Atmospheric Heat Redistribution on Hot Jupiters

Infrared lightcurves of transiting hot Jupiters present a trend in which the atmospheres of the hottest planets are less efficient at redistributing the stellar energy absorbed on their daysides---and thus have a larger day-night temperature contrast---than colder planets. No predictive atmospheric model has been published that identifies which dynamical mechanisms determine the atmospheric heat redistribution efficiency on tidally locked exoplanets. Here we present a two-layer shallow water model of the atmospheric dynamics on synchronously rotating planets that explains the observed trend. Our model shows that planets with weak friction and weak irradiation exhibit a banded zonal flow with minimal day-night temperature differences, while models with strong irradiation and/or strong friction exhibit a day-night flow pattern with order-unity fractional day-night temperature differences. To interpret the model, we develop a scaling theory that shows that the timescale for gravity waves to propagate horizontally over planetary scales, t_wave, plays a dominant role in controlling the transition from small to large temperature contrasts. This implies that heat redistribution is governed by a wave-like process, similar to the one responsible for the weak temperature gradients in the Earth's tropics. When atmospheric drag can be neglected, the transition from small to large day-night temperature contrasts occurs when t_wave ~ sqrt(t_rad/Omega), where t_rad is the radiative relaxation time and Omega is the planetary rotation frequency. Alternatively, this transition criterion can be expressed as t_rad ~ t_vert, where t_vert is the timescale for a fluid parcel to move vertically over the difference in day-night thickness. These results subsume the commonly used timescale comparison for estimating heat redistribution efficiency between t_rad and the global horizontal advection timescale, t_adv.Comment: Accepted to ApJ with minor edits compared to version 1; 17 pages, 11 figure

Quantization of the Jackiw-Teitelboim model

We study the phase space structure of the Jackiw-Teitelboim model in its connection variables formulation where the gauge group of the field theory is given by local SL(2,R) (or SU(2) for the Euclidean model), i.e. the de Sitter group in two dimensions. In order to make the connection with two dimensional gravity explicit, a partial gauge fixing of the de Sitter symmetry can be introduced that reduces it to spacetime diffeomorphisms. This can be done in different ways. Having no local physical degrees of freedom, the reduced phase space of the model is finite dimensional. The simplicity of this gauge field theory allows for studying different avenues for quantization, which may use various (partial) gauge fixings. We show that reduction and quantization are noncommuting operations: the representation of basic variables as operators in a Hilbert space depend on the order chosen for the latter. Moreover, a representation that is natural in one case may not even be available in the other leading to inequivalent quantum theories.Comment: Published version, a short note (not present in the published version) on the quantization of the null sector has been adde