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Application of Nuclear Technology to Art Identification Problems: First Annual Report

Throughout the centuries, as man has become increasingly affluent, his interest in antiquities and objects of art, and the price he has been willing to pay for them, has increased. Inevitably, one result has been to attract the unscrupulous to the production and sale of counterfeit paintings, sculptures, and other works of art. The skill of forgers varies but often is highly sophisticated. However, dealers, museum curators, and other experts have also become more skillful in the detection of forgeries. Scientific tools of increasing sensitivity and sophistication have gradually been applied to the examination of the materials of art and archaeology. Such tools frequently support and render more reliable the judgment of the experts. The quality of forgeries may improve further as their makers become acquainted with the new methods of detection and in turn learn to circumvent or confound the methods. Therefore, the development of still more advanced methods of examination has great utility in the art world. This is particularly true if the ultimate effect is to make circumvention of the methods of examination so costly that the economic incentives for producing forgeries may be substantially reduced, if not eliminated.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗

Temperature dependence of uranium and thorium partitioning in igneous zircons

Zircon is a key mineral in geochronology because of its chemical and physical durability and tendency to incorporate radioactive trace elements such as U and Th. Quantifying the partitioning of the actinide elements is critical to constrain initial non-secular equilibrium amounts of 230 Th in zircon. An excess or deficit of 206 Pb will be produced from such an initial excess/deficit of 230 Th from the secular equilibrium condition, which influences the calculated 206 Pb/ 238 U age (Schärer, 1984, Mattinson, 1973). However, there is no standard way to calculate Th/U partitioning ratios when applying age corrections to young igneous zircon, making uncertainties hard to estimate. To better understand U and Th partitioning of zircon/melt that is the cornerstone of the secular disequilibrium correction, zircon was synthesized in one-atmosphere experiments using basaltic andesite, andesite, and rhyolite starting materials, doped with Zr, U, and Th. Different experimental temperatures and oxygen fugacity conditions (ΔQFM−4 to ΔQFM+4) were explored to examine their effects on U and Th partitioning. In addition, we specifically quantify the effects of sector zoning, fractional crystallization, and melt composition on U and Th partitioning. By combining experimental and natural zircon data, we find that temperature has the primary control on the partitioning of U and Th in the zircon and calibrate an inverse relationship between these partition coefficients and crystallization temperatures. The calibrated equation can be applied to the 230 Th correction for an improvement in the accuracy of Th-corrected 206 Pb/ 238 U dates when the zircon crystallization temperature is known.

206Pb/238U dating↗

Predicting images for the dynamics of stellar clusters ( π-DOC ): a deep learning framework to predict mass, distance, and age of globular clusters

ABSTRACT Dynamical mass estimates of simple systems such as globular clusters (GCs) still suffer from up to a factor of 2 uncertainty. This is primarily due to the oversimplifications of standard dynamical models that often neglect the effects of the long-term evolution of GCs. Here, we introduce a new approach to measure the dynamical properties of GCs, based on the combination of a deep-learning framework and the large amount of data from direct N-body simulations. Our algorithm, π-DOC (Predicting Images for the Dynamics Of stellar Clusters) is composed of two convolutional networks, trained to learn the non-trivial transformation between an observed GC luminosity map and its associated mass distribution, age, and distance. The training set is made of V-band luminosity and mass maps constructed as mock observations from N-body simulations. The tests on π-DOC demonstrate that we can predict the mass distribution with a mean error per pixel of 27 per cent, and the age and distance with an accuracy of 1.5 Gyr and 6 kpc, respectively. In turn, we recover the shape of the mass-to-light profile and its global value with a mean error of 12 per cent, which implies that we efficiently trace mass segregation. A preliminary comparison with observations indicates that our algorithm is able to predict the dynamical properties of GCs within the limits of the training set. These encouraging results demonstrate that our deep-learning framework and its forward modelling approach can offer a rapid and adaptable tool competitive with standard dynamical models.

Chardin, Jonathan↗