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Jun Yang

Publications and source records attributed to Jun Yang.

At least 469 records · Page 26Linked to original sources
arXiv2014

Water Trapping on Tidally Locked Terrestrial Planets Requires Special Conditions

Surface liquid water is essential for standard planetary habitability. Calculations of atmospheric circulation on tidally locked planets around M stars suggest that this peculiar orbital configuration lends itself to the trapping of large amounts of water in kilometers-thick ice on the night side, potentially removing all liquid water from the day side where photosynthesis is possible. We study this problem using a global climate model including coupled atmosphere, ocean, land, and sea-ice components as well as a continental ice sheet model driven by the climate model output. For a waterworld we find that surface winds transport sea ice toward the day side and the ocean carries heat toward the night side. As a result, night-side sea ice remains O(10 m) thick and night-side water trapping is insignificant. If a planet has large continents on its night side, they can grow ice sheets O(1000 m) thick if the geothermal heat flux is similar to Earth's or smaller. Planets with a water complement similar to Earth's would therefore experience a large decrease in sea level when plate tectonics drives their continents onto the night side, but would not experience complete day-side dessication. Only planets with a geothermal heat flux lower than Earth's, much of their surface covered by continents, and a surface water reservoir O(10 %) of Earth's would be susceptible to complete water trapping.

astro-ph.EP↗
arXiv2014

Binary orbits as the driver of gamma-ray emission and mass ejection in classical novae

Classical novae are the most common astrophysical thermonuclear explosions, occurring on the surfaces of white dwarf stars accreting gas from companions in binary star systems. Novae typically expel ~10^(-4) solar masses of material at velocities exceeding 1,000 kilometres per second. However, the mechanism of mass ejection in novae is poorly understood, and could be dominated by the impulsive flash of thermonuclear energy, prolonged optically thick winds, or binary interaction with the nova envelope. Classical novae are now routinely detected in gigaelectronvolt gamma-ray wavelengths, suggesting that relativistic particles are accelerated by strong shocks in the ejecta. Here we report high-resolution radio imaging of the gamma-ray-emitting nova V959 Mon. We find that its ejecta were shaped by the motion of the binary system: some gas was expelled rapidly along the poles as a wind from the white dwarf, while denser material drifted out along the equatorial plane, propelled by orbital motion. At the interface between the equatorial and polar regions, we observe synchrotron emission indicative of shocks and relativistic particle acceleration, thereby pinpointing the location of gamma-ray production. Binary shaping of the nova ejecta and associated internal shocks are expected to be widespread among novae, explaining why many novae are gamma-ray emitters.

astro-ph.HE↗
arXiv2014

Joint Design of Optimal Cooperative Jamming and Power Allocation for Linear Precoding

Linear precoding and cooperative jamming for multiuser broadcast channel is studied to enhance the physical layer security. We consider the system where multiple independent data streams are transmitted from the base station to multiple legitimate users with the help of a friendly jammer. It is assumed that a normalized linear precoding matrix is given at the base station, whereas the power allocated to each user is to be determined. The problem is to jointly design the power allocation across different users for linear precoding and the cooperative jamming at the friendly jammer. The goal is to maximize a lower bound of the secrecy rate, provided that a minimum communication rate to the users is guaranteed. The optimal solution is obtained when the number of antennas at the friendly jammer is no less than the total number of antennas at the users and eavesdropper. Moreover, a suboptimal algorithm is proposed, which can be applied for all the scenarios. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed schemes are effective for secure communications.

cs.IT↗
arXiv2014

Strong Dependence of the Inner Edge of the Habitable Zone on Planetary Rotation Rate

