General Relativistic Augmentation of Neutrino Pair Annihilation Energy Deposition Near Neutron Stars

General relativistic calculations are made of neutrino-antineutrino annihilation into electron-positron pairs near the surface of a neutron star. It is found that the efficiency of this process is enhanced over the Newtonian values up to a factor of more than 4 in the regime applicable to Type II supernovae and by up to a factor of 30 for collapsing neutron stars.Comment: 14 pages, 6 figure

Fabrication process of a high temperature polymer matrix engine duct

The process that was used in the molding of an advanced composite outer by-pass duct planned for the F404 engine is discussed. This duct was developed as a potential replacement for the existing titanium duct in order to reduce both the weight and cost of the duct. The composite duct is now going into the manufacturing technology portion of the program. The duct is fabricated using graphite cloth impregnated with the PMR-15 matrix system

Improved Heterogeneous Distance Functions

Instance-based learning techniques typically handle continuous and linear input values well, but often do not handle nominal input attributes appropriately. The Value Difference Metric (VDM) was designed to find reasonable distance values between nominal attribute values, but it largely ignores continuous attributes, requiring discretization to map continuous values into nominal values. This paper proposes three new heterogeneous distance functions, called the Heterogeneous Value Difference Metric (HVDM), the Interpolated Value Difference Metric (IVDM), and the Windowed Value Difference Metric (WVDM). These new distance functions are designed to handle applications with nominal attributes, continuous attributes, or both. In experiments on 48 applications the new distance metrics achieve higher classification accuracy on average than three previous distance functions on those datasets that have both nominal and continuous attributes.Comment: See http://www.jair.org/ for an online appendix and other files accompanying this articl

Influence of constituent properties and geometric form on behavior of woven fabric reinforced composites

Th potential for woven fabric composite forms to increase the interlaminar strength and toughness properties of laminated composite septems is studied. Experimental and analytical studies were performed on a z-axis fabric

A Model for Short Gamma-Ray Bursts: Heated Neutron Stars in Close Binary Systems

In this paper we present a model for the short (< second) population of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). In this model heated neutron stars in a close binary system near their last stable orbit emit neutrinos at large luminosities (~ 10^53 ergs/sec). A fraction of these neutrinos will annihilate to form an electron-positron pair plasma wind which will, in turn, expand and recombine to photons which make the gamma-ray burst. We study neutrino annihilation and show that a substantial fraction (~ 50%) of energy deposited comes from inter-star neutrinos, where each member of the neutrino pair originates from each neutron star. Thus, in addition to the annihilation of neutrinos blowing off of a single star, we have a new source of baryon free energy that is deposited between the stars. To model the pair plasma wind between stars, we do three-dimensional relativistic numerical hydrodynamic calculations. Preliminary results are also presented of new, fully general relativistic calculations of gravitationally attracting stars falling from infinity with no angular momentum. These simulations exhibit a compression effect.Comment: 3 pages, 3 postscript figs (2 color), to appear in "Gamma-Ray Burst and Afterglow Astronomy 2001", Woods Hole; 5-9 Nov, 200

Critical velocity ionisation in substellar atmospheres

The observation of radio, X-ray and Hα emission from substellar objects indicates the presence of plasma regions and associated high-energy processes in their surrounding envelopes. This paper numerically simulates and characterises Critical Velocity Ionisation, a potential ionisation process, that can efficiently generate plasma as a result of neutral gas flows interacting with seed magnetized plasmas. By coupling a Gas-MHD interactions code (to simulate the ionisation mechanism) with a substellar global circulation model (to provide the required gas flows) we quantify the spatial extent of the resulting plasma regions, their degree of ionisation and their lifetime for a typical substellar atmosphere. It is found that the typical average ionisation fraction reached at equilibrium (where the ionisation and recombination rates are equal and opposite) ranges from 10-5 to 10-8, at pressures between 10-1 and 10-3 bar, with a trend of increasing ionisation fraction with decreasing atmospheric pressure. The ionisation fractions reached as a result of Critical Velocity Ionisation are sufficient to allow magnetic fields to couple to gas flows in the atmosphere

Acoustic suppression of the coffee-ring effect

We study the influence of acoustic fields on the evaporative self-assembly of solute particles suspended inside sessile droplets of complex fluids. The self-assembly process often results in an undesirable ring-like heterogeneous residue, a phenomenon known as the coffee-ring effect. Here we show that this ring-like self-assembly can be controlled acoustically to form homogeneous disc-like or concentrated spot-like residues. The principle of our method lies in the formation of dynamic patterns of particles in acoustically excited droplets, which inhibits the evaporation-driven convective transport of particles towards the contact line. We elucidate the mechanisms of this pattern formation and also obtain conditions for the suppression of the coffee-ring effect. Our results provide a more general solution to suppress the coffee-ring effect without any physiochemical modification of the fluids, the particles or the surface, thus potentially useful in a broad range of industrial and analytical applications that require homogenous solute depositions

A pharmacological cocktail for arresting actin dynamics in living cells.

The actin cytoskeleton is regulated by factors that influence polymer assembly, disassembly, and network rearrangement. Drugs that inhibit these events have been used to test the role of actin dynamics in a wide range of cellular processes. Previous methods of arresting actin rearrangements take minutes to act and work well in some contexts, but can lead to significant actin reorganization in cells with rapid actin dynamics, such as neutrophils. In this paper, we report a pharmacological cocktail that not only arrests actin dynamics but also preserves the structure of the existing actin network in neutrophil-like HL-60 cells, human fibrosarcoma HT1080 cells, and mouse NIH 3T3 fibroblast cells. Our cocktail induces an arrest of actin dynamics that initiates within seconds and persists for longer than 10 min, during which time cells maintain their responsivity to external stimuli. With this cocktail, we demonstrate that actin dynamics, and not simply morphological polarity or actin accumulation at the leading edge, are required for the spatial persistence of Rac activation in HL-60 cells. Our drug combination preserves the structure of the existing cytoskeleton while blocking actin assembly, disassembly, and rearrangement, and should prove useful for investigating the role of actin dynamics in a wide range of cellular signaling contexts