3,766 research outputs found
The importance of habitat quality for marine reserve fishery linkages
We model marine reserve - fishery linkages to evaluate the potential contribution of habitat-quality improvements inside a marine reserve to fish productivity and fishery catches. Data from Mombasa Marine National Park, Kenya, and the adjacent fishery are used. Marine reserves increase total fish biomass directly by providing refuge from exploitation and indirectly by improving fish habitat in the reserve. As natural mortality of the fish stock decreases in response to habitat enhancement in the reserve, catches increase by up to 2.6 tonnes (t).km(-2).year(-1) and total fish biomass by up to 36 t.km(-2). However, if habitat-quality improvement reduces the propensity of fish to move out of the reserve, catches may fall by up to 0.9 t.km(-2).year(-1). Our results indicate that habitat protection in reserves can underpin fish productivity and, depending on its effects on fish movements, augment catches
Autocorrelation analysis for the unbiased determination of power-law exponents in single-quantum-dot blinking
We present an unbiased and robust analysis method for power-law blinking
statistics in the photoluminescence of single nano-emitters, allowing us to
extract both the bright- and dark-state power-law exponents from the emitters'
intensity autocorrelation functions. As opposed to the widely-used threshold
method, our technique therefore does not require discriminating the emission
levels of bright and dark states in the experimental intensity timetraces. We
rely on the simultaneous recording of 450 emission timetraces of single
CdSe/CdS core/shell quantum dots at a frame rate of 250 Hz with single photon
sensitivity. Under these conditions, our approach can determine ON and OFF
power-law exponents with a precision of 3% from a comparison to numerical
simulations, even for shot-noise-dominated emission signals with an average
intensity below 1 photon per frame and per quantum dot. These capabilities pave
the way for the unbiased, threshold-free determination of blinking power-law
exponents at the micro-second timescale
Simulated Performance of 3-DTI Gamma-Ray Telescope Concepts
We present Monte Carlo simulations of two astronomical gamma-ray telescope concepts based on the ThreeDimensional Track Imager (3- DTI) detector. The 3-DTI consists of a time projection chamber with two-dimensional, crossedstrip micro-well detector readout. The full three- dimensional reconstruction of charged-particle tracks in the gas volume is obtained from transient digitizers, which record the time signature of the charge collected in the wells of each strip. Such detectors hold great promise for advanced Compton telescope (ACT) and advanced pair telescope (APT) concepts due to the very precise measurement of charged particle momenta that is possible (Compton recoil electrons and electron-positron pairs, respectively). We have investigated the performance of baseline ACT and APT designs based on the 3-DTI detector using simulation tools based on GEANT3 and GEANT4, respectively. We present the expected imaging, spectroscopy, polarimetry, and background performance of each design
In memoriam two distinguished participants of the Bregenz Symmetries in Science Symposia: Marcos Moshinsky and Yurii Fedorovich Smirnov
Some particular facets of the numerous works by Marcos Moshinsky and Yurii
Fedorovich Smirnov are presented in these notes. The accent is put on some of
the common interests of Yurii and Marcos in physics, theoretical chemistry, and
mathematical physics. These notes also contain some more personal memories of
Yurii Smirnov.Comment: Submitted for publication in Journal of Physics: Conference Serie
The First Swift BAT Gamma-Ray Burst Catalog
We present the first Swift Burst Alert Telescope (BAT) catalog of gamma-ray
bursts (GRBs), which contains bursts detected by the BAT between 2004 December
19 and 2007 June 16. This catalog (hereafter BAT1 catalog) contains burst
trigger time, location, 90% error radius, duration, fluence, peak flux, and
time averaged spectral parameters for each of 237 GRBs, as measured by the BAT.
The BAT-determined position reported here is within 1.75' of the Swift X-ray
Telescope (XRT)-determined position for 90% of these GRBs. The BAT T_90 and
T_50 durations peak at 80 and 20 seconds, respectively. From the
fluence-fluence correlation, we conclude that about 60% of the observed peak
energies, Epeak, of BAT GRBs could be less than 100 keV. We confirm that GRB
fluence to hardness and GRB peak flux to hardness are correlated for BAT bursts
in analogous ways to previous missions' results. The correlation between the
photon index in a simple power-law model and Epeak is also confirmed. We also
report the current status for the on-orbit BAT calibrations based on
observations of the Crab Nebula.Comment: 63 pages, 23 figures, Accepted in ApJS, Corrected for the BAT ground
position, the image significance, and the error radius of GRB 051105, Five
machine-readable tables are available at
http://swift.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/swift/results/bat1_catalog
D-term inflation and neutrino mass
We study a -term inflation scenario in a model extended from the minimal
supersymmetric standard model (MSSM) by two additional abelian factor groups
focussing on its particle physics aspects. Condensates of the fields related to
the inflation can naturally give a possible solution to both the -problem
in the MSSM and the neutrino mass through their nonrenormalizable couplings to
the MSSM fields. Mixings between neutrinos and neutralinos are also induced by
some of these condensates. Small neutrino masses are generated by a weak scale
seesaw mechanism as a result of these mixings. Moreover, the decay of the
condensates may be able to cause the leptogenesis. Usually known discrepancy
between both values of a Fayet-Iliopoulos -term which are predicted by the
COBE normalization and also by an anomalous U(1) in the weakly-coupled
superstring might be reconciled.Comment: 21 pages, LaTeX, small modifications, one reference adde
Confirmation of the \eps -- \eiso (Amati) relation from the X-ray flash XRF 050416A observed by Swift/BAT
We report Swift Burst Alert Telescope (BAT) observations of the X-ray Flash
(XRF) XRF 050416A. The fluence ratio between the 15-25 keV and 25-50 keV energy
bands of this event is 1.5, thus making it the softest gamma-ray burst (GRB)
observed by BAT so far. The spectrum is well fitted by the Band function with
E^{\rm obs}_{\rm peak} of 15.0_{-2.7}^{+2.3} keV. Assuming the redshift of the
host galaxy (z = 0.6535), the isotropic-equivalent radiated energy E_{\rm iso}
and the peak energy at the GRB rest frame (E^{\rm src}_{\rm peak}) of XRF
050416A are not only consistent with the correlation found by Amati et al. and
extended to XRFs by Sakamoto et al., but also fill-in the gap of this relation
around the 30 - 80 keV range of E^{\rm src}_{\rm peak}. This result tightens
the validity of the E^{\rm src}_{\rm peak} - E_{\rm iso} relation from XRFs to
GRBs.
We also find that the jet break time estimated using the empirical relation
between E^{\rm src}_{\rm peak} and the collimation corrected energy E_{\gamma}
is inconsistent with the afterglow observation by Swift X-ray Telescope. This
could be due to the extra external shock emission overlaid around the jet break
time or to the non existence of a jet break feature for XRF, which might be a
further challenging for GRB jet emission, models and XRF/GRB unification
scenarios.Comment: 16 pages, 4 figures; accepted for publication in ApJ
Medium-Energy Gamma-Ray Astrophysics with the 3-DTI Gamma-Ray Telescope
Gamma-ray observations in the medium energy range (0.50-50.0 MeV) are central to unfolding many outstanding questions in astrophysics. The challenges of medium-energy gamma-ray observations, however, are the low photon statistics and large backgrounds. We review these questions, address the telescope technology requirements, and describe our development of the 3-Dimensional Track Imaging (3-DTI) Compton telescope and its performance for a new mediumenergy gamma-ray mission. The 3-DTI is a large-volume time projection chamber (TPC) with a 2-dimensional gas micro-well detector (MWD) readout
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