434 research outputs found
Binary and Core-Shell Nanoparticle Dispersed Liquid Crystal Cells for Metamaterial Applications
We theoretically explored the feasibility of a tunable metamaterial using binary as well as core-shell nanoparticle dispersed liquid crystal cells in the infrared and optical regimes. Owing to the spatial variation of the permittivity of the liquid crystal host upon the application of a bias voltage, the host was decomposed into a layered medium and the effective refractive index recalculated for each layer due to the distribution of polaritonic and plasmonic nanoparticles.
The scattering, extinction, and absorption of such a nanoparticle dispersed liquid crystal cell were also found. Depending on the applied voltage bias across the liquid crystal host, the types of nanoparticles used, and their radii and volume-filling fractions in the liquid crystal host, near-zero as well as negative index of refraction can be obtained over a range of frequencies, according to the effective medium theory
To Extend or not to Extend: on the Uniqueness of Browser Extensions and Web Logins
Recent works showed that websites can detect browser extensions that users
install and websites they are logged into. This poses significant privacy
risks, since extensions and Web logins that reflect user's behavior, can be
used to uniquely identify users on the Web. This paper reports on the first
large-scale behavioral uniqueness study based on 16,393 users who visited our
website. We test and detect the presence of 16,743 Chrome extensions, covering
28% of all free Chrome extensions. We also detect whether the user is connected
to 60 different websites.
We analyze how unique users are based on their behavior, and find out that
54.86% of users that have installed at least one detectable extension are
unique; 19.53% of users are unique among those who have logged into one or more
detectable websites; and 89.23% are unique among users with at least one
extension and one login. We use an advanced fingerprinting algorithm and show
that it is possible to identify a user in less than 625 milliseconds by
selecting the most unique combinations of extensions.
Because privacy extensions contribute to the uniqueness of users, we study
the trade-off between the amount of trackers blocked by such extensions and how
unique the users of these extensions are. We have found that privacy extensions
should be considered more useful than harmful. The paper concludes with
possible countermeasures.Comment: accepted at WPES 201
Abundance Profiles and Kinematics of Damped Lyman-alpha Absorbing Galaxies at z < 0.65
We present a spectroscopic study of six damped Lya absorption (DLA) systems
at z<0.65, based on moderate-to-high resolution spectra of the galaxies
responsible for the absorbers. Combining known metallicity measurements of the
absorbers with known optical properties of the absorbing galaxies, we confirm
that the low metal content of the DLA population can arise naturally as a
combination of gas cross-section selection and metallicity gradients commonly
observed in local disk galaxies. We also study the Tully-Fisher relation of the
DLA-selected galaxies and find little detectable evidence for evolution in the
disk population between z=0 and z~0.5. Additional results of our analysis are
as follows. (1) The DLA galaxies exhibit a range of spectral properties, from
post-starburst, to normal disks, and to starburst systems, supporting the idea
that DLA galaxies are drawn from the typical field population. (2) Large
rotating HI disks of radius 30 h^{-1} kpc and of dynamic mass M_dyn > 10^{11}
h^{-1} M_sun appear to be common at intermediate redshifts. (3) Using an
ensemble of six galaxy-DLA pairs, we derive an abundance profile that is
characterized by a radial gradient of -0.041 +/- 0.012 dex per kiloparsec (or
equivalently a scale length of 10.6 h^{-1} kpc) from galactic center to 30
h^{-1} kpc radius. (4) Adopting known N(HI) profiles of nearby galaxies and the
best-fit radial gradient, we further derive an N(HI)-weighted mean metallicity
_weighted = -0.50 +/- 0.07 for the DLA population over 100 random lines of
sight, consistent with _weighted = -0.64 (-0.86, +0.40) observed for z~1 DLA
systems from Prochaska et al. Our analysis demonstrates that the low metal
