Search results for "Orders of Magnitude"
showing 10 items of 188 documents
Neutron skins of atomic nuclei: per aspera ad astra
2019
The complex nature of the nuclear forces generates a broad range and diversity of observational phenomena. Heavy nuclei, though orders of magnitude less massive than neutron stars, are governed by the same underlying physics, which is enshrined in the nuclear equation of state. Heavy nuclei are expected to develop a neutron-rich skin where many neutrons collect near the surface. Such a skin thickness is strongly sensitive to the poorly-known density dependence of the symmetry energy near saturation density. An accurate and model-independent determination of the neutron-skin thickness of heavy nuclei would provide a significant first constraint on the density dependence of the nuclear symmet…
Probing Planck scale physics with IceCube
2005
Neutrino oscillations can be affected by decoherence induced e.g. by Planck scale suppressed interactions with the space-time foam predicted in some approaches to quantum gravity. We study the prospects for observing such effects at IceCube, using the likely flux of TeV antineutrinos from the Cygnus spiral arm. We formulate the statistical analysis for evaluating the sensitivity to quantum decoherence in the presence of the background from atmospheric neutrinos, as well as from plausible cosmic neutrino sources. We demonstrate that IceCube will improve the sensitivity to decoherence effects of ${\cal O}(E^2/M_{\rm Pl})$ by 17 orders of magnitude over present limits and, moreover, that it ca…
Narrowing the window of inflationary magnetogenesis
2017
We consider inflationary magnetogenesis where the conformal symmetry is broken by the term $f^2(\phi) F_{\alpha\beta} F^{\alpha\beta}$. We assume that the magnetic field power spectrum today between 0.1 and $10^4$ Mpc is a power law, with upper and lower limits from observation. This fixes $f$ to be close to a power law in conformal time in the window during inflation when the modes observed today are generated. In contrast to previous work, we do not make any assumptions about the form of $f$ outside these scales. We cover all possible reheating histories, described by an average equation of state $-1/3 <\bar{w} <1$. Requiring that strong coupling and large backreaction are avoided both at…
Constraints on Cosmic Strings Using Data from the Third Advanced LIGO–Virgo Observing Run
2021
We search for gravitational-wave signals produced by cosmic strings in the Advanced LIGO and Virgo full O3 data set. Search results are presented for gravitational waves produced by cosmic string loop features such as cusps, kinks and, for the first time, kink-kink collisions.cA template-based search for short-duration transient signals does not yield a detection. We also use the stochastic gravitational-wave background energy density upper limits derived from the O3 data to constrain the cosmic string tension, $G\mu$, as a function of the number of kinks, or the number of cusps, for two cosmic string loop distribution models.cAdditionally, we develop and test a third model which interpolat…
Influence of impurity scattering on Drude response in heavy-fermion UPd2Al3
2010
The frequency-dependent conductivity of heavy-fermion metals can often be described within the picture of the Drude response: the transport relaxation rate is the only relevant frequency scale and, furthermore, reduced by orders of magnitude compared to normal metals. While the relaxation-time enhancement corresponds to the effective-mass enhancement in these materials, i.e. a fundamental material characteristic, the absolute value of the relaxation time depends on the details of the relevant scattering processes. Here we discuss the influence of impurity scattering on the Drude response of the heavy fermions in UPd2Al3 by comparing different thin film samples.
Gold Nanoparticle Growth Monitored in situ Using a Novel Fast Optical Single-Particle Spectroscopy Method
2007
Size- and shape-dependent optical properties of gold nanorods allow monitoring their growth using a novel fast single-particle spectroscopy (fastSPS) method. FastSPS uses a spatially addressable electronic shutter based on a liquid crystal device to investigate particles randomly deposited on a substrate, orders of magnitude faster than other techniques. We use fastSPS to observe nanoparticle growth in situ on a single-particle level and extract quantitative data on nanoparticle growth.
Cavity optomechanics mediated by a quantum two-level system
2015
Coupling electromagnetic waves in a cavity and mechanical vibrations via the radiation pressure of photons is a promising platform for investigations of quantum–mechanical properties of motion. A drawback is that the effect of one photon tends to be tiny, and hence one of the pressing challenges is to substantially increase the interaction strength. A novel scenario is to introduce into the setup a quantum two-level system (qubit), which, besides strengthening the coupling, allows for rich physics via strongly enhanced nonlinearities. Here we present a design of cavity optomechanics in the microwave frequency regime involving a Josephson junction qubit. We demonstrate boosting of the radiat…
Search for Spin-Dependent Short-Range Interaction with an 3He/129Xe Clock Comparison Experiment
2016
We performed an experiment to search for a new spin-dependent P- and T-violating nucleon–nucleon interaction [Formula: see text] which is mediated by light pseudoscalar bosons such as axions or axionlike particles. This interaction causes a shift [Formula: see text] in the precession frequency of nuclear spin polarized gases in the presence of an unpolarized mass. In order to measure this frequency shift a 3He/[Formula: see text]Xe comagnetometer was used which is based on the detection of free precession of 3He and [Formula: see text]Xe nuclear spins using SQUIDs as detectors. For the upper limit of [Formula: see text] we obtained 7.1[Formula: see text]nHz. With this value, an upper limit…
Triple resonant four-wave mixing: A microwatt continuous-wave laser source in the vacuum ultraviolet region at 120 nm
2012
We present a vacuum ultraviolet laser source by four-wave mixing in mercury vapour based on solid-state laser systems. Maximum powers of 6μW were achieved with an increase of four orders of magnitude in efficiency.
Conceptual design of the International Axion Observatory (IAXO)
2014
The International Axion Observatory (IAXO) will be a forth generation axion helioscope. As its primary physics goal, IAXO will look for axions or axion-like particles (ALPs) originating in the Sun via the Primakoff conversion of the solar plasma photons. In terms of signal-to-noise ratio, IAXO will be about 4-5 orders of magnitude more sensitive than CAST, currently the most powerful axion helioscope, reaching sensitivity to axion-photon couplings down to a few $\times 10^{-12}$ GeV$^{-1}$ and thus probing a large fraction of the currently unexplored axion and ALP parameter space. IAXO will also be sensitive to solar axions produced by mechanisms mediated by the axion-electron coupling $g_{…