A UME Kibble balance displacement measurement procedure

<p>The redefinition of the kilogram in terms of Planck constant came into effect on 20 May 2019. The National Metrology Institute of Turkey (UME) realised the new definition by means of the oscillating magnet Kibble balance. The novel dynamical measurement procedure developed for Kibble balance in Turkey has the advantage of being less sensitive to environmental disturbances compared to the traditional Kibble balance experiments. Precise displacement measurements are performed either with Michelson or Fabry-Perot interferometers in worldwide Kibble balances. Moreover, most of them operate in a global vacuum. A commercial Michelson interferometer has been used in UME’s Kibble balance experiment. In this article, we determine the contribution of ultra-small oscillations to the Planck constant by taking simultaneous displacement measurements on two back-to-back mirrors attached to the piezoelectric transducer, undergoing an oscillatory motion with the Michelson and Fabry-Perot interferometers. The following novel measurement procedure makes such measurements possible in a regular laboratory environment. Otherwise, the experiment needs to be performed in a global vacuum. This is why we were required to investigate the resolution performances of these devices in laboratory conditions. As the expected relative uncertainty in the redefinition of kilogram is above the resolution uncertainties of both interferometers, we may conclude that a commercial Michelson interferometer will serve our purposes in our route to the redefinition of a kilogram by means of local vacuum.</p>

Spectral and accretion evolution of H1743−322 during outbursts in RXTE era

Aims. We study the spectral evolution of the H1743−322 during outbursts in the RXTE era. We aim to connect the variation of the spectral parameters with the accretion parameters along with the progress of the outbursts. We understand the evolution of the accretion parameters and hence the dynamics of the accretion process in light of the irradiated disc instability model. Methods. We provide a comprehensive study of all the outbursts of H1743−322 between 2003 and 2011. We performed spectral modelling of all the RXTE/PCA observations using phenomenological models. Also, we carried out spectral modelling by a hydrodynamic accretion flow model and estimated the accretion parameters. We applied the irradiated disc instability scenario in the presence of both Keplerian and sub-Keplerain accretion components to understand the evolution of accretion parameters. For this purpose, we propose a toy model for the time variation of the accretion rates following a powerlaw during outbursts. Results. All of the outbursts show spectral state transitions in the hardness-intensity diagram. The 2003 and 2004 outbursts are long-duration outbursts and relatively softer than the other outbursts. The 2008b and 2011 outbursts provide a unique opportunity to estimate the critical accretion rate (ṁdc) for triggering an outburst in this system within a narrow range of 0.076 < ṁdc < 0.086 (in Eddington units). In the absence of any dynamical measurement, we attempt to constrain a few orbital parameters of the system using an assumed mass and ṁdc in the range.

WISDOM project – IV. A molecular gas dynamical measurement of the supermassive black hole mass in NGC 524

ABSTRACT We present high angular resolution (0.3 arcsec or $37\, \mathrm{pc}$) Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array observations of the CO(2–1) line emission from a central disc in the early-type galaxy NGC 524. This disc is shown to be dynamically relaxed, exhibiting ordered rotation about a compact $1.3\, \mathrm{mm}$ continuum source, which we identify as emission from an active supermassive black hole (SMBH). There is a hole at the centre of the disc slightly larger than the SMBH sphere of influence. An azimuthal distortion of the observed velocity field is found to be due to either a position angle warp or radial gas flow over the inner 2${^{\prime\prime}_{.}}$5. By forward-modelling the observations, we obtain an estimate of the SMBH mass of $4.0^{+3.5}_{-2.0}\times 10^8\,$ M⊙, where the uncertainties are at the 3σ level. The uncertainties are dominated by the poorly constrained inclination and the stellar mass-to-light ratio of this galaxy, and our measurement is consistent with the established correlation between SMBH mass and stellar velocity dispersion. Our result is roughly half that of the previous stellar dynamical measurement, but is consistent within the uncertainties of both. We also present and apply a new tool for modelling complex molecular gas distributions.

A Fast-Multi-Channel Sub-Millikelvin Precision Resistance Thermometer Readout Based on the Round-Robin Structure

The fast response multipoint high-precision temperature measurement is often necessary in many dynamical measurement fields and industrial applications. However, limited by the existing electric circuit architecture, either the AC or DC bridges have the shortcoming that the rates or precisions degenerate markedly in the multi-channel scanning mode. To overcome this disadvantage, a round-robin structural low-cost ratiometric resistance thermometer readout based on several commercial 32-bit sigma-delta analogue-to-digital converters (Σ-Δ ADCs) was presented in this article. The experimental results show that the precision of this readout corresponds to 0.1 mK at 1 Hz when sampling four channel resistors simultaneously, while the precision and rate are not degenerating with the channel number increasing. In addition, the uncertainty of the readout is investigated in this article. It shows that the presented readout can achieve an uncertainty as low as 2.1 mK at 1 Hz (K = 2).