Above the Law: The Prosecutor\u27s Duty to Seek Justice and the Performance of Substantial Assistance Agreements

We study the gravitational-wave (GW) signatures of clouds of ultralight bosons around black holes (BHs) in binary inspirals. These clouds, which are formed via superradiance instabilities for rapidly rotating BHs, produce distinct effects in the population of BH masses and spins, and, for real fields, a continuous monochromatic GW signal. We show that the presence of a binary companion greatly enriches the dynamical evolution of the system, most remarkably through the existence of resonant transitions between the growing and decaying modes of the cloud (analogous to Rabi oscillations in atomic physics). These resonances have rich phenomenological implications for current and future GW detectors. Notably, the amplitude of the GW signal from the clouds may be reduced, and in many cases terminated, much before the binary merger. The presence of a boson cloud can also be revealed in the GW signal from the binary through the imprint of finite-size effects, such as spin-induced multipole moments and tidal Love numbers. The time dependence of the cloud's energy density during the resonance leads to a sharp feature, or at least attenuation, in the contribution from the finite-size terms to the waveforms. The observation of these effects would constrain the properties of putative ultralight bosons through precision GW data, offering new probes of physics beyond the Standard Model

The pointer basis and the feedback stabilization of quantum systems

The dynamics for an open quantum system can be `unravelled' in infinitely many ways, depending on how the environment is monitored, yielding different sorts of conditioned states, evolving stochastically. In the case of ideal monitoring these states are pure, and the set of states for a given monitoring forms a basis (which is overcomplete in general) for the system. It has been argued elsewhere [D. Atkins et al., Europhys. Lett. 69, 163 (2005)] that the `pointer basis' as introduced by Zurek and Paz [Phys. Rev. Lett 70, 1187(1993)], should be identified with the unravelling-induced basis which decoheres most slowly. Here we show the applicability of this concept of pointer basis to the problem of state stabilization for quantum systems. In particular we prove that for linear Gaussian quantum systems, if the feedback control is assumed to be strong compared to the decoherence of the pointer basis, then the system can be stabilized in one of the pointer basis states with a fidelity close to one (the infidelity varies inversely with the control strength). Moreover, if the aim of the feedback is to maximize the fidelity of the unconditioned system state with a pure state that is one of its conditioned states, then the optimal unravelling for stabilizing the system in this way is that which induces the pointer basis for the conditioned states. We illustrate these results with a model system: quantum Brownian motion. We show that even if the feedback control strength is comparable to the decoherence, the optimal unravelling still induces a basis very close to the pointer basis. However if the feedback control is weak compared to the decoherence, this is not the case

Valley-kink in Bilayer Graphene at ν=0\nu=0: A Charge Density Signature for Quantum Hall Ferromagnetism

We investigate interaction-induced valley domain walls in bilayer graphene in the $\nu=0$ quantum Hall state, subject to a perpendicular electric field that is antisymmetric across a line in the sample. Such a state can be realized in a double-gated suspended sample, where the electric field changes sign across a line in the middle. The non-interacting energy spectrum of the ground state is characterized by a sharp domain wall between two valley-polarized regions. Using the Hartree-Fock approximation, we find that the Coulomb interaction opens a gap between the two lowest-lying states near the Fermi level, yielding a smooth domain wall with a kink configuration in the valley index. Our results suggest the possibility to visualize the domain wall via measuring the charge density difference between the two graphene layers, which we find exhibits a characteristic pattern. The width of the kink and the resulting pattern can be tuned by the interplay between the magnetic field and gate electric fields

A study of earth radar returns from Alouette satellite

Ground radar reflection coefficient analysis on Alouette sounder ionogram

LM radar reflectivity simulation Final report

Ultrasonic simulation of lunar module radar reflectivit

Probing the superconducting gap symmetry of PrRu4_{4}Sb12_{12}: A comparison with PrOs4_{4}Sb12_{12}

We report measurements of the magnetic penetration depth $\lambda$ in single crystals of PrRu$_{4}$Sb$_{12}$ down to 0.1 K. Both $\lambda$ and superfluid density $\rho_{s}$ exhibit an exponential behavior for $T$ $<$ 0.5$T_{c}$, with parameters $\Delta$(0)/\textit{k}$_{B}$\textit{T}$_{c}$ = 1.9 and $\lambda(0)$ = 2900 \AA. The value of $\Delta$(0) is consistent with the specific-heat jump value of $\Delta C/\gamma T_{c}$ = 1.87 measured elsewhere, while the value of $\lambda(0)$ is consistent with the measured value of the electronic heat-capacity coefficient $\gamma$. Our data are consistent with PrRu$_{4}$Sb$_{12}$ being a moderate-coupling, fully-gapped superconductor. We suggest experiments to study how the nature of the superconducting state evolves with increasing Ru substitution for Os

A quantitative assessment of empirical magnetic field models at geosynchronous orbit during magnetic storms

[1] We evaluate the performance of recent empirical magnetic field models (Tsyganenko, 1996, 2002a, 2002b; Tsyganenko and Sitnov, 2005, hereafter referred to as T96, T02 and TS05, respectively) during magnetic storm times including both pre- and post-storm intervals. The model outputs are compared with GOES observations of the magnetic field at geosynchronous orbit. In the case of a major magnetic storm, the T96 and T02 models predict anomalously strong negative Bz at geostationary orbit on the nightside due to input values exceeding the model limits, whereas a comprehensive magnetic field data survey using GOES does not support that prediction. On the basis of additional comparisons using 52 storm events, we discuss the strengths and limitations of each model. Furthermore, we quantify the performance of individual models at predicting geostationary magnetic fields as a function of local time, Dst, and storm phase. Compared to the earlier models (T96 and T02), the most recent storm-time model (TS05) has the best overall performance across the entire range of local times, storm levels, and storm phases at geostationary orbit. The field residuals between TS05 and GOES are small (≤3 nT) compared to the intrinsic short time-scale magnetic variability of the geostationary environment even during non-storm conditions (∼24 nT). Finally, we demonstrate how field model errors may affect radiation belt studies when estimating electron phase space density