25,003 research outputs found
Remote sensing of atmospheric winds using a coherent, CW lidar and speckle-turbulence interaction
Speckle turbulence interaction has the potential for allowing single ended remote sensing of the path averaged vector crosswind in a plane perpendicular to the line of sight to a target. If a laser transmitter is used to illuminate a target, the resultant speckle field generated by the target is randomly perturbed by the atmospheric turbulence as it propagates back to the location of the transmitter-receiver. When a cross wind is present, this scintillation pattern will move with time across the receiver. A continuous wave (cw) laser transmitter of modest power level in conjunction with optical heterodyne detection was used to exploit the speckel turbulence interaction and measure the crosswind. The use of a cw transmitter at 10.6 microns and optical heterodyne detection has many advantages over direct detection and a double pulsed source in the visible or near infrared. These advantages include the availability of compact, reliable and inexpensive transmitters, better penetration of smoke, dust and fog; stable output power; low beam pointing jitter; and considerably reduced complexity in the receiver electronics
Stellar Motion around Spiral Arms: Gaia Mock Data
We compare the stellar motion around a spiral arm created in two different
scenarios, transient/co-rotating spiral arms and density-wave-like spiral arms.
We generate Gaia mock data from snapshots of the simulations following these
two scenarios using our stellar population code, SNAPDRAGONS, which takes into
account dust extinction and the expected Gaia errors. We compare the observed
rotation velocity around a spiral arm similar in position to the Perseus arm,
and find that there is a clear difference in the velocity features around the
spiral arm between the co-rotating spiral arm and the density-wave-like spiral
arm. Our result demonstrates that the volume and accuracy of the Gaia data are
sufficient to clearly distinguish these two scenarios of the spiral arms.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure, to appear in the proceedings of "The Milky Way
Unravelled by Gaia: GREAT Science from the Gaia Data Releases", Barcelona,
1-5 December 2014, eds. N. Walton, F. Figueras, C. Soubira
Neural Modeling and Control of Diesel Engine with Pollution Constraints
The paper describes a neural approach for modelling and control of a
turbocharged Diesel engine. A neural model, whose structure is mainly based on
some physical equations describing the engine behaviour, is built for the
rotation speed and the exhaust gas opacity. The model is composed of three
interconnected neural submodels, each of them constituting a nonlinear
multi-input single-output error model. The structural identification and the
parameter estimation from data gathered on a real engine are described. The
neural direct model is then used to determine a neural controller of the
engine, in a specialized training scheme minimising a multivariable criterion.
Simulations show the effect of the pollution constraint weighting on a
trajectory tracking of the engine speed. Neural networks, which are flexible
and parsimonious nonlinear black-box models, with universal approximation
capabilities, can accurately describe or control complex nonlinear systems,
with little a priori theoretical knowledge. The presented work extends optimal
neuro-control to the multivariable case and shows the flexibility of neural
optimisers. Considering the preliminary results, it appears that neural
networks can be used as embedded models for engine control, to satisfy the more
and more restricting pollutant emission legislation. Particularly, they are
able to model nonlinear dynamics and outperform during transients the control
schemes based on static mappings.Comment: 15 page
Generic dynamics of 4-dimensional C2 Hamiltonian systems
We study the dynamical behaviour of Hamiltonian flows defined on
4-dimensional compact symplectic manifolds. We find the existence of a
C2-residual set of Hamiltonians for which every regular energy surface is
either Anosov or it is in the closure of energy surfaces with zero Lyapunov
exponents a.e. This is in the spirit of the Bochi-Mane dichotomy for
area-preserving diffeomorphisms on compact surfaces and its continuous-time
version for 3-dimensional volume-preserving flows
Another short-burst host galaxy with an optically obscured high star formation rate: The case of GRB 071227
We report on radio continuum observations of the host galaxy of the short
gamma-ray burst 071227 (z=0.381) with the Australia Telescope Compact Array
(ATCA). We detect the galaxy in the 5.5 GHz band with an integrated flux
density of Fnu = 43 +/- 11 microJy, corresponding to an unobscured
star-formation rate (SFR) of about 24 Msun/yr, forty times higher than what was
found from optical emission lines. Among the ~30 well-identified and studied
host galaxies of short bursts this is the third case where the host is found to
undergo an episode of intense star formation. This suggests that a fraction of
all short-burst progenitors hosted in star-forming galaxies could be physically
related to recent star formation activity, implying a relatively short merger
time scale.Comment: 6 pages, ApJ, accepted for publicatio
Using the Sound Card as a Timer
Experiments in mechanics can often be timed by the sounds they produce. In
such cases, digital audio recordings provide a simple way of measuring time
intervals with an accuracy comparable to that of photogate timers. We
illustrate this with an experiment in the physics of sports: to measure the
speed of a hard-kicked soccer ball.Comment: 3 pages, 4 figures, Late
Northern JHK Standard Stars for Array Detectors
We report J, H and K photometry of 86 stars in 40 fields in the northern
hemisphere. The fields are smaller than or comparable to a 4x4 arcmin
field-of-view, and are roughly uniformly distributed over the sky, making them
suitable for a homogeneous broadband calibration network for near-infrared
panoramic detectors. K magnitudes range from 8.5 to 14, and J-K colors from
-0.1 to 1.2. The photometry is derived from a total of 3899 reduced images;
each star has been measured, on average, 26.0 times per filter on 5.5 nights.
Typical errors on the photometry are about 0.012.Comment: 10 pages including 3 figures, one separate figure on four pages. The
finding chart of the AS-30 field and a few coordinates have been corrected.
GIF finding charts can also be found at
http://www.arcetri.astro.it/~hunt/std.htm
Coarsening in surface growth models without slope selection
We study conserved models of crystal growth in one dimension [] which are linearly unstable and develop a mound
structure whose typical size L increases in time (). If the local
slope () increases indefinitely, depends on the exponent
characterizing the large behaviour of the surface current (): for and for
.Comment: 7 pages, 2 EPS figures. To be published in J. Phys. A (Letter to the
Editor
Morphology of the 12-micron Seyfert Galaxies: II. Optical and Near-Infrared Image Atlas
We present 263 optical and near-infrared (NIR) images for 42 Seyfert 1s and
48 Seyfert 2s, selected from the Extended 12-micron Galaxy Sample.
Elliptically-averaged profiles are derived from the images, and isophotal radii
and magnitudes are calculated from these. We also report virtual aperture
photometry, that judging from comparison with previous work, is accurate to
roughly 0.05mag in the optical, and 0.07mag in the NIR. Our B-band isophotal
magnitude and radii, obtained from ellipse fitting, are in good agreement with
those of RC3. When compared with the B band, V, I, J, and K isophotal diameters
show that the colors in the outer regions of Seyferts are consistent with the
colors of normal spirals. Differences in the integrated isophotal colors and
comparison with a simple model show that the active nucleus+bulge is stronger
and redder in the NIR than in the optical. Finally, roughly estimated Seyfert
disk surface brightnesses are significantly brighter in B and K than those in
normal spirals of similar morphological type.Comment: 17 pgs including figures; Table 2 is a separate file. Complete Figure
1 is available by contacting the authors. Accepted for publication in ApJ
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