553 research outputs found
New X-ray observations of the Geminga pulsar wind nebula
Previous observations of the middle-aged pulsar Geminga with XMM-Newton and
Chandra have shown an unusual pulsar wind nebula (PWN), with a 20" long central
(axial) tail directed opposite to the pulsar's proper motion and two 2' long,
bent lateral (outer) tails. Here we report on a deeper (78 ks) Chandra
observation and a few additional XMM-Newton observations of the Geminga PWN.
The new Chandra observation has shown that the axial tail, which includes up to
three brighter blobs, extends at least 50" (i.e., 0.06 d_{250} pc) from the
pulsar. It also allowed us to image the patchy outer tails and the emission in
the immediate vicinity of the pulsar with high resolution. The PWN luminosity,
L_{0.3-8 keV} ~ 3\times 10^{29} d_{250}^2 erg/s, is lower than the pulsar's
magnetospheric luminosity by a factor of 10. The spectra of the PWN elements
are rather hard (photon index ~ 1). Comparing the two Chandra images, we found
evidence of PWN variability, including possible motion of the blobs along the
axial tail. The X-ray PWN is the synchrotron radiation from relativistic
particles of the pulsar wind; its morphology is connected with the supersonic
motion of Geminga. We speculate that the outer tails are either (1) a sky
projection of the limb-brightened boundary of a shell formed in the region of
contact discontinuity, where the wind bulk flow is decelerated by shear
instability, or (2) polar outflows from the pulsar bent by the ram pressure
from the ISM. In the former case, the axial tail may be a jet emanating along
the pulsar's spin axis, perhaps aligned with the direction of motion. In the
latter case, the axial tail may be the shocked pulsar wind collimated by the
ram pressure.Comment: 16 pages, including 6 figures; minor changes in the text; typos
corrected; published in Ap
Methyl Jasmonate Regulates Podophyllotoxin Accumulation in Podophyllum hexandrum by Altering the ROS-Responsive Podophyllotoxin Pathway Gene Expression Additionally through the Down Regulation of Few Interfering miRNAs
Podophylloxin (ptox), primarily obtained from Podophyllum hexandrum, is the precursor for semi-synthetic anticancer drugs viz. etoposide, etopophos, and teniposide. Previous
studies established that methyl jasmonate (MeJA) treated cell culture of P. hexandrum accumulate ptox significantly. However, the molecular mechanism of MeJA induced ptox
accumulation is yet to be explored. Here, we demonstrate that MeJA induces reactive oxygen species (ROS) production, which stimulates ptox accumulation significantly and
up regulates three ROS-responsive ptox biosynthetic genes, namely, PhCAD3, PhCAD4 (cinnamyl alcohol dehydrogenase), and NAC3 by increasing their mRNA stability. Classic
uncoupler of oxidative phosphorylation, carbonylcyanide m-chlorophenylhydrazone, as well as H2O2 treatment induced the ROS generation and consequently, enhanced the
ptox production. However, when the ROS was inhibited with NADPH oxidase inhibitor diphenylene iodonium and Superoxide dismutase inhibitor diethyldithio-carbamic acid,
the ROS inhibiting agent, the ptox production was decreased significantly. We also noted that, MeJA up regulated other ptox biosynthetic pathway genes which are not affected by the MeJA induced ROS. Further, these ROS non-responsive genes were controlled by MeJA through the down regulation of five secondary metabolites biosynthesis specific miRNAs viz. miR172i, miR035, miR1438, miR2275, and miR8291.
