1,537 research outputs found
Exploring the Use of Virtual Worlds as a Scientific Research Platform: The Meta-Institute for Computational Astrophysics (MICA)
We describe the Meta-Institute for Computational Astrophysics (MICA), the
first professional scientific organization based exclusively in virtual worlds
(VWs). The goals of MICA are to explore the utility of the emerging VR and VWs
technologies for scientific and scholarly work in general, and to facilitate
and accelerate their adoption by the scientific research community. MICA itself
is an experiment in academic and scientific practices enabled by the immersive
VR technologies. We describe the current and planned activities and research
directions of MICA, and offer some thoughts as to what the future developments
in this arena may be.Comment: 15 pages, to appear in the refereed proceedings of "Facets of Virtual
Environments" (FaVE 2009), eds. F. Lehmann-Grube, J. Sablating, et al., ICST
Lecture Notes Ser., Berlin: Springer Verlag (2009); version with full
resolution color figures is available at
http://www.mica-vw.org/wiki/index.php/Publication
The organization and management of the Virtual Astronomical Observatory
The U.S. Virtual Astronomical Observatory (VAO; http://www.us-vao.org/) has
been in operation since May 2010. Its goal is to enable new science through
efficient integration of distributed multi-wavelength data. This paper
describes the management and organization of the VAO, and emphasizes the
techniques used to ensure efficiency in a distributed organization. Management
methods include using an annual program plan as the basis for establishing
contracts with member organizations, regular communication, and monitoring of
processes.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures. SPIE Conference 8449: Modeling, Systems
Engineering, and Project Management for Astronomy
Probabilistic Cross-Identification of Astronomical Sources
We present a general probabilistic formalism for cross-identifying
astronomical point sources in multiple observations. Our Bayesian approach,
symmetric in all observations, is the foundation of a unified framework for
object matching, where not only spatial information, but physical properties,
such as colors, redshift and luminosity, can also be considered in a natural
way. We provide a practical recipe to implement an efficient recursive
algorithm to evaluate the Bayes factor over a set of catalogs with known
circular errors in positions. This new methodology is crucial for studies
leveraging the synergy of today's multi-wavelength observations and to enter
the time-domain science of the upcoming survey telescopes.Comment: Accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal, 8 pages, 1
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The Dark Matter Contribution to Galactic Diffuse Gamma Ray Emission
Observations of diffuse Galactic gamma ray emission (DGE) by the Fermi Large
Area Telescope (LAT) allow a detailed study of cosmic rays and the interstellar
medium. However, diffuse emission models of the inner Galaxy underpredict the
Fermi-LAT data at energies above a few GeV and hint at possible
non-astrophysical sources including dark matter (DM) annihilations or decays.
We present a study of the possible emission components from DM using the
high-resolution Via Lactea II N-body simulation of a Milky Way-sized DM halo.
We generate full-sky maps of DM annihilation and decay signals that include
modeling of the adiabatic contraction of the host density profile, Sommerfeld
enhanced DM annihilations, -wave annihilations, and decaying DM. We compare
our results with the DGE models produced by the Fermi-LAT team over different
sky regions, including the Galactic center, high Galactic latitudes, and the
Galactic anti-center. This work provides possible templates to fit the
observational data that includes the contribution of the subhalo population to
DM gamma-ray emission, with the significance depending on the
annihilation/decay channels and the Galactic regions being considered.Comment: Published by PR
A Robust Classification of Galaxy Spectra: Dealing with Noisy and Incomplete Data
Over the next few years new spectroscopic surveys (from the optical surveys
of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the 2 degree Field survey through to
space-based ultraviolet satellites such as GALEX) will provide the opportunity
and challenge of understanding how galaxies of different spectral type evolve
with redshift. Techniques have been developed to classify galaxies based on
their continuum and line spectra. Some of the most promising of these have used
the Karhunen and Loeve transform (or Principal Component Analysis) to separate
galaxies into distinct classes. Their limitation has been that they assume that
the spectral coverage and quality of the spectra are constant for all galaxies
within a given sample. In this paper we develop a general formalism that
accounts for the missing data within the observed spectra (such as the removal
of sky lines or the effect of sampling different intrinsic rest wavelength
ranges due to the redshift of a galaxy). We demonstrate that by correcting for
these gaps we can recover an almost redshift independent classification scheme.
From this classification we can derive an optimal interpolation that
reconstructs the underlying galaxy spectral energy distributions in the regions
of missing data. This provides a simple and effective mechanism for building
galaxy spectral energy distributions directly from data that may be noisy,
incomplete or drawn from a number of different sources.Comment: 20 pages, 8 figures. Accepted for publication in A
Symmetry analysis of internal rotation
Barriers of infinite (or very large) height prevent certain rearrangements of the atoms in a molecule from occurring and thus the complete nuclear permutation inversion (CNPI) group of the molecule can be reduced. Using the example of acetaldehyde molecule, it was pointed out that some barriers of infinite height, in addition to reducing the CNPI group, constrain torsional dynamics explicitly and influence how the torsional coordinate transforms under the MS group. It was proved that the symmetry properties of the torsional potential do not depend on the geometrical symmetry of either the top or the frame.The authors would like to thank Projects E-10/2001 of the Hungarian–Spanish Intergovernmental Cooperations on Science and Technology, BFM2000-1106 and BFM2001- 2315 of the Ministerio de Ciencia y Technologia (Spain), and Grant Nos. OTKA T034327 and T033074 for support.Peer Reviewe
Potential energy surfaces of charge transfer states
In this paper the potential energy curves of charge transfer (CT) electronic states and their interaction with local ones have been investigated. Besides the global view of these curves, special attention has been paid to the region of the crossing and the infinite separation limit. It was found that triple excitations are needed to accurately describe potential energy surfaces of CT states. Among the cheaper variants, both STEOM-CCSD and CCSD(T)(a)* methods are promising in this respect. The somewhat larger error of CCSD for CT states can be explained by its size extensivity error and the overestimation of the asymptotic excitation energy. Second order approximations are not advantageous for the error cancellation, in fact CC2 is much worse for CT states than any other method investigated here. The results also show that the location of the (avoided) crossings of local and CT states depend very much on the accurate description of the CT states. Failure to describe this topology might affect dynamics, and a warning, in particular in case of CC2, should be issued if CT states play a role in the physics of the problem
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