Thesis (Ph.D.)--George Mason University, 2009. / Vita: p. 108. Thesis co-directors: John Wallin, Thomas Wanner. Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Computational Science and Informatics. Title from PDF t.p. (viewed Oct. 12, 2009). Includes bibliographical references (p. 102-107). Also issued in print.

Thesis (M. Phil.)--University of Hong Kong, 1991.

Thesis (M.S.)--Oregon State University, 2008. / Printout. Includes bibliographical references (leaf 24). Also available on the World Wide Web.

One possibility for detecting low-amplitude pulsational variations is through gravitational microlensing. During a microlensing event, the temporary brightness increase leads to improvement in the signal-to-noise ratio, and thereby better detectability of pulsational signatures in light curves. We explore this possibility under two primary considerations. The first is when the standard point-source and point-lens approximation applies. In this scenario, dividing the observed light curve by the best-fitted microlensing model leads to residuals that result in pulsational features with improved uncertainties. The second is for transit events (single lens) or caustic crossing (binary lens). The point-source approximation breaks down, and residuals relative to a simple best-fitted microlensing model display more complex behaviour. We employ a Monte Carlo simulation of microlensing of pulsating variables toward the Galactic bulge for the surveys of OGLE and of KMTNet. We demonstrate that the efficiency for detecting pulsational signatures with intrinsic amplitudes of <0.25 mag during single and binary microlensing events, at differences in χ2 of Δχ2 > 350, is $\sim \!50\!-\!60{{\ \rm per\ cent}}$. The maximum efficiency occurs for pulsational periods P ≃ 0.1-0.3 d. We also study the possibility that high-magnification microlensing events of non-radially pulsating stars could be misinterpreted as planetary or binary microlensing events. We conclude that small asymmetric features around light curve peaks due to stellar pulsations could be misdiagnosed with crossing (or passing close to) small caustic curves.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Alabama at Birmingham, 2009. / Description based on contents viewed June 2, 2009; title from PDF t.p. Includes bibliographical references (p. 71-76).

The presence of a giant planet in a low-viscosity disc can create a gap edge in the disc's radial density profile sharp enough to excite the Rossby wave instability. This instability may evolve into dust-trapping vortices that might explain the `banana-shaped' features in recently observed asymmetric transition discs with inner cavities. Previous hydrodynamical simulations of planet-induced vortices have neglected the time-scale of hundreds to thousands of orbits to grow a massive planet to Jupiter size. In this work, we study the effect of a giant planet's runaway growth time-scale on the lifetime and characteristics of the resulting vortex. For two different planet masses (1 and 5 Jupiter masses) and two different disc viscosities (alpha= 3 x 10-4 and 3 x 10-5), we compare the vortices induced by planets with several different growth time-scales between 10 and 4000 planet orbits. In general, we find that slowly-growing planets create significantly weaker vortices with lifetimes and surface densities reduced by more than 50 per cent. For the higher disc viscosity, the longest growth time-scales in our study inhibit vortex formation altogether. Additionally, slowly-growing planets produce vortices that are up to twice as elongated, with azimuthal extents well above 180. in some cases. These unique, elongated vortices likely create a distinct signature in the dust observations that differentiates them from the more concentrated vortices that correspond to planets with faster growth time-scales. Lastly, we find that the low viscosities necessary for vortex formation likely prevent planets from growing quickly enough to trigger the instability in self-consistent models.

