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Creators/Authors contains: "Wagner, S."

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  1. As the climate changes, fire regimes at northern high latitudes are shifting, which may alter the distribution and sequestration of carbon on land, in rivers, and in the ocean. However, dissolved black carbon dynamics (DBC) within the land-ocean continuum and amid such rapidly changing wildfire regimes are poorly understood. In summer 2022, the Yukon River watershed experienced its second highest fire year on record. This dataset includes dissolved organic carbon (DOC) quantities and DBC quantities, character, and compound-specific stable carbon isotopes of Yukon River Delta and Bering Sea water (Alaska, USA), collected during the spring freshets of 2019 and 2023, as well as late summer 2022. DBC was analyzed using the benzenepolycarboxylic acid (BPCA) method. 
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  2. Wildfires are a worldwide disturbance with unclear implications for stream water quality. We examined stream water chemistry responses immediately (<1 month) following a wildfire by measuring over 40 constituents in four gauged coastal watersheds that burned at low to moderate severity. Three of the four watersheds also had pre‐fire concentration‐discharge data for 14 constituents: suspended sediment (SSfine), dissolved organic and inorganic carbon (DOC, DIC), specific UV absorbance (SUVA), major ions (Ca2+, K+, Mg2+, Na+, Cl, SO42−, NO3, F), and select trace elements (total dissolved Mn, Fe). In all watersheds, post‐fire stream water concentrations of SSfine, DOC, Ca2+, Cl, and changed when compared to pre‐fire data. Post‐fire changes in , K+, Na+, Mg2+, DIC, SUVA, and total dissolved Fe were also found for at least two of the three streams. For constituents with detectable responses to wildfire, post‐fire changes in the slopes of concentration‐discharge relationships commonly resulted in stronger enrichment trends or weaker dilution trends, suggesting that new contributing sources were surficial or near the surface. However, a few geogenic solutes, Ca2+, Mg2+, and DIC, displayed stronger dilution trends at nearly all sites post‐fire. Moreover, fire‐induced constituent concentration changes were highly discharge and site‐dependent. These similarities and differences in across‐site stream water chemistry responses to wildfire emphasize the need for a deeper understanding of landscape‐scale changes to solute sources and pathways. Our findings also highlight the importance of being explicit about reference points for both stream discharge and pre‐fire stream water chemistry in post‐fire assessment of concentration changes. 
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  3. ABSTRACT Localization of fast radio bursts (FRBs) to arcsecond and subarcsecond precision maximizes their potential as cosmological probes. To that end, FRB detection instruments are deploying triggered complex-voltage capture systems to localize FRBs, identify their host galaxy, and measure a redshift. Here, we report the discovery and localization of two FRBs (20220717A and 20220905A) that were captured by the transient buffer system deployed by the MeerTRAP instrument at the MeerKAT telescope in South Africa. We were able to localize the FRBs to precision of $$\sim$$1 arcsecond that allowed us to unambiguously identify the host galaxy for FRB 20220717A (posterior probability $$\sim$$0.97). FRB 20220905A lies in a crowded region of the sky with a tentative identification of a host galaxy but the faintness and the difficulty in obtaining an optical spectrum preclude a conclusive association. The bursts show low linear polarization fractions (10–17 per cent) that conform to the large diversity in the polarization fraction observed in apparently non-repeating FRBs akin to single pulses from neutron stars. We also show that the host galaxy of FRB 20220717A contributes roughly 15 per cent of the total dispersion measure (DM), indicating that it is located in a plasma-rich part of the host galaxy which can explain the large rotation measure. The scattering in FRB 20220717A can be mostly attributed to the host galaxy and the intervening medium and is consistent with what is seen in the wider FRB population. 
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  4. The Arctic is experiencing unprecedented rates of climate change, leading to numerous disturbances on the terrestrial landscape, including shrubification, increased frequency of wildfires, and permafrost thaw. These changes may impact the mobilization of terrestrial organic carbon into Arctic rivers and are hypothesized to lead to distinct alterations to the molecular composition and thus the reactivity of riverine dissolved organic matter (DOM). To understand how these three major perturbations may impact DOM dynamics in Arctic fluvial and coastal systems, we examined the concentration and bioavailability of dissolved organic carbon (DOC) together with the molecular‐level DOM composition of different source endmember leachates from the Yukon River watershed using biodegradation incubation experiments and Fourier transform ion cyclotron resonance mass spectrometry (FT‐ICR MS). Simulated climate‐related landscape perturbations generally led to increased leachate DOC concentrations. Incubations demonstrated that the biodegradability of leachate DOC was lowest for vegetation endmembers, particularly for shrubs (12.3% DOC loss), and highest for thawing Yedoma permafrost (64.9% loss) and organic‐rich tundra soil (70.9% loss). FT‐ICR MS highlighted that aliphatic and high‐H/C molecular formulas were preferentially biodegraded, whereas condensed aromatic and polyphenolic compounds were relatively enriched post‐biodegradation in all endmember leachates. Together these findings suggest that with continued climate change and landscape perturbation, larger amounts of less bioavailable DOC will be mobilized into Arctic rivers leading to higher relative amounts of highly aromatic, biologically stable DOM being exported into receiving ecosystems and the Arctic Ocean, potentially altering the rates and mechanisms of carbon turnover in the coastal zone. 
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  5. null (Ed.)
    Autonomous vehicles are predicted to dominate the transportation industry in the foreseeable future. Safety is one of the major chal- lenges to the early deployment of self-driving systems. To ensure safety, self-driving vehicles must sense and detect humans, other vehicles, and road infrastructure accurately, robustly, and timely. However, existing sensing techniques used by self-driving vehicles may not be absolutely reliable. In this paper, we design REITS, a system to improve the reliability of RF-based sensing modules for autonomous vehicles. We conduct theoretical analysis on possible failures of existing RF-based sensing systems. Based on the analysis, REITS adopts a multi-antenna design, which enables constructive blind beamforming to return an enhanced radar signal in the incident direction. REITS can also let the existing radar system sense identifi- cation information by switching between constructive beamforming state and destructive beamforming state. Preliminary results show that REITS improves the detection distance of a self-driving car radar by a factor of 3.63. 
