Relativistic Quantum Scattering on a Cone

We study the relativistic quantum mechanical scattering of a bosonic particle by an infinite straight cosmic string, considering the non-minimal coupling between the bosonic field and the scalar curvature. In this case, an effective two-dimensional delta-function interaction takes place besides the usual topological scattering and a renormalization procedure is necessary in order to treat the problem that appears in connection with the delta-function.Comment: 22 pages, LATEX fil

Anaesthesia - related fears - a cross - sectional survey among the portuguese population

Introduction: Patients experience preoperative anxiety. The objective of this study was to assess patients’ fears concerning anaesthesia and evaluate possible associations with sociodemographic background and previous anaesthesia. Methods: A survey was filled preoperatively, for 6 months, including anaesthesia-related fears, sociodemographic data, previous anaesthesia and surgery, current surgical and anaesthetic procedure, and preferred anaesthesia technique. Descriptive statistics, principal component analysis, Chi-square test, t-test and ANOVA were used for statistical analysis. Results: 153 questionnaires were collected. The mean age was 58 years, 61.4% were female and 59.5% employed. 47.1% had an anaesthesia consultation before. 49.7% were ASA II. 78.4% had been submitted to surgery before, 81.7% to anaesthesia and 14.5% had regional anaesthesia. In 73.5% general anaesthesia preferred. Half of patients with previous regional anaesthesia favoured this technique. The most relevant fears were “being paralysed because of anaesthesia”, “not waking up” and “waking up during surgery”. The least relevant were “fasting incapacity”, “having nightmares” and “speaking of personal matters”. A statistically significant relation was observed between the fear of “feeling pain after surgery” and having a previous anaesthetic experience. Female and unemployed patients were more concerned with general complications, while male patients gave more importance to awareness and paralysis. Conclusion: Paralysis after anaesthesia, intraoperative awareness and death were the main concerns of our inquiries.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Caracterização de propriedade modal e levantamento de custos de produção de peixes redondos na região de Araguaína, TO.

Araguaína, munícipio localizado na região Norte do estado do Tocantins, recebeu no dia 22 de novembro de 2019 um painel de levamento de custos da produção aquícola da região. Este painel foi realizado pela Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuária (Embrapa) em parceria com o Instituto de Desenvolvimento Rural do Estado do Tocantins (Ruraltins). Essa ação faz parte do projeto SITE Aquicultura e contou com a participação de 10 pessoas, entre produtores e técnicos da região. O objetivo do painel é caracterizar a propriedade modal da região e levantar dados de custo de produção da piscicultura a partir das informações disponibilizadas no momento da reunião pelos participantes com base no último ciclo produtivo encerrado.bitstream/item/224659/1/SITE-aquicultura-03.pd

Water regimes on the development of accessions of the Manihot genus.

The objective of this work was to select water deficit-tolerant accessions of the genus Manihot, through morphological characters under different water regimes. The experiment was conducted in a randomized block design, using a split-plot arrangement with plots consisting of tree water regimes (simulated rainfall and water depth of 100 and 20% crop evapotranspiration (ETc)), and subplots consisting of eight accessions of the genus Manihot(Gema-de-Ovo and Engana-Ladrão from the species M. esculenta Crantz, and BGMS-115, BGMS-110, BGMS-102, BGMS-79, BGMS-24, and BGMS-48 from Manihot sp.). The accessions were evaluated considering two crop cycles: the first had 120 and 60 days from the application of the treatments. Plant height, stem diameter, number of leaves, leaf lobe length and shoot dry mass production were evaluated. For each cropping cycle, a split-plot analysis of variance was performed. The highest genotypic means were expressed by the accessions BGMS-115, BGMS-102, BGMS-79 and BGMS-24 for most of the analyzed variables, regardless of the cultivation cycle. For the characteristic shoot dry mass production, accessions BGMS-102 and BGMS-79 showed the best performances under conditions of limited water regime (20% ETc), regardless of the cropping cycle. Accession BGMS-102 was also grouped in the group with the highest genotypic means, for this trait, in treatments with rain simulation and 100% ETc, in the first cycle, demonstrating that, under stress conditions, this accession is an option to tolerate low water precipitation and responds well when higher precipitation occurs

