High refractive index of melanin in shiny occipital feathers of a bird of paradise

Male Lawes's Parotia, a bird of paradise, use the highly directional reflection of the structurally colored, brilliant-silvery occipital feathers in their courtship display. As in other birds, the structural coloration is produced by ordered melanin pigmentation. The barbules of the Parotia's occipital feathers, with thickness ~3 µm, contain 6–7 layers of densely packed melanin rodlets (diameter ~0.25 µm, length ~2 µm). The effectively ~0.2 µm thick melanin layers separated by ~0.2 µm thick keratin layers create a multilayer interference reflector. Reflectance measurements yielded peak wavelengths in the near-infrared at ~1.3 µm, i.e., far outside the visible wavelength range. With the Jamin-Lebedeff interference microscopy method recently developed for pigmented media, we here determined the refractive index of the intact barbules. We thus derived the wavelength dependence of the refractive index of the barbules' melanin to be 1.7–1.8 in the visible wavelength range. Implementing the anatomical and refractive index data in an optical multilayer model, we calculated the barbules' reflectance, transmittance and absorptance spectra, thereby confirming measured spectra

Angular and spectral sensitivity of fly photoreceptors. III. Dependence on the pupil mechanism in the blowfly Calliphora

A wave optics model for the facet lens-rhabdomere system of fly eyes is used to analyze the dependence of the angular and spectral sensitivity of R1-6 photoreceptors on the pupil mechanism. This assembly of light-absorbing pigment granules in the soma interacts with the waveguide modes propagating in the rhabdomere. A fly rhabdomere carries two modes in the middle wavelength range and four modes at short wavelengths, depending on the rhabdomere diameter and the angle of the incident light flux. The extension of the mode to outside the rhabdomere strongly depends on wavelength, and this dependence plays a determinant role in the light control function of the pupil. The absorbance spectrum of the pigment in the pupil granules is severely depressed at short wavelengths by waveguide effects, resulting in a distinct blue peak. Accordingly, pupil closure suppresses the photoreceptor's spectral sensitivity much more in the blue-green than in the UV. The pupil only narrows the angular sensitivity at short wavelengths. The geometrical size of the rhabdomere governs the angular sensitivity of fly photoreceptors in the dark-adapted state, but diffraction takes over in the fully light-adapted state

A Forward Branching Phase-Space Generator

We develop a forward branching phase-space generator for use in next-to-leading order parton level event generators. By performing 2 -> 3 branchings from a fixed jet phase-space point, all bremsstrahlung events contributing to the given jet configuration are generated. The resulting phase-space integration is three-dimensional irrespective of the considered jet multiplicity. In this first study, we use the forward branching phase-space generator to calculate in the leading-color approximation next-to-leading order corrections to fully differential gluonic jet configurations.Comment: 35 pages, 5 figures, 1 tabl

Derivation of Photochrome Absorption Spectra from Absorbance Difference Measurements

A method is presented with the aid of which the absorption spectrum of at least one of the two states of a photochrome can be calculated from experimental difference spectra. It is shown that the method can be applied to (biological) photochromes contained in inhomogeneous media together with absorbing, non-photochromic impurities. This medium may have the properties of an optical waveguide

Non-perturbative proton stability

Proton decay is a generic prediction of GUT models and is therefore an important channel to detect the existence of unification or to set limits on GUT models. Current bounds on the proton lifetime are around 10^33 years, which sets stringent limits on the GUT scale. These limits are obtained under `reasonable' assumptions about the size of the hadronic matrix elements. In this paper we present a non-perturbative calculation of the hadronic matrix elements within the chiral bag model of the proton. We argue that there is an exponential suppression of the matrix elements, due to non-perturbative QCD, that stifles proton decay by orders of magnitude -- potentially O(10^-10). This suppression is present for small quark masses and is due to the chiral symmetry breaking of QCD. Such a suppression has clear implications for GUT models and could resuscitate several scenarios

The exact theory for scattering of waves by thick holes in a slab and other objects with non-separable geometries

The theory for scattering of electromagnetic waves is developed for scattering objects for which the natural modes of the field inside the object do not couple one-to-one with those outside the scatterer. Key feature of the calculation of the scattered fields is the introduction of a new set of modes. As an example, we calculate the reflected and transmitted fields generated by an electromagnetic plane wave that impinges upon a multilayer slab of which the layers are stacked perpendicular to the boundary planes. As this is the geometry of a thick plate with slits our theory encompasses the exact scattering theory of electromagnetic waves by a thick plate with slits.