Finally, this study suggested two possible mechanisms through which MeJA modulates the ptox biosynthesis: primarily by increasing the mRNA stability of ROS-responsive
genes and secondly, by the up regulation of ROS non-responsive genes through the down regulation of some ROS non-responsive miRNA
Testing hypotheses in the Birnbaum-Saunders distribution under type-II censored samples
The two-parameter Birnbaum-Saunders distribution has been used succesfully to
model fatigue failure times. Although censoring is typical in reliability and
survival studies, little work has been published on the analysis of censored
data for this distribution. In this paper, we address the issue of performing
testing inference on the two parameters of the Birnbaum-Saunders distribution
under type-II right censored samples. The likelihood ratio statistic and a
recently proposed statistic, the gradient statistic, provide a convenient
framework for statistical inference in such a case, since they do not require
to obtain, estimate or invert an information matrix, which is an advantage in
problems involving censored data. An extensive Monte Carlo simulation study is
carried out in order to investigate and compare the finite sample performance
of the likelihood ratio and the gradient tests. Our numerical results show
evidence that the gradient test should be preferred. Three empirical
applications are presented.Comment: Submitted for publicatio
A Generic Transferable EEG Decoder for Online Detection of Error Potential in Target Selection
Reliable detection of error from electroencephalography (EEG) signals as feedback while performing a discrete target selection task across sessions and subjects has a huge scope in real-time rehabilitative application of Brain-computer Interfacing (BCI). Error Related Potentials (ErrP) are EEG signals which occur when the participant observes an erroneous feedback from the system. ErrP holds significance in such closed-loop system, as BCI is prone to error and we need an effective method of systematic error detection as feedback for correction. In this paper, we have proposed a novel scheme for online detection of error feedback directly from the EEG signal in a transferable environment (i.e., across sessions and across subjects). For this purpose, we have used a P300-speller dataset available on a BCI competition website. The task involves the subject to select a letter of a word which is followed by a feedback period. The feedback period displays the letter selected and, if the selection is wrong, the subject perceives it by the generation of ErrP signal. Our proposed system is designed to detect ErrP present in the EEG from new independent datasets, not involved in its training. Thus, the decoder is trained using EEG features of 16 subjects for single-trial classification and tested on 10 independent subjects. The decoder designed for this task is an ensemble of linear discriminant analysis, quadratic discriminant analysis, and logistic regression classifier. The performance of the decoder is evaluated using accuracy, F1-score, and Area Under the Curve metric and the results obtained is 73.97, 83.53, and 73.18%, respectively
Incompressible Fluids of the de Sitter Horizon and Beyond
There are (at least) two surfaces of particular interest in eternal de Sitter
space. One is the timelike hypersurface constituting the lab wall of a static
patch observer and the other is the future boundary of global de Sitter space.
We study both linear and non-linear deformations of four-dimensional de Sitter
space which obey the Einstein equation. Our deformations leave the induced
conformal metric and trace of the extrinsic curvature unchanged for a fixed
hypersurface. This hypersurface is either timelike within the static patch or
spacelike in the future diamond. We require the deformations to be regular at
the future horizon of the static patch observer. For linearized perturbations
in the future diamond, this corresponds to imposing incoming flux solely from
the future horizon of a single static patch observer. When the slices are
arbitrarily close to the cosmological horizon, the finite deformations are
characterized by solutions to the incompressible Navier-Stokes equation for
both spacelike and timelike hypersurfaces. We then study, at the level of
linearized gravity, the change in the discrete dispersion relation as we push
the timelike hypersurface toward the worldline of the static patch. Finally, we
study the spectrum of linearized solutions as the spacelike slices are pushed
to future infinity and relate our calculations to analogous ones in the context
of massless topological black holes in AdS.Comment: 27 pages, 8 figure
Detailed Process Simulation of Pre-combustion IGCC Plants Using Coal-slurry and Dry Coal Gasifiers
AbstractThe selection of the gasifier in an Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (IGCC) plant affects both downstream process configurations and net plant efficiency considerably. It is well known that a Shell gasifier using dry coal has lower operating pressure, higher carbon conversion, lower CO2 production and lower H2/CO ratio compared to a General Electric Energy (GEE) gasifier using coal slurry. These differences also affect how to configure downstream processes when an IGCC is retrofitted for carbon capture. The net plant efficiency decreases by different extents depending on the gasifier type as shown in the DOE NETL report The aim of this study is to elucidate how the differences between the two gasifiers correspond to the difference in plant performance without and with carbon capture. To achieve this, detailed process simulations of the two IGCC plants and an integrated Selexol carbon capture unit have been carried out based on literature configurations using the commercial software Honeywell UniSim Design R400®. From the analysis of the results an explanation is presented as to why the wet slurry gasifier configuration has a lower net efficiency loss when the carbon capture unit is integrated
The 331 model with right-handed neutrinos
We explore some more consequences of the electroweak
model with right-handed neutrinos. By introducing the mixing angle
, the {\it exact} physical eigenstates for neutral gauge bosons are
obtained. Because of the mixing, there is a modification to the coupling
proportional to . The data from the -decay allows us to fix the
limit for as . >From the neutrino
neutral current scatterings, we estimate a bound for the new neutral gauge
boson mass in the range 300 GeV, and from symmetry-breaking hierarchy a
bound for the new charged and neutral (non-Hermitian) gauge bosons are obtained.Comment: Slight changes in section 5, Latex, 16 page
A systematic analysis of the broad Fe Kalpha line in neutron star LMXBs with XMM-Newton
We analysed the XMM-Newton archival observations of 16 neutron star (NS)
low-mass X-ray binaries (LMXBs) to study the Fe K emission in these objects.