content of DLA systems does not rule out the possibility that the DLA
population trace the field galaxy population.Comment: 57 pages, 17 figures, to appear in the ApJ 20 February 2005 issue; a
pdf version of the paper with full-resolution figures is available at
http://falcon.mit.edu/~hchen/public/tmp/dlachem.pd
Journey to the Center of the Cookie Ecosystem: Unraveling Actors' Roles and Relationships
Web pages have been steadily increasing in complexity over time, including code snippets from several distinct origins and organizations. While this may be a known phenomenon, its implications on the panorama of cookie tracking received little attention until now. Our study focuses on filling this gap, through the analysis of crawl results that are both large-scale and fine-grained, encompassing the whole set of events that lead to the creation and sharing of around 138 million cookies from crawling more than 6 million webpages. Our analysis lets us paint a highly detailed picture of the cookie ecosystem, discovering an intricate network of connections between players that reciprocally exchange information and include each other's content in web pages whose owners may not even be aware. We discover that, in most webpages, tracking cookies are set and shared by organizations at the end of complex chains that involve several middlemen. We also study the impact of cookie ghostwriting, i.e., a common practice where an entity creates cookies in the name of another party, or the webpage. We attribute and define a set of roles in the cookie ecosystem, related to cookie creation and sharing. We see that organizations can and do follow different patterns, including behaviors that previous studies could not uncover: for example, many cookie ghostwriters send cookies they create to themselves, which makes them able to perform cross-site tracking even for users that deleted third-party cookies in their browsers. While some organizations concentrate the flow of information on themselves, others behave as dispatchers, allowing other organizations to perform tracking on the pages that include their content
A New Look At Carbon Abundances In Planetary Nebulae. III. DDDM1, IC 3568, IC4593, NGC 6210, NGC 6720, NGC 6826, & NGC 7009
This paper is the third in a series reporting on a study of carbon abundances
in a carefully chosen sample of planetary nebulae representing a large range in
progenitor mass and metallicity. We make use of the IUE Final Archive database
containing consistently-reduced spectra to measure line strengths of C III]
1909 along with numerous other UV lines for the planetary nebulae DDDM1, IC
3568, IC 4593, NGC 6210, NGC 6720, NGC 6826, & NGC 7009. We combine the IUE
data with line strengths from optical spectra obtained specifically to match
the IUE slit positions as closely as possible, to determine values for the
abundance ratios He/H, O/H, C/O, N/O, and Ne/O. The ratio of C III] 1909/C II
4267 is found to be effective for merging UV and optical spectra when He II
1640/4686 is unavailable. Our abundance determination method includes a 5-level
program whose results are fine-tuned by corrections derived from detailed
photoionization models constrained by the same set of emission lines. All
objects appear to have subsolar levels of O/H, and all but one show N/O levels
above solar. In addition, the seven planetary nebulae span a broad range in C/O
values. We infer that many of our objects are matter bounded, and thus the
standard ionization correction factor for N/O may be inappropriate for these
PNe. Finally, we estimate C/O using both collisionally-excited and
recombination lines associated with C+2 and find the well established result
that abundances from recombination lines usually exceed those from
collisionally-excited lines by several times.Comment: 36 pages, 7 tables, 2 figures, latex. Tables and figures supplied as
two separate postscript files. Accepted for publication in Ap
On the Origin of [OII] Emission in Red Sequence and Post-starburst Galaxies
We investigate the emission-line properties of galaxies with red rest-frame
colors using spectra from SDSS DR4. Emission lines are detected in more than
half of the red galaxies. We focus on the relationship between two emission
lines commonly used as star formation rate indicators: Ha 6563 and [OII] 3727.
