Performance of a high-work, low-aspect-ratio turbine stator tested with a realistic inlet radial temperature gradient

A 0.767-scale model of a turbine stator designed for the core of a high-bypass-ratio aircraft engine was tested with uniform inlet conditions and with an inlet radial temperature profile simulating engine conditions. The principal measurements were radial and circumferential surveys of stator-exit total temperature, total pressure, and flow angle. The stator-exit flow field was also computed by using a three-dimensional Navier-Stokes solver. Other than temperature, there were no apparent differences in performance due to the inlet conditions. The computed results compared quite well with the experimental results

Higher dimensional models of light Majorana neutrinos confronted by data

We discuss experimental and observational constraints on certain models of higher dimensional light Majorana neutrinos. Models with flavor blind brane-bulk couplings plus three or four flavor diagonal light Majorana neutrinos on the brane, with subsequent mixing induced solely by the Kaluza-Klein tower of states, are found to be excluded by data on the oscillations of solar, atmospheric and reactor neutrinos, taken together with the WMAP upper bound on the sum of neutrino masses. Extra dimensions, if relevant to neutrino mixing, need to discriminate between neutrino flavors.Comment: 5 pages, Revtex4, 2 PS figures. Fig. 2a and 2b from earlier version are now combined into one figure. Minor modifications in the text. References adde

Conversion from linear to circular polarization in FPGA

Context: Radio astronomical receivers are now expanding their frequency range to cover large (octave) fractional bandwidths for sensitivity and spectral flexibility, which makes the design of good analogue circular polarizers challenging. Better polarization purity requires a flatter phase response over increasingly wide bandwidth, which is most easily achieved with digital techniques. They offer the ability to form circular polarization with perfect polarization purity over arbitrarily wide fractional bandwidths, due to the ease of introducing a perfect quadrature phase shift. Further, the rapid improvements in field programmable gate arrays provide the high processing power, low cost, portability and reconfigurability needed to make practical the implementation of the formation of circular polarization digitally. Aims: Here we explore the performance of a circular polarizer implemented with digital techniques. Methods: We designed a digital circular polarizer in which the intermediate frequency signals from a receiver with native linear polarizations were sampled and converted to circular polarization. The frequency-dependent instrumental phase difference and gain scaling factors were determined using an injected noise signal and applied to the two linear polarizations to equalize the transfer characteristics of the two polarization channels. This equalization was performed in 512 frequency channels over a 512 MHz bandwidth. Circular polarization was formed by quadrature phase shifting and summing the equalized linear polarization signals. Results: We obtained polarization purity of -25 dB corresponding to a D-term of 0.06 over the whole bandwidth. Conclusions: This technique enables construction of broad-band radio astronomy receivers with native linear polarization to form circular polarization for VLBI.Comment: 11 pages 8 figure

Unification, Multiplets and Proton Decay

We make a detailed analysis of gauge coupling unification in supersymmetry. When the Standard Model gauge group is embedded in a Grand Unified Theory, new particles often appear below the GUT scale in order to predict the right phenomenology at low energy. While these new particles are beyond the reach of accelerator experiments, they change the prediction of \alpha_s. Here we classify all the (SU(3)_C,SU(2)_L,U(1)_Y) representations which improve or worsen the prediction. Running experimentally determined values of the coupling constants at two loops we calculate the allowed range of masses of fields in these representations. We explore the implication of these results in SU(5) and SU(3)^3 (trinification) models. We discover that minimal trinification predicts light triplet Higgs particles which lead to proton decay with a lifetime in the vicinity of the current experimental bound.Comment: figures replaced, new calculations and references added. A quantitative description of dependence of unification on varying input parameters as well as varying the sparticle spectrum is added. This version to appear in PR

Folding model analysis of proton radioactivity of spherical proton emitters

Half lives of the decays of spherical nuclei away from proton drip line by proton emissions are estimated theoretically. The quantum mechanical tunneling probability is calculated within the WKB approximation. Microscopic proton-nucleus interaction potentials are obtained by single folding the densities of the daughter nuclei with M3Y effective interaction supplemented by a zero-range pseudo-potential for exchange along with the density dependence. Strengths of the M3Y interaction are extracted by fitting its matrix elements in an oscillator basis to those elements of the G-matrix obtained with the Reid-Elliott soft-core nucleon-nucleon interaction. Parameters of the density dependence are obtained from the nuclear matter calculations. Spherical charge distributions are used for calculating the Coulomb interaction potentials. These calculations provide reasonable estimates for the observed proton radioactivity lifetimes of proton rich nuclei for proton emissions from 26 ground and isomeric states of spherical proton emitters.Comment: 6 page

Look before you Hop: Conversational Question Answering over Knowledge Graphs Using Judicious Context Expansion

Fact-centric information needs are rarely one-shot; users typically ask follow-up questions to explore a topic. In such a conversational setting, the user's inputs are often incomplete, with entities or predicates left out, and ungrammatical phrases. This poses a huge challenge to question answering (QA) systems that typically rely on cues in full-fledged interrogative sentences. As a solution, we develop CONVEX: an unsupervised method that can answer incomplete questions over a knowledge graph (KG) by maintaining conversation context using entities and predicates seen so far and automatically inferring missing or ambiguous pieces for follow-up questions. The core of our method is a graph exploration algorithm that judiciously expands a frontier to find candidate answers for the current question. To evaluate CONVEX, we release ConvQuestions, a crowdsourced benchmark with 11,200 distinct conversations from five different domains. We show that CONVEX: (i) adds conversational support to any stand-alone QA system, and (ii) outperforms state-of-the-art baselines and question completion strategies

Position Dependent Mass Schroedinger Equation and Isospectral Potentials : Intertwining Operator approach

Here we have studied first and second-order intertwining approach to generate isospectral partner potentials of position-dependent (effective) mass Schroedinger equation. The second-order intertwiner is constructed directly by taking it as second order linear differential operator with position depndent coefficients and the system of equations arising from the intertwining relationship is solved for the coefficients by taking an ansatz. A complete scheme for obtaining general solution is obtained which is valid for any arbitrary potential and mass function. The proposed technique allows us to generate isospectral potentials with the following spectral modifications: (i) to add new bound state(s), (ii) to remove bound state(s) and (iii) to leave the spectrum unaffected. To explain our findings with the help of an illustration, we have used point canonical transformation (PCT) to obtain the general solution of the position dependent mass Schrodinger equation corresponding to a potential and mass function. It is shown that our results are consistent with the formulation of type A N-fold supersymmetry [14,18] for the particular case N = 1 and N = 2 respectively.Comment: Some references have been adde

TEQUILA: Temporal Question Answering over Knowledge Bases

Question answering over knowledge bases (KB-QA) poses challenges in handling complex questions that need to be decomposed into sub-questions. An important case, addressed here, is that of temporal questions, where cues for temporal relations need to be discovered and handled. We present TEQUILA, an enabler method for temporal QA that can run on top of any KB-QA engine. TEQUILA has four stages. It detects if a question has temporal intent. It decomposes and rewrites the question into non-temporal sub-questions and temporal constraints. Answers to sub-questions are then retrieved from the underlying KB-QA engine. Finally, TEQUILA uses constraint reasoning on temporal intervals to compute final answers to the full question. Comparisons against state-of-the-art baselines show the viability of our method