Photometric redshifts and clustering of emission line galaxies selected jointly by DES and eBOSS

We present the results of the first test plates of the extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey. This paper focuses on the emission line galaxies (ELG) population targetted from the Dark Energy Survey (DES) photometry. We analyse the success rate, efficiency, redshift distribution, and clustering properties of the targets. From the 9000 spectroscopic redshifts targetted, 4600 have been selected from the DES photometry. The total success rate for redshifts between 0.6 and 1.2 is 71\% and 68\% respectively for a bright and faint, on average more distant, samples including redshifts measured from a single strong emission line. We find a mean redshift of 0.8 and 0.87, with 15 and 13\% of unknown redshifts respectively for the bright and faint samples. In the redshift range 0.6<z<1.2, for the most secure spectroscopic redshifts, the mean redshift for the bright and faint sample is 0.85 and 0.9 respectively. Star contamination is lower than 2\%. We measure a galaxy bias averaged on scales of 1 and 10~Mpc/h of 1.72 \pm 0.1 for the bright sample and of 1.78 \pm 0.12 for the faint sample. The error on the galaxy bias have been obtained propagating the errors in the correlation function to the fitted parameters. This redshift evolution for the galaxy bias is in agreement with theoretical expectations for a galaxy population with MB-5\log h < -21.0. We note that biasing is derived from the galaxy clustering relative to a model for the mass fluctuations. We investigate the quality of the DES photometric redshifts and find that the outlier fraction can be reduced using a comparison between template fitting and neural network, or using a random forest algorithm

COSMOGRAIL XVI: Time delays for the quadruply imaged quasar DES J0408-5354 with high-cadence photometric monitoring

We present time-delay measurements for the new quadruply imaged quasar DES J0408-5354, the first quadruply imaged quasar found in the Dark Energy Survey (DES). Our result is made possible by implementing a new observational strategy using almost daily observations with the MPIA 2.2m telescope at La Silla observatory and deep exposures reaching a signal-to-noise ratio of about 1000 per quasar image. This data quality allows us to catch small photometric variations (a few mmag rms) of the quasar, acting on temporal scales much shorter than microlensing, hence making the time delay measurement very robust against microlensing. In only 7 months we measure very accurately one of the time delays in DES J0408-5354: Dt(AB) = -112.1 +- 2.1 days (1.8%) using only the MPIA 2.2m data. In combination with data taken with the 1.2m Euler Swiss telescope, we also measure two delays involving the D component of the system Dt(AD) = -155.5 +- 12.8 days (8.2%) and Dt(BD) = -42.4 +- 17.6 days (41%), where all the error bars include systematics. Turning these time delays into cosmological constraints will require deep HST imaging or ground-based Adaptive Optics (AO), and information on the velocity field of the lensing galaxy.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures, accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysic

Astrometric calibration and performance of the Dark Energy Camera

We characterize the ability of the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) to perform relative astrometry across its 500~Mpix, 3 deg^2 science field of view, and across 4 years of operation. This is done using internal comparisons of ~4x10^7 measurements of high-S/N stellar images obtained in repeat visits to fields of moderate stellar density, with the telescope dithered to move the sources around the array. An empirical astrometric model includes terms for: optical distortions; stray electric fields in the CCD detectors; chromatic terms in the instrumental and atmospheric optics; shifts in CCD relative positions of up to ~10 um when the DECam temperature cycles; and low-order distortions to each exposure from changes in atmospheric refraction and telescope alignment. Errors in this astrometric model are dominated by stochastic variations with typical amplitudes of 10-30 mas (in a 30 s exposure) and 5-10 arcmin coherence length, plausibly attributed to Kolmogorov-spectrum atmospheric turbulence. The size of these atmospheric distortions is not closely related to the seeing. Given an astrometric reference catalog at density ~0.7 arcmin^{-2}, e.g. from Gaia, the typical atmospheric distortions can be interpolated to 7 mas RMS accuracy (for 30 s exposures) with 1 arcmin coherence length for residual errors. Remaining detectable error contributors are 2-4 mas RMS from unmodelled stray electric fields in the devices, and another 2-4 mas RMS from focal plane shifts between camera thermal cycles. Thus the astrometric solution for a single DECam exposure is accurate to 3-6 mas (0.02 pixels, or 300 nm) on the focal plane, plus the stochastic atmospheric distortion.Comment: Submitted to PAS

