43,825 research outputs found
The cosmological constant and the relaxed universe
We study the role of the cosmological constant (CC) as a component of dark
energy (DE). It is argued that the cosmological term is in general unavoidable
and it should not be ignored even when dynamical DE sources are considered.
From the theoretical point of view quantum zero-point energy and phase
transitions suggest a CC of large magnitude in contrast to its tiny observed
value. Simply relieving this disaccord with a counterterm requires extreme
fine-tuning which is referred to as the old CC problem. To avoid it, we discuss
some recent approaches for neutralising a large CC dynamically without adding a
fine-tuned counterterm. This can be realised by an effective DE component which
relaxes the cosmic expansion by counteracting the effect of the large CC.
Alternatively, a CC filter is constructed by modifying gravity to make it
insensitive to vacuum energy.Comment: 6 pages, no figures, based on a talk presented at PASCOS 201
Influential cited references in FEMS Microbiology Letters: lessons from Reference Publication Year Spectroscopy (RPYS)
The journal FEMS Microbiology Letters covers all aspects of microbiology including virology. On which scientific shoulders do the papers published in this journal stand? Which are the classic papers used by the authors? We aim to answer these questions in this study by applying the Reference Publication Year Spectroscopy (RPYS) analysis to all papers published in this journal between 1977 and 2017. In total, 16 837 publications with 410 586 cited references are analyzed. Mainly, the studies published in the journal FEMS Microbiology Letters draw knowledge from methods developed to quantify or characterize biochemical substances such as proteins, nucleic acids, lipids, or carbohydrates and from improvements of techniques suitable for studies of bacterial genetics. The techniques frequently used for studying the genetic of microorganisms in FEMS Microbiology Letters' studies were developed using samples prepared from microorganisms. Methods required for the investigation of proteins, carbohydrates, or lipids were mostly transferred from other fields of life science to microbiology
Analytical studies of nuclear light bulb engine radiant heat transfer and performance characteristics
Analytical model of nuclear light bulb engine radiant heat transfer and engine performance, dynamics and control, heat loads and shutdown characteristic
Characterization of Active Main Belt Object P/2012 F5 (Gibbs): A Possible Impacted Asteroid
In this work we characterize the recently discovered active main belt object
P/2012 F5 (Gibbs), which was discovered with a dust trail > 7' in length in the
outer main belt, 7 months prior to aphelion. We use optical imaging obtained on
UT 2012 March 27 to analyze the central condensation and the long trail. We
find nuclear B-band and R-band apparent magnitudes of 20.96 and 19.93 mag,
respectively, which give an upper limit on the radius of the nucleus of 2.1 km.
The geometric cross-section of material in the trail was ~ 4 x 10^8 m^2,
corresponding to a dust mass of ~ 5 x 10^7 kg. Analysis of infrared images
taken by the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer in September 2010 reveals that
the object was below the detection limit, suggesting that it was less active
than it was during 2012, or possibly inactive, just 6 months after it passed
through perihelion. We set a 1-sigma upper limit on its radius during this time
of 2.9 km. P/2012 F5 (Gibbs) is dynamically stable in the outer main belt on
timescales of ~ 1 Gyr, pointing towards an asteroidal origin. We find that the
morphology of the ejected dust is consistent with it being produced by a single
event that occurred on UT 2011 July 7 20 days, possibly as the result of
a collision with a small impactor.Comment: 29 pages, 5 figures. Accepted for publication in Ap
Lower Bounds in the Preprocessing and Query Phases of Routing Algorithms
In the last decade, there has been a substantial amount of research in
finding routing algorithms designed specifically to run on real-world graphs.
