Three-dimensional non-LTE radiative transfer computation of the Ca 8542 infrared line from a radiation-MHD simulation

Interpretation of imagery of the solar chromosphere in the widely used \CaIIIR infrared line is hampered by its complex, three-dimensional and non-LTE formation. Forward modelling is required to aid understanding. We use a 3D non-LTE radiative transfer code to compute synthetic \CaIIIR images from a radiation-MHD simulation of the solar atmosphere spanning from the convection zone to the corona. We compare the simulation with observations obtained with the CRISP filter at the Swedish 1--m Solar Telescope. We find that the simulation reproduces dark patches in the blue line wing caused by Doppler shifts, brightenings in the line core caused by upward-propagating shocks and thin dark elongated structures in the line core that form the interface between upward and downward gas motion in the chromosphere. The synthetic line core is narrower than the observed one, indicating that the sun exhibits both more vigorous large-scale dynamics as well as small scale motions that are not resolved within the simulation, presumably owing to a lack of spatial resolution.Comment: accepted as ApJ lette

On the Efficiency of Optimising Shallow Backtracking in Prolog

The cost of backtracking has been identified as one of the bottlenecks in achieving peak performance in compiled Prolog programs. Much of the backtracking in Prolog programs is shallow, i.e. is caused by unification failures in the head of a clause when there are more alternatives for the same procedure, and so special treatment of this form of backtracking has been proposed as a significant optimisation. This paper describes a modified WAM which optimises shallow backtracking. Four different implementation approaches are compared. A number of benchmark results are presented, measuring the relative tradeoffs between compilation time, code size, and run time. The results show that the speedup gained by this optimisation can be significant

Completed representation ring spectra of nilpotent groups

In this paper, we examine the `derived completion' of the representation ring of a pro-p group G_p^ with respect to an augmentation ideal. This completion is no longer a ring: it is a spectrum with the structure of a module spectrum over the Eilenberg-MacLane spectrum HZ, and can have higher homotopy information. In order to explain the origin of some of these higher homotopy classes, we define a deformation representation ring functor R[-] from groups to ring spectra, and show that the map R[G_p^] --> R[G] becomes an equivalence after completion when G is finitely generated nilpotent. As an application, we compute the derived completion of the representation ring of the simplest nontrivial case, the p-adic Heisenberg group.Comment: This is the version published by Algebraic & Geometric Topology on 26 February 200