Oxford Centre for High Energy Density Science (OxCHEDS)

Abstract:

Proton radiography is a technique in high energy density science to diagnose magnetic and/or electric fields in a plasma by firing a proton beam and detecting its modulated intensity profile on a screen. Current approaches to retrieve the integrated field from the modulated intensity profile require the unmodulated beam intensity profile before the interaction, which is rarely available experimentally due to shot-to-shot variability. In this paper, we present a statistical method to retrieve the integrated field without needing to know the exact source profile. We apply our method to experimental data, showing the robustness of our approach. Our proposed technique allows not only for the retrieval of the path-integrated fields, but also of the statistical properties of the fields.

Abstract:

In this Letter, we investigate the effect of orbital angular momentum (OAM) on elastic photon-photon scattering in a vacuum for the first time. We define exact solutions to the vacuum electromagnetic wave equation which carry OAM. Using those, the expected coupling between three initial waves is derived in the framework of an effective field theory based on the Euler-Heisenberg Lagrangian and shows that OAM adds a signature to the generated photons thereby greatly improving the signal-to-noise ratio. This forms the basis for a proposed high-power laser experiment utilizing quantum optics techniques to filter the generated photons based on their OAM state.

Abstract:

We quantify the biases in the diurnal cycle of air temperature in ERA5, using hourly climate station data for four stations in Saskatchewan, Canada. Compared with ERA-Interim, the biases in ERA5 have been greatly reduced, and show no differences with snow cover. We compute fits to the ERA5 mean air temperature biases based on ERA5 effective cloud albedo. They can be used to improve the ERA5 diurnal cycle of air temperature for modeling agricultural processes. Diurnally, ERA5 has a negative wind speed bias, which increases quasi-linearly with wind speed, and is greater in the daytime than at night. We evaluate ERA5 precipitation against the original climate station precipitation data, and a second generation adjusted precipitation dataset by Mekis and Vincent (2011). For the warm season, ERA5 has a high bias of 8 ± 9% above the Mekis dataset. ERA5 is −22 ± 7% below the Mekis estimate in winter, suggesting that their correction with snow may be too large. It is likely that the ERA5 precipitation bias is small, which is encouraging for agricultural modeling. Data from a BSRN site near Regina shows that the biases in the downwelling shortwave and longwave radiation estimates in ERA5 are small, and have changed little from ERA-Interim. We show that the annual cycle of the Saskatchewan surface energy and water budgets in ERA5 are realistic. In particular the damping of extremes in summer precipitation by the extraction of soil water is comparable in ERA5 to our earlier observational estimate based on gravity satellite data.