Environmental impact of crude oil spillage at Agoubiri community in Southern Ijaw local government area of Bayelsa State

Assessment of the result of crude oil spillage that occurred at Aguobiri Community in Southern Ijaw Local Government Area of Bayelsa State in 2007, is presented in this paper. The results of the laboratory analysis of water samples for Total Hydro carbon content (THC) was 1.56mg/l, 2.94mg/l and 23.96mg/l at 300m,200m and 9m respectively from the spill point. Heavy metals values in plant tissues were Vanadium-2.1 4mg/kg, Nicke-4.06mg/kg and THC of 09,309.5mg/kg at 300m from the spill point. The values of heavy metals in soil samples were Vanadium 2.14mg/kg and Nickel4.19mg/kg and THC of 133,886.20mg/kg at 300m from the spill point. This is to buttress the fact that oil spill is not limited to the site of occurrence but spreads to affect flora life far away from the spill point. Consequently, this negatively impacts farming and fisheries activities in such areas

Perfect mirrors and the self-accelerating box paradox

We consider the question raised by Unruh and Wald of whether mirrored boxes can self-accelerate in flat spacetime (the ``self-accelerating box paradox''). From the point of view of the box, which perceives the acceleration as an impressed gravitational field, this is equivalent to asking whether the box can be supported by the buoyant force arising from its immersion in a perceived bath of thermal (Unruh) radiation. The perfect mirrors we study are of the type that rely on light internal degrees of freedom which adjust to and reflect impinging radiation. We suggest that a minimum of one internal mirror degree of freedom is required for each bulk field degree of freedom reflected. A short calculation then shows that such mirrors necessarily absorb enough heat from the thermal bath that their increased mass prevents them from floating on the thermal radiation. For this type of mirror the paradox is therefore resolved. We also observe that this failure of boxes to ``float'' invalidates one of the assumptions going into the Unruh-Wald analysis of entropy balances involving boxes lowered adiabatically toward black holes. Nevertheless, their broad argument can be maintained until the box reaches a new regime in which box-antibox pairs dominate over massless fields as contributions to thermal radiation.Comment: 11 pages, Revtex4, changes made in response to referee and to enhance clarity, discussion of massive fields correcte

Single and double qubit gates by manipulating degeneracy

A novel mechanism is proposed for single and double qubit state manipulations in quantum computation with four-fold degenerate energy levels. The principle is based on starting with a four fold degeneracy, lifting it stepwise adiabatically by a set of control parameters and performing the quantum gate operations on non-degenerate states. A particular realization of the proposed mechanism is suggested by using inductively coupled rf-squid loops in the macroscopic quantum tunnelling regime where the energy eigen levels are directly connected with the measurable flux states. The one qubit and two qubit controlled operations are demonstrated explicitly. The appearance of the flux states also allows precise read-in and read-out operations by the measurement of flux.Comment: 6 pages + 5 figures (separately included

Quantum corrections to the dynamics of interacting bosons: beyond the truncated Wigner approximation

We develop a consistent perturbation theory in quantum fluctuations around the classical evolution of a system of interacting bosons. The zero order approximation gives the classical Gross-Pitaevskii equations. In the next order we recover the truncated Wigner approximation, where the evolution is still classical but the initial conditions are distributed according to the Wigner transform of the initial density matrix. Further corrections can be characterized as quantum scattering events, which appear in the form of a nonlinear response of the observable to an infinitesimal displacement of the field along its classical evolution. At the end of the paper we give a few numerical examples to test the formalism.Comment: published versio

Decomposition and nutrient release of leguminous plants in coffee agroforestry systems.

Leguminous plants used as green manure are an important nutrient source for coffee plantations, especially for soils with low nutrient levels. Field experiments were conducted in the Zona da Mata of Minas Gerais State, Brazil to evaluate the decomposition and nutrient release rates of four leguminous species used as green manures (Arachis pintoi, Calopogonium mucunoides, Stizolobium aterrimum and Stylosanthes guianensis) in a coffee agroforestry system under two different climate conditions. The initial N contents in plant residues varied from 25.7 to 37.0 g kg-1 and P from 2.4 to 3.0 g kg-1. The lignin/N, lignin/polyphenol and(lignin+polyphenol)/N ratios were low in all residues studied. Mass loss rates were highest in the first 15 days, when 25 % of the residues were decomposed. From 15 to 30 days, the decomposition rate decreased on both farms. On the farm in Pedra Dourada (PD), the decomposition constant k increased in the order C. mucunoides < S. aterrimum < S. guianensis < A. pintoi. On the farm in Araponga (ARA), there was no difference in the decomposition rate among leguminous plants. The N release rates varied from 0.0036 to 0.0096 d-1. Around 32 % of the total N content in the plant material was released in the first 15 days. In ARA, the N concentration in the S. aterrimum residues was always significantly higher than in the other residues. At the end of 360 days, the N released was 78 % in ARA and 89 % in PD of the initial content. Phosphorus was the most rapidly released nutrient (k values from 0.0165 to 0.0394 d-1). Residue decomposition and nutrient release did not correlate with initial residue chemistry and biochemistry, but differences in climatic conditions between the two study sites modified the decomposition rate constants

