamma)vertical bar < 1.0 and transverse momenta 30 < p(T)(gamma) < 200 GeV. The b-quark jets are required to have p(T)(jet) > 15 GeVand vertical bar y(jet)vertical bar < 1.5. The ratio of differential production cross sections for gamma + 2 b-jets to gamma + b-jet as a function of p(T)(gamma) is also presented. The results are based on the proton-antiproton collision data at root s = 1.96 TeV collected with the D0 detector at the Fermilab Tevatron Collider. The measured cross sections and their ratios are compared to the next- to- leading order perturbative QCD calculations as well as predictions based on the k(T)- factorization approach and those from the sherpa and pythia Monte Carlo event generators
Measurement of the top quark mass using the matrix element technique in dilepton final states
We present a measurement of the top quark mass in ppÂŻ collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 1.96 TeV at the Fermilab Tevatron collider. The data were collected by the D0 experiment corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 9.7ââfbâ1. The matrix element technique is applied to ttÂŻ events in the final state containing leptons (electrons or muons) with high transverse momenta and at least two jets. The calibration of the jet energy scale determined in the lepton+jets final state of ttÂŻ decays is applied to jet energies. This correction provides a substantial reduction in systematic uncertainties. We obtain a top quark mass of mt=173.93±1.84ââGeV
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