Deep optical imaging of AGB circumstellar envelopes

We report results of a program to image the extended circumstellar envelopes of asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars in dust-scattered Galactic light. The goal is to characterize the shapes of the envelopes to probe the mass-loss geometry and the presence of hidden binary companions. The observations consist of deep optical imaging of 22 AGB stars with high mass loss rates: 16 with the ESO 3.5 m NTT telescope, and the remainder with other telescopes. The circumstellar envelopes are detected in 15 objects, with mass loss rates > 2E-6 Msun/year. The surface brightness of the envelopes shows a strong decrease with Galactic radius, which indicates a steep radial gradient in the interstellar radiation field. The envelopes range from circular to elliptical in shape, and we characterize them by the ellipticity (E = major/minor axis) of iso-intensity contours. We find that about 50 percent of the envelopes are close to circular with E 1.2. We interpret the shapes in terms of populations of single stars and binaries whose envelopes are flattened by a companion. The distribution of E is qualitatively consistent with expectations based on population synthesis models of binary AGB stars. We also find that about 50 percent of the sample exhibit small-scale, elongated features in the central regions. We interpret these as the escape of light from the central star through polar holes, which are also likely produced by companions. Our observations of envelope flattening and polar holes point to a hidden population of companions within the circumstellar envelopes of AGB stars. These companions are expected to play an important role in the transition to post-AGB stars and the formation of planetary nebulae.Comment: 19 pages, 13 figures, color pictures in Appendix, accepted by A&

Reversibility Checking for Markov Chains

In this paper, we present reversibility preserving operations on Markov chain transition matrices. Simple row and column operations allow us to create new reversible transition matrices and yield an easy method for checking a Markov chain for reversibility

MeV ion scattering from thin Si single crystals: A novel approach to interface studies

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Light pseudoscalar eta and H->eta eta decay in the simplest little Higgs mode

The SU(3) simplest little Higgs model in its original framework without the so-called mu term inevitably involves a massless pseudoscalar boson eta, which is problematic for b-physics and cosmological axion limit. With the mu term introduced by hand, the eta boson acquires mass m_eta ~ mu, which can be lighter than half the Higgs boson mass in a large portion of the parameter space. In addition, the introduced mu term generates sizable coupling of H-eta-eta. The Higgs boson can dominantly decay into a pair of eta's especially when mH below the WW threshold. Another new decay channel of H->Z+eta can be dominant or compatible with H -> WW for mH above the Z+eta threshold. We show that the LEP bound on the Higgs boson mass is loosened to some extent due to this new H->eta eta decay channel as well as the reduced coupling of H-Z-Z. The Higgs boson mass bound falls to about 110 GeV for f=3-4 TeV. Since the eta boson decays mainly into a bb pair, H-> eta eta -> 4b and H-> Z eta -> Z bb open up other interesting search channels in the pursuit of the Higgs boson in the future experiments. We discuss on these issues.Comment: major modification considering the simplest little Higgs model with the mu ter

Thermal Diagnostics with the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly onboard the Solar Dynamics Observatory: A Validated Method for Differential Emission Measure Inversions

We present a new method for performing differential emission measure (DEM) inversions on narrow-band EUV images from the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) onboard the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). The method yields positive definite DEM solutions by solving a linear program. This method has been validated against a diverse set of thermal models of varying complexity and realism. These include (1) idealized gaussian DEM distributions, (2) 3D models of NOAA Active Region 11158 comprising quasi-steady loop atmospheres in a non-linear force-free field, and (3) thermodynamic models from a fully-compressible, 3D MHD simulation of AR corona formation following magnetic flux emergence. We then present results from the application of the method to AIA observations of Active Region 11158, comparing the region's thermal structure on two successive solar rotations. Additionally, we show how the DEM inversion method can be adapted to simultaneously invert AIA and XRT data, and how supplementing AIA data with the latter improves the inversion result. The speed of the method allows for routine production of DEM maps, thus facilitating science studies that require tracking of the thermal structure of the solar corona in time and space.Comment: 21 pages, 18 figures, accepted for publication in Ap

Strange-Beauty Meson Production at ppˉp\bar p Colliders

The production rates and transverse momentum distributions of the strange-beauty mesons $B_s$ and $B_s^*$ at $p\bar p$ colliders are calculated assuming fragmentation is the dominant process. Results are given for the Tevatron in the large transverse momentum region, where fragmentation is expected to be most important.Comment: Minor changes in the discussion section. Also available at http://www.ph.utexas.edu/~cheung/paper.htm

Conformal Symmetries of Adiabatic Modes in Cosmology

We remark on the existence of non-linearly realized conformal symmetries for scalar adiabatic perturbations in cosmology. These conformal symmetries are present for any cosmological background, beyond any slow-roll or quasi-de Sitter approximation. The dilatation transformation shifts the curvature perturbation by a constant, and corresponds to the well-known symmetry under spatial rescaling. We argue that the scalar sector is also invariant under special conformal transformations, which shift the curvature perturbation by a term linear in the spatial coordinates. We discuss whether these conformal symmetries can be extended to include tensor perturbations. Tensor modes introduce their own set of non-linearly realized symmetries. We identify an infinite set of large gauge transformations which maintain the transverse, traceless gauge condition, while shifting the tensor mode non-trivially.Comment: 16 page

Gamma-ray Constraints on Effective Interactions of the Dark Matter

Using an effective interaction approach to describe the interactions between the dark matter particle and the light degrees of freedom of the standard model, we calculate the gamma-ray flux due to the annihilation of the dark matter into quarks, followed by fragmentation into neutral pions which subsequently decay into photons. By comparison to the mid-latitude data released from the Fermi-LAT experiment, we obtain useful constraints on the size of the effective interactions and they are found to be comparable to those deduced from collider, gamma-ray line and anti-matter search experiments. However, the two operators induced by scalar and vector exchange among fermionic dark matter and light quarks that contribute to spin-independent cross sections are constrained more stringently by the recent XENON100 data.Comment: 22 pages, 4 figures; title fixed and a couple of references adde