Related papers: A Procedure for Correcting the Apparent Optical De…
To measure the column densities of interstellar and intergalactic gas clouds using absorption line spectroscopy, the apparent optical depth technique (AOD) of Savage & Sembach (1991) can be used instead of a curve-of-growth analysis or…
Optical nebular emission lines are commonly used to estimate the star formation rate of galaxies and the black hole accretion rate of their central active nucleus. The accuracy of the conversion from line strengths to physical properties…
Absorption imaging is a commonly adopted method to acquire, with high temporal resolution, spatial information on a partially transparent object. It relies on the interference between a probe beam and the coherent response of the object. In…
We describe the use of partially overlapping galaxies to provide direct measurements of the effective absorption in galaxy disks, independent of assumptions about internal disk structure. The non-overlapping parts of the galaxies and…
The relative population of the fine structure sublevels of an atom's ground state is affected by radiative transitions induced by an anisotropic radiation flux. This causes the alignment of atomic angular momentum. In terms of observational…
Given a set of samples, a few of them being possibly saturated, we propose an efficient algorithm in order to cancel saturation while reconstructing band-limited signals. Our method satisfies a minimum-loss constraint and relies on…
We report on a far above saturation absorption imaging technique to investigate the characteristics of dense packets of ultracold atoms. The transparency of the cloud is controlled by the incident light intensity as a result of the…
Interstellar scintillation can be used to probe transverse sizes of radio sources on scales inaccessible to the nominal resolution of any terrestrial telescope, e.g. $\lesssim 10^{-6}$ arc sec. Methodology is presented that exploits this…
To underscore the value of high spectral resolution for the study of low-z QSO absorption lines, we briefly present Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph echelle data that demonstrate how increased resolution leads to dramatic improvement in…
We propose and demonstrate an experimental method to measure by absorption imaging the size and local column density of a cloud of atoms, even when its smallest dimension is smaller than the resolution of the imaging system. To do this, we…
A new method, based on simulated annealing technique and aimed at the inverse problem in the analysis of intergalactic or interstellar complex spectra of hydrogen and metal lines, is outlined. We consider the process of line formation in…
The Nitrogen-to-Oxygen (N/O) abundance ratio is an important diagnostic of galaxy evolution since the ratio is closely tied to the growth of metallicity and the star formation history in galaxies. Estimates for the N/O ratio are…
Recently, convincing evidence was found for extremely large X-ray absorption by column densities $> 10^{23} cm^{-2}$ in broad absorption line quasars. One consequence of this is that any soft X-ray emission from these QSOs would be the…
We present a new method of interpolation for the pixel brightness estimation in astronomical images. Our new method is simple and easily implementable. We show the comparison of this method with the widely used linear interpolation and…
Radiative transfer calculations have predicted intensity enhancements for optically thick emission lines, as opposed to the normal intensity reductions, for astrophysical plasmas under certain conditions. In particular, the results are…
The multiple passages of light through an absorption inhomogeneity of finite size deep within a turbid medium is analyzed for optical imaging using the ``self-energy'' diagram. The nonlinear correction becomes more important for an…
A simple, yet general, formalism for the optimized linear combination of astrophysical images is constructed and demonstrated. The formalism allows the user to combine multiple undersampled images to provide oversampled output at high…
Absorption imaging of ultracold atoms is the foundation for quantitative extraction of information from experiments with ultracold atoms. Due to the limited exposure time available in these systems, the signal-to-noise ratio is largest for…
Optical aberrations of optical systems cause significant degradation of imaging quality. Aberration correction by sophisticated lens designs and special glass materials generally incurs high cost of manufacturing and the increase in the…
Optical stellar interferometers have demonstrated milli-arcsecond resolution with few apertures spaced hundreds of meters apart. To obtain rich direct images, many apertures will be needed, for a better sampling of the incoming wavefront.…