14447660
The local stability of accretion disks with advection
The local stability of accretion disks with advection is studied together with the considerations of radial viscous force and thermal diffusion. For a geometrically thin, radiative cooling dominated disk, the thermal diffusion has nearly no effects on the thermal and viscous modes. The including of thermal diffusion, however, tends to stabilize the acoustic modes which, if without advection, are unstable if the disk is optically thick, radiation pressure dominated or optically thin, and are stable if the disk is optically thick, gas pressure dominated. The including of very little advection has significant effects on two acoustic modes. Independent on the optical depth, the instability of the outward propagating mode (O-mode) is enhanced and that of the inward propagating mode (I-mode) is damped if the disk is gas pressure dominated, while the instability of O-mode is damped and that of I-mode is enhanced if the disk is radiation pressure dominated. For a geometrically slim, advection-dominated disk, both the thermal and viscous modes, as well as I-mode, are always stable if the disk is optically thin. The including of thermal diffusion tends to make these modes more stable. However, the O-mode can become unstable when $q/m$ is very large ($q$ is the ratio of advective to viscous dissipated energy and $m$ the Mach number), even if the thermal diffusion is considered. On the other hand, if the advection-dominated disk is optically thick, we found there is no self-consistent acoustic modes in our local analyses. The thermal diffusion has no effect on the stable viscous mode but has a significant contribution to enhance the thermal instability.
118517819
Quasar candidate selection and photometric redshift estimation based on SDSS and UKIDSS data
We present a sample of 8498 quasars with both SDSS ugriz optical and UKIDSS Y JHK near-IR photometric data. With this sample, we obtain the median colour-z relations based on 7400 quasars with magnitude uncertainties less than 0.1mag in all bands. By analyzing the quasar colours, we propose an empirical criterion in the Y K vs. g z colour-colour diagram to separate stars and quasars with redshift z < 4, and two other criteria for selecting high redshift quasars. Using the SDSS-UKIDSS colourz relations, we estimate the photometric redshifts of 8498 SDSS-UKIDSS quasars, and find that 85.0% of them are consistent with the spectroscopic redshifts within |�z| < 0.2, which leads to a significant increase of the photometric redshift accuracy than that based on the SDSS colour-z relations only. As two tests, we compare our colour selection criterion with a small UKIDSS/EDR quasar/star sample and a sample of 4671 variable sources in the SDSS Stripe 82 region with both SDSS and UKIDSS data. We find that they can be clearly divided into two classes (quasars and stars) by our criterion in the Y K vs. g z plot. We select 3834 quasar candidates from the variable sources with g < 20.5 in Stripe 82, 826 of them being SDSS quasars and the rest without SDSS spectroscopy. We estimate the photometric redshifts for 3519 quasar candidates with all UKIDSS Y JHK data and find an accuracy of 87.5% within |�z| < 0.2 with the spectroscopic redshifts of 819 SDSS-UKIDSS identified quasars among them. We demonstrate that even at the same spectroscopy limit as SDSS, with our criterion we can at least partially recover the missing quasars with z � 2.7 in SDSS. The SDSS identified quasars only take a small fraction (21.5%) of our quasar candidates selected from the variable sources in Stripe 82, indicating that a deeper spectroscopy is very promising in producing a much larger sample of quasars than SDSS. The implications of our current results to the future Chinese LAMOST quasar survey are also discussed.
11771360
The Nature of Linearly Polarized Millimeter and Submillimeter Emission in Sagittarius A
The linearly polarized millimeter and sub-millimeter emission in Sagittarius A* is produced within 10 Schwarzschild radii of the supermassive black hole at the Galactic Center and may originate from a hot magnetized accretion disk, where electrons are heated efficiently by turbulent plasma waves. I n such a scenario, the flux density and polarization are very sensitive to the electron heating rate and the inclination angle of disk, respectively, and the major axis of the submillimeter intrinsic polarization, which is aligned with the rotation axis of the disk, is perpendicular to the major axis of the polarized near-infrared emission. In combination with MHD simulations, which study the properties of the magnetic field and viscous stresses, the current spectral and polarization measurements give tight constraints on the model parameters. Simultaneous observations will be able to test the model.
