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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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At least 127 records · Page 7

Extracting the Galactic Center excess’ source-count distribution with neural nets

The two leading hypotheses for the Galactic Center excess (GCE) in the Fermi data are an unresolved population of faint millisecond pulsars (MSPs) and dark-matter (DM) annihilation. The dichotomy between these explanations is typically reflected by modeling them as two separate emission components. However, point sources (PSs) such as MSPs become statistically degenerate with smooth Poisson emission in the ultrafaint limit (formally where each source is expected to contribute much less than one photon on average), leading to an ambiguity that can render questions such as whether the emission is PS-like or Poissonian in nature ill defined. We present a conceptually new approach that describes the PS and Poisson emission in a unified manner and only afterwards derives constraints on the Poissonian component from the so obtained results. For the implementation of this approach, we leverage deep learning techniques, centered around a neural network-based method for histogram regression that expresses uncertainties in terms of quantiles. We demonstrate that our method is robust against a number of systematics that have plagued previous approaches, in particular DM/PS misattribution. In the Fermi data, we find a faint GCE described by a median source-count distribution (SCD) peaked at a flux of ~ 4 x 10 -11 counts cm -2 s -1 (corresponding to ~ 3-4 expected counts per PS), which would require N ~ $\mathscr{O}$(10 4 ) sources to explain the entire excess (median value N = 29,300 across the sky). Although faint, this SCD allows us to derive the constraint η ρ ≤ 66% for the Poissonian fraction of the GCE flux η ρ at 95% confidence, suggesting that a substantial amount of the GCE flux is due to PSs.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

Evolution of decaying particles and decay products in various scenarios for the future expansion of the Universe

We examine nonrelativistic particles that decay into relativistic products in big rip, little rip, and pseudorip models for the future evolution of the Universe. In contrast to decays that occur in standard ΛCDM, the evolution of the ratio r of the energy density of the relativistic decay products to the energy density of the initially decaying particles can decrease with time in all of these models. In big rip and little rip models, r always goes to zero asymptotically, while this ratio evolves to infinity or a constant in pseudorip models.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

Modeling iterative reconstruction and displacement field in the large scale structure

The next generation of galaxy surveys like the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument and Euclid will provide datasets orders of magnitude larger than anything available to date. Our ability to model nonlinear effects in late time matter perturbations will be a key to unlock the full potential of these datasets, and the area of initial condition reconstruction is attracting growing attention. Iterative reconstruction developed by Marcel Schmittfull et al. is a technique designed to reconstruct the displacement field from the observed galaxy distribution. The nonlinear displacement field and initial linear density field are highly correlated. Therefore, reconstructing the nonlinear displacement field enables us to extract the primordial cosmological information better than from the late time density field at the level of the two-point statistics. This paper will test to what extent the iterative reconstruction can recover the true displacement field and construct a perturbation theory model for the postreconstructed field. We model the iterative reconstruction process with Lagrangian perturbation theory (LPT) up to third order for dark matter in real space and compare it with N-body simulations. Here we find that the simulated iterative reconstruction does not converge to the nonlinear displacement field, and the discrepancy mainly appears in the shift term, i.e., the term correlated directly with the linear density field. On the contrary, our 3LPT model predicts that the iterative reconstruction should converge to the nonlinear displacement field. We discuss the sources of discrepancy, including numerical noise/artifacts on small scales, and present an ad hoc phenomenological model that improves the agreement.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

Deep learning simulations of the microwave sky

Here we present 500 high-resolution, full-sky millimeter-wave deep learning (DL) simulations that include lensed CMB maps and correlated foreground components. We find that these MillimeterDL simulations can reproduce a wide range of non-Gaussian summary statistics matching the input training simulations, while only being optimized to match the power spectra. The procedure we develop in this work enables the capability to mass produce independent full-sky realizations from a single expensive full-sky simulation, when ordinarily the latter would not provide enough training data. We also circumvent a common limitation of high-resolution DL simulations that they be confined to small sky areas, often due to memory or GPU issues; we do this by developing a “stitching” procedure that can recover the large-scale, high-order statistics and avoid discontinuities or repeated features in the maps. In addition, since our network takes as input a full-sky lensing convergence map, it can in principle take a full-sky lensing convergence map from any large-scale structure (LSS) simulation and generate the corresponding lensed CMB and correlated foreground components at millimeter wavelengths; this is especially useful in the current era of combining results from both CMB and LSS surveys, which require a common set of simulations.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

Distribution function of nuclei from $\mathcal{e}^±$ scattering in the presence of a strong primordial magnetic field

