559 research outputs found
Hamiltonian approach to QCD in Coulomb gauge - a survey of recent results
I report on recent results obtained within the Hamiltonian approach to QCD in
Coulomb gauge. Furthermore this approach is compared to recent lattice data,
which were obtained by an alternative gauge fixing method and which show an
improved agreement with the continuum results. By relating the Gribov
confinement scenario to the center vortex picture of confinement it is shown
that the Coulomb string tension is tied to the spatial string tension. For the
quark sector a vacuum wave functional is used which explicitly contains the
coupling of the quarks to the transverse gluons and which results in
variational equations which are free of ultraviolet divergences. The
variational approach is extended to finite temperatures by compactifying a
spatial dimension. The effective potential of the Polyakov loop is evaluated
from the zero-temperature variational solution. For pure Yang--Mills theory,
the deconfinement phase transition is found to be second order for SU(2) and
first order for SU(3), in agreement with the lattice results. The corresponding
critical temperatures are found to be and , respectively. When quarks are included, the deconfinement
transition turns into a cross-over. From the dual and chiral quark condensate
one finds pseudo-critical temperatures of and , respectively, for the deconfinement and chiral transition.Comment: Talk given by H. Reinhardt at "5th Winter Workshop on
Non-Perturbative Quantum Field Theory", 22-24 March 2017, Sophia-Antipolis,
France. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1609.09370,
arXiv:1510.03286, arXiv:1607.0814
Spinodal instabilities within BUU approach
Using a recently developed method for the inclusion of fluctuation in the BUU
dynamics, we study the self-consistent propagation of inherent thermal noise of
unstable nuclear matter. The large time behaviour of the evolving system
exhibits synergism between fluctuation and non-linearities in a universal
manner which manifest in the appearance of macroscopic structure in the average
description.Comment: 12 pages Revtex. Two figures, uuencoded, are enclosed in a separate
fil
Agent-based homeostatic control for green energy in the smart grid
With dwindling non-renewable energy reserves and the adverse effects of climate change, the development of the smart electricity grid is seen as key to solving global energy security issues and to reducing carbon emissions. In this respect, there is a growing need to integrate renewable (or green) energy sources in the grid. However, the intermittency of these energy sources requires that demand must also be made more responsive to changes in supply, and a number of smart grid technologies are being developed, such as high-capacity batteries and smart meters for the home, to enable consumers to be more responsive to conditions on the grid in real-time. Traditional solutions based on these technologies, however, tend to ignore the fact that individual consumers will behave in such a way that best satisfies their own preferences to use or store energy (as opposed to that of the supplier or the grid operator). Hence, in practice, it is unclear how these solutions will cope with large numbers of consumers using their devices in this way. Against this background, in this paper, we develop novel control mechanisms based on the use of autonomous agents to better incorporate consumer preferences in managing demand. These agents, residing on consumers' smart meters, can both communicate with the grid and optimise their owner's energy consumption to satisfy their preferences. More specifically, we provide a novel control mechanism that models and controls a system comprising of a green energy supplier operating within the grid and a number of individual homes (each possibly owning a storage device). This control mechanism is based on the concept of homeostasis whereby control signals are sent to individual components of a system, based on their continuous feedback, in order to change their state so that the system may reach a stable equilibrium. Thus, we define a new carbon-based pricing mechanism for this green energy supplier that takes advantage of carbon-intensity signals available on the internet in order to provide real-time pricing. The pricing scheme is designed in such a way that it can be readily implemented using existing communication technologies and is easily understandable by consumers. Building upon this, we develop new control signals that the supplier can use to incentivise agents to shift demand (using their storage device) to times when green energy is available. Moreover, we show how these signals can be adapted according to changes in supply and to various degrees of penetration of storage in the system. We empirically evaluate our system and show that, when all homes are equipped with storage devices, the supplier can significantly reduce its reliance on other carbon-emitting power sources to cater for its own shortfalls. By so doing, the supplier reduces the carbon emission of the system by up to 25% while the consumer reduces its costs by up to 14.5%. Finally, we demonstrate that our homeostatic control mechanism is not sensitive to small prediction errors and the supplier is incentivised to accurately predict its green production to minimise costs
Kill rate as a tool in efficiency evaluation of Neoseiulus californicus (Acari: Phytoseiidae) mass reared on factitious food
The predatory mites of the Phytoseiidae family are crucial biological control agents widely utilized in biological pest management targeting phytophagous mites and insects. Key factors in these control strategies are that phytoseiids must be able to find their main target prey and to maintain high populations and efficacy. To reduce expenses and time-consuming production methods of mass rearing of phytoseiids, pollen and other factitious (i.e., non-natural/nontarget) hosts need to be present as an alternative food for predatory mite populations. The mass-rearing possibilities of these predators on alternative food sources, such as astigmatid mites (i.e., house and stored mites) and pollen, must be evaluated not only by the cost of rearing settings but on the basis of their efficiency maintenance in killing prey. The pest kill rate (km) is the average daily lifetime killing of the pest by the natural enemy under consideration and can represent a useful indicator for phytoseiids efficacy to rank them as BCAs on the basis of their effective killing/predation on target prey. In this study, we evidenced that 2 astigmatid mites, Glycyphagus domesticus (De Geer) and Lepidoglyphus destructor (Schrank), and Quercus ilex L. pollen can be successfully adopted as substitute food sources for mass rearing of the phytoseiid Neoseiulus californicus (MgGregor); then, we determined that these populations of BCAs maintained a consistent km at new/first impact on the main target pest, Tetranychus urticae Koch
