Mitigation of microbunching instability in x-ray free electron laser linacs

The microbunching instability seeded by small initial density modulation and driven by collective effects can cause significant electron beam quality degradation in next generation x-ray free electron lasers. A method exploiting longitudinal mixing derived from the natural transverse spread of the electron beam through a dispersive bending magnet was proposed to suppress this instability several years ago [Phys. Rev. Lett. 111, 054801 (2013)PRLTAO0031-900710.1103/PhysRevLett.111.054801]. Instead of using bending magnets to introduce the transverse-to-longitudinal coupling, which will lead to an inconvenient deflection of the downstream beam line, in this paper, we propose a scheme to mitigate the microbunching instability by inserting a quadrupole magnet inside a bunch compressor of the accelerator. This results in transverse-to-longitudinal phase space mixing and large slice energy spread that can efficiently mitigate the growth of the microbunching instability through the major accelerator section. Finally, at the exit of the accelerator, a dogleg section is used to restore the emittance and slice energy spread before entering the undulator radiation section. Multiparticle simulations show that the transverse space charge, structure wakefield, and the coherent synchrotron radiation effects will have a relatively small impact on this scheme

Chiral expansion of the π0→γγ\pi^0\rightarrow\gamma\gamma decay width

A chiral field theory of mesons has been applied to study the contribution of the current quark masses to the $\pi^0\rightarrow\gamma\gamma$ decay width at the next leading order. $2\%$ enhancement has been predicted and there is no new parameter.Comment: 9 page

Excitation function of nucleon and pion elliptic flow in relativistic heavy-ion collisions

Within a relativistic transport (ART) model for heavy-ion collisions, we show that the recently observed characteristic change from out-of-plane to in-plane elliptic flow of protons in mid-central Au+Au collisions as the incident energy increases is consistent with the calculated results using a stiff nuclear equation of state (K=380 MeV). We have also studied the elliptic flow of pions and the transverse momentum dependence of both the nucleon and pion elliptic flow in order to gain further insight about the collision dynamics.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figure

Interchange Reconnection Alfven Wave Generation

Given recent observational results of interchange reconnection processes in the solar corona and the theoretical development of the S-Web model for the slow solar wind, we extend the analysis of the 3D MHD simulation of interchange reconnection by Edmondson et al. (Astrophys. J. 707, 1427, 2009). Specifically, we analyze the consequences of the dynamic streamer-belt jump that corresponds to flux opening by interchange reconnection. Information about the magnetic field restructuring by interchange reconnection is carried throughout the system by Alfven waves propagating away from the reconnection region, distributing the shear and twist imparted by the driving flows, including shedding the injected stress-energy and accumulated magnetic helicity along newly open fieldlines. We quantify the properties of the reconnection-generated wave activity in the simulation. There is a localized high-frequency component associated with the current sheet/reconnection site and an extended low-frequency component associated with the large-scale torsional Alfven wave generated from the interchange reconnection field restructuring. The characteristic wavelengths of the torsional Alfven wave reflect the spatial size of the energized bipolar flux region. Lastly, we discuss avenues of future research by modeling these interchange reconnection-driven waves and investigating their observational signatures.Comment: 18 pages, 7 figures, accepted for publication in Solar Physic

τ→ρππν\tau\to\rho\pi\pi\nu decays

Effective chiral theory of mesons is applied to study the four decay modes of $\tau\to\rho\pi\pi\nu$. Theoretical values of the branching ratios are in agreement with the data. The theory predicts that the $a_{1}$ resonance plays a dominant role in these decays. There is no new parameter in this study.Comment: 12 pages and one figur

High-accuracy critical exponents of O(N) hierarchical sigma models

We perform high-accuracy calculations of the critical exponent gamma and its subleading exponent for the 3D O(N) Dyson's hierarchical model, for N up to 20. We calculate the critical temperatures for the nonlinear sigma model measure. We discuss the possibility of extracting the first coefficients of the 1/N expansion from our numerical data. We show that the leading and subleading exponents agreewith Polchinski equation and the equivalent Litim equation, in the local potential approximation, with at least 4 significant digits.Comment: 4 pages, 2 Figs., uses revte