3,005 research outputs found
Panoramic Views of the Cygnus Loop
We present a complete atlas of the Cygnus Loop supernova remnant in the light
of [O III] (5007), H alpha, and [S II] (6717, 6731). Despite its shell-like
appearance, the Cygnus Loop is not a current example of a Sedov-Taylor blast
wave. Rather, the optical emission traces interactions of the supernova blast
wave with clumps of gas. The surrounding interstellar medium forms the walls of
a cavity through which the blast wave now propagates, including a nearly
complete shell in which non-radiative filaments are detected. The Cygnus Loop
blast wave is not breaking out of a dense cloud, but is instead running into
confining walls. The interstellar medium dominates not only the appearance of
the Cygnus Loop but also the continued evolution of the blast wave. If this is
a typical example of a supernova remnant, then global models of the
interstellar medium must account for such significant blast wave deceleration.Comment: 28 pages AAS Latex, 28 black+white figures, 6 color figures. To be
published in The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Serie
Middle and Late Pleistocene environmental history of the Marsworth area, south-central England
To elucidate the Middle and Late Pleistocene environmental history of south-central England, we report the stratigraphy, sedimentology, palaeoecology and geochronology of some deposits near the foot of the Chiltern Hills scarp at Marsworth, Buckinghamshire. The Marsworth site is important because its sedimentary sequences contain a rich record of warm stages and cold stages, and it lies close to the Anglian glacial limit. Critical to its history are the origin and age of a brown pebbly silty clay (diamicton) previously interpreted as weathered till.
The deposits described infill a river channel incised into chalk bedrock. They comprise clayey, silty and gravelly sediments, many containing locally derived chalk and some with molluscan, ostracod and vertebrate remains. Most of the deposits are readily attributed to periglacial and fluvial processes, and some are dated by optically stimulated luminescence to Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) 6. Although our sedimentological data do not discriminate between a glacial or periglacial interpretation of the diamicton, amino-acid dating of three molluscan taxa from beneath it indicates that it is younger than MIS 9 and older than MIS 5e. This makes a glacial interpretation unlikely, and we interpret the diamicton as a periglacial slope deposit.
The Pleistocene history reconstructed for Marsworth identifies four key elements: (1) Anglian glaciation during MIS 12 closely approached Marsworth, introducing far-travelled pebbles such as Rhaxella chert and possibly some fine sand minerals into the area. (2) Interglacial environments inferred from fluvial sediments during MIS 7 varied from fully interglacial conditions during sub-stages 7e and 7c, cool temperate conditions during sub-stage 7b or 7a, temperate conditions similar to those today in central England towards the end of the interglacial, and cool temperate conditions during sub-stage 7a. (3) Periglacial activity during MIS 6 involved thermal contraction cracking, permafrost development, fracturing of chalk bedrock, fluvial activity, slopewash, mass movement and deposition of loess and coversand. (4) Fully interglacial conditions during sub-stage 5e led to renewed fluvial activity, soil formation and acidic weathering
Topology of amorphous tetrahedral semiconductors on intermediate lengthscales
Using the recently-proposed ``activation-relaxation technique'' for
optimizing complex structures, we develop a structural model appropriate to
a-GaAs which is almost free of odd-membered rings, i.e., wrong bonds, and
possesses an almost perfect coordination of four. The model is found to be
superior to structures obtained from much more computer-intensive tight-binding
or quantum molecular-dynamics simulations. For the elemental system a-Si, where
wrong bonds do not exist, the cost in elastic energy for removing odd-membered
rings is such that the traditional continuous-random network is appropriate.
Our study thus provides, for the first time, direct information on the nature
of intermediate-range topology in amorphous tetrahedral semiconductors.Comment: 4 pages, Latex and 2 postscript figure
Geometric Aspects of the Moduli Space of Riemann Surfaces
This is a survey of our recent results on the geometry of moduli spaces and
Teichmuller spaces of Riemann surfaces appeared in math.DG/0403068 and
math.DG/0409220. We introduce new metrics on the moduli and the Teichmuller
spaces of Riemann surfaces with very good properties, study their curvatures
and boundary behaviors in great detail. Based on the careful analysis of these
new metrics, we have a good understanding of the Kahler-Einstein metric from
which we prove that the logarithmic cotangent bundle of the moduli space is
stable. Another corolary is a proof of the equivalences of all of the known
classical complete metrics to the new metrics, in particular Yau's conjectures
in the early 80s on the equivalences of the Kahler-Einstein metric to the
Teichmuller and the Bergman metric.Comment: Survey article of our recent results on the subject. Typoes
corrrecte
Hydrodynamic Interactions in Two Dimensions
We measure hydrodynamic interactions between colloidal particles confined in
a thin sheet of fluid. The reduced dimensionality, compared to a bulk fluid,
increases dramatically the range of couplings. Using optical tweezers we force
a two body system along the eigenmodes of the mobility tensor and find that
eigen-mobilities change logarithmically with particle separation. At a hundred
radii distance, the mobilities for correlated and anti-correlated motions
differ by a factor of two, whereas in bulk fluids, they would be practically
indistinguishable. We derive the two dimensional counterpart of the Oseen
hydrodynamic tensor which quantitatively reproduces the observed behavior.
These results highlight the importance of dimensionality for transport and
interactions in colloidal systems and proteins in biological membranes.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure
- …