2132712
Inclinations and black hole masses of Seyfert 1 galaxies
A tight correlation between black hole mass (MBH) and central velocity dispersion (σ) has been found recently for both active and quiescent galaxies. By applying this correlation, we develop a simple method to derive the inclination angles for a sample of 11 Seyfert 1 galaxies that have both measured central velocity dispersions and black hole masses estimated by reverberation mapping. These angles, with a mean value of 36° that agrees well with the result obtained by fitting the iron Kα lines of Seyfert 1 galaxies observed with ASCA, provide further support to the orientation-dependent unification scheme of active galactic nuclei (AGNs). A positive correlation of the inclinations with observed FWHMs of the Hβ line and a possible anticorrelation with the nuclear radio loudness have been found. We conclude that more accurate knowledge of inclinations and broad-line region dynamics is needed to improve the black hole mass determination of AGNs with the reverberation mapping technique.
2227030
Testing the transition layer model of quasi-periodic oscillations in neutron star X-ray binaries
We compare the theoretical predictions of the transition layer model with some observational features of quasi-periodic oscillations (QPOs) in neutron star X-ray binaries. We found that the correlation between horizontal branch oscillation (HBO) frequencies and kilohertz (kHz) QPO frequencies, the difference between the low-frequency QPOs in atoll sources and HBOs in Z sources, and the correlation between the frequencies of low-frequency QPOs and break frequencies can be well explained by the transition layer model, provided the neutron star mass is around 1.4 M☉ and the angle between magnetosphere equator and accretion disk plane is around 6°. The observed decrease of peak separation between the two kHz QPO frequencies with the increase of the kHz QPO frequencies and the increase of QPO frequencies with the increase of inferred mass accretion rate are also consistent with the theoretical predictions of the transition layer model. In addition, we derive a simple equation that can be adopted to estimate the angle (δ) between magnetosphere equator and accretion disk plane by use of the simultaneously observed QPO frequency data. We estimate this angle, in the range of 4°-8°, for five Z sources and two atoll sources. The nearly constant δ value for each source, derived from the different sets of simultaneously observed QPO frequency data, provides a strong test of the theoretical model. Finally, we suggest that similar transition layer oscillations may be responsible for the observed QPOs in accretion-powered millisecond X-ray pulsars and Galactic black hole candidates.
118357880
ON THE STRUCTURE OF ACCRETION DISKS WITH OUTFLOWS
To study the outflows from accretion disks, we solve the set of hydrodynamic equations for accretion disks in spherical coordinates (rθ) to obtain the explicit structure along the θ-direction. Using self-similar assumptions in the radial direction, we change the equations to a set of ordinary differential equations about the θ-coordinate, which are then solved with symmetrical boundary conditions in the equatorial plane; the velocity field is then obtained. The α viscosity prescription is applied and an advective factor f is used to simplify the energy equation. The results display thinner, quasi-Keplerian disks for Shakura-Sunyaev disks; thicker, sub-Keplerian disks for advection-dominated accretion flows; and slim disks which are consistent with previous popular analytical models. However, an inflow region and an outflow region always exist, except when the viscosity parameter α is too large, which supports the results of some recent numerical simulation works. Our results indicate that the outflows should be common in various accretion disks and may be stronger in slim disks, where both advection and radiation pressure are dominant. We also present the structure's dependence on the input parameters and discuss their physical meanings. The caveats of this work and possible improvements for the future are discussed.
67823085
General Properties on Applying the Principle of Minimum Sensitivity to High-order Perturbative QCD Predictions
As one of the key components of perturbative QCD theory, it is helpful to find a systematic and reliable way to set the renormalization scale for a high-energy process. The conventional treatment is to take a typical momentum as the renormalization scale, which assigns an arbitrary range and an arbitrary systematic error to pQCD predictions, leading to the well-known renormalization scheme and scale ambiguities. As a practical solution for such scale setting problem, the "Principle of Minimum Sensitivity" (PMS), has been proposed in the literature. The PMS suggests to determine an optimal scale for the pQCD approximant of an observable by requiring its slope over the scheme and scale changes to vanish. In the paper, we present a detailed discussion on general properties of PMS by utilizing three quantities $R_{e^+e^-}$, $R_\tau$ and $\Gamma(H\rightarrow b\bar{b})$ up to four-loop QCD corrections. After applying the PMS, the accuracy of pQCD prediction, the pQCD convergence, the pQCD predictive power and etc., have been discussed. Furthermore, we compare PMS with another fundamental scale setting approach, i.e. the Principle of Maximum Conformality (PMC)... Our results show that PMS does provide a practical way to set the effective scale for high-energy process, and the PMS prediction agrees with the PMC one by including enough high-order QCD corrections, both of which shall be more accurate than the prediction under the conventional scale setting. However, the PMS pQCD convergence is an accidental, which usually fails to achieve a correct prediction of unknown high-order contributions with next-to-leading order QCD correction only, i.e. it is always far from the "true" values predicted by including more high-order contributions.
