Laboratory studies of the roughness and suspended load of alluvial streams

This report describes research work done under Contract No. DA-25-075-eng-3866 with the U. S. Army, Corps of Engineers, Missouri River Division, Omaha, during the period 1954-1957, on problems of suspended load transport in alluvial streams. A total of 94 experimental runs were made in two laboratory flumes charged with fine sand of several size distributions. Special attention was given to the variation of the friction factor caused by the changing bed configuration and the damping effect of suspended sediment. The relationship between the sediment transportation rate and the hydraulic variables was also investigated. Most of the runs (General Studies, Chap. V) were made with the bed of the flume completely covered with loose sand but some special runs (Special Studies, Chap. VII) were made with the sand bed chemically solidified in place to prevent sediment transport while preserving the bed configuration previously generated by a natural flow of the same velocity with loose sand. The principal laboratory results are as follows: 1. The friction factor f for a stream with a movable sand bed may vary several fold, being highest at low or medium flow velocities and lowest at high velocity. 2. The principal cause of the variation in f is the appearance of dunes at low or medium velocities and disappearance at high velocities. 3. A secondary cause for the reduction in f for high sediment transport rates is the damping effect of the suspended sediment on the turbulence, and the concomitant reduction in the turbulent diffusion coefficients. The maximum observed reduction due directly to the sediment load was only about 28 percent. 4. The discharge and sediment transportation rate are not unique functions of depth and slope because of the variable roughness. Slope (or shear) must probably be considered a dependent variable for alluvial streams because several equilibrium flows can yield the same slope and shear stress. The laboratory data are compared with similar data for natural streams, and the most promising existing analyses for roughness and sediment load are discussed in the light of the present findings. In addition, a critical review of early and recent literature on the resistance of sediment-laden streams is presented in Chapter II

On the occurrence and detectability of Bose-Einstein condensation in helium white dwarfs

It has been recently proposed that helium white dwarfs may provide promising conditions for the occurrence of the Bose-Einstein condensation. The argument supporting this expectation is that in some conditions attained in the core of these objects, the typical De Broglie wavelength associated with helium nuclei is of the order of the mean distance between neighboring nuclei. In these conditions the system should depart from classical behavior showing quantum effects. As helium nuclei are bosons, they are expected to condense. In order to explore the possibility of detecting the Bose-Einstein condensation in the evolution of helium white dwarfs we have computed a set of models for a variety of stellar masses and values of the condensation temperature. We do not perform a detailed treatment of the condensation process but mimic it by suppressing the nuclei contribution to the equation of state by applying an adequate function. As the cooling of white dwarfs depends on average properties of the whole stellar interior, this procedure should be suitable for exploring the departure of the cooling process from that predicted by the standard treatment. We find that the Bose-Einstein condensation has noticeable, but not dramatic effects on the cooling process only for the most massive white dwarfs compatible with a helium dominated interior (\approx 0.50 M_\odot) and very low luminosities (say, Log(L/L_\odot) < -4.0). These facts lead us to conclude that it seems extremely difficult to find observable signals of the Bose-Einstein condensation. Recently, it has been suggested that the population of helium white dwarfs detected in the globular cluster NGC 6397 is a good candidate for detecting signals of the Bose-Einstein condensation. We find that these stars have masses too low and are too bright to have an already condensed interior.Comment: 13 pages, 3 figures, 2 tables, accepted for publication in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics (JCAP

An evolutionary model for the gamma-ray system PSR J1311-3430 and its companion

The most recent member of the millisecond pulsar with very low-mass companions and short orbital periods class, PSR J1311-3430 (Pletsch et al. 2012) is a remarkable object in various senses. Besides being the first discovered in gamma-rays, its measured features include the very low or absent hydrogen content. We show in this Letter that this important piece of information leads to a very restricted range of initial periods for a given donor mass. For that purpose, we calculate in detail the evolution of the binary system self-consistently, including mass transfer and evaporation, finding the features of the new evolutionary path leading to the observed configuration. It is also important to remark that the detailed evolutionary history of the system naturally leads to a high final pulsar mass, as it seems to be demanded by observations.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures, 1 table. Accepted for publication in MNRAS Letter

Scale Invariant Interest Points with Shearlets

Shearlets are a relatively new directional multi-scale framework for signal analysis, which have been shown effective to enhance signal discontinuities such as edges and corners at multiple scales. In this work we address the problem of detecting and describing blob-like features in the shearlets framework. We derive a measure which is very effective for blob detection and closely related to the Laplacian of Gaussian. We demonstrate the measure satisfies the perfect scale invariance property in the continuous case. In the discrete setting, we derive algorithms for blob detection and keypoint description. Finally, we provide qualitative justifications of our findings as well as a quantitative evaluation on benchmark data. We also report an experimental evidence that our method is very suitable to deal with compressed and noisy images, thanks to the sparsity property of shearlets

Positive operator valued measures covariant with respect to an irreducible representation

Given an irreducible representation of a group G, we show that all the covariant positive operator valued measures based on G/Z, where Z is a central subgroup, are described by trace class, trace one positive operators.Comment: 9 pages, Latex2