4,542 research outputs found
Currents between tethered electrodes in a magnetized laboratory plasma
Laboratory experiments on important plasma physics issues of electrodynamic tethers were performed. These included current propagation, formation of wave wings, limits of current collection, nonlinear effects and instabilities, charging phenomena, and characteristics of transmission lines in plasmas. The experiments were conducted in a large afterglow plasma. The current system was established with a small electron-emitting hot cathode tethered to an electron-collecting anode, both movable across the magnetic field and energized by potential difference up to V approx.=100 T(sub e). The total current density in space and time was obtained from complete measurements of the perturbed magnetic field. The fast spacecraft motion was reproduced in the laboratory by moving the tethered electrodes in small increments, applying delayed current pulses, and reconstructing the net field by a linear superposition of locally emitted wavelets. With this technique, the small-amplitude dc current pattern is shown to form whistler wings at each electrode instead of the generally accepted Alfven wings. For the beam electrode, the whistler wing separates from the field-aligned beam which carries no net current. Large amplitude return currents to a stationary anode generate current-driven microinstabilities, parallel electric fields, ion depletions, current disruptions and time-varying electrode charging. At appropriately high potentials and neutral densities, excess neutrals are ionized near the anode. The anode sheath emits high-frequency electron transit-time oscillations at the sheath-plasma resonance. The beam generates Langmuir turbulence, ion sound turbulence, electron heating, space charge fields, and Hall currents. An insulated, perfectly conducting transmission line embedded in the plasma becomes lossy due to excitation of whistler waves and magnetic field diffusion effects. The implications of the laboratory observations on electrodynamic tethers in space are discussed
Laboratory experiments on current flow between stationary and moving electrodes in magnetoplasmas
Laboratory experiments were performed in order to investigate the basic physics of current flow between tethered electrodes in magnetoplasmas. The major findings are summarized. The experiments are performed in an effectively very large laboratory plasma in which not only the nonlinear current collection is addressed but also the propagation and spread of currents, the formation of current wings by moving electrodes, the current closure, and radiation from transmission lines. The laboratory plasma consists of a pulsed dc discharge whose Maxwellian afterglow provides a quiescent, current-free uniform background plasma. Electrodes consisting of collectors and electron emitters are inserted into the plasma and a pulsed voltage is applied between two floating electrodes via insulated transmission lines. Besides the applied current in the wire, the total current density in the plasma is obtained from space and time resolved magnetic probe measurements via Maxwell's law. Langmuir probes yield the plasma parameters
Prospects for probing the gluon density in protons using heavy quarkonium hadroproduction
We examine carefully bottomonia hadroproduction in proton colliders,
especially focusing on the LHC, as a way of probing the gluon density in
protons. To this end we develop some previous work, getting quantitative
predictions and concluding that our proposal can be useful to perform
consistency checks of the parameterization sets of different parton
distribution functions.Comment: LaTeX, 14 pages, 6 EPS figure
Calibrated Sub-Bundles in Non-Compact Manifolds of Special Holonomy
This paper is a continuation of math.DG/0408005. We first construct special
Lagrangian submanifolds of the Ricci-flat Stenzel metric (of holonomy SU(n)) on
the cotangent bundle of S^n by looking at the conormal bundle of appropriate
submanifolds of S^n. We find that the condition for the conormal bundle to be
special Lagrangian is the same as that discovered by Harvey-Lawson for
submanifolds in R^n in their pioneering paper. We also construct calibrated
submanifolds in complete metrics with special holonomy G_2 and Spin(7)
discovered by Bryant and Salamon on the total spaces of appropriate bundles
over self-dual Einstein four manifolds. The submanifolds are constructed as
certain subbundles over immersed surfaces. We show that this construction
requires the surface to be minimal in the associative and Cayley cases, and to
be (properly oriented) real isotropic in the coassociative case. We also make
some remarks about using these constructions as a possible local model for the
