162 research outputs found
A boundary integral equation method in the frequency domain for cracks under transient loading
Acknowledgments The financial support of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and Advanced Research Collaboration (ARC) Programme (funded by the British Council and DAAD) is gratefully acknowledged.Peer reviewedPublisher PD
A Bayesian estimate of the CMB-large-scale structure cross-correlation
Evidences for late-time acceleration of the Universe are provided by multiple
probes, such as Type Ia supernovae, the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and
large-scale structure (LSS). In this work, we focus on the integrated
Sachs--Wolfe (ISW) effect, i.e., secondary CMB fluctuations generated by
evolving gravitational potentials due to the transition between, e.g., the
matter and dark energy (DE) dominated phases. Therefore, assuming a flat
universe, DE properties can be inferred from ISW detections. We present a
Bayesian approach to compute the CMB--LSS cross-correlation signal. The method
is based on the estimate of the likelihood for measuring a combined set
consisting of a CMB temperature and a galaxy contrast maps, provided that we
have some information on the statistical properties of the fluctuations
affecting these maps. The likelihood is estimated by a sampling algorithm,
therefore avoiding the computationally demanding techniques of direct
evaluation in either pixel or harmonic space. As local tracers of the matter
distribution at large scales, we used the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS)
galaxy catalog and, for the CMB temperature fluctuations, the ninth-year data
release of the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP9). The results show a
dominance of cosmic variance over the weak recovered signal, due mainly to the
shallowness of the catalog used, with systematics associated with the sampling
algorithm playing a secondary role as sources of uncertainty. When combined
with other complementary probes, the method presented in this paper is expected
to be a useful tool to late-time acceleration studies in cosmology.Comment: 21 pages, 15 figures, 4 tables. We extended the previous analyses
including WMAP9 Q, V and W channels, besides the ILC map. Updated to match
accepted ApJ versio
Alignment tests for low CMB multipoles
We investigate the large scale anomalies in the angular distribution of the
cosmic microwave background radiation as measured by WMAP using several tests.
These tests, based on the multipole vector expansion, measure correlations
between the phases of the multipoles as expressed by the directions of the
multipole vectors and their associated normal planes. We have computed the
probability distribution functions for 46 such tests, for the multipoles l=2-5.
We confirm earlier findings that point to a high level of alignment between l=2
(quadrupole) and l=3 (octopole), but with our tests we do not find significant
planarity in the octopole. In addition, we have found other possible anomalies
in the alignment between the octopole and the l=4 (hexadecupole) components, as
well as in the planarity of l=4 and l=5. We introduce the notion of a total
likelihood to estimate the relevance of the low-multipoles tests of
non-gaussianity. We show that, as a result of these tests, the CMB maps which
are most widely used for cosmological analysis lie within the ~ 10% of randomly
generated maps with lowest likelihoods.Comment: References added, updated discussion on alignment with Ecliptic
Plane. 12 Pages, 6 Figures. Results for additional maps, the normalized
frequencies for the tests and a Mathematica Notebook that computes the tests
can be found on http://fma.if.usp.br/~abramo/MVA.htm
Spillover and diffraction sidelobe contamination in a double-shielded experiment for mapping Galactic synchrotron emission
We have analyzed observations from a radioastronomical experiment to survey
the sky at decimetric wavelengths along with feed pattern measurements in order
to account for the level of ground contamination entering the sidelobes. A
major asset of the experiment is the use of a wire mesh fence around the
rim-halo shielded antenna with the purpose of levelling out and reducing this
source of stray radiation for zenith-centered 1-rpm circular scans. We
investigate the shielding performance of the experiment by means of a geometric
diffraction model in order to predict the level of the spillover and
diffraction sidelobes in the direction of the ground. Using 408 MHz and 1465
MHz feed measurements, the model shows how a weakly-diffracting and unshielded
antenna configuration becomes strongly-diffracting and double-shielded as
far-field diffraction effects give way to near-field ones. Due to the
asymmetric response of the feeds, the orientation of their radiation fields
with respect to the secondary must be known a priori before comparing model
predictions with observational data. By adjusting the attenuation coefficient
of the wire mesh the model is able to reproduce the amount of differential
ground pick-up observed during test measurements at 1465 MHz.Comment: 14 pages, 17 eps + 1 gif figures and 4 Tables. Accepted for
publication in A&AS. Fig.7 available at full resolution from
http://www.das.inpe.br/~tello/publications.ht
The conduciveness of CA-rule graphs
Given two subsets A and B of nodes in a directed graph, the conduciveness of
the graph from A to B is the ratio representing how many of the edges outgoing
from nodes in A are incoming to nodes in B. When the graph's nodes stand for
the possible solutions to certain problems of combinatorial optimization,
choosing its edges appropriately has been shown to lead to conduciveness
properties that provide useful insight into the performance of algorithms to
solve those problems. Here we study the conduciveness of CA-rule graphs, that
is, graphs whose node set is the set of all CA rules given a cell's number of
possible states and neighborhood size. We consider several different edge sets
interconnecting these nodes, both deterministic and random ones, and derive
analytical expressions for the resulting graph's conduciveness toward rules
having a fixed number of non-quiescent entries. We demonstrate that one of the
random edge sets, characterized by allowing nodes to be sparsely interconnected
across any Hamming distance between the corresponding rules, has the potential
of providing reasonable conduciveness toward the desired rules. We conjecture
that this may lie at the bottom of the best strategies known to date for
discovering complex rules to solve specific problems, all of an evolutionary
nature
Observational Constraints on Visser's Cosmological Model
Theories of gravity for which gravitons can be treated as massive particles
have presently been studied as realistic modifications of General Relativity,
and can be tested with cosmological observations. In this work, we study the
ability of a recently proposed theory with massive gravitons, the so-called
Visser theory, to explain the measurements of luminosity distance from the
Union2 compilation, the most recent Type-Ia Supernovae (SNe Ia) dataset,
adopting the current ratio of the total density of non-relativistic matter to
the critical density () as a free parameter. We also combine the SNe
Ia data with constraints from Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (BAO) and CMB
measurements. We find that, for the allowed interval of values for ,
a model based on Visser's theory can produce an accelerated expansion period
without any dark energy component, but the combined analysis (SNe Ia + BAO +
CMB) shows that the model is disfavored when compared with CDM model.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figure
Model of the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction
The article describes results of the modified model of the
Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction, which resembles rather well the limit set
observed upon experimental performance of the reaction in the Petri dish. We
discuss the concept of the ignition of circular waves and show that only the
asymmetrical ignition leads to the formation of spiral structures. From the
qualitative assumptions on the behavior of dynamic systems, we conclude that
the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction likely forms a regular grid.Comment: 17 pages, 12 figure
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