The amplitude of the primordial magnetic field (PMF) is constrained from observational limits on primordial nuclear abundances. Within this constraint, it is possible that nuclear motion is regulated by Coulomb scattering with electrons and positrons (e ± s), while e ± s are affected by a PMF rather than collisions. For example, at a temperature of 10 9 K, thermal nuclei typically experience ~ 10 21 scatterings per second that are dominated by very small angle scattering leading to minuscule changes in the nuclear kinetic energy of order $\mathcal{O}$(1) eV. In this paper the upper limit on the effects of a possible discretization of the e ± momenta by the PMF on the nuclear momentum distribution is estimated under the extreme assumptions that the momentum of the e ± is relaxed before and after Coulomb scattering to Landau levels, and that during Coulomb scattering the PMF is neglected. This assumption explicitly breaks the time reversal invariance of Coulomb scattering, and the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution is not a trivial steady state solution of the Boltzmann equation under these assumptions. Here we numerically evaluate the collision terms in the Boltzmann equation, and show that the introduction of a special direction in the e ± distribution by the PMF generates no directional dependence of the collisional destruction term of nuclei. Large anisotropies in the nuclear distribution function are then constrained from big bang nucleosynthesis. Ultimately, we conclude that a PMF does not significantly affect the isotropy or big bang nucleosynthesis.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

Model-independent versus model-dependent interpretation of the SDSS-III BOSS power spectrum: Bridging the divide

The traditional clustering analyses of galaxy redshift surveys compress the clustering data into a set of late-time physical variables in a model-independent way. This approach has recently been extended by an additional shape variable encoding early-time physics information. Here we apply this new technique, ShapeFit, to SDSS-III BOSS data and show that it matches the constraining power of alternative, model-dependent approaches, which directly constrain the model’s parameters adopting a cosmological model ab initio. ShapeFit is ~30 times faster, model independent, naturally splits early- and late-time variables, and enables a better control of observational systematics.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

Measurement of the B s 0 → μ + μ - decay properties and search for the B 0 → μ + μ - and B s 0 → μ + μ - γ decays

An improved measurement of the decay $B^0_S$ → $μ^+μ^-$ and searches for the decays $B^0$ → $μ^+μ^+$ and $B^0_S$ → $μ^+μ^-γ$ are performed at the LHCb experiment using data collected in proton-proton collisions at $\sqrt{s}$ = 7, 8 and 13 TeV. corresponding to integrated luminosities of 1, 2 and 6 fb -1 , respectively. The $B^0_S$ → $μ^+μ^-$ branching fraction and effective lifetime are measured to be $\mathscr{B}$($B^0_S$ → $μ^+μ^-$) = (3.09$^{(+0.46+0.15)}_{(-0.43-0.11)}$) x 10 -9 and $τ(B^0_s →μ^+μ^-)$ = (2.07 ± 0.29 ± 0.03) ps, respectively, where the uncertainties include both statistical and systematic contributions. No significant signal for $B^0$ → $μ^+μ^-$ and $B^0_S$ → $μ^+μ^-γ$ decays is found and the upper limits $\mathscr{B}$($B^0$ → $μ^+μ^-$) < 2.6 x 10 -10 and $B^0_S$ → $μ^+μ^-γ$ < 2.0 x 10 -9 at 95% confidence level are determined, where the latter is limited to the range $m_{μμ}$ > 4.9 GeV/c 2 . Additionally, the ratio between the $B^0$ → $μ^+μ^-$ and $B^0_S$ → $μ^+μ^-$ branching fractions is measured to be $\mathscr{R}_{μ+μ-}$ < 0.095 at 95% confidence level. The results are in agreement with the Standard Model predictions.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

Transversity GPDs of the proton from lattice QCD

We present the first calculation of the x dependence of the isovector transversity generalized parton distributions (GPDs) for the proton within lattice QCD. We compute the matrix elements with nonlocal operators containing a Wilson line. The calculation implements the Breit symmetric frame. The proton momenta are chosen as 0.83, 1.25, and 1.67 GeV, and the values of the momentum transfer squared are 0.69 and 1.02 GeV 2 . These combinations include cases with zero and nonzero skewness. The calculation is performed using one ensemble of twisted-mass fermions with a clover term: two degenerate-mass light quarks, a strange quark, and a charm quark. The lattice results are renormalized nonperturbatively and finally matched to the light-cone GPDs using one-loop perturbation theory within the framework of large-momentum effective theory. The final GPDs are given in the $\overline{MS}$ scheme at a scale of 2 GeV. In addition to the individual GPDs, we form the combination of the transversity GPDs that is related to the transverse spin structure of the proton. Finally, we extract the lowest two moments of the GPDs and draw a number of important qualitative conclusions.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