intersection of compact calibrated submanifolds in a compact manifold with
special holonomy.Comment: 20 pages; for Revised Version: Minor cosmetic changes, some
paragraphs rewritten for improved clarit
Optimizing the Power Production in an Osmotic Engine via Microfluidic Fabricated and Surface Crosslinked Hydrogels Utilizing Fresh and Salt Water
Salinity gradients between seawater and river water is a renewable source of energy having a worldwide potential capacity of about 3.1 TW. This energy can be extracted by e.g., an osmotic engine, using hydrogels with high water uptake capacity. Consecutive exposing hydrogels to fresh and saline water makes swellingâshrinking cycles, which can be utilized to move a piston in an osmotic engine. The production of power with this method is significantly suppressed by gelblocking, where voids between particles are blocked so that the water flow is limited and the absorbency significantly retarded. To improve the power production, the gelblocking is minimized within this article by using spherical monoâdispersed hydrogels made by microfluidic technique. In this study monoâdisperse poly(acrylic acidâcoâsodium acrylate) hydrogels with varying diameters (100â600 ”m) and varying degrees of neutralization (DN = 10â75 mol%) are synthesized. In addition, hydrogels with different DN are utilized for additional surface crosslinking to fabricate coreâshell particles. The maximum power of 0.67 W kg is obtained for hydrogels with a diameter of 105 ”m, degree of crosslinking (DC) = 1.7 mol%, DN = 75 mol%, and a coreâshell architecture, which is three times higher compared to hydrogels having undefined size without a coreâshell framework
Design, Construction and Metrology of the Overlap Detectors for the ALFA system
The Overlap Detectors of the ALFA syste
Theoretical uncertainties for measurements of alpha_s from electroweak observables
One of the most precise measurements of the strong coupling constant
alpha_s(MZ) is obtained in the context of global analyses of precision
electroweak data. This article reviews the sensitivity of different electroweak
observables to alpha_s and describes the perturbative uncertainties related to
missing higher orders. The complete renormalisation scale dependence for the
relevant observables is calculated at next-to-next-to-leading order and a new
method is presented to determine the corresponding perturbative uncertainty for
measurements of alpha_s based on these observables.Comment: v4: Revised version with new tables and figure
Coherent states on spheres
We describe a family of coherent states and an associated resolution of the
identity for a quantum particle whose classical configuration space is the
d-dimensional sphere S^d. The coherent states are labeled by points in the
associated phase space T*(S^d). These coherent states are NOT of Perelomov type
but rather are constructed as the eigenvectors of suitably defined annihilation
operators. We describe as well the Segal-Bargmann representation for the
system, the associated unitary Segal-Bargmann transform, and a natural
inversion formula. Although many of these results are in principle special
cases of the results of B. Hall and M. Stenzel, we give here a substantially
different description based on ideas of T. Thiemann and of K. Kowalski and J.
Rembielinski. All of these results can be generalized to a system whose
configuration space is an arbitrary compact symmetric space. We focus on the
sphere case in order to be able to carry out the calculations in a
self-contained and explicit way.Comment: Revised version. Submitted to J. Mathematical Physic
Hadron beam test of a scintillating fibre tracker system for elastic scattering and luminosity measurement in ATLAS
A scintillating fibre tracker is proposed to measure elastic proton
scattering at very small angles in the ATLAS experiment at CERN. The tracker
will be located in so-called Roman Pot units at a distance of 240 m on each
side of the ATLAS interaction point. An initial validation of the design
choices was achieved in a beam test at DESY in a relatively low energy electron
beam and using slow off-the-shelf electronics. Here we report on the results
from a second beam test experiment carried out at CERN, where new detector
prototypes were tested in a high energy hadron beam, using the first version of
the custom designed front-end electronics. The results show an adequate
tracking performance under conditions which are similar to the situation at the
LHC. In addition, the alignment method using so-called overlap detectors was
studied and shown to have the expected precision.Comment: 12 pages, 8 figures. Submitted to Journal of Instrumentation (JINST
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