Food web structure and mercury transfer in two contrasting Ugandan highland crater lakes (East Africa)

Abstract in English and FrenchVolcanic crater lakes scattered throughout western Uganda are important local sources of water and fish. Two representative but contrasting crater lakes near the Kibale National Park were sampled in 2000; the hyper-eutrophic Lake Saka, which is highly affected by agricultural practices, and the mesotrophic Lake Nkuruba that is still surrounded by intact forest. The food web structures in these two lakes were assessed using stable nitrogen (d15N) and carbon (d13C) isotope analyses, and the mercury (THg) transfer patterns were quantified. The d15N results indicate that food webs in both lakes are abbreviated, with only one to two trophic levels from primary consumers. The Lake Saka biota had distinctively enriched d13C values compared with those in Lake Nkuruba, which may be due to 12C-limited phytoplankton blooms in this lake. In Lake Nkuruba, two introduced tilapiine species and the introduced guppy Poecilia reticulata fed predominantly upon invertebrates and decomposed terrestrial plant material. In Lake Saka, the introduced Nile perch Lates niloticus appeared to occupy the top trophic position, but stable isotope values of the endemic haplochromine cichlids exclude those as Nile perch prey items. THg was found to biomagnify through the food web, reaching highest concentrations in P. reticulata in Nkuruba, which tended to be higher than for L. niloticus in Saka, suggesting increased bioavailability of THg in Nkuruba. Maximum THg concentrations in fish never approached WHO recommended guidelines (200 ng g-1) designed to protect at-risk groups

Two-Loop g -> gg Splitting Amplitudes in QCD

Splitting amplitudes are universal functions governing the collinear behavior of scattering amplitudes for massless particles. We compute the two-loop g -> gg splitting amplitudes in QCD, N=1, and N=4 super-Yang-Mills theories, which describe the limits of two-loop n-point amplitudes where two gluon momenta become parallel. They also represent an ingredient in a direct x-space computation of DGLAP evolution kernels at next-to-next-to-leading order. To obtain the splitting amplitudes, we use the unitarity sewing method. In contrast to the usual light-cone gauge treatment, our calculation does not rely on the principal-value or Mandelstam-Leibbrandt prescriptions, even though the loop integrals contain some of the denominators typically encountered in light-cone gauge. We reduce the integrals to a set of 13 master integrals using integration-by-parts and Lorentz invariance identities. The master integrals are computed with the aid of differential equations in the splitting momentum fraction z. The epsilon-poles of the splitting amplitudes are consistent with a formula due to Catani for the infrared singularities of two-loop scattering amplitudes. This consistency essentially provides an inductive proof of Catani's formula, as well as an ansatz for previously-unknown 1/epsilon pole terms having non-trivial color structure. Finite terms in the splitting amplitudes determine the collinear behavior of finite remainders in this formula.Comment: 100 pages, 33 figures. Added remarks about leading-transcendentality argument of hep-th/0404092, and additional explanation of cut-reconstruction uniquenes

Projection of Favorable Gas-Producting Areas From Paleoenvironmental Data

Paleoenvironmental biofacies analysis of recent wells in dark Devonian shales in the Applachian Basin has shown that these facies can be projected to areas with no control points. In particular, the facies distribution in Perry County, Kentucky, were found to be precisely those that were predicted earlier from biofacies and organic geochemical data from the VA-1 well in Wise County, Virginia, and the KY-2 well in Martin County, Kentucky. This demonstrates the importance of these data in assessing the volume of gas in the shale throughout the basin as well as in selecting future test sites. The recent biofacies and geochemical work together with a review of the tectonics of the basin have contributed to an evolving interpretation of the geologic control of the biofacies. While a marine environment persisted throughout the Upper Devonian over the Applachian and Illinois Basin (and probably the Michigan Basin), dynamic emergent areas controlled an intermittent introduction of large amounts of organic matter. Large amounts of non-marine organic matter were periodically transported in the basin from a dynamic source province to the Southeast; massive "blooms" of Tasmanites intermittently spread both east and west from the edges of the emerging Cincinnati Arch. At times one or the other of these organic types swept entirely across the basins; at other times a more normal open marine biota flourished and was deposited, probably under the influence of connections to the open seas to the south and northwest, the north being closed by the collision and suturing of continental plates and the east by the growing Applachian Mountains

