6,803 research outputs found
Multimegawatt thermionic reactor systems for space applications
Design features and performance characteristics of thermionic reactor systems for space application
X-ray reverberation around accreting black holes
Luminous accreting stellar mass and supermassive black holes produce
power-law continuum X-ray emission from a compact central corona. Reverberation
time lags occur due to light travel time-delays between changes in the direct
coronal emission and corresponding variations in its reflection from the
accretion flow. Reverberation is detectable using light curves made in
different X-ray energy bands, since the direct and reflected components have
different spectral shapes. Larger, lower frequency, lags are also seen and are
identified with propagation of fluctuations through the accretion flow and
associated corona. We review the evidence for X-ray reverberation in active
galactic nuclei and black hole X-ray binaries, showing how it can be best
measured and how it may be modelled. The timescales and energy-dependence of
the high frequency reverberation lags show that much of the signal is
originating from very close to the black hole in some objects, within a few
gravitational radii of the event horizon. We consider how these signals can be
studied in the future to carry out X-ray reverberation mapping of the regions
closest to black holes.Comment: 72 pages, 32 figures. Accepted for publication in The Astronomy and
Astrophysics Review. Corrected for mostly minor typos, but in particular
errors are corrected in the denominators of the covariance and rms spectrum
error equations (Eqn. 14 and 15
Optical frequency comb generation from a monolithic microresonator
Optical frequency combs provide equidistant frequency markers in the
infrared, visible and ultra-violet and can link an unknown optical frequency to
a radio or microwave frequency reference. Since their inception frequency combs
have triggered major advances in optical frequency metrology and precision
measurements and in applications such as broadband laser-based gas sensing8 and
molecular fingerprinting. Early work generated frequency combs by intra-cavity
phase modulation while to date frequency combs are generated utilizing the
comb-like mode structure of mode-locked lasers, whose repetition rate and
carrier envelope phase can be stabilized. Here, we report an entirely novel
approach in which equally spaced frequency markers are generated from a
continuous wave (CW) pump laser of a known frequency interacting with the modes
of a monolithic high-Q microresonator13 via the Kerr nonlinearity. The
intrinsically broadband nature of parametric gain enables the generation of
discrete comb modes over a 500 nm wide span (ca. 70 THz) around 1550 nm without
relying on any external spectral broadening. Optical-heterodyne-based
measurements reveal that cascaded parametric interactions give rise to an
optical frequency comb, overcoming passive cavity dispersion. The uniformity of
the mode spacing has been verified to within a relative experimental precision
of 7.3*10(-18).Comment: Manuscript and Supplementary Informatio
Discovery of high-frequency iron K lags in Ark 564 and Mrk 335
We use archival XMM-Newton observations of Ark 564 and Mrk 335 to calculate
the frequency dependent time-lags for these two well-studied sources. We
discover high-frequency Fe K lags in both sources, indicating that the red wing
of the line precedes the rest frame energy by roughly 100 s and 150 s for Ark
564 and Mrk 335, respectively. Including these two new sources, Fe K
reverberation lags have been observed in seven Seyfert galaxies. We examine the
low-frequency lag-energy spectrum, which is smooth, and shows no feature of
reverberation, as would be expected if the low-frequency lags were produced by
distant reflection off circumnuclear material. The clear differences in the low
and high frequency lag-energy spectra indicate that the lags are produced by
two distinct physical processes. Finally, we find that the amplitude of the Fe
K lag scales with black hole mass for these seven sources, consistent with a
relativistic reflection model where the lag is the light travel delay
associated with reflection of continuum photons off the inner disc.Comment: 10 pages, 12 figures, accepted for publication in MNRA
The Closest Look at 1H0707-495: X-ray Reverberation Lags with 1.3 Ms of Data
Reverberation lags in AGN were first discovered in the NLS1 galaxy,
1H0707-495. We present a follow-up analysis using 1.3 Ms of data, which allows
for the closest ever look at the reverberation signature of this remarkable
source. We confirm previous findings of a hard lag of ~100 seconds at
frequencies v ~ [0.5 - 4] e-4 Hz, and a soft lag of ~30 seconds at higher
frequencies, v ~ [0.6 - 3] e-3 Hz. These two frequency domains clearly show
