10,468 research outputs found
Simulations of small-scale explosive events on the Sun
Small-scale explosive events or microflares occur throughout the
chromospheric network of the Sun. They are seen as sudden bursts of highly
Doppler shifted spectral lines of ions formed at temperatures in the range
2x10^4 - 5x10^5 K. They tend to occur near regions of cancelling photospheric
magnetic fields and are thought to be directly associated with magnetic field
reconnection. Recent observations have revealed that they have a bi-directional
jet structure reminiscent of Petschek reconnection. In this paper compressible
MHD simulations of the evolution of a current sheet to a steady Petschek,
jet-like configuration are computed using the Versatile Advection Code. We
obtain velocity profiles that can be compared with recent ultraviolet line
profile observations. By choosing initial conditions representative of magnetic
loops in the solar corona and chromosphere, it is possible to explain the fact
that jets flowing outward into the corona are more extended and appear before
jets flowing towards the chromosphere. This model can reproduce the high
Doppler shifted components of the line profiles but the brightening at low
velocities, near the centre of the bi-directional jet, cannot be explained by
this simple MHD model.Comment: 16 pages, 8 figures. To be published in Solar Physic
The duration distribution of Swift Gamma-Ray Bursts
Decades ago two classes of gamma-ray bursts were identified and delineated as
having durations shorter and longer than about 2 s. Subsequently indications
also supported the existence of a third class. Using maximum likelihood
estimation we analyze the duration distribution of 888 Swift BAT bursts
observed before October 2015. Fitting three log-normal functions to the
duration distribution of the bursts provides a better fit than two log-normal
distributions, with 99.9999% significance. Similarly to earlier results, we
found that a fourth component is not needed. The relative frequencies of the
distribution of the groups are 8% for short, 35% for intermediate and 57% for
long bursts which correspond to our previous results. We analyse the redshift
distribution for the 269 GRBs of the 888 GRBs with known redshift. We find no
evidence for the previously suggested difference between the long and
intermediate GRBs' redshift distribution. The observed redshift distribution of
the 20 short GRBs differs with high significance from the distributions of the
other groups.Comment: accepte
Delocalized Entanglement of Atoms in optical Lattices
We show how to detect and quantify entanglement of atoms in optical lattices
in terms of correlations functions of the momentum distribution. These
distributions can be measured directly in the experiments. We introduce two
kinds of entanglement measures related to the position and the spin of the
atoms
Numerical simulation of prominence oscillations
We present numerical simulations, obtained with the Versatile Advection Code,
of the oscillations of an inverse polarity prominence. The internal prominence
equilibrium, the surrounding corona and the inert photosphere are well
represented. Gravity and thermodynamics are not taken into account, but it is
argued that these are not crucial. The oscillations can be understood in terms
of a solid body moving through a plasma. The mass of this solid body is
determined by the magnetic field topology, not by the prominence mass proper.
The model also allows us to study the effect of the ambient coronal plasma on
the motion of the prominence body. Horizontal oscillations are damped through
the emission of slow waves while vertical oscillations are damped through the
emission of fast waves.Comment: 12 pages, 14 figures, accepted by Astronomy and Astrophysic
Advanced operator-splitting-based semi-implicit spectral method to solve the binary phase-field crystal equations with variable coefficients
We present an efficient method to solve numerically the equations of dissipative dynamics of the binary phase-field crystal model proposed by Elder et al. [Phys. Rev. B 75, 064107 (2007)] characterized by variable coefficients. Using the operator splitting method, the problem has been decomposed into sub-problems that can be solved more efficiently. A combination of non-trivial splitting with spectral semi-implicit solution leads to sets of algebraic equations of diagonal matrix form. Extensive testing of the method has been carried out to find the optimum balance among errors associated with time integration, spatial discretization, and splitting. We show that our method speeds up the computations by orders of magnitude relative to the conventional explicit finite difference scheme, while the costs of the pointwise implicit solution per timestep remains low. Also we show that due to its numerical dissipation, finite differencing can not compete with spectral differencing in terms of accuracy. In addition, we demonstrate that our method can efficiently be parallelized for distributed memory systems, where an excellent scalability with the number of CPUs is observed
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