Spectroscopic Determination of the Low Redshift Type Ia Supernova Rate from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

Kavli Affiliate: Mark SubbaRao | Summary:Supernova rates are directly coupled to high mass stellar birth and evolution. As such, they are one of the few direct measures of the history of cosmic stellar evolution. In this paper we describe an probabilistic technique for identifying supernovae within spectroscopic samples of galaxies. We present a study of […]


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Surprising lack of magnetism in the conductance channels of Pt atomic chains

Kavli Affiliate: Roel H. M. Smit | Summary:Pt is known to show spontaneous formation of chains of metal atoms upon breaking a metallic contact. From model calculations these have been predicted to be spin polarized, which is reasonable in view of the Stoner enhanced susceptibility of bulk Pt and the increased density of states due […]


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Circle-valued Morse theory for complex hyperplane arrangements

Kavli Affiliate: Toshitake Kohno | Summary:Let A be an essential complex hyperplane arrangement in an n-dimensional complex vector space V. Let H denote the union of the hyperplanes, and M denote the complement to H in V. We develop the real-valued and circle-valued Morse theory for M and prove, in particular, that M has the […]


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Quantum phase transitions in transverse field spin models: from statistical physics to quantum information

Kavli Affiliate: Thomas Rosenbaum | Summary:We review quantum phase transitions of spin systems in transverse magnetic fields taking the examples of the spin-1/2 Ising and XY models in a transverse field. Beginning with an overview of quantum phase transitions, we introduce a number of model Hamiltonians. We provide exact solutions in one spatial dimension connecting […]


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Digital Plasmonics

Kavli Affiliate: Kobus Kuipers | Summary:The field of plasmonics offers a route to control light fields with metallic nanostructures through the excitation of Surface Plasmon Polaritons (SPPs). These surface waves, bound to a metal dielectric interface, tightly confine electromagnetic energy. Active control over SPPs has potential for applications in sensing, photovoltaics, quantum communication, nano circuitry, […]


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Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope: High-Energy Results from the First Year

Kavli Affiliate: Peter Michelson | Summary:The Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope (Fermi) was launched on June 11, 2008 and began its first year sky survey on August 11, 2008. The Large Area Telescope (LAT), a wide field-of-view pair-conversion telescope covering the energy range from 20 MeV to more than 300 GeV, is the primary instrument on […]


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The Electromagnetic Fields of a Spinning Spherical Shell of Charge

Kavli Affiliate: John Belcher | Summary:We consider the problem of a rotating charged spherical shell of radius a carrying an axially symmetric distribution of charge. We give the interior and exterior solutions to this problem for arbitrary zonal dependence of the surface charge distribution and for arbitrary time dependence of the rotation rate. Surprisingly, these […]


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DFT-based many-body analysis of electron transport through molecules

Kavli Affiliate: Joseph M. Thijssen | Summary:We present a method which uses density functional theory (DFT) to treat transport through a single molecule connected to two conducting leads for the weak and intermediate coupling. This case is not accessible to standard non-equilibrium Green’s function (NEGF) calculations. Our method is based on a mapping of the […]


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An Extended and More Sensitive Search for Periodicities in RXTE/ASM X-ray Light Curves

Kavli Affiliate: Edmund Bertschinger | Summary:We present the results of a systematic search in approximately 14 years of Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer All-Sky Monitor data for evidence of periodicities not reported by Wen et al. (2006). Two variations of the commonly used Fourier analysis search method have been employed to achieve significant improvements in sensitivity. […]


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