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  6. A<sc>bstract</sc> A measurement of the angular structure of inclusive jets and those containing a prompt D0meson in proton-proton collisions at the LHC at a center-of-mass energy of 5.02 TeV is presented. The data corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 301 pb−1were collected by the CMS experiment in 2017. Two jet grooming algorithms, late-kTand soft drop, are used to study the intrajet radiation pattern using iterative Cambridge-Aachen declustering. The splitting-angle distributions of jets with transverse momentum (pT) of around 100 GeV, obtained with these two algorithms, show that there is a shift of the distribution for jets containing a prompt D0meson with respect to inclusive jets. The suppression of emissions at small angles observed in the late-kTgrooming approach is consistent with the dead-cone effect, whereas the similar suppression for splittings selected with the soft-drop algorithm appears to be induced by gluon splitting to charm quark-antiquark pairs at large angles. The measured distributions are corrected to the particle level and can be used to constrain model predictions for the substructure of high-pTcharm quark jets. 
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  7. null (Ed.)
    Context. Blazars are the most numerous class of high-energy (HE; E ∼ 50 MeV−100 GeV) and very high-energy (VHE; E ∼ 100 GeV−10 TeV) gamma-ray emitters. Currently, a measured spectroscopic redshift is available for only about 50% of gamma-ray BL Lacertae objects (BL Lacs), mainly due to the difficulty in measuring reliable redshifts from their nearly featureless continuum-dominated optical spectra. The knowledge of the redshift is fundamental for understanding the emission from blazars, for population studies and also for indirect studies of the extragalactic background light and searches for Lorentz invariance violation and axion-like particles using blazars. Aims. This paper is the first in a series of papers that aim to measure the redshift of a sample of blazars likely to be detected with the upcoming Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA), a ground-based gamma-ray observatory. Methods. Monte Carlo simulations were performed to select those hard spectrum gamma-ray blazars detected with the Fermi -LAT telescope still lacking redshift measurements, but likely to be detected by CTA in 30 hours of observing time or less. Optical observing campaigns involving deep imaging and spectroscopic observations were organised to efficiently constrain their redshifts. We performed deep medium- to high-resolution spectroscopy of 19 blazar optical counterparts with the Keck II, SALT, and ESO NTT telescopes. We searched systematically for spectral features and, when possible, we estimated the contribution of the host galaxy to the total flux. Results. We measured eleven firm spectroscopic redshifts with values ranging from 0.1116 to 0.482, one tentative redshift, three redshift lower limits including one at z ≥ 0.449 and another at z ≥ 0.868. Four BL Lacs show featureless spectra. 
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  8. A hot and dense state of nuclear matter, known as the quark-gluon plasma, is created in collisions of ultrarelativistic heavy nuclei. Highly energetic quarks and gluons, collectively referred to as partons, lose energy as they travel through this matter, leading to suppressed production of particles with large transverse momenta ( p T ). Conversely, high- p T particle suppression has not been seen in proton-lead collisions, raising questions regarding the minimum system size required to observe parton energy loss. Oxygen-oxygen (OO) collisions examine a region of effective system size that lies between these two extreme cases. The CMS detector at the CERN LHC has been used to quantify charged-particle production in inclusive OO collisions for the first time via measurements of the nuclear modification factor ( R AA ). The R AA is derived by comparing particle production to expectations based on proton-proton ( p p ) data and has a value of unity in the absence of nuclear effects. The data for OO and p p collisions at a nucleon-nucleon center-of-mass energy s NN = 5.36 TeV correspond to integrated luminosities of 6.1 nb 1 and 1.02 pb 1 , respectively. The R AA is below unity with a minimum of 0.69 ± 0.04 around p T = 6 GeV . The data exhibit better agreement with theoretical models incorporating parton energy loss as compared to baseline models without energy loss. 
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  9. A<sc>bstract</sc> A measurement of the substructure of bottom quark jets (b jets) in proton-proton (pp) collisions is presented. The measurement uses data collected in pp collisions at$$ \sqrt{s}=5.02 $$ s = 5.02 TeV, with a low number of simultaneous interactions per bunch crossing, recorded by the CMS experiment in 2017, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 301 pb−1. An algorithm to identify and cluster the charged decay daughters of b hadrons is developed for this analysis, which facilitates the exposure of the gluon radiation pattern of b jets using iterative Cambridge-Aachen declustering. The soft-drop-groomed jet radius,Rg, and momentum balance,zg, of b quark jets are presented. These observables can be used to test perturbative quantum chromodynamics predictions that account for mass effects. Because the b hadron is partially reconstructed from its charged decay daughters, only charged particles are used for the jet substructure studies. In addition, a jet fragmentation function,zb,ch, is measured, which is defined as the distribution of the ratio of the transverse momentum (pT) of the partially reconstructed b hadron with respect to the charged-particle component of the jetpT. The substructure variable distributions are unfolded to the charged-particle level. The b jet substructure is compared to the substructure of jets in an inclusive jet sample that is dominated by light-quark and gluon jets in order to assess the role of the b quark mass. A strong suppression of emissions at smallRgvalues is observed for b jets when compared to inclusive jets, consistent with the dead-cone effect. The measurement is also compared with theoretical predictions from Monte Carlo event generators. This is the first substructure measurement of b jets that clusters together the b hadron decay daughters independent of the b hadron species and decay channel. 
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