The accumulation and trapping of grains at planet gaps: effects of grain growth and fragmentation

We model the dust evolution in protoplanetary disks with full 3D, Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH), two-phase (gas+dust) hydrodynamical simulations. The gas+dust dynamics, where aerodynamic drag leads to the vertical settling and radial migration of grains, is consistently treated. In a previous work, we characterized the spatial distribution of non-growing dust grains of different sizes in a disk containing a gap-opening planet and investigated the gap's detectability with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). Here we take into account the effects of grain growth and fragmentation and study their impact on the distribution of solids in the disk. We show that rapid grain growth in the two accumulation zones around planet gaps is strongly affected by fragmentation. We discuss the consequences for ALMA observations.Comment: Accepted for publication in Planetary and Space Science. 13 pages, 4 figure

Evidence of magnetic field quenching of phosphorous-doped silicon quantum dots

We present data on the electrical transport properties of highly-doped silicon-on-insulator quantum dots under the effect of pulsed magnetic fields up to 48 T. At low field intensities, B<7 T, we observe a strong modification of the conductance due to the destruction of weak localization whereas at higher fields, where the magnetic field length becomes comparable to the effective Bohr radius of phosphorous in silicon, a strong decrease in conductance is demonstrated. Data in the high and low electric field bias regimes are then compared to show that close to the Coulomb blockade edge magnetically-induced quenching to single donors in the quantum dot is achieved at about 40 T.Comment: accepted for publication at Current Applied Physic

The effect of a planet on the dust distribution in a 3D protoplanetary disk

Aims: We investigate the behaviour of dust in protoplanetary disks under the action of gas drag in the presence of a planet. Our goal is twofold: to determine the spatial distribution of dust depending on grain size and planet mass, and therefore to provide a framework for interpretation of coming observations and future studies of planetesimal growth. Method: We numerically model the evolution of dust in a protoplanetary disk using a two-fluid (gas + dust) Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) code, which is non-self-gravitating and locally isothermal. The code follows the three dimensional distribution of dust in a protoplanetary disk as it interacts with the gas via aerodynamic drag. In this work, we present the evolution of a minimum mass solar nebula (MMSN) disk comprising 1% dust by mass in the presence of an embedded planet. We run a series of simulations which vary the grain size and planetary mass to see how they affect the resulting disk structure. Results: We find that gap formation is much more rapid and striking in the dust layer than in the gaseous disk and that a system with a given stellar, disk and planetary mass will have a completely different appearance depending on the grain size. For low mass planets in our MMSN disk, a gap can open in the dust disk while not in the gas disk. We also note that dust accumulates at the external edge of the planetary gap and speculate that the presence of a planet in the disk may enhance the formation of a second planet by facilitating the growth of planetesimals in this high density region.Comment: 13 pages, 12 figures. Accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysic

Invariance Violation Extends the Cosmic Ray Horizon ?

We postulate in the present paper that the energy-momentum relation is modified for very high energy particles to violate Lorentz invariance and the speed of photon is changed from the light velocity c. The violation effect is amplified, in a sensitive way to detection, through the modified kinematical constraints on the conservation of energy and momentum, in the absorption process of gamma-rays colliding against photons of longer wavelengths and converting into an electron-positron pair. For gamma-rays of energies higher than 10 TeV, the minimum energy of the soft photons for the reaction and then the absorption mean free path of gamma-rays are altered by orders of magnitude from the ones conventionally estimated. Consideration is similarly applied to high energy cosmic ray protons. The consequences may require the standard assumptions on the maximum distance that very high energy radiation can travel from to be revised.Comment: 14 pages, 1 figure, to be published in Ap J Letter

A Scalable Asynchronous Distributed Algorithm for Topic Modeling

Learning meaningful topic models with massive document collections which contain millions of documents and billions of tokens is challenging because of two reasons: First, one needs to deal with a large number of topics (typically in the order of thousands). Second, one needs a scalable and efficient way of distributing the computation across multiple machines. In this paper we present a novel algorithm F+Nomad LDA which simultaneously tackles both these problems. In order to handle large number of topics we use an appropriately modified Fenwick tree. This data structure allows us to sample from a multinomial distribution over $T$ items in $O(\log T)$ time. Moreover, when topic counts change the data structure can be updated in $O(\log T)$ time. In order to distribute the computation across multiple processor we present a novel asynchronous framework inspired by the Nomad algorithm of \cite{YunYuHsietal13}. We show that F+Nomad LDA significantly outperform state-of-the-art on massive problems which involve millions of documents, billions of words, and thousands of topics

Gluino Air Showers as a Signal of Split Supersymmetry

It has been proposed recently that, within the framework of split Supersymmetry, long lived gluinos generated in astrophysical sources could be detected using the signatures of the air showers they produce, thus providing a lower bound for their lifetime and for the scale of SUSY breaking. We present the longitudinal profile and lateral spread of $G$-hadron induced extensive air showers and consider the possibility of measuring them with a detector with the characteristics of the Pierre Auger Observatory.Comment: 4 pages, 3 eps figure

Excitons in coupled InAs/InP self-assembled quantum wires

Optical transitions in coupled InAs/InP self-assembled quantum wires are studied within the single-band effective mass approximation including effects due to strain. Both vertically and horizontally coupled quantum wires are investigated and the ground state, excited states and the photoluminescence peak energies are calculated. Where possible we compare with available photo-luminescence data from which it was possible to determine the height of the quantum wires. An anti-crossing of the energy of excited states is found for vertically coupled wires signaling a change of symmetry of the exciton wavefunction. This crossing is the signature of two different coupling regimes.Comment: 8 pages, 8 figures. To appear in Physical Review

ON THE FRAGILITY OF HIGH-DIMENSIONAL CONTROLLERS

In this paper we study the fragility of controllers designed to optimize some performance indices. We trace the fragility problem to the dimension of the resulting controllers, and use results from high-dimensional geometry to analyze the problem both in the continuous and discrete domains

Seidel elements and mirror transformations

The goal of this article is to give a precise relation between the mirror symmetry transformation of Givental and the Seidel elements for a smooth projective toric variety $X$ with $-K_X$ nef. We show that the Seidel elements entirely determine the mirror transformation and mirror coordinates.Comment: 36 pages. We corrected several issues as pointed out by the refere

Gluino zero-modes for non-trivial holonomy calorons

We couple fermion fields in the adjoint representation (gluinos) to the SU(2) gauge field of unit charge calorons defined on R^3 x S_1. We compute corresponding zero-modes of the Dirac equation. These are relevant in semiclassical studies of N=1 Super-symmetric Yang-Mills theory. Our formulas, show that, up to a term proportional to the vector potential, the modes can be constructed by different linear combinations of two contributions adding up to the total caloron field strength.Comment: 17 pages, 3 Postscript figures, late