653 research outputs found
Turbid Arctic Coastal Waters: Potential Hotspots for Primary Productivity. Riverine Influence on Microbial Productivity in high Arctic Fjords
The coastal domain of the Arctic is in rapid change with shifts in discharge phenology and catchment characteristics. Riverine discharge shapes hydrography, under water light climate, and nutrient dynamics during the brief melt season. Nutrients transported from catchment to coast can stimulate primary productivity, yet light attenuation caused by high surface turbidity is considered a limiting factor. This in turn affects the relative role of bacterial growth, with subsequent changes to carbon and metabolic balances. However, the effect of nutrient versus light availability on microbial growth remains understudied.
The main goal of this master’s thesis was to assess the impact of riverine inputs on bacterial and primary production in a High Arctic Fjord Estuary. A full melt season study (May to September) was conducted in Adventfjorden, Svalbard, with samples collected across horizontal and vertical salinity and turbidity gradients. Microbial productivity was measured using in vitro incubations for net primary productivity (NPP) and bacterial production (BP), using the 14C-bicarbonate and 3H-methyl-thymidine incorporation essay methods. I paired this with in situ estimations of system metabolic balance (gross community production (GCP) versus community respiration (CR)) over a 24h incubation period.
I found that NPP had the potential of exceeding BP by 100 to ~2800 times in freshwater influenced fjord waters, which was up to 3 times higher than the saline fjord max. Light had a strong impact on system metabolic balance, yet the system was net autotrophic even under low light conditions.
River influenced areas in Arctic fjords are potential hotspots for high, sustained primary productivity during the melt season, challenging previous consensus. This has implications for our general understanding of nutrient cycling and carbon balances in the Arctic
Renormalization Group Summation and the Free Energy of Hot QCD
Using an approach developed in the context of zero-temperature QCD to
systematically sum higher order effects whose form is fixed by the
renormalization group equation, we sum to all orders the leading log (LL) and
next-to-leading log (NLL) contributions to the thermodynamic free energy in hot
QCD. While the result varies considerably less with changes in the
renormalization scale than does the purely perturbative result, a novel
ambiguity arises which reflects the strong scheme dependence of thermal
perturbation theory.Comment: 7 pages REVTEX4, 2 figures; v2: typos correcte
Thermodynamic gauge-theory cascade
It is proposed that the cooling of a thermalized SU() gauge theory can be
formulated in terms of a cascade involving three effective theories with
successively reduced (and spontaneously broken) gauge symmetries, SU()
U(1) Z. The approach is based on the assumption that away
from a phase transition the bulk of the quantum interaction inherent to the
system is implicitly encoded in the (incomplete) classical dynamics of a
collective part made of low-energy condensed degrees of freedom. The properties
of (some of the) statistically fluctuating fields are determined by these
condensate(s). This leads to a quasi-particle description at tree-level. It
appears that radiative corrections, which are sizable at large gauge coupling,
do not change the tree-level picture qualitatively. The thermodynamic
self-consistency of the quasi-particle approach implies nonperturbative
evolution equations for the associated masses. The temperature dependence of
these masses, in turn, determine the evolution of the gauge coupling(s). The
hot gauge system approaches the behavior of an ideal gas of massless gluons at
asymptotically large temperature. A negative equation of state is possible at a
stage where the system is about to settle into the phase of the (spontaneously
broken) Z symmetry.Comment: 25 pages, 6 figures, 1 reference added, minor corrections in text,
errors in Sec. 3.2 corrected, PRD versio
d_{x^2-y^2} Symmetry and the Pairing Mechanism
An important question is if the gap in the high temperature cuprates has
d_{x^2-y^2} symmetry, what does that tell us about the underlying interaction
responsible for pairing. Here we explore this by determining how three
different types of electron-phonon interactions affect the d_{x^2-y^2} pairing
found within an RPA treatment of the 2D Hubbard model. These results imply that
interactions which become more positive as the momentum transfer increases
favor d_{x^2-y^2} pairing in a nearly half-filled band.Comment: 9 pages and 2 eps figs, uses revtex with epsf, in press, PR
Andreev Bound States at the Interface of Antiferromagnets and d-wave Superconductors
We set up a simple transfer matrix formalism to study the existence of bound
states at interfaces and in junctions between antiferromagnets and d-wave
superconductors. The well-studied zero energy mode at the {110} interface
between an insulator and a d-wave superconductor is spin split when the
insulator is an antiferromagnet. This has as a consequence that any competing
interface induced superconducting order parameter that breaks the time reversal
symmetry needs to exceed a critical value before a charge current is induced
along the interface.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure
