No Arabic abstract
The use of roman numerals for stellar populations represents a classification approach to galaxy formation which is now well behind us. Nevertheless, the concept of a pristine generation of stars, followed by a protogalactic era, and finally the mainstream stellar population is a plausible starting point for testing our physical understanding of early star formation. This will be observationally driven as never before in the coming decade. In this paper, we search out observational tests of an idealized coeval and homogeneous distribution of population II stars. We examine the spatial distribution of quasars, globular clusters, and the integrated free electron density of the intergalactic medium, in order to test the assumption of homogeneity. Any $real$ inhomogeneity implies a population II that is not coeval.
The direct searches for Superymmetry at colliders can be complemented by direct searches for dark matter (DM) in underground experiments, if one assumes the Lightest Supersymmetric Particle (LSP) provides the dark matter of the universe. It will be shown that within the Constrained minimal Supersymmetric Model (CMSSM) the direct searches for DM are complementary to direct LHC searches for SUSY and Higgs particles using analytical formulae. A combined excluded region from LHC, WMAP and XENON100 will be provided, showing that within the CMSSM gluinos below 1 TeV and LSP masses below 160 GeV are excluded (m_{1/2} > 400 GeV) independent of the squark masses.
Mirrors are everywhere in our daily lives. Existing computer vision systems do not consider mirrors, and hence may get confused by the reflected content inside a mirror, resulting in a severe performance degradation. However, separating the real content outside a mirror from the reflected content inside it is non-trivial. The key challenge is that mirrors typically reflect contents similar to their surroundings, making it very difficult to differentiate the two. In this paper, we present a novel method to segment mirrors from an input image. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to address the mirror segmentation problem with a computational approach. We make the following contributions. First, we construct a large-scale mirror dataset that contains mirror images with corresponding manually annotated masks. This dataset covers a variety of daily life scenes, and will be made publicly available for future research. Second, we propose a novel network, called MirrorNet, for mirror segmentation, by modeling both semantical and low-level color/texture discontinuities between the contents inside and outside of the mirrors. Third, we conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the proposed method, and show that it outperforms the carefully chosen baselines from the state-of-the-art detection and segmentation methods.
We use the S-matrix bootstrap to carve out the space of unitary, crossing symmetric and supersymmetric graviton scattering amplitudes in ten dimensions. We focus on the leading Wilson coefficient $alpha$ controlling the leading correction to maximal supergravity. The negative region $alpha<0$ is excluded by a simple dual argument based on linearized unitarity (the desert). A whole semi-infinite region $alpha gtrsim 0.14$ is allowed by the primal bootstrap (the garden). A finite intermediate region is excluded by non-perturbative unitarity (the swamp). Remarkably, string theory seems to cover all (or at least almost all) the garden from very large positive $alpha$ -- at weak coupling -- to the swamp boundary -- at strong coupling.
We systematically analyze the flavor color spin structure of the pentaquark $q^4bar{Q}$ system in a constituent quark model based on the chromomagnetic interaction in both the SU(3) flavor symmetric and SU(3) flavor broken case with and without charm quarks. We show that the originally proposed pentaquark state $bar{Q}s qqq$ by Gignoux et al and by Lipkin indeed belongs to the most stable pentaquark configuration, but that when charm quark mass correction based on recent experiments are taken into account, a doubly charmed antistrange pentaquark configuration ($udc c bar{s}$) is perhaps the only flavor exotic configuration that could be stable and realistically searched for at present through the $Lambda_c K^+ K^- pi^+$ final states. The proposed final state is just reconstructing $K^+$ instead of $pi^+$ in the measurement of $Xi^{++}_{cc} rightarrow Lambda_c K^- pi^+ pi^+$ reported by LHCb collaboration and hence measurable immediately.
We study the number and the distribution of low mass Pop III stars in the Milky Way. In our numerical model, hierarchical formation of dark matter minihalos and Milky Way sized halos are followed by a high resolution cosmological simulation. We model the Pop III formation in H2 cooling minihalos without metal under UV radiation of the Lyman-Werner bands. Assuming a Kroupa IMF from 0.15 to 1.0 Msun for low mass Pop III stars, as a working hypothesis, we try to constrain the theoretical models in reverse by current and future observations. We find that the survivors tend to concentrate on the center of halo and subhalos. We also evaluate the observability of Pop III survivors in the Milky Way and dwarf galaxies, and constraints on the number of Pop III survivors per minihalo. The higher latitude fields require lower sample sizes because of the high number density of stars in the galactic disk, the required sample sizes are comparable in the high and middle latitude fields by photometrically selecting low metallicity stars with optimized narrow band filters, and the required number of dwarf galaxies to find one Pop III survivor is less than ten at <100 kpc for the tip of redgiant stars. Provided that available observations have not detected any survivors, the formation models of low mass Pop III stars with more than ten stars per minihalo are already excluded. Furthermore, we discuss the way to constrain the IMF of Pop III star at a high mass range of > 10 Msun.