Planetary rotation rate is a key parameter in determining atmospheric circulation and hence the spatial pattern of clouds. Since clouds can exert a dominant control on planetary radiation balance, rotation rate could be critical for determining mean planetary climate. Here we investigate this idea using a three-dimensional general circulation model with a sophisticated cloud scheme. We find that slowly rotating planets (like Venus) can maintain an Earth-like climate at nearly twice the stellar flux as rapidly rotating planets (like Earth). This suggests that many exoplanets previously believed to be too hot may actually be habitable, depending on their rotation rate. The explanation for this behavior is that slowly rotating planets have a weak Coriolis force and long daytime illumination, which promotes strong convergence and convection in the substellar region. This produces a large area of optically thick clouds, which greatly increases the planetary albedo. In contrast, on rapidly rotating planets a much narrower belt of clouds form in the deep tropics, leading to a relatively low albedo. A particularly striking example of the importance of rotation rate suggested by our simulations is that a planet with modern Earth's atmosphere, in Venus' orbit, and with modern Venus' (slow) rotation rate would be habitable. This would imply that if Venus went through a runaway greenhouse, it had a higher rotation rate at that time.

astro-ph.EP↗
arXiv2014

Incremental Discovery of Prominent Situational Facts

We study the novel problem of finding new, prominent situational facts, which are emerging statements about objects that stand out within certain contexts. Many such facts are newsworthy---e.g., an athlete's outstanding performance in a game, or a viral video's impressive popularity. Effective and efficient identification of these facts assists journalists in reporting, one of the main goals of computational journalism. Technically, we consider an ever-growing table of objects with dimension and measure attributes. A situational fact is a "contextual" skyline tuple that stands out against historical tuples in a context, specified by a conjunctive constraint involving dimension attributes, when a set of measure attributes are compared. New tuples are constantly added to the table, reflecting events happening in the real world. Our goal is to discover constraint-measure pairs that qualify a new tuple as a contextual skyline tuple, and discover them quickly before the event becomes yesterday's news. A brute-force approach requires exhaustive comparison with every tuple, under every constraint, and in every measure subspace. We design algorithms in response to these challenges using three corresponding ideas---tuple reduction, constraint pruning, and sharing computation across measure subspaces. We also adopt a simple prominence measure to rank the discovered facts when they are numerous. Experiments over two real datasets validate the effectiveness and efficiency of our techniques.

cs.DB↗
arXiv2014

A Low-order Model of Water Vapor, Clouds, and Thermal Emission for Tidally Locked Terrestrial Planets

In the spirit of minimal modeling of complex systems, we develop an idealized two-column model to investigate the climate of tidally locked terrestrial planets with Earth-like atmospheres in the habitable zone of M-dwarf stars. The model is able to approximate the fundamental features of the climate obtained from three-dimensional (3D) atmospheric general circulation model (GCM) simulations. One important reason for the two-column model's success is that it reproduces the high cloud albedo of the GCM simulations, which reduces the planet's temperature and delays the onset of a runaway greenhouse state. The two-column model also clearly illustrates a secondary mechanism for determining the climate: the nightside acts as a ``radiator fin'' through which infrared energy can be lost to space easily. This radiator fin is maintained by a temperature inversion and dry air on the nightside, and plays a similar role to the subtropics on modern Earth. Since 1D radiative-convective models cannot capture the effects of the cloud albedo and radiator fin, they are systematically biased towards a narrower habitable zone. We also show that cloud parameters are most important for determining the day--night thermal emission contrast in the two-column model, which decreases and eventually reverses as the stellar flux increases. This reversal is important because it could be detected by future extrasolar planet characterization missions, which would suggest that the planet has Earth-like water clouds and is potentially habitable.

astro-ph.EP↗
arXiv2014

Very Long Baseline Interferometry Measured Proper Motion and Parallax of the $γ$-ray Millisecond Pulsar PSR J0218+4232

PSR J0218$+$4232 is a millisecond pulsar (MSP) with a flux density $\sim$ 0.9 mJy at 1.4 GHz. It is very bright in the high-energy X-ray and $γ$-ray domains. We conducted an astrometric program using the European VLBI Network (EVN) at 1.6 GHz to measure its proper motion and parallax. A model-independent distance would also help constrain its $γ$-ray luminosity. We achieved a detection of signal-to-noise ratio S/N > 37 for the weak pulsar in all five epochs. Using an extragalactic radio source lying 20 arcmin away from the pulsar, we estimate the pulsar's proper motion to be $μ_α\cosδ=5.35\pm0.05$ mas yr$^{-1}$ and $μ_δ=-3.74\pm 0.12$ mas yr$^{-1}$, and a parallax of $π=0.16\pm0.09$ mas. The very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) proper motion has significantly improved upon the estimates from long-term pulsar timing observations. The VLBI parallax provides the first model-independent distance constraints: $d=6.3^{+8.0}_{-2.3}$ kpc, with a corresponding $3σ$ lower-limit of $d=2.3$ kpc. This is the first pulsar trigonometric parallax measurement based solely on EVN observations. Using the derived distance, we believe that PSR J0218$+$4232 is the most energetic $γ$-ray MSP known to date. The luminosity based on even our 3$σ$ lower-limit distance is high enough to pose challenges to the conventional outer gap and slot gap models.

