Searching for a dusty cometary belt around TRAPPIST-1 with ALMA

Low-mass stars might offer today the best opportunities to detect and characterize planetary systems, especially those harbouring close-in low-mass temperate planets. Among those stars, TRAPPIST-1 is exceptional since it has seven Earth-sized planets, of which three could sustain liquid water on their surfaces. Here we present new and deep ALMA observations of TRAPPIST-1 to look for an exo-Kuiper belt which can provide clues about the formation and architecture of this system. Our observations at 0.88 mm did not detect dust emission, but can place an upper limit of 23 µJy if the belt is smaller than 4 au, and 0.15 mJy if resolved and 100 au in radius. These limits correspond to low dust masses of ̃10-5 to 10-2 M⊕, which are expected after 8 Gyr of collisional evolution unless the system was born with a >20 M⊕ belt of 100 km-sized planetesimals beyond 40 au or suffered a dynamical instability. This 20 M⊕ mass upper limit is comparable to the combined mass in TRAPPIST-1 planets, thus it is possible that most of the available solid mass in this system was used to form the known planets. A similar analysis of the ALMA data on Proxima Cen leads us to conclude that a belt born with a mass ≳1 M⊕ in 100 km-sized planetesimals could explain its putative outer belt at 30 au. We recommend that future characterizations of debris discs around low-mass stars should focus on nearby and young systems if possible

Performance of the AMS-02 Transition Radiation Detector

For cosmic particle spectroscopy on the International Space Station the AMS experiment will be equipped with a Transition Radiation Detector (TRD) to improve particle identification. The TRD has 20 layers of fleece radiator with Xe/CO2 proportional mode straw tube chambers. They are supported in a conically shaped octagon structure made of CFC-Al-honeycomb. For low power consumption VA analog multiplexers are used as front-end readout. A 20 layer prototype built from final design components has achieved proton rejections from 100 to 2000 at 90% electron efficiency for proton beam energies up to 250 GeV with cluster counting, likelihood and neural net selection algorithms.Comment: 11 pages, 25 figures, espcrc2.sty (elsevier 2-column

James Hutton’s geological tours of Scotland : romanticism, literary strategies, and the scientific quest

This article explores a somewhat neglected part of the story of the emergence of geology as a science and discourse in the late eighteenth century – James Hutton’s posthumously published accounts of the geological tours of Scotland that he undertook in the years 1785 to 1788 in search of empirical evidence in support of his theory of the Earth and that he intended to include in the projected third volume of his Theory of the Earth of 1795. The article brings some of the assumptions and techniques of literary criticism to bear on Hutton’s scientific travel writing in order to open up new connections between geology, Romantic aesthetics and eighteenth-century travel writing about Scotland. Close analysis of Hutton’s accounts of his field trips to Glen Tilt, Galloway and Arran, supplemented by later accounts of the discoveries at Jedburgh and Siccar Point, reveals the interplay between desire, travel and the scientific quest and foregrounds the textual strategies that Hutton uses to persuade his readers that they share in the experience of geological discovery and interpretation as ‘virtual witnesses’. As well as allowing us to revisit the interrelation between scientific theory and discovery, this article concludes that Hutton was a much better writer than he has been given credit for and suggests that if these geological tours had been published in 1795 they would have made it impossible for critics to dismiss him as an armchair geologist

Transient dust in warm debris disks - Detection of Fe-rich olivine grains

(Abridged) Debris disks trace remnant reservoirs of leftover planetesimals in planetary systems. A handful of "warm" debris disks have been discovered in the last years, where emission in excess starts in the mid-infrared. An interesting subset within these warm debris disks are those where emission features are detected in mid-IR spectra, which points towards the presence of warm micron-sized dust grains. Given the ages of the host stars, the presence of these grains is puzzling, and questions their origin and survival in time. This study focuses on determining the mineralogy of the dust around 7 debris disks with evidence for warm dust, based on Spitzer/IRS spectroscopic data, in order to provide new insights into the origin of the dust grains. We present a new radiative transfer code dedicated to SED modeling of optically thin disks. We make use of this code on the SEDs of seven warm debris disks, in combination with recent laboratory experiments on dust optical properties. We find that most, if not all, debris disks in our sample are experiencing a transient phase, suggesting a production of small dust grains on relatively short timescales. From a mineralogical point of view, we find that enstatite grains have small abundances compared to crystalline olivine grains. The main result of our study is that we find evidences for Fe-rich crystalline olivine grains (Fe / [Mg + Fe] ~ 0.2) for several debris disks. This finding contrasts with studies of gas-rich protoplanetary disks. The presence of Fe-rich olivine grains, and the overall differences between the mineralogy of dust in Class II disks compared to debris disks suggest that the transient crystalline dust is of a new generation. We discuss possible crystallization routes to explain our results, and comment on the mechanisms that may be responsible for the production of small dust grains

The discovery of new warm debris disks around F-type stars

We report the discovery of four rare debris disks with warm excesses around F-stars, significantly increasing the number of such systems known in the solar neighborhood. Three of the disks are consistent with the predictions of steady state planetesimal disk evolution models. The oldest source, HD 169666, displays a dust fractional luminosity too high to be in steady state and we suggest that this system recently underwent a transient event of dust production. In addition, two spectra of this star separated by ~three years show silicate emission features, indicative of submicron- to micron-sized grains. We argue that such small grains would be rapidly depleted and their presence in both spectra suggests that the production of small dust is continuous over at least on few years timescale. We predict that systems showing variable mid-infrared spectra, if exist, will provide valuable help in distinguishing the possible scenarios proposed for dust replenishment.Comment: Accepted for publication in ApJ Letters, 13 pages, 2 figures, 2 table

