VLA Imaging of the Disk Surrounding the Nearby Young Star TW Hya

The TW Hya system is perhaps the closest analog to the early solar nebula. We have used the Very Large Array to image TW Hya at wavelengths of 7mm and 3.6 cm with resolutions 0.1 arcseconds (about 5 AU) and 1.0 arcseconds (about 50 AU), respectively. The 7mm emission is extended and appears dominated by a dusty disk of radius larger than 50 AU surrounding the star. The 3.6 cm emission is unresolved and likely arises from an ionized wind or gyrosynchrotron activity. The dust spectrum and spatially resolved 7mm images of the TW Hya disk are fitted by a simple model with temperature and surface density described by radial power laws, $T(r)\propto r^{-0.5}$ and $\Sigma(r) \propto r^{-1}$. These properties are consistent with an irradiated gaseous accretion disk of mass $\sim0.03~{\rm M_{\odot}}$ with an accretion rate $\sim10^{-8}~{\rm M_{\odot}yr^{-1}}$ and viscosity parameter $\alpha = 0.01$. The estimates of mass and mass accretion rates are uncertain as the gas-to-dust ratio in the TW Hya disk may have evolved from the standard interstellar value.Comment: 13 pages, 3 figures, accepted by ApJ Letter

Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless Transition in Spin-Charge Separated Superconductor

A model for spin-charge separated superconductivity in two dimensions is introduced where the phases of the spinon and holon order parameters couple gauge-invariantly to a statistical gauge-field representing chiral spin-fluctuations. The model is analyzed in the continuum limit and in the low-temperature limit. In both cases we find that physical electronic phase correlations show a superconducting-normal phase transition of the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless type, while statistical gauge-field excitations are found to be strictly gapless. The normal-to-superconductor phase boundary for this model is also obtained as a function of carrier density, where we find that its shape compares favorably with that of the experimentally observed phase diagram for the oxide superconductors.Comment: 35 pages, TeX, CSLA-P-93-