My essay is called “Alive but Insignificant: An Analysis of Cosmic Horror in H.P. Lovecraft’s Writing”. Howard Phillips Lovecraft has written many short stories surrounding the idea of “cosmic horror”. In this essay I seek to investigate how this cosmic horror works and what connections it has to occultism by analyzing six of his short stories: The Call of Cthulhu, The Colour Out of Space, The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, The Haunter of The Dark, The Nameless City and Nyarlathotep. In the essay I use sources that show Lovecraft’s biography and letters to build an idea of how he might have been thinking when writing and in the theory segment I bring up the sublime to show what “cosmic horror” means when analyzing Lovecraft. I analyze the stories based on three categories: The Fear of Cosmos, The Fear of The Occult and The Fear of The Abyss.   In the second to last segment called discussion I got through everything that I have found through my analysis: Within The Fear of Cosmos, I analyze The Colour Out of Space, Nyarlathotep and The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath to find that the fear comes from the idea that there is a force somewhere out in space that can destroy humanity on a whim and humans have no way of stopping it. Within The Fear of The Occult, I analyze the Cthulhucult in The Call of Cthulhu by bringing up Lovecraft’s connections to occultism and potential connections to Helena Blavatsky. To enforce the connection between Lovecraft and Blavatsky I use a quote from Haunter of The Dark that presents a book that Blavatsky has ties to. There I find that the fear comes from the idea that a malevolent monster is whispering in the ears of people, encouraging them to commit horrific acts and to abandon their humanity in its name. In The Fear of The Abyss, I analyze The Nameless City and The Call of Cthulhu to find that the fear comes from the idea that there is a powerful and horrifying monster sleeping somewhere under the earth and the ocean, waiting for the right time to awaken and come out of hiding, all while humanity is unaware of it.   In the very last segment I go through some comments regarding the essay, where I share my biggest problems with Lovecraft and why certain parts of the essay was cut out.

<p dir="ltr">Neutron star mergers generate powerful gravitational waves and various types of electromagnetic signals, including gamma-ray bursts (GRB), kilonovae, and their afterglows. Observing and modeling these signals help us understand the physical processes of the merger events. Radiation from mergers can also serve as probes to study nuclear physics and cosmology. In this report, I focus on two types of signals: the GRB afterglow and the kilonova. GRB afterglows are non-thermal radiation produced by the interaction of relativistic jets and circumburst material, where the jets are launched perpendicular to the merger plane. Kilonovae are the thermal radiation emitted from the hot materials ejected during the merger. Besides the modeling of these objects, I also investigate their application in multimessenger astrophysics, especially the constraint on the expansion rate of the Universe. </p><p dir="ltr">First, I developed a GRB afterglow model to account for the off-axis observation of a structured jet. Using a jet structure derived from a three-dimensional general relativistic magnetohydrodynamic simulation, we performed a joint analysis of the multimessenger data of the neutron star merger event GW170817, including the gravitational wave data and GRB afterglow data in the radio band. We have tightly constrained the observing angle of GW170817 and broken the degeneracy between the inclination angle and luminosity distance measured in gravitational waves. With a better constrained distance, we improved the standard siren measurement of the Hubble constant to $H_0 = 69.5\pm 4\ \mathrm{km\ s^{-1}\ Mpc^{-1}}$. The error bar has been reduced by a factor of 2. This work demonstrates that the modeling of off-axis GRB afterglow can significantly improve the standard siren method, provided that we have a reliable jet structure.</p><p dir="ltr">Second, I upgrade the GRB afterglow model in the first work, extending it to the late time where lateral spreading of the GRB jet becomes important. In this model, the ultra-relativistic blastwave is approximated by an infinitely thin two-dimensional surface. With this approximation, the hydrodynamic equations can be analytically integrated over the radius. Further assuming axial symmetry, the three-dimensional hydrodynamic simulation can be reduced to one dimension, which significantly increases the computational efficiency. We have compared our method to full numerical simulations and existing GRB afterglow modeling tools. The comparison shows good agreement and verifies our approach. Compared to these tools, our model has better flexibility and is applicable in a broader context. This method has been developed into a numerical code, \texttt{jetsimpy}, which we have provided to the community. It will serve as a powerful tool in the era of multimessenger astrophysics.</p><p dir="ltr">Finally, I investigate the possibility of long-lived massive neutron stars as neutron star merger remnants. A long-lived massive neutron star can inject a significant amount of energy into the merger ejecta, boosting the luminosity of kilonova by several orders of magnitude. However, this type of event has not yet been observed in optical sky surveys. We developed a boosted kilonova model with a detailed calculation of the photoionization process to better describe the efficiency of energy injection from spin down power to the ejecta. Our study found that boosted kilonovae, if commonly occurring, they should have already been observed given the accumulated time in sky surveys. As a result, the absence of detection implies that long-lived massive neutron stars as neutron star merger remnants are likely to be rare in the Universe.</p>

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No description available.

