33,873 research outputs found
Determination of bonding parameters and inspection techniques for cadmium-to-stainless steel bonds and assembly of two capsule housings Final report
Bonding parameters and quality control for cadmium-stainless steel clad fuel pellet containment vessel productio
Volume-reflecting dielectric heat shield
White, volume-reflecting dielectric material absorbs essentially none of the incident radiant energy, and continues to reflect even though in severe environment its surface is melted and is being vaporized. Process of overall reflectance in dielectric material, involving internal refractions and reflections, is similar to process of reflection in paints
Screening for health risks: A social science perspective
Health screening promises to reduce risks to individuals via probabilistic sifting of populations for medical conditions. The categorisation and selection of 'conditions' such as cardiovascular events, dementia and depression for screening itself requires prior interpretive labour which usually remains unexamined. Screening systems can take diverse organisational forms and varying relationships to health status, as when purported disease precursors, for example 'pre-cancerous' polyps, or supposed risk factors, such as high cholesterol themselves, become targets for screening. Screening at best yields small, although not necessarily unworthwhile, net population health gains. It also creates new risks, leaving some individuals worse-off than if they had been left alone. The difficulties associated with attempting to measure small net gains through randomised controlled trials are sometimes underestimated. Despite endemic doubts about its clinical utility, bibliometric analysis of published papers shows that responses to health risks are coming to be increasingly thought about in terms of screening. This shift is superimposed on a strengthening tendency to view health through the lens of risk. It merits further scrutiny as a societal phenomenon
On the soft X-ray spectrum of cooling flows
Strong evidence for cooling flows has been found in low resolution X-ray
imaging and spectra of many clusters of galaxies. However high resolution X-ray
spectra of several clusters from the Reflection Grating Spectrometer (RGS) on
XMM-Newton now show a soft X-ray spectrum inconsistent with a simple cooling
flow. The main problem is a lack of the emission lines expected from gas
cooling below 1--2 keV. Lines from gas at about 2--3 keV are observed, even in
a high temperature cluster such as A 1835, indicating that gas is cooling down
to about 2--3 keV, but is not found at lower temperatures. Here we discuss
several solutions to the problem; heating, mixing, differential absorption and
inhomogeneous metallicity. Continuous or sporadic heating creates further
problems, including the targetting of the heat at the cooler gas and also the
high total energy required. So far there is no clear observational evidence for
widespread heating, or shocks, in cluster cores, except in radio lobes which
occupy only part of the volume. The implied ages of cooling flows are short, at
about 1 Gyr. Mixing. or absorption, of the cooling gas are other possibilities.
Alternatively, if the metals in the intracluster medium are not uniformly
spread but are clumped, then little line emission is expected from the gas
cooling below 1 keV. The low metallicity part cools without line emission
whereas the strengths of the soft X-ray lines from the metal-rich gas depend on
the mass fraction of that gas and not on the abundance, since soft X-ray line
emission dominates the cooling function below 2 keV.Comment: 5 pages, with 2 figures, submitted to MNRA
Stability of the Submillimeter Brightness of the Atmosphere Above Mauna Kea, Chajnantor and the South Pole
The summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii, the area near Cerro Chajnantor in Chile,
and the South Pole are sites of large millimeter or submillimeter wavelength
telescopes. We have placed 860 GHz sky brightness monitors at all three sites
and present a comparative study of the measured submillimeter brightness due to
atmospheric thermal emission. We report the stability of that quantity at each
site.Comment: 6 figure
Quantum Hall Phase Diagram of Second Landau-level Half-filled Bilayers: Abelian versus Non-Abelian States
The quantum Hall phase diagram of the half-filled bilayer system in the
second Landau level is studied as a function of tunneling and layer separation
using exact diagonalization. We make the striking prediction that bilayer
structures would manifest two distinct branches of incompressible fractional
quantum Hall effect (FQHE) corresponding to the Abelian 331 state (at moderate
to low tunneling and large layer separation) and the non-Abelian Pfaffian state
(at large tunneling and small layer separation). The observation of these two
FQHE branches and the quantum phase transition between them will be compelling
evidence supporting the existence of the non-Abelian Pfaffian state in the
second Landau level.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure
Principal sources and dispersal patterns of suspended particulate matter in nearshore surface waters of the northeast Pacific Ocean and the Hawaiian Islands
The author has identified the following significant results. ERTS-1 multispectral scanner imagery of the nearshore surface waters of the Northeast Pacific Ocean is proving to be a useful tool for determining source and dispersal of suspended particulate matter. The principal sources of the turbid water, seen best on the green and red bands, are river and stream effluents and actively eroding coastlines; secondary sources are waste effluents and production of planktonic organisms, but these may sometimes be masked by the very turbid plumes of suspended sediment being discharged into the nearshore zone during times of high river discharge. The configuration and distribution of the plumes of turbid water also can be used to infer near-surface current directions. Comparison of imagery of the nearshore water off the northern California coast from October 1972 and January 1973 shows a reversal of the near-surface currents, from predominantly south-setting in the fall (California Current) to north-setting in the winter (Davidson Current)
Diagnostics of the structure of AGN's broad line regions with reverberation mapping data: confirmation of the two-component broad line region model
We re-examine the ten Reverberation Mapping (RM) sources with public data
based on the two-component model of the Broad Line Region (BLR). In fitting
their broad H-beta lines, six of them only need one Gaussian component, one of
them has a double-peak profile, one has an irregular profile, and only two of
them need two components, i.e., a Very Broad Gaussian Component (VBGC) and an
Inter-Mediate Gaussian Component (IMGC). The Gaussian components are assumed to
come from two distinct regions in the two-component model; they are Very Broad
Line Region (VBLR) and Inter-Mediate Line region (IMLR). The two sources with a
two-component profile are Mrk 509 and NGC 4051. The time lags of the two
components of both sources satisfy ,
where and are the lags of the two components while
and represent the mean gas velocities of the two regions,
supporting the two-component model of the BLR of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN).
The fact that most of these ten sources only have the VBGC confirms the
assumption that RM mainly measures the radius of the VBLR; consequently, the
radius obtained from the R-L relationship mainly represent the radius of VBLR.
Moreover, NGC 4051, with a lag of about 5 days in the one component model, is
an outlier on the R-L relationship as shown in Kaspi et al. (2005); however
this problem disappears in our two-component model with lags of about 2 and 6
days for the VBGC and IMGC, respectively.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures. Accepted for publication in the Special Issue of
Science in China (G) "Astrophysics of Black holes and Related Compact
Objects
- …