This is a White Paper in support of the mission concept of the Large Observatory for X-ray Timing (LOFT), proposed as a medium-sized ESA mission. We discuss the potential of LOFT for the study of high-energy radiation from thunderstorms and lightning. For a summary, we refer to the paper.
LOFT (Large Observatory For x-ray Timing) is one of the ESA M3 missions selected within the Cosmic Vision program in 2011 to carry out an assessment phase study and compete for a launch opportunity in 2022-2024. The phase-A studies of all M3 missions
were completed at the end of 2013. LOFT is designed to carry on-board two instruments with sensitivity in the 2-50 keV range: a 10 m 2 class Large Area Detector (LAD) with a <1{deg} collimated FoV and a wide field monitor (WFM) making use of coded masks and providing an instantaneous coverage of more than 1/3 of the sky. The prime goal of the WFM will be to detect transient sources to be observed by the LAD. However, thanks to its unique combination of a wide field of view (FoV) and energy resolution (better than 500 eV), the WFM will be also an excellent monitoring instrument to study the long term variability of many classes of X-ray sources. The WFM consists of 10 independent and identical coded mask cameras arranged in 5 pairs to provide the desired sky coverage. We provide here an overview of the instrument design, configuration, and capabilities of the LOFT WFM. The compact and modular design of the WFM could easily make the instrument concept adaptable for other missions.
Large, complex, multi-scale, multi-physics simulation codes, running on high performance com-puting (HPC) platforms, have become essential to advancing science and engineering. These codes simulate multi-scale, multi-physics phenomena with unpreceden
ted fidelity on petascale platforms, and are used by large communities. Continued ability of these codes to run on future platforms is as crucial to their communities as continued improvements in instruments and facilities are to experimental scientists. However, the ability of code developers to do these things faces a serious challenge with the paradigm shift underway in platform architecture. The complexity and uncertainty of the future platforms makes it essential to approach this challenge cooperatively as a community. We need to develop common abstractions, frameworks, programming models and software development methodologies that can be applied across a broad range of complex simulation codes, and common software infrastructure to support them. In this position paper we express and discuss our belief that such an infrastructure is critical to the deployment of existing and new large, multi-scale, multi-physics codes on future HPC platforms.
We systematically measured the DC voltage V_ISH induced by spin pumping together with the inverse spin Hall effect in ferromagnet/platinum bilayer films. In all our samples, comprising ferromagnetic 3d transition metals, Heusler compounds, ferrite sp
inel oxides, and magnetic semiconductors, V_ISH invariably has the same polarity. V_ISH furthermore scales with the magnetization precession cone angle with a universal prefactor, irrespective of the magnetic properties, the charge carrier transport mechanism or type. These findings quantitatively corroborate the present theoretical understanding of spin pumping in combination with the inverse spin Hall effect.