Historically, software production methods and tools have a unique goal: to produce high quality software. Since the goal of Model-Driven Development (MDD) methods is no different, MDD methods have emerged to take advantage of the benefits of using conceptual models to produce high quality software. In such MDD contexts, conceptual models are used as input to automatically generate final applications. Thus, we advocate that there is a relation between the quality of the final software product and the quality of the models used to generate it. The quality of conceptual models can be influenced by many factors. In this thesis, we focus on the accuracy of the techniques used to predict the characteristics of the development process and the generated products. In terms of the prediction techniques for software development processes, it is widely accepted that knowing the functional size of applications in order to successfully apply effort models and budget models is essential. In order to evaluate the quality of generated applications, defect detection is considered to be the most suitable technique. The research goal of this thesis is to provide an accurate measurement procedure based on COSMIC for the automatic sizing of object-oriented OO-Method MDD applications. To achieve this research goal, it is necessary to accurately measure the conceptual models used in the generation of object-oriented applications. It is also very important for these models not to have defects so that the applications to be measured are correctly represented. In this thesis, we present the OOmCFP (OO-Method COSMIC Function Points) measurement procedure. This procedure makes a twofold contribution: the accurate measurement of objectoriented applications generated in MDD environments from the conceptual models involved, and the verification of conceptual models to allow the complete generation of correct final applications from the conceptual models involved. The OOmCFP procedure has been systematically designed, applied, and automated. This measurement procedure has been validated to conform to the ISO 14143 standard, the metrology concepts defined in the ISO VIM, and the accuracy of the measurements obtained according to ISO 5725. This procedure has also been validated by performing empirical studies. The results of the empirical studies demonstrate that OOmCFP can obtain accurate measures of the functional size of applications generated in MDD environments from the corresponding conceptual models. / Marín Campusano, BM. (2011). Functional Size Measurement and Model Verification for Software Model-Driven Developments: A COSMIC-based Approach [Tesis doctoral]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/11237

[pt] O princípio da equivalência é um pressuposto fundamental da Teoria da Relatividade Geral, entretanto, nas tentativas de quantização da gravidade os cálculos estão levando, muitas vezes, a pequenas violações desse princípio (VEP). Por esse motivo, se mostra necessário testá-lo e obter limites estatísticos para essas violações, a fim de possivelmente descartar alguns cenários. Uma das frentes com grande possibilidade de limitar os valores dessa violação é analisando a oscilação de neutrinos atmosféricos de altas energias, gerados pelos raios cósmicos. A oscilação padrão de sabores dos neutrinos que atravessam a Terra se torna desprezível em altas energias, enquanto a oscilação induzida por VEP se torna cada vez mais proeminente nessa faixa da energia. Neste trabalho, usamos uma abordagem minimalista da VEP, em que ela aconteceria através de diferentes valores de constantes gravitacionais para cada autoestado de massa de neutrino, parametrizado como Gi ≡ γiG onde o G é contante gravitacional, e traçamos limites para os parâmetros \Phi \Delta\gamma_21 e \Phi \Delta\gamma_21 no plano (\Phi \Delta\gamma_21 , \Phi \Delta\gamma_31), onde o \Phi é o potencial gravitacional. Para isso, foram usados os dados de rastros de múons gerados da interação de neutrinos atmosféricos com a rocha ou gelo, coletados por um ano pelo IceCube na sua forma completa (IC-86). Os múons possuem energias entre 400 GeV e 20 TeV, e os dados coletados foram comparados com os valores esperados pelos melhores modelos de produção de neutrinos muônicos atmosféricos. / [en] The equivalence principle is a fundamental assumption of General Relativity. However, in several quantum gravity scenarios, small violations of thisprinciple (VEP) is expected. For this reason, it is important to test this principle and obtain statistical limits on its violation, in order to possibly discardsome scenarios. One way to constrain