different energy dependences in their lag spectra. We also find evidence for a
signature from the broad Fe K line in the high frequency lag spectrum. We use
Monte Carlo simulations to show how the lag and coherence measurements respond
to the addition of Poisson noise and to dilution by other components. With our
better understanding of these effects on the lag, we show that the lag-energy
spectra can be modelled with a scenario in which low frequency hard lags are
produced by a compact corona responding to accretion rate fluctuations
propagating through an optically thick accretion disc, and the high frequency
soft lags are produced by short light-travel delay associated with reflection
of coronal power-law photons off the disc.Comment: 11 pages, 10 figures. Accepted for publication in MNRA
Phase transformation in Si from semiconducting diamond to metallic beta-Sn phase in QMC and DFT under hydrostatic and anisotropic stress
Silicon undergoes a phase transition from the semiconducting diamond phase to
the metallic beta-Sn phase under pressure. We use quantum Monte Carlo
calculations to predict the transformation pressure and compare the results to
density functional calculations employing the LDA, PBE, PW91, WC, AM05, PBEsol
and HSE06 exchange-correlation functionals. Diffusion Monte Carlo predicts a
transition pressure of 14.0 +- 1.0 GPa slightly above the experimentally
observed transition pressure range of 11.3 to 12.6 GPa. The HSE06 hybrid
functional predicts a transition pressure of 12.4 GPa in excellent agreement
with experiments. Exchange-correlation functionals using the local-density
approximation and generalized-gradient approximations result in transition
pressures ranging from 3.5 to 10.0 GPa, well below the experimental values. The
transition pressure is sensitive to stress anisotropy. Anisotropy in the stress
along any of the cubic axes of the diamond phase of silicon lowers the
equilibrium transition pressure and may explain the discrepancy between the
various experimental values as well as the small overestimate of the quantum
Monte Carlo transition pressure
Resonant X-Ray Scattering on the M-Edge Spectra from Triple-k Structure Phase in U_{0.75}Np_{0.25}O_{2} and UO_{2}
We derive an expression for the scattering amplitude of resonant x-ray
scattering under the assumption that the Hamiltonian describing the
intermediate state preserves spherical symmetry. On the basis of this
expression, we demonstrate that the energy profile of the RXS spectra expected
near U and Np M_4 edges from the triple-k antiferromagnetic ordering phase in
UO_{2} and U_{0.75}Np_{0.25}O_{2} agree well with those from the experiments.
We demonstrate that the spectra in the \sigma-\sigma' and \sigma-\pi' channels
exhibit quadrupole and dipole natures, respectively.Comment: 3 pages, 3 figures, to be published in J. Phys. Soc. Jpn. Supp
Galaxy formation in the Planck cosmology - II. Star-formation histories and post-processing magnitude reconstruction
We adapt the L-Galaxies semi-analytic model to follow the star-formation
histories (SFH) of galaxies -- by which we mean a record of the formation time
and metallicities of the stars that are present in each galaxy at a given time.
We use these to construct stellar spectra in post-processing, which offers
large efficiency savings and allows user-defined spectral bands and dust models
to be applied to data stored in the Millennium data repository.
We contrast model SFHs from the Millennium Simulation with observed ones from
the VESPA algorithm as applied to the SDSS-7 catalogue. The overall agreement
is good, with both simulated and SDSS galaxies showing a steeper SFH with
increased stellar mass. The SFHs of blue and red galaxies, however, show poor
agreement between data and simulations, which may indicate that the termination
of star formation is too abrupt in the models.
The mean star-formation rate (SFR) of model galaxies is well-defined and is
accurately modelled by a double power law at all redshifts: SFR proportional to
, where Gyr, is the age of the
stars and is the loopback time to the onset of galaxy formation; above a
redshift of unity, this is well approximated by a gamma function: SFR
proportional to , where Gyr. Individual
galaxies, however, show a wide dispersion about this mean. When split by mass,
the SFR peaks earlier for high-mass galaxies than for lower-mass ones, and we
interpret this downsizing as a mass-dependence in the evolution of the quenched
fraction: the SFHs of star-forming galaxies show only a weak mass dependence.Comment: Accepted version of the paper, to appear in MNRAS. Compared to the
original version, contains more detail on the post-processing of magnitudes,
including a table of rms magnitude errors. SFHs available on Millennium
database http://gavo.mpa-garching.mpg.de/MyMillennium
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