10,143 research outputs found
Simulations of Dust in Interacting Galaxies
A new Monte-Carlo radiative-transfer code, Sunrise, is used to study the
effects of dust in N-body/hydrodynamic simulations of interacting galaxies.
Dust has a profound effect on the appearance of the simulated galaxies. At peak
luminosities, about 90% of the bolometric luminosity is absorbed, and the dust
obscuration scales with luminosity in such a way that the brightness at
UV/visual wavelengths remains roughly constant. A general relationship between
the fraction of energy absorbed and the ratio of bolometric luminosity to
baryonic mass is found. Comparing to observations, the simulations are found to
follow a relation similar to the observed IRX-Beta relation found by Meurer et
al (1999) when similar luminosity objects are considered. The
highest-luminosity simulated galaxies depart from this relation and occupy the
region where local (U)LIRGs are found. This agreement is contingent on the
presence of Milky-Way-like dust, while SMC-like dust results in far too red a
UV continuum slope to match observations. The simulations are used to study the
performance of star-formation indicators in the presence of dust. The
far-infrared luminosity is found to be reliable. In contrast, the H-alpha and
far-UV luminosity suffer severely from dust attenuation, and dust corrections
can only partially remedy the situation.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figures, to appear in the proceedings of the conference
"The Spectral Energy Distribution of Gas-Rich Galaxies", eds. C.C. Popescu &
R.J. Tuffs (Heidelberg, October 2004
Corrections for gravitational lensing of supernovae: better than average?
We investigate the possibility of correcting for the magnification due to
gravitational lensing of standard candle sources, such as Type Ia supernovae.
Our method uses the observed properties of the foreground galaxies along the
lines-of-sight to each source and the accuracy of the lensing correction
depends on the quality and depth of these observations as well as the
uncertainties in translating the observed luminosities to the matter
distribution in the lensing galaxies. The current work is limited to cases
where the matter density is dominated by the individual galaxy halos. However,
it is straightforward to generalize the method to include also gravitational
lensing from cluster scale halos. We show that the dispersion due to lensing
for a standard candle source at z=1.5 can be reduced from about 7% to ~< 3%,
i.e. the magnification correction is useful in reducing the scatter in the Type
Ia Hubble diagram, especially at high redshifts where the required long
exposure times makes it hard to reach large statistics and the dispersion due
to lensing becomes comparable to the intrinsic Type Ia scatter.Comment: Matches accepted version, includes clarifications and additional
issues. 28 pages, 7 figures, accepted for publication in Ap
A streamwise-constant model of turbulent pipe flow
A streamwise-constant model is presented to investigate the basic mechanisms
responsible for the change in mean flow occuring during pipe flow transition.
Using a single forced momentum balance equation, we show that the shape of the
velocity profile is robust to changes in the forcing profile and that both
linear non-normal and nonlinear effects are required to capture the change in
mean flow associated with transition to turbulence. The particularly simple
form of the model allows for the study of the momentum transfer directly by
inspection of the equations. The distribution of the high- and low-speed
streaks over the cross-section of the pipe produced by our model is remarkably
similar to one observed in the velocity field near the trailing edge of the
puff structures present in pipe flow transition. Under stochastic forcing, the
model exhibits a quasi-periodic self-sustaining cycle characterized by the
creation and subsequent decay of "streamwise-constant puffs", so-called due to
the good agreement between the temporal evolution of their velocity field and
the projection of the velocity field associated with three-dimensional puffs in
a frame of reference moving at the bulk velocity. We establish that the flow
dynamics are relatively insensitive to the regeneration mechanisms invoked to
produce near-wall streamwise vortices and that using small, unstructured
background disturbances to regenerate the streamwise vortices is sufficient to
capture the formation of the high- and low-speed streaks and their segregation
leading to the blunting of the velocity profile characteristic of turbulent
pipe flow
Lensing magnification of supernovae in the GOODS-fields
Gravitational lensing of high-redshift supernovae is potentially an important
source of uncertainty when deriving cosmological parameters from the measured
brightness of Type Ia supernovae, especially in deep surveys with scarce
statistics. Photometric and spectroscopic measurements of foreground galaxies
along the lines-of-sight of 33 supernovae discovered with the Hubble Space
Telescope, both core-collapse and Type Ia, are used to model the magnification
probability distributions of the sources. Modelling galaxy halos with SIS or