astro-ph.SR↗
arXiv2013

Fully Automatic Liquid Metal Printer towards Personal Electronics Manufacture

Printed electronics is quickly emerging with tremendous value in a wide variety of latest electrical engineering areas. However, restricted to the rather limited conductive inks and printing strategies, the currently existing electronics manufacturing tools are generally complicated, expensive, time, material, water and energy consuming, and thus mainly restricted to the industrial use. Here from an alternative way, the present article demonstrated for the first time an entirely automatic printing system for personal electronics manufacturing through introducing a composite liquid metal ink delivery and printing mechanism to overcome the large surface tension facing the solution, and integrating it with the notebook computer controlling algorithm. With the developed printer, any desired electronically conductive patterns spanning from single wires to various complex structures like integrated circuit (IC), antenna, PCB, RFID, electronic greeting cards, decoration arts, classical buildings (White House, Great Wall etc.) or more do-it-yourself (DIY) circuits were demonstrated to be printed out in a moment with high precision. And the total cost for the whole system has reached personal affordability, which is hard to offer by so far the state of the art technologies. Some fundamental fluid dynamics mechanisms related to the proposed tapping mode enabled reliable printing and adhesion of the liquid metal electronics on the flexible substrate was systematically disclosed through theoretical interpretation and experimental measurements. This clearly beyond-the-lab technology and pervasively available liquid metal printer opens the way for large scale home level electronics making in the coming time.

cs.ET↗
arXiv2013

Stabilizing Cloud Feedback Dramatically Expands the Habitable Zone of Tidally Locked Planets

The habitable zone (HZ) is the circumstellar region where a planet can sustain surface liquid water. Searching for terrestrial planets in the HZ of nearby stars is the stated goal of ongoing and planned extrasolar planet surveys. Previous estimates of the inner edge of the HZ were based on one-dimensional radiative-convective models. The most serious limitation of these models is the inability to predict cloud behavior. Here we use global climate models with sophisticated cloud schemes to show that due to a stabilizing cloud feedback, tidally locked planets can be habitable at twice the stellar flux found by previous studies. This dramatically expands the HZ and roughly doubles the frequency of habitable planets orbiting red dwarf stars. At high stellar flux, strong convection produces thick water clouds near the substellar location that greatly increase the planetary albedo and reduce surface temperatures. Higher insolation produces stronger substellar convection and therefore higher albedo, making this phenomenon a stabilizing climate feedback. Substellar clouds also effectively block outgoing radiation from the surface, reducing or even completely reversing the thermal emission contrast between dayside and nightside. The presence of substellar water clouds and the resulting clement surface conditions will therefore be detectable with the James Webb Space Telescope.

astro-ph.EP↗
arXiv2013

Baseline drift effect on the performance of neutron and gamma ray discrimination using frequency gradient analysis

Frequency gradient analysis (FGA) effectively discriminates neutrons and gamma rays by examining the frequency-domain features of the photomultiplier tube anode signal. This approach is insensitive to noise but is inevitably affected by the baseline drift, similar to other pulse shape discrimination methods. The baseline drift effect is attributed to the factors such as power line fluctuation, dark current, noise disturbances, hum, and pulse tail in front-end electronics. This effect needs to be elucidated and quantified before the baseline shift can be estimated and removed from the captured signal. Therefore, the effect of baseline shift on the discrimination performance of neutrons and gamma rays with organic scintillation detectors using FGA is investigated in this paper. The relationship between the baseline shift and discrimination parameters of FGA is derived and verified by an experimental system consisting of an americium-beryllium source, a BC501A liquid scintillator detector, and a 5 GSPS 8-bit oscilloscope. Both theoretical and experimental results show that the estimation of the baseline shift is necessary, and the removal of baseline drift from the pulse shapes can improve the discrimination performance of FGA.

