Effects of nuclear explosions | EPFL Graph Search

The effects of a nuclear explosion on its immediate vicinity are typically much more destructive and multifaceted than those caused by conventional explosives. In most cases, the energy released from a nuclear weapon detonated within the lower atmosphere can be approximately divided into four basic categories: *the blast and shockwave: 50% of total energy *thermal radiation: 35% of total energy *ionizing radiation: 5% of total energy (more in a neutron bomb) *residual radiation: 5–10% of total energy with the mass of the explosion. Depending on the design of the weapon and the location in which it is detonated, the energy distributed to any one of these categories may be significantly higher or lower. The physical blast effect is created by the coupling of immense amounts of energy, spanning the electromagnetic spectrum, with the surroundings. The environment of the explosion (e.g. submarine, ground burst, air burst, or exo-atmospheric) determines how much energy is distributed to

Cosmological constraints on deviations from Lorentz invariance in gravity and dark matter

Benjamin Audren, Diego Blas Temino, Mikhail Ivanov, Julien Lesgourgues, Sergey Sibiryakov

We consider a scenario where local Lorentz invariance is violated by the existence of a preferred time direction at every space-time point. This scenario can arise in the context of quantum gravity and its description at low energies contains a unit time-like vector field which parameterizes the preferred direction. The particle physics tests of Lorentz invariance preclude a direct coupling of this vector to the fields of the Standard Model, but do not bear implications for dark matter. We discuss how the presence of this vector and its possible coupling to dark matter affect the evolution of the Universe. At the level of homogeneous cosmology the only effect of Lorentz invariance violation is a rescaling of the expansion rate. The physics is richer at the level of perturbations. We identify three effects crucial for observations: the rescaling of the matter contribution to the Poisson equation, the appearance of an extra contribution to the anisotropic stress and the scale-dependent enhancement of dark matter clustering. These effects result in distinctive features in the power spectra of the CMB and density fluctuations. Making use of the data from Planck and WiggleZ we obtain the most stringent cosmological constraints to date on departures from Lorentz symmetry. Our analysis provides the first direct bounds on deviations from Lorentz invariance in the dark matter sector.

Iop Publishing Ltd2015

Importance of centrifugal effects for the internal kink mode stability in toroidally rotating tokamak plasmas

Jonathan Graves

Analytical theory and two different magnetohydrodynamical stability codes are used in a study of the effects of toroidal plasma rotation on the stability of the ideal, internal kink mode in tokamaks. The focus of the paper is on the role that the centrifugal effects on the plasma equilibrium play for the stability of this mode, and results from one code where centrifugal effects are self-consistently included (CASTOR-FLOW) [ E. Strumberger et al., Nucl. Fusion 45, 1156 (2005) ] are compared with the results from another code where such effects are not taken into account (MISHKA-F) [ I. T. Chapman et al., Phys. Plasmas 13, 062511 (2006) ]. It is found that, even at rather modest flow speeds, the centrifugal effects are very important for the stability of the internal kink mode. While the results from the two codes can be quite similar for certain profiles in the plasma, completely opposite results are obtained for other profiles. A very good agreement between analytical theory and the numerical results are, both for inconsistent and consistent equilibria, found for plasmas with large aspect ratio. From the analytical theory, the distinctly different stability properties of equilibria with and without centrifugal effects included can be traced to the stabilizing effect of the geodesic acoustic mode (GAM) induced by the plasma rotation. This GAM exists solely as a consequence of the nonuniform plasma density and pressure created by the centrifugal force on the flux surfaces, and a stabilizing coupling of the internal kink instability to this mode cannot therefore take place if the centrifugal effects are not included in the equilibrium. In addition to the GAM stabilization, the effects of the radial profiles of the plasma density and rotation velocity are also found to be significant, and the importance of these effects increases with decreasing aspect ratio.

AIP2009

Importance of centrifugal effects for the internal kink mode stability in toroidally rotating tokamak plasmas

Jonathan Graves

AIP2009