B. Ning | Searcharxiv

arXiv2021

State transitions of GX 339-4 during its outburst rising phase

We investigate systematically four outbursts of black hole system GX 339-4 observed by the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) in both spectral and timing domains and find that these outbursts have some common properties although they experience different 'q' tracks in the hardness-intensity diagram (HID). While the spectral indices are around 1.5 in low hard state (LHS), 2.4 in soft intermediate state (SIMS) and high soft state (HSS), the spectral parameters of thermal, non-thermal and reflection components vary significantly in transitions from LHS to HIMS. Also the quasi periodic oscillation (QPO) shows a peculiar behavior during the state transition between LHS and HIMS: the RMS drop of type C fundamental QPO is accompanied with showing-up of the second harmonic. Interestingly, the QPO RMS is found to have a similar linear relationship with the non-thermal fraction of emission in different outbursts. These findings provide more clues to our understanding the outburst of the black hole X-ray binary system.

astro-ph.HE↗

arXiv2014

High-precision Distribution of Highly-stable Optical Pulse Trains with Sub-10-fs Timing Jitter

High-precision optical pulse trains distribution via fibre links has made huge impacts in many fields. In most published works, the accuracies are still fundamentally limited by some unavoidable noises, such as thermal and shot noise from conventional photodiodes, thermal noise from mixers. Here, we demonstrate a new high-precision timing distribution system by using highly-precision phase detector to overcome the limitations. Instead of using photodiodes and microwave mixers, we use several fibre Sagnac-loop-based optical-microwave phase detectors to realize optical-electrical conversion and phase measurements, for suppressing the noises and achieving ultra-high accuracy. A 10-km fibre link distribution experiment shows our system provides a residual instability at the level of 4.6*10-15@1-s and 6.1*10-18@10000-s, with an integrated timing jitter as low as 3.8 fs in a bandwidth of 1 Hz to 100 KHz. This low instability and timing jitter makes it possible that our system can be used in the optical clock distribution or the applications for the facilities which require extremely accuracy frequency time synchronization.

physics.optics↗