physics.ins-det↗
arXiv2013

XTE J1752-223 in outburst: a persistent radio jet, dramatic flaring, multiple ejections and linear polarisation

The black hole candidate, XTE J1752-223, was discovered in 2009 October when it entered an outburst. We obtained radio data from the Australia Telescope Compact Array for the duration of the ~9 month event. The lightcurves show that the radio emission from the compact jet persisted for the duration of an extended hard state and through the transition to the intermediate state. The flux then rose rapidly by a factor of 10 and the radio source entered a series of at least 7 maxima, the first of which was likely to be emission associated with the compact jet. The subsequent 6 flares were accompanied by variable behaviour in terms of radio spectrum, degree of linear polarisation, morphology and associated X-ray behaviour. They were, however, remarkably similar in terms of the estimated minimum power required to launch such an ejection event. We compare the timing of radio peaks with the location of the ejecta, imaged by contemporaneous VLBI experiments. We then discuss the mechanism behind the events, in terms of whether discrete ejections is the most likely description of the behaviour. One ejection, at least, appears to be travelling with apparent superluminal motion. The range of properties, however, suggests that mutiple mechanisms may be relevant and that at least some of the emission is coming from shocked interactions amongst the ejecta and between the ejecta and the interstellar medium. We also compare the radio flux density with the X-ray source during the hard state and conclude that XTE J1752-223 is a radio-weak/X-ray-bright outlier on the universal correlation for black hole transient sources.

astro-ph.HE↗
arXiv2013

Concentration on Surfaces for a Singularly Perturbed Neumann Problem in Three-Dimensional Domains

We consider the following singularly perturbed elliptic problem $$ \varepsilon^2\triangle\tilde{u}-\tilde{u}+\tilde{u}^p=0, \ \tilde{u}>0\quad \mbox{in} \ Ω,\ \ \ \frac{\partial\tilde{u}}{\partial \mathbf{n}}=0 \quad \mbox{on}\ \partialΩ, $$ where $Ω$ is a bounded domain in $\mathbb{R}^3$ with smooth boundary, $\varepsilon$ is a small parameter, $\mathbf{n}$ denotes the inward normal of $ \partialΩ$ and the exponent $p>1$. Let $Γ$ be a hypersurface intersecting $\partialΩ$ in the right angle along its boundary $\partialΓ$ and satisfying a {\em non-degenerate condition}. We establish the existence of a solution $u_\varepsilon$ concentrating along a surface $\tildeΓ$ close to $Γ$, exponentially small in $\varepsilon$ at any positive distance from the surface $\tildeΓ$, provided $\varepsilon$ is small and away from certain {\em critical numbers}. The concentrating surface $\tildeΓ$ will collapse to $Γ$ as $\varepsilon\rightarrow 0$.

math.AP↗
arXiv2012

VLBI detection of the Galactic black hole binary candidate MAXI J1836-194

The X-ray transient MAXI J1836-194 is a newly-identified Galactic black hole binary candidate. As most X-ray transients, it was discovered at the beginning of an X-ray outburst. After the initial canonical X-ray hard state, the outburst evolved into a hard intermediate state and then went back to the hard state. The existing RATAN-600 radio monitoring observations revealed that it was variable on a timescale of days and had a flat or inverted spectrum, consistent with optically thick synchrotron emission, possibly from a self-absorbed jet in the vicinity of the central compact object. We observed the transient in the hard state near the end of the X-ray outburst with the European VLBI Network (EVN) at 5 GHz and the Chinese VLBI Network (CVN) at 2.3 and 8.3 GHz. The 8.3 GHz observations were carried out at a recording rate of 2048 Mbps using the newly-developed Chinese VLBI data acquisition system (CDAS), twice higher than the recording rate used in the other observations. We successfully detected the low-declination source with a high confidence level in both observations. The source was unresolved (<=0.5 mas), which is in agreement with an AU-scale compact jet.

