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Thesis (M.S.)--Boston Universit

Simulating the symmetron: domain walls and symmetry-restoring impurities

In this paper we study the dynamics of relativistic domain walls in the presence of static symmetry-restoring impurities. The field theory is precisely the same as what is known to cosmologists as the "symmetron model", whereby the usual $\mathbb{Z}_2$ symmetry breaking potential is appended with a space-varying mass-term (the space-variation is set by the profile of the impurity, which we take to be a "tanh"-function). After presenting the outcomes of a suite of different numerical experiments we have three main results: (1) domain walls pin to impurities, (2) domain wall necklaces can be energetically preferred configurations, and (3) impurities significantly modifies the usual ${N}_{\rm dw}\propto t^{-1}$ scaling law for random networks of domain walls.Comment: 24 pages; 14 figure

Effective action approach to cosmological perturbations in dark energy and modified gravity

In light of upcoming observations modelling perturbations in dark energy and modified gravity models has become an important topic of research. We develop an effective action to construct the components of the perturbed dark energy momentum tensor which appears in the perturbed generalized gravitational field equations, {\delta}G_{\mu\nu} = 8{\pi}G{\delta}T_{\mu\nu} + {\delta}U_{\mu\nu} for linearized perturbations. Our method does not require knowledge of the Lagrangian density of the dark sector to be provided, only its field content. The method is based on the fact that it is only necessary to specify the perturbed Lagrangian to quadratic order and couples this with the assumption of global statistical isotropy of spatial sections to show that the model can be specified completely in terms of a finite number of background dependent functions. We present our formalism in a coordinate independent fashion and provide explicit formulae for the perturbed conservation equation and the components of {\delta}U_{\mu\nu} for two explicit generic examples: (i) the dark sector does not contain extra fields, L = L(g_{\mu\nu}) and (ii) the dark sector contains a scalar field and its first derivative L = L(g_{\mu\nu}, {\phi}, \nabla_{\mu}{\phi}). We discuss how the formalism can be applied to modified gravity models containing derivatives of the metric, curvature tensors, higher derivatives of the scalar fields and vector fields.Comment: Version accepted by JCAP. Typos corrected. Covariant decoupling conditions adde

Documents of the JPL Photovoltaics Program Analysis and Integration Center: An annotated bibliography

A bibliography of internal and external documents produced by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, based on the work performed by the Photovoltaics Program Analysis and Integration Center, is presented with annotations. As shown in the Table of Contents, the bibliography is divided into three subject areas: (1) Assessments, (2) Methdological Studies, and (3) Supporting Studies. Annotated abstracts are presented for 20 papers

The 5C 6 and 5C 7 surveys of radio sources

5C 6 and 5C 7 continue the series of deep surveys made at 408 and 1407 MHz with the One-Mile telescope at Cambridge. They were intended (1) to provide a sample of faint radio sources suitable for further study; (2) to improve the statistics of source counts N(S) and spectral-index distributions at low flux densities; (3) to study the isotropy of the distribution of faint sources. Each observed field is about 4° in diameter at 408 MHz and 1° in diameter at 1407 MHz, and the field-centres are a α = 02ʰ14ᵐ, δ = 32° (5C 6) and α = 08ᵏ17ᵐ, δ = 27° (5C 7). The synthesized beamwidths (FWHM) are 80 arcsec (408 MHz) and 23 arcsec (1407 MHz). The techniques of observation and data-analysis followed closely those used for 5C 5 (Pearson, T. J., 1975. Mon. Not. R. astr. Soc., 171, 475), with some minor variations which are noted in Section 2

Explicit comprehension instruction : a review of research and a new conceptualization of instruction

Includes bibliographical references (p. 13-16)The work upon which this publication was based was supported in part by the Office of Educational Research and Improvement under cooperative agreement no. OEG 0087-C100

Fast iterative solvers for convection-diffusion control problems

In this manuscript, we describe effective solvers for the optimal control of stabilized convection-diffusion problems. We employ the local projection stabilization, which we show to give the same matrix system whether the discretize-then-optimize or optimize-then-discretize approach for this problem is used. We then derive two effective preconditioners for this problem, the �first to be used with MINRES and the second to be used with the Bramble-Pasciak Conjugate Gradient method. The key components of both preconditioners are an accurate mass matrix approximation, a good approximation of the Schur complement, and an appropriate multigrid process to enact this latter approximation. We present numerical results to demonstrate that these preconditioners result in convergence in a small number of iterations, which is robust with respect to the mesh size h, and the regularization parameter β, for a range of problems