The sample includes all the observations of NS LMXBs performed in EPIC pn
Timing mode with XMM-Newton publicly available until September 30, 2009. We
performed a detailed data analysis considering pile-up and background effects.
The properties of the iron lines differed from previous published analyses due
to either incorrect pile-up corrections or different continuum
parameterization. 80% of the observations for which a spectrum can be extracted
showed significant Fe line emission. We found an average line centroid of 6.67
0.02 keV and a finite width, , of 0.33 0.02 keV. The
equivalent width of the lines varied between 17 and 189 eV, with an average
weighted value of 42 eV. For sources where several observations were
available the Fe line parameters changed between observations whenever the
continuum changed significantly. The line parameters did not show any
correlation with luminosity. Most important, we could fit the Fe line with a
simple Gaussian component for all the sources. The lines did not show the
asymmetric profiles that were interpreted as an indication of relativistic
effects in previous analyses of these LMXBs.Comment: Accepted for publication in A&
X-ray Spectroscopy of MXB 1728-34 with XMM-Newton
We have analysed an XMM-Newton observation of the low mass X-ray binary and
atoll source MXB 1728-34. The source was in a low luminosity state during the
XMM-Newton observation, corresponding to a bolometric X-ray luminosity of
5*10E36 d^2 erg/s, where d is the distance in units of 5.1 kpc. The 1-11 keV
X-ray spectrum of the source, obtained combining data from all the five
instruments on-board XMM-Newton, is well fitted by a Comptonized continuum.
Evident residuals are present at 6-7 keV which are ascribed to the presence of
a broad iron emission line. This feature can be equally well fitted by a
relativistically smeared line or by a self-consistent, relativistically
smeared, reflection model. Under the hypothesis that the iron line is produced
by reflection from the inner accretion disk, we can infer important information
on the physical parameters of the system, such as the inner disk radius, Rin =
25-100 km, and the inclination of the system, 44{\deg} < i < 60{\deg}.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures, Accepted by A&A on 29.03.201
Bounds and Decays of New Heavy Vector-like Top Partners
We study the phenomenology of new heavy vector-like fermions that couple to
the third generation quarks via Yukawa interactions, covering all the allowed
representations under the standard model gauge groups. We first review tree and
loop level bounds on these states. We then discuss tree level decays and
loop-induced decays to photon or gluon plus top. The main decays at tree level
are to W b and/or Z and Higgs plus top via the new Yukawa couplings. The
radiative loop decays turn out to be quite close to the naive estimate: in all
cases, in the allowed perturbative parameter space, the branching ratios are
mildly sensitive on the new Yukawa couplings and small. We therefore conclude
that the new states can be observed at the LHC and that the tree level decays
can allow to distinguish the different representations. Moreover, the
observation of the radiative decays at the LHC would suggest a large Yukawa
coupling in the non-perturbative regime.Comment: 32 pages, 2 tables, 10 figure
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