11,760 research outputs found
Dust absorption and scattering in the silicon K-edge
The composition and properties of interstellar silicate dust are not well
understood. In X-rays, interstellar dust can be studied in detail by making use
of the fine structure features in the Si K-edge. The features in the Si K-edge
offer a range of possibilities to study silicon-bearing dust, such as
investigating the crystallinity, abundance, and the chemical composition along
a given line of sight. We present newly acquired laboratory measurements of the
silicon K-edge of several silicate-compounds that complement our measurements
from our earlier pilot study. The resulting dust extinction profiles serve as
templates for the interstellar extinction that we observe. The extinction
profiles were used to model the interstellar dust in the dense environments of
the Galaxy. The laboratory measurements, taken at the Soleil synchrotron
facility in Paris, were adapted for astrophysical data analysis and implemented
in the SPEX spectral fitting program. The models were used to fit the spectra
of nine low-mass X-ray binaries located in the Galactic center neighborhood in
order to determine the dust properties along those lines of sight. Most lines
of sight can be fit well by amorphous olivine. We also established upper limits
on the amount of crystalline material that the modeling allows. We obtained
values of the total silicon abundance, silicon dust abundance, and depletion
along each of the sightlines. We find a possible gradient of
dex/kpc for the total silicon abundance versus the Galactocentric distance. We
do not find a relation between the depletion and the extinction along the line
of sight.Comment: 18 pages, 16 figures. Accepted for publication in Astronomy and
Astrophysic
Investigating the interstellar dust through the Fe K-edge
The chemical and physical properties of interstellar dust in the densest
regions of the Galaxy are still not well understood. X-rays provide a powerful
probe since they can penetrate gas and dust over a wide range of column
densities (up to ). The interaction (scattering and
absorption) with the medium imprints spectral signatures that reflect the
individual atoms which constitute the gas, molecule, or solid. In this work we
investigate the ability of high resolution X-ray spectroscopy to probe the
properties of cosmic grains containing iron. Although iron is heavily depleted
into interstellar dust, the nature of the Fe-bearing grains is still largely
uncertain. In our analysis we use iron K-edge synchrotron data of minerals
likely present in the ISM dust taken at the European Synchrotron Radiation
Facility. We explore the prospects of determining the chemical composition and
the size of astrophysical dust in the Galactic centre and in molecular clouds
with future X-ray missions. The energy resolution and the effective area of the
present X-ray telescopes are not sufficient to detect and study the Fe K-edge,
even for bright X-ray sources. From the analysis of the extinction cross
sections of our dust models implemented in the spectral fitting program SPEX,
the Fe K-edge is promising for investigating both the chemistry and the size
distribution of the interstellar dust. We find that the chemical composition
regulates the X-ray absorption fine structures in the post edge region, whereas
the scattering feature in the pre-edge is sensitive to the mean grain size.
Finally, we note that the Fe K-edge is insensitive to other dust properties,
such as the porosity and the geometry of the dust.Comment: 11 pages, 10 figures. Accepted for publication in Astronomy and
Astrophysic
Determining atmospheric electric fields using MGMR3D
Cosmic-ray particles impinging on the atmosphere induce high-energy particle
cascades in air, an Extensive Air Shower (EAS), emitting coherent radio
emission. This emission is affected by the presence of strong electric fields
during thunderstorm conditions. To reconstruct the atmospheric electric field
from the measured radio footprint of the EAS we use an analytic model for the
calculation of the radio emission, MGMR3D. In this work we make an extensive
comparison between the results of a microscopic model for radio emission,
CoREAS, to obtain an improved parametrization for MGMR3D in the presence of
atmospheric electric fields, as well as confidence intervals. The approach to
extract the electric field structure is applied successfully to an event with a
complicated radio footprint measured by LOFAR during thunderstorm conditions.
This shows that, with the improved parametrization, MGMR3D can be used to
extract the structure of the atmospheric electric field.Comment: The paper is accepted for publication in Physical Review
Fast Algorithm for Finding the Eigenvalue Distribution of Very Large Matrices
A theoretical analysis is given of the equation of motion method, due to
Alben et al., to compute the eigenvalue distribution (density of states) of
very large matrices. The salient feature of this method is that for matrices of
the kind encountered in quantum physics the memory and CPU requirements of this
method scale linearly with the dimension of the matrix. We derive a rigorous
estimate of the statistical error, supporting earlier observations that the
computational efficiency of this approach increases with matrix size. We use
this method and an imaginary-time version of it to compute the energy and the
specific heat of three different, exactly solvable, spin-1/2 models and compare
with the exact results to study the dependence of the statistical errors on
sample and matrix size.Comment: 24 pages, 24 figure
Alpha-decay Rates of Yb and Gd in Solar Neutrino Detectors
The -decay rates for the nuclides Yb
and Gd have been estimated from transmission probabilities
in a systematic -nucleus potential and from an improved fit to
-decay rates in the rare-earth mass region. Whereas -decay of
Gd in natural gadolinium is a severe obstacle for the use of gadolinium
as a low-energy solar-neutrino detector, we show that
-decay does not contribute significantly to the background in a
ytterbium detector. An extremely long -decay lifetime of Yb
is obtained from calculation, which may be close to the sensitivity limit in a
low-background solar neutrino detector.Comment: 12 pages, 1 figure; An author name was correcte
Lepton Flavor Violation: Constraints from exotic muon to electron conversion
The exotic neutrinoless nuclear conversion is studied within
the conventional extensions of the standard model as well as in the minimal
supersymmetric (SUSY) models with and without R-parity conservation. The
dependence of the conversion rates on the nucleon and nuclear
structure is consistently taken into account. Using our calculated transition
matrix elements and the available experimental data on the branching ratio
for Ti and Pb as well as the expected experimental
sensitivity for Al employed as a target in the planned at Brookhaven
conversion (MECO) experiment, we extract very severe constraints
for the flavor violation parameters. We especially emphasize on the constraints
resulting for SUSY R-parity violating parameters.Comment: 14 pages, 2 figures. Based on the Invited talk given by T.S. Kosmas
at the International Conference on Non-Accelerator New Physics(NANP'99),
Dubna, Russia, 199
Measurement of the circular polarization in radio emission from extensive air showers confirms emission mechanisms
We report here on a novel analysis of the complete set of four Stokes
parameters that uniquely determine the linear and/or circular polarization of
the radio signal for an extensive air shower. The observed dependency of the
circular polarization on azimuth angle and distance to the shower axis is a
clear signature of the interfering contributions from two different radiation
mechanisms, a main contribution due to a geomagnetically-induced transverse
current and a secondary component due to the build-up of excess charge at the
shower front. The data, as measured at LOFAR, agree very well with a
calculation from first principles. This opens the possibility to use circular
polarization as an investigative tool in the analysis of air shower structure,
such as for the determination of atmospheric electric fields.Comment: Accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.
EQUIPT: protocol of a comparative effectiveness research study evaluating cross-context transferability of economic evidence on tobacco control
This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial.This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.Tobacco smoking claims 700 000 lives every year in Europe and the cost of tobacco smoking in the EU is estimated between €98 and €130 billion annually; direct medical care costs and indirect costs such as workday losses each represent half of this amount. Policymakers all across Europe are in need of bespoke information on the economic and wider returns of investing in evidence-based tobacco control, including smoking cessation agendas. EQUIPT is designed to test the transferability of one such economic evidence base-the English Tobacco Return on Investment (ROI) tool-to other EU member states
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