There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality.

Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

I and i

https://biblio.ugent.be/publication/685594/file/1130605.pdf

Review of Particle Physics

Deposits of clastic carbonate-dominated (calciclastic) sedimentary slope systems in the rock record have been identified mostly as linearly-consistent carbonate apron deposits, even though most ancient clastic carbonate slope deposits fit the submarine fan systems better. Calciclastic submarine fans are consequently rarely described and are poorly understood. Subsequently, very little is known especially in mud-dominated calciclastic submarine fan systems. Presented in this study are a sedimentological core and petrographic characterisation of samples from eleven boreholes from the Lower Carboniferous of Bowland Basin (Northwest England) that reveals a >250 m thick calciturbidite complex deposited in a calciclastic submarine fan setting. Seven facies are recognised from core and thin section characterisation and are grouped into three carbonate turbidite sequences. They include: 1) Calciturbidites, comprising mostly of highto low-density, wavy-laminated bioclast-rich facies; 2) low-density densite mudstones which are characterised by planar laminated and unlaminated muddominated facies; and 3) Calcidebrites which are muddy or hyper-concentrated debrisflow deposits occurring as poorly-sorted, chaotic, mud-supported floatstones. These

Phd by thesis

We provide scaling relations and fitting formulae for adiabatic cold dark matter cosmologies that account for all baryon effects in the matter transfer function to better than 10% in the large-scale structure regime. They are based upon a physically well-motivated separation of the effects of acoustic oscillations, Compton drag, velocity overshoot, baryon infall, adiabatic damping, Silk damping, and cold dark matter growth suppression. We also find a simpler, more accurate, and better motivated form for the zero-baryon transfer function than previous works. These descriptions are employed to quantify the amplitude and location of baryonic features in linear theory. While baryonic oscillations are prominent if the baryon fraction Ωb/Ω0 Ω0h2 + 0.2, the main effect in more conventional cosmologies is a sharp suppression in the transfer function below the sound horizon. We provide a simple but accurate description of this effect and stress that it is not well approximated by a change in the shape parameter Γ.

/pdf/baryonic-features-in-the-matter-transfer-function-29fsgas0gz.pdf

Baryonic features in the matter transfer function

There is almost universal agreement among astronomers that most of the mass in the Universe and most of the mass in the Galactic halo is dark. Many lines of reasoning suggest that the dark matter consists of some new, as yet undiscovered, weakly-interacting massive particle (WIMP). There is now a vast experimental effort being surmounted to detect WIMPS in the halo. The most promising techniques involve direct detection in low-background laboratory detectors and indirect detection through observation of energetic neutrinos from annihilation of WIMPs that have accumulated in the Sun and/or the Earth. Of the many WIMP candidates, perhaps the best motivated and certainly the most theoretically developed is the neutralino, the lightest superpartner in many supersymmetric theories. We review the minimal supersymmetric extension of the Standard Model and discuss prospects for detection of neutralino dark matter. We review in detail how to calculate the cosmological abundance of the neutralino and the event rates for both direct- and indirect-detection schemes, and we discuss astrophysical and laboratory constraints on supersymmetric models. We isolate and clarify the uncertainties from particle physics, nuclear physics, and astrophysics that enter at each step in the calculation. We briefly review other related dark-matter candidates and detection techniques.

Supersymmetric Dark Matter

The abundances of D, He-3, He-4, and Li-7, are presently recalculated within the framework of primordial nucleosynthesis in the standard hot big band model, in order to estimate the primordial abundances of the light elements. A comparison between theory and experiment demonstrates the consistency of standard model predictions; the baryon density parameter is constrained on the basis of a nucleon-to-photon ratio of 2.8-4.0. These bounds imply that the bulk of the baryons in the universe are dark, requiring that the universe be dominated by nonbaryonic matter.

http://inspirehep.net/record/29191/files/fermilab-pub-91-036-A.pdf

Primordial nucleosynthesis redux

https://www.luth.obspm.fr/IHP06/lectures/silk-uzan/IHP_bib/olive2000.pdf

Primordial nucleosynthesis: Theory and observations

The depletion of lithium during the pre-main-sequence and main-sequence phases of stellar evolution plays a crucial role in the comparison of the predictions of big bang nucleosynthesis with the abundances observed in halo stars. Previous work has indicated a wide range of possible depletion factors, ranging from minimal in standard (nonrotating) stellar models to as much as an order of magnitude in models that include rotational mixing. Recent progress in the study of the angular momentum evolution of low-mass stars permits the construction of theoretical models capable of reproducing the angular momentum evolution of low-mass open cluster stars. The distribution of initial angular momenta can be inferred from stellar rotation data in young open clusters. In this paper we report on the application of these models to the study of lithium depletion in main-sequence halo stars. A range of initial angular momenta produces a range of lithium depletion factors on the main sequence. Using the distribution of initial conditions inferred from young open clusters leads to a well-defined halo lithium plateau with modest scatter and a small population of outliers. The mass-dependent angular momentum loss law inferred from open cluster studies produces a nearly flat plateau, unlike previous models that exhibited a downward curvature for hotter temperatures in the 7Li-Teff plane. The overall depletion factor for the plateau stars is sensitive primarily to the solar initial angular momentum used in the calibration for the mixing diffusion coefficients. Uncertainties remain in the treatment of the internal angular momentum transport in the models, and the potential impact of these uncertainties on our results is discussed. The 6Li/7Li depletion ratio is also examined. We find that the dispersion in the plateau and the 6Li/7Li depletion ratio scale with the absolute 7Li depletion in the plateau, and we use observational data to set bounds on the 7Li depletion in main-sequence halo stars. A maximum of 0.4 dex depletion is set by the observed dispersion and 6Li/7Li depletion ratio, and a minimum of 0.2 dex depletion is required by both the presence of highly overdepleted halo stars and consistency with the solar and open cluster 7Li data. The cosmological implications of these bounds on the primordial abundance of 7Li are discussed.

/pdf/halo-star-lithium-depletion-1u6wy8ujx7.pdf

Halo Star Lithium Depletion

Warm dark matter (WDM) might more easily account for small scale clustering measurements than the heavier particles typically invoked incold dark matter (�CDM) cosmologies. In this paper, we consider aWDM cosmology in which sterile neutrinoss, with a mass ms of roughly 1-100 keV, are the dark matter. We use the diffuse X-ray spectrum (total minus resolved point source emission) of the Andromeda galaxy to constrain the rate of sterile neutrino radiative decay: �s → �e,µ,� + . Our findings demand that ms < 3.5 keV (95% C.L.) which is a significant improvement over the previous (95% C.L.) limits inferred from the X-ray emission of nearby clusters, ms < 8.2 keV (Virgo A) and ms < 6.3 keV (Virgo A + Coma).

Direct X-ray Constraints on Sterile Neutrino Warm Dark Matter

In theories with extra dimensions, the dependence of fundamental constants on the volume of the compact space allows one to use primordial nucleosynthesis to probe the structure of compact dimensions during the first few minutes after the big bang. Requiring the yield of primordial sup4He to be within acceptable limits, we find that in ten-dimensional superstring models the size of the extra dimensions during primordial nucleosynthesis must have been within 0.5% of their current value, while in Kaluza-Klein models the extra dimensions must have been within 1% of their current value.

Terry P. Walker

Papers

Primordial nucleosynthesis redux

Primordial nucleosynthesis: Theory and observations

Halo Star Lithium Depletion

Direct X-ray Constraints on Sterile Neutrino Warm Dark Matter

Time variation of fundamental constants, primordial nucleosynthesis, and the size of extra dimensions.