Efficient room temperature cw Yb:glass laser pumped by a 946nm Nd:YAG laser

By pumping with a cw diode-pumped Nd:YAG laser operating at 946nm laser operation of a new Yb-doped phosphate glass with 440mW cw output power and a slope efficiency of 48% with respect to the absorbed pump power was achieved at room temperature

A New Transport Regime in the Quantum Hall Effect

This paper describes an experimental identification and characterization of a new low temperature transport regime near the quantum Hall-to-insulator transition. In this regime, a wide range of transport data are compactly described by a simple phenomenological form which, on the one hand, is inconsistent with either quantum Hall or insulating behavior and, on the other hand, is also clearly at odds with a quantum-critical, or scaling, description. We are unable to determine whether this new regime represents a clearly defined state or is a consequence of finite temperature and sample-size measurements.Comment: Revtex, 3 pages, 2 figure

High power diode-bar-pumped Nd:YAG laser at 946nm

Diode-pumped Nd:YAG lasers operating at ~946nm are potentially attractive sources since they can be frequency-doubled to the blue. However, efficient lasing on the 946nm transition is considerably more difficult to achieve than on the more familiar 1.064µm transition. This is partly due to its quasi-three-level nature which results in a significant reabsorption loss which (at room temperature) is ~0.8%/mm for a 1% Nd doped YAG rod. The main problem however, with the 946nm line, is its small stimulated emission cross-section which is ~9 times smaller than for the 1.064µm line. As a result, 946nm Nd:YAG lasers have a threshold which is at least a factor of 9 times higher than for a comparable 1.064µm laser

Differential Thermal Analysis of Commercial and Dental Waxes

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/67104/2/10.1177_00220345670460051701.pd

Highly-efficient cw blue light generation via first-order quasi-phase-matched frequency-doubling of a diode-pumped 946nm Nd:YAG laser

49 mW of cw blue light have been generated with a conversion efficiency of 4.6% by first-order quasi-phase-matched frequency doubling of a high-power diode-pumped 946 nm Nd:YAG laser. A sample of periodically poled LiNbO3, with domain reversal period of 4.6 µm and length of 6 mm was used in the experiment. The measured effective nonlinear coefficient of 19 pm/V and the bandwidth of 3 °C for the quasi-phase-matching curve (second harmonic power vs. temperature) are very close to the theoretical limits.<br/

Onset of magnetism in B2 transition metals aluminides

Ab initio calculation results for the electronic structure of disordered bcc Fe(x)Al(1-x) (0.4<x<0.75), Co(x)Al(1-x) and Ni(x)Al(1-x) (x=0.4; 0.5; 0.6) alloys near the 1:1 stoichiometry, as well as of the ordered B2 (FeAl, CoAl, NiAl) phases with point defects are presented. The calculations were performed using the coherent potential approximation within the Korringa-Kohn-Rostoker method (KKR-CPA) for the disordered case and the tight-binding linear muffin-tin orbital (TB-LMTO) method for the intermetallic compounds. We studied in particular the onset of magnetism in Fe-Al and Co-Al systems as a function of the defect structure. We found the appearance of large local magnetic moments associated with the transition metal (TM) antisite defect in FeAl and CoAl compounds, in agreement with the experimental findings. Moreover, we found that any vacancies on both sublattices enhance the magnetic moments via reducing the charge transfer to a TM atom. Disordered Fe-Al alloys are ferromagnetically ordered for the whole range of composition studied, whereas Co-Al becomes magnetic only for Co concentration >0.5.Comment: 11 pages with 9 embedded postscript figures, to be published in Phys.Rev.

Spin instabilities and quantum phase transitions in integral and fractional quantum Hall states

The inter-Landau-level spin excitations of quantum Hall states at filling factors nu=2 and 4/3 are investigated by exact numerical diagonalization for the situation in which the cyclotron (hbar*omega_c) and Zeeman (E_Z) splittings are comparable. The relevant quasiparticles and their interactions are studied, including stable spin wave and skyrmion bound states. For nu=2, a spin instability at a finite value of epsilon=hbar*omega_c-E_Z leads to an abrupt paramagnetic to ferromagnetic transition, in agreement with the mean-field approximation. However, for nu=4/3 a new and unexpected quantum phase transition is found which involves a gradual change from paramagnetic to ferromagnetic occupancy of the partially filled Landau level as epsilon is decreased.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figures, submitted to Phys.Rev.Let

The distribution of transit durations for Kepler planet candidates and implications for their orbital eccentricities

‘In these times, during the rise in the popularity of institutional repositories, the Society does not forbid authors from depositing their work in such repositories. However, the AAS regards the deposit of scholarly work in such repositories to be a decision of the individual scholar, as long as the individual's actions respect the diligence of the journals and their reviewers.’ Original article can be found at : http://iopscience.iop.org/ Copyright American Astronomical SocietyDoppler planet searches have discovered that giant planets follow orbits with a wide range of orbital eccentricities, revolutionizing theories of planet formation. The discovery of hundreds of exoplanet candidates by NASA's Kepler mission enables astronomers to characterize the eccentricity distribution of small exoplanets. Measuring the eccentricity of individual planets is only practical in favorable cases that are amenable to complementary techniques (e.g., radial velocities, transit timing variations, occultation photometry). Yet even in the absence of individual eccentricities, it is possible to study the distribution of eccentricities based on the distribution of transit durations (relative to the maximum transit duration for a circular orbit). We analyze the transit duration distribution of Kepler planet candidates. We find that for host stars with T > 5100 K we cannot invert this to infer the eccentricity distribution at this time due to uncertainties and possible systematics in the host star densities. With this limitation in mind, we compare the observed transit duration distribution with models to rule out extreme distributions. If we assume a Rayleigh eccentricity distribution for Kepler planet candidates, then we find best fits with a mean eccentricity of 0.1-0.25 for host stars with T ≤ 5100 K. We compare the transit duration distribution for different subsets of Kepler planet candidates and discuss tentative trends with planetary radius and multiplicity. High-precision spectroscopic follow-up observations for a large sample of host stars will be required to confirm which trends are real and which are the results of systematic errors in stellar radii. Finally, we identify planet candidates that must be eccentric or have a significantly underestimated stellar radius.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Giants On Deformed Backgrounds

We study giant graviton probes in the framework of the three--parameter deformation of the AdS_5 x S^5 background. We examine both the case when the brane expands in the deformed part of the geometry and the case when it blows up into AdS. Performing a detailed analysis of small fluctuations around the giants, the configurations turn out to be stable. Our results hold even for the supersymmetric Lunin-Maldacena deformation.Comment: LaTex, 28 pages, uses JHEP3; v2: minor corrections, references added; v3: final version accepted for publication in JHE

Semiclassical Trace Formulas for Noninteracting Identical Particles

We extend the Gutzwiller trace formula to systems of noninteracting identical particles. The standard relation for isolated orbits does not apply since the energy of each particle is separately conserved causing the periodic orbits to occur in continuous families. The identical nature of the particles also introduces discrete permutational symmetries. We exploit the formalism of Creagh and Littlejohn [Phys. Rev. A 44, 836 (1991)], who have studied semiclassical dynamics in the presence of continuous symmetries, to derive many-body trace formulas for the full and symmetry-reduced densities of states. Numerical studies of the three-particle cardioid billiard are used to explicitly illustrate and test the results of the theory.Comment: 29 pages, 11 figures, submitted to PR