4 research outputs found
Using PV technology to offset utility costs in a future residence hall
This project encapsulated the design of a PV array for a future WPI residence hall. It included a complete set of construction information as well as an economic feasibility study for the project. Subjects covered include renewable technology, power technology, and construction practices and management
Social programming at Worcester Polytechnic Institute
This project studies the social programming structure at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. The first half of the report uses Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and Cooperative Institute Research Program data to identify the typical student at WPI and discuss how well their social programming needs are met by the WPI Social Committee. The second half of the report focuses on the Budget Allocation Process at WPI and possible ways of improving the process, using Northeastern University as a comparison
GeV observations of star-forming galaxies with the FERMI large area telescope
Recent detections of the starburst galaxies M82 and NGC 253 by gamma-ray
telescopes suggest that galaxies rapidly forming massive stars are more
luminous at gamma-ray energies compared to their quiescent relatives. Building
upon those results, we examine a sample of 69 dwarf, spiral, and luminous and
ultraluminous infrared galaxies at photon energies 0.1-100 GeV using 3 years of
data collected by the Large Area Telescope (LAT) on the \textit{Fermi Gamma-ray
Space Telescope} (\textit{Fermi}). Measured fluxes from significantly detected
sources and flux upper limits for the remaining galaxies are used to explore
the physics of cosmic rays in galaxies. We find further evidence for
quasi-linear scaling relations between gamma-ray luminosity and both radio
continuum luminosity and total infrared luminosity which apply both to
quiescent galaxies of the Local Group and low-redshift starburst galaxies
(conservative -values accounting for statistical and
systematic uncertainties). The normalizations of these scaling relations
correspond to luminosity ratios of and
for a galaxy with a star formation
rate of 1 yr, assuming a Chabrier initial mass function.
Using the relationship between infrared luminosity and gamma-ray luminosity,
the collective intensity of unresolved star-forming galaxies at redshifts
above 0.1 GeV is estimated to be 0.4-2.4 ph
cm s sr (4-23% of the intensity of the isotropic diffuse
component measured with the LAT). We anticipate that galaxies could be
detected by their cosmic-ray induced gamma-ray emission during a 10-year
\textit{Fermi} mission.Comment: Accepted for publication in ApJ. 33 pages, 12 figure
The Fermi Large Area Telescope On Orbit: Event Classification, Instrument Response Functions, and Calibration
The Fermi Large Area Telescope (Fermi-LAT, hereafter LAT), the primary
instrument on the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope (Fermi) mission, is an
imaging, wide field-of-view, high-energy \gamma-ray telescope, covering the
energy range from 20 MeV to more than 300 GeV. During the first years of the
mission the LAT team has gained considerable insight into the in-flight
performance of the instrument. Accordingly, we have updated the analysis used
to reduce LAT data for public release as well as the Instrument Response
Functions (IRFs), the description of the instrument performance provided for
data analysis. In this paper we describe the effects that motivated these
updates. Furthermore, we discuss how we originally derived IRFs from Monte
Carlo simulations and later corrected those IRFs for discrepancies observed
between flight and simulated data. We also give details of the validations
performed using flight data and quantify the residual uncertainties in the
IRFs. Finally, we describe techniques the LAT team has developed to propagate
those uncertainties into estimates of the systematic errors on common
measurements such as fluxes and spectra of astrophysical sources.Comment: 169 pages, 90 figures. Corresponding Authors, L. Baldini
([email protected]), E. Charles ([email protected]), and R.
Rando ([email protected]) Accepted for publication in ApJ Supplemen