HD 8673 hosts a massive exoplanet in a highly eccentric orbit (e=0.723). Based on two epochs of speckle interferometry a previous publication identified a candidate stellar companion. We observed HD 8673 multiple times with the 10 m Keck II telescope
, the 5 m Hale telescope, the 3.63 m AEOS telescope and the 1.5m Palomar telescope in a variety of filters with the aim of confirming and characterizing the stellar companion. We did not detect the candidate companion, which we now conclude was a false detection, but we did detect a fainter companion. We collected astrometry and photometry of the companion on six epochs in a variety of filters. The measured differential photometry enabled us to determine that the companion is an early M dwarf with a mass estimate of 0.33-0.45 M?. The companion has a projected separation of 10 AU, which is one of the smallest projected separations of an exoplanet host binary system. Based on the limited astrometry collected, we are able to constrain the orbit of the stellar companion to a semi-major axis of 35{60 AU, an eccentricity ? 0.5 and an inclination of 75{85?. The stellar companion has likely strongly in uenced the orbit of the exoplanet and quite possibly explains its high eccentricity.
Cavity optomechanics offers powerful methods for controlling optical fields and mechanical motion. A number of proposals have predicted that this control can be extended considerably in devices where multiple cavity modes couple to each other via the
motion of a single mechanical oscillator. Here we study the dynamical properties of such a multimode optomechanical device, in which the coupling between cavity modes results from mechanically-induced avoided crossings in the cavitys spectrum. Near the avoided crossings we find that the optical spring shows distinct features that arise from the interaction between cavity modes. Precisely at an avoided crossing, we show that the particular form of the optical spring provides a classical analog of a quantum-nondemolition measurement of the intracavity photon number. The mechanical oscillators Brownian motion, an important source of noise in these measurements, is minimized by operating the device at cryogenic temperature (500 mK).
Propagation of light in a highly scattering medium is among the most fascinating optical effect that everyone experiences on an everyday basis and possesses a number of fundamental problems which have yet to be solved. Conventional wisdom suggests th
at non-linear effects do not play a significant role because the diffusive nature of scattering acts to spread the intensity, dramatically weakening these effects. We demonstrate the first experimental evidence of lasing on a Raman transition in a bulk three-dimensional random media. From a practical standpoint, Raman transitions allow for spectroscopic analysis of the chemical makeup of the sample. A random Raman laser could serve as a bright Raman source allowing for remote, chemically specific, identification of powders and aerosols. Fundamentally, the first demonstration of this new light source opens up an entire new field of study into non-linear light propagation in turbid media, with the most notable application related to non-invasive biomedical imaging.
In the minimal supersymmetric extension of the Standard Model (MSSM), if the two Higgs doublets are lighter than some subset of the superpartners of the Standard Model particles, then it is possible to integrate out the heavy states to obtain an effe
ctive broken-supersymmetric low-energy Lagrangian. This Lagrangian can contain dimension-four gauge invariant Higgs interactions that violate supersymmetry (SUSY). The wrong-Higgs Yukawa couplings generated by one-loop radiative corrections are a well known example of this phenomenon. In this paper, we examine gauge invariant gaugino--higgsino--Higgs boson interactions that violate supersymmetry. Such wrong-Higgs gaugino couplings can be generated in models of gauge-mediated SUSY-breaking in which some of the messenger fields couple to the MSSM Higgs bosons. In regions of parameter space where the messenger scale is low and tan(beta) is large, these hard SUSY-breaking operators yield tan(beta)-enhanced corrections to tree-level supersymmetric relations in the chargino and neutralino sectors that can be as large as 20%. We demonstrate how physical observables in the chargino sector can be used to isolate the tan(beta)-enhanced effects derived from the wrong-Higgs gaugino operators.
