The competitiveness of the Portuguese wine sector and a case study of exports and activity diversification in the Vinhos Verdes region

The world wine market is currently characterised by two principal wine suppliers: the European and the New World. Countries such as France, Italy, Spain and Portugal have witnessed a tremendous growth in the New World wine- makers (Australia, Chile, South Africa, etc.). As competition continues to intensify, wineries are searching for new channels to increase revenues and many vintners chose to develop other activities. Portugal is one of the European countries that present several natural and technical constraints which might be now resulting in modest performance regarding its position in the global wine market, competitiveness and dynamism required to overcome difficulties. The main objective of the study is to provide information to vintners concerning the current situation of the wine industry and possibly to present "holes" in the market which overall might be explored as new business opportunities. To that end, the research will attempt to measure the competitiveness of the Portuguese wine industry and its behaviour during a time period considered. This will be based on indices such as the trade intensity index, revealed comparative advantage, auto- sufficiency and market share ratios. This paper will also try to analyse empirically the specific case of exports and activity diversification in the Vinhos Verdes region.wine industry, competitiveness indices, exports, activity diversification, Vinhos Verdes wine, Agribusiness,

Induced mass in N=2 super Yang-Mills theories

The masses of the matter fields of N=2 Super-Yang-Mills theories can be defined as parameters of deformed supersymmetry transformations. The formulation used involves central charges for the matter fields. The explicit form of the deformed supersymmetry transformations and of the invariant Lagrangian in presence of the gauge supermultiplet are constructed. This works generalizes a former one, due to the same authors, which presented the free matter case.Comment: 15 pages, Late

Storage and Retrieval of a Microwave Field in a Spin Ensemble

We report the storage and retrieval of a small microwave field from a superconducting resonator into collective excitations of a spin ensemble. The spins are nitrogen-vacancy centers in a diamond crystal. The storage time of the order of 30 ns is limited by inhomogeneous broadening of the spin ensemble.Comment: 4 pages + supplementary material. Submitted to PR

Thermal Cycling Stability of Silica Membranes for Gas Separation

Hydrogen is being seen as an alternative energy carrier to conventional hydrocarbons to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. High efficiency separation technologies to remove hydrogen from the greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, are therefore in growing demand. Traditional thermodynamic separation systems utilise distillation, absorption and adsorption, but are limited in efficiency at compact scales. Molecular sieve silica (MSS) membranes can perform this separation as they have high permselectivity of hydrogen to carbon dioxide, but their stability under thermal cycling is not well reported. In this work we exposed a standard MSS membrane and a carbonised template MSS (CTMSS) membrane to thermal cycling from 100 to 450°C. The standard MSS and carbonised template CTMSS membranes both showed permselectivity of helium to nitrogen dropping from around 10 to 6 in the first set of cycles, remaining stable until the last test. The permselectivity drop was due to small micropore collapse, which occurred via structure movement during cycling. Simulating single stage membrane separation with a 50:50 molar feed of H2:CO2, H2 exiting the permeate stream would start at 79% and stabilise at 67%. Higher selectivity membranes showed less of a purity drop, indicating the margin at which to design a stable membrane separation unit for CO2 capture

BRSGO Serra Dourada: cultivar de arroz de terras altas para agricultura familiar do Estado de Goiás.

O objetivo deste trabalho é apresentar a nova cultivar de arroz de terras altas desenvolvida para agricultura familiar do Estado de Goiás. Essa cultivar foi obtida a partir do cruzamento entre as variedades Katy e Confiança, realizado em 1995 e identificado como CNAx6629

Avoiding the dry season: dispersal time and syndrome mediate seed dormancy in grasses in Neotropical savanna and wet grasslands.

Question: In seasonal rainfall systems, seed dormancy is a strategy to avoid germination and seedling emergence in the dry season. Grass species in Brazilian savannas (Cerrado) show variation in seed dispersal timing and mechanisms, and occur in different habitat types (distinguished by soil moisture) within a seasonal rainfall environment. However, it is unknown whether dormancy has evolved in these systems as a dominant way in which germination is deferred, or how it correlates with other key traits such as dispersal, where known trade-offs exist for avoiding competition. We asked whether seed germination and dormancy vary with dispersal and abiotic factors in savanna systems. Specifically, we assessed dormancy by comparing seeds: (1) from species living in habitats with contrasting soil moisture during the dry season (open savannas vs wet grasslands); (2) dispersed at different times (early in the wet season, late in the wet season and in the dry season); and (3) showing alternate dispersal syndromes (barochoric vs anemochoric). Location: Open savannas and wet grasslands in central Brazil. Methods: We collected seeds of 29 grass species and tested viability and dormancy using germination trials with fresh seeds, which was then repeated after dry storage for 3, 6, 9 and 12 mo. GLMM were used to test whether the degree of dormancy was dependent on habitat type, seed dispersal time and seed dispersal syndrome. Results: Seeds from wet grasslands lived longer and had consistently higher germination rates than seeds from open savannas. Additionally, fresh seeds dispersed late in the wet season had higher levels of seed dormancy compared to seeds dispersed early in the wet season. Finally, we found that anemochoric seeds had lower levels of dormancy than barochoric seeds. Conclusions: Seed dormancy among Neotropical grasses was higher for seeds of species from dry habitats, dispersed late in the wet season, and with short distance dispersal (barochory). These results suggest that seed dormancy is a key mechanism by which seeds avoid seedling emergence in the dry season, an effect offset by habitat-specific soil moisture availability. The trade-off between dormancy and seed dispersal suggests that both strategies are costly and had non-additive benefits

Strongly coupling a cavity to inhomogeneous ensembles of emitters : potential for long lived solid-state quantum memories

We investigate theoretically the coupling of a cavity mode to a continuous distribution of emitters. We discuss the influence of the emitters inhomogeneous broadening on the existence and on the coherence properties of the polaritonic peaks. We find that their coherence depends crucially on the shape of the distribution and not only on its width. Under certain conditions the coupling to the cavity protects the polaritonic states from inhomogeneous broadening, resulting in a longer storage time for a quantum memory based on emitters ensembles. When two different ensembles of emitters are coupled to the resonator, they support a peculiar collective dark state, also very attractive for the storage of quantum information.Comment: 10 Pages, 6 Figure

Electron spin resonance detected by a superconducting qubit

A new method for detecting the magnetic resonance of electronic spins at low temperature is demonstrated. It consists in measuring the signal emitted by the spins with a superconducting qubit that acts as a single-microwave-photon detector, resulting in an enhanced sensitivity. We implement this new type of electron-spin resonance spectroscopy using a hybrid quantum circuit in which a transmon qubit is coupled to a spin ensemble consisting of NV centers in diamond. With this setup we measure the NV center absorption spectrum at 30mK at an excitation level of \thicksim15\,\mu_{B} out of an ensemble of 10^{11} spins.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, submitted to PR

Hydrostability and Scaling Up Molecular Sieve Silica (MSS) Membranes for H2/CO Separation in Fuel Cell Systems

MSS membranes are a good candidate for CO cleanup in fuel cell fuel processing systems due to their ability to selectively permeate H2 over CO via molecular sieving. Successfully scaled up tubular membranes were stable under dry conditions to 400°C with H2 permeance as high as 2 x 10-6 mol.m-2.s^-1.Pa^-1 at 200 degrees C and H2/CO selectivity up to 6.4, indicating molecular sieving was the dominant mechanism. A novel carbonised template molecular sieve silica (CTMSS) technology gave the scaled up membranes resilience in hydrothermal conditions up to 400 degrees C in 34% steam and synthetic reformate, which is required for use in fuel cell CO cleanup systems