4,616 research outputs found
Gamma Ray Burst Host Galaxies Have `Normal' Luminosities
The galactic environment of Gamma Ray Bursts can provide good evidence about
the nature of the progenitor system, with two old arguments implying that the
burst host galaxies are significantly subluminous. New data and new analysis
have now reversed this picture: (A) Even though the first two known host
galaxies are indeed greatly subluminous, the next eight hosts have absolute
magnitudes typical for a population of field galaxies. A detailed analysis of
the 16 known hosts (ten with red shifts) shows them to be consistent with a
Schechter luminosity function with as expected for
normal galaxies. (B) Bright bursts from the Interplanetary Network are
typically 18 times brighter than the faint bursts with red shifts, however the
bright bursts do not have galaxies inside their error boxes to limits deeper
than expected based on the luminosities for the two samples being identical. A
new solution to this dilemma is that a broad burst luminosity function along
with a burst number density varying as the star formation rate will require the
average luminosity of the bright sample (
or ) to be much greater than the
average luminosity of the faint sample ( or ). This places the bright bursts at distances
for which host galaxies with a normal luminosity will not violate the observed
limits. In conclusion, all current evidence points to GRB host galaxies being
normal in luminosity.Comment: 18 pages, 3 figures, Submitted to ApJLet
A first order Tsallis theory
We investigate first-order approximations to both i) Tsallis' entropy
and ii) the -MaxEnt solution (called q-exponential functions ). It is
shown that the functions arising from the procedure ii) are the MaxEnt
solutions to the entropy emerging from i). The present treatment is free of the
poles that, for classic quadratic Hamiltonians, appear in Tsallis' approach, as
demonstrated in [Europhysics Letters {\bf 104}, (2013), 60003]. Additionally,
we show that our treatment is compatible with extant date on the ozone layer.Comment: 4 figures adde
Beam optics of gain-guided soft-x-ray lasers in cylindrical plasmas
Includes bibliographical references (page 2851).We analyze soft-x-ray beam propagation and amplification in gain-guided amplifiers of cylindrical geometry for arbitrary gain and density profiles. A general relation that must be fulfilled for refraction not to be an impediment to the exponential growth of the intensity is obtained. It is shown that for sufficiently long plasma columns the effective gain, reduced by refraction, is determined solely by the gain and the curvature of the density profile at the position of maximum density, even when the location of the gain and the density maxima do not coincide. We analyze the case of amplifiers with gain-length approaching saturation and show that refraction reduces the effective gain-length product at which gain saturation occurs. The theoretical results are used to analyze the output of a capillary discharge soft-x-ray laser
Origin of photoluminescence signals obtained by picosecond-excitation correlation measurements
Includes bibliographical references (page 14355).We have developed a theory that explains the spectral distribution and the different time decay behaviors of the signals observed in picosecond excitation-correlation measurements of semiconductor materials. The results display good quantitative agreement with experiments on multiple quantum wells and show that band filling has an important role in determining the characteristics of the correlation signals. Two limit cases are found and mathematically characterized: the nondegenerate regime, where the signals are positive with exponential-like decays, and the degenerate regime, where band filling gives rise to negative signals. It is shown that the technique is a sensitive probe of the carrier dynamics not fully exploited in previous work
Severe New Limits on the Host Galaxies of Gamma Ray Bursts
The nature of Gamma Ray Bursts (GRBs) remains a complete mystery, despite the
recent breakthrough discovery of low energy counterparts, although it is now
generally believed that at least most GRBs are at cosmological distances.
Virtually all proposed cosmological models require bursters to reside in
ordinary galaxies. This can be tested by looking inside the smallest GRB error
boxes to see if ordinary galaxies appear at the expected brightness levels.
This letter reports on an analysis of the contents of 26 of the smallest
regions, many from the brightest bursts. These events will have and
small uncertainties about luminosity functions, K corrections and galaxy
evolutions; whereas the recent events with optical transients are much fainter
and hence have high redshifts and grave difficulties in interpretation. This
analysis strongly rejects the many models with peak luminosities of as deduced from the curve with no evolution.
Indeed, the lower limit on acceptable luminosities is . The only possible solution is to either place GRBs at
unexpectedly large distances (with for the faint BATSE bursts) or to
require bursters to be far outside any normal host galaxy.Comment: 17 pages, to be published by ApJ
Detection of brain functional-connectivity difference in post-stroke patients using group-level covariance modeling
Functional brain connectivity, as revealed through distant correlations in
the signals measured by functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), is a
promising source of biomarkers of brain pathologies. However, establishing and
using diagnostic markers requires probabilistic inter-subject comparisons.
Principled comparison of functional-connectivity structures is still a
challenging issue. We give a new matrix-variate probabilistic model suitable
for inter-subject comparison of functional connectivity matrices on the
manifold of Symmetric Positive Definite (SPD) matrices. We show that this model
leads to a new algorithm for principled comparison of connectivity coefficients
between pairs of regions. We apply this model to comparing separately
post-stroke patients to a group of healthy controls. We find
neurologically-relevant connection differences and show that our model is more
sensitive that the standard procedure. To the best of our knowledge, these
results are the first report of functional connectivity differences between a
single-patient and a group and thus establish an important step toward using
functional connectivity as a diagnostic tool
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