1,074 research outputs found
Status of the isophot detector development
ISOPHOT is one of the four focal plane experiments of the European Space Agency's Infrared Space Observatory (ISO). Scheduled for a 1993 launch, it will operate extrinsic silicon and germanium photoconductors at low temperature and low background during the longer than 18 month mission. These detectors cover the wavelength range from 2.5 to 200 microns and are used as single elements and in arrays. A cryogenic preamplifier was developed to read out a total number of 223 detector pixels
Determination of confusion noise for far-infrared measurements
We present a detailed assessment of the far-infrared confusion noise imposed
on measurements with the ISOPHOT far-infrared detectors and cameras aboard the
ISO satellite. We provide confusion noise values for all measurement
configurations and observing modes of ISOPHOT in the 90<=lambda<=200um
wavelength range. Based on these results we also give estimates for cirrus
confusion noise levels at the resolution limits of current and future
instruments of infrared space telescopes: Spitzer/MIPS, ASTRO-F/FIS and
Herschel/PACS.Comment: A&A accepted; FITS files and appendices are available at:
http://www.konkoly.hu/staff/pkisscs/confnoise
Far-Infrared Emission from Intracluster Dust in Abell Clusters
The ISOPHOT instrument aboard ISO has been used to observe extended FIR
emission of six Abell clusters. The raw profiles of the I_(120 um) / I_(180 um)
surface brightness ratio including zodiacal light show a bump towards Abell
1656 (Coma), dips towards Abell 262 and Abell 2670, and are without clear
structure towards Abell 400, Abell 496, and Abell 4038. After subtraction of
the zodiacal light, the bump towards Abell 1656 is still present, while the
dips towards Abell 262 and Abell 2670 are no longer noticable. This indicates a
localized excess of emitting material outside the Galaxy towards Abell 1656,
while the behavior in Abell 262 and Abell 2670 can be reconciled with galactic
cirrus structures localized on the line-of-sight to these clusters. The excess
towards Abell 1656 (Coma) is interpreted as thermal emission from intracluster
dust distributed in the hot X-ray emitting intracluster medium. The absence of
any signature for intracluster dust in five clusters and the rather low
inferred dust mass in Abell 1656 indicates that intracluster dust is likely not
responsible for the excess X-ray absorption seen in cooling flow clusters.
These observations thereby represent a further unsuccessful attempt in
detecting the presumed final stage of the cooling flow material, in accord with
quite a number of previous studies in other wavelengths regions. Finally, the
observed dimming of the high-redshift supernovae is unlikely be attributable to
extinction caused by dust in the intracluster or even a presumed intercluster
medium.Comment: 16 pages, 32 figures, accepted for publication in Astronomy &
Astrophysic
Quasispecies evolution in general mean-field landscapes
I consider a class of fitness landscapes, in which the fitness is a function
of a finite number of phenotypic "traits", which are themselves linear
functions of the genotype. I show that the stationary trait distribution in
such a landscape can be explicitly evaluated in a suitably defined
"thermodynamic limit", which is a combination of infinite-genome and strong
selection limits. These considerations can be applied in particular to identify
relevant features of the evolution of promoter binding sites, in spite of the
shortness of the corresponding sequences.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures, Europhysics Letters style (included) Finite-size
scaling analysis sketched. To appear in Europhysics Letter
Deep far infrared ISOPHOT survey in "Selected Area 57", I. Observations and source counts
We present here the results of a deep survey in a 0.4 sq.deg. blank field in
Selected Area 57 conducted with the ISOPHOT instrument aboard ESAs Infrared
Space Observatory (ISO) at both 60 um and 90 um. The resulting sky maps have a
spatial resolution of 15 x 23 sq.arcsec. per pixel which is much higher than
the 90 x 90 sq.arcsec. pixels of the IRAS All Sky Survey. We describe the main
instrumental effects encountered in our data, outline our data reduction and
analysis scheme and present astrometry and photometry of the detected point
sources. With a formal signal to noise ratio of 6.75 we have source detection
limits of 90 mJy at 60 um and 50 mJy at 90 um. To these limits we find
cumulated number densities of 5+-3.5 per sq.deg. at 60 um and 14.8+-5.0 per
sq.deg.at 90 um. These number densities of sources are found to be lower than
previously reported results from ISO but the data do not allow us to
discriminate between no-evolution scenarios and various evolutionary models.Comment: 15 pages, 11 figures, accepted by Astronomy & Astrophysic
Nonlinear electron-phonon coupling in doped manganites
We employ time-resolved resonant x-ray diffraction to study the melting of
charge order and the associated insulator-metal transition in the doped
manganite PrCaMnO after resonant excitation of a
high-frequency infrared-active lattice mode. We find that the charge order
reduces promptly and highly nonlinearly as function of excitation fluence.
Density functional theory calculations suggest that direct anharmonic coupling
between the excited lattice mode and the electronic structure drive these
dynamics, highlighting a new avenue of nonlinear phonon control
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