Binge flying: Behavioural addiction and climate change

Recent popular press suggests that ‘binge flying’ constitutes a new site of behavioural addiction. We theoretically appraise and empirically support this proposition through interviews with consumers in Norway and the United Kingdom conducted in 2009. Consistent findings from across two national contexts evidence a growing negative discourse towards frequent short-haul tourist air travel and illustrate strategies of guilt suppression and denial used to span a cognitive dissonance between the short-term personal benefits of tourism and the air travel’s associated long-term consequences for climate change. Tensions between tourism consumption and changing social norms towards acceptable flying practice exemplify how this social group is beginning to (re)frame what constitutes ‘excessive’ holiday flying, despite concomitantly continuing their own frequent air travels

The Active Traveling Wave in the Cochlea

A sound stimulus entering the inner ear excites a deformation of the basilar membrane which travels along the cochlea towards the apex. It is well established that this wave-like disturbance is amplified by an active system. Recently, it has been proposed that the active system consists of a set of self-tuned critical oscillators which automatically operate at an oscillatory instability. Here, we show how the concepts of a traveling wave and of self-tuned critical oscillators can be combined to describe the nonlinear wave in the cochlea.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figure

Use-cases on evolution

This report presents a set of use cases for evolution and reactivity for data in the Web and Semantic Web. This set is organized around three different case study scenarios, each of them is related to one of the three different areas of application within Rewerse. Namely, the scenarios are: “The Rewerse Information System and Portal”, closely related to the work of A3 – Personalised Information Systems; “Organizing Travels”, that may be related to the work of A1 – Events, Time, and Locations; “Updates and evolution in bioinformatics data sources” related to the work of A2 – Towards a Bioinformatics Web

Laser-based acceleration of non-relativistic electrons at a dielectric structure

A proof-of-principle experiment demonstrating dielectric laser acceleration of non-relativistic electrons in the vicinity of a fused-silica grating is reported. The grating structure is utilized to generate an electromagnetic surface wave that travels synchronously with and efficiently imparts momentum on 28keV electrons. We observe a maximum acceleration gradient of 25MeV/m. We investigate in detail the parameter dependencies and find excellent agreement with numerical simulations. With the availability of compact and efficient fiber laser technology, these findings may pave the way towards an all-optical compact particle accelerator. This work also represents the demonstration of the inverse Smith-Purcell effect in the optical regime.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure

Pure single photon generation by type-I PDC with backward-wave amplification

We explore a promising method of generating pure heralded single photons. Our approach is based on parametric downconversion in a periodically-poled waveguide. However, unlike conventional downconversion sources, the photon pairs are counter-propagating: one travels with the pump beam in the forward direction while the other is backpropagating towards the laser source. Our calculations reveal that these downconverted two-photon states carry minimal spectral correlations within each photon-pair. This approach offers the possibility to employ a new range of downconversion processes and materials like PPLN (previously considered unsuitable due to their unfavorable phasematching properties) to herald pure single photons over a broad frequency range.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures, minor text changes and reformattin

Old Inflation in String Theory

We propose a stringy version of the old inflation scenario which does not require any slow-roll inflaton potential and is based on a specific example of string compatification with warped metric. Our set-up admits the presence of anti-D3-branes in the deep infrared region of the metric and a false vacuum state with positive vacuum energy density. The latter is responsible for the accelerated period of inflation. The false vacuum exists only if the number of anti-D3-branes is smaller than a critical number and the graceful exit from inflation is attained if a number of anti-D3-branes travels from the ultraviolet towards the infrared region. The cosmological curvature perturbation is generated through the curvaton mechanism.Comment: 31 pages, 3 figures; typos corrected and reference adde