Measurement of the Mass Profile of Abell 1689

In this letter we present calibrated mass and light profiles of the rich cluster of galaxies Abell 1689 out to 1 $h^{-1}$ Mpc from the center. The high surface density of faint blue galaxies at high redshift, selected by their low surface brightness, are unique tools for mapping the projected mass distribution of foreground mass concentrations. The systematic gravitational lens distortions of $10^4$ of these background galaxies in 15\arcmin\ fields reveal detailed mass profiles for intervening clusters of galaxies, and are a direct measure of the growth of mass inhomogeneity. The mass is measured directly, avoiding uncertainties encountered in velocity or X-ray derived mass estimates. Mass in the rich cluster Abell 1689 follows smoothed light, outside 100 h$^{-1}$ kpc, with a rest-frame V band mass-to-light ratio of $400 \pm 60$ $h^{-1} (M/L_V)_\odot$. Near the cluster center, mass appears to be more smoothly distributed than light. Out to a radius of 1 $h^{-1}$ Mpc the total mass follows a steeper than isothermal profile. Comparing with preliminary high resolution N-body clustering simulations for various cosmogonies on these scales, these data are incompatible with hot dark matter, a poor fit to most mixed dark matter models, and favor open or $\Lambda > 0$ cold dark matter. Substructure is seen in both the mass and the light, but detailed correspondence is erased on scales less than 100 $h^{-1}$ kpc.Comment: 13 pages, uuencoded, compressed postscript file, 2 figures included additional 1Mbyte figure available on request. Only change is that in original errorbars on Fig. 5 were a factor of 2 too big

Spiral Waves in Media with Complex Excitable Dynamics

The structure of spiral waves is investigated in super-excitable reaction-diffusion systems where the local dynamics exhibits multi-looped phase space trajectories. It is shown that such systems support stable spiral waves with broken symmetry and complex temporal dynamics. The main structural features of such waves, synchronization defect lines, are demonstrated to be similar to those of spiral waves in systems with complex-oscillatory dynamics.Comment: to appear in International Journal of Bifurcation and Chao

The LSST Data Mining Research Agenda

We describe features of the LSST science database that are amenable to scientific data mining, object classification, outlier identification, anomaly detection, image quality assurance, and survey science validation. The data mining research agenda includes: scalability (at petabytes scales) of existing machine learning and data mining algorithms; development of grid-enabled parallel data mining algorithms; designing a robust system for brokering classifications from the LSST event pipeline (which may produce 10,000 or more event alerts per night); multi-resolution methods for exploration of petascale databases; indexing of multi-attribute multi-dimensional astronomical databases (beyond spatial indexing) for rapid querying of petabyte databases; and more.Comment: 5 pages, Presented at the "Classification and Discovery in Large Astronomical Surveys" meeting, Ringberg Castle, 14-17 October, 200

X-ray absorption study of Ti-activated sodium aluminum hydride

Ti K-edge x-ray absorption near edge spectroscopy (XANES) was used to explore the Ti valence and coordination in Ti-activated sodium alanate. An empirical relationship was established between the Ti valence and the Ti K-edge onset based on a set of standards. This relationship was used to estimate oxidation states of the titanium catalyst in 2 mol% and 4 mol% Ti-doped NaAlH4. These results demonstrate that the formal titanium valence is zero in doped sodium alanate and nearly invariant during hydrogen cycling. A qualitative comparison of the edge fine structure suggests that the Ti is present on the surface in the form of amorphous TiAl3.Comment: 3 pages, 4 figures, submitted to Appl. Phys. Let