118371472
Holographic entanglement entropy and thermodynamic instability of planar R-charged black holes
The holographic entanglement entropy of an infinite strip subsystem on the asymptotic AdS boundary is used as a probe to study the thermodynamic instabilities of planar R-charged black holes (or their dual field theories). We focus on the single-charge AdS black holes in $D=5$, which correspond to spinning D3-branes with one non-vanishing angular momentum. Our results show that the holographic entanglement entropy indeed exhibits the thermodynamic instability associated with the divergence of the specific heat. When the width of the strip is large enough, the finite part of the holographic entanglement entropy as a function of the temperature resembles the thermal entropy, as is expected. As the width becomes smaller, however, the two entropies behave differently. In particular, there exists a critical value for the width of the strip, below which the finite part of the holographic entanglement entropy as a function of the temperature develops a self-intersection. We also find similar behavior in the single-charge black holes in $D=4$ and $7$.
118830580
Dynamics of holographic vacuum energy in the DGP model
We consider the evolution of the vacuum energy in the Dvali-Gabadadze-Porrati (DGP) model according to the holographic principle under the assumption that the relation linking the IR and UV cutoffs still holds in this scenario. The model is studied when the IR cutoff is chosen to be the Hubble scale H(-1), the particle horizon R(ph), and the future event horizon R(eh), respectively. The two branches of the DGP model are also taken into account. Through numerical analysis, we find that in the cases of H(-1) in the (+) branch and R(eh) in both branches, the vacuum energy can play the role of dark energy. Moreover, when considering the combination of the vacuum energy and the 5D gravity effect in both branches, the equation of state of the effective dark energy may cross -1, which may lead to the big rip singularity. Besides, we constrain the model with the Type Ia supernovae and baryon oscillation data and find that our model is consistent with current data within 1 sigma, and that the observations prefer either a pure holographic dark energy or a pure DGP model.
35031954
Systematic all-orders method to eliminate renormalization-scale and scheme ambiguities in perturbative QCD.
We introduce a generalization of the conventional renormalization schemes used in dimensional regularization, which illuminates the renormalization scheme and scale ambiguities of perturbative QCD predictions, exposes the general pattern of nonconformal {β(i)} terms, and reveals a special degeneracy of the terms in the perturbative coefficients. It allows us to systematically determine the argument of the running coupling order by order in perturbative QCD in a form which can be readily automatized. The new method satisfies all of the principles of the renormalization group and eliminates an unnecessary source of systematic error.
118422229
Revisiting the real graviton effects at CERN LHC within the quantum gravity theory with large extra dimensions
CERN LHC provides a good experimental platform to perturbatively probe the fundamental gravity scale up to several TeV, with the precise value depending on the number of extra dimensions. The leading experimental signal of the graviton at the LHC is from the process $pp\ensuremath{\rightarrow}\mathrm{\text{jet}}+{\mathrm{E\ensuremath{\llap{\not\;}}}}_{T}$, where ${\mathrm{E\ensuremath{\llap{\not\;}}}}_{T}$ stands for the transverse missing energy. A detailed discussion on the hadronic production of the real graviton through hard subprocesses: $q\overline{q}\ensuremath{\rightarrow}G+g$, $g+q\ensuremath{\rightarrow}G+q$, and $g+g\ensuremath{\rightarrow}G+g$ have been studied within the quantum gravity theory with large extra dimensions. The main theoretical uncertainties together with the dominant standard model background to these processes, e.g. $q\overline{q}\ensuremath{\rightarrow}{Z}^{0}+g$ and $g+q\ensuremath{\rightarrow}{Z}^{0}+q$ with ${Z}^{0}$ further decaying into neutrinos, have also been discussed. It is found that only in a certain jet energy region and with a certain number of extra dimensions can the quantum gravity signal be distinguished from the background, which inversely lead to the effective scale ${M}_{D}$ to be probed up to $(8.8\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}0.9)\text{ }\text{ }\mathrm{TeV}$ for two extra dimensions and $(5.9\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}0.5)\text{ }\text{ }\mathrm{TeV}$ for four extra dimensions with sufficient integrated luminosity, e.g. $100\text{ }\text{ }{\mathrm{fb}}^{\ensuremath{-}1}$, at CERN LHC.