Development of a high capacity toroidal Ni/Cd cell

A nickel cadmium battery design which can offer better thermal management, higher energy density and much lower cost than the state-of-the-art is emphasized. A toroidal Ni/Cd cell concept is described. It was critically reviewed and used to develop two cell designs for practical implementation. One is a double swaged and the other a swaged welded configuration

Advanced photovoltaic power systems using tandem GaAs/GaSb concentrator modules

In 1989, Boeing announced the fabrication of a tandem gallium concentrator solar cell with an energy conversion efficiency of 30 percent. This research breakthrough has now led to panels which are significantly smaller, lighter, more radiation resistant, and potentially less expensive than the traditional silicon flat plate electric power supply. The new Boeing tandem concentrator (BTC) module uses an array of lightweight silicone Fresnel lenses mounted on the front side of a light weight aluminum honeycomb structure to focus sunlight onto small area solar cells mounted on a thin back plane. This module design is shown schematically. The tandem solar cell in this new module consists of a gallium arsenide light sensitive cell with a 24 percent energy conversion efficiency stacked on top of a gallium antimonide infrared sensitive cell with a conversion efficiency of 6 percent. This gives a total efficiency 30 percent for the cell-stack. The lens optical efficiency is typically 85 percent. Discounting for efficiency losses associated with lens packing, cell wiring, and cell operating temperature still allows for a module efficiency of 22 percent which leads to a module power density of 300 Watts/sq. m. This performance provides more than twice the power density available from a single crystal silicon flat plate module and at least four times the power density available from amorphous silicon modules. The fact that the lenses are only 0.010 ft. thick and the aluminum foil back plane is only 0.003 ft. thick leads to a very lightweight module. Although the cells are an easy to handle thickness of 0.020 ft., the fact that they are small, occupying one-twenty-fifth of the module area, means that they add little to the module weight. After summing all the module weights and given the high module power, we find that we are able to fabricate BTC modules with specific power of 100 watts/kg

Tandem concentrator solar cells with 30 percent (AMO) power conversion efficiency

Very high efficiency concentrator solar panels are envisioned as economical and reliable electrical power subsystems for space based platforms of the future. GaAs concentrator cells with very high efficiencies and good sub-bandgap transmissions can be fabricated on standard wafers. GaSb booster cell development is progressing very well; performance characteristics are still improving dramatically. Consistent GaAs/GaSb stacked cell AMO efficiencies greater than 30 percent are expected

Dynamical properties of ultracold bosons in an optical lattice

We study the excitation spectrum of strongly correlated lattice bosons for the Mott-insulating phase and for the superfluid phase close to localization. Within a Schwinger-boson mean-field approach we find two gapped modes in the Mott insulator and the combination of a sound mode (Goldstone) and a gapped (Higgs) mode in the superfluid. To make our findings comparable with experimental results, we calculate the dynamic structure factor as well as the linear response to the optical lattice modulation introduced by Stoeferle et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 92, 130403 (2004)]. We find that the puzzling finite frequency absorption observed in the superfluid phase could be explained via the excitation of the gapped (Higgs) mode. We check the consistency of our results with an adapted f-sum-rule and propose an extension of the experimental technique by Stoeferle et al. to further verify our findings.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figure

Heavy Flavour Baryons in Hyper Central Model

Heavy flavor baryons containing single and double charm (beauty) quarks with light flavor combinations are studied using the hyper central description of the three-body problem. The confinement potential is assumed as hyper central coulomb plus power potential with power index $\upsilon$. The ground state masses of the heavy flavor, $J^P={1/2}^+$ and ${3/2}^+$ baryons are computed for different power index, $\nu$ starting from 0.5 to 2.0. The predicted masses are found to attain a saturated value in each case of quark combinations beyond the power index $\nu=1.0$.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figure

Hydrodynamical Simulations of the Lyman Alpha Forest: Model Comparisons

We investigate the properties of the Lyman alpha forest as predicted by numerical simulations for a range of currently viable cosmological models. This is done in order to understand the dependencies of the forest on cosmological parameters. Focusing on the redshift range from two to four, we show that: (1) most of the evolution in the distributions of optical depth, flux and column density can be understood by simple scaling relations, (2) the shape of optical depth distribution is a sensitive probe of the amplitude of density fluctuations on scales of a few hundred kpc, (3) the mean of the b distribution (a measure of the width of the absorption lines) is also very sensitive to fluctuations on these scales, and decreases as they increase. We perform a preliminary comparison to observations, where available. A number of other properties are also examined, including the evolution in the number of lines, the two-point flux distribution and the HeII opacity.Comment: 37 pages, 21 figures, submitted to Ap

Emission from the D1D5 CFT: Higher Twists

We study a certain class of nonextremal D1D5 geometries and their ergoregion emission. Using a detailed CFT computation and the formalism developed in arXiv:0906.2015 [hep-th], we compute the full spectrum and rate of emission from the geometries and find exact agreement with the gravity answer. Previously, only part of the spectrum had been reproduced using a CFT description. We close with a discussion of the context and significance of the calculation.Comment: 39 pages, 6 figures, late

New instability of non-extremal black holes: spitting out supertubes

We search for stable bound states of non-extremal rotating three-charge black holes in five dimensions (Cvetic-Youm black holes) and supertubes. We do this by studying the potential of supertube probes in the non-extremal black hole background and find that generically the marginally bound state of the supersymmetric limit becomes metastable and disappears with non-extremality (higher temperature). However near extremality there is a range of parameters allowing for stable bound states, which have lower energy than the supertube-black hole merger. Angular momentum is crucial for this effect. We use this setup in the D1-D5 decoupling limit to map a thermodynamic instability of the CFT (a new phase which is entropically dominant over the black hole phase) to a tunneling instability of the black hole towards the supertube-black hole bound state. This generalizes the results of ArXiv:1108.0411 [hep-th], which mapped an entropy enigma in the bulk to the dual CFT in a supersymmetric setup.Comment: 28 pages + appendix, 15 figures, v2: References added, typos corrected. Version published in JHE

Comments on black holes I: The possibility of complementarity

We comment on a recent paper of Almheiri, Marolf, Polchinski and Sully who argue against black hole complementarity based on the claim that an infalling observer 'burns' as he approaches the horizon. We show that in fact measurements made by an infalling observer outside the horizon are statistically identical for the cases of vacuum at the horizon and radiation emerging from a stretched horizon. This forces us to follow the dynamics all the way to the horizon, where we need to know the details of Planck scale physics. We note that in string theory the fuzzball structure of microstates does not give any place to 'continue through' this Planck regime. AMPS argue that interactions near the horizon preclude traditional complementarity. But the conjecture of 'fuzzball complementarity' works in the opposite way: the infalling quantum is absorbed by the fuzzball surface, and it is the resulting dynamics that is conjectured to admit a complementary description.Comment: 34 pages, 6 figures, v3: clarifications & references adde