7392737
Timing of a Young Mildly Recycled Pulsar with a Massive White Dwarf Companion
We report on timing observations of the recently discovered binary pulsar PSR J1952+2630 using the Arecibo Observatory. The mildly recycled 20.7-ms pulsar is in a 9.4-hr orbit with a massive, MW D > 0.93 M⊙, white dwarf (WD) companion. We present, for the first time, a phase-coherent timing solution, with precise spin, astrometric, and Keplerian orbital parameters. This shows that the characteristic age of PSR J1952+2630 is 77 Myr, younger by one order of magnitude than any other recycled pulsar–massive WD system. We derive an upper limit on the true age of the system of 150 Myr. We investigate the formation of PSR J1952+2630 using detailed modelling of the mass-transfer process from a naked helium star on to the neutron star following a common-envelope phase (Case BB Roche-lobe overflow). From our modelling of the progenitor system, we constrain the accretion efficiency of the neutron star, which suggests a value between 100 and 300% of the Eddington accretion limit. We present numerical models of the chemical structure of a possible oxygenneon-magnesium WD companion. Furthermore, we calculate the past and the future spin evolution of PSR J1952+2630, until the system merges in about 3.4 Gyr due to gravitational wave emission. Although we detect no relativistic effects in our timing analysis we show that several such effects will become measurable with continued observations over the next 10 years; thus PSR J1952+2630 has potential as a testbed for gravitational theories.
55413960
SEARCHING FOR PULSARS USING IMAGE PATTERN RECOGNITION
In the modern era of big data, many fields of astronomy are generating huge volumes of data, the analysis of which can sometimes be the limiting factor in research. Fortunately, computer scientists have developed powerful data-mining techniques that can be applied to various fields. In this paper, we present a novel artificial intelligence (AI) program that identifies pulsars from recent surveys by using image pattern recognition with deep neural nets—the PICS (Pulsar Image-based Classification System) AI. The AI mimics human experts and distinguishes pulsars from noise and interference by looking for patterns from candidate plots. Different from other pulsar selection programs that search for expected patterns, the PICS AI is taught the salient features of different pulsars from a set of human-labeled candidates through machine learning. The training candidates are collected from the Pulsar Arecibo L-band Feed Array (PALFA) survey. The information from each pulsar candidate is synthesized in four diagnostic plots, which consist of image data with up to thousands of pixels. The AI takes these data from each candidate as its input and uses thousands of such candidates to train its ~9000 neurons. The deep neural networks in this AI system grant it superior ability to recognize various types of pulsars as well as their harmonic signals. The trained AI's performance has been validated with a large set of candidates from a different pulsar survey, the Green Bank North Celestial Cap survey. In this completely independent test, the PICS ranked 264 out of 277 pulsar-related candidates, including all 56 previously known pulsars and 208 of their harmonics, in the top 961 (1%) of 90,008 test candidates, missing only 13 harmonics. The first non-pulsar candidate appears at rank 187, following 45 pulsars and 141 harmonics. In other words, 100% of the pulsars were ranked in the top 1% of all candidates, while 80% were ranked higher than any noise or interference. The performance of this system can be improved over time as more training data are accumulated. This AI system has been integrated into the PALFA survey pipeline and has discovered six new pulsars to date.
118616891
X-RAY OBSERVATIONS OF HIGH-B RADIO PULSARS
The study of high-magnetic-field pulsars is important for examining the relationships between radio pulsars, magnetars, and X-ray-isolated neutron stars (XINSs). Here, we report on X-ray observations of three such high-magnetic-field radio pulsars. We first present the results of a deep XMM-Newton observation of PSR J1734–3333, taken to follow up on its initial detection in 2009. The pulsar's spectrum is well fit by a blackbody with a temperature of 300 ± 60 eV, with bolometric luminosity for a distance of 6.1 kpc. We detect no X-ray pulsations from the source, setting a 1σ upper limit on the pulsed fraction of 60% in the 0.5-3 keV band. We compare PSR J1734–3333 to other rotation-powered pulsars of similar age and find that it is significantly hotter, supporting the hypothesis that the magnetic field affects the observed thermal properties of pulsars. We also report on XMM-Newton and Chandra observations of PSRs B1845–19 and J1001–5939. We do not detect either pulsar, setting 3σ upper limits on their blackbody temperatures of 48 and 56 eV, respectively. Despite the similarities in rotational properties, these sources are significantly cooler than all but one of the XINSs, which we attribute to the two groups having been born with different magnetic fields and hence evolving differently.
119186907
Are valence quarks rotating
We suggest to compare the deep inelastic scattering structure functions measured in the unpolarized charged-lepton scattering off a transversely polarized proton and off a longitudinally polarized proton at larger Bjorken variable $x$, one may get a direct evidence concerning the valence quark orbital angular momentum in the proton. This possible rotating effect is estimated by using a proton-ensemble model.
18398117
A Dynamical model for nuclear structure functions
We construct a dynamical model for the parton distributions in a nucleus by perturbative evolution of input distributions from a low starting scale. These input distributions are obtained by modifications of the corresponding free nucleon ones; the modifications being determined by standard nuclear physics considerations. The model gives good agreement with existing data. Its extension to the spin dependent case enables an estimation of nuclear modifications to asymmetries observed in recent doubly polarised deep inelastic scattering experiments. Although the structure functions themselves are very different from the free nucleon ones, their ratio is insensitive to these changes.
14042487
Prediction for unintegrated parton distributions
Unintegrated parton distributions in the proton and nucleus are predicted by a modified Dokshitzer-Gribov-Lipatov-Altarelli-Parisi (DGLAP) equation incorporating the shadowing corrections, which include exact energy-momentum conservation in each splitting and fusion vertices. We find that the nuclear shadowing effects are obvious, although they are far from the saturation limit. On the other hand, we point out that the suppression of the unintegrated gluon distribution toward lower k{sub t}{sup 2} may arise from the valence-like input rather than the saturation effects.
79230
Contributions of gluon recombination to saturation phenomena
Parton distributions in the small $x$ region are numerically predicted by using a modified DGLAP equation with the GRV-like input distributions. We find that gluon recombination at twist-4 level obviously suppresses the rapid growth of parton densities with $x$ decrease. We show that before the saturation scale $Q^2_s$ is reached, saturation and partial saturation appear in the small $x$ behavior of parton distributions in nucleus and free proton, respectively. The antishadowing contributions to the saturation phenomena are also discussed.
17569178
Nuclear enhanced power corrections to DIS structure functions
Abstract We calculate nuclear enhanced power corrections to structure functions measured in deeply inelastic lepton–nucleus scattering in Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD). We find that the nuclear medium enhanced power corrections at order of O ( α s / Q 2 ) enhance the longitudinal structure function  F L , and suppress the transverse structure function  F 1 . We demonstrate that strong nuclear effects in σ A / σ D and R A / R D , recently observed by HERMES Collaboration, can be explained in terms of the nuclear enhanced power corrections.