Metopolophium festucae cerealium (Hemiptera: Aphididae) : a new addition to the aphid fauna of North America

Metopolophium festucae cerealium (Stroyan) (Hemiptera: Aphididae) was found in wheat fields in the Pacific Northwest in 2011 and 2012. This is the first record of M. f. cerealium in North America. This subspecies can be a serious pest of cereal crops

Propagation of the 2012 March Coronal Mass Ejections from the Sun to Heliopause

In 2012 March the Sun exhibited extraordinary activities. In particular, the active region NOAA AR 11429 emitted a series of large coronal mass ejections (CMEs) which were imaged by STEREO as it rotated with the Sun from the east to west. These sustained eruptions are expected to generate a global shell of disturbed material sweeping through the heliosphere. A cluster of shocks and interplanetary CMEs (ICMEs) were observed near the Earth, and are propagated outward from 1 AU using an MHD model. The transient streams interact with each other, which erases memory of the source and results in a large merged interaction region (MIR) with a preceding shock. The MHD model predicts that the shock and MIR would reach 120 AU around 2013 April 22, which agrees well with the period of radio emissions and the time of a transient disturbance in galactic cosmic rays detected by Voyager 1. These results are important for understanding the "fate" of CMEs in the outer heliosphere and provide confidence that the heliopause is located around 120 AU from the Sun.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figures, accepted for publication in ApJ Letter

Elastic metamaterials with simultaneously negative effective shear modulus and mass density

We propose a type of elastic metamaterial comprising fluid-solid composite inclusions which can possess negative shear modulus and negative mass density over a large frequency region. Such a solid metamaterial has a unique elastic property that only transverse waves can propagate with a negative dispersion while longitudinal waves are forbidden. This leads to many interesting phenomena such as negative refraction, which is demonstrated by using a wedge sample, and a significant amount of mode conversion from transverse waves to longitudinal waves that cannot occur on the interface of two natural solids

Non-LTE Calculations of the Fe I 6173 {\AA} Line in a Flaring Atmosphere

The Fe I 6173 {\AA} line is widely used in the measurements of vector magnetic fields by instruments including the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI). We perform non-local thermodynamic equilibrium calculations of this line based on radiative hydrodynamic simulations in a flaring atmosphere. We employ both a quiet-Sun atmosphere and a penumbral atmosphere as the initial one in our simulations. We find that, in the quiet-Sun atmosphere, the line center is obviously enhanced during an intermediate flare. The enhanced emission is contributed from both radiative backwarming in the photosphere and particle beam heating in the lower chromosphere. A blue asymmetry of the line profile also appears due to an upward mass motion in the lower chromosphere. If we take a penumbral atmosphere as the initial atmosphere, the line has a more significant response to the flare heating, showing a central emission and an obvious asymmetry. The low spectral resolution of HMI would indicate some loss of information but the enhancement and line asymmetry are still kept. By calculating polarized line profiles, we find that the Stokes I and V profiles can be altered as a result of flare heating. Thus the distortion of this line has a crucial influence on the magnetic field measured from this line, and one should be cautious in interpreting the magnetic transients observed frequently in solar flares.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figures, accepted by ApJ

Symmetry protected fractional Chern insulators and fractional topological insulators

In this paper we construct fully symmetric wavefunctions for the spin-polarized fractional Chern insulators (FCI) and time-reversal-invariant fractional topological insulators (FTI) in two dimensions using the parton approach. We show that the lattice symmetry gives rise to many different FCI and FTI phases even with the same filling fraction $\nu$ (and the same quantized Hall conductance $\sigma_{xy}$ in FCI case). They have different symmetry-protected topological orders, which are characterized by different projective symmetry groups. We mainly focus on FCI phases which are realized in a partially filled band with Chern number one. The low-energy gauge groups of a generic $\sigma_{xy}=1/m\cdot e^2/h$ FCI wavefunctions can be either $SU(m)$ or the discrete group $Z_m$, and in the latter case the associated low-energy physics are described by Chern-Simons-Higgs theories. We use our construction to compute the ground state degeneracy. Examples of FCI/FTI wavefunctions on honeycomb lattice and checkerboard lattice are explicitly given. Possible non-Abelian FCI phases which may be realized in a partially filled band with Chern number two are discussed. Generic FTI wavefunctions in the absence of spin conservation are also presented whose low-energy gauge groups can be either $SU(m)\times SU(m)$ or $Z_m\times Z_m$. The constructed wavefunctions also set up the framework for future variational Monte Carlo simulations.Comment: 24 pages, 13 figures, published versio

Interference detection and correction applied to incoherent-scatter radar power spectrum measurement

A median filter based interference detection and correction technique is evaluated and the method applied to the Arecibo incoherent scatter radar D-region ionospheric power spectrum is discussed. The method can be extended to other kinds of data when the statistics involved in the process are still valid