MagAO: Status and on-sky performance of the Magellan adaptive optics system

MagAO is the new adaptive optics system with visible-light and infrared science cameras, located on the 6.5-m Magellan "Clay" telescope at Las Campanas Observatory, Chile. The instrument locks on natural guide stars (NGS) from 0$^\mathrm{th}$ to 16$^\mathrm{th}$ $R$-band magnitude, measures turbulence with a modulating pyramid wavefront sensor binnable from 28x28 to 7x7 subapertures, and uses a 585-actuator adaptive secondary mirror (ASM) to provide flat wavefronts to the two science cameras. MagAO is a mutated clone of the similar AO systems at the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) at Mt. Graham, Arizona. The high-level AO loop controls up to 378 modes and operates at frame rates up to 1000 Hz. The instrument has two science cameras: VisAO operating from 0.5-1 $\mu$m and Clio2 operating from 1-5 $\mu$m. MagAO was installed in 2012 and successfully completed two commissioning runs in 2012-2013. In April 2014 we had our first science run that was open to the general Magellan community. Observers from Arizona, Carnegie, Australia, Harvard, MIT, Michigan, and Chile took observations in collaboration with the MagAO instrument team. Here we describe the MagAO instrument, describe our on-sky performance, and report our status as of summer 2014.Comment: 13 pages, 11 figures, to appear in Proc. SPIE 9148-

Dynamics of hadron strong production and decay

We generalize results of lattice QCD to determine the spin-dependent symmetries and factorization properties of meson production in OZI allowed processes. This explains some conjectures previously made in the literature about axial meson decays and gives predictions for exclusive decays of vector charmonia, including ways of establishing the structure of Y(4260) and Y(4325) from their S-wave decays. Factorization gives a selection rule which forbids $e^+e^- \to D^* D_2$ near threshold with the tensor meson in helicity 2. The relations among amplitudes for double charmonia production \e^+e^-\to \psi\chi_{0,1,2} are expected to differ from the analagous relations among light flavour production such as \e^+e^-\to \omega f_{0,1,2}.Comment: 13 pages; journal versio

Looking for a gift of Nature: Hadron loops and hybrid mixing

We investigate how coupling of valence q qbar to meson pairs can modify the properties of conventional q qbar and hybrid mesons. In a symmetry limit the mixing between hybrids and conventional q qbar with the same J^PC is shown to vanish. Flavor mixing between heavy and light q qbar due to meson loops is shown to be dual to the results of gluon mediated pQCD, and qualitatively different from mixing involving light flavors alone. The validity of the OZI rule for conventional q qbar and hybrid mesons is discussed.Comment: v2: added important references and discussion of previous literature; results and conclusions unchanged. 8 pages, 2 figure

The nucleon's octet axial-charge g_A^8 with chiral corrections

The value of the nucleon's flavour-singlet axial-charge extracted from polarised deep inelastic scattering is sensitive to the value of the octet axial-charge g_A^8 which is usually taken from an analysis of hyperon beta-decays within the framework of SU(3) symmetry, namely 0.58 \pm 0.03. Using the Cloudy Bag model we find that the value of g_A^8 is reduced by as much as 20% below the usual phenomenological value. This increases the value of the flavour singlet axial charge (g_A^0|_inv) derived from deep inelastic data and significantly reduces the difference between it and g_A^8.Comment: 12 page

Confinement and the Pion Nucleon Sigma Term

Gribov's theory of confinement offers a simple explanaton of the value of the pion nucleon sigma term. There is no need to invoke a large strange quark component in the nucleon.Comment: 4 pages, Cavendish HEP 93/

Canonical Interpretation of the D_{sJ}(2860) and D_{sJ}(2690)

The spectrum and decay properties of radially excited $D_s$ states are examined in a new model. Good agreement is obtained with the properties of two recently announced $D_s$ mesons identified as $D_{s0}(2860) = c\bar{s}(2P)$ and $D^*_{s}(2690) = c\bar{s}$ as a possible mixture of $(2S;{}^3S_1)$ and $(1D;{}^3D_1)$. Searching for these mesons in B decays is advocated due to large predicted branching ratios.Comment: 6 pages, 2 ps figures, revte

MetricGAN+/-: Increasing Robustness of Noise Reduction on Unseen Data

Training of speech enhancement systems often does not incorporate knowledge of human perception and thus can lead to unnatural sounding results. Incorporating psychoacoustically motivated speech perception metrics as part of model training via a predictor network has recently gained interest. However, the performance of such predictors is limited by the distribution of metric scores that appear in the training data. In this work, we propose MetricGAN+/- (an extension of MetricGAN+, one such metric-motivated system) which introduces an additional network - a "de-generator" which attempts to improve the robustness of the prediction network (and by extension of the generator) by ensuring observation of a wider range of metric scores in training. Experimental results on the VoiceBank-DEMAND dataset show relative improvement in PESQ score of 3.8% (3.05 vs 3.22 PESQ score), as well as better generalisation to unseen noise and speech.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, Submitted to EUSIPCO 202