A 3D Printed Toolbox for Opto-Mechanical Components

Nowadays is very common to find headlines in the media where it is stated that 3D printing is a technology called to change our lives in the near future. For many authors, we are living in times of a third industrial revolution. Howerver, we are currently in a stage of development where the use of 3D printing is advantageous over other manufacturing technologies only in rare scenarios. Fortunately, scientific research is one of them. Here we present the development of a set of opto-mechanical components that can be built easily using a 3D printer based on Fused Filament Fabrication (FFF) and parts that can be found on any hardware store. The components of the set presented here are highly customizable, low-cost, require a short time to be fabricated and offer a performance that compares favorably with respect to low-end commercial alternatives.Comment: 9 pages, 9 figure

Detection of the old stellar component of the major Galactic bar

We present near-IR colour--magnitude diagrams and star counts for a number of regions along the Galactic plane. It is shown that along the l=27 b=0 line of sight there is a feature at 5.7 +-0.7kpc with a density of stars at least a factor two and probably more than a factor five times that of the disc at the same position. This feature forms a distinct clump on an H vs. J-H diagram and is seen at all longitudes from the bulge to about l=28, but at no longitude greater than this. The distance to the feature at l=20 is about 0.5kpc further than at l=27 and by l=10 it has merged with, or has become, the bulge. Given that at l=27 and l=21 there is also a clustering of very young stars, the only component that can reasonably explain what is seen is a bar with half length of around 4kpc and a position angle of about 43+-7.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures accepted as a letter in MNRA

How to generate pentagonal symmetry using Turing systems

We explore numerically the formation of Turing patterns in a confined circular domain with small aspect ratio. Our results show that stable fivefold patterns are formed over a well defined range of disk sizes, offering a possible mechanism for inducing the fivefold symmetry observed in early development of regular echinoids. Using this pattern as a seed, more complex biological structures can be mimicked, such as the pigmentation pattern of sea urchins and the plate arrangements of the calyxes of primitive camerate crinoids

A study of the KNKN-K∗NK^*N coupled systems

We study the strangeness $+1$ meson-baryon systems to obtain improved $KN$ and $K^*N$ amplitudes and to look for a possible resonance formation by the $KN$-$K^*N$ coupled interaction. We obtain amplitudes for light vector meson-baryon systems by implementing the $s$-, $t$-, $u$- channel diagrams and a contact interaction. The pseudoscalar meson-baryon interactions are obtained by relying on the Weinberg-Tomozawa theorem. The transition amplitudes between the systems consisting of pseudoscalars and vector mesons are calculated by extending the Kroll-Ruderman term for pion photoproduction replacing the photon by a vector meson. We fix the subtraction constants required to calculate the loops by fitting our $KN$ amplitudes to the data available for the isospin 0 and 1 $s$-wave phase shifts. We provide the scattering lengths and the total cross sections for the $KN$ and $K^* N$ systems obtained in our model, which can be useful in future in-medium calculations. Our amplitudes do not correspond to formation of any resonance in none of the isospin and spin configurations.Comment: Published version, sent to avoid confusions recently noticed by author