23093560
Signatures of the Z = 82 shell closure in α-decay process.
In recent experiments at the velocity filter Separator for Heavy Ion reaction Products (SHIP) (GSI, Darmstadt), an extended and improved set of α-decay data for more than 20 of the most neutron-deficient isotopes in the region from lead to thorium was obtained. The combined analysis of this newly available α-decay data, of which the (186)Po decay is reported here, allowed us for the first time to clearly show that crossing the Z = 82 shell to higher proton numbers strongly accelerates the α decay. From the experimental data, the α-particle formation probabilities are deduced following the Universal Decay Law approach. The formation probabilities are discussed in the framework of the pairing force acting among the protons and the neutrons forming the α particle. A striking resemblance between the phenomenological pairing gap deduced from experimental binding energies and the formation probabilities is noted. These findings support the conjecture that both the N = 126 and Z = 82 shell closures strongly influence the α-formation probability.
201093324
Proton Radioactivity
16408480
Effective Kaon energy from a novel chiral SU(3) model
Abstract A new chiral SU(3) Lagrangian is proposed to describe the properties of kaons and anti-kaons in the nuclear medium, The saturation properties of nuclear matter are reproduced as well as the results of the Dirac-Briickner theory, After introducing the coupling between the omega meson and the kaon, our results for effective kaon and anti-kaon energy are quite similar as calculated in the one-boson-exchange model.
13153867
Mass measurements of very neutron-deficient Mo and Tc isotopes and their impact on rp process nucleosynthesis.
The masses of ten proton-rich nuclides, including the N=Z+1 nuclides ⁸⁵Mo and ⁸⁷Tc, were measured with the Penning trap mass spectrometer SHIPTRAP. Compared to the Atomic Mass Evaluation 2003 a systematic shift of the mass surface by up to 1.6 MeV is observed causing significant abundance changes of the ashes of astrophysical x-ray bursts. Surprisingly low α separation energies for neutron-deficient Mo and Tc are found, making the formation of a ZrNb cycle in the rp process possible. Such a cycle would impose an upper temperature limit for the synthesis of elements beyond Nb in the rp process.
119438146
The discovery of the heaviest elements
121183473
Observation of rotating nuclear molecules and determination of their lifetimes
Long-living rotating nuclear molecules (or “dinuclear systems”) have been observed at the velocity filter SHIP at GSI in reactions of 64Ni + 207Pb at Coulomb barrier energies. The rotation was directly revealed by the velocity spectra of deep inelastic target-like transfer products which are formed during the lifetime of the nuclear molecule and emitted after its breakup. The corresponding rotation angles were about 180 degree pointing to long nuclear interaction times or lifetimes of the system, respectively. We deduced the lifetimes from the lines in the velocity spectra originating from two different rotation angles. Further, the unambiguous correlation of a certain transfer product with its individual velocity spectrum allowed us to study the lifetimes as a function of the number of transferred protons.
118359212
Generic inference of inflation models by non-Gaussianity and primordial power spectrum reconstruction
We present a generic inference method for inflation models from observational data by the usage of higher-order statistics of the curvature perturbation on uniform density hypersurfaces. This method is based on the calculation of the posterior for the primordial non-Gaussianity parameters fNL and gNL, which in general depend on specific parameters of inflation and reheating models, and enables to discriminate among the still viable inflation models. To keep analyticity as far as possible to dispense with numerically expensive sampling techniques a saddle-point approximation is introduced, whose precision is validated for a numerical toy example. The mathematical formulation is done in a generic way so that the approach remains applicable to cosmic microwave background data as well as to large scale structure data. Additionally, we review a few currently interesting inflation models and present numerical toy examples thereof in two and three dimensions to demonstrate the efficiency of the higher-order statistics method. A second quantity of interest is the primordial power spectrum. Here, we present two Bayesian methods to infer it from observational data, the so called critical filter and an extension thereof with smoothness prior, both allowing for a non-parametric spectrum reconstruction. These methods are able to reconstruct the spectra of the observed perturbations and the primordial ones of curvature perturbation even in case of non-Gaussianity and partial sky coverage. We argue that observables like T- and B-modes permit to measure both spectra. This also allows to infer the level of non-Gaussianity generated since inflation.
119430795
The Casimir effect in the presence of compactified universal extra dimensions
Abstract The Casimir force in a system consisting of two parallel conducting plates in the presence of compactified universal extra dimensions (UXD) is analyzed. The Casimir force with UXDs differs from the force obtained without extra dimensions. A new power law for the Casimir force is derived. By comparison to experimental data the size R of the universal extra dimensions can be restricted to R ⩽10 nm for one extra dimension.
37247936
Degravitation of the cosmological constant and graviton width
We study the possibility of decoupling gravity from the vacuum energy. This is effectively equivalent to promoting Newton's constant to a high-pass filter that degravitates sources of characteristic wavelength larger than a certain macroscopic (super) horizon scale L. We study the underlying physics and the consistency of this phenomenon. In particular, the absence of ghosts, already at the linear level, implies that in any such theory the graviton should either have a mass 1/L, or be a resonance of similar width. This has profound physical implications for the degravitation idea.
124873309
The Spectrum of fluctuations in inflationary quantum cosmology
20326557
Brane Induced Gravity, its Ghost and the Cosmological Constant Problem
Brane Induced Gravity is regarded as a promising framework for addressing the cosmological constant problem, but it also suffers from a ghost instability for parameter values that make it phenomeno ...