4,227 research outputs found
Warhorses Amongst War Machines: The German Army\u27s Use of Horses and Cavalry During World War II
This thesis explores the role of the horse as used by the German Army throughout the Second World War. Contrary to the propagandic image of a mechanized Germany and of the blitzkrieg, the reality of warfare at the time remained primarily dependent on the horse, as man and beast continued to engage in conflict side by side. Horses served a variety of uses within the German forces, from mounted cavalry to hauling artillery, with disasters and successes throughout the war. Employing vast numbers of horses, the Germans allocated extensive resources, and often found themselves relying on the animal when vehicles losses were high. The scope of this work includes a discussion on war strategy, select campaigns in which the horse played a pivotal role, the history of cavalry within Germany, and training of cavalrymen and their horses. It is important to understand the role of the horse within the scope and context of the German Army during World War II, in order to fully analyze and comprehend the German Army’s operations
Neutrino Scattering in a Magnetic Field
Motivated by the evidence for a finite neutrino mass we examine anew the
interaction of neutrinos in a magnetic field. We present the rate for radiative
scattering for both massless and massive neutrinos in the standard model and
give the corresponding numerical estimates. We also consider the effects
arising from a possible neutrino magnetic moment.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures; Acknowledgements added 05.07.200
Making Electrospun Spider Silk Fibers Stronger
Spider silk is one of the most robust and versatile fibers making it a topic of interest in the scientific community. Possessing strength and elasticity many have sought to create fibers comparable to natural spider silk. Up until recently many scientists have fallen short of creating said fibers. With the use of a technique called electrospinning, comparable spider silk fibers have been created. Electrospinning is the process of creating fibers from a polymer solution using an electrical field. This method leads to the formation of nanofibers. These Fibers can then be further modified by crosslinking, a technique traditionally used to analyze protein-protein interactions
Finding Strong Gravitational Lenses in the Kilo Degree Survey with Convolutional Neural Networks
The volume of data that will be produced by new-generation surveys requires
automatic classification methods to select and analyze sources. Indeed, this is
the case for the search for strong gravitational lenses, where the population
of the detectable lensed sources is only a very small fraction of the full
source population. We apply for the first time a morphological classification
method based on a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for recognizing strong
gravitational lenses in square degrees of the Kilo Degree Survey (KiDS),
one of the current-generation optical wide surveys. The CNN is currently
optimized to recognize lenses with Einstein radii arcsec, about
twice the -band seeing in KiDS. In a sample of colour-magnitude
selected Luminous Red Galaxies (LRG), of which three are known lenses, the CNN
retrieves 761 strong-lens candidates and correctly classifies two out of three
of the known lenses. The misclassified lens has an Einstein radius below the
range on which the algorithm is trained. We down-select the most reliable 56
candidates by a joint visual inspection. This final sample is presented and
discussed. A conservative estimate based on our results shows that with our
proposed method it should be possible to find massive LRG-galaxy
lenses at z\lsim 0.4 in KiDS when completed. In the most optimistic scenario
this number can grow considerably (to maximally 2400 lenses), when
widening the colour-magnitude selection and training the CNN to recognize
smaller image-separation lens systems.Comment: 24 pages, 17 figures. Published in MNRA
Strong field ionization to multiple electronic states in water
High harmonic spectra show that laser-induced strong field ionization of
water has a significant contribution from an inner-valence orbital. Our
experiment uses the ratio of H2O and D2O high harmonic yields to isolate the
characteristic nuclear motion of the molecular ionic states. The nuclear motion
initiated via ionization of the highest occupied molecular orbital (HOMO) is
small and is expected to lead to similar harmonic yields for the two isotopes.
In contrast, ionization of the second least bound orbital (HOMO-1) exhibits
itself via a strong bending motion which creates a significant isotope effect.
We elaborate on this interpretation by simulating strong field ionization and
high harmonic generation from the water isotopes using the time-dependent
Schr\"odinger equation. We expect that this isotope marking scheme for probing
excited ionic states in strong field processes can be generalized to other
molecules
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