Resonant tunneling and the multichannel Kondo problem: the quantum Brownian motion description

We study mesoscopic resonant tunneling as well as multichannel Kondo problems by mapping them to a first-quantized quantum mechanical model of a particle moving in a multi-dimensional periodic potential with Ohmic dissipation. From a renormalization group analysis, we obtain phase diagrams of the quantum Brownian motion model with various lattice symmetries. For a symmorphic lattice, there are two phases at T=0: a localized phase in which the particle is trapped in a potential minimum, and a free phase in which the particle is unaffected by the periodic potential. For a non-symmorphic lattice, however, there may be an additional intermediate phase in which the particle is neither localized nor completely free. The fixed point governing the intermediate phase is shown to be identical to the well-known multichannel Kondo fixed point in the Toulouse limit as well as the resonance fixed point of a quantum dot model and a double-barrier Luttinger liquid model. The mapping allows us to compute the fixed-poing mobility $\mu^*$ of the quantum Brownian motion model exactly, using known conformal-field-theory results of the Kondo problem. From the mobility, we find that the peak value of the conductance resonance of a spin-1/2 quantum dot problem is given by $e^2/2h$. The scaling form of the resonance line shape is predicted

Transport Properties near the z=2 Insulator-Superconductor Transition

We consider here the fluctuation conductivity near the point of the insulator-superconductor transition in a system of regular Josephson junction arrays in the presence of particle-hole asymmetry or equivalently homogeneous charge frustration. The transition is characterised by the dynamic critical exponent $z=2$, opening the possibility of the perturbative renormalization-group (RG) treatment. The quartic interaction in the Ginzburg-Landau action and the coupling to the Ohmic heat bath, giving the finite quasiparticle life-time, lead to the non-monotonic behavior of the dc conductivity as a function of temperature in the leading logarithmic approximation.Comment: Revised version for publication. To appear in PR

Quasi-spin Model for Macroscopic Quantum Tunnelling between Two Coupled Bose-Einstein Condensates

The macroscopic quantum tunneling between two coupled Bose-Einstein condensates (BEC) (radio-frequency coupled two-component BECs or two BECs confined in a double-well potential) is mapped onto the tunneling of an uniaxial spin with an applied magnetic field. The tunneling exponent is calculated with an imaginary-time path-integral method. In the limit of low barrier, the dependence of tunneling exponent on the system parameters is obtained, and the crossover temperature from thermal regime to quantum regime is estimated. The detailed information about the tunnelling will give help to control population conversion between coupled BECs and realize quantum computation with coupled BECs.Comment: 20 pages, 4 figures, accepted by Phys.Rev.

Quantum effects on the BKT phase transition of two-dimensional Josephson arrays

The phase diagram of two dimensional Josephson arrays is studied by means of the mapping to the quantum XY model. The quantum effects onto the thermodynamics of the system can be evaluated with quantitative accuracy by a semiclassical method, the {\em pure-quantum self-consistent harmonic approximation}, and those of dissipation can be included in the same framework by the Caldeira-Leggett model. Within this scheme, the critical temperature of the superconductor-to-insulator transition, which is a Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless one, can be calculated in an extremely easy way as a function of the quantum coupling and of the dissipation mechanism. Previous quantum Monte Carlo results for the same model appear to be rather inaccurate, while the comparison with experimental data leads to conclude that the commonly assumed model is not suitable to describe in detail the real system.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, to be published in Phys. Rev.

Interlayer hopping properties of electrons in layered metals

A formalism is proposed to study the electron tunneling between extended states, based on the spin-boson Hamiltonian previously used in two-level systems. It is applied to analyze the out--of--plane tunneling in layered metals considering different models. By studying the effects of in--plane interactions on the interlayer tunneling of electrons near the Fermi level, we establish the relation between departure from Fermi liquid behavior driven by electron correlations inside the layer and the out of plane coherence. Response functions, directly comparable with experimental data are obtained