this violation is analyzing the flavor oscillation pattern of high-energy atmospheric neutrinos, generated by cosmicrays. The standard oscillation of neutrino s flavor crossing the Earth becomesnegligible at high energies, while the oscillation induced by VEP becomes increasingly prominent in this range of energy. In this work, we use a minimalisticapproach about the VEP, in which it would occur because of different valuesof gravitational constants for each neutrino mass eigenstate, parameterized asGi ≡ γiG where G is the gravitational constant, and we derive limits on theparameters Phi Deltagamma_21 and Phi Deltagamma_21 in the (Phi Deltagamma_21 , Phi Deltagamma_31) plane, where Phi is thegravitational potential. To this end, muon-tracks events generated from theinteraction of atmospheric neutrinos with the rock or ice, collected for oneyear by IceCube in its complete form (IC-86), were used. The detected muonshave energies between 400 GeV and 20 TeV, and the collected data has beencompared with the values expected by the best models of atmospheric muonneutrino production.

Thèse numérisée par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

[pt] Conforme entramos na era de precisão da astronomia multimensageira, novas janelas se abrem para compreendermos melhor o Universo, desde a escala quântica até a escala cósmica. Em particular, o estudo de fenômenos astrofísicos de altas energias tem nos permitido acessar os ambientes mais extremos conhecidos pela humanidade, bem como obter avanços sem precedentes no domínio da física de partículas. Esta tese resume as descobertas importantes da astrofísica multi-mensageira ao longo dos anos, e, em seguida, foca a sua atenção em três tópicos relevantes que estão atualmente sendo investigados neste campo. Primeiramente, abordamos o problema da propagação de raios gama no espaço. Interações durante este processo levam à formação de cascatas eletromagnéticas que se desenvolvem ao longo de distâncias cosmológicas. Apresentaremos um código semi-analítico chamado “γ-Cascade”, que calcula os fluxos na Terra resultantes de tais cascatas. Também exploramos a possibilidade de se produzir neutrinos em cascatas ocorrendo a energias ultra-altas. Em segundo lugar, estabeleceremos uma relação multimensageira nova e original entre os fluxos medidos de neutrinos astrofísicos entre TeV–PeV e raios cósmicos ultra-energéticos. Para isso, utilizaremos nossas observações precisas de raios gama em energias abaixo de TeV, demonstrando o poder de uma análise multimensageira. Finalmente, estudaremos a evolução da composição de sabor de neutrinos produzidos em supernovas. Nosso novo método permite previsões genéricas sobre os possíveis sabores de neutrinos medidos na Terra. São levados em consideração os efeitos de matéria dentro dos ambientes densos de supernovas, enquanto permanecemos completamente agnósticos em relação ao resultado das conversões auto-induzidas de sabor em seus núcleos. / [en] As we enter the precision era of multi-messenger astronomy, new windows are opened for us to better understand the Universe, from quantum to cosmic scales. In particular, the study of high-energy astrophysical phenomena has allowed us to probe the most extreme environments known to mankind, as well as obtain unprecedented breakthroughs within the realm of particle physics. This thesis summarizes the important findings of multi-messenger astrophysics over the years, before focusing its attention to three relevant topics currently being investigated in the field. Firstly, we tackle the problem of γ-ray propagation in space. High center-of-momenta interactions during this process leads to the formation of electromagnetic cascades that develop over cosmological distances. We describe a semi-analytical code called “γ-Cascade, which calculates the fluxes at the Earth resulting from such cascades. We also explore the possibility of producing neutrinos in ultra-high-energy cascades. Secondly, we establish a new, original multi-messenger connection between the measured fluxes of TeV–PeV astrophysical neutrinos and ultra-high-energy cosmic rays. This is done by taking advantage of our precise γ-ray observations at sub-TeV energies, demonstrating the power of multi-messenger analyses. Finally, we study the evolution of the flavor composition of supernova neutrinos in a model-independent way. Our novel method allows for predictions of the neutrino flavor content measured at the Earth from supernovae, accounting for matter effects within its dense environment, while remaining completely agnostic about the outcome of self-induced flavor conversions in its core.

