191 research outputs found

    Design and optimisation of wheel-rail profiles for adhesion improvement

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    This paper describes a study for the optimisation of the wheel profile in wheel-rail system to increase the overall level of adhesion available at the contact interface, in particular to investigate how the wheel and rail profile combination may be designed to ensure the improved delivery of tractive/braking forces even in poor contact conditions. The research focuses on the geometric combination of both wheel and rail profiles to establish how the contact interface may be optimised to increase the adhesion level, but also to investigate how the change in the property of the contact mechanics at the wheel-rail interface may also lead to changes in the vehicle dynamic behavior

    A Monte Carlo comparison between template-based and Wiener-filter CMB dipole estimators

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    We review and compare two different CMB dipole estimators discussed in the literature, and assess their performances through Monte Carlo simulations. The first method amounts to simple template regression with partial sky data, while the second method is an optimal Wiener filter (or Gibbs sampling) implementation. The main difference between the two methods is that the latter approach takes into account correlations with higher-order CMB temperature fluctuations that arise from non-orthogonal spherical harmonics on an incomplete sky, which for recent CMB data sets (such as Planck) is the dominant source of uncertainty. For an accepted sky fraction of 81% and an angular CMB power spectrum corresponding to the best-fit Planck 2018 Λ\LambdaCDM model, we find that the uncertainty on the recovered dipole amplitude is about six times smaller for the Wiener filter approach than for the template approach, corresponding to 0.5 and 3 μ~\muK, respectively. Similar relative differences are found for the corresponding directional parameters and other sky fractions. We note that the Wiener filter algorithm is generally applicable to any dipole estimation problem on an incomplete sky, as long as a statistical and computationally tractable model is available for the unmasked higher-order fluctuations. The methodology described in this paper forms the numerical basis for the most recent determination of the CMB solar dipole from Planck, as summarized by arXiv:2007.04997.Comment: 8 pages, 10 figures, submitted to A&

    The Solution Structures of Two Human IgG1 Antibodies Show Conformational Stability and Accommodate Their C1q and FcγR Ligands.

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    The human IgG1 antibody subclass shows distinct properties compared with the IgG2, IgG3, and IgG4 subclasses and is the most exploited subclass in therapeutic antibodies. It is the most abundant subclass, has a half-life as long as that of IgG2 and IgG4, binds the FcγR receptor, and activates complement. There is limited structural information on full-length human IgG1 because of the challenges of crystallization. To rectify this, we have studied the solution structures of two human IgG1 6a and 19a monoclonal antibodies in different buffers at different temperatures. Analytical ultracentrifugation showed that both antibodies were predominantly monomeric, with sedimentation coefficients s20,w (0) of 6.3-6.4 S. Only a minor dimer peak was observed, and the amount was not dependent on buffer conditions. Solution scattering showed that the x-ray radius of gyration Rg increased with salt concentration, whereas the neutron Rg values remained unchanged with temperature. The x-ray and neutron distance distribution curves P(r) revealed two peaks, M1 and M2, whose positions were unchanged in different buffers to indicate conformational stability. Constrained atomistic scattering modeling revealed predominantly asymmetric solution structures for both antibodies with extended hinge structures. Both structures were similar to the only known crystal structure of full-length human IgG1. The Fab conformations in both structures were suitably positioned to permit the Fc region to bind readily to its FcγR and C1q ligands without steric clashes, unlike human IgG4. Our molecular models for human IgG1 explain its immune activities, and we discuss its stability and function for therapeutic applications

    Cosmoglobe DR1. III. First full-sky model of polarized synchrotron emission from all WMAP and Planck LFI data

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    We present the first model of full-sky polarized synchrotron emission that is derived from all WMAP and Planck LFI frequency maps. The basis of this analysis is the set of end-to-end reprocessed Cosmoglobe Data Release 1 sky maps presented in a companion paper, which have significantly lower instrumental systematics than the legacy products from each experiment. We find that the resulting polarized synchrotron amplitude map has an average noise rms of 3.2 μK3.2\,\mathrm{\mu K} at 30 GHz and 2∘2^{\circ} FWHM, which is 30% lower than the recently released BeyondPlanck model that included only LFI+WMAP Ka-V data, and 29% lower than the WMAP K-band map alone. The mean BB-to-EE power spectrum ratio is 0.40±0.020.40\pm0.02, with amplitudes consistent with those measured previously by Planck and QUIJOTE. Assuming a power law model for the synchrotron spectral energy distribution, and using the TT--TT plot method, we find a full-sky inverse noise-variance weighted mean of βs=−3.07±0.07\beta_{\mathrm{s}}=-3.07\pm0.07 between Cosmoglobe DR1 K-band and 30 GHz, in good agreement with previous estimates. In summary, the novel Cosmoglobe DR1 synchrotron model is both more sensitive and systematically cleaner than similar previous models, and it has a more complete error description that is defined by a set of Monte Carlo posterior samples. We believe that these products are preferable over previous Planck and WMAP products for all synchrotron-related scientific applications, including simulation, forecasting and component separation.Comment: 15 pages, 15 figures, submitted to A&

