Remanence Increase in SrFe12_{12}O19_{19}/Fe Exchange-Decoupled Hard-Soft Composite Magnets Owing to Dipolar Interactions

In the search for improved permanent magnets, fueled by the geostrategic and environmental issues associated with rare-earth-based magnets, magnetically hard (high anisotropy)-soft (high magnetization) composite magnets hold promise as alternative magnets that could replace modern permanent magnets, such as rare-earth-based and ceramic magnets, in certain applications. However, so far, the magnetic properties reported for hard-soft composites have been underwhelming. Here, an attempt to further understand the correlation between magnetic and microstructural properties in strontium ferrite-based composites, hard SrFe$_{12}$O$_{19}$ (SFO) ceramics with different contents of Fe particles as soft phase, both in powder and in dense injection molded magnets, is presented. In addition, the influence of soft phase particle dimension, in the nano- and micron-sized regimes, on these properties is studied. While Fe and SFO are not exchange-coupled in our magnets, a remanence that is higher than expected is measured. In fact, in composite injection molded anisotropic (magnetically oriented) magnets, remanence is improved by 2.4% with respect to a pure ferrite identical magnet. The analysis of the experimental results in combination with micromagnetic simulations allows us to establish that the type of interaction between hard and soft phases is of a dipolar nature, and is responsible for the alignment of a fraction of the soft spins with the magnetization of the hard. The mechanism unraveled in this work has implications for the development of novel hard-soft permanent magnets

AstroGrid-D: Grid Technology for Astronomical Science

We present status and results of AstroGrid-D, a joint effort of astrophysicists and computer scientists to employ grid technology for scientific applications. AstroGrid-D provides access to a network of distributed machines with a set of commands as well as software interfaces. It allows simple use of computer and storage facilities and to schedule or monitor compute tasks and data management. It is based on the Globus Toolkit middleware (GT4). Chapter 1 describes the context which led to the demand for advanced software solutions in Astrophysics, and we state the goals of the project. We then present characteristic astrophysical applications that have been implemented on AstroGrid-D in chapter 2. We describe simulations of different complexity, compute-intensive calculations running on multiple sites, and advanced applications for specific scientific purposes, such as a connection to robotic telescopes. We can show from these examples how grid execution improves e.g. the scientific workflow. Chapter 3 explains the software tools and services that we adapted or newly developed. Section 3.1 is focused on the administrative aspects of the infrastructure, to manage users and monitor activity. Section 3.2 characterises the central components of our architecture: The AstroGrid-D information service to collect and store metadata, a file management system, the data management system, and a job manager for automatic submission of compute tasks. We summarise the successfully established infrastructure in chapter 4, concluding with our future plans to establish AstroGrid-D as a platform of modern e-Astronomy.Comment: 14 pages, 12 figures Subjects: data analysis, image processing, robotic telescopes, simulations, grid. Accepted for publication in New Astronom

Matching and Evaluation of Disjunctive Predicates for Data Stream Sharing

New optimization techniques, e. g., in data stream management systems (DSMSs), make the treatment of disjunctive predicates a necessity. In this paper, we introduce and compare methods for matching and evaluating disjunctive predicates

Data Stream Sharing

Abstract. Recent research efforts in the fields of data stream processing and data stream management systems (DSMSs) show the increasing importance of processing data streams, e. g., in the e-science domain. Together with the advent of peer-to-peer (P2P) networks and grid computing, this leads to the necessity of developing new techniques for distributing and processing continuous queries over data streams in such networks. In this paper, we present a novel approach for optimizing the integration, distribution, and execution of newly registered continuous queries over data streams in grid-based P2P networks. We introduce Windowed XQuery (WXQuery), our XQuery-based subscription language for continuous queries over XML data streams supporting window-based operators. Concentrating on filtering and window-based aggregation, we present our stream sharing algorithms as well as experimental evaluation results from the astrophysics application domain to assess our approach.