PHYSIOLOGICAL PARTICULARITIES OF PLANTS FROM THE CRASSULACEAE FAMILY

The interest in research regarding plants from the Crassulaceae family has arisen with the discovery of the fact that they have the ability to absorb and fix carbon dioxide during the night because during daytime they keep their stomata closed in order to save water.The data presented in the paper reveals that these plants have high drought resistance, both by providing high osmotic pressure at the cellular level, and by regulating the gas exchange (water, carbon dioxide, oxygen) due to the prompt reaction of closure and opening of the stomata.Absorptionand saving water in this way is very important in the environmental conditions in which these plants live.

Demonstration of all-optical beam steering in modulated photