University of Maryland, Baltimore County

About: University of Maryland, Baltimore County is a education organization based out in Baltimore, Maryland, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Galaxy. The organization has 8749 authors who have published 20843 publications receiving 795706 citations. The organization is also known as: UMBC.

Volume illustration: non-photorealistic rendering of volume models

Abstract: Accurately and automatically conveying the structure of a volume model is a problem that has not been fully solved by existing volume rendering approaches. Physics-based volume rendering approaches create images which may match the appearance of translucent materials in nature but may not embody important structural details. Transfer function approaches allow flexible design of the volume appearance but generally require substantial hand-tuning for each new data set in order to be effective. We introduce the volume illustration approach, combining the familiarity of a physics-based illumination model with the ability to enhance important features using non-photorealistic rendering techniques. Since the features to be enhanced are defined on the basis of local volume characteristics rather than volume sample values, the application of volume illustration techniques requires less manual tuning than the design of a good transfer function. Volume illustration provides a flexible unified framework for enhancing structural perception of volume models through the amplification of features and the addition of illumination effects.

A universal scaling for the energetics of relativistic jets from black hole systems

Abstract: Black holes generate collimated, relativistic jets, which have been observed in gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), microquasars, and at the center of some galaxies [active galactic nuclei (AGN)]. How jet physics scales from stellar black holes in GRBs to the supermassive ones in AGN is still unknown. Here, we show that jets produced by AGN and GRBs exhibit the same correlation between the kinetic power carried by accelerated particles and the gamma-ray luminosity, with AGN and GRBs lying at the low- and high-luminosity ends, respectively, of the correlation. This result implies that the efficiency of energy dissipation in jets produced in black hole systems is similar over 10 orders of magnitude in jet power, establishing a physical analogy between AGN and GRBs.

Constraints on cosmological dark matter annihilation from the Fermi-LAT isotropic diffuse gamma-ray measurement

Abstract: The first published Fermi large area telescope (Fermi-LAT) measurement of the isotropic diffuse gamma-ray emission is in good agreement with a single power law, and is not showing any signature of a dominant contribution from dark matter sources in the energy range from 20 to 100 GeV. We use the absolute size and spectral shape of this measured flux to derive cross section limits on three types of generic dark matter candidates: annihilating into quarks, charged leptons and monochromatic photons. Predicted gamma-ray fluxes from annihilating dark matter are strongly affected by the underlying distribution of dark matter, and by using different available results of matter structure formation we assess these uncertainties. We also quantify how the dark matter constraints depend on the assumed conventional backgrounds and on the Universe's transparency to high-energy gamma-rays. In reasonable background and dark matter structure scenarios (but not in all scenarios we consider) it is possible to exclude models proposed to explain the excess of electrons and positrons measured by the Fermi-LAT and PAMELA experiments. Derived limits also start to probe cross sections expected from thermally produced relics (e.g. in minimal supersymmetry models) annihilating predominantly into quarks. For the monochromatic gamma-ray signature, the current measurement constrains only dark matter scenarios with very strong signals.