NFW-profiles and using M/L scaling laws provided by the Faber-Jackson and
Tully-Fisher relations, we find clear evidence for supernovae with lensing
(de)magnification. However, the magnification distribution of the Type Ia
supernovae used to determine cosmological distances matches very well the
expectations for an unbiased sample, i.e.their mean magnification factor is
consistent with unity. Our results show that the lensing distortions of the
supernova brightness can be well understood for the GOODS sample and that
correcting for this effect has a negligible impact on the derived cosmological
parameters.Comment: 22 pages, 9 figures, accepted for publication by Ap
Shapes of Stellar Systems and Dark Halos from Simulations of Galaxy Major Mergers
Using a sample of 89 snapshots from 58 hydrodynamic binary galaxy major
merger simulations, we find that stellar remnants are mostly oblate while dark
matter halos are mostly prolate or triaxial. The stellar minor axis and the
halo major axis are almost always nearly perpendicular. This can be understood
by considering the influence of angular momentum and dissipation during the
merger. If binary mergers of spiral galaxies are responsible for the formation
of elliptical galaxies or some subpopulation thereof, these galaxies can be
expected to be oblate and inhabit their halos with the predicted shapes and
orientations. These predictions are potentially relevant to observational
studies of weak gravitational lensing, where one must stack many optically
aligned galaxies in order to determine the shape of the resulting stacked mass
distribution. The simple relationship between the dark and luminous matter
presented here can be used to guide the stacking of galaxies to minimize the
information lost.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figures. Minor changes to match published versio
Exact ground states of a staggered supersymmetric model for lattice fermions
We study a supersymmetric model for strongly interacting lattice fermions in
the presence of a staggering parameter. The staggering is introduced as a
tunable parameter in the manifestly supersymmetric Hamiltonian. We obtain
analytic expressions for the ground states in the limit of small and large
staggering for the model on the class of doubly decorated lattices. On this
type of lattice there are two ground states, each with a different density. In
one limit we find these ground states to be a simple Wigner crystal and a
valence bond solid (VBS) state. In the other limit we find two types of quantum
liquids. As a special case, we investigate the quantum liquid state on the one
dimensional chain in detail. It is characterized by a massless kink that
separates two types of order.Comment: 21 pages, 6 figures, v2: largely rewritten version with more emphasis
on physical interpretatio
Nonperturbative treatment of giant atoms using chain transformations
Superconducting circuits coupled to acoustic waveguides have extended the
range of phenomena that can be experimentally studied using tools from quantum
optics. In particular giant artificial atoms permit the investigation of
systems in which the electric dipole approximation breaks down and pronounced
non-Markovian effects become important. While previous studies of giant atoms
focused on the realm of the rotating-wave approximation, we go beyond this and
perform a numerically exact analysis of giant atoms strongly coupled to their
environment, in regimes where counterrotating terms cannot be neglected. To
achieve this, we use a Lanczos transformation to cast the field Hamiltonian
into the form of a one-dimensional chain and employ matrix-product state
simulations. This approach yields access to a wide range of system-bath
observables and to previously unexplored parameter regimes.Comment: 8+5 pages, 8+2 figures, 1+1 tables. v3: update published versio
A theory of normed simulations
In existing simulation proof techniques, a single step in a lower-level
specification may be simulated by an extended execution fragment in a
higher-level one. As a result, it is cumbersome to mechanize these techniques
using general purpose theorem provers. Moreover, it is undecidable whether a
given relation is a simulation, even if tautology checking is decidable for the
underlying specification logic. This paper introduces various types of normed
simulations. In a normed simulation, each step in a lower-level specification
can be simulated by at most one step in the higher-level one, for any related
pair of states. In earlier work we demonstrated that normed simulations are
quite useful as a vehicle for the formalization of refinement proofs via
theorem provers. Here we show that normed simulations also have pleasant
theoretical properties: (1) under some reasonable assumptions, it is decidable
whether a given relation is a normed forward simulation, provided tautology
checking is decidable for the underlying logic; (2) at the semantic level,
normed forward and backward simulations together form a complete proof method
for establishing behavior inclusion, provided that the higher-level
specification has finite invisible nondeterminism.Comment: 31 pages, 10figure
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