Gammastrahlenblitze (Gamma-Ray Bursts, GRBs) gehören zu den energiereichsten transienten Ereignissen im Universum und werden als mögliche Quellen von ultra-hochenergetischen kosmischen Strahlen (Ultra-High-Energy Cosmic Rays, UHECRs) gehandelt. Eine eindeutige Bestätigung durch UHECR-Messungen ist jedoch schwierig, da die Richtungsinformation der kosmischen Strahlen während ihrer Ausbreitung aufgrund von Ablenkung durch Magnetfelder teilweise verloren geht. In dieser Dissertation folgen wir einem alternativen multi-messenger Ansatz in welchem die Anwesenheit von kosmischen Strahlen in einem astrophysikalischen Objekt durch Neutrino- oder Photon-Signaturen angezeigt wird. Hierfür simulieren wir GRBs im Internal-Schock-Szenario, welches verschiedene Emissionszonen entlang des astrophysikalischen Jets erfasst, und berechnen nukleare Wechselwirkungen mit modernsten numerischen Codes. In diesem Rahmen diskutieren wir unter welchen Voraussetzungen die Quellklasse von GRBs UHECR-Daten beschreiben kann ohne Neutrinolimits. Letzere begründen sich im Mangel an gemessenen hoch-energetischen (High-Energy, HE) Neutrinos, die mit bekannten GRBs assoziert werden konnten. Die Neutrinolimits können alternativ in Objekten niedriger Leuchtkraft eingehalten werden, die typischerweise eine niedrige Neutrinoproduktionseffizienz haben. Wir präsentieren leptonische Strahlungsmodellierungen für die Unterklasse von GRBs niedriger Leuchktraft mit einem Fokus auf sehr hoch-energetischer (Very-High-Energy, VHE) Emission welche von aktuellen/zukünfitgen Instrumenten beobachtet werden könnte und bestimmen wir die maximalen Energien verschiedener Atomkerne. Die Präsenz von Hadronen kann alternativ durch Signaturen in verschiedenen Wellenlängen des Photonspektrums angezeigt werden. Wir erforschen diesen Ansatz in lepto-hadronischen Modellen für GRBs mit hoher Leuchtkraft, wobei wir kritisch diskutieren, welche Bedingungen erfüllt sein müssen damit typische GRB-Spektren reproduziert werden können. / Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs) are among the most energetic transients in the Universe and candidate sources of Ultra-High-Energy Cosmic Rays (UHECRs). A clear confirmation from UHECR measurements is however challenging, as the directional information of cosmic rays is partially lost due to deflection by (inter-)galactic magnetic fields. In this dissertation we follow an alternative multi-messenger approach, in which the presence of UHECRs in an astrophysical object is indicated by neutrino or photon signatures produced in nuclear interactions. For this, we simulate GRBs in the multi-zone internal shock model, which accounts for different emission zones along the astrophysical jet and calculate nuclear interactions with state-of-the-art numerical codes. In this framework we discuss under which conditions the population of GRBs can still account for UHECR measurements while obeying current neutrino limits that stem from the lack of detected High-Energy (HE) neutrinos which could be associated with known GRBs. These neutrino limits may alternatively be met in low-luminosity objects, which typically have low neutrino production efficiency. We present leptonic radiation models of the sub-class of low-luminosity GRBs, with a focus on Very-High-Energy (VHE) emission potentially observable by current/future instruments. Connecting to UHECRs, we determine maximal energies of different cosmic-ray nuclei. The presence of nuclei may also be indicated by multi-wavelength signatures in the photon spectrum. We explore this approach in lepto-hadronic models of high-luminosity bursts, where we also critically review the conditions necessary to reproduce typical GRB spectra within our model.