    Cosmoglobe DR1 results. II. Constraints on isotropic cosmic birefringence from reprocessed WMAP and Planck LFI data

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    Cosmic birefringence is a parity-violating effect that might have rotated the plane of linearly polarized light of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) by an angle β\beta since its emission. This has recently been measured to be non-zero at a statistical significance of 3.6σ3.6\sigma in the official Planck PR4 and 9-year WMAP data. In this work, we constrain β\beta using the reprocessed BeyondPlanck LFI and Cosmoglobe DR1 WMAP polarization maps. These novel maps have both lower systematic residuals and a more complete error description than the corresponding official products. Foreground EBEB correlations could bias measurements of β\beta, and while thermal dust EBEB emission has been argued to be statistically non-zero, no evidence for synchrotron EBEB power has been reported. Unlike the dust-dominated Planck HFI maps, the majority of the LFI and WMAP polarization maps are instead dominated by synchrotron emission. Simultaneously constraining β\beta and the polarization miscalibration angle, α\alpha, of each channel, we find a best-fit value of β=0.35∘±0.70∘\beta=0.35^{\circ}\pm0.70^{\circ} with LFI and WMAP data only. When including the Planck HFI PR4 maps, but fitting β\beta separately for dust-dominated, β>70 GHz\beta_{>70\,\mathrm{GHz}}, and synchrotron-dominated channels, β≤70 GHz\beta_{\leq 70\,\mathrm{GHz}}, we find β≤70 GHz=0.53∘±0.28∘\beta_{\leq 70\,\mathrm{GHz}}=0.53^{\circ}\pm0.28^\circ. This differs from zero with a statistical significance of 1.9σ1.9\sigma, and the main contribution to this value comes from the LFI 70 GHz channel. While the statistical significances of these results are low on their own, the measurement derived from the LFI and WMAP synchrotron-dominated maps agrees with the previously reported HFI-dominated constraints, despite the very different astrophysical and instrumental systematics involved in all these experiments.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures, 2 tables. Submitted to A&

    Cosmoglobe DR1 results. I. Improved Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe maps through Bayesian end-to-end analysis

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    We present Cosmoglobe Data Release 1, which implements the first joint analysis of WMAP and Planck LFI time-ordered data, processed within a single Bayesian end-to-end framework. This framework builds directly on a similar analysis of the LFI measurements by the BeyondPlanck collaboration, and approaches the CMB analysis challenge through Gibbs sampling of a global posterior distribution, simultaneously accounting for calibration, mapmaking, and component separation. The computational cost of producing one complete WMAP+LFI Gibbs sample is 812 CPU-hr, of which 603 CPU-hrs are spent on WMAP low-level processing; this demonstrates that end-to-end Bayesian analysis of the WMAP data is computationally feasible. We find that our WMAP posterior mean temperature sky maps and CMB temperature power spectrum are largely consistent with the official WMAP9 results. Perhaps the most notable difference is that our CMB dipole amplitude is 3366.2±1.4 μK3366.2 \pm 1.4\ \mathrm{\mu K}, which is $11\ \mathrm{\mu K}higherthantheWMAP9estimateand higher than the WMAP9 estimate and 2.5\ {\sigma}$ higher than BeyondPlanck; however, it is in perfect agreement with the HFI-dominated Planck PR4 result. In contrast, our WMAP polarization maps differ more notably from the WMAP9 results, and in general exhibit significantly lower large-scale residuals. We attribute this to a better constrained gain and transmission imbalance model. It is particularly noteworthy that the W-band polarization sky map, which was excluded from the official WMAP cosmological analysis, for the first time appears visually consistent with the V-band sky map. Similarly, the long standing discrepancy between the WMAP K-band and LFI 30 GHz maps is finally resolved, and the difference between the two maps appears consistent with instrumental noise at high Galactic latitudes. All maps and the associated code are made publicly available through the Cosmoglobe web page.Comment: 65 pages, 61 figures. Data available at cosmoglobe.uio.no. Submitted to A&

    BeyondPlanck XII. Cosmological parameter constraints with end-to-end error propagation