Two nonmagnetic impurities in the DSC and DDW state of the cuprate superconductors as a probe for the pseudogap
The quantum interference between two nonmagnetic impurities is studied
numerically in both the d-wave superconducting (DSC) and the d-density wave
(DDW) state. In all calculations we include the tunnelling through excited
states from the CuO planes to the BiO layer probed by the STM tip. Compared
to the single impurity case, a systematic study of the modulations in the
two-impurity local density of states can distinguish between the DSC or DDW
states. This is important if the origin of the pseudogap phase is caused by
preformed pairs or DDW order. Furthermore, in the DSC state the study of the
LDOS around two nonmagnetic impurities provide further tests for the potential
scattering model versus more strongly correlated models.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figure
Thermodynamics of Large-N_f QCD at Finite Chemical Potential
We extend the previously obtained results for the thermodynamic potential of
hot QCD in the limit of large number of fermions to non-vanishing chemical
potential. We give exact results for the thermal pressure in the entire range
of temperature and chemical potential for which the presence of a Landau pole
is negligible numerically. In addition we compute linear and non-linear quark
susceptibilities at zero chemical potential, and the entropy at small
temperatures. We compare with the available perturbative results and determine
their range of applicability. Our numerical accuracy is sufficiently high to
check and verify existing results, including the recent perturbative results by
Vuorinen on quark number susceptibilities and the older results by Freedman and
McLerran on the pressure at zero temperature and high chemical potential. We
also obtain a number of perturbative coefficients at sixth order in the
coupling that have not yet been calculated analytically. In the case of both
non-zero temperature and non-zero chemical potential, we investigate the range
of validity of a scaling behaviour noticed recently in lattice calculations by
Fodor, Katz, and Szabo at moderately large chemical potential and find that it
breaks down rather abruptly at , which points to a
presumably generic obstruction for extrapolating data from small to large
chemical potential. At sufficiently small temperatures , we find
dominating non-Fermi-liquid contributions to the interaction part of the
entropy, which exhibits strong nonlinearity in the temperature and an excess
over the free-theory value.Comment: 18 pages, 7 figures, JHEP style; v2: several updates, rewritten and
extended sect. 3.4 covering now "Entropy at small temperatures and
non-Fermi-liquid behaviour"; v3: additional remarks at the end of sect. 3.4;
v4: minor corrections and additions (version to appear in JHEP
Onset of magnetism in B2 transition metals aluminides
Ab initio calculation results for the electronic structure of disordered bcc
Fe(x)Al(1-x) (0.4<x<0.75), Co(x)Al(1-x) and Ni(x)Al(1-x) (x=0.4; 0.5; 0.6)
alloys near the 1:1 stoichiometry, as well as of the ordered B2 (FeAl, CoAl,
NiAl) phases with point defects are presented. The calculations were performed
using the coherent potential approximation within the Korringa-Kohn-Rostoker
method (KKR-CPA) for the disordered case and the tight-binding linear
muffin-tin orbital (TB-LMTO) method for the intermetallic compounds. We studied
in particular the onset of magnetism in Fe-Al and Co-Al systems as a function
of the defect structure. We found the appearance of large local magnetic
moments associated with the transition metal (TM) antisite defect in FeAl and
CoAl compounds, in agreement with the experimental findings. Moreover, we found
that any vacancies on both sublattices enhance the magnetic moments via
reducing the charge transfer to a TM atom. Disordered Fe-Al alloys are
ferromagnetically ordered for the whole range of composition studied, whereas
Co-Al becomes magnetic only for Co concentration >0.5.Comment: 11 pages with 9 embedded postscript figures, to be published in
Phys.Rev.
The Free Energy Of Hot Gauge Theories
The total perturbative contribution to the free-energy of hot SU(3) gauge
theory is argued to lie significantly higher than the full result obtained by
lattice simulations. This then suggests the existence of large non-perturbative
corrections even at temperatures a few times above the critical temperature.
Some speculations are then made on the nature and origin of the
non-perturbative corrections. The analysis is then carried out for quantum
chromodynamics, gauge theories, and quantum electrodynamics, leading
to a conjecture and one more speculation.Comment: Revised Journal version;25 pages Latex and 11 .eps figures in
separate file. Requires epsf.st
Differences Between Hole and Electron Doping of a Two-Leg CuO Ladder
Here we report results of a density-matrix-renormalization-group (DMRG)
calculation of the charge, spin, and pairing properties of a two-leg CuO
Hubbard ladder. The outer oxygen atoms as well as the rung and leg oxygen atoms
are included along with near-neighbor and oxygen-hopping matrix elements. This
system allows us to study the effects of hole and electron doping on a system
which is a charge transfer insulator at a filling of one hole per Cu and
exhibits power law, d-wave-like pairing correlations when doped. In particular,
we focus on the differences between doping with holes or electrons.Comment: REVTEX 4, 10 pages, 13 figure
- …