Radio Frequency Interference Mitigation

Radio astronomy observational facilities are under constant upgradation and development to achieve better capabilities including increasing the time and frequency resolutions of the recorded data, and increasing the receiving and recording bandwidth. As only a limited spectrum resource has been allocated to radio astronomy by the International Telecommunication Union, this results in the radio observational instrumentation being inevitably exposed to undesirable radio frequency interference (RFI) signals which originate mainly from terrestrial human activity and are becoming stronger with time. RFIs degrade the quality of astronomical data and even lead to data loss. The impact of RFIs on scientific outcome is becoming progressively difficult to manage. In this article, we motivate the requirement for RFI mitigation, and review the RFI characteristics, mitigation techniques and strategies. Mitigation strategies adopted at some representative observatories, telescopes and arrays are also introduced. We also discuss and present advantages and shortcomings of the four classes of RFI mitigation strategies, applicable at the connected causal stages: preventive, pre-detection, pre-correlation and post-correlation. The proper identification and flagging of RFI is key to the reduction of data loss and improvement in data quality, and is also the ultimate goal of developing RFI mitigation techniques. This can be achieved through a strategy involving a combination of the discussed techniques in stages. Recent advances in high speed digital signal processing and high performance computing allow for performing RFI excision of large data volumes generated from large telescopes or arrays in both real time and offline modes, aiding the proposed strategy.Comment: 26 pages, 10 figures, Chinese version accepted for publication in Acta Astronomica Sinica; English version to appear in Chinese Astronomy and Astrophysic

Orbital Kondo effect in a parallel double quantum dot

We construct a theoretical model to study the orbital Kondo effect in a parallel double quantum dot (DQD). Recently, pseudospin-resolved transport spectroscopy of the orbital Kondo effect in a DQD has been experimentally reported. The experiment revealed that when interdot tunneling is ignored, there exist two and one Kondo peaks in the conductance-bias curve for the pseudospin-non-resolved and pseudospin-resolved cases, respectively. Our theoretical studies reproduce this experimental result. We also investigate the situation of all lead voltages being non-equal (the complete pseudospin-resolved case), and find that there are four Kondo peaks at most in the curve of the conductance versus the pseudospin splitting energy. When the interdot tunneling is introduced, some new Kondo peaks and dips can emerge. Besides, the pseudospin transport and the pseudospin flipping current are also studied in the DQD system. Since the pseudospin transport is much easier to be controlled and measured than the real spin transport, it can be used to study the physical phenomenon related to the spin transport.Comment: 18 pages, 7 figures, accepted by J. Phys.: Condens. Matter in September 201

Computing the ground state solution of Bose-Einstein condensates by a normalized gradient flow

In this paper, we prove the energy diminishing of a normalized gradient flow which provides a mathematical justification of the imaginary time method used in physical literatures to compute the ground state solution of Bose-Einstein condensates (BEC). We also investigate the energy diminishing property for the discretization of the normalized gradient flow. Two numerical methods are proposed for such discretizations: one is the backward Euler centered finite difference (BEFD), the other one is an explicit time-splitting sine-spectral (TSSP) method. Energy diminishing for BEFD and TSSP for linear case, and monotonicity for BEFD for both linear and nonlinear cases are proven. Comparison between the two methods and existing methods, e.g. Crank-Nicolson finite difference (CNFD) or forward Euler finite difference (FEFD), shows that BEFD and TSSP are much better in terms of preserving energy diminishing property of the normalized gradient flow. Numerical results in 1d, 2d and 3d with magnetic trap confinement potential, as well as a potential of a stirrer corresponding to a far-blue detuned Gaussian laser beam are reported to demonstrate the effectiveness of BEFD and TSSP methods. Furthermore we observe that the normalized gradient flow can also be applied directly to compute the first excited state solution in BEC when the initial data is chosen as an odd function.Comment: 28 pages, 6 figure