In cosmological N-body simulations, the representation of dark matter as discrete 'macroparticles' suppresses the growth of structure, such that simulations no longer reproduce linear theory on small scales near k(Nyquist). Marcos et al. demonstrate that this is due to sparse sampling of modes near k(Nyquist) and that the often-assumed continuum growing modes are not proper growing modes of the particle system. We develop initial conditions (ICs) that respect the particle linear theory growing modes and then rescale the mode amplitudes to account for growth suppression. These ICs also allow us to take advantage of our very accurate N-body code ABACUS to implement second-order Lagrangian perturbation theory (2LPT) in configuration space. The combination of 2LPT and rescaling improves the accuracy of the late-time power spectra, halo mass functions, and halo clustering. In particular, we achieve 1 per cent accuracy in the power spectrum down to k(Nyquist), versus k(Nyquist)/4 without rescaling or k(Nyquist)/13 without 2LPT, relative to an oversampled reference simulation. We anticipate that our 2LPT will be useful for large simulations where fast Fourier transforms are expensive and that rescaling will be useful for suites of medium-resolution simulations used in cosmic emulators and galaxy survey mock catalogues. Code to generate ICs is available at https://github.com/lgarrison/zeldovich-PLT.

We find that the initial dust masses in planetary debris disks are correlated with the metallicities of their central stars. We compiled a large sample of systems, including Spitzer, the Herschel DUNES and DEBRIS surveys, and WISE debris disk candidates. We also merged 33 metallicity catalogs to provide homogeneous [Fe/H] and sigma([Fe/H]) values. We analyzed this merged sample, including 222 detected disks (74 warm and 148 cold) around a total of 187 systems (some with multiple components) and 440 disks with only upper limits (125 warm and 315 cold) around a total of 360 systems. The disk dust masses at a common early evolutionary point in time were determined using our numerical disk evolutionary code, evolving a unique model for each of the 662 disks backward to an age of 1 Myr. We find that disk-bearing stars seldom have metallicities less than [Fe/H] = -0.2 and that the distribution of warm component masses lacks examples with large mass around stars of low metallicity ([Fe/H] < -0.085). Previous efforts to find a correlation have been largely unsuccessful; the primary improvements supporting our result are (1) basing the study on dust masses, not just infrared excess detections; (2) including upper limits on dust mass in a quantitative way; (3) accounting for the evolution of debris disk excesses as systems age; (4) accounting fully for the range of uncertainties in metallicity measurements; and (5) having a statistically large enough sample.

We present an outline of basic assumptions and governing structural equations describing atmospheres of sub-stellar mass objects, in particular the extrasolar giant planets and brown dwarfs. Although most of the presentation of the physical and numerical background is generic, details of the implementation pertain mostly to the code COOLTLUSTY. We also present a review of numerical approaches and computer codes devised to solve the structural equations, and make a critical evaluation of their efficiency and accuracy.

Context. High-contrast scattered light observations have revealed the surface morphology of several dozen protoplanetary disks at optical and near-infrared wavelengths. Inclined disks offer the opportunity to measure part of the phase function of the dust grains that reside in the disk surface which is essential for our understanding of protoplanetary dust properties and the early stages of planet formation. Aims. We aim to construct a method which takes into account how the flaring shape of the scattering surface of an optically thick protoplanetary disk projects onto the image plane of the observer. This allows us to map physical quantities (e.g., scattering radius and scattering angle) onto scattered light images and retrieve stellar irradiation corrected images (r(2)-scaled) and dust phase functions. Methods. The scattered light mapping method projects a power law shaped disk surface onto the detector plane after which the observed scattered light image is interpolated backward onto the disk surface. We apply the method on archival polarized intensity images of the protoplanetary disk around HD 100546 that were obtained with VLT/SPHERE in the R' band and VLT/NACO in the H and K-s bands. \Results. The brightest side of the r(2)-scaled R-0 band polarized intensity image of HD 100546 changes from the far to the near side of the disk when a flaring instead of a geometrically flat disk surface is used for the r(2)-scaling. The decrease in polarized surface brightness in the scattering angle range of similar to 40 degrees-70 degrees is likely a result of the dust phase function and degree of polarization which peak in different scattering angle regimes. The derived phase functions show part of a forward scattering peak, which indicates that large, aggregate dust grains dominate the scattering opacity in the disk surface. Conclusions. Projection effects of a protoplanetary disk surface need to be taken into account to correctly interpret scattered light images. Applying the correct scaling for the correction of stellar irradiation is crucial for the interpretation of the images and the derivation of the dust properties in the disk surface layer.