Zur Zeit wird das IceCube Neutrino-Teleskop am Südpol im Eis der Antarktis installiert, die Hälfte des Detektors ist bereits im Betrieb. Bei Fertigstellung im Jahr 2011 wird mehr als 1 km^3 Eis mit Photovervielfachern instrumentiert sein. IceCube bietet damit eine einzigartige Möglichkeit, die Quellen der kosmischen Strahlung mit Hilfe hochenergetischer Neutrinos zu finden. Im Rahmen dieser Arbeit wurde die Sensitivität des kompletten Icecube Detektors für den Nachweis eines diffusen Flusses von Elektronneutrinos bestimmt. Ziel war es, die Eigenschaften des Detektors für Energien oberhalb von einem PeV zu bestimmen. Besonderes Augenmerk wurde dabei auf die Simulation von elektromagnetischen Kaskaden gelegt, die in Neutrino-Nukleon-Wechselwirkungen auftreten. Da existierende Parametrisierungen die Unterdrückung der Wechselwirkungsquerschnitte durch den LPM-Effekt nicht beinhalten, wurde eine Simulation des Energieverlustes von elektromagnetischen Kaskaden für Energien oberhalb von 1 PeV entwickelt, die entsprechend modifizierte Wirkungsquerschnitte verwendet. Die Analyse, die in dieser Arbeit vorgestellt wird, nutzt die komplette Information des durch einen Photovervielfacher aufgezeichneten Ladungsverlaufes aus, die mit der Datennahme des IceCube Detektors zur Verfügung steht. Es werden neue Methoden entwickelt, um zwischen atmosphärischen Myonen-Hintergrund- und Signalereignissen von Kaskaden aus Neutrino-Nukleon-Wechselwirkungen zu unterscheiden. Die erreichbare Sensitivität innerhalb einer Laufzeit von einem Jahr ist 1.5*10^-8 E^-2 GeV/(cm^2 sr s) in einem Energiebereich von 16 TeV bis 13 PeV für den Nachweis von Elektronneutrinos eines diffusen Flusses. Eine Verbesserung von mindestens einer Größenordnung wird erwartet, wenn alle Neutrinofamilien in die Analyse einbezogen werden. Damit sollte eine Sensitivität erreicht werden, die auf dem gleichen Niveau einer diffusen Myonenanalyse liegt. / IceCube is a neutrino telescope currently under construction in the glacial ice at South Pole. At the moment half of the detector is installed, when completed it will instrument 1 km^3 of ice providing a unique experimental setup to detect high energy neutrinos from astrophysical sources. In this work the sensitivity of the complete IceCube detector for a diffuse electron-neutrino flux is analyzed, with a focus on energies above 1 PeV. Emphasis is put on the correct simulation of the energy deposit of electromagnetic cascades from charged-current electron-neutrino interactions. Since existing parameterizations lack the description of suppression effects at high energies, a simulation of the energy deposit of electromagnetic cascades with energies above 1 PeV is developed, including cross sections which account for the LPM suppression of bremsstrahlung and pair creation. An attempt is made to reconstruct the direction of these elongated showers. The analysis presented here makes use of the full charge waveform recorded with the data acquisition system of the IceCube detector. It introduces new methods to discriminate efficiently between the background of atmospheric muons, including muon bundles, and cascade signal events from electron-neutrino interactions. Within one year of operation of the complete detector a sensitivity of 1.5*10^-8 E^-2 GeV/(cm^2 sr s) is reached, which is valid for a diffuse electron-neutrino flux in the energy range from 16 TeV to 13 PeV. Including all neutrino flavors in this analysis, an improvement of at least one order of magnitude is expected, reaching the anticipated performance of a diffuse muon analysis.