20,099 research outputs found
Effects of a traffic noise background on judgements of aircraft noise
A study was conducted in which subjects judged aircraft noises in the presence of road traffic background noise. Two different techniques for presenting the background noises were evaluated. For one technique, the background noise was continuous over the whole of a test session. For the other, the background noise was changed with each aircraft noise. A range of aircraft noise levels and traffic noise levels were presented to simulate typical indoor levels
Modular instrumentation system for real-time measurements and control on reciprocating engines
An instrumentation system was developed for reciprocating engines. Among the parameters measured are the indicated mean effective pressure, or theoretical work per cycle, and the mass fraction burn rate, a measure of the combustion rate in the cylinder. These computations are performed from measured cylinder pressure and crankshaft angle and are available in real time for the experimenter. A 100 or 200 consecutive-cycle sample is analyzed to reduce the effect of cyclic variations in the engine. Data are displayed in bargraph form, and the mean and standard deviation are computed. Other instruments are also described
The Magnetic Topology of the Weak-Lined T Tauri Star V410 - A Simultaneous Temperature and Magnetic Field Inversion
We present a detailed temperature and magnetic investigation of the T Tauri
star V410 Tau by means of a simultaneous Doppler- and Zeeman-Doppler Imaging.
Moreover we introduce a new line profile reconstruction method based on a
singular value decomposition (SVD) to extract the weak polarized line profiles.
One of the key features of the line profile reconstruction is that the SVD line
profiles are amenable to radiative transfer modeling within our Zeeman-Doppler
Imaging code iMap. The code also utilizes a new iterative regularization scheme
which is independent of any additional surface constraints. To provide more
stability a vital part of our inversion strategy is the inversion of both
Stokes I and Stokes V profiles to simultaneously reconstruct the temperature
and magnetic field surface distribution of V410 Tau. A new image-shear analysis
is also implemented to allow the search for image and line profile distortions
induced by a differential rotation of the star. The magnetic field structure we
obtain for V410 Tau shows a good spatial correlation with the surface
temperature and is dominated by a strong field within the cool polar spot. The
Zeeman-Doppler maps exhibit a large-scale organization of both polarities
around the polar cap in the form of a twisted bipolar structure. The magnetic
field reaches a value of almost 2 kG within the polar region but smaller fields
are also present down to lower latitudes. The pronounced non-axisymmetric field
structure and the non-detection of a differential rotation for V410 Tau
supports the idea of an underlying -type dynamo, which is predicted
for weak-lined T Tauri stars.Comment: Accepted for A&A, 18 pages, 10 figure
Phase transitions and crossovers in reaction-diffusion models with catalyst deactivation
The activity of catalytic materials is reduced during operation by several
mechanisms, one of them being poisoning of catalytic sites by chemisorbed
impurities or products. Here we study the effects of poisoning in two
reaction-diffusion models in one-dimensional lattices with randomly distributed
catalytic sites. Unimolecular and bimolecular single-species reactions are
considered, without reactant input during the operation. The models show
transitions between a phase with continuous decay of reactant concentration and
a phase with asymptotic non-zero reactant concentration and complete poisoning
of the catalyst. The transition boundary depends on the initial reactant and
catalyst concentrations and on the poisoning probability. The critical system
behaves as in the two-species annihilation reaction, with reactant
concentration decaying as t^{-1/4} and the catalytic sites playing the role of
the second species. In the unimolecular reaction, a significant crossover to
the asymptotic scaling is observed even when one of those parameters is 10% far
from criticality. Consequently, an effective power-law decay of concentration
may persist up to long times and lead to an apparent change in the reaction
kinetics. In the bimolecular single-species reaction, the critical scaling is
followed by a two-dimensional rapid decay, thus two crossovers are found.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figure
Semi-Phenomenological Analysis of Dynamics of Nonlinear Excitations in One-Dimensional Electron-Phonon System
The structure of moving nonlinear excitations in one-dimensional
electron-phonon systems is studied semi-phenomenologically by using an
effective action in which the width of the nonlinear excitation is treated as a
dynamical variable. The effective action can be derived from Su, Schrieffer and
Heeger's model or its continuum version proposed by Takayama, Lin-Liu and Maki
with an assumption that the nonlinear excitation moves uniformly without any
deformation except the change of its width. The form of the action is
essentially the same as that discussed by Bishop and coworkers in studying the
dynamics of the soliton in polyacetylene, though some details are different.
For the moving excitation with a velocity , the width is determined by
minimizing the effective action. A requirement that there must be a minimum in
the action as a function of its width provides a maximum velocity. The velocity
dependence of the width and energy can be determined. The motions of a soliton
in p olyacetylene and an acoustic polaron in polydiacetylene are studied within
this formulation. The obtained results are in good agreement with those of
numerical simulations.Comment: 19 pages, LaTeX, 7 Postscript figures, to be published in J. Phys.
Soc. Jpn. vol.65 (1996) No.
Low Noise 1 THzâ1.4 THz Mixers Using Nb/Al-AlN/NbTiN SIS Junctions
We present the development of a low noise 1.2 THz and 1.4 THz SIS mixers for heterodyne spectrometry on the Stratospheric Observatory For Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) and Herschel Space Observatory. This frequency range is above the limit for the commonly used Nb quasi particle SIS junctions, and a special type of hybrid Nb/AlN/NbTiN junctions has been developed for this project.We are using a quasi-optical mixer design with two Nb/AlN/NbTiN junctions with an area of 0.25 ”m^2. The SIS junction tuning circuit is made of Nb and gold wire layers. At 1.13 THz the minimum SIS receiver uncorrected noise temperature is 450 K. The SIS receiver noise corrected for the loss in the LO coupler and in the cryostat optics is 350â450 K across 1.1â1.25 THz band. The receiver has a uniform sensitivity in a full 4â8 GHz IF band.
The 1.4 THz SIS receiver test at 1.33â1.35 THz gives promising results, although limited by the level of available LO power. Extrapolation of the data obtained with low LO power level shows a possibility to reach 500 K DSB receiver noise using already existing SIS mixer
The dimerized phase of ionic Hubbard models
We derive an effective Hamiltonian for the ionic Hubbard model at half
filling, extended to include nearest-neighbor repulsion. Using a spin-particle
transformation, the effective model is mapped onto simple spin-1 models in two
particular cases. Using another spin-particle transformation, a slightly
modified model is mapped into an SU(3) antiferromagnetic Heisenberg model whose
exact ground state is known to be spontaneously dimerized. From the effective
models several properties of the dimerized phase are discussed, like
ferroelectricity and fractional charge excitations. Using bosonization and
recent developments in the theory of macroscopic polarization, we show that the
polarization is proportional to the charge of the elementary excitations
The circumbinary disk of HD 98800B: Evidence for disk warping
The quadruple young stellar system HD 98800 consists of two spectroscopic binary pairs with a circumbinary disk around the B component. Recent work by Boden and collaborators using infrared interferometry and radial velocity data resulted in a determination of the physical orbit for HD 98800B. We use the resulting inclination of the binary and the measured extinction toward the B component stars to constrain the distribution of circumbinary material. Although a standard optically and geometrically thick disk model can reproduce the spectral energy distribution, it cannot account for the observed extinction if the binary and the disk are coplanar. We next constructed a dynamical model to investigate the influence of the A component, which is not in the BaâBb orbital plane, on the B disk. We find that these interactions have a substantial impact on the inclination of the B circumbinary disk with respect to the BaâBb orbital plane. The resulting warp would be sufficient to place material into the line of sight and the noncoplanar disk orientation may also cause the upper layers of the disk to intersect the line of sight if the disk is geometrically thick. These simulations also support that the dynamics of the BaâBb orbit clear the inner region to a radius of~3 AU. We then discuss whether the somewhat unusual properties of the HD 98800B disk are consistent with material remnant from the star formation process or with more recent creation by collisions from larger bodies
Random wave functions and percolation
Recently it was conjectured that nodal domains of random wave functions are
adequately described by critical percolation theory. In this paper we
strengthen this conjecture in two respects. First, we show that, though wave
function correlations decay slowly, a careful use of Harris' criterion confirms
that these correlations are unessential and nodal domains of random wave
functions belong to the same universality class as non critical percolation.
Second, we argue that level domains of random wave functions are described by
the non-critical percolation model.Comment: 13 page
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