1,927 research outputs found
HESS J1632-478: an energetic relic
HESS J1632-478 is an extended and still unidentified TeV source in the
galactic plane. In order to identify the source of the very high energy
emission and to constrain its spectral energy distribution, we used a deep
observation of the field obtained with XMM-Newton together with data from
Molonglo, Spitzer and Fermi to detect counterparts at other wavelengths. The
flux density emitted by HESS J1632-478 peaks at very high energies and is more
than 20 times weaker at all other wavelengths probed. The source spectrum
features two large prominent bumps with the synchrotron emission peaking in the
ultraviolet and the external inverse Compton emission peaking in the TeV. HESS
J1632-478 is an energetic pulsar wind nebula with an age of the order of 10^4
years. Its bolometric (mostly GeV-TeV) luminosity reaches 10% of the current
pulsar spin down power. The synchrotron nebula has a size of 1 pc and contains
an unresolved point-like X-ray source, probably the pulsar with its wind
termination shock.Comment: A&A accepted, 9 pages, 5 figures, 4 table
The Contribution of the Light Quark Condensate to the Pion-Nucleon Sigma Term
There has been a discrepancy between values of the pion-nucleon sigma term
extracted by two different methods for many years. Analysis of recent high
precision pion-nucleon data has widened the gap between the two determinations.
It is argued that the two extractions correspond to different quantities and
that the difference between them can be understood and calculated.Comment: Modern Physics Letters A (in press
Quark Masses: An Environmental Impact Statement
We investigate worlds that lie on a slice through the parameter space of the
Standard Model over which quark masses vary. We allow as many as three quarks
to participate in nuclei, while fixing the mass of the electron and the average
mass of the lightest baryon flavor multiplet. We classify as "congenial" worlds
that satisfy the environmental constraint that the quark masses allow for
stable nuclei with charges one, six, and eight, making organic chemistry
possible. Whether a congenial world actually produces observers depends on a
multitude of historical contingencies, beginning with primordial
nucleosynthesis, which we do not explore. Such constraints may be independently
superimposed on our results. Environmental constraints such as the ones we
study may be combined with information about the a priori distribution of quark
masses over the landscape of possible universes to determine whether the
measured values of the quark masses are determined environmentally, but our
analysis is independent of such an anthropic approach.
We estimate baryon masses as functions of quark masses and nuclear masses as
functions of baryon masses. We check for the stability of nuclei against
fission, strong particle emission, and weak nucleon emission. For two light
quarks with charges 2/3 and -1/3, we find a band of congeniality roughly 29 MeV
wide in their mass difference. We also find another, less robust region of
congeniality with one light, charge -1/3 quark, and two heavier, approximately
degenerate charge -1/3 and 2/3 quarks. No other assignment of light quark
charges yields congenial worlds with two baryons participating in nuclei. We
identify and discuss the region in quark-mass space where nuclei would be made
from three or more baryon species.Comment: 40 pages, 16 figures (in color), 4 tables. See paper for a more
detailed abstract. v4: Cleaning up minor typo
The chiral quark condensate and pion decay constant in nuclear matter at next-to-leading order
Making use of the recently developed chiral power counting for the physics of
nuclear matter [1,2], we evaluate the in-medium chiral quark condensate up to
next-to-leading order for both symmetric nuclear matter and neutron matter. Our
calculation includes the full in-medium iteration of the leading order local
and one-pion exchange nucleon-nucleon interactions. Interestingly, we find a
cancellation between the contributions stemming from the quark mass dependence
of the nucleon mass appearing in the in-medium nucleon-nucleon interactions.
Only the contributions originating from the explicit quark mass dependence of
the pion mass survive. This cancellation is the reason of previous observations
concerning the dominant role of the long-range pion contributions and the
suppression of short-range nucleon-nucleon interactions. We find that the
linear density contribution to the in-medium chiral quark condensate is only
slightly modified for pure neutron matter by the nucleon-nucleon interactions.
For symmetric nuclear matter the in-medium corrections are larger, although
smaller compared to other approaches due to the full iteration of the lowest
order nucleon-nucleon tree-level amplitudes. Our calculation satisfies the
Hellmann-Feynman theorem to the order worked out. Also we address the problem
of calculating the leading in-medium corrections to the pion decay constant. We
find that there are no extra in-medium corrections that violate the
Gell-Mann-Oakes-Renner relation up to next-to-leading order.Comment: 21 pages, 9 figure
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