astro-ph.HE↗
arXiv2012

Optimizing I/O for Big Array Analytics

Big array analytics is becoming indispensable in answering important scientific and business questions. Most analysis tasks consist of multiple steps, each making one or multiple passes over the arrays to be analyzed and generating intermediate results. In the big data setting, I/O optimization is a key to efficient analytics. In this paper, we develop a framework and techniques for capturing a broad range of analysis tasks expressible in nested-loop forms, representing them in a declarative way, and optimizing their I/O by identifying sharing opportunities. Experiment results show that our optimizer is capable of finding execution plans that exploit nontrivial I/O sharing opportunities with significant savings.

cs.DB↗
arXiv2011

VLBI observations of 10 CSO candidates: expansion velocities of hot spots

Observations of ten Compact Symmetric Objects ({\rm CSO}) candidates have been made with the Very Long Baseline Array at 8.4 GHz in 2005 and with a combined Chinese and European VLBI array at 8.4 GHz in 2009. The 2009 observations incorporate for the first time the two new Chinese telescopes at Miyun and Kunming for international astrophysical observations. The observational data, in combination with archival VLBA data from previous epochs, have been used to derive the proper motions of the VLBI components. Because of the long time baseline of $\sim$16 years of the VLBI data sets, the expansion velocities of the hot spots can be measured at an accuracy as high as $\sim$1.3 $μ$as yr$^{-1}$. Six of the ten sources are identified as CSOs with a typical double or triple morphology on the basis of both spectral index maps and their mirror-symmetry of proper motions of the terminal hot spots. The compact double source J1324+4048 is also identified as a CSO candidate. Among the three remaining sources, J1756+5748 and J2312+3847 are identified as core-jet sources with proper motions of their jet components relating to systemic source expansion. The third source J0017+5312 is likely also a core-jet source, but a robust detection of a core is needed for an unambiguous identification. The kinematic ages of the CSOs derived from proper motions range from 300 to 2500 years. The kinematic age distribution of the CSOs confirm an overabundance of compact young CSOs with ages less than 500 years. CSOs with known kinematic ages may be used to study the dynamical evolution of extragalactic radio sources at early stages.

astro-ph.CO↗
arXiv2010

Tensor factorizations of local second-order Møller Plesset theory

Efficient electronic structure methods can be built around efficient tensor representations of the wavefunction. Here we describe a general view of tensor factorization for the compact representation of electronic wavefunctions. We use these ideas to construct low-complexity representations of the doubles amplitudes in local second order Møller-Plesset perturbation theory. We introduce two approximations - the direct orbital specific virtual approximation and the full orbital specific virtual approximation. In these approximations, each occupied orbital is associated with a small set of correlating virtual orbitals. Conceptually, the representation lies between the projected atomic orbital representation in Pulay-Saebø local correlation theories and pair natural orbital correlation theories. We have tested the orbital specific virtual approximations on a variety of systems and properties including total energies, reaction energies, and potential energy curves. Compared to the Pulay-Saebø ansatz, we find that these approximations exhibit favourable accuracy and computational times, while yielding smooth potential energy curves.

physics.comp-ph↗
arXiv2009

RIOT: I/O-Efficient Numerical Computing without SQL

R is a numerical computing environment that is widely popular for statistical data analysis. Like many such environments, R performs poorly for large datasets whose sizes exceed that of physical memory. We present our vision of RIOT (R with I/O Transparency), a system that makes R programs I/O-efficient in a way transparent to the users. We describe our experience with RIOT-DB, an initial prototype that uses a relational database system as a backend. Despite the overhead and inadequacy of generic database systems in handling array data and numerical computation, RIOT-DB significantly outperforms R in many large-data scenarios, thanks to a suite of high-level, inter-operation optimizations that integrate seamlessly into R. While many techniques in RIOT are inspired by databases (and, for RIOT-DB, realized by a database system), RIOT users are insulated from anything database related. Compared with previous approaches that require users to learn new languages and rewrite their programs to interface with a database, RIOT will, we believe, be easier to adopt by the majority of the R users.

cs.DB↗