A new natural,super-hard,transparent polymorph of carbon from the Popigai impact crater,Russia

A natural shockwave event led to the formation of a new crystalline polymorph of carbon in gneisses from the Popigai crater, Russia. The new species occupies the interior of a multiphase assemblage and is entirely enveloped by lonsdaleite and graphite. Polishing hardness of this new phase is greater than that of lonsdaleite. Micro-beam synchrotron X-ray diffraction, imaging and fluorescence studies revealed a pure transparent carbon phase. The diffraction pattern is indexed in terms of a cubic cell (a=14.697 Å, space group Pm3m.). This species was neither encountered in static or dynamic high-pressure experiment nor predicted by theoretical calculations. To cite this article: A. El Goresy et al., C. R. Geoscience 335 (2003).     

A strategy for finding gravitationally lensed distant supernovae

Distant Type Ia and II supernovae (SNe) can serve as valuable probes of the history of the cosmic expansion and star formation, and provide important information on their progenitor models. At present, however, there are few observational constraints on the abundance of SNe at high redshifts. A major science driver for the Next Generation Space Telescope is the study of such very distant SNe. In this paper we discuss strategies for finding and counting distant SNe by using repeat imaging of supercritical intermediate redshift clusters whose mass distributions are well constrained via modelling of strongly lensed features. For a variety of different models for the star formation history and supernova progenitors, we estimate the likelihood of detecting lensed SNe as a function of their redshift. In the case of a survey conducted with Hubble Space Telescope ( HST ), we predict a high probability of seeing a supernova in a single return visit with either Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 or Advanced Camera for Surveys, and a much higher probability of detecting examples with     in the lensed case. Most events would represent magnified SNe II at     and a fraction will be more distant examples. We discuss various ways to classify such events using ground-based infrared photometry. We demonstrate an application of the method using the HST archival data and discuss the case of a possible event found in the rich cluster AC 114     .     

Analytical study of the effect of the geometrical parameters during the interaction of regular wave-horizontal plate-current

The present work is an analytical study of the influence of geometrical parameters, such as length, thickness and immersion of the plate, on the reflection coefficient of a regular wave for an immersed horizontal plate in the presence of a uniform current with the same direction as the propagation of the incident regular wave. This study was performed using the linearized potential theory with the evanescent modes while searching for complex roots to the dispersion equation that are neither pure real nor pure imaginary. The results show that the effects of the immersion and the relative length on the reflection coefficient of the plate are accentuated by the presence of the current, whereas the plate thickness practically does not have an effect if it is relatively small.