2011 (IPP)

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://localhost:4000/handle/11007/151

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    Soft time lags in the X-ray emission of mrk 1040
    (2011-01-30) Tripathi, Shruti; Misra, Ranjeev; Dewangan, Gulab Chand; et al.
    Temporal analysis of X-ray binaries and Active Galactic Nuclei have shown that hard X-rays react to variation of soft ones after a time delay. The opposite trend, or soft lag, has only been seen in a few rare Quasi-periodic Oscillations in X-ray binaries and recently for the AGN, 1H 0707-495, on short timescales of ∼ 103 secs. Here, we report analysis of a XMM-Newton observation of Mrk 1040, which reveals that on the dominant variability timescale of ∼ 104 secs, the source seems to exhibit soft lags. If the lags are frequency independent, they could be due to reverberation effects of a relativistically blurred reflection component responding to a varying continuum. Alternatively, they could be due to Comptonization delays in the case when high energy photons impinge back on the soft photon source. Both models can be verified and their parameters tightly constrained, because they will need to predict the photon spectrum, the r.m.s variability and time lag as a function of energy. A successful application of either model will provide unprecedented information on the radiative process, geometry and more importantly the size of the system, which in turn may provide stringent test of strong general relativistic effects.
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    Oscillation in the inflaton potential: Exact numerical analysis and comparison with the recent and forthcoming CMB datasets
    (2011-06-15) Aich, Moumita; Hazra, Dhiraj Kumar; Sriramkumar, L.; et al.
    Amongst the multitude of inflationary models currently available, models that lead to features in the primordial scalar spectrum are drawing increasing attention, since certain features have been found to provide a better fit to the CMB data than the conventional, nearly scale invariant, primordial spectrum. In this work, we carry out an exact numerical analysis of two models that lead to oscillations over all scales in the scalar power spectrum. We consider the model described by a quadratic potential which is superposed by a sinusoidal modulation and the recently popular axion monodromy model. Since the oscillations continue even onto smaller scales, in addition to the WMAP data, we also compare the models with the small scale data from ACT. Though, both the models, broadly, result in oscillations in the spectrum, interestingly, we find that, while the monodromy model leads to a considerably better fit to the data in comparison to the standard power law spectrum, the quadratic potential superposed with a sinusoidal modulation does not improve the fit to a similar extent. We also carry out forecasting of the parameters using simulated Planck data for both the models. We show that the Planck mock data performs better in constraining the model parameters as compared to the presently available CMB datasets.
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    Exploring the dust content of SDSS DR7 damped lyman alpha systems at 2.156 Zab <5.2
    (2011-09-02) Khare, Pushpa; et al.; Berk, D. V.; York, D. G.
    We have studied a sample of 1084 intervening absorption systems with 2.156 zab 65.2, having log(NHI) > 20.0 in the spectra of QSOs in Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) data release 7 (DR7), with the aim of understanding the nature and abundance of the dust and the chemical abundances in the DLA absorbers. Composite spectra were constructed for the full sample and several subsamples, chosen on the basis of absorber and QSO properties. Average extinction curves were obtained for the samples by comparing their geometric mean composite spectra with those of two samples of QSOs, matching in zem and i magnitude with the DLA sample, one sample without any absorbers along their lines of sight and the other without any DLAs along their lines of sight irrespective of the presence of other absorption systems. We also derived relative extinction curves of several pairs of subsamples. While the average reddening in the DLA sample is small, we find definite evidence for the presence of dust in subsamples based on absorber properties, in particular the strength of metal absorption lines. DLAs along lines of sight to QSOs which are not colour selected are found to be more dusty compared to those along the lines of sight to the more numerous colour selected QSOs. From these studies and from the strengths of absorption lines in the composite spectra, we conclude that 6 10% of the DLAs in SDSS DR7 cause significant reddening, have stronger absorption lines and have higher abundances as compared to the rest of the sample. The rest of the sample shows little reddening.While due to the dominant color selection method used to target QSOs in the SDSS DR7, this fraction of 10% likely represents a lower limit for the global fraction of dusty DLAs at high-z, it is also possible that the dust grain sizes at high redshifts are larger, giving rise to a flat extinction curve over the observed range of wavelengths.
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    Evolution of shocks and turbulence in the formation of galaxy clusters embedded in megaparsec-scale filaments
    (2011-04-26) Iapichino, L.; Miniati, F.; et al.; Paul, Surajit
    Massive structures like cluster of galaxies, embedded in cosmic filaments, release enormous amount of energy through their interactions. These events are associated with production of Mpc-scale shocks and injection of considerable amount of turbulence, affecting the non-thermal energy budget of the ICM. In order to study this thoroughly, we performed a set of cosmological simulations using the hydrodynamical code Enzo.We studied the formation of clusters undergoing major mergers, the propagation of merger shocks and their interaction with the filamentary cosmic web. This interaction is shown to pro- duce peripheral structures remarkably similar to giant radio relics observed, for example, in Abell 3376 and Abell 3667. We find a relatively long timescale (about 4 Gyr) for turbulence decay in the centre of major merging clusters. This timescale is substantially longer than typically assumed in the turbulent re-acceleration models, invoked for explaining the statistics of observed radio halos.
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    Cross-correlation search for a hot spot of gravitational waves
    (2011-05-31) Dhurandhar, Sanjeev; Tagoshi, H.; Okada, Yuta; et al.
    The cross-correlation search has been previously applied to map the gravitational wave (GW) stochastic background in the sky and also to target GW from rotating neutron stars/pulsars. Here we investigate how the cross-correlation method can be used to target a small region in the sky spanning at most a few pixels, where a pixel in the sky is determined by the diffraction limit which depends on the (i) baseline joining a pair of detectors and (ii) detector bandwidth. Here as one of the promising targets, we consider the Virgo cluster - a ”hot spot” spanning few pixels - which could contain, as estimates suggest ~ 10¹¹ neutron stars, of which a small fraction would continuously emit GW in the bandwidth of the detectors. For the detector baselines, we consider advanced detector pairs among LCGT, LIGO, Virgo, ET etc. Our results show that sufficient signal to noise can be accumulated with integration times of the order of a year. The results improve for the multibaseline search. This analysis could as well be applied to other likely hot spots in the sky and other possible pairs of detectors.