9,003 research outputs found
Forming a Primordial Star in a Relic HII Region
There has been considerable theoretical debate over whether photoionization
and supernova feedback from the first Population III stars facilitate or
suppress the formation of the next generation of stars. We present results from
an Eulerian adaptive mesh refinement simulation demonstrating the formation of
a primordial star within a region ionized by an earlier nearby star. Despite
the higher temperatures of the ionized gas and its flow out of the dark matter
potential wells, this second star formed within 23 million years of its
neighbor's death. The enhanced electron fraction within the HII region
catalyzes rapid molecular hydrogen formation that leads to faster cooling in
the subsequent star forming halos than in the first halos. This "second
generation" primordial protostar has a much lower accretion rate because,
unlike the first protostar, it forms in a rotationally supported disk of
approx. 10-100 solar masses. This is primarily due to the much higher angular
momentum of the halo in which the second star forms. In contrast to previously
published scenarios, such configurations may allow binaries or multiple systems
of lower mass stars to form. These first high resolution calculations offer
insight into the impact of feedback upon subsequent populations of stars and
clearly demonstrate how primordial chemistry promotes the formation of
subsequent generations of stars even in the presence of the entropy injected by
the first stars into the IGM.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures. Some revisions, including enhanced discussion of
angular momentum issues. Asrophysical Journal, accepte
Evolution and Explosion of Very Massive Primordial Stars
While the modern stellar IMF shows a rapid decline with increasing mass,
theoretical investigations suggest that very massive stars (>100 solar masses)
may have been abundant in the early universe. Other calculations also indicate
that, lacking metals, these same stars reach their late evolutionary stages
without appreciable mass loss. After central helium burning, they encounter the
electron-positron pair instability, collapse, and burn oxygen and silicon
explosively. If sufficient energy is released by the burning, these stars
explode as brilliant supernovae with energies up to 100 times that of an
ordinary core collapse supernova. They also eject up to 50 solar masses of
radioactive Ni56. Stars less massive than 140 solar masses or more massive than
260 solar masses should collapse into black holes instead of exploding, thus
bounding the pair-creation supernovae with regions of stellar mass that are
nucleosynthetically sterile. Pair-instability supernovae might be detectable in
the near infrared out to redshifts of 20 or more and their ashes should leave a
distinctive nucleosynthetic pattern.Comment: 7 pages, including 4 figures; in. proc. MPA/ESO/MPE/USM Joint
Astronomy Conference "Lighthouses of the Universe: The Most Luminous
Celestial Objects and their use for Cosmology
X-ray Scattering Study of the spin-Peierls transition and soft phonon behavior in TiOCl
We have studied the S=1/2 quasi-one-dimensional antiferromagnet TiOCl using
single crystal x-ray diffraction and inelastic x-ray scattering techniques. The
Ti ions form staggered spin chains which dimerize below Tc1 = 66 K and have an
incommensurate lattice distortion between Tc1 and Tc2 = 92 K. Based on our
measurements of the intensities, wave vectors, and harmonics of the
incommensurate superlattice peaks, we construct a model for the incommensurate
modulation. The results are in good agreement with a soliton lattice model,
though some quantitative discrepancies exist near Tc2. The behavior of the
phonons has been studied using inelastic x-ray scattering with ~2 meV energy
resolution. For the first time, a zone boundary phonon which softens at the
spin-Peierls temperature Tsp has been observed. Our results show reasonably
good quantitative agreement with the Cross-Fisher theory for the phonon
dynamics at wave vectors near the zone boundary and temperatures near Tsp.
However, not all aspects of the data can be described, such as the strong
overdamping of the soft mode above Tsp. Overall, our results show that TiOCl is
a good realization of a spin-Peierls system, where the phonon softening allows
us to identify the transition temperature as Tsp=Tc2=92 KComment: 14 pages, 14 figure
Pioneer Anomaly: Evaluating Newly Recovered Data
The Pioneer 10/11 spacecraft yielded the most precise navigation in deep
space to date. However, their radio-metric tracking data received from the
distances between 20--70 astronomical units from the Sun consistently indicated
the presence of a small, anomalous, Doppler frequency drift. The drift is a
blue frequency shift that can be interpreted as a sunward acceleration of a_P =
(8.74 +/- 1.33) x 10^(-10) m/s^2 for each particular spacecraft. This signal
has become known as the Pioneer anomaly; the nature of this anomaly remains
unexplained.
New Pioneer 10 and 11 radio-metric Doppler data recently became available.
The much extended set of Pioneer Doppler data is the primary source for new
upcoming investigation of the anomaly. We also have almost entire records of
flight telemetry files received from the the Pioneers. Together with original
project documentation and newly developed software tools, this additional
information is now used to reconstruct the engineering history of both
spacecraft. To that extent, a thermal model of the Pioneer vehicles is being
developed to study possible contribution of thermal recoil force acting on the
two spacecraft. In addition, to improve the accuracy of orbital reconstruction,
we developed a new approach that uses actual flight telemetry data during
trajectory analysis of radio-metric Doppler files. The ultimate goal of these
efforts is to investigate possible contributions of the thermal recoil force to
the detected anomalous acceleration.Comment: 12 pages, 15 figures, invited talk at the "III Mexican Meeting on
Mathematical and Experimental Physics," Mexico City, Mexico, 10-14 September
200
A natural renormalizable model of metastable SUSY breaking
We propose a model of metastable dynamical supersymmetry breaking in which
all scales are generated dynamically. Our construction is a simple variant of
the Intriligator-Seiberg-Shih model, with quark masses induced by
renormalizable couplings to an auxiliary supersymmetric QCD sector. Since all
scales arise from dimensional transmutation, the model has no fundamental
dimensionful parameters. It also does not rely on higher-dimensional operators.Comment: 9 pages; v2: typos correcte
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