Effects of adiabaticity and non-adiabaticity of dust charge fluctuation on the propagation of the dust ion acoustic waves in inhomogeneous dusty plasma

A theoretical investigation has been made for adiabatic positive and negative dust charge fluctuations on the propagation of dust-ion acoustic waves (DIAWs) in a weakly inhomogeneous, collisionless, unmagnetized dusty plasmas consisting of cold positive ions, stationary positively and negatively charged dust particles and isothermal electrons. The reductive perturbation method is employed to reduce the basic set of fluid equations to the variable coefficients Korteweg–de Vries (KdV) equation. Either compressive or rarefactive solitons are shown to exist depending on the critical value of the ion density, which in turn, depends on the inhomogeneous distribution of the ion. The dissipative effects of non-adiabatic dust charge variation has been studied which cause generation of dust ion acoustic shock waves governed by KdV-Burger (KdVB) equation. The results of the present investigation may be applicable to some dusty plasma environments, such as dusty plasma existing in polar mesosphere region.     

Secure wireless collection and distribution of commercial airplane health data

The introduction of wireless communication capabilities supporting transfer of sensor data and information on-board commercial airplanes as well as between airplanes and supporting ground systems has the potential to significantly improve the safety and efficiency of air travel. The benefits, however, come at the cost of information security vulnerabilities introduced by data networks. Regulatory institutions, including the FAA, are aware that security requirements for network-enabled airplanes must be fully identified. Therefore, this focuses on wireless airplane health monitoring and management, and contributes a security framework to identify threats and system requirements to mitigate these threats. We also present challenges and open problems in enabling secure use of wireless sensor networks for health monitoring and control of commercial airplanes.     

Plasma transfer processes at the magnetopause

Space Science Reviews -     

Computation and Elicitation of Valleyness

Abstract

Existing methods for land surface form characterisation often focus on relatively simple landform element classifications and do not evaluate results with large scale participant experiments. This piece of research takes a semantics-grounded approach to characterising the landform valley. Based on definitions three algorithms to characterise valleys in a fuzzy way are introduced. Comparison of the results to assessments regarding the degree of being in a valley gained from over 800 participants in a questionnaire survey yields significant amounts of explained variance (R ² = 0.35–0.37). Furthermore, accounting for very ambiguously perceived stimuli showing vast low places leads to markedly improved regressions (R ² = 0.45–0.49), weighting of the data with a measure of uncertainty in judgment even more so (R ² = 0.50–0.55).     

Physics of Electric Discharges in Atmospheric Gases: An Informal Introduction

A short account of the physics of electrical discharges in gases is given from the viewpoint of its historical evolution and application to planetary atmospheres. As such it serves as an introduction to the papers on particular aspects of electric discharges contained in this issue, in particular in the chapters on lightning and the discharges which in the last two decades have been observed to take place in Earth’s upper atmosphere. In addition to briefly reviewing the early history of gas discharge physics we discuss the main parameters affecting atmospheric discharges like collision frequency, mean free path and critical electric field strength. Any discharge current in the atmosphere is clearly carried only by electrons. Above the lower boundary of the mesosphere the electrons must be considered magnetized with the conductivity becoming a tensor. Moreover, the collisional mean free path in the upper atmosphere becomes relatively large which lowers the critical electric field there and more easily enables discharges than at lower altitudes. Finally we briefly mention the importance of such discharges as sources for wave emission.     

Reciprocal radar waveforms

Digitally coded radar waveforms can be used to obtain large time-bandwidth products (pulse compression ratios). It is demonstrated that periodic radar waveforms with zero sidelobes or almost zero sidelobes can be defined. A perfect periodic code is a periodic code whose autocorrelation function has zero sidelobes and whose amplitude is uniform (maximum power efficiency=1). An asymptotically perfect periodic code has the property that as the number of elements in the code goes to infinity the autocorrelation function of the code has zero sidelobes and its power efficiency is one. The authors introduce a class of radar waveforms that are either perfect or asymptotically perfect codes. These are called reciprocal codes because they can be derived through a linear transformation of known codes. The aperiodic performance of the reciprocal code is examined     

Statistical properties of the most powerful solar and heliospheric disturbances

We present and discuss here the first version of a data base of extreme solar and heliospheric events. The data base contains now 87 extreme events mostly since 1940. An event is classified as extreme if one of the three critical parameters passed a lower limit. The critical parameters were the X-ray flux (parameter R), solar proton flux (parameter S) and geomagnetic disturbance level (parameter G). We find that the five strongest extreme events based on four variables (X-rays SEP, Dst, Ap) are completely separate except for the October 2003 event which is one the five most extreme events according to SEP, Dst and Ap. This underlines the special character of the October 2003 event, making it unique within 35 years. We also find that the events based on R and G are rather separate, indicating that the location of even extreme flares on the solar disk is important for geomagnetic effects. We also find that S = 3 events are not extreme in the same sense as R > 3 and G > 3 events, while S = 5 events are missing so far. This suggests that it might be useful to rescale the classification of SEP fluxes.