431 research outputs found
Line-of-sight velocity distributions of elliptical galaxies from collisionless mergers
We analyse the skewness of the line-of-sight velocity distributions in model
elliptical galaxies built through collisionless galaxy mergers. We build the
models using large N-body simulations of mergers between either two spiral or
two elliptical galaxies. Our aim is to investigate whether the observed ranges
of skewness coefficient (h3) and the rotational support (V/sigma), as well as
the anticorrelation between h3 and V, may be reproduced through collisionless
mergers. Previous attempts using N-body simulations failed to reach V/sigma ~
1-2 and corresponding high h3 values, which suggested that gas dynamics and
ensuing star formation might be needed in order to explain the skewness
properties of ellipticals through mergers. Here we show that high V/sigma and
high h3 are reproduced in collisionless spiral-spiral mergers whenever a
central bulge allows the discs to retain some of their original angular
momentum during the merger. We also show that elliptical-elliptical mergers,
unless merging from a high-angular momentum orbit, reproduce the strong
skewness observed in non-rotating, giant, boxy ellipticals. The behaviour of
the h3 coefficient therefore associates rapidly-rotating disky ellipticals to
disc-disc mergers, and associates boxy, slowly-rotating giant ellipticals to
elliptical-elliptical mergers, a framework generally consistent with the
expectations of hierarchical galaxy formation.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, MNRAS Letters, in pres
Intermittent energy dissipation by turbulent reconnection
Magnetic reconnection—the process responsible for many explosive phenomena in both nature and laboratory—is efficient at dissipating magnetic energy into particle energy. To date, exactly how this dissipation happens remains unclear, owing to the scarcity of multipoint measurements of the “diffusion region” at the sub-ion scale. Here we report such a measurement by Cluster—four spacecraft with separation of 1/5 ion scale. We discover numerous current filaments and magnetic nulls inside the diffusion region of magnetic reconnection, with the strongest currents appearing at spiral nulls (O-lines) and the separatrices. Inside each current filament, kinetic-scale turbulence is significantly increased and the energy dissipation, E′ ⋅ j, is 100 times larger than the typical value. At the jet reversal point, where radial nulls (X-lines) are detected, the current, turbulence, and energy dissipations are surprisingly small. All these features clearly demonstrate that energy dissipation in magnetic reconnection occurs at O-lines but not X-lines
Fast Fourier Orthogonalization
The classical fast Fourier transform (FFT) allows to compute in quasi-linear time the product of two polynomials, in the {\em circular convolution ring} R[x]/(x^d−1) --- a task that naively requires quadratic time. Equivalently, it allows to accelerate matrix-vector products when the matrix is *circulant*.
In this work, we discover that the ideas of the FFT can be applied to speed up the orthogonalization process of matrices with circulant blocks of size d×d . We show that, when d is composite, it is possible to proceed to the orthogonalization in an inductive way ---up to an appropriate re-indexation of rows and columns. This leads to a structured Gram-Schmidt decomposition. In turn, this structured Gram-Schmidt decomposition accelerates a cornerstone lattice algorithm: the nearest plane algorithm. The complexity of both algorithms may be brought down to Θ(dlogd).
Our results easily extend to *cyclotomic rings*, and can be adapted to Gaussian samplers. This finds applications in lattice-based cryptography, improving the performances of trapdoor functions
Multi-GPU Acceleration of the iPIC3D Implicit Particle-in-Cell Code
iPIC3D is a widely used massively parallel Particle-in-Cell code for the
simulation of space plasmas. However, its current implementation does not
support execution on multiple GPUs. In this paper, we describe the porting of
iPIC3D particle mover to GPUs and the optimization steps to increase the
performance and parallel scaling on multiple GPUs. We analyze the strong
scaling of the mover on two GPU clusters and evaluate its performance and
acceleration. The optimized GPU version which uses pinned memory and
asynchronous data prefetching outperform their corresponding CPU versions by
5-10x on two different systems equipped with NVIDIA K80 and V100 GPUs.Comment: Accepted for publication in ICCS 201
Theoretical modeling of propagation of magneto-acoustic waves in magnetic regions below sunspots
We use 2D numerical simulations and eikonal approximation, to study
properties of MHD waves traveling below the solar surface through the magnetic
structure of sunspots. We consider a series of magnetostatic models of sunspots
of different magnetic field strengths, from 10 Mm below the photosphere to the
low chromosphere. The purpose of these studies is to quantify the effect of the
magnetic field on local helioseismology measurements by modeling waves excited
by sub-photospheric sources. Time-distance propagation diagrams and wave travel
times are calculated for models of various field strength and compared to the
non-magnetic case. The results clearly indicate that the observed time-distance
helioseismology signals in sunspot regions correspond to fast MHD waves. The
slow MHD waves form a distinctly different pattern in the time-distance
diagram, which has not been detected in observations. The numerical results are
in good agreement with the solution in the short-wavelength (eikonal)
approximation, providing its validation. The frequency dependence of the travel
times is in a good qualitative agreement with observations.Comment: accepted by Ap
DANSSino: a pilot version of the DANSS neutrino detector
DANSSino is a reduced pilot version of a solid-state detector of reactor
antineutrinos (to be created within the DANSS project and installed under the
industrial 3 GW(th) reactor of the Kalinin Nuclear Power Plant -- KNPP).
Numerous tests performed at a distance of 11 m from the reactor core
demonstrate operability of the chosen design and reveal the main sources of the
background. In spite of its small size (20x20x100 ccm), the pilot detector
turned out to be quite sensitive to reactor antineutrinos, detecting about 70
IBD events per day with the signal-to-background ratio about unity.Comment: 16 pages, 11 figures, 3 tables. arXiv admin note: substantial text
overlap with arXiv:1304.369
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