69,136 research outputs found
Effects of turbulent dust grain motion to interstellar chemistry
Theoretical studies have revealed that dust grains are usually moving fast
through the turbulent interstellar gas, which could have significant effects
upon interstellar chemistry by modifying grain accretion. This effect is
investigated in this work on the basis of numerical gas-grain chemical
modeling. Major features of the grain motion effect in the typical environment
of dark clouds (DC) can be summarised as follows: 1) decrease of gas-phase
(both neutral and ionic) abundances and increase of surface abundances by up to
2-3 orders of magnitude; 2) shifts of the existing chemical jumps to earlier
evolution ages for gas-phase species and to later ages for surface species by
factors of about ten; 3) a few exceptional cases in which some species turn out
to be insensitive to this effect and some other species can show opposite
behaviors too. These effects usually begin to emerge from a typical DC model
age of about 10^5 yr. The grain motion in a typical cold neutral medium (CNM)
can help overcome the Coulomb repulsive barrier to enable effective accretion
of cations onto positively charged grains. As a result, the grain motion
greatly enhances the abundances of some gas-phase and surface species by
factors up to 2-6 or more orders of magnitude in the CNM model. The grain
motion effect in a typical molecular cloud (MC) is intermediate between that of
the DC and CNM models, but with weaker strength. The grain motion is found to
be important to consider in chemical simulations of typical interstellar
medium.Comment: 20 pages, 10 figures and 2 table
Study of Interplanetary Magnetic Field with Ground State Alignment
We demonstrate a new way of studying interplanetary magnetic field -- Ground
State Alignment (GSA). Instead of sending thousands of space probes, GSA allows
magnetic mapping with any ground telescope facilities equipped with
spectropolarimeter. The polarization of spectral lines that are pumped by the
anisotropic radiation from the Sun is influenced by the magnetic realignment,
which happens for magnetic field (<1G). As a result, the linear polarization
becomes an excellent tracer of the embedded magnetic field. The method is
illustrated by our synthetic observations of the Jupiter's Io and comet Halley.
Polarization at each point was constructed according to the local magnetic
field detected by spacecrafts. Both spatial and temporal variations of
turbulent magnetic field can be traced with this technique as well. The
influence of magnetic field on the polarization of scattered light is discussed
in detail. For remote regions like the IBEX ribbons discovered at the boundary
of interstellar medium, GSA provides a unique diagnostics of magnetic field.Comment: 11 pages, 19 figures, published in Astrophysics and Space Scienc
Simple ultraviolet-based soft-lithography process for fabrication of low-loss polymer polysiloxanes-based waveguides
A simple ultraviolet (UV)-based soft-lithography process is used for fabrication of polymer polysiloxanes (PSQ-L) waveguides. The imprint process is first done on the cladding PSQ-LL layer and is followed by a spin-coating step to fill the imprinted features with core PSQ-LH layer material. The optical loss of the straight PSQ-L waveguides is characterised by the Fabry-Perot method for the first time. Even with non-polished facet of the waveguide, the Fabry-Perot resonance spectrum is obtained. An upper limit scattering loss of the waveguide is extracted to be less than 0.8 +/- 0.2 dB/cm for TE mode and 1.3 +/- 0.2 dB/cm for TM mode at 1550 nm. The fully transferred pattern and low scattering loss proves it to be an effective way to replicate low-loss polymer PSQ-L-based waveguides
- …