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    We present cosmological parameter constraints as estimated using the Bayesian BeyondPlanck (BP) analysis framework. This method supports seamless end-to-end error propagation from raw time-ordered data to final cosmological parameters. As a first demonstration of the method, we analyze time-ordered Planck LFI observations, combined with selected external data (WMAP 33-61GHz, Planck HFI DR4 353 and 857GHz, and Haslam 408MHz) in the form of pixelized maps which are used to break critical astrophysical degeneracies. Overall, all results are generally in good agreement with previously reported values from Planck 2018 and WMAP, with the largest relative difference for any parameter of about 1 sigma when considering only temperature multipoles between 29<l<601. In cases where there are differences, we note that the BP results are generally slightly closer to the high-l HFI-dominated Planck 2018 results than previous analyses, suggesting slightly less tension between low and high multipoles. Using low-l polarization information from LFI and WMAP, we find a best-fit value of tau=0.066 +/- 0.013, which is higher than the low value of tau=0.051 +/- 0.006 derived from Planck 2018 and slightly lower than the value of 0.069 +/- 0.011 derived from joint analysis of official LFI and WMAP products. Most importantly, however, we find that the uncertainty derived in the BP processing is about 30% larger than when analyzing the official products, after taking into account the different sky coverage. We argue that this is due to marginalizing over a more complete model of instrumental and astrophysical parameters, and this results in both more reliable and more rigorously defined uncertainties. We find that about 2000 Monte Carlo samples are required to achieve robust convergence for low-resolution CMB covariance matrix with 225 independent modes.Comment: 13 pages, 10 figure

    BeyondPlanck X. Planck LFI frequency maps with sample-based error propagation

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    We present Planck LFI frequency sky maps derived within the BeyondPlanck framework. This framework draws samples from a global posterior distribution that includes instrumental, astrophysical and cosmological parameters, and the main product is an entire ensemble of frequency sky map samples. This ensemble allows for computationally convenient end-to-end propagation of low-level instrumental uncertainties into higher-level science products. We show that the two dominant sources of LFI instrumental systematic uncertainties are correlated noise and gain fluctuations, and the products presented here support - for the first time - full Bayesian error propagation for these effects at full angular resolution. We compare our posterior mean maps with traditional frequency maps delivered by the Planck collaboration, and find generally good agreement. The most important quality improvement is due to significantly lower calibration uncertainties in the new processing, as we find a fractional absolute calibration uncertainty at 70 GHz of δg0/g0=5⋅10−5\delta g_{0}/g_{0} =5 \cdot 10^{-5}, which is nominally 40 times smaller than that reported by Planck 2018. However, the original Planck 2018 estimate has a non-trivial statistical interpretation, and this further illustrates the advantage of the new framework in terms of producing self-consistent and well-defined error estimates of all involved quantities without the need of ad hoc uncertainty contributions. We describe how low-resolution data products, including dense pixel-pixel covariance matrices, may be produced directly from the posterior samples without the need for computationally expensive analytic calculations or simulations. We conclude that posterior-based frequency map sampling provides unique capabilities in terms of low-level systematics modelling and error propagation, and may play an important role for future CMB B-mode experiments. (Abridged.)Comment: 32 pages, 23 figures, data available from https://www.cosmoglobe.uio.no

    BeyondPlanck XI. Bayesian CMB analysis with sample-based end-to-end error propagation

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    We present posterior sample-based cosmic microwave background (CMB) constraints from Planck LFI and WMAP observations derived through global end-to-end Bayesian processing. We use these samples to study correlations between CMB, foreground, and instrumental parameters, and we identify a particularly strong degeneracy between CMB temperature fluctuations and free-free emission on intermediate angular scales, which is mitigated through model reduction, masking, and resampling. We compare our posterior-based CMB results with previous Planck products, and find generally good agreement, but with higher noise due to exclusion of HFI data. We find a best-fit CMB dipole amplitude of 3362.7±1.4μK3362.7\pm1.4{\mu}K, in excellent agreement with previous Planck results. The quoted uncertainty is derived directly from the sampled posterior distribution, and does not involve any ad hoc contribution for systematic effects. Similarly, we find a temperature quadrupole amplitude of σ2TT=229±97μK2\sigma^{TT}_2=229\pm97{\mu}K^2, in good agreement with previous results in terms of the amplitude, but the uncertainty is an order of magnitude larger than the diagonal Fisher uncertainty. Relatedly, we find lower evidence for a possible alignment between ℓ=2\ell = 2 and ℓ=3\ell = 3 than previously reported due to a much larger scatter in the individual quadrupole coefficients, caused both by marginalizing over a more complete set of systematic effects, and by our more conservative analysis mask. For higher multipoles, we find that the angular temperature power spectrum is generally in good agreement with both Planck and WMAP. This is the first time the sample-based asymptotically exact Blackwell-Rao estimator has been successfully established for multipoles up to ℓ≤600\ell\le600, and it now accounts for the majority of the cosmologically important information. Cosmological parameter constraints are presented in a companion paper. (Abriged)Comment: 26 pages, 24 figures. Submitted to A&A. Part of the BeyondPlanck paper suit
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