17,252 research outputs found
No periodicity revealed for an "eclipsing" ultraluminous supersoft X-ray source in M81
Luminous supersoft X-ray sources found in the Milky Way and Magellanic Clouds
are likely white dwarfs that steadily or cyclically burn accreted matter on
their surface, which are promising type Ia supernova progenitors. Observations
of distant galaxies with Chandra and XMM-Newton have revealed supersoft sources
that are generally hotter and more luminous, including some ultraluminous
supersoft sources (ULSs) that are possibly intermediate mass black holes of a
few thousand solar masses. In this paper we report our X-ray spectral and
timing analysis for M81-ULS1, an ultraluminous supersoft source in the nearby
spiral galaxy M81. M81-ULS1 has been persistently supersoft in 17 Chandra ACIS
observations spanning six years, and its spectrum can be described by either a
eV blackbody for a white dwarf, or a
eV multicolor accretion disk for a
intermediate mass black hole. In two observations, the light curves exhibited
dramatic flux drop/rise on time scales of seconds, reminiscent of
eclipse ingress/egress in eclipsing X-ray binaries. However, the exhaustive
search for periodicity in the reasonable range of 50 ksec to 50 days failed to
reveal an orbital period. The failure to reveal any periodicity is consistent
with the long period ( yrs) predicted for this system given the optical
identification of the secondary with an asymptotic giant star. Also, the
eclipse-like dramatic flux changes in hours are hard to explain under the white
dwarf model, but can in principle be explained by disk temperature changes
induced by accretion rate variations under the intermediate mass black hole
model.Comment: 19 pages, 7 figures, 1 table, to appear in ApJ
Geometric constant defining shape transitions of carbon nanotubes under pressure
Journal ArticleWe demonstrate that when a single-walled carbon nanotube is under pressure it undergoes a series of shape transitions, first transforming from a circle to an oval and then from an oval to a peanut. Most remarkably, the ratio of the area of the tube cross sections at the second transition over that at the first transition appears as a constant, independent of the tube radius. Its accurate value is computed to be G = 0:819 469, by formulating a variational geometry problem to represent single-walled carbon nanotubes with a family of closed plane curves of fixed length and minimum bending energy. The implications of such a geometric constant in designing nanotube electromechanical pressure sensors are discussed
Mechanism for nanotube formation from self-bending nanofilms driven by atomic-scale surface-stress imbalance
Journal ArticleWe demonstrate, by theoretical analysis and molecular dynamics simulation, a mechanism for fabricating nanotubes by self-bending of nanofilms under intrinsic surface-stress imbalance due to surface reconstruction. A freestanding Si nanofilm may spontaneously bend itself into a nanotube without external stress load, and a bilayer SiGe nanofilm may bend into a nanotube with Ge as the inner layer, opposite of the normal bending configuration defined by misfit strain. Such rolled-up nanotubes can accommodate a high level of strain, even beyond the magnitude of lattice mismatch, greatly modifying the tube electronic and optoelectronic properties
Modified Timoshenko formula for bending of ultrathin strained bilayer films
Journal ArticleMechanical bending of nanoscale thin films can be quite different from that of macroscopic thick films. However, current understanding of mechanical bending of nanoscale thin strained bilayer films is often limited within the Timoshenko model [Timoshenko, J. Opt. Soc. Am. 11, 233 (1925)], which was originally derived for macroscopic thick films. Here, we derive a modified Timoshenko formula by including the prominent effect of surface stress played in the nanofilms, which gives a much better agreement with the experiments than the classical formula
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