Does magnetic pressure affect the ICM dynamics?

A possible discrepancy found in the determination of mass from gravitational lensing data, and from X-rays observations, has been largely discussed in the latest years (for instance, Miralda-Escude & Babul (1995)). Another important discrepancy related to these data is that the dark matter is more centrally condensed than the X-ray-emitting gas, and also with respect to the galaxy distribution (Eyles et al. 1991). Could these discrepancies be consequence of the standard description of the ICM, in which it is assumed hydrostatic equilibrium maintained by thermal pressure? We follow the evolution of the ICM, considering a term of magnetic pressure, aiming at answering the question whether or not these discrepancies can be explained via non-thermal terms of pressure. Our results suggest that the magnetic pressure could only affect the dynamics of the ICM on scales as small as < 1kpc. Our models are constrained by the observations of large and small scale fields and we are successful at reproducing available data, for both Faraday rotation limits and inverse Compton limits for the magnetic fields. In our calculations the radius (from the cluster center) in which magnetic pressure reaches equipartition is smaller than radii derived in previous works, as a consequence of the more realistic treatment of the magnetic field geometry and the consideration of a sink term in the cooling flow.Comment: 8 pages with 7 figures included. MNRAS accepted. Minor changes in the section of discussions and conclusions. Also available at http://www.iac.es/publicaciones/preprints.htm

Responding to Vaccine Safety Signals during Pandemic Influenza: A Modeling Study

Background: Managing emerging vaccine safety signals during an influenza pandemic is challenging. Federal regulators must balance vaccine risks against benefits while maintaining public confidence in the public health system. Methods: We developed a multi-criteria decision analysis model to explore regulatory decision-making in the context of emerging vaccine safety signals during a pandemic. We simulated vaccine safety surveillance system capabilities and used an age-structured compartmental model to develop potential pandemic scenarios. We used an expert-derived multi-attribute utility function to evaluate potential regulatory responses by combining four outcome measures into a single measure of interest: 1) expected vaccination benefit from averted influenza; 2) expected vaccination risk from vaccine-associated febrile seizures; 3) expected vaccination risk from vaccine-associated Guillain-Barre Syndrome; and 4) expected change in vaccine-seeking behavior in future influenza seasons. Results: Over multiple scenarios, risk communication, with or without suspension of vaccination of high-risk persons, were the consistently preferred regulatory responses over no action or general suspension when safety signals were detected during a pandemic influenza. On average, the expert panel valued near-term vaccine-related outcomes relative to long-term projected outcomes by 3∶1. However, when decision-makers had minimal ability to influence near-term outcomes, the response was selected primarily by projected impacts on future vaccine-seeking behavior. Conclusions: The selected regulatory response depends on how quickly a vaccine safety signal is identified relative to the peak of the pandemic and the initiation of vaccination. Our analysis suggested two areas for future investment: efforts to improve the size and timeliness of the surveillance system and behavioral research to understand changes in vaccine-seeking behavior

Cosmological implications of the KATRIN experiment

The upcoming Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino (KATRIN) experiment will put unprecedented constraints on the absolute mass of the electron neutrino, \mnue. In this paper we investigate how this information on \mnue will affect our constraints on cosmological parameters. We consider two scenarios; one where \mnue=0 (i.e., no detection by KATRIN), and one where \mnue=0.3eV. We find that the constraints on \mnue from KATRIN will affect estimates of some important cosmological parameters significantly. For example, the significance of $n_s<1$ and the inferred value of $\Omega_\Lambda$ depend on the results from the KATRIN experiment.Comment: 13 page

Fluid phonons and inflaton quanta at the protoinflationary transition

Quantum and thermal fluctuations of an irrotational fluid are studied across the transition regime connecting a protoinflationary phase of decelerated expansion to an accelerated epoch driven by a single inflaton field. The protoinflationary inhomogeneities are suppressed when the transition to the slow roll phase occurs sharply over space-like hypersurfaces of constant energy density. If the transition is delayed, the interaction of the quasi-normal modes related, asymptotically, to fluid phonons and inflaton quanta leads to an enhancement of curvature perturbations. It is shown that the dynamics of the fluctuations across the protoinflationary boundaries is determined by the monotonicity properties of the pump fields controlling the energy transfer between the background geometry and the quasi-normal modes of the fluctuations. After corroborating the analytical arguments with explicit numerical examples, general lessons are drawn on the classification of the protoinflationary transition.Comment: 30 pages, 3 figure

