Magnetised Thermal Self-focusing and Filamentation of Long-Pulse Lasers in Plasmas Relevant to Magnetised ICF Experiments

In this paper we study the influence of the magnetised thermal conductivity on the propagation of a nanosecond $10^{14} \mathrm{Wcm}^{-2}$ laser in an underdense plasma by performing simulations of a paraxial model laser in a plasma with the full Braginskii magnetised transport coefficients. Analytic theory and simulations show the shortening of the self-focal length of a laser beam in a plasma as a result of the reduction of the plasma thermal conductivity in a magnetic field. Furthermore the filamentation of a laser via the thermal mechanism is found to have an increased spatial growth rate in a magnetised plasma. We discuss the effect of these results on recent magnetised inertial fusion experiments where filamentation can be detrimental to laser propagation and uniform laser heating. We conclude the application of external magnetic fields to laser-plasma experiments requires the inclusion of the extended electron transport terms in simulations of laser propagation.Comment: 10 pages, 9 figure

Searching for Planets in the Hyades. I. The Keck Radial Velocity Survey

We describe a high-precision radial velocity search for jovian-mass companions to main sequence stars in the Hyades star cluster. The Hyades provides an extremely well controlled sample of stars of the same age, the same metallicity, and a common birth and early dynamical environment. This sample allows us to explore the dependence of the process of planet formation on only a single independent variable: the stellar mass. In this paper we describe the survey and summarize results for the first five years.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures; To appear in the July 2002 issue of The Astronomical Journa

The Birth of High Mass Stars: Accretion and/or Mergers?

The observational consequences of the merger scenario for massive star formation are explored and contrasted with the gradual accumulation of mass by accretion. Protostellar mergers may produce high luminosity infrared flares lasting years to centuries followed by a luminosity decline on the Kelvin-Helmholtz time-scale of the merger product. Mergers may be surrounded by thick tori of expanding debris, impulsive wide-angle outflows, and shock induced maser and radio continuum emission. Collision products are expected to have fast stellar rotation and a large multiplicity fraction. Close encounters or mergers will produce circumstellar debris disks with an orientation that differs form that of a pre-existing disk. The extremely rare merger of two stars close to the upper-mass end of the IMF may be a possible pathway to hypernova generated gamma-ray bursters. While accretional growth can lead to the formation of massive stars in isolation or in loose clusters, mergers can only occur in high-density cluster environments. It is proposed that the outflow emerging from the OMC1 core in the Orion molecular cloud was produced by a protostellar merger that released between $10^{48}$ to $10^{49}$ ergs less than a thousand years ago

Macroscopic control parameter for avalanche models for bursty transport

Similarity analysis is used to identify the control parameter RA for the subset of avalanching systems that can exhibit self-organized criticality (SOC). This parameter expresses the ratio of driving to dissipation. The transition to SOC, when the number of excited degrees of freedom is maximal, is found to occur when RA-->0. This is in the opposite sense to (Kolmogorov) turbulence, thus identifying a deep distinction between turbulence and SOC and suggesting an observable property that could distinguish them. A corollary of this similarity analysis is that SOC phenomenology, that is, power law scaling of avalanches, can persist for finite RA with the same RA-->0 exponent if the system supports a sufficiently large range of lengthscales, necessary for SOC to be a candidate for physical (RA finite) systems

INCREMENTAL LEARNING OF PROCEDURAL PLANNING KNOWLEDGE IN CHALLENGING ENVIRONMENTS

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/75646/1/j.1467-8640.2005.00280.x.pd

Strategies for optimal sky subtraction in the low surface brightness regime

© 2024 The Author(s). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Royal Astronomical Society. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/The low surface brightness (LSB) regime (μg  ≳  26 mag arcsec−2) comprises a vast, mostly unexplored discovery space, from dwarf galaxies to the diffuse interstellar medium. Accessing this regime requires precisely removing instrumental signatures and light contamination, including, most critically, night sky emission. This is not trivial, as faint astrophysical and instrumental contamination can bias sky models at the precision needed to characterize LSB structures. Using idealized synthetic images, we assess how this bias impacts two common LSB-oriented sky-estimation algorithms: (1) masking and parametric modelling, and (2) stacking and smoothing dithered exposures. Undetected flux limits both methods by imposing a pedestal offset to all derived sky models. Careful, deep masking of fixed sources can mitigate this, but source density always imposes a fundamental limit. Stellar scattered light can contribute ∼28–29 mag arcsec−2 of background flux even in low-density fields; its removal is critical prior to sky estimation. For complex skies, image combining is an effective non-parametric approach, although it strongly depends on observing strategy and adds noise to images on the smoothing kernel scale. Preemptive subtraction of fixed sources may be the only practical approach for robust sky estimation. We thus tested a third algorithm, subtracting a preliminary sky-subtracted coadd from exposures to isolate sky emission. Unfortunately, initial errors in sky estimation propagate through all subsequent sky models, making the method impractical. For large-scale surveys like Legacy Survey of Space and Time, where key science goals constrain observing strategy, masking and modelling remain the optimal sky estimation approach, assuming stellar scattered light is removed first.Peer reviewe

