Evidence for strong extragalactic magnetic fields from Fermi observations of TeV blazars

Magnetic fields in galaxies are produced via the amplification of seed magnetic fields of unknown nature. The seed fields, which might exist in their initial form in the intergalactic medium, were never detected. We report a lower bound $B\ge 3\times 10^{-16}$~gauss on the strength of intergalactic magnetic fields, which stems from the nonobservation of GeV gamma-ray emission from electromagnetic cascade initiated by tera-electron volt gamma-ray in intergalactic medium. The bound improves as $\lambda_B^{-1/2}$ if magnetic field correlation length, $\lambda_B$, is much smaller than a megaparsec. This lower bound constrains models for the origin of cosmic magnetic fields.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figure

The U.S. demographic transition

agriculture;manufacturing;technological change

Engines of liberation

women;technological change

Computational screening of magnetocaloric alloys

An exciting development over the past few decades has been the use of high-throughput computational screening as a means of identifying promising candidate materials for a variety of structural or functional properties. Experimentally, it is often found that the highest-performing materials contain substantial atomic site disorder. These are frequently overlooked in high-throughput computational searches however, due to difficulties in dealing with materials that do not possess simple, well-defined crystallographic unit cells. Here we demonstrate that the screening of magnetocaloric materials with the help of the density functional theory-based magnetic deformation proxy can be extended to systems with atomic site disorder. This is accomplished by thermodynamic averaging of the magnetic deformation for ordered supercells across a solid solution. We show that the highly non-monotonic magnetocaloric properties of the disordered solid solutions Mn(Co$_{1-x}$Fe$_x$)Ge and (Mn$_{1-x}$Ni$_x$)CoGe are successfully captured using this method.Comment: Main text: 8 pages, 6 figures. Supplemental Material: 2 pages, 2 figure

Real space investigation of structural changes at the metal-insulator transition in VO2

Synchrotron X-ray total scattering studies of structural changes in rutile VO2 at the metal-insulator transition temperature of 340 K reveal that monoclinic and tetragonal phases of VO2 coexist in equilibrium, as expected for a first-order phase transition. No evidence for any distinct intermediate phase is seen. Unbiased local structure studies of the changes in V--V distances through the phase transition, using reverse Monte Carlo methods, support the idea of phase coexistence and point to the high degree of correlation in the dimerized low-temperature structure. No evidence for short range V--V correlations that would be suggestive of local dimers is found in the metallic phase.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figure

Beyond BAO: improving cosmological constraints from BOSS with measurement of the void-galaxy cross-correlation

We present a measurement of the anisotropic void-galaxy cross-correlation function in the CMASS galaxy sample of the BOSS DR12 data release. We perform a joint fit to the data for redshift space distortions (RSD) due to galaxy peculiar velocities and anisotropies due to the Alcock-Paczynski (AP) effect, for the first time using a velocity field reconstruction technique to remove the complicating effects of RSD in the void centre positions themselves. Fits to the void-galaxy function give a 1% measurement of the AP parameter combination $D_A(z)H(z)/c = 0.4367\pm 0.0045$ at redshift $z=0.57$, where $D_A$ is the angular diameter distance and $H$ the Hubble parameter, exceeding the precision obtainable from baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) by a factor of ~3.5 and free of systematic errors. From voids alone we also obtain a 10% measure of the growth rate, $f\sigma_8(z=0.57)=0.501\pm0.051$. The parameter degeneracies are orthogonal to those obtained from galaxy clustering. Combining void information with that from BAO and galaxy RSD in the same CMASS sample, we measure $D_A(0.57)/r_s=9.383\pm 0.077$ (at 0.8% precision), $H(0.57)r_s=(14.05\pm 0.14)\;10^3$ kms$^{-1}$Mpc$^{-1}$ (1%) and $f\sigma_8=0.453\pm0.022$ (4.9%), consistent with cosmic microwave background (CMB) measurements from Planck. These represent a factor \sim2 improvement in precision over previous results through the inclusion of void information. Fitting a flat cosmological constant $\Lambda$CDM model to these results in combination with Planck CMB data, we find up to an 11% reduction in uncertainties on $H_0$ and $\Omega_m$ compared to use of the corresponding BOSS consensus values. Constraints on extended models with non-flat geometry and a dark energy of state that differs from $w=-1$ show an even greater improvement.Comment: 22 pages, 15 figures. Accepted for publication in Phys.Rev.D. v2 corrects small error in likelihood analysis; minor changes to figures and text, cosmological results unchanged. Reconstruction and void-finding code available at https://github.com/seshnadathur/Revolver, likelihood analysis code available at https://github.com/seshnadathur/void-galaxy-cosmo-fitte