Chemical Evolution of the Galaxy Based on the Oscillatory Star Formation History

We model the star formation history (SFH) and the chemical evolution of the Galactic disk by combining an infall model and a limit-cycle model of the interstellar medium (ISM). Recent observations have shown that the SFH of the Galactic disk violently variates or oscillates. We model the oscillatory SFH based on the limit-cycle behavior of the fractional masses of three components of the ISM. The observed period of the oscillation ($\sim 1$ Gyr) is reproduced within the natural parameter range. This means that we can interpret the oscillatory SFH as the limit-cycle behavior of the ISM. We then test the chemical evolution of stars and gas in the framework of the limit-cycle model, since the oscillatory behavior of the SFH may cause an oscillatory evolution of the metallicity. We find however that the oscillatory behavior of metallicity is not prominent because the metallicity reflects the past integrated SFH. This indicates that the metallicity cannot be used to distinguish an oscillatory SFH from one without oscillations.Comment: 21 pages LaTeX, to appear in Ap

Testing the Relation Between the Local and Cosmic Star Formation Histories

Recently, there has been great progress toward observationally determining the mean star formation history of the universe. When accurately known, the cosmic star formation rate could provide much information about Galactic evolution, if the Milky Way's star formation rate is representative of the average cosmic star formation history. A simple hypothesis is that our local star formation rate is proportional to the cosmic mean. In addition, to specify a star formation history, one must also adopt an initial mass function (IMF); typically it is assumed that the IMF is a smooth function which is constant in time. We show how to test directly the compatibility of all these assumptions, by making use of the local (solar neighborhood) star formation record encoded in the present-day stellar mass function. Present data suggests that at least one of the following is false: (1) the local IMF is constant in time; (2) the local IMF is a smooth (unimodal) function; and/or (3) star formation in the Galactic disk was representative of the cosmic mean. We briefly discuss how to determine which of these assumptions fail, and improvements in observations which will sharpen this test.Comment: 14 pages in LaTeX (uses aaspp4.sty). 5 postscript figures. To appear in the Astrophysical Journa

Possible Stellar Metallicity Enhancements from the Accretion of Planets

A number of recently discovered extrasolar planet candidates have surprisingly small orbits, which may indicate that considerable orbital migration takes place in protoplanetary systems. A natural consequence of orbital migration is for a series of planets to be accreted, destroyed, and then thoroughly mixed into the convective envelope of the central star. We study the ramifications of planet accretion for the final main sequence metallicity of the star. If maximum disk lifetimes are on the order of 10 Myr, stars with masses near 1 solar mass are predicted to have virtually no metallicity enhancement. On the other hand, early F and late A type stars with masses of 1.5--2.0 solar masses can experience significant metallicity enhancements due to their considerably smaller convection zones during the first 10 Myr of pre-main-sequence evolution. We show that the metallicities of an aggregate of unevolved F stars are consistent with an average star accreting about 2 Jupiter-mass planets from a protoplanetary disk having a 10 Myr dispersal time.Comment: 14 pages, AAS LaTeX, 3 figures, accepted to ApJ Letter

Effective action in DSR1 quantum field theory

We present the one-loop effective action of a quantum scalar field with DSR1 space-time symmetry as a sum over field modes. The effective action has real and imaginary parts and manifest charge conjugation asymmetry, which provides an alternative theoretical setting to the study of the particle-antiparticle asymmetry in nature.Comment: 8 page

Schwinger's Method for the Massive Casimir Effect

We apply to the massive scalar field a method recently proposed by Schwinger to calculate the Casimir effect. The method is applied with two different regularization schemes: the Schwinger original one by means of Poisson formula and another one by means of analytical continuation.Comment: plain TeX, 6 pages, DFTUZ-93-2

A new improved optimization of perturbation theory: applications to the oscillator energy levels and Bose-Einstein critical temperature

Improving perturbation theory via a variational optimization has generally produced in higher orders an embarrassingly large set of solutions, most of them unphysical (complex). We introduce an extension of the optimized perturbation method which leads to a drastic reduction of the number of acceptable solutions. The properties of this new method are studied and it is then applied to the calculation of relevant quantities in different $\phi^4$ models, such as the anharmonic oscillator energy levels and the critical Bose-Einstein Condensation temperature shift $\Delta T_c$ recently investigated by various authors. Our present estimates of $\Delta T_c$, incorporating the most recently available six and seven loop perturbative information, are in excellent agreement with all the available lattice numerical simulations. This represents a very substantial improvement over previous treatments.Comment: 9 pages, no figures. v2: minor wording changes in title/abstract, to appear in Phys.Rev.

A fertile floodplain soil in the border of Rio Negro in the Central Amazon Brazil.

PT2371

Exact 1/N and Optimized Perturbative Evaluation of mu_c for Homogeneous Interacting Bose Gases

In the framework of the O(N) three-dimensional effective scalar field model for homogeneous dilute weakly interacting Bose gases we use the 1/N expansion to evaluate, within the large N limit, the parameter r_c which is directly related to the critical chemical potential mu_c. This quantity enters the order-a^2 n^{2/3} coefficient contributing to the critical temperature shift Delta T_c where a represents the s-wave scattering length and n represents the density. Compared to the recent precise numerical lattice simulation results, our calculation suggests that the large N approximation performs rather well even for the physical case N=2. We then calculate the same quantity but using different forms of the optimized perturbative (variational) method, showing that these produce excellent results both for the finite N and large-N cases.Comment: 12 pages, 2 figures. We have performed a refined and extended numerical analysis to take into account the very recent results of Ref. [15

O solo de várzea nas margens do rio Negro - Amazonas - Brasil.

Este trabalho teve como objetivo amostrar, caracterizar e estimar a área com predominância de um solo tipicamente de várzea (eutrófico) nas margens de um rio de água preta (rio Negro)