• Atmospheric Overturning Circulation on Dry, Tidally-locked Rocky Planets is Mainly Driven by Radiative Cooling

    分类: 天文学 >> 天文学 提交时间: 2023-02-19

    摘要: In this study, we examine the driving mechanism for the atmospheric overturning circulation on dry, tidally-locked rocky planets without the condensation of water vapor or other species. We find that the main driving process is the radiative cooling of CO2 (or other non-condensable greenhouse gases) rather than CO2 greenhouse warming or stellar radiation. Stellar radiation is the ultimate mechanism but not the direct mechanism. Due to the combination of the uneven distribution in the stellar radiation and effective horizontal energy transports in the free troposphere, there is strong temperature inversion in the area away from the substellar region. This inversion makes CO2 to have a radiative cooling effect rather than a radiative warming effect for the atmosphere, same as that in the stratosphere of Earth's atmosphere. This cooling effect produces negative buoyancy and drives large-scale downwelling, supporting the formation of a global-scale overturning circulation. If CO2 is excluded from the atmosphere, the overturning circulation becomes very weak, regardless the level of stellar radiation. This mechanism is completely different from that for the atmospheric overturning circulation on Earth or on moist, tidally-locked rocky planets, where latent heat release and/or baroclinic instability are the dominated mechanisms. Our study improves the understanding of the atmospheric circulation on tidally-locked exoplanets and also on other dry planets, such as Venus and Mars in the solar system.

  • Lensing by primordial black holes: constraints from gravitational wave observations

    分类: 天文学 >> 天文学 提交时间: 2023-02-19

    摘要: Primordial black holes (PBHs) have been proposed to explain at least a portion of dark matter. Observations have put strong constraints on PBHs in terms of the fraction of dark matter which they can represent, $f_{\rm PBH}$, across a wide mass range -- apart from the stellar-mass range of $20M_\odot\lesssim M_{\rm PBH}\lesssim 100M_\odot$. In this paper, we explore the possibility that such PBHs could serve as point-mass lenses capable of altering the gravitational-wave (GW) signals observed from binary black hole (BBH) mergers along their line-of-sight. We find that careful GW data analysis could verify the existence of such PBHs based on the $fitting~factor$ and odds ratio analyses. When such a lensed GW signal is detected, we expect to be able to measure the redshifted mass of the lens with a relative error $\Delta M_{\rm PBH}/M_{\rm PBH}\lesssim0.3$. If no such lensed GW events were detected despite the operation of sensitive GW detectors accumulating large numbers of BBH mergers, it would translate into a stringent constraint of $f_{\rm PBH}\lesssim 10^{-2}-10^{-5}$ for PBHs with a mass larger than $\sim10M_\odot$ by the Einstein Telescope after one year of running, and $f_{\rm PBH}\lesssim 0.2$ for PBHs with mass greater than $\sim 50M_\odot$ for advanced LIGO after ten years of running.

  • Particle acceleration in shearing flows: the case for large-scale jets

    分类: 天文学 >> 天文学 提交时间: 2023-02-19

    摘要: X-ray observations of kilo-parsec scale jets indicate that a synchrotron origin of the sustained non-thermal emission is likely. This requires distributed acceleration of electrons up to near PeV energies along the jet. The underlying acceleration mechanism is still unclear. Shear acceleration is a promising candidate, as velocity-shear stratification is a natural consequence of the collimated flow of a jet. We study the details of shear acceleration by solving the steady-state Fokker-Planck-type equation and provide a simple general solution for trans-relativistic jets for a range of magnetohydrodynamic turbulent power-law spectra. In general, the accelerated particle population is a power-law spectrum with an exponential-like cut-off, where the power-law index is determined by the turbulence spectrum and the balance of escape and acceleration of particles. Adopting a simple linearly decreasing velocity profile in the boundary of large-scale jets, we find that the multi-wavelength spectral energy distribution of X-ray jets, such as Centaurus A and 3C 273, can be reproduced with electrons that are accelerated up to $\sim$ PeV. In kpc-scale jets, protons may be accelerated up to $\sim$ EeV, supporting the hypothesis that large-scale jets are strong candidates for ultra-high-energy-cosmic-ray sources within the framework of shear acceleration.

  • Measurement-device-independent quantum key distribution for nonstandalone networks

    分类: 光学 >> 量子光学 提交时间: 2023-02-19

    摘要: Untrusted node networks initially implemented by measurement-device-independent quantum key distribution (MDI-QKD) protocol are a crucial step on the roadmap of the quantum Internet. Considering extensive QKD implementations of trusted node networks, a workable upgrading tactic of existing networks toward MDI networks needs to be explicit. Here, referring to the nonstandalone (NSA) network of 5G, we propose an NSA-MDI scheme as an evolutionary selection for existing phase-encoding BB84 networks. Our solution can upgrade the BB84 networks and terminals that employ various phase-encoding schemes to immediately support MDI without hardware changes. This cost-effective upgrade effectively promotes the deployment of MDI networks as a step of untrusted node networks while taking full advantage of existing networks. In addition, the diversified demands on security and bandwidth are satisfied, and network survivability is improved.