494 research outputs found
Electricity futures prices in an emissions constrained economy: Evidence from European power markets
We investigate the economic factors that drive electricity risk premia in the European emissions constrained economy. Our analysis is undertaken for monthly baseload electricity futures for delivery in the Nordic, French and British power markets. We find that electricity risk premia are significantly related to the volatility of electricity spot prices, demand and revenues, and the price volatility of the carbon dioxide (CO2) futures traded under the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS). This finding has significant implications for the pricing of electricity futures since it highlights for the first time the role of carbon market uncertainties as a main determinant of the relationship between spot and futures electricity prices in Europe. Our results also suggest that for the electricity markets under scrutiny futures prices are determined rationally by risk-averse economic agents
Local Guarantees in Graph Cuts and Clustering
Correlation Clustering is an elegant model that captures fundamental graph
cut problems such as Min Cut, Multiway Cut, and Multicut, extensively
studied in combinatorial optimization. Here, we are given a graph with edges
labeled or and the goal is to produce a clustering that agrees with the
labels as much as possible: edges within clusters and edges across
clusters. The classical approach towards Correlation Clustering (and other
graph cut problems) is to optimize a global objective. We depart from this and
study local objectives: minimizing the maximum number of disagreements for
edges incident on a single node, and the analogous max min agreements
objective. This naturally gives rise to a family of basic min-max graph cut
problems. A prototypical representative is Min Max Cut: find an cut
minimizing the largest number of cut edges incident on any node. We present the
following results: an -approximation for the problem of
minimizing the maximum total weight of disagreement edges incident on any node
(thus providing the first known approximation for the above family of min-max
graph cut problems), a remarkably simple -approximation for minimizing
local disagreements in complete graphs (improving upon the previous best known
approximation of ), and a -approximation for
maximizing the minimum total weight of agreement edges incident on any node,
hence improving upon the -approximation that follows from
the study of approximate pure Nash equilibria in cut and party affiliation
games
The Comoving Infrared Luminosity Density: Domination of Cold Galaxies across 0<z<1
In this paper we examine the contribution of galaxies with different infrared
(IR) spectral energy distributions (SEDs) to the comoving infrared luminosity
density, a proxy for the comoving star formation rate (SFR) density. We
characterise galaxies as having either a cold or hot IR SED depending upon
whether the rest-frame wavelength of their peak IR energy output is above or
below 90um. Our work is based on a far-IR selected sample both in the local
Universe and at high redshift, the former consisting of IRAS 60um-selected
galaxies at z<0.07 and the latter of Spitzer 70um selected galaxies across
0.1<z<1. We find that the total IR luminosity densities for each
redshift/luminosity bin agree well with results derived from other deep
mid/far-IR surveys. At z<0.07 we observe the previously known results: that
moderate luminosity galaxies (L_IR<10^11 Lsun) dominate the total luminosity
density and that the fraction of cold galaxies decreases with increasing
luminosity, becoming negligible at the highest luminosities. Conversely, above
z=0.1 we find that luminous IR galaxies (L_IR>10^11 Lsun), the majority of
which are cold, dominate the IR luminosity density. We therefore infer that
cold galaxies dominate the IR luminosity density across the whole 0<z<1 range,
hence appear to be the main driver behind the increase in SFR density up to z~1
whereas local luminous galaxies are not, on the whole, representative of the
high redshift population.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication in MNRA
Selection of ULIRGs in Infrared and Submm Surveys
We examine the selection characteristics of infrared and sub-mm surveys with
IRAS, Spitzer, BLAST, Herschel and SCUBA and identify the range of dust
temperatures these surveys are sensitive to, for galaxies in the ULIRG
luminosity range (12<log(LIR)<13), between z=0 and z=4. We find that the extent
of the redshift range over which surveys are unbiased is a function of the
wavelength of selection, flux density limit and ULIRG luminosity. Short
wavelength (<200{\mu}m) surveys with IRAS, Spitzer/MIPS and Herschel/PACS are
sensitive to all SED types in a large temperature interval (17-87K), over a
substantial fraction of their accessible redshift range. On the other hand,
long wavelength (>200{\mu}m) surveys with BLAST, Herschel/ SPIRE and SCUBA are
significantly more sensitive to cold ULIRGs, disfavouring warmer SEDs even at
low redshifts. We evaluate observations in the context of survey selection
effects, finding that the lack of cold ULIRGs in the local (z<0.1) Universe is
not a consequence of selection and that the range of ULIRG temperatures seen
locally is only a subset of a much larger range which exists at high redshift.