In 2010, Abraham et al. showed upper bounds on the query time in terms of a
graph's highway dimension and diameter for the current fastest routing
algorithms, including contraction hierarchies, transit node routing, and hub
labeling. In this paper, we show corresponding lower bounds for the same three
algorithms. We also show how to improve a result by Milosavljevic which lower
bounds the number of shortcuts added in the preprocessing stage for contraction
hierarchies. We relax the assumption of an optimal contraction order (which is
NP-hard to compute), allowing the result to be applicable to real-world
instances. Finally, we give a proof that optimal preprocessing for hub labeling
is NP-hard. Hardness of optimal preprocessing is known for most routing
algorithms, and was suspected to be true for hub labeling
NEOWISE observations of comet C/2013 A1 (Siding Spring) as it approaches Mars
The Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) mission
observed comet C/2013 A1 (Siding Spring) three times at 3.4 {\mu}m and 4.6
{\mu}m as the comet approached Mars in 2014. The comet is an extremely
interesting target since its close approach to Mars in late 2014 will be
observed by various spacecraft in-situ. The observations were taken in 2014
Jan., Jul. and Sep. when the comet was at heliocentric distances of 3.82 AU,
1.88 AU, and 1.48 AU. The level of activity increased significantly between the
Jan. and Jul. visits but then decreased by the time of the observations in
Sep., approximately 4 weeks prior to its close approach to Mars. In this work
we calculate Af\r{ho} values, and CO/CO2 production rates.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures, accepted by Astrophysical Journal Letter
Runtime Verification of Temporal Properties over Out-of-order Data Streams
We present a monitoring approach for verifying systems at runtime. Our
approach targets systems whose components communicate with the monitors over
unreliable channels, where messages can be delayed or lost. In contrast to
prior works, whose property specification languages are limited to
propositional temporal logics, our approach handles an extension of the
real-time logic MTL with freeze quantifiers for reasoning about data values. We
present its underlying theory based on a new three-valued semantics that is
well suited to soundly and completely reason online about event streams in the
presence of message delay or loss. We also evaluate our approach
experimentally. Our prototype implementation processes hundreds of events per
second in settings where messages are received out of order.Comment: long version of the CAV 2017 pape
Lingering grains of truth around comet 17P/Holmes
Comet 17P/Holmes underwent a massive outburst in 2007 Oct., brightening by a
factor of almost a million in under 48 hours. We used infrared images taken by
the Wide-Field Survey Explorer mission to characterize the comet as it appeared
at a heliocentric distance of 5.1 AU almost 3 years after the outburst. The
comet appeared to be active with a coma and dust trail along the orbital plane.
We constrained the diameter, albedo, and beaming parameter of the nucleus to
4.135 0.610 km, 0.03 0.01 and 1.03 0.21, respectively. The
properties of the nucleus are consistent with those of other Jupiter Family
comets. The best-fit temperature of the coma was 134 11 K, slightly
higher than the blackbody temperature at that heliocentric distance. Using
Finson-Probstein modeling we found that the morphology of the trail was
consistent with ejection during the 2007 outburst and was made up of dust
grains between 250 m and a few cm in radius. The trail mass was 1.2
- 5.3 10 kg.Comment: Accepted to ApJ. 2 tables, 4 figure
Factorization and Resummation for Dijet Invariant Mass Spectra
Multijet cross sections at the LHC and Tevatron are sensitive to several
distinct kinematic energy scales. When measuring the dijet invariant mass m_jj
between two signal jets produced in association with other jets or weak bosons,
m_jj will typically be much smaller than the total partonic center-of-mass
energy Q, but larger than the individual jet masses m, such that there can be a
hierarchy of scales m << m_jj << Q. This situation arises in many new-physics
analyses at the LHC, where the invariant mass between jets is used to gain
access to the masses of new-physics particles in a decay chain. At present, the
logarithms arising from such a hierarchy of kinematic scales can only be summed
at the leading-logarithmic level provided by parton-shower programs. We
construct an effective field theory, SCET+, which is an extension of
soft-collinear effective theory that applies to this situation of hierarchical
jets. It allows for a rigorous separation of different scales in a multiscale
soft function and for a systematic resummation of logarithms of both m_jj/Q and
m/Q. As an explicit example, we consider the invariant mass spectrum of the two
closest jets in e+e- -> 3 jets. We also give the generalization to pp -> N jets
plus leptons relevant for the LHC.Comment: 37 pages, 6 figures; v2: journal versio
Asteroid family identification using the Hierarchical Clustering Method and WISE/NEOWISE physical properties
Using albedos from WISE/NEOWISE to separate distinct albedo groups within the
Main Belt asteroids, we apply the Hierarchical Clustering Method to these
subpopulations and identify dynamically associated clusters of asteroids. While
this survey is limited to the ~35% of known Main Belt asteroids that were
detected by NEOWISE, we present the families linked from these objects as
higher confidence associations than can be obtained from dynamical linking
alone. We find that over one-third of the observed population of the Main Belt
is represented in the high-confidence cores of dynamical families. The albedo
distribution of family members differs significantly from the albedo
distribution of background objects in the same region of the Main Belt, however
interpretation of this effect is complicated by the incomplete identification
of lower-confidence family members. In total we link 38,298 asteroids into 76
distinct families. This work represents a critical step necessary to debias the
albedo and size distributions of asteroids in the Main Belt and understand the
formation and history of small bodies in our Solar system.Comment: Accepted to ApJ. Full version of Table 3 to be published
electronically in Ap
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