13 research outputs found
Bright spots, physical activity investments that work : sweatcoin : a steps generated virtual currency for sustained physical activity behaviour change
Sweatcoin converts the step count recorded on smartphones into a virtual currency. Using this app, users generate financial rewards through physical activity, with higher levels of activity creating a higher ‘income’. Sweatcoins can subsequently be used to purchase commercially available products from an in-app marketplace
Spin polarization versus lifetime effects at point contacts between superconducting niobium and normal metals
Point-contact Andreev reflection spectroscopy is used to measure the spin
polarization of metals but analysis of the spectra has encountered a number of
serious challenges, one of which is the difficulty to distinguish the effects
of spin polarization from those of the finite lifetime of Cooper pairs. We have
recently confirmed the polarization-lifetime ambiguity for Nb-Co and Nb-Cu
contacts and suggested to use Fermi surface mismatch, the normal reflection due
to the difference of Fermi wave vectors of the two electrodes, to solve this
dilemma. Here we present further experiments on contacts between
superconducting Nb and the ferromagnets Fe and Ni as well as the noble metals
Ag and Pt that support our previous results. Our data indicate that the Nb -
normal metal interfaces have a transparency of up to about 80 per cent and a
small, if not negligible, spin polarization.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures, submitted to Proceedings of the 26th Conference
on Low Temperature Physic
The Pioneer Anomaly
Radio-metric Doppler tracking data received from the Pioneer 10 and 11
spacecraft from heliocentric distances of 20-70 AU has consistently indicated
the presence of a small, anomalous, blue-shifted frequency drift uniformly
changing with a rate of ~6 x 10^{-9} Hz/s. Ultimately, the drift was
interpreted as a constant sunward deceleration of each particular spacecraft at
the level of a_P = (8.74 +/- 1.33) x 10^{-10} m/s^2. This apparent violation of
the Newton's gravitational inverse-square law has become known as the Pioneer
anomaly; the nature of this anomaly remains unexplained. In this review, we
summarize the current knowledge of the physical properties of the anomaly and
the conditions that led to its detection and characterization. We review
various mechanisms proposed to explain the anomaly and discuss the current
state of efforts to determine its nature. A comprehensive new investigation of
the anomalous behavior of the two Pioneers has begun recently. The new efforts
rely on the much-extended set of radio-metric Doppler data for both spacecraft
in conjunction with the newly available complete record of their telemetry
files and a large archive of original project documentation. As the new study
is yet to report its findings, this review provides the necessary background
for the new results to appear in the near future. In particular, we provide a
significant amount of information on the design, operations and behavior of the
two Pioneers during their entire missions, including descriptions of various
data formats and techniques used for their navigation and radio-science data
analysis. As most of this information was recovered relatively recently, it was
not used in the previous studies of the Pioneer anomaly, but it is critical for
the new investigation.Comment: 165 pages, 40 figures, 16 tables; accepted for publication in Living
Reviews in Relativit