We demonstrate that the local luminosity-temperature (L-T) relation, which
indicates that more luminous sources are also hotter, is not applicable in the
distant Universe when extrapolated to the ULIRG regime, because the scatter in
observed temperatures is too large. Finally, we show that the difference
between the ULIRG temperature distributions locally and at high redshift is not
the result of galaxies becoming colder due to an L-T relation which evolves as
a function of redshift. Instead, they are consistent with a picture where the
evolution of the infrared luminosity function is temperature dependent, i.e.
cold galaxies evolve at a faster rate than their warm counterparts.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figures, accepted for publication in MNRA
AEGIS: Infrared Spectral Energy Distributions of MIPS 70micron selected sources
We present 0.5 -160 micron Spectral Energy Distributions (SEDs) of galaxies,
detected at 70microns with the Multiband Imaging Photometer for Spitzer (MIPS),
using broadband imaging data from Spitzer and ground-based telescopes.
Spectroscopic redshifts, in the range 0.2<z<1.5, have been measured as part of
the Deep Extragalactic Evolutionary Probe2 (DEEP2) project. Based on the SEDs
we explore the nature and physical properties of the sources. Using the optical
spectra we derive Hbeta and [OII]-based Star Formation Rates (SFR) which are
10-100 times lower than SFR estimates based on IR and radio. The median offset
in SFR between optical and IR is reduced by a factor of ~3 when we apply a
typical extinction corrections. We investigate mid-to-far infrared correlations
for low redshift (>0.5) and high redshift (0.5<z<1.2) bins. Using this unique
``far-infrared'' selected sample we derive an empirical mid to far-infrared
relationship that can be used to estimate the infrared energy budget of
galaxies in the high-redshift universe. Our sample can be used as a template to
translate far-infrared luminosities into bolometric luminosities for high
redshift objects.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figures, accepted for publication in AEGIS ApJL Special
Issu
The link between SCUBA and Spitzer: cold galaxies at z lt 1
We show that the far-IR properties of distant Luminous and UltraLuminous InfraRed Galaxies (LIRGs and ULIRGs, respectively) are on average divergent from analogous sources in the local Universe. Our analysis is based on Spitzer Multiband Imaging Photometer (MIPS) and Infrared Array Camera (IRAC) data of LIR > 1010 L⊙, 70 μm selected objects in the 0.1 1 SubMillimetre Galaxies (SMGs) discovered in blank-field submillimetre surveys. The Herschel Space Observatory is well placed to fully characterize the nature of these objects, as its coverage extends over a major part of the far-IR/sub-mm SED for a wide redshift range
Characterizing the radio continuum emission from intense starburst galaxies
© 2016 The Authors Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society.The intrinsic thermal (free-free) and non-thermal (synchrotron) emission components that comprise the radio continuum of galaxies represent unique, dust-free measures of star formation rates (SFR). Such high SFR galaxies will dominate the deepest current and future radio surveys. We disentangle the thermal and non-thermal emission components of the radio continuum of six ultraluminous infrared galaxies (LFIR > 1012.5 L?) at redshifts of 0.2 = z = 0.5 and 22 IR selected galaxies. Radio data over a wide frequency range (0.8 < ? <10 GHz) are fitted with a star-forming galaxy model comprising of thermal and non-thermal components. The luminosities of both radio continuum components are strongly correlated to the 60 µm luminosity across many orders of magnitude (consistent with the far-IR to radio correlation). We demonstrate that the spectral index of the radio continuum spectral energy distribution is a useful proxy for the thermal fraction. We also find that there is an increase in mean and scatter of the thermal fraction with FIR to radio luminosity ratio which could be influenced by different time-scales of the thermal and non-thermal emission mechanisms
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