2,968 research outputs found

    Insights into coacervative and dispersive liquid-phase microextraction strategies with hydrophilic media - a review

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    Since the development of liquid-phase microextraction (LPME), different LPME modes depending on the experimental set-up to carry out the extraction have been described. Dispersive liquid-liquid microextraction (DLLME), in which a small amount of the water-insoluble extraction solvent is dispersed in the sample, is the most successful mode in terms of number of applications reported. Advances within DLLME have been mainly shifted to the incorporation of green, smart and tunable materials as extraction solvents to improve the sustainability and efficiency of the method. In this sense, hydrophilic media represent a promising alternative since the water-miscibility of these substances increases the mass transfer of the analytes to the extraction media, leading to higher extraction efficiencies. Considering the variety of hydrophilic media that have been incorporated in LPME approaches resembling DLLME, this review aims to classify these methods in order to clarify the confusing terminology used for some of the strategies. Hydrophilic media covered in this review comprise surfactants, polar organic solvents, deep eutectic solvents, ionic liquids, water-miscible polymers, and switchable solvents. Different physicochemical mechanisms of phase separation are discussed for each LPME method, including the coacervation phenomena and other driving forces, such as pH, temperature, salting-out effect, metathesis reaction and organic solvents. LPME modes are classified (in cloud-point extraction, coacervative extraction, aqueous biphasic systems, and different DLLME modes depending on the extraction medium) according to both the nature of the water-miscible extraction phase and the driving force of the separation. In addition, the main advances and analytical applications of these methods in the last three years are described.publishe

    Theory and Applications of Non-Relativistic and Relativistic Turbulent Reconnection

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    Realistic astrophysical environments are turbulent due to the extremely high Reynolds numbers. Therefore, the theories of reconnection intended for describing astrophysical reconnection should not ignore the effects of turbulence on magnetic reconnection. Turbulence is known to change the nature of many physical processes dramatically and in this review we claim that magnetic reconnection is not an exception. We stress that not only astrophysical turbulence is ubiquitous, but also magnetic reconnection itself induces turbulence. Thus turbulence must be accounted for in any realistic astrophysical reconnection setup. We argue that due to the similarities of MHD turbulence in relativistic and non-relativistic cases the theory of magnetic reconnection developed for the non-relativistic case can be extended to the relativistic case and we provide numerical simulations that support this conjecture. We also provide quantitative comparisons of the theoretical predictions and results of numerical experiments, including the situations when turbulent reconnection is self-driven, i.e. the turbulence in the system is generated by the reconnection process itself. We show how turbulent reconnection entails the violation of magnetic flux freezing, the conclusion that has really far reaching consequences for many realistically turbulent astrophysical environments. In addition, we consider observational testing of turbulent reconnection as well as numerous implications of the theory. The former includes the Sun and solar wind reconnection, while the latter include the process of reconnection diffusion induced by turbulent reconnection, the acceleration of energetic particles, bursts of turbulent reconnection related to black hole sources as well as gamma ray bursts. Finally, we explain why turbulent reconnection cannot be explained by turbulent resistivity or derived through the mean field approach.Comment: 66 pages, 24 figures, a chapter of the book "Magnetic Reconnection - Concepts and Applications", editors W. Gonzalez, E. N. Parke

    An All-Sky Search for Three Flavors of Neutrinos from Gamma-Ray Bursts with the IceCube Neutrino Observatory

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    We present the results and methodology of a search for neutrinos produced in the decay of charged pions created in interactions between protons and gamma-rays during the prompt emission of 807 gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) over the entire sky. This three-year search is the first in IceCube for shower-like Cherenkov light patterns from electron, muon, and tau neutrinos correlated with GRBs. We detect five low-significance events correlated with five GRBs. These events are consistent with the background expectation from atmospheric muons and neutrinos. The results of this search in combination with those of IceCube's four years of searches for track-like Cherenkov light patterns from muon neutrinos correlated with Northern-Hemisphere GRBs produce limits that tightly constrain current models of neutrino and ultra high energy cosmic ray production in GRB fireballs.Comment: 33 pages, 14 figures; minor changes made to match published version in the Astrophysical Journal, 2016 June 2

    The IceCube Neutrino Observatory - Contributions to ICRC 2015 Part II: Atmospheric and Astrophysical Diffuse Neutrino Searches of All Flavors

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    Papers on atmospheric and astrophysical diffuse neutrino searches of all flavors submitted to the 34th International Cosmic Ray Conference (ICRC 2015, The Hague) by the IceCube Collaboration.Comment: 66 pages, 36 figures, Papers submitted to the 34th International Cosmic Ray Conference, The Hague 2015, v2 has a corrected author lis

    Improved limits on dark matter annihilation in the Sun with the 79-string IceCube detector and implications for supersymmetry

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    We present an improved event-level likelihood formalism for including neutrino telescope data in global fits to new physics. We derive limits on spin-dependent dark matter-proton scattering by employing the new formalism in a re-analysis of data from the 79-string IceCube search for dark matter annihilation in the Sun, including explicit energy information for each event. The new analysis excludes a number of models in the weak-scale minimal supersymmetric standard model (MSSM) for the first time. This work is accompanied by the public release of the 79-string IceCube data, as well as an associated computer code for applying the new likelihood to arbitrary dark matter models.Comment: 24 pages, 8 figs, 1 table. Contact authors: Pat Scott & Matthias Danninger. Likelihood tool available at http://nulike.hepforge.org. v2: small updates to address JCAP referee repor

    Searches for sterile neutrinos with the IceCube detector

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    The IceCube neutrino telescope at the South Pole has measured the atmospheric muon neutrino spectrum as a function of zenith angle and energy in the approximate 320 GeV to 20 TeV range, to search for the oscillation signatures of light sterile neutrinos. No evidence for anomalous nu(mu) or (nu) over bar (mu) disappearance is observed in either of two independently developed analyses, each using one year of atmospheric neutrino data. New exclusion limits are placed on the parameter space of the 3 + 1 model, in which muon antineutrinos experience a strong Mikheyev-Smirnov-Wolfenstein-resonant oscillation. The exclusion limits extend to sin(2)2 theta(24) <= 0.02 at Delta m(2) similar to 0.3 eV(2) at the 90% confidence level. The allowed region from global analysis of appearance experiments, including LSND and MiniBooNE, is excluded at approximately the 99% confidence level for the global best-fit value of vertical bar U-e4 vertical bar(2)

    The contribution of Fermi-2LAC blazars to the diffuse TeV-PeV neutrino flux

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    The recent discovery of a diffuse cosmic neutrino flux extending up to PeV energies raises the question of which astrophysical sources generate this signal. One class of extragalactic sources which may produce such high-energy neutrinos are blazars. We present a likelihood analysis searching for cumulative neutrino emission from blazars in the 2nd Fermi-LAT AGN catalogue (2LAC) using an IceCube neutrino dataset 2009-12 which was optimised for the detection of individual sources. In contrast to previous searches with IceCube, the populations investigated contain up to hundreds of sources, the largest one being the entire blazar sample in the 2LAC catalogue. No significant excess is observed and upper limits for the cumulative flux from these populations are obtained. These constrain the maximum contribution of the 2LAC blazars to the observed astrophysical neutrino flux to be 27%27 \% or less between around 10 TeV and 2 PeV, assuming equipartition of flavours at Earth and a single power-law spectrum with a spectral index of 2.5-2.5. We can still exclude that the 2LAC blazars (and sub-populations) emit more than 50%50 \% of the observed neutrinos up to a spectral index as hard as 2.2-2.2 in the same energy range. Our result takes into account that the neutrino source count distribution is unknown, and it does not assume strict proportionality of the neutrino flux to the measured 2LAC γ\gamma-ray signal for each source. Additionally, we constrain recent models for neutrino emission by blazars.Comment: 18 pages, 22 figure

    Characterization of the Atmospheric Muon Flux in IceCube

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    Muons produced in atmospheric cosmic ray showers account for the by far dominant part of the event yield in large-volume underground particle detectors. The IceCube detector, with an instrumented volume of about a cubic kilometer, has the potential to conduct unique investigations on atmospheric muons by exploiting the large collection area and the possibility to track particles over a long distance. Through detailed reconstruction of energy deposition along the tracks, the characteristics of muon bundles can be quantified, and individual particles of exceptionally high energy identified. The data can then be used to constrain the cosmic ray primary flux and the contribution to atmospheric lepton fluxes from prompt decays of short-lived hadrons. In this paper, techniques for the extraction of physical measurements from atmospheric muon events are described and first results are presented. The multiplicity spectrum of TeV muons in cosmic ray air showers for primaries in the energy range from the knee to the ankle is derived and found to be consistent with recent results from surface detectors. The single muon energy spectrum is determined up to PeV energies and shows a clear indication for the emergence of a distinct spectral component from prompt decays of short-lived hadrons. The magnitude of the prompt flux, which should include a substantial contribution from light vector meson di-muon decays, is consistent with current theoretical predictions.Comment: 36 pages, 39 figure
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