Diagnostics of the molecular component of PDRs with mechanical heating. II: line intensities and ratios

CO observations in active galactic nuclei and star-bursts reveal high kinetic temperatures. Those environments are thought to be very turbulent due to dynamic phenomena such as outflows and high supernova rates. We investigate the effect of mechanical heating (MH) on atomic fine-structure and molecular lines, and their ratios. We use those ratios as a diagnostic to constrain the amount of MH in an object and also study its significance on estimating the H2 mass. Equilibrium PDRs models were used to compute the thermal and chemical balance for the clouds. The equilibria were solved for numerically using the optimized version of the Leiden PDR-XDR code. Large velocity gradient calculations were done as post-processing on the output of the PDR models using RADEX. High-J CO line ratios are very sensitive to MH. Emission becomes at least one order of magnitude brighter in clouds with n~10^5~cm^-3 and a star formation rate of 1 Solar Mass per year (corresponding to a MH rate of 2 * 10^-19 erg cm^-3 s^-1). Emission of low-J CO lines is not as sensitive to MH, but they do become brighter in response to MH. Generally, for all of the lines we considered, MH increases excitation temperatures and decreases the optical depth at the line centre. Hence line ratios are also affected, strongly in some cases. Ratios involving HCN are a good diagnostic for MH, such as HCN(1-0)/CO(1-0) and HCN(1-0)/HCO^+(1-0). Both ratios increase by a factor 3 or more for a MH equivalent to > 5 percent of the surface heating, as opposed to pure PDRs. The first major conclusion is that low-J to high-J intensity ratios will yield a good estimate of the MH rate (as opposed to only low-J ratios). The second one is that the MH rate should be taken into account when determining A_V or equivalently N_H, and consequently the cloud mass. Ignoring MH will also lead to large errors in density and radiation field estimates.Comment: 38 pages, to appear in A&

Anti-dark and Mexican-hat solitons in the Sasa-Satsuma equation on the continuous wave background

In this letter, via the Darboux transformation method we construct new analytic soliton solutions for the Sasa-Satsuma equation which describes the femtosecond pulses propagation in a monomode fiber. We reveal that two different types of femtosecond solitons, i.e., the anti-dark (AD) and Mexican-hat (MH) solitons, can form on a continuous wave (CW) background, and numerically study their stability under small initial perturbations. Different from the common bright and dark solitons, the AD and MH solitons can exhibit both the resonant and elastic interactions, as well as various partially/completely inelastic interactions which are composed of such two fundamental interactions. In addition, we find that the energy exchange between some interacting soliton and the CW background may lead to one AD soliton changing into an MH one, or one MH soliton into an AD one.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figure

Three-Loop Predictions for the Light Higgs Mass in the MSSM

The Minimal Supersymmetric Extension of the Standard Model (MSSM) features a light Higgs boson, the mass Mh of which is predicted by the theory. Given that the LHC will be able to measure the mass of a light Higgs with great accuracy, a precise theoretical calculation of Mh yields an important test of the MSSM. In order to deliver this precision, we present three-loop radiative corrections of O(alpha_t*alpha_s^2) and provide a computer code that combines our results with corrections to Mh at lower loop orders that are available in the literature.Comment: 3 pages, 1 figure, contribution to the proceedings of the conference "Physics at LHC 2010