PVEX: An expert system for producibility/value engineering

PVEX is described as an expert system that solves the problem of selection of the material and process in missile manufacturing. The producibility and the value problem has been deeply studied in the past years, and was written in dBase III and PROLOG before. A new approach is presented in that the solution is achieved by introducing hypothetical reasoning, heuristic criteria integrated with a simple hypertext system and shell programming. PVEX combines KMS with Unix scripts which graphically depicts decision trees. The decision trees convey high level qualitative problem solving knowledge to users, and a stand-alone help facility and technical documentation is available through KMS. The system developed is considerably less development costly than any other comparable expert system

Aerodynamic loads on deployed canard surfaces and rocket nose section of the Apollo launch escape vehicle

Aerodynamic loads on deployed canard surfaces and rocket nose section of Apollo launch escape vehicl

New measurements of cosmic infrared background fluctuations from early epochs

Cosmic infrared background fluctuations may contain measurable contribution from objects inaccessible to current telescopic studies, such as the first stars and other luminous objects in the first Gyr of the Universe's evolution. In an attempt to uncover this contribution we have analyzed the GOODS data obtained with the Spitzer IRAC instrument, which are deeper and cover larger scales than the Spitzer data we have previously analyzed. Here we report these new measurements of the cosmic infrared background (CIB) fluctuations remaining after removing cosmic sources to fainter levels than before. The remaining anisotropies on scales > 0.5 arcmin have a significant clustering component with a low shot-noise contribution. We show that these fluctuations cannot be accounted for by instrumental effects, nor by the Solar system and Galactic foreground emissions and must arise from extragalactic sources.Comment: Ap.J.Letters, in pres

Dynamical Mean Field Theory for the Bose-Hubbard Model

The dynamical mean field theory (DMFT), which is successful in the study of strongly correlated fermions, was recently extended to boson systems [Phys. Rev. B {\textbf 77}, 235106 (2008)]. In this paper, we employ the bosonic DMFT to study the Bose-Hubbard model which describes on-site interacting bosons in a lattice. Using exact diagonalization as the impurity solver, we get the DMFT solutions for the Green's function, the occupation density, as well as the condensate fraction on a Bethe lattice. Various phases are identified: the Mott insulator, the Bose-Einstein condensed (BEC) phase, and the normal phase. At finite temperatures, we obtain the crossover between the Mott-like regime and the normal phase, as well as the BEC-to-normal phase transition. Phase diagrams on the $\mu/U-\tilde{t}/U$ plane and on the $T/U-\tilde{t}/U$ plane are produced ($\tilde{t}$ is the scaled hopping amplitude). We compare our results with the previous ones, and discuss the implication of these results to experiments.Comment: 11 pages, 8 figure

Cosmic Infrared Background Fluctuations and Zodiacal Light

We have performed a specific observational test to measure the effect that the zodiacal light can have on measurements of the spatial fluctuations of the near-IR background. Previous estimates of possible fluctuations caused by zodiacal light have often been extrapolated from observations of the thermal emission at longer wavelengths and low angular resolution, or from IRAC observations of high latitude fields where zodiacal light is faint and not strongly varying with time. The new observations analyzed here target the COSMOS field, at low ecliptic latitude where the zodiacal light intensity varies by factors of $\sim2$ over the range of solar elongations at which the field can be observed. We find that the white noise component of the spatial power spectrum of the background is correlated with the modeled zodiacal light intensity. Roughly half of the measured white noise is correlated with the zodiacal light, but a more detailed interpretation of the white noise is hampered by systematic uncertainties that are evident in the zodiacal light model. At large angular scales ($\gtrsim100"$) where excess power above the white noise is observed, we find no correlation of the power with the modeled intensity of the zodiacal light. This test clearly indicates that the large scale power in the infrared background is not being caused by the zodiacal light.Comment: 17 pp. Accepted for publication in the Ap