Do the Herschel cold clouds in the Galactic halo embody its dark matter?

Recent Herschel/SPIRE maps of the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds (SMC, LMC) exhibit in each thousands of clouds. Observed at 250 microns, they must be cold, T ~ 15 K, hence the name "Herschel cold clouds" (HCCs). From the observed rotational velocity profile and the assumption of spherical symmetry, the Galactic mass density is modeled in a form close to that of an isothermal sphere. If the HCCs constitute a certain fraction of it, their angular size distribution has a specified shape. A fit to the data deduced from the SMC/LMC maps supports this and yields for their radius 2.5 pc, with a small change when allowing for a spread in HCC radii. There are so many HCCs that they will make up all the missing Halo mass density if there is spherical symmetry and their average mass is of order 15,000 Mo. This compares well with the Jeans mass of circa 40,000 Mo and puts forward that the HCCs are in fact Jeans clusters, constituting all the Galactic dark matter and much of its missing baryons, a conclusion deduced before from a different field of the sky (Nieuwenhuizen, Schild and Gibson 2011). A preliminary analysis of the intensities yields that the Jeans clusters themselves may consist of some billion MACHOs of a few dozen Earth masses. With a size of dozens of solar radii, they would mostly obscure stars in the LMC, SMC and towards the Galactic center, and may thus have been overlooked in microlensing.Comment: Revised and corrected version, matches published version. Conclusions unchange

Simulation of the hydrogen ground state in Stochastic Electrodynamics

Stochastic electrodynamics is a classical theory which assumes that the physical vacuum consists of classical stochastic fields with average energy $\frac{1}{2}\hbar \omega$ in each mode, i.e., the zero-point Planck spectrum. While this classical theory explains many quantum phenomena related to harmonic oscillator problems, hard results on nonlinear systems are still lacking. In this work the hydrogen ground state is studied by numerically solving the Abraham -- Lorentz equation in the dipole approximation. First the stochastic Gaussian field is represented by a sum over Gaussian frequency components, next the dynamics is solved numerically using OpenCL. The approach improves on work by Cole and Zou 2003 by treating the full $3d$ problem and reaching longer simulation times. The results are compared with a conjecture for the ground state phase space density. Though short time results suggest a trend towards confirmation, in all attempted modelings the atom ionises at longer times.Comment: 20 pages, 9 figures. Published version, minor change

Magnetic flux plays an important role during a BHXRB outburst in radiative 2T GRMHD simulations

Black hole (BH) X-ray binaries cycle through different spectral states of accretion over the course of months to years. Although fluctuations in the BH mass accretion rate are generally recognized as the most important component of state transitions, it is becoming increasingly evident that magnetic fields play a similarly important role. In this article, we present the first radiative two-temperature (2T) general relativistic magnetohydrodynamics (GRMHD) simulations in which an accretion disk transitions from a quiescent state at an accretion rate of $\dot{M} \sim 10^{-10} \dot{M}_{\rm Edd}$ to a hard-intermediate state at an accretion rate of $\dot{M} \sim 10^{-2} \dot{M}_{\rm Edd}$. This huge parameter space in mass accretion rate is bridged by artificially rescaling the gas density scale of the simulations. We present two jetted BH models with varying degrees of magnetic flux saturation. We demonstrate that in `Standard and Normal Evolution' models, which are unsaturated with magnetic flux, the hot torus collapses into a thin and cold accretion disk when $\dot{M} \gtrsim 5\times 10^{-3} \dot{M}_{\rm Edd}$. On the other hand, in `Magnetically Arrested Disk' models, which are fully saturated with vertical magnetic flux, the plasma remains mostly hot with substructures that condense into cold clumps of gas when $\dot{M} \gtrsim 1 \times 10^{-2} \dot{M}_{\rm Edd}$. This suggests that the spectral signatures observed during state transitions are closely tied to the level of magnetic flux saturation.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, accompanying animations included in YouTube playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDO1oeU33Gwm1Thyw0iHC14BbvBWaG5c

Potential Vorticity Evolution of a Protoplanetary Disk with An Embedded Protoplanet

We present two-dimensional inviscid hydrodynamic simulations of a protoplanetary disk with an embedded planet, emphasizing the evolution of potential vorticity (the ratio of vorticity to density) and its dependence on numerical resolutions. By analyzing the structure of spiral shocks made by the planet, we show that progressive changes of the potential vorticity caused by spiral shocks ultimately lead to the excitation of a secondary instability. We also demonstrate that very high numerical resolution is required to both follow the potential vorticity changes and identify the location where the secondary instability is first excited. Low-resolution results are shown to give the wrong location. We establish the robustness of a secondary instability and its impact on the torque onto the planet. After the saturation of the instability, the disk shows large-scale non-axisymmetry, causing the torque on the planet to oscillate with large amplitude. The impact of the oscillating torque on the protoplanet's migration remains to be investigated.Comment: 17 pages total with 9 figures (Fig.4,5,9 are in .jpg), accepted to Ap

Corresponding States of Structural Glass Formers

The variation with respect to temperature T of transport properties of 58 fragile structural glass forming liquids (68 data sets in total) are analyzed and shown to exhibit a remarkable degree of universality. In particular, super-Arrhenius behaviors of all super-cooled liquids appear to collapse to one parabola for which there is no singular behavior at any finite temperature. This behavior is bounded by an onset temperature To above which liquid transport has a much weaker temperature dependence. A similar collapse is also demonstrated, over the smaller available range, for existing numerical simulation data.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures. Updated References, Table Values, Submitted for Publicatio

Transverse momentum and centrality dependence of dihadron correlations in Au+Au collisions at sqrt(s_NN)=200 GeV: Jet-quenching and the response of partonic matter

Azimuthal angle \Delta\phi correlations are presented for charged hadrons from dijets for 0.4 < p_T < 10 GeV/c in Au+Au collisions at sqrt(s_NN) = 200 GeV. With increasing p_T, the away-side distribution evolves from a broad to a concave shape, then to a convex shape. Comparisons to p+p data suggest that the away-side can be divided into a partially suppressed "head" region centered at Delta\phi ~ \pi, and an enhanced "shoulder" region centered at Delta\phi ~ \pi +/- 1.1. The p_T spectrum for the "head" region softens toward central collisions, consistent with the onset of jet quenching. The spectral slope for the "shoulder" region is independent of centrality and trigger p_T, which offers constraints on energy transport mechanisms and suggests that the "shoulder" region contains the medium response to energetic jets.Comment: 420 authors from 58 institutions, 6 pages, 4 figures. Submitted to Physical Review Letters. Plain text data tables for the points plotted in figures for this and previous PHENIX publications are (or will be) publicly available at http://www.phenix.bnl.gov/papers.htm