Related papers: A Modelers' Opacity Wish List
Availability of reliable atomic and molecular opacity tables is essential in a wide variety of astronomical modeling: the solar and stellar interiors, stellar and planetary atmospheres, stellar evolution, pulsating stars, and protoplanetary…
Dust grains have been detected in various astronomical objects. Interpretation of observations of dusty objects includes three components: 1) determination of the materials which can exist in the solid phase and the measurements or…
Probing the existence of hypothetical particles beyond the Standard model often deals with extreme parameters: large energies, tiny cross-sections, large time scales, etc. Sometimes laboratory experiments can test required regions of…
Following several recommendations presented by the Astrophysics Decadal Survey 2010 centered around the need to define "a future ultraviolet-optical space capability," on 2012 May 25, NASA issued a Request for Information (RFI) seeking…
Atmospheric spectroscopy provides a window into the properties of exoplanets. However, the physical interpretation of retrieved data and its implications for the internal properties of exoplanets remains nebulous. This letter addresses…
In this paper I review the motivation and current status of modeling of plasmas exposed to strong radiation fields, as it applies to the study of cosmic X-ray sources. This includes some of the astrophysical issues which can be addressed,…
Neutrinos, and primarily neutrino oscillations, have undoubtedly been one of the most exciting topics in the field of high-energy physics over the past few years. The existence of neutrino oscillations would require an extension of the…
Laboratory (laser and Z-pinch) opacity measurements of well-characterized plasmas provide data to assist inertial confinement fusion, astrophysics and atomic-physics research. In order to test the atomic-physics codes devoted to the…
The current need for atomic data to model stellar spectra obtained in various wavelength ranges is described. The level of completeness and accuracy of these data is discussed.
Some hypotheses in modern theoretical physics that have not any experimental verification are listed. The goal of the paper is not to criticize or be lawyers any of these hypotheses. The purpose is focus physicists attention on that now…
The detection of the theoretically expected dark matter is central to particle physics and cosmology. Current fashionable supersymmetric models provide a natural dark matter candidate which is the lightest supersymmetric particle (LSP). The…
These lectures have been given to particle physicists, mostly experimentalists and very briefly and at a pedestrian level review the problems of dark matter. The content of the lectures is the following: 1. Introduction. 2. Cosmological…
These lectures are intended to provide a brief pedagogical review of dark matter for the newcomer to the subject. We begin with a discussion of the astrophysical evidence for dark matter. The standard weakly-interacting massive particle…
The absence of a neutrino flux from self-annihilating dark matter captured in the Sun has tightly constrained some leading particle dark matter scenarios. The impact of astrophysical uncertainties on the capture process of dark matter in…
Observational astronomy is plagued with selection effects that must be taken into account when interpreting data from astronomical surveys. Because of the physical limitations of observing time and instrument sensitivity, datasets are…
Ideal absorption describes a particular means of optimizing light-matter interactions with a host of potential applications. This work presents new analytic formulas and describes semi-analytical methods for the design of electric or…
We summarize here the discussions around photospheric constraints, current uncertainties in models of stellar atmospheres, and reports on ongoing spectroscopic surveys. Rather than a panorama of the state of the art, we chose to present a…
One of the oft-cited qualities sought after in a potential future engineering employee is an analytical mind that is "continually examining things." In one sense this examination is discouraged in an instructional laboratory employing…
Many of the fundamental questions in astrophysics can be addressed using spectroscopic observations of photoionized cosmic plasmas. However, the reliability of the inferred astrophysics depends on the accuracy of the underlying atomic data…
Several lines of evidence suggest that some of the dark matter may be non-baryonic: the non-detection of various plausible baryonic candidates for dark matter inferred, e.g., from galaxy rotation curves and from cluster of galaxy velocity…