1,809 research outputs found
Monte Carlo simulations of air showers in atmospheric electric fields
The development of cosmic ray air showers can be influenced by atmospheric
electric fields. Under fair weather conditions these fields are small, but the
strong fields inside thunderstorms can have a significant effect on the
electromagnetic component of a shower. Understanding this effect is
particularly important for radio detection of air showers, since the radio
emission is produced by the shower electrons and positrons. We perform Monte
Carlo simulations to calculate the effects of different electric field
configurations on the shower development. We find that the electric field
becomes important for values of the order of 1 kV/cm. Not only can the energy
distribution of electrons and positrons change significantly for such field
strengths, it is also possible that runaway electron breakdown occurs at high
altitudes, which is an important effect in lightning initiation.Comment: 24 pages, 19 figures, accepted for publication in Astroparticle
Physic
Testing the Within-State Distribution in Mixture Models for Responses and Response Times
Mixture models have been developed to enable detection of within-subject differences in responses and response times to psychometric test items. To enable mixture modeling of both responses and response times, a distributional assumption is needed for the within-state response time distribution. Since violations of the assumed response time distribution may bias the modeling results, choosing an appropriate within-state distribution is important. However, testing this distributional assumption is challenging as the latent within-state response time distribution is by definition different from the observed distribution. Therefore, existing tests on the observed distribution cannot be used. In this article, we propose statistical tests on the within-state response time distribution in a mixture modeling framework for responses and response times. We investigate the viability of the newly proposed tests in a simulation study, and we apply the test to a real data set
Spatially and Spectrally Resolved Observations of a Zebra Pattern in Solar Decimetric Radio Burst
We present the first interferometric observation of a zebra-pattern radio
burst with simultaneous high spectral (~ 1 MHz) and high time (20 ms)
resolution. The Frequency-Agile Solar Radiotelescope (FASR) Subsystem Testbed
(FST) and the Owens Valley Solar Array (OVSA) were used in parallel to observe
the X1.5 flare on 14 December 2006. By using OVSA to calibrate the FST the
source position of the zebra pattern can be located on the solar disk. With the
help of multi-wavelength observations and a nonlinear force-free field (NLFFF)
extrapolation, the zebra source is explored in relation to the magnetic field
configuration. New constraints are placed on the source size and position as a
function of frequency and time. We conclude that the zebra burst is consistent
with a double-plasma resonance (DPR) model in which the radio emission occurs
in resonance layers where the upper hybrid frequency is harmonically related to
the electron cyclotron frequency in a coronal magnetic loop.Comment: Accepted for publication in Ap
- …