Ferromagnetic 0-pi Junctions as Classical Spins

The ground state of highly damped PdNi based 0-pi ferromagnetic Josephson junctions shows a spontaneous half quantum vortex, sustained by a supercurrent of undetermined sign. This supercurrent flows in the electrode of a Josephson junction used as a detector and produces a phi(0)/4 shift in its magnetic diffraction pattern. We have measured the statistics of the positive or negative sign shift occurring at the superconducting transition of such a junction. The randomness of the shift sign, the reproducibility of its magnitude and the possibility of achieving exact flux compensation upon field cooling: all these features show that 0-pi junctions behave as classical spins, just as magnetic nanoparticles with uniaxial anisotropy.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

Ill-posedness in the Einstein equations

It is shown that the formulation of the Einstein equations widely in use in numerical relativity, namely, the standard ADM form, as well as some of its variations (including the most recent conformally-decomposed version), suffers from a certain but standard type of ill-posedness. Specifically, the norm of the solution is not bounded by the norm of the initial data irrespective of the data. A long-running numerical experiment is performed as well, showing that the type of ill-posedness observed may not be serious in specific practical applications, as is known from many numerical simulations.Comment: 13 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication in Journal of Mathematical Physics (to appear August 2000

Assembling strategies in extrinsic evolvable hardware with bi-directional incremental evolution

Bidirectional incremental evolution (BIE) has been proposed as a technique to overcome the ”stalling” effect in evolvable hardware applications. However preliminary results show perceptible dependence of performance of BIE and quality of evaluated circuit on assembling strategy applied during reverse stage of incremental evolution. The purpose of this paper is to develop assembling strategy that will assist BIE to produce relatively optimal solution with minimal computational effort (e.g. the minimal number of generations)

Distances to six Cepheids in the LMC cluster NGC1866 from the near-IR surface-brightness method

We derive individual distances to six Cepheids in the young populous star cluster NGC1866 in the Large Magellanic Cloud employing the near-IR surface brightness technique. With six stars available at the exact same distance we can directly measure the intrinsic uncertainty of the method. We find a standard deviation of 0.11 mag, two to three times larger than the error estimates and more in line with the estimates from Bayesian statistical analysis by Barnes et al. (2005). Using all six distance estimates we determine an unweighted mean cluster distance of 18.30+-0.05. The observations indicate that NGC1866 is close to be at the same distance as the main body of the LMC. If we use the stronger dependence of the p-factor on the period as suggested by Gieren et al. (2005) we find a distance of 18.50+-0.05 (internal error) and the PL relations for Galactic and MC Cepheids are in very good agreement.Comment: Presented at the conference "Stellar Pulsation and Evolution" in Monte Porzio Catone, June 2005. To appear in Mem. Soc. Ast. It. 76/

Faraday rotation in the MOJAVE blazars: 3C 273 a case study

Radio polarimetric observations of Active Galactic Nuclei can reveal the magnetic field structure in the parsec-scale jets of these sources. We have observed the gamma-ray blazar 3C 273 as part of our multi-frequency survey with the Very Long Baseline Array to study Faraday rotation in a large sample of jets. Our observations re-confirm the transverse rotation measure gradient in 3C 273. For the first time the gradient is seen to cross zero which is further indication for a helical magnetic field and spine-sheath structure in the jet. We believe the difference to previous epochs is due to a different part of the jet being illuminated in our observations.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures. To appear in the proceedings of "Beamed and Unbeamed Gamma-rays from Galaxies", held in Muonio, Finland, April 11-15, 2011. Journal of Physics: Conference Serie