A possible signature of the influence of tidal perturbations in dwarf galaxy scaling relations

© 2023 The Author(s). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Royal Astronomical Society. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)Dwarf galaxies are excellent cosmological probes, because their shallow potential wells make them very sensitive to the key processes that drive galaxy evolution, including baryonic feedback, tidal interactions, and ram pressure stripping. However, some of the key parameters of dwarf galaxies, which help trace the effects of these processes, are still debated, including the relationship between their sizes and masses. We re-examine the Fornax Cluster dwarf population from the point of view of isomass-radius--stellar mass relations (IRSMRs) using the Fornax Deep Survey Dwarf galaxy Catalogue, with the centrally located (among dwarfs) $3.63 \mathcal{M}_{\odot}$~pc$^{-2}$ isodensity radius defining our fiducial relation. This relation is a powerful diagnostic tool for identifying dwarfs with unusual structure, as dwarf galaxies' remarkable monotonicity in light profile shapes, as a function of stellar mass, reduces the relation's scatter tremendously. By examining how different dwarf properties (colour, tenth-nearest-neighbour distance, etc.) correlate with distance from our fiducial relation, we find a significant population of structural outliers with comparatively lower central mass surface density and larger half-light-radii, residing in locally denser regions in the cluster, albeit with similar red colours. We propose that these faint, extended outliers likely formed through tidal disturbances, which make the dwarfs more diffuse, but with little mass loss. Comparing these outliers with ultra-diffuse galaxies (UDGs), we find that the term UDG lacks discriminatory power; UDGs in the Fornax Cluster lie both on and off of IRSMRs defined at small radii, while IRSMR outliers with masses below $\sim 10^{7.5} \mathcal{M}_{\odot}$ are excluded from the UDG classification due to their small effective radii.Peer reviewe

First-principles calculation of intrinsic defect formation volumes in silicon

We present an extensive first-principles study of the pressure dependence of the formation enthalpies of all the know vacancy and self-interstitial configurations in silicon, in each charge state from -2 through +2. The neutral vacancy is found to have a formation volume that varies markedly with pressure, leading to a remarkably large negative value (-0.68 atomic volumes) for the zero-pressure formation volume of a Frenkel pair (V + I). The interaction of volume and charge was examined, leading to pressure--Fermi level stability diagrams of the defects. Finally, we quantify the anisotropic nature of the lattice relaxation around the neutral defects.Comment: 9 pages, 9 figure

The Decay of Accreting Triple Systems as Brown Dwarf Formation Scenario

We investigate the dynamical decay of non-hierarchical accreting triple systems and its implications on the ejection model as Brown Dwarf formation scenario. A modified chain-regularization scheme is used to integrate the equations of motion, that also allows for mass changes over time as well as for momentum transfer from the accreted gas mass onto the bodies. We integrate an ensemble of triple systems within a certain volume with different accretion rates, assuming several prescriptions of how momentum is transferred onto the bodies. We follow their evolution until the systems have decayed. We analyze the end states and decay times of these systems and determine the fraction of Brown Dwarfs formed, their escape speeds as well as the semi-major axis distribution of the formed Brown Dwarf binaries. We find that the formation probability of Brown Dwarfs depends strongly on the assumed momentum transfer which is related to the motion of the gas. Due to ongoing accretion and consequent shrinkage of the systems, the median escape velocity is increased by a factor of 2 and the binary separations are decreased by a factor of 5 compared with non-accreting systems. Furthermore, the obtained semi-major axis distribution drops off sharply to either side of the median, which is also supported by observations. We conclude that accretion and momentum transfer of accreted gas during the dynamical decay of triple systems is able to produce the observed distribution of close binary Brown Dwarfs, making the ejection model a viable option as Brown Dwarf formation scenario.Comment: 31 pages, 8 figures, accepted for publication in Ap