No Arabic abstract
We apply Dickes theory of superradiance introduced in 1954 to the methanol 6.7 GHz and water 22 GHz spectral lines, often detected in molecular clouds as signposts for the early stages of the star formation process. We suggest that superradiance, characterized by burst-like features taking place over a wide range of time-scales, may provide a natural explanation for the recent observations of periodic and seemingly alternating methanol and water maser flares in G107.298+5.639. Although these observations would be very difficult to explain within the context of maser theory, we show that these flares may result from simultaneously initiated 6.7-GHz methanol and 22-GHz water superradiant bursts operating on different time-scales, thus providing a natural mechanism for their observed durations and time ordering. The evidence of superradiance in this source further suggests the existence of entangled quantum mechanical states, involving a very large number of molecules, over distances up to a few kilometres in the interstellar medium.
We propose here that the lithium decrease at super-solar metallicities observed in high resolution spectroscopic surveys can be explained by the interplay of mixed populations, coming from the inner regions of the Milky Way disc. The lower lithium content of these stars is a consequence of inside-out disc formation, plus radial migration. In this framework, local stars with super-solar metallicities would have migrated to the solar vicinity and depleted their original lithium during their travel time. To arrive to such a result, we took advantage of the AMBRE catalog of lithium abundances combined with chemical evolution models which take into account the contribution to the lithium enrichment by different nucleosynthetic sources. A large proportion of migrated stars can explain the observed lower lithium abundance at super-solar metallicities. We stress that nowadays, there is no stellar model able to predict Li-depletion for such super-solar metallicity stars, and the Solar Li-depletion has to be assumed. In addition, it currently exists no solid quantitative estimate of the proportion of migrated stars in the Solar neighborhood and their travel time. Our results illustrate how important it is to properly include radial migration when comparing chemical evolution models to observations, and that in this case, the lithium decrease at larger metallicities does not necessarily imply that stellar yields have to be modified, contrary to previous claims in literature.
We report the discovery of 6.035GHz hydroxyl (OH) maser flares toward the massive star forming region IRAS18566+0408 (G37.55+0.20), which is the only region known to show periodic formaldehyde (4.8 GHz H2CO) and methanol (6.7 GHz CH3OH) maser flares. The observations were conducted between October 2008 and January 2010 with the 305m Arecibo Telescope in Puerto Rico. We detected two flare events, one in March 2009, and one in September to November 2009. The OH maser flares are not simultaneous with the H2CO flares, but may be correlated with CH3OH flares from a component at corresponding velocities. A possible correlated variability of OH and CH3OH masers in IRAS18566+0408 is consistent with a common excitation mechanism (IR pumping) as predicted by theory.
The ISM, powered by SNe, is turbulent and permeated by a magnetic field (with a mean and a turbulent component). It constitutes a frothy medium that is mostly out of equilibrium and is ram pressure dominated on most of the temperature ranges, except for T< 200 K and T> 1E6 K, where magnetic and thermal pressures dominate, respectively. Such lack of equilibrium is also imposed by the feedback of the radiative processes into the ISM flow. Many models of the ISM or isolated phenomena, such as bubbles, superbubbles, clouds evolution, etc., take for granted that the flow is in the so-called collisional ionization equilibrium (CIE). However, recombination time scales of most of the ions below 1E6 K are longer than the cooling time scale. This implies that the recombination lags behind and the plasma is overionized while it cools. As a consequence cooling deviates from CIE. This has severe implications on the evolution of the ISM flow and its ionization structure. Here, besides reviewing several models of the ISM, including bubbles and superbubbles, the validity of the CIE approximation is discussed, and a presentation of recent developments in modeling the ISM by taking into account the time-dependent ionization structure of the flow in a full-blown numerical 3D high resolution simulation is presented.
We analyze a criterion which guarantees that the ground states of certain many body systems are stable under perturbations. Specifically, we consider PEPS, which are believed to provide an efficient description, based on local tensors, for the low energy physics arising from local interactions. In order to assess stability in the framework of PEPS, one thus needs to understand how physically allowed perturbations of the local tensor affect the properties of the global state. In this paper, we show that a restricted version of the Local Topological Quantum Order (LTQO) condition provides a checkable criterion which allows to assess the stability of local properties of PEPS under physical perturbations. We moreover show that LTQO itself is stable under perturbations which preserve the spectral gap, leading to nontrivial examples of PEPS which possess LTQO and are thus stable under arbitrary perturbations.
We study the quantum dynamics of a symmetric nanomechanical graphene resonator with degenerate flexural modes. Applying voltage pulses to two back gates, flexural vibrations of the membrane can be selectively actuated and manipulated. For graphene, nonlinear response becomes important already for amplitudes comparable to the magnitude of zero point fluctuations. We show, using analytical and numerical methods, that this allows for creation of cat-like superpositions of coherent states as well as superpositions of coherent cat-like non-product states.