There is a strong bimodality in [OII]/Ha ratio in the full SDSS sample which
closely corresponds to the bimodality in rest-frame color. Nearly all of the
line-emitting red galaxies have line ratios typical of various types of AGN --
most commonly LINERs, a small fraction of transition objects and, more rarely,
Seyferts. Only ~6% of red galaxies display star-forming line ratios. A straight
line in the [OII]-Ha equivalent width plane separates LINER-like galaxies from
other categories. Quiescent galaxies with no detectable emission lines and
LINER-like galaxies combine to form a single, tight red sequence in
color-magnitude-concentration space. [OII] EWs in LINER- and AGN-like galaxies
can be as large as in star-forming galaxies. Thus, unless objects with
AGN/LINER-like line ratios are excluded, [OII] emission cannot be used directly
as a proxy for star formation rate. Lack of [OII] emission is generally used to
indicate lack of star formation when post-starburst galaxies are selected at
high redshift. Our results imply, however, that these samples have been cut on
AGN properties as well as star formation, and therefore may provide seriously
incomplete sets of post-starburst galaxies. Furthermore, post-starburst
galaxies identifed in SDSS by requiring minimal Ha EW generally exhibit weak
but nonzero line emission with ratios typical of AGNs; few of them show
residual star formation. This suggests that most post-starbursts may harbor
AGNs/LINERs.Comment: 21 pages, 15 figures. v2: Added 4 new figures and updated many;
extended text. No conclusions change. v3: minor modifications and figure
updates to match version accepted by Ap
The DEEP2 Galaxy Redshift Survey: Discovery of Luminous, Metal-poor, Sta r-forming Galaxies at Redshifts z~0.7
We have discovered a sample of 17 metal-poor, yet luminous, star-forming
galaxies at redshifts z~0.7. They were selected from the initial phase of the
DEEP2 survey of 3900 galaxies and the Team Keck Redshift Survey (TKRS) of 1536
galaxies as those showing the temperature-sensitive [OIII]l4363 auroral line.
These rare galaxies have blue luminosities close to L*, high star formation
rates of 5 to 12 solar masses per year, and oxygen abundances of 1/3 to 1/10
solar. They thus lie significantly off the luminosity-metallicity relation
found previously for field galaxies with strong emission lines at redshifts
z~0.7. The prior surveys relied on indirect, empirical calibrations of the R23
diagnostic and the assumption that luminous galaxies are not metal-poor. Our
discovery suggests that this assumption is sometimes invalid. As a class, these
newly-discovered galaxies are: (1) more metal-poor than common classes of
bright emission-line galaxies at z~0.7 or at the present epoch; (2) comparable
in metallicity to z~3 Lyman Break Galaxies but less luminous; and (3)
comparable in metallicity to local metal-poor eXtreme Blue Compact Galaxies
(XBCGs), but more luminous. Together, the three samples suggest that the
most-luminous, metal-poor, compact galaxies become fainter over time.Comment: This is a .tgz file. It should create the following files: texto.tex,
tab1.tex, f1.eps and f2.eps. The LaTeX style used is emulateapj.cls, version
November 26, 2004. This submission is 5 pages long, one table and two
figures. To appear in ApJ
On the abundance discrepancy problem in HII regions
The origin of the abundance discrepancy is one of the key problems in the
physics of photoionized nebula. In this work, we analize and discuss data for a
sample of Galactic and extragalactic HII regions where this abundance
discrepancy has been determined. We find that the abundance discrepancy factor
(ADF) is fairly constant and of the order of 2 in all the available sample of
HII regions. This is a rather different behaviour than that observed in
planetary nebulae, where the ADF shows a much wider range of values. We do not
find correlations between the ADF and the O/H, O++/H+ ratios, the ionization
degree, Te(High), Te(Low)/ Te(High), FWHM, and the effective temperature of the
main ionizing stars within the observational uncertainties. These results
indicate that whatever mechanism is producing the abundance discrepancy in HII
regions it does not substantially depend on those nebular parameters. On the
contrary, the ADF seems to be slightly dependent on the excitation energy, a
fact that is consistent with the predictions of the classical temperature
fluctuations paradigm. Finally, we obtain that Te values obtained from OII
recombination lines in HII regions are in agreement with those obtained from
collisionally excited line ratios, a behaviour that is again different from
that observed in planetary nebulae. These similar temperature determinations
are in contradiction with the predictions of the model based on the presence of
chemically inhomogeneous clumps but are consistent with the temperature
fluctuations paradigm. We conclude that all the indications suggest that the
physical mechanism responsible of the abundance discrepancy in HII regions and
planetary nebulae are different.Comment: 14 pages, 8 figures, 9 tables. Accepted for publication in the Ap
- âŠ