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Precision fiber optic gyroscopes were mounted mechanically de-coupled above spinning rings inside a cryostat. Below a critical temperature (typically <30 K), the gyroscopes measure a significant deviation from their usual offset due to Earth's rotation. This deviation is proportional to the applied angular ring velocity with maximum signals towards lower temperatures. The anomalous gyroscope signal is about 8 orders of magnitude smaller then the applied angular ring velocity, compensating about one third of the Earth rotation offset at an angular top speed of 420 rad/s. Moreover, our data shows a parity violation as the effect appears to be dominant for rotation against the Earth's spin. No systematic effect was found to explain this effect including the magnetic environment, vibration and helium gas friction suggesting that our observation is a new low temperature phenomenon. Tests in various configurations suggest that the rotating low temperature helium may be the source of our anomalous signals., Comment: Poster presented at the 25th Low Temperature Physics Conference, Amsterdam, Aug 2008, to appear in the Journal of Physics Conference Proceedings

High-resolution accelerometer and laser gyroscope measurements were performed in the vicinity of spinning rings at cryogenic temperatures. After passing a critical temperature, which does not coincide with the material's superconducting temperature, the angular acceleration and angular velocity applied to the rotating ring could be seen on the sensors although they are mechanically de-coupled. A parity violation was observed for the laser gyroscope measurements such that the effect was greatly pronounced in the clockwise-direction only. The experiments seem to compare well with recent independent tests obtained by the Canterbury Ring Laser Group and the Gravity-Probe B satellite. All systematic effects analyzed so far are at least 3 orders of magnitude below the observed phenomenon. The available experimental data indicates that the fields scale similar to classical frame-dragging fields. A number of theories that predicted large frame-dragging fields around spinning superconductors can be ruled out by up to 4 orders of magnitude., Comment: Paper presented at the 18th International Conference on General Relativity & Gravitation, Sydney, Jul 2007 and at the Time & Matter Conference, Bled, Sept 2007, GPB Data Corrected and Model Updated

It is well known that a rotating superconductor produces a magnetic field proportional to its angular velocity. The authors conjectured earlier, that in addition to this so-called London moment, also a large gravitomagnetic field should appear to explain an apparent mass increase of Niobium Cooper-pairs. A similar field is predicted from Einstein's general relativity theory and the presently observed amount of dark energy in the universe. An experimental facility was designed and built to measure small acceleration fields as well as gravitomagnetic fields in the vicinity of a fast rotating and accelerating superconductor in order to detect this so-called gravitomagnetic London moment. This paper summarizes the efforts and results that have been obtained so far. Measurements with Niobium superconductors indeed show first signs which appear to be within a factor of 2 of our theoretical prediction. Possible error sources as well as the experimental difficulties are reviewed and discussed. If the gravitomagnetic London moment indeed exists, acceleration fields could be produced in a laboratory environment., Comment: To appear in the proceedings of the STAIF-2007 conference published by AIP

Due to the curse of dimensionality, estimation in a multidimensional nonparametric regression model is in general not feasible. Hence, additional restrictions are introduced, and the additive model takes a prominent place. The restrictions imposed can lead to serious bias. Here, a new estimator is proposed which allows penalizing the nonadditive part of a regression function. This offers a smooth choice between the full and the additive model. As a byproduct, this penalty leads to a regularization in sparse regions. If the additive model does not hold, a small penalty introduces an additional bias compared to the full model which is compensated by the reduced bias due to using smaller bandwidths. For increasing penalties, this estimator converges to the additive smooth backfitting estimator of Mammen, Linton and Nielsen [Ann. Statist. 27 (1999) 1443-1490]. The structure of the estimator is investigated and two algorithms are provided. A proposal for selection of tuning parameters is made and the respective properties are studied. Finally, a finite sample evaluation is performed for simulated and ozone data., Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/009053604000001246 in the Annals of Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org)