Long-term X-ray emission from Swift J1644+57

The X-ray emission from Swift J1644+57 is not steadily decreasing instead it shows multiple pulses with declining amplitudes. We model the pulses as reverse shocks from collisions between the late ejected shells and the externally shocked material, which is decelerated while sweeping the ambient medium. The peak of each pulse is taken as the maximum emission of each reverse shock. With a proper set of parameters, the envelope of peaks in the light curve as well as the spectrum can be modelled nicely.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures, accepted for publication in MNRA

Constraining the bulk Lorentz factor from the photosphere emission

We propose a direct and model-independent method to constrain the Lorentz factor of a relativistically expanding object, like gamma-ray bursts. Only the measurements, such as thermal component of the emission, the distance and the variable time scale of the light curve, are used. If the uncertainties are considered, we will obtain lower limits of the Lorentz factor instead. We apply this method to GRB 090618 and get a lower limit of the Lorentz factor to be 22. The method can be used to any relativistically moving object, such as gamma-ray bursts, blazars, and soft gamma-ray repeaters, providing the thermal component of the emission being observed.Comment: 10 pages, 1 figur

A rapid cosmic-ray increase in BC 3372-3371 from ancient buried tree rings in China

Cosmic rays interact with the Earth's atmosphere to produce $^{14}$C, which can be absorbed by trees. Therefore, rapid increases of $^{14}$C in tree rings can be used to probe previous cosmic-ray events. By this method, three $^{14}$C rapidly increasing events have been found. Plausible causes of these events include large solar proton events, supernovae or short gamma-ray bursts. However, due to the lack of measurements of $^{14}$C by year, the occurrence frequency of such $^{14}$C rapidly increasing events is poorly known. In addition, rapid increases may be hidden in the IntCal13 data with five-year resolution. Here we report the result of $^{14}$C measurements using an ancient buried tree during the period between BC 3388 and 3358. We find a rapid increase of about 9\textperthousand~ in the $^{14}$C content from BC 3372 to BC 3371. We suggest that this event could originate from a large solar proton event.Comment: 23 pages, 3 figures, 2 tables, published in Nature Communication

Nonleptonic two-body charmless B decays involving a tensor meson in the Perturbative QCD Approach

Two-body charmless hadronic B decays involving a light tensor meson in the final states are studied in the perturbative QCD approach based on $k_T$ factorization. From our calculations, we find that the decay branching ratios for color allowed tree-dominated decays $B\to a_{2}^{0}\pi^{+}$ and $B\to a_{2}^{-}\pi^{+}$ modes are of order $10^{-6}$ and $10^{-5}$, respectively. While other color suppressed tree-dominated decays have very small branching ratios. In general, the branching ratios of most decays are in the range of $10^{-5}$ to $10^{-8}$, which are bigger by one or two orders of magnitude than those predictions obtained in Isgur-Scora-Grinstein-Wise II model and in the covariant light-front approach, but consistent with the recent experimental measurements and the QCD factorization calculations. Since the decays with a tensor meson emitted from vacuum are prohibited in naive factorization, the contributions of nonfactorizable and annihilation diagrams are very important to these decays, which are calculable in our perturbative QCD approach. We also give predictions to the direct CP asymmetries, some of which are large enough for the future experiments to measure. Because we considered the mixing between $f_{2}$ and $f_{2}'$, the decay rates are enhanced significantly for some decays involving $f_{2}^{\prime}$ meson, even with a small mixing angle.Comment: 26 pages, 2 figure

Sigma_c Dbar and Lambda_c Dbar states in a chiral quark model

The S-wave Sigma_c Dbar and Lambda_c Dbar states with isospin I=1/2 and spin S=1/2 are dynamically investigated within the framework of a chiral constituent quark model by solving a resonating group method (RGM) equation. The results show that the interaction between Sigma_c and Dbar is attractive, which consequently results in a Sigma_c Dbar bound state with the binding energy of about 5-42 MeV, unlike the case of Lambda_c Dbar state, which has a repulsive interaction and thus is unbound. The channel coupling effect of Sigma_c Dbar and Lambda_c Dbar is found to be negligible due to the fact that the gap between the Sigma_c Dbar and Lambda_c Dbar thresholds is relatively large and the Sigma_c Dbar and Lambda_c Dbar transition interaction is weak.Comment: 7 pages,2 figures. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:nucl-th/0606056 by other author

Improved global robust asymptotic stability criteria for delayed cellular neural networks

This paper considers the problem of global robust stability analysis of delayed cellular neural networks (DCNNs) with norm-bounded parameter uncertainties. In terms of a linear matrix inequality, a new sufficient condition ensuring a nominal DCNN to have a unique equilibrium point which is globally asymptotically stable is proposed. This condition is shown to be a generalization and improvement over some previous criteria. Based on the stability result, a robust stability condition is developed, which contains an existing robust stability result as a special case. An example is provided to demonstrate the reduced conservativeness of the proposed results. © 2005 IEEE.published_or_final_versio