The Physics of Cluster Mergers

Clusters of galaxies generally form by the gravitational merger of smaller clusters and groups. Major cluster mergers are the most energetic events in the Universe since the Big Bang. Some of the basic physical properties of mergers will be discussed, with an emphasis on simple analytic arguments rather than numerical simulations. Semi-analytic estimates of merger rates are reviewed, and a simple treatment of the kinematics of binary mergers is given. Mergers drive shocks into the intracluster medium, and these shocks heat the gas and should also accelerate nonthermal relativistic particles. X-ray observations of shocks can be used to determine the geometry and kinematics of the merger. Many clusters contain cooling flow cores; the hydrodynamical interactions of these cores with the hotter, less dense gas during mergers are discussed. As a result of particle acceleration in shocks, clusters of galaxies should contain very large populations of relativistic electrons and ions. Electrons with Lorentz factors gamma~300 (energies E = gamma m_e c^2 ~ 150 MeV) are expected to be particularly common. Observations and models for the radio, extreme ultraviolet, hard X-ray, and gamma-ray emission from nonthermal particles accelerated in these mergers are described.Comment: 38 pages with 9 embedded Postscript figures. To appear in Merging Processes in Clusters of Galaxies, edited by L. Feretti, I. M. Gioia, and G. Giovannini (Dordrecht: Kluwer), in press (2001

Some doubts on the validity of the foreground Galactic contribution subtraction from microwave anisotropies

The Galactic foreground contamination in CMBR anisotropies, especially from the dust component, is not easily separable from the cosmological or extragalactic component. In this paper, some doubts will be raised concerning the validity of the methods used to date to remove Galactic dust emission in order to show that none of them achieves its goal. First, I review the recent bibliography on the topic and discuss critically the methods of foreground subtraction: the cross-correlation with templates, analysis assuming the spectral shape of the Galactic components, the "maximum entropy method", "internal linear combination", and "wavelet-based high resolution fitting of internal templates". Second, I analyse the galactic latitude dependence from WMAP data. The frequency dependence is discussed with the data in the available literature. The result is that all methods of subtracting the Galactic contamination are inaccurate. The galactic latitude dependence analysis or the frequency dependence of the anisotropies in the range 50-250 GHz put a constraint on the maximum Galactic contribution in the power spectrum to be less than a ~10% (68% C. L.) for a ~1 degree scale, and possibly higher for larger scales. The origin of most of the signal in the CMBR anisotropies is not Galactic. In any case, the subtraction of the Galaxy is not accurate enough to allow a "precision Cosmology"; other sources of contamination (extragalactic, solar system) are also present.Comment: 24 pages, 1 figure, accepted to be published in J. Astrophys. Ast

Time Uncertainty in Quantum Gravitational Systems

It is generally argued that the combined effect of Heisenberg principle and general relativity leads to a minimum time uncertainty. Most of the analyses supporting this conclusion are based on a perturbative approach to quantization. We consider a simple family of gravitational models, including the Einstein-Rosen waves, in which the (non-linearized) inclusion of gravity changes the normalization of time translations by a monotonic energy-dependent factor. In these circumstances, it is shown that a maximum time resolution emerges non-perturbatively only if the total energy is bounded. Perturbatively, however, there always exists a minimum uncertainty in the physical time.Comment: (4 pages, no figures) Accepted for publication in Physical Review

Dissidents and God-Talk in the Johannine Epistles

Peer reviewe

Fermion-scalar interactions with domain wall fermions

Domain wall fermions are defined on a lattice with an extra direction the size of which controls the chiral properties of the theory. When gauge fields are coupled to domain wall fermions the extra direction is treated as an internal flavor space. Here it is found that this is not the case for scalar fields. Instead, the interaction takes place only along the link that connects the boundaries of the extra direction. This reveals a richness in the way different spin particles are coupled to domain wall fermions. As an application, 4-Fermi models are studied using large N techniques and the results are supported by numerical simulations with N=2. It is found that the chiral properties of domain wall fermions in these models are good across a large range of couplings and that a phase with parity-flavor broken symmetry can develop for negative bare masses if the number of sites along the extra direction is finite.Comment: LaTeX, 17 pages, 8 eps figures; comment regarding the width of Aoki phase added in sec. 3; references adde