Ice-Enriched Loess and the Formation of Periglacial Terrain in Mid-Utopia Planitia, Mars

Landforms suggestive of periglacial processes are commonplace in mid-Utopia Planitia, Mars. They form syngenetically in ground-ice comprised of loess transported by katabatic wind from the NPLDs and enriched by ice through the thaw-freeze cycling of obliquity-driven precipitation

Electron temperature fluctuation measurements in the pedestal of improved confinement regimes at ASDEX Upgrade

US DOE (DE-SC0006419, DE-SC0014264, and DE- SC0017381)EUROfusion Consortium (No. 633053

Optimal low-thrust trajectories to asteroids through an algorithm based on differential dynamic programming

In this paper an optimisation algorithm based on Differential Dynamic Programming is applied to the design of rendezvous and fly-by trajectories to near Earth objects. Differential dynamic programming is a successive approximation technique that computes a feedback control law in correspondence of a fixed number of decision times. In this way the high dimensional problem characteristic of low-thrust optimisation is reduced into a series of small dimensional problems. The proposed method exploits the stage-wise approach to incorporate an adaptive refinement of the discretisation mesh within the optimisation process. A particular interpolation technique was used to preserve the feedback nature of the control law, thus improving robustness against some approximation errors introduced during the adaptation process. The algorithm implements global variations of the control law, which ensure a further increase in robustness. The results presented show how the proposed approach is capable of fully exploiting the multi-body dynamics of the problem; in fact, in one of the study cases, a fly-by of the Earth is scheduled, which was not included in the first guess solution

Squark Flavor Violation at the LHC

We consider the prospects for measuring squark flavor violation through the signal of single top production at the LHC. We study this signal in the context of R-symmetric supersymmetry, which allows for large flavor violation in the squark sector, however the results can also be generalized to the MSSM. The single top signal arises from squark pair production in which one squark decays to a top and gaugino, whereas the other squark decays to a non-top quark and gaugino. We study three decay patterns: (I) squark decay into a quark and neutralino LSP; (II) squark decay into a quark and neutralino NLSP, with subsequent decay of the NLSP to a photon and gravitino; (III) squark decay into a quark and chargino NLSP, with subsequent decay of the NLSP to a H^\pm/W^\pm and gravitino. Case II is the most promising, when the NLSP decay is prompt, since every event contains two hard photons that can be used to tag the events, reducing the background to a negligible level. Case I is promising if the neutralino LSP is bino-like. We carefully consider large SM backgrounds and identify a series of cuts to isolate the signal. Case III can occur in the MRSSM with Higgsino-like lightest gauginos. Due to the large Higgs coupling, squarks preferentially decay to top quarks, substantially reducing the potential flavor violating signal. Nevertheless, the flavor violating signal might still be identifiable if the chargino NLSP is long-lived.Comment: 9 figures and 4 table

Non-local heat transport, rotation reversals and up/down impurity density asymmetries in Alcator C-Mod ohmic L-mode plasmas

Several seemingly unrelated effects in Alcator C-Mod ohmic L-mode plasmas are shown to be closely connected: non-local heat transport, core toroidal rotation reversals, energy confinement saturation and up/down impurity density asymmetries. These phenomena all abruptly transform at a critical value of the collisionality. At low densities in the linear ohmic confinement regime, with collisionality ν[subscript *] ≤ 0.35 (evaluated inside of the q = 3/2 surface), heat transport exhibits non-local behaviour, core toroidal rotation is directed co-current, edge impurity density profiles are up/down symmetric and a turbulent feature in core density fluctuations with k[subscript θ] up to 15 cm[superscript −1] (k[subscript θ]ρ[subscript s] ~ 1) is present. At high density/collisionality with saturated ohmic confinement, electron thermal transport is diffusive, core rotation is in the counter-current direction, edge impurity density profiles are up/down asymmetric and the high k[subscript θ] turbulent feature is absent. The rotation reversal stagnation point (just inside of the q = 3/2 surface) coincides with the non-local electron temperature profile inversion radius. All of these observations suggest a possible unification in a model with trapped electron mode prevalence at low collisionality and ion temperature gradient mode domination at high collisionality.United States. Dept. of Energy (Contract DE-FC02-99ER54512)United States. Dept. of Energy. Office of Fusion Energy Sciences (Postdoctoral Research Program

Biotechnology and the Politics of Truth : From the Green Revolution to an Evergreen Revolution

This paper investigates why and how issues around the diffusion of GM technologies and products to developing countries have become so central to a debate which has shifted away from technical issues of cost-benefit optimisation in a context of uniform mass production and consumption in the North, to the moral case for GM crops to feed the hungry and aid ‘development’ in the South. Using comparison between agricultural biotechnology and the ‘Green Revolution’ as a cross cutting theme, the contributions of this paper are threefold. Firstly, by analysing biotechnology as a set of overlapping frames within a discursive formation, four frames are identified which summarise key challenges presented by biotechnology era. Secondly, the use of Foucault's concept of bio-power to synthesise key themes from the frame analysis illuminates the ‘revolutionary’ nature of the biotech revolution. Thirdly, the potential of actor-network theory to provide a tools for the empirical study of processes of (re)negotiation of nature/society relations in the context of agricultural biotechnology controversies is explored