Deconfined Fermions but Confined Coherence?

The cuprate superconductors and certain organic conductors exhibit transport which is qualitatively anisotropic, yet at the same time other properties of these materials strongly suggest the existence of a Fermi surface and low energy excitations with substantial free electron character. The former of these features is very difficult to account for if the material possesses three dimensional coherence, while the latter is inconsistent with a description based on a two dimensional fixed point. We therefore present a new proposal for these materials in which they are categorized by a fixed point at which transport in one direction is not renormalization group irrelevant, but is intrinsically incoherent, i.e. the incoherence is present in a pure system, at zero temperature. The defining property of such a state is that single electron coherence is confined to lower dimensional subspaces (planes or chains) so that it is impossible to observe interference effects between histories which involve electrons moving between these subspaces.Comment: 31 pages, REVTEX, 3 eps figures, epsf.tex macr

Development of an adaptive window-opening algorithm to predict the thermal comfort, energy use and overheating in buildings

This investigation of the window opening data from extensive field surveys in UK office buildings demonstrates: 1) how people control the indoor environment by opening windows; 2) the cooling potential of opening windows; and 3) the use of an ‘adaptive algorithm’ for predicting window opening behaviour for thermal simulation in ESP-r. It was found that when the window was open the mean indoor and outdoor temperatures were higher than when closed, but show that nonetheless there was a useful cooling effect from opening a window. The adaptive algorithm for window opening behaviour was then used in thermal simulation studies for some typical office designs. The thermal simulation results were in general agreement with the findings of the field surveys. The adaptive algorithm is shown to provide insights not available using non adaptive simulation methods and can assist in achieving more comfortable, lower energy buildings while avoiding overheating

Evidence of traffic-related pollutant control in soil-based Sustainable Urban Drainage Systems (SUDS)

SUDS are being increasingly employed to control highway runoff and have the potential to protect groundwater and surface water quality by minimising the risks of both point and diffuse sources of pollution. While these systems are effective at retaining polluted solids by filtration and sedimentation processes, less is known of the detail of pollutant behaviour within SUDS structures. This paper reports on investigations carried out as part of a co-ordinated programme of controlled studies and field measurements at soft-engineered SUDS undertaken in the UK, observing the accumulation and behaviour of traffic-related heavy metals, oil and PAHs. The field data presented were collected from two extended detention basins serving the M74 motorway in the south-west of Scotland. Additional data were supplied from an experimental lysimeter soil core leaching study. Results show that basin design influences pollutant accumulation and behaviour in the basins. Management and/or control strategies are discussed for reducing the impact of traffic-related pollutants on the aqueous environment

Comfort driven adaptive window opening behaviour and the influence of building design

It is important to understand and model the behaviour of occupants in buildings and how this behaviour impacts energy use and comfort. It is similarly important to understand how a buildings design affects occupant comfort, occupant behaviour and ultimately the energy used in the operation of the building. In this work a behavioural algorithm for window opening developed from field survey data has been implemented in a dynamic simulation tool. The algorithm is in alignment with the proposed CEN standard for adaptive thermal comfort. The algorithm is first compared to the field study data then used to illustrate the impact of adaptive behaviour on summer indoor temperatures and heating energy. The simulation model is also used to illustrate the sensitivity of the occupant adaptive behaviour to building design parameters such as solar shading and thermal mass and the resulting impact on energy use and comfort. The results are compared to those from other approaches to model window opening behaviour. The adaptive algorithm is shown to provide insights not available using non adaptive simulation methods and can assist in achieving more comfortable and lower energy buildings

Conjugate times and regularity of the minimum time function with differential inclusions

This paper studies the regularity of the minimum time function, $T(\cdot)$, for a control system with a general closed target, taking the state equation in the form of a differential inclusion. Our first result is a sensitivity relation which guarantees the propagation of the proximal subdifferential of $T$ along any optimal trajectory. Then, we obtain the local $C^2$ regularity of the minimum time function along optimal trajectories by using such a relation to exclude the presence of conjugate times

The Transition Between Quantum Coherence and Incoherence

We show that a transformed Caldeira-Leggett Hamltonian has two distinct families of fixed points, rather than a single unique fixed point as often conjectured based on its connection to the anisotropic Kondo model. The two families are distinguished by a sharp qualitative difference in their quantum coherence properties and we argue that this distinction is best understood as the result of a transition in the model between degeneracy and non-degeneracy in the spectral function of the ``spin-flip'' operator.Comment: some typos corrected and a reference adde

Experimental and numerical study of local mean age of air

This paper presents the results from the experimental and numerical study of a room with mixing ventilation, focused on the local mean age of air (LMA). The measurements were performed using the tracer gas concentration decay method. The numerical predictions were obtained from the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) module of the latest version of the ESP-r software