Long-wavelength observations of debris discs around sun-like stars

[Abridged] We present two deep surveys of circumstellar discs around solar-type stars at different ages carried out at 350 micron with the CSO and at 1.2 mm with the IRAM 30-m telescope. The aim of this study is to understand the evolution timescale of circumstellar debris discs, and the physical mechanisms responsible for such evolution around solar-type stars. In addition, we perform a detailed characterisation of the detected debris discs. Theoretically, the mass of the disc is expected to decrease with time. In order to test this hypothesis, we performed the generalised Kendall's tau correlation and three different two-sample tests. A characterisation of the detected debris discs has been obtained by computing the collision and Poynting-Robertson timescales and by modelling the spectral energy distribution. The Kendall's tau correlation yields a probability of 76% that the mass of debris discs and their age are correlated. Similarly, the three two-sample tests give a probability between 70 and 83% that younger and older debris systems belong to different parent populations in terms of dust mass. We detected submillimetre/millimetre emission from six debris discs, enabling a detailed SED modelling. Our results on the correlation and evolution of dust mass as a function of age are conditioned by the sensitivity limit of our survey. Deeper millimetre observations are needed to confirm the evolution of debris material around solar-like stars. In the case of the detected discs, the comparison between collision and Poynting-Robertson timescales supports the hypothesis that these discs are collision dominated. All detected debris disc systems show the inner part evacuated from small micron-sized grains.Comment: Accepted by A&

Kondo effect in coupled quantum dots: a Non-crossing approximation study

The out-of-equilibrium transport properties of a double quantum dot system in the Kondo regime are studied theoretically by means of a two-impurity Anderson Hamiltonian with inter-impurity hopping. The Hamiltonian, formulated in slave-boson language, is solved by means of a generalization of the non-crossing approximation (NCA) to the present problem. We provide benchmark calculations of the predictions of the NCA for the linear and nonlinear transport properties of coupled quantum dots in the Kondo regime. We give a series of predictions that can be observed experimentally in linear and nonlinear transport measurements through coupled quantum dots. Importantly, it is demonstrated that measurements of the differential conductance ${\cal G}=dI/dV$, for the appropriate values of voltages and inter-dot tunneling couplings, can give a direct observation of the coherent superposition between the many-body Kondo states of each dot. This coherence can be also detected in the linear transport through the system: the curve linear conductance vs temperature is non-monotonic, with a maximum at a temperature $T^*$ characterizing quantum coherence between both Kondo states.Comment: 20 pages, 17 figure

A young hierarchical triple system harbouring a candidate debris disc

We report the detection of a wide young hierarchical triple system where the primary has a candidate debris disc. The primary, TYC 5241-986-1 A, is a known Tycho star which we classify as a late-K star with emission in the X-ray, near- and far-ultraviolet (UV) and Hα suggestive of youth. Its proper motion, photometric distance (65–105 pc) and radial velocity lead us to associate the system with the broadly defined Local Association of young stars but not specifically with any young moving group. The presence of weak lithium absorption and X-ray and calcium H and K emission support an age in the 20 to ∼125 Myr range. The secondary is a pair of M4.5 ± 0.5 dwarfs with near- and far-UV and Hα emission separated by approximately 1 arcsec (∼65–105 au projected separation) which lie of 145 arcsec (9200–15200 au) from the primary. The primary has a Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) 22 μm excess and follow-up Herschel observations also detect an excess at 70 μm. The excess emissions are indicative of a 100–175 K debris disc. We also explore the possibility that this excess could be due to a coincident background galaxy and conclude that this is unlikely. Debris discs are extremely rare around stars older than 15 Myr, hence if the excess is caused by a disc this is an extremely novel system

Search for ZZ and ZW Production in ppbar Collisions at sqrt(s) = 1.96 TeV

We present a search for ZZ and ZW vector boson pair production in ppbar collisions at sqrt(s) = 1.96 TeV using the leptonic decay channels ZZ --> ll nu nu, ZZ --> l l l' l' and ZW --> l l l' nu. In a data sample corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 194 pb-1 collected with the Collider Detector at Fermilab, 3 candidate events are found with an expected background of 1.0 +/- 0.2 events. We set a 95% confidence level upper limit of 15.2 pb on the cross section for ZZ plus ZW production, compared to the standard model prediction of 5.0 +/- 0.4 pb.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures. This version is accepted for publication by Phys. Rev. D Rapid Communication

Measurement of the Cross Section for Prompt Diphoton Production in p-pbar Collisions at sqrt(s) = 1.96 TeV

We report a measurement of the rate of prompt diphoton production in $p\bar{p}$ collisions at $\sqrt{s}=1.96 ~\hbox{TeV}$ using a data sample of 207 pb$^{-1}$ collected with the upgraded Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF II). The background from non-prompt sources is determined using a statistical method based on differences in the electromagnetic showers. The cross section is measured as a function of the diphoton mass, the transverse momentum of the diphoton system, and the azimuthal angle between the two photons and is found to be consistent with perturbative QCD predictions.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures,revtex4. Version accepted by PRL, but with cross section tables i