Delta G from Compass

Measurements of the gluon polarization $\frac{\Delta G}{G}$ via the open charm channel and based on the helicity asymmetry of large transverse-momentum hadrons in the final state are presented. The data have been collected in the years 2002-2004 by the COMPASS experiment at CERN using a 160 GeV/c polarized muon beam scattered off a polarized $^6$LiD target. The new result for $\frac{\Delta G}{G}$ from the charm channel is $-0.57 \pm 0.41 (stat.)$ at $x_G \simeq 0.15$ and scale $\mu^2 \simeq 13$ (GeV/c)$^2$. The gluon polarization from high-$p_T$ hadron pairs is $\frac{\Delta G}{G} = 0.016\pm 0.058 (stat.)\pm 0.055 (syst.)$ at $x_G \simeq 0.085^{+0.07}_{-0.035}$ ($Q^2 < 1$ (GeV/c)$^2$ and $\mu^2 \simeq 3$ (GeV/c)$^2$)Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, Talk given on XIV Interantional Workshop on DIS, 20-24 April, 2006, Tsukuba, Japa

International tourism in Małopolskie Województwo: the present situation and prospects for development

Małopolskie Województwo is one of the most popular tourist regions in Poland. Due to many attractions, long traditions of hosting tourists and well-developed accommodation facilities, Małopolskie Województwo has become the destination for a growing number of international tourists in recent years. Significant growth in incoming international tourism is found both in Kraków and in mountain areas. The objective of this paper is to present the state of development of incoming international tourism in Małopolskie Województwo

Testing and selection cosmological models with dark energy

It is described dynamics of a large class of accelerating cosmological models in terms of dynamical systems of the Newtonian type. The evolution of the models is reduced to the motion of a particle in a potential well parameterized by the scale factor. This potential function can be reconstructed from distant supernovae type Ia data and many cosmological models represented in terms of the potential becomes in a good agreement with current observational data. It is proposed to use the information criteria to overcome this degeneracy within a class of A) dark energy models and B) simple models basing on modification of the FRW equation. Two class of models can be recommended by the Akaike (AIC) and Schwarz (BIC) information criteria: the phantom and $\Lambda$CDM models.Comment: Talk at Albert Einstein Century International Conference at Palais de l'Unesco, Paris, France, 18-23 July 2005; to appear in the Proceedings; AIP style files included, 6 pages, 2 figure

Optimization of exposure time division for wide field observations

The optical observations of wide fields of view encounter the problem of selection of best exposure time. As there are usually plenty of objects observed simultaneously, the quality of photometry of the brightest ones is always better than of the dimmer ones. Frequently all of them are equally interesting for the astronomers and thus it is desired to have all of them measured with the highest possible accuracy. In this paper we present a novel optimization algorithm dedicated for the division of exposure time into sub-exposures, which allows to perform photometry with more balanced noise budget. Thanks to the proposed technique, the photometric precision of dimmer objects is increased at the expense of the measurement fidelity of the brightest ones. We tested the method on real observations using two telescope setups demonstrating its usefulness and good agreement with the theoretical expectations. The main application of our approach is a wide range of sky surveys, including the ones performed by the space telescopes. The method can be applied for planning virtually any photometric observations, in which the objects of interest show a wide range of magnitudes.Comment: 18 pages, 5 figure

Delta G from high pT events at SMC and high pT analysis at COMPASS

Measurements of the longitudinal spin cross section asymmetry for deep inelastic muon-nucleon interactions with two high transverse momentum hadrons ($p_T >$ 0.7 GeV) in the final state are presented for SMC data for polarized proton and deuteron and for data on polarized deuteron from COMPASS taken in 2002 and 2003. The muon asymmetries determined with a cut on $Q^2>$ 1 GeV$^2$ in SMC are: $A_p = 0.03 \pm 0.057\pm 0.01$ and $A_d = 0.070 \pm 0.076 \pm 0.010$, respectively. From these values a gluon polarization $\Delta G /G = -0.20\pm 0.28\pm 0.10$ was obtained at an average fraction of nucleon momentum carried by gluons $\eta = 0.07$. The measured asymmetry (with cut on $Q^2>$ 1 GeV$^2$) in COMPASS is $(A_d/D) = -0.015 \pm 0.08 \pm 0.013$ where D is depolarization factor and the gluon polarization $\Delta G /G = 0.06\pm 0.31\pmComment: 4 pages, 3 figures, Talk given at 10-th International Conference Baryons04, October 25-29, 2004, Ecole Polytechnique, Palaiseau, Franc

Three steps to accelerated expansion

We study the dynamics of a non-minimally coupled scalar field cosmology with a potential function. We use the framework of dynamical systems theory to investigate all evolutional paths admissible for all initial conditions. Additionally, we assume the presence of barotropic matter and show that the dynamics can be formulated in terms of an autonomous dynamical system. We have found fixed points corresponding to three main stages of the evolution of the universe, namely, radiation, matter and quintessence domination epochs. Using the linearization of the dynamical systems in the vicinity of the critical points we explicitly obtain formulas determining the effective equation of state parameter for the universe at different epochs. In our approach the form of $w(z)$ parametrisation is derived directly from the dynamical equations rather than postulated {\it a priori}.Comment: 4 pages, 1 fig; w-art.cls; prepared for the proceedings of The Grassmannian Conference in Fundamental Cosmology "Grasscosmofun'09" (14-19 September, 2009), University of Szczecin, Polan

Chasing Lambda

Recent astronomical observations of SNIa, CMB, as well as BAO in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, suggest that the current Universe has entered a stage of an accelerated expansion with the transition redshift at $z \simeq 0.5$. While the simplest candidates to explain this fact is cosmological constant/vacuum energy, there exists a serious problem of coincidence. In theoretical cosmology we can find many possible approaches alleviating this problem by applying new physics or other conception of dark energy. We consider state of art candidates for the description of accelerating Universe in the framework of the Bayesian model selection. We point out advantages as well as troubles of this approach. We find that the combination of four data bases gives a stringent posterior probability of the $\Lambda$CDM model which is 74%. This fact is a quantitative exemplification of a turmoil in modern cosmology over the $\Lambda$ problem.Comment: Talk presented at the "A Century of Cosmology - Past, Present and Future" conference, S.Servolo(Venice), Italy, August 27-31 2007. To be published in Il Nuovo Ciment

Beyond the current noise limit in imaging through turbulent medium

Shift-and-add is an approach employed to mitigate the phenomenon of resolution degradation in images acquired through a turbulent medium. Using this technique, a large number of consecutive short exposures is registered below the coherence time of the atmosphere or other blurring medium. The acquired images are shifted to the position of the brightest speckle and stacked together to obtain high-resolution and high signal-to-noise frame. In this paper we present a highly efficient method for determination of frames shifts, even if in a single frame the object cannot be distinguished from the background noise. The technique utilizes our custom genetic algorithm, which iteratively evolves a set of image shifts. We used the maximal energy of stacked images as an objective function for shifts estimation and validate the efficiency of the method on simulated and real images of simple and complex sources. Obtained results confirmed, that our proposed method allows for the recovery of spatial distribution of objects even only 2% brighter than their background. The presented approach extends significantly current limits of image reconstruction with the use of shift-and-add method. The applications of our algorithm include both the optical and the infrared imaging. Our method may be also employed as a digital image stabilizer in extremely low light level conditions in professional and consumer applications.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figure