Generalized entropy and temperature in nuclear multifragmentation
In the framework of a 2D Vlasov model, we study the time evolution of the
"coarse-grained" Generalized Entropy (GE) in a nuclear system which undergoes a
multifragmentation (MF) phase transition. We investigate the GE both for the
gas and the fragments (surface and bulk part respectively). We find that the
formation of the surface causes the growth of the GE during the process of
fragmentation. This quantity then characterizes the MF and confirms the crucial
role of deterministic chaos in filling the new available phase-space: at
variance with the exact time evolution, no entropy change is found when the
linear response is applied. Numerical simulations were used also to extract
information about final temperatures of the fragments. From a fitting of the
momentum distribution with a Fermi-Dirac function we extract the temperature of
the fragments at the end of the process. We calculate also the gas temperature
by averaging over the available phase space. The latter is a few times larger
than the former, indicating a gas not in equilibrium. Though the model is very
schematic, this fact seems to be very general and could explain the discrepancy
found in experimental data when using the slope of light particles spectra
instead of the double ratio of isotope yields method in order to extract the
nuclear caloric curve.Comment: 26 pages, 9 postscript figures included, Revtex, some figures and
part of text changed, version accepted for publication in PR
How strange are compact star interiors ?
We discuss a Nambu--Jona-Lasinio (NJL) type quantum field theoretical
approach to the quark matter equation of state with color superconductivity and
construct hybrid star models on this basis. It has recently been demonstrated
that with increasing baryon density, the different quark flavors may occur
sequentially, starting with down-quarks only, before the second light quark
flavor and at highest densities also the strange quark flavor appears. We find
that color superconducting phases are favorable over non-superconducting ones
which entails consequences for thermodynamic and transport properties of hybrid
star matter. In particular, for NJL-type models no strange quark matter phases
can occur in compact star interiors due to mechanical instability against
gravitational collapse, unless a sufficiently strong flavor mixing as provided
by the Kobayashi-Maskawa-'t Hooft determinant interaction is present in the
model. We discuss observational data on mass-radius relationships of compact
stars which can put constraints on the properties of dense matter equation of
state.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures, to appear in the Proceedings of the International
Conference SQM2009, Buzios, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Sep.27-Oct.2, 200
Universal Behavior of Lyapunov Exponents in Unstable Systems
We calculate the Lyapunov exponents in a classical molecular dynamics
framework. The system is composed of few hundreds particles interacting either
through Yukawa (Nuclear) or Slater-Kirkwood (Atomic) forces. The forces are
chosen to give an Equation of State that resembles the nuclear and the atomic
Equation Of State respectively near the critical point for liquid-gas
phase transition. We find the largest fluctuations for an initial "critical
temperature". The largest Lyapunov exponents are always positive and
can be very well fitted near this "critical temperature" with a functional form
, where the exponent is
independent of the system and mass number. At smaller temperatures we find that
, a universal behavior characteristic of an order
to chaos transition.Comment: 11 pages, RevTeX, 3 figures not included available upon reques
The hadron-quark phase transition in dense matter and neutron stars
We study the hadron-quark phase transition in the interior of neutron stars
(NS's). We calculate the equation of state (EOS) of hadronic matter using the
Brueckner-Bethe-Goldstone formalism with realistic two-body and three-body
forces, as well as a relativistic mean field model. For quark matter we employ
the MIT bag model constraining the bag constant by using the indications coming
from the recent experimental results obtained at the CERN SPS on the formation
of a quark-gluon plasma. We find necessary to introduce a density dependent bag
parameter, and the corresponding consistent thermodynamical formalism. We
calculate the structure of NS interiors with the EOS comprising both phases,
and we find that the NS maximum masses fall in a relatively narrow interval,
. The precise value of the
maximum mass turns out to be only weakly correlated with the value of the
energy density at the assumed transition point in nearly symmetric nuclear
matter.Comment: 25 pages, Revtex4, 16 figures included as postscrip
Finite temperature calculations for the bulk properties of strange star using a many-body approach
We have considered a hot strange star matter, just after the collapse of a
supernova, as a composition of strange, up and down quarks to calculate the
bulk properties of this system at finite temperature with the density dependent
bag constant. To parameterize the density dependent bag constant, we use our
results for the lowest order constrained variational (LOCV) calculations of
asymmetric nuclear matter. Our calculations for the structure properties of the
strange star at different temperatures indicate that its maximum mass decreases
by increasing the temperature. We have also compared our results with those of
a fixed value of the bag constant. It can be seen that the density dependent
bag constant leads to higher values of the maximum mass and radius for the
strange star.Comment: 21 pages, 2 tables, 12 figures Astrophys. (2011) accepte
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