10,785 research outputs found
Gamma-Ray Burst Spectral Features: Interpretation as X-ray Emission From A Photoionized Plasma
Numerous reports have been made of features, either in emission or
absorption, in the 10 - 1000 keV spectra of some gamma-ray bursts. Originally
interpreted in the context of Galactic neutron star models as cyclotron line
emission and annihilation features, the recent demonstration that
the majority of GRBs lie at cosmological distances make these explanations
unlikely. In this letter, we adopt a relativistic fireball model for
cosmological GRBs in which dense, metal rich blobs or filaments of plasma are
entrained in the relativistic outflow. In the context of this model, we
investigate the conditions under which broadband features, similar to those
detected, can be observed. We find a limited region of parameter space capable
of reproducing the observed GRB spectra. Finally, we discuss possible
constraints further high-energy spectral observations could place on fireball
model parameters.Comment: Accepted for publication in Astrophysical Journal Letters Four pages,
2 figure
Non-monotonic size dependence of the elastic modulus of nanocrystalline ZnO embedded in a nanocrystalline silver matrix
We present the first high pressure Raman study on nanocrystalline ZnO films
with different average crystallite sizes. The problem of low Raman signals from
nano sized particles was overcome by forming a nanocomposite of Ag and ZnO
nanoparticles. The presence of the nanodispersed Ag particles leads to a
substantial surface enhancement of the Raman signal from ZnO. We find that the
elastic modulus of nanocrystalline ZnO shows a non-monotonic dependence on the
crystallite size. We suggest that the non-monotonicity arises from an interplay
between the elastic properties of the individual grains and the intergranular
region.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figure
Move Forward and Tell: A Progressive Generator of Video Descriptions
We present an efficient framework that can generate a coherent paragraph to
describe a given video. Previous works on video captioning usually focus on
video clips. They typically treat an entire video as a whole and generate the
caption conditioned on a single embedding. On the contrary, we consider videos
with rich temporal structures and aim to generate paragraph descriptions that
can preserve the story flow while being coherent and concise. Towards this
goal, we propose a new approach, which produces a descriptive paragraph by
assembling temporally localized descriptions. Given a video, it selects a
sequence of distinctive clips and generates sentences thereon in a coherent
manner. Particularly, the selection of clips and the production of sentences
are done jointly and progressively driven by a recurrent network -- what to
describe next depends on what have been said before. Here, the recurrent
network is learned via self-critical sequence training with both sentence-level
and paragraph-level rewards. On the ActivityNet Captions dataset, our method
demonstrated the capability of generating high-quality paragraph descriptions
for videos. Compared to those by other methods, the descriptions produced by
our method are often more relevant, more coherent, and more concise.Comment: Accepted by ECCV 201
Parallelizing Deadlock Resolution in Symbolic Synthesis of Distributed Programs
Previous work has shown that there are two major complexity barriers in the
synthesis of fault-tolerant distributed programs: (1) generation of fault-span,
the set of states reachable in the presence of faults, and (2) resolving
deadlock states, from where the program has no outgoing transitions. Of these,
the former closely resembles with model checking and, hence, techniques for
efficient verification are directly applicable to it. Hence, we focus on
expediting the latter with the use of multi-core technology.
We present two approaches for parallelization by considering different design
choices. The first approach is based on the computation of equivalence classes
of program transitions (called group computation) that are needed due to the
issue of distribution (i.e., inability of processes to atomically read and
write all program variables). We show that in most cases the speedup of this
approach is close to the ideal speedup and in some cases it is superlinear. The
second approach uses traditional technique of partitioning deadlock states
among multiple threads. However, our experiments show that the speedup for this
approach is small. Consequently, our analysis demonstrates that a simple
approach of parallelizing the group computation is likely to be the effective
method for using multi-core computing in the context of deadlock resolution
Variability Profiles of Millisecond X-Ray Pulsars: Results of Pseudo-Newtonian 3D MHD Simulations
We model the variability profiles of millisecond period X-ray pulsars. We
performed three-dimensional magnetohydrodynamic simulations of disk accretion
to millisecond period neutron stars with a misaligned magnetic dipole moment,
using the pseudo-Newtonian Paczynski-Wiita potential to model general
relativistic effects. We found that the shapes of the resulting funnel streams
of accreting matter and the hot spots on the surface of the star are quite
similar to those for more slowly rotating stars obtained from earlier
simulations using the Newtonian potential. The funnel streams and hot spots
rotate approximately with the same angular velocity as the star. The spots are
bow-shaped (bar-shaped) for small (large) misalignment angles. We found that
the matter falling on the star has a higher Mach number when we use the
Paczynski-Wiita potential than in the Newtonian case.
Having obtained the surface distribution of the emitted flux, we calculated
the variability curves of the star, taking into account general relativistic,
Doppler and light-travel-time effects. We found that general relativistic
effects decrease the pulse fraction (flatten the light curve), while Doppler
and light-travel-time effects increase it and distort the light curve. We also
found that the light curves from our hot spots are reproduced reasonably well
by spots with a gaussian flux distribution centered at the magnetic poles. We
also calculated the observed image of the star in a few cases, and saw that for
certain orientations, both the antipodal hot spots are simultaneously visible,
as noted by earlier authors.Comment: 9 pages, 10 figures, accepted for publication in ApJ; corrected some
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