77,511 research outputs found
Cavity ringdown laser absorption spectroscopy and time-of-flight mass spectroscopy of jet-cooled silver silicides
The cavity ringdown technique has been employed for the first spectroscopic characterization of the AgSi molecule, which is generated in a pulsed laser vaporization plasma reactor. A total of 20 rovibronic bands between 365 and 385 nm have been measured and analyzed to yield molecular properties for the X, B, and C 2Sigma states of AgSi. A time-of-flight mass spectrometer simultaneously monitors species produced in the molecular beam and has provided the first direct evidence for the existence of polyatomic silver silicides. Comparison of the AgSi data to our recent results for the CuSi diatom reveals very similar chemical bonding in the two coinage metal silicides, apparently dominated by covalent interactions
Physician Acceptance of New Medicare Patients Stabilizes in 2004-05
Measures access to physicians by Medicare beneficiaries in recent years, in relation to the decline in the number of U.S. physicians accepting patients during the late 1990s. Explores factors that determine why a physician accepts new patients
Coronagraphic phase diversity: performance study and laboratory demonstration
The final performance of current and future instruments dedicated to
exoplanet detection and characterization (such as SPHERE on the European Very
Large Telescope, GPI on Gemini North, or future instruments on Extremely Large
Telescopes) is limited by uncorrected quasi-static aberrations. These
aberrations create long-lived speckles in the scientific image plane, which can
easily be mistaken for planets. Common adaptive optics systems require
dedicated components to perform wave-front analysis. The ultimate wave-front
measurement performance is thus limited by the unavoidable differential
aberrations between the wavefront sensor and the scientific camera. To reach
the level of detectivity required by high-contrast imaging, these differential
aberrations must be estimated and compensated for. In this paper, we
characterize and experimentally validate a wave-front sensing method that
relies on focal-plane data. Our method, called COFFEE (for COronagraphic
Focal-plane wave-Front Estimation for Exoplanet detection), is based on a
Bayesian approach, and it consists in an extension of phase diversity to
high-contrast imaging. It estimates the differential aberrations using only two
focal-plane coronagraphic images recorded from the scientific camera itself. In
this paper, we first present a thorough characterization of COFFEE's
performance by means of numerical simulations. This characterization is then
compared with an experimental validation of COFFEE using an in-house adaptive
optics bench and an apodized Roddier & Roddier phase mask coronagraph. An
excellent match between experimental results and the theoretical study is
found. Lastly, we present a preliminary validation of COFFEE's ability to
compensate for the aberrations upstream of a coronagraph.Comment: A&A accepte
Hypernovae and light dark matter as possible Galactic positron sources
The electron-positron annihilation source in the Galactic center region has
recently been observed with INTEGRAL/SPI, which shows that this 511 keV source
is strong and its extension is consistent with the Galactic bulge geometry. The
positron production rate, estimated to more than 10 per second, is very
high and raises a challenging question about the nature of the Galactic
positron source. Commonly considered astrophysical positron injectors, namely
type Ia supernovae are rare events and fall short to explain the observed
positron production rate. In this paper, we study the possibility of Galactic
positron production by hypernovae events, exemplified by the recently observed
SN2003dh/GRB030329, an asymmetric explosion of a Wolf-Rayet star associated
with a gamma-ray burst. In these kinds of events, the ejected material becomes
quickly transparent to positrons, which spread out in the interstellar medium.
Non radioactive processes, such as decays of heavy dark matter particles
(neutralinos) predicted by most extensions of the standard model of particle
physics, could also produce positrons as byproducts. However they are expected
to be accompanied by a large flux of high-energy gamma-rays, which were not
observed by EGRET and ground based Tcherenkov experiments. In this context we
explore the possibility of direct positron production by annihilation of light
dark matter particles.Comment: 8 pages, 0 figures, 35th COSPAR, accepted in July 2005 by Elsevier
Science for publication in "Advances in Space Research
What Accounts for the Emergence of Malthusian Fertility in Transition Economies?
