A New Galactic Wolf-Rayet Star in Centaurus

In this work I communicate the detection of a new Galactic Wolf-Rayet star (WR60a) in Centaurus. The H- and K-band spectra of WR60a, show strong carbon near-infrared emission lines, characteristic of Wolf-Rayet stars of the WC5-7 sub-type. Adopting mean absolute magnitude M$_K$ and mean intrinsic ($J-K_S$) and ($H-K_S$) colours, it was found that WR60a suffer a mean visual extinction of 3.8$\pm$1.3 magnitudes, being located at a probable heliocentric distance of 5.2$\pm$0.8 Kpc, which for the related Galactic longitude (l=312) puts this star probably in the Carina-Sagittarius arm at about 5.9 kpc from the Galactic center. I searched for clusters in the vicinity of WR60a, and in principle found no previously known clusters in a search radius region of several tens arc-minutes. The detection of a well isolated WR star induced us to seek for some still unknown cluster, somewhere in the vicinity of WR60a. From inspection of 5.8$\mu$m and 8.0$\mu$m Spitzer/IRAC GLIMPSE images of the region around the new WR star, it was found strong mid-infrared extended emission at about 13.5 arcmin south-west of WR60a. The study of the the H-K$_S$ colour distribution of point sources associated with the extended emission, reveals the presence of a new Galactic cluster candidate probably formed by at least 85 stars.Comment: 5 pages, 2 tables and 4 figures. Figure 4 is in low-resolution mode. The published on-line version of the paper can be obtained at http://www.isrn.com/journals/astro/2011/632850

Discovery of two Galactic Wolf-Rayet stars in Circinus

I report the discovery of two new Galactic Wolf-Rayet stars in Circinus via detection of their C, N and He Near-Infrared emission lines, using ESO-NTT-SOFI archival data. The H- and K-band spectra of WR67a and WR67b, indicate that they are Wolf-Rayet stars of WN6h and WC8 sub-types, respectively. WR67a presents a weak-lined spectrum probably reminiscent of young hydrogen rich main-sequence stars such as WR25 in Car OB1 and HD97950 in NGC3603. Indeed, this conclusion is reinforced by the close morphological match of the WR67a H- and K-band spectra with that for WR21a, a known extremely massive binary system. WR67b is probably a non-dusty WC8 Wolf-Rayet star that has a estimated heliocentric distance of 2.7(0.9) kpc, which for its Galactic coordinates, puts the star probably in the near portion of the Scutum-Centaurus arm.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication on MNRA

Transport through quantum rings

The transport of fermions through nanocircuits plays a major role in mesoscopic physics. Exploring the analogy with classical wave scattering, basic notions of nanoscale transport can be explained in a simple way, even at the level of undergraduate Solid State Physics courses, and more so if these explanations are supported by numerical simulations of these nanocircuits. This paper presents a simple tight-binding method for the study of the conductance of quantum nanorings connected to one-dimensional leads. We show how to address the effects of applied magnetic and electric fields and illustrate concepts such as Aharonov-Bohm conductance oscillations, resonant tunneling and destructive interference.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figure