Stellar archeology of the nearby LINER galaxies NGC 4579 and NGC 4736

Stellar archeology of nearby LINER galaxies may reveal if there is a stellar young population that may be responsible for the LINER phenomenon. We show results for the classical LINER galaxies NGC 4579 and NGC 4736 and find no evidence of such populations.Comment: 2 pages, 2 figures, to be published in the Proceedings of the IAU Symposium no. 26

Mapping low and high density clouds in astrophysical nebulae by imaging forbidden line emission

Emission line ratios have been essential for determining physical parameters such as gas temperature and density in astrophysical gaseous nebulae. With the advent of panoramic spectroscopic devices, images of regions with emission lines related to these physical parameters can, in principle, also be produced. We show that, with observations from modern instruments, it is possible to transform images taken from density sensitive forbidden lines into images of emission from high and low-density clouds by applying a transformation matrix. In order to achieve this, images of the pairs of density sensitive lines as well as the adjacent continuum have to be observed and combined. We have computed the critical densities for a series of pairs of lines in the infrared, optical, ultraviolet and X-rays bands, and calculated the pair line intensity ratios in the high and low-density limit using a 4 and 5 level atom approximation. In order to illustrate the method we applied it to GMOS-IFU data of two galactic nuclei. We conclude that this method provides new information of astrophysical interest, especially for mapping low and high-density clouds; for this reason we call it "the ld/hd imaging method".Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures, accepted for publication on MNRA

Temperature effect on (2+1) experimental Kardar-Parisi-Zhang growth

We report on the effect of substrate temperature (T) on both local structure and long-wavelength fluctuations of polycrystalline CdTe thin films deposited on Si(001). A strong T-dependent mound evolution is observed and explained in terms of the energy barrier to inter-grain diffusion at grain boundaries, as corroborated by Monte Carlo simulations. This leads to transitions from uncorrelated growth to a crossover from random-to-correlated growth and transient anomalous scaling as T increases. Due to these finite-time effects, we were not able to determine the universality class of the system through the critical exponents. Nevertheless, we demonstrate that this can be circumvented by analyzing height, roughness and maximal height distributions, which allow us to prove that CdTe grows asymptotically according to the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) equation in a broad range of T. More important, one finds positive (negative) velocity excess in the growth at low (high) T, indicating that it is possible to control the KPZ non-linearity by adjusting the temperature.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figure

PCA Tomography and its application to nearby galactic nuclei

With the development of modern technologies such as IFUs, it is possible to obtain data cubes in which one produces images with spectral resolution. To extract information from them can be quite complex, and hence the development of new methods of data analysis is desirable. We briefly describe a method of analysis of data cubes (data from single field observations, containing two spatial and one spectral dimension) that uses Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to express the data in the form of reduced dimensionality, facilitating efficient information extraction from very large data sets. We applied the method, for illustration purpose, to the central region of the low ionization nuclear emission region (LINER) galaxy NGC 4736, and demonstrate that it has a type 1 active nucleus, not known before. Furthermore, we show that it is displaced from the centre of its stellar bulge.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure, 1 table, to be published in the Proceedings of the IAU Symposium no. 26

Mean-field calculation of critical parameters and log-periodic characterization of an aperiodic-modulated model

We employ a mean-field approximation to study the Ising model with aperiodic modulation of its interactions in one spatial direction. Two different values for the exchange constant, $J_A$ and $J_B$, are present, according to the Fibonacci sequence. We calculated the pseudo-critical temperatures for finite systems and extrapolate them to the thermodynamic limit. We explicitly obtain the exponents $\beta$, $\delta$, and $\gamma$ and, from the usual scaling relations for anisotropic models at the upper critical dimension (assumed to be 4 for the model we treat), we calculate $\alpha$, $\nu$, $\nu_{//}$, $\eta$, and $\eta_{//}$. Within the framework of a renormalization-group approach, the Fibonacci sequence is a marginal one and we obtain exponents which depend on the ratio $r \equiv J_B/J_A$, as expected. But the scaling relation $\gamma = \beta (\delta -1)$ is obeyed for all values of $r$ we studied. We characterize some thermodynamic functions as log-periodic functions of their arguments, as expected for aperiodic-modulated models, and obtain precise values for the exponents from this characterization.Comment: 17 pages, including 9 figures, to appear in Phys. Rev.