The transition to market-oriented economies in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union in the 1990s, like the Great Depression in the U.S. and Germany in the 1930s, generated sharp declines in real incomes and a corresponding drop in fertility. This is contrary to the robust negative relationship between income and fertility that has been extensively documented. This paper presents a theoretical model that explains the positive relationship between fertility and income. The model predicts that: i) the perceived level of subsistence consumption fundamentally determines whether fertility and income are positively or negatively related; ii) once incomes decline below a threshold, declining labor income causes fertility to fall; and iii) rising income inequality has a negative impact on fertility rates. Empirical tests using both aggregate and microeconomic data provide strong support for the predictions of the model. Our empirics predict that the perceived subsistence level is a statistically significant determinant of fertility and that the average country in our sample will remain in a Mathusian fertility regime for twenty more years.Fertility; Subsistence Consumption; Transition
Different types of X-ray bursts from GRS 1915+105 and their origin
We report the X-ray observations of the Galactic X-ray transient source GRS
1915+105 with the PPCs of the Indian X-ray Astronomy Experiment(IXAE) onboard
the Indian satellite IRS-P3 during 1997 June - August, which have revealed the
presence of four types of intense X-ray bursts. All the observed bursts have a
slow exponential rise, a sharp linear decay, and they can broadly be put in two
classes: irregular and quasi-regular bursts in one class, and regular bursts in
another class. The regular bursts are found to have two distinct time scales
and they persist over extended durations. There is a strong correlation between
the preceding quiescent time and the burst duration for the quasi-regular and
irregular bursts. No such correlation is found for the regular bursts. The
ratio of average flux during the burst time to the average flux during the
quiescent phase is high and variable for the quasi- regular and irregular
bursts while it is low and constant for the regular bursts. We suggest that the
peculiar bursts that we have seen are charact- eristic of the change of state
of the source. The source can switch back and forth between the low-hard state
and the high-soft state near critical accretion rates in a very short time
scale. A test of the model is presented using the publicly available 13-60 keV
RXTE/PCA data for irregular and regular bursts concurrent with our
observations.Comment: 13 pages, 12 figures, Accepted in APJ, emulateapj style use
Dark-ages Reionization & Galaxy Formation Simulation VIII. Suppressed growth of dark matter halos during the Epoch of Reionization
We investigate how the hydrostatic suppression of baryonic accretion affects
the growth rate of dark matter halos during the Epoch of Reionization. By
comparing halo properties in a simplistic hydrodynamic simulation in which gas
only cools adiabatically, with its collisionless equivalent, we find that halo
growth is slowed as hydrostatic forces prevent gas from collapsing. In our
simulations, at the high redshifts relevant for reionization (between
and ), halos that host dwarf galaxies () can be reduced by up to a factor of 2 in mass due to the
hydrostatic pressure of baryons. Consequently, the inclusion of baryonic
effects reduces the amplitude of the low mass tail of the halo mass function by
factors of 2 to 4. In addition, we find that the fraction of baryons in dark
matter halos hosting dwarf galaxies at high redshift never exceeds
of the cosmic baryon fraction. When implementing baryonic processes, including
cooling, star formation, supernova feedback and reionization, the suppression
effects become more significant with further reductions of to
60\%. Although convergence tests suggest that the suppression may become weaker
in higher resolution simulations, this suppressed growth will be important for
semi-analytic models of galaxy formation, in which the halo mass inherited from
an underlying N-body simulation directly determines galaxy properties. Based on
the adiabatic simulation, we provide tables to account for these effects in
N-body simulations, and present a modification of the halo mass function along
with explanatory analytic calculations.Comment: 17 pages, 11 figures; Updated to match the published version. Two
changes in Figures 1 and 3 in order to 1) correct bin sizes of the 10^8 and
10^8.5 Msol bins for NOSN_NOZCOOL_NoRe (was 0.5, should be 0.25); 2) include
stellar mass in baryon fraction (was missed in Fig. 3). Quantitative
description of Fig. 3 changed slightly in Section 2.2. All other results and
conclusions remain unchange
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