H0LiCOW X: Spectroscopic/imaging survey and galaxy-group identification around the strong gravitational lens system WFI2033-4723

Galaxies and galaxy groups located along the line of sight towards gravitationally lensed quasars produce high-order perturbations of the gravitational potential at the lens position. When these perturbation are too large, they can induce a systematic error on $H_0$ of a few-percent if the lens system is used for cosmological inference and the perturbers are not explicitly accounted for in the lens model. In this work, we present a detailed characterization of the environment of the lens system WFI2033-4723 ($z_{\rm src} = 1.662$, $z_{\rm lens}$ = 0.6575), one of the core targets of the H0LICOW project for which we present cosmological inferences in a companion paper (Rusu et al. 2019). We use the Gemini and ESO-Very Large telescopes to measure the spectroscopic redshifts of the brightest galaxies towards the lens, and use the ESO-MUSE integral field spectrograph to measure the velocity-dispersion of the lens ($\sigma_{\rm {los}}= 250^{+15}_{-21}$ km/s) and of several nearby galaxies. In addition, we measure photometric redshifts and stellar masses of all galaxies down to $i < 23$ mag, mainly based on Dark Energy Survey imaging (DR1). Our new catalog, complemented with literature data, more than doubles the number of known galaxy spectroscopic redshifts in the direct vicinity of the lens, expanding to 116 (64) the number of spectroscopic redshifts for galaxies separated by less than 3 arcmin (2 arcmin) from the lens. Using the flexion-shift as a measure of the amplitude of the gravitational perturbation, we identify 2 galaxy groups and 3 galaxies that require specific attention in the lens models. The ESO MUSE data enable us to measure the velocity-dispersions of three of these galaxies. These results are essential for the cosmological inference analysis presented in Rusu et al. (2019).Comment: Matches the version accepted for publication by MNRAS. Note that this paper previously appeared as H0LICOW X

Quasar accretion disk sizes from continuum reverberation mapping in the DES standard-star fields

Measurements of the physical properties of accretion disks in active galactic nuclei are important for better understanding the growth and evolution of supermassive black holes. We present the accretion disk sizes of 22 quasars from continuum reverberation mapping with data from the Dark Energy Survey (DES) standard star fields and the supernova C fields. We construct continuum lightcurves with the \textit{griz} photometry that span five seasons of DES observations. These data sample the time variability of the quasars with a cadence as short as one day, which corresponds to a rest frame cadence that is a factor of a few higher than most previous work. We derive time lags between bands with both JAVELIN and the interpolated cross-correlation function method, and fit for accretion disk sizes using the JAVELIN Thin Disk model. These new measurements include disks around black holes with masses as small as $\sim10^7$ $M_{\odot}$, which have equivalent sizes at 2500\AA \, as small as $\sim 0.1$ light days in the rest frame. We find that most objects have accretion disk sizes consistent with the prediction of the standard thin disk model when we take disk variability into account. We have also simulated the expected yield of accretion disk measurements under various observational scenarios for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope Deep Drilling Fields. We find that the number of disk measurements would increase significantly if the default cadence is changed from three days to two days or one day.Comment: 33 pages, 24 figure