5,393 research outputs found
Easy on that trigger dad: a study of long term family photo retrieval
We examine the effects of new technologies for digital photography on people's longer term storage and access to collections of personal photos. We report an empirical study of parents' ability to retrieve photos related to salient family events from more than a year ago. Performance was relatively poor with people failing to find almost 40% of pictures. We analyze participants' organizational and access strategies to identify reasons for this poor performance. Possible reasons for retrieval failure include: storing too many pictures, rudimentary organization, use of multiple storage systems, failure to maintain collections and participants' false beliefs about their ability to access photos. We conclude by exploring the technical and theoretical implications of these findings
Generalized Paraxial Ray Trace Procedure Derived from Geodesic Deviation
Paraxial ray tracing procedures have become widely accepted techniques for
acoustic models in seismology and underwater acoustics. To date a generic form
of these procedures including fluid motion and time dependence has not appeared
in the literature. A detailed investigation of the characteristic curves of the
equations of hydrodynamics allows for an immediate generalization of the
procedure to be extracted from the equation form geodesic deviation. The
general paraxial ray trace equations serve as an ideal supplement to ordinary
ray tracing in predicting the deformation of acoustic beams in random
environments. The general procedure is derived in terms of affine
parameterization and in a coordinate time parameterization ideal for
application to physical acoustic ray propagation. The formalism is applied to
layered media, where the deviation equation reduces to a second order
differential equation for a single field with a general solution in terms of a
depth integral along the ray path. Some features are illustrated through
special cases which lead to exact solutions in terms of either ordinary or
special functions.Comment: Original; 40 pages (double spaced), 1 figure Replaced version; 36
pages single spaced, 7 figures. Expanded content; Complete derivation of the
equations from the equations of hydrodynamics, introduction of an auxiliary
basis for three dimensional wave-front modeling. Typos in text and equations
correcte
Theory of Optical Transmission through Elliptical Nanohole Arrays
We present a theory which explains (in the quasistatic limit) the
experimentally observed [R. Gordon, {\it et al}, Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 92},
037401 (2004)] squared dependence of the depolarization ratio on the aspect
ratio of the holes, as well as other features of extraordinary light
transition. We calculated the effective dielectric tensor of a metal film
penetrated by elliptical cylindrical holes and found the extraordinarily light
transmission at special frequencies related to the surface plasmon resonances
of the composite film. We also propose to use the magnetic field for getting a
strong polarization effect, which depends on the ratio of the cyclotron to
plasmon frequencies.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure
Spectral representation of the effective dielectric constant of graded composites
We generalize the Bergman-Milton spectral representation, originally derived
for a two-component composite, to extract the spectral density function for the
effective dielectric constant of a graded composite. This work has been
motivated by a recent study of the optical absorption spectrum of a graded
metallic film [Applied Physics Letters, 85, 94 (2004)] in which a broad
surface-plasmon absorption band has been shown to be responsible for enhanced
nonlinear optical response as well as an attractive figure of merit. It turns
out that, unlike in the case of homogeneous constituent components, the
characteristic function of a graded composite is a continuous function because
of the continuous variation of the dielectric function within the constituent
components. Analytic generalization to three dimensional graded composites is
discussed, and numerical calculations of multilayered composites are given as a
simple application.Comment: Physical Review E, submitted for publication
HD101584: Circumstellar characteristics and evolutionary status
We have performed a study of the characteristics of the circumstellar
environment of the binary object HD101584, that provides information on a
likely evolutionary scenario. We have obtained and analysed ALMA observations,
complemented with observations using APEX, of a large number of molecular
lines. An analysis of the spectral energy distribution has also been performed.
Emissions from 12 molecular species (not counting isotopologues) have been
observed, and most of them mapped with angular resolutions in the range 0.1" to
0.6". Four circumstellar components are identified: i) a central compact source
of size 0.15", ii) an expanding equatorial density enhancement (a flattened
density distribution in the plane of the orbit) of size 3", iii) a bipolar
high-velocity outflow (150 km/s), and iv) an hourglass structure. The outflow
is directed almost along the line of sight. There is evidence of a second
bipolar outflow. The mass of the circumstellar gas is 0.5[D/1 kpc]^2 Msun,
about half of it lies in the equatorial density enhancement. The dust mass is
0.01[D/1 kpc]^2 Msun, and a substantial fraction of this is in the form of
large-sized, up to 1 mm, grains. The estimated kinetic age of the outflow is
770[D/1 kpc] yr. The kinetic energy and the scalar momentum of the accelerated
gas are estimated to be 7x10^(45)[D/1 kpc]^2 erg and 10^(39)[D/1 kpc]^2 g cm/s,
respectively. We provide good evidence that the binary system HD101584 is in a
post-common-envelope-evolution phase, that ended before a stellar merger.
Isotope ratios combined with stellar mass estimates suggest that the primary
star's evolution was terminated already on the first red giant branch (RGB).
Most of the energy required to drive the outflowing gas was probably released
when material fell towards the companion.Comment: Accepted for publication in A&
Dissipationless Anomalous Hall Current in Films
The observation of dissipationless anomalous Hall current is one of the
experimental evidences to confirm the intrinsic origin of anomalous Hall
effect. To study the origin of anomalous Hall effect in iron,
Fe(SiO) granular films with volume fraction of SiO
0\le x \le 40.51 were fabricated using co-sputtering. Hall and longitudinal
resistivities were measured in the temperature range 5 to 350 K with magnetic
fields up to 5 Tesla. As x increased from 0 to 40.51, the anomalous Hall
resistivity and longitudinal resistivity increased about 4 and 3 orders in
magnitude, respectively. Analysis of the results revealed that the normalized
anomalous Hall conductivity is a constant for all the samples, the evidence of
dissipationless anomalous Hall current in Fe.Comment: 17 pages, 5 figures;
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevB.83.20531
ELVIS - ELectromagnetic Vector Information Sensor
The ELVIS instrument was recently proposed by the authors for the Indian
Chandrayaan-1 mission to the Moon and is presently under consideration by the
Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). The scientific objective of ELVIS is
to explore the electromagnetic environment of the moon. ELVIS samples the full
three-dimensional (3D) electric field vector, E(x,t), up to 18 MHz, with
selective Nyqvist frequency bandwidths down to 5 kHz, and one component of the
magnetic field vector, B(x,t), from a few Hz up to 100 kHz.As a transient
detector, ELVIS is capable of detecting pulses with a minimum pulse width of 5
ns. The instrument comprises three orthogonal electric dipole antennas, one
magnetic search coil antenna and a four-channel digital sampling system,
utilising flexible digital down conversion and filtering together with
state-of-the-art onboard digital signal processing.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures. Submitted to the DGLR Int. Symposium "To Moon and
Beyond", Bremen, Germany, 2005. Companion paper to arXiv:astro-ph/050921
Suppression of 2\pi\ phase-slip due to hidden zero modes in one dimensional topological superconductors
We study phase slips in one-dimensional topological superconducting wires.
These wires have been proposed as building blocks for topologically protected
qubits in which the quantum information is distributed over the length of the
device and thus is immune to local sources of decoherence. However, phase-slips
are non-local events that can result in decoherence. Phase slips in topological
superconductors are peculiar for the reason that they occur in multiples of
4\pi\ (instead of 2\pi\ in conventional superconductors). We re-establish this
fact via a beautiful analogy to the particle physics concept of dynamic
symmetry breaking by explicitly finding a "hidden" zero mode in the fermion
spectrum computed in the background of a 2\pi\ phase-slip. Armed with the
understanding of phase-slips in topological superconductors, we propose a
simple experimental setup with which the predictions can be tested by
monitoring tunneling rate of a superconducting flux quantum through a
topological superconducting wire.Comment: 18 pages,14 figures, Updated referenc
Dynamics of Wolbachia pipientis gene expression across the Drosophila melanogaster life cycle
Symbiotic interactions between microbes and their multicellular hosts have
manifold impacts on molecular, cellular and organismal biology. To identify
candidate bacterial genes involved in maintaining endosymbiotic associations
with insect hosts, we analyzed genome-wide patterns of gene expression in the
alpha-proteobacteria Wolbachia pipientis across the life cycle of Drosophila
melanogaster using public data from the modENCODE project that was generated in
a Wolbachia-infected version of the ISO1 reference strain. We find that the
majority of Wolbachia genes are expressed at detectable levels in D.
melanogaster across the entire life cycle, but that only 7.8% of 1195 Wolbachia
genes exhibit robust stage- or sex-specific expression differences when studied
in the "holo-organism" context. Wolbachia genes that are differentially
expressed during development are typically up-regulated after D. melanogaster
embryogenesis, and include many bacterial membrane, secretion system and
ankyrin-repeat containing proteins. Sex-biased genes are often organised as
small operons of uncharacterised genes and are mainly up-regulated in adult
males D. melanogaster in an age-dependent manner suggesting a potential role in
cytoplasmic incompatibility. Our results indicate that large changes in
Wolbachia gene expression across the Drosophila life-cycle are relatively rare
when assayed across all host tissues, but that candidate genes to understand
host-microbe interaction in facultative endosymbionts can be successfully
identified using holo-organism expression profiling. Our work also shows that
mining public gene expression data in D. melanogaster provides a rich set of
resources to probe the functional basis of the Wolbachia-Drosophila symbiosis
and annotate the transcriptional outputs of the Wolbachia genome.Comment: 58 pages, 6 figures, 6 supplemental figures, 4 supplemental files
(available at
https://github.com/bergmanlab/wolbachia/tree/master/gutzwiller_et_al/arxiv
Possible Observational Criteria for Distinguishing Brown Dwarfs from Planets
The difference in formation process between binary stars and planetary
systems is reflected in their composition as well as their orbital
architecture, particularly orbital eccentricity as a function of orbital
period. It is suggested here that this difference can be used as an
observational criterion to distinguish between brown dwarfs and planets.
Application of the orbital criterion suggests that with three possible
exceptions, all of the recently-discovered substellar companions discovered to
date may be brown dwarfs and not planets. These criterion may be used as a
guide for interpretation of the nature of sub-stellar mass companions to stars
in the future.Comment: LaTeX, 11 pages including 2 figures, accepted for publication in the
Astrophysical Journal Letter
- …