Sensitivity of woody carbon stocks to bark investment strategy in Neotropical savannas and forests

Fire frequencies are changing in Neotropical savannas and forests as a result of forest fragmentation and increasing drought. Such changes in fire regime and climate are hypothesized to destabilize tropical carbon storage, but there has been little consideration of the widespread variability in tree fire tolerance strategies. To test how aboveground carbon stocks change with fire frequency and composition of plants with different fire tolerance strategies, we update the Ecosystem Demography model 2 (ED2) with (i) a fire survivorship module based on tree bark thickness (a key fire-tolerance trait across woody plants in savannas and forests), and (ii) plant functional types representative of trees in the region. With these updates, the model is better able to predict how fire frequency affects population demography and aboveground woody carbon. Simulations illustrate that the high survival rate of thick-barked, large trees reduces carbon losses with increasing fire frequency, with high investment in bark being particularly important in reducing losses in the wettest sites. Additionally, in landscapes that frequently burn, bark investment can broaden the range of climate and fire conditions under which savannas occur by reducing the range of conditions leading to either complete tree loss or complete grass loss. These results highlight that tropical vegetation dynamics depend not only on rainfall and changing fire frequencies but also on tree fire survival strategy. Further, our results indicate that fire survival strategy is fundamentally important in regulating tree size demography in ecosystems exposed to fire, which increases the preservation of aboveground carbon stocks and the coexistence of different plant functional groups

Heavy holes: precursor to superconductivity in antiferromagnetic CeIn3

Numerous phenomenological parallels have been drawn between f- and d- electron systems in an attempt to understand their display of unconventional superconductivity. The microscopics of how electrons evolve from participation in large moment antiferromagnetism to superconductivity in these systems, however, remains a mystery. Knowing the origin of Cooper paired electrons in momentum space is a crucial prerequisite for understanding the pairing mechanism. Of especial interest are pressure-induced superconductors CeIn3 and CeRhIn5 in which disparate magnetic and superconducting orders apparently coexist - arising from within the same f-electron degrees of freedom. Here we present ambient pressure quantum oscillation measurements on CeIn3 that crucially identify the electronic structure - potentially similar to high temperature superconductors. Heavy pockets of f-character are revealed in CeIn3, undergoing an unexpected effective mass divergence well before the antiferromagnetic critical field. We thus uncover the softening of a branch of quasiparticle excitations located away from the traditional spin-fluctuation dominated antiferromagnetic quantum critical point. The observed Fermi surface of dispersive f-electrons in CeIn3 could potentially explain the emergence of Cooper pairs from within a strong moment antiferromagnet.Comment: To appear in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science

Detection of coherent magnons via ultrafast pump-probe reflectance spectroscopy in multiferroic Ba0.6Sr1.4Zn2Fe12O22

We report the detection of a magnetic resonance mode in multiferroic Ba0.6Sr1.4Zn2Fe12O22 using time domain pump-probe reflectance spectroscopy. Magnetic sublattice precession is coherently excited via picosecond thermal modification of the exchange energy. Importantly, this precession is recorded as a change in reflectance caused by the dynamic magnetoelectric effect. Thus, transient reflectance provides a sensitive probe of magnetization dynamics in materials with strong magnetoelectric coupling, such as multiferroics, revealing new possibilities for application in spintronics and ultrafast manipulation of magnetic moments.Comment: 4 figure

Induced polarization at a paraelectric/superconducting interface

We examine the modified electronic states at the interface between superconducting and ferro(para)-electric heterostructures. We find that electric polarization $P$ and superconducting $\psi$ order parameters can be significantly modified due to coupling through linear terms brought about by explicit symmetry breaking at the interface. Using an effective action and a Ginzburg-Landau formalism, we show that an interaction term linear in the electric polarization will modify the superconducting order parameter $\psi$ at the interface. This also produces modulation of a ferroelectric polarization. It is shown that a paraelectric-superconductor interaction will produce an interface-induced ferroelectric polarization.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, Submitted to Phys. Rev.

Validity of the rigid band picture for the t-J model

We present an exact diagonalization study of the doping dependence of the single particle Green's function in 16, 18 and 20 site clusters of t-J model. We find evidence for rigid-band behaviour starting from the half-filled case: upon doping, the topmost states of the quasiparticle band observed in the photoemisson spectrum at half-filling cross the chemical potential and reappear as the lowermost states of the inverse photoemission spectrum. Features in the inverse photoemission spectra which are inconsistent with rigid-band behaviour are shown to originate from the nontrivial point group symmetry of the ground state with two holes, which enforces different selection rules than at half-filling. Deviations from rigid band behaviour which lead to the formation of the `large Fermi surface' in the momentum distribution occur only at energies far from the chemical potential. A Luttinger Fermi surface and a nearest neighbor hopping band do not exist.Comment: Remarks: Revtex file + 7 figures attached as compressed postscript files Figures can also be obtained by ordinary mail on reques

Spin bags in the doped t-J model

We present a nonperturbative method for deriving a quasiparticle description of the low-energy excitations in the t-J model for strongly correlated electrons. Using the exact diagonalization technique we evaluated exactly the spectral functions of composite operators which describe an electron or hole dressed by antiferromagnetic spin fluctuations as expected in the string or spin bag picture. For hole doping up to $1/8$, use of the composite operators leads to a drastic simplification of the single particle spectral function: at half-filling it takes free-particle form, for the doped case it resembles a system of weakly interacting Fermions corresponding to the doped holes. We conclude that for all doping levels under study, the elementary electronic excitations next to the Fermi level are adequately described by the antiferromagnetic spin fluctuation picture and show that the dressing of the holes leads to formation of a bound state with d(x^2-y^2) symmetry.Comment: Remarks: Revtex file + 4 figures attached as compressed postscript files Figures can also be obtained by ordinary mail on reques

On the origin of the decrease in the torsional oscillator period of solid He4

A decrease in the rotational period observed in torsional oscillator measurements was recently taken as a possible indication of a supersolid state of helium. We reexamine this interpretation and note that the decrease in the rotation period is also consistent with a solidification of a small liquid-like component into a low-temperature glass. Such a solidification may occur by a low-temperature quench of topological defects (e.g., grain boundaries or dislocations) which we examined in an earlier work. The low-temperature glass can account for not only a monotonic decrease in the rotation period as the temperature is lowered but also explains the peak in the dissipation occurring near the transition point. Unlike the non-classical rotational inertia scenario, which depends on the supersolid fraction, the dependence of the rotational period on external parameters, e.g., the oscillator velocity, provides an alternate interpretation of the oscillator experiments. Future experiments might explore this effect.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures; to appear in Phys. Rev.

The spatiotemporal evolution of granular microslip precursors to laboratory earthquakes

Laboratory earthquake experiments provide important observational constraints for our understanding of earthquake physics. Here we leverage continuous waveform data from a network of piezoceramic sensors to study the spatial and temporal evolution of microslip activity during a shear experiment with synthetic fault gouge. We combine machine learning techniques with ray theoretical seismology to detect, associate, and locate tens of thousands of microslip events within the gouge layer. Microslip activity is concentrated near the center of the system but is highly variable in space and time. While microslip activity rate increases as failure approaches, the spatiotemporal evolution can differ substantially between stick-slip cycles. These results illustrate that even within a single, well-constrained laboratory experiment, the dynamics of earthquake nucleation can be highly complex