Black Hole Entropy Associated with Supersymmetric Sigma Model

By means of an identity that equates elliptic genus partition function of a supersymmetric sigma model on the $N$-fold symmetric product $S^N X$ of $X$ ($S^N X=X^N/S_N$, $S_N$ is the symmetric group of $N$ elements) to the partition function of a second quantized string theory, we derive the asymptotic expansion of the partition function as well as the asymptotic for the degeneracy of spectrum in string theory. The asymptotic expansion for the state counting reproduces the logarithmic correction to the black hole entropy.Comment: 11 pages, no figures, version to appear in the Phys. Rev. D (2003

Counting BPS states on the Enriques Calabi-Yau

We study topological string amplitudes for the FHSV model using various techniques. This model has a type II realization involving a Calabi-Yau threefold with Enriques fibres, which we call the Enriques Calabi-Yau. By applying heterotic/type IIA duality, we compute the topological amplitudes in the fibre to all genera. It turns out that there are two different ways to do the computation that lead to topological couplings with different BPS content. One of them leads to the standard D0-D2 counting amplitudes, and from the other one we obtain information about bound states of D0-D4-D2 branes on the Enriques fibre. We also study the model using mirror symmetry and the holomorphic anomaly equations. We verify in this way the heterotic results for the D0-D2 generating functional for low genera and find closed expressions for the topological amplitudes on the total space in terms of modular forms, and up to genus four. This model turns out to be much simpler than the generic B-model and might be exactly solvable.Comment: 62 pages, v3: some results at genus 3 corrected, more typos correcte

Electronic structure of nuclear-spin-polarization-induced quantum dots

We study a system in which electrons in a two-dimensional electron gas are confined by a nonhomogeneous nuclear spin polarization. The system consists of a heterostructure that has non-zero nuclei spins. We show that in this system electrons can be confined into a dot region through a local nuclear spin polarization. The nuclear-spin-polarization-induced quantum dot has interesting properties indicating that electron energy levels are time-dependent because of the nuclear spin relaxation and diffusion processes. Electron confining potential is a solution of diffusion equation with relaxation. Experimental investigations of the time-dependence of electron energy levels will result in more information about nuclear spin interactions in solids

Steiner t-designs for large t

One of the most central and long-standing open questions in combinatorial design theory concerns the existence of Steiner t-designs for large values of t. Although in his classical 1987 paper, L. Teirlinck has shown that non-trivial t-designs exist for all values of t, no non-trivial Steiner t-design with t > 5 has been constructed until now. Understandingly, the case t = 6 has received considerable attention. There has been recent progress concerning the existence of highly symmetric Steiner 6-designs: It is shown in [M. Huber, J. Algebr. Comb. 26 (2007), pp. 453-476] that no non-trivial flag-transitive Steiner 6-design can exist. In this paper, we announce that essentially also no block-transitive Steiner 6-design can exist.Comment: 9 pages; to appear in: Mathematical Methods in Computer Science 2008, ed. by J.Calmet, W.Geiselmann, J.Mueller-Quade, Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Scienc

Topological String Amplitudes, Complete Intersection Calabi-Yau Spaces and Threshold Corrections

We present the most complete list of mirror pairs of Calabi-Yau complete intersections in toric ambient varieties and develop the methods to solve the topological string and to calculate higher genus amplitudes on these compact Calabi-Yau spaces. These symplectic invariants are used to remove redundancies in examples. The construction of the B-model propagators leads to compatibility conditions, which constrain multi-parameter mirror maps. For K3 fibered Calabi-Yau spaces without reducible fibers we find closed formulas for all genus contributions in the fiber direction from the geometry of the fibration. If the heterotic dual to this geometry is known, the higher genus invariants can be identified with the degeneracies of BPS states contributing to gravitational threshold corrections and all genus checks on string duality in the perturbative regime are accomplished. We find, however, that the BPS degeneracies do not uniquely fix the non-perturbative completion of the heterotic string. For these geometries we can write the topological partition function in terms of the Donaldson-Thomas invariants and we perform a non-trivial check of S-duality in topological strings. We further investigate transitions via collapsing D5 del Pezzo surfaces and the occurrence of free Z2 quotients that lead to a new class of heterotic duals.Comment: 117 pages, 1 Postscript figur

Outlier Resistant PCA Ensembles

Statistical re-sampling techniques have been used extensively and successfully in the machine learning approaches for generation of classifier and predictor ensembles. It has been frequently shown that combining so called unstable predictors has a stabilizing effect on and improves the performance of the prediction system generated in this way. In this paper we use the re-sampling techniques in the context of Principal Component Analysis (PCA). We show that the proposed PCA ensembles exhibit a much more robust behaviour in the presence of outliers which can seriously affect the performance of an individual PCA algorithm. The performance and characteristics of the proposed approaches are illustrated on a number of experimental studies where an individual PCA is compared to the introduced PCA ensemble