13,645 research outputs found
Star Formation Around Super-Massive Black Holes
The presence of young massive stars orbiting on eccentric rings within a few
tenths of a parsec of the supermassive black hole in the Galactic centre is
challenging for theories of star formation. The high tidal shear from the black
hole should tear apart the molecular clouds that form stars elsewhere in the
Galaxy, while transporting the stars to the Galactic centre also appears
unlikely during their stellar lifetimes. We present numerical simulations of
the infall of a giant molecular cloud that interacts with the black hole. The
transfer of energy during closest approach allows part of the cloud to become
bound to the black hole, forming an eccentric disc that quickly fragments to
form stars. Compressional heating due to the black hole raises the temperature
of the gas to 100-1000K, ensuring that the fragmentation produces relatively
high stellar masses. These stars retain the eccentricity of the disc and, for a
sufficiently massive initial cloud, produce an extremely top-heavy distribution
of stellar masses. This potentially repetitive process can therefore explain
the presence of multiple eccentric rings of young stars in the presence of a
supermassive black hole.Comment: 20 pages includingh 7 figures. "This is the author's version of the
work. It is posted here by permission of the AAAS for personal use, not for
redistribution. The definitive version was published in Science, 321, (22
August 2008), doi:10.1126/science.1160653". Reprints and animations can be
found at http://star-www.st-and.ac.uk/~iab1
Accurate statistics of a flexible polymer chain in shear flow
We present exact and analytically accurate results for the problem of a
flexible polymer chain in shear flow. Under such a flow the polymer tumbles,
and the probability distribution of the tumbling times of the polymer
decays exponentially as (where is the
longest relaxation time). We show that for a Rouse chain, this nontrivial
constant can be calculated in the limit of large Weissenberg number
(high shear rate) and is in excellent agreement with our simulation result of
. We also derive exactly the distribution functions for
the length and the orientational angles of the end-to-end vector of the
polymer.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures. Minor changes. Texts differ slightly from the PRL
published versio
Low-Energy Properties of Antiferromagnetic Spin-1/2 Heisenberg Ladders with an Odd Number of Legs
An effective low-energy description for multi-leg spin-1/2 Heisenberg ladders
with an odd number of legs is proposed. Using a newly developed Monte Carlo
loop algorithm and exact diagonalization techniques, the uniform and staggered
magnetic susceptibility and the entropy are calculated for ladders with 1, 3,
and 5 legs. These systems show a low-temperature scaling behavior similar to
spin-1/2 chains with longer ranged unfrustrated exchange interactions. The
spinon velocity does not change as the number of legs increases, but the energy
scale parameter decreases markedly.Comment: 4 pages and 5 figure
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