Study of composites as substrate materials in large space telescopes

Nonmetallic composites such as the graphite/epoxy system were investigated as possible substrates for the primary mirror of the large space telescope. The possible use of fiber reinforced metal matrix composites was reviewed in the literature. Problems arising out of the use of composites as substrate materials such as grinding, polishing, adherence of reflective coatings, rigidity of substrate, hygrospcopici tendency of the composites, thermal and temporal stability and other related problems were examined

Thermodynamics of free Domain Wall fermions

Studying various thermodynamic quantities for the free domain wall fermions for both finite and infinite fifth dimensional extent N_5, we find that the lattice corrections are minimum for $N_T\geq10$ for both energy density and susceptibility, for its irrelevant parameter M in the range 1.45-1.50. The correction terms are, however, quite large for small lattice sizes of $N_T\leq8$. We propose modifications of the domain wall operator, as well as the overlap operator, to reduce the finite cut-off effects to within 10% of the continuum results of the thermodynamic quantities for the currently used N_T=6-8 lattices. Incorporating chemical potential, we show that \mu^2 divergences are absent for a large class of such domain wall fermion actions although the chiral symmetry is broken for $\mu\neq0$.Comment: 11 pages, 15 figures include

A faster method of computation of lattice quark number susceptibilities

We compute the quark number susceptibilities in two flavor QCD for staggered fermions by adding the chemical potential as a Lagrange multiplier for the point-split number density term. Since lesser number of quark propagators are required at any order, this method leads to faster computations. We propose a subtraction procedure to remove the inherent undesired lattice terms and check that it works well by comparing our results with the existing ones where the elimination of these terms is analytically guaranteed. We also show that the ratios of susceptibilities are robust, opening a door for better estimates of location of the QCD critical point through the computation of the tenth and twelfth order baryon number susceptibilities without significant additional computational overload.Comment: 10 pages, 12 figure

Superspace formulation and correlation functions of 3d superconformal field theories

We study $3d$ SCFTs in the superspace formalism and discuss superfields and on-shell higher spin current multiplets in free $3d$ SCFTs with $\mathcal{N}= 1,2,3,4$ and $6$ superconformal symmetry. For $\mathcal{N}=1$ 3d SCFTs we determine the superconformal invariants in superspace needed for constructing 3-point functions of higher spin operators, find the non-linear relations between the invariants and consequently write down all the independent invariant structures, both parity even and odd, for various 3-point functions of higher spin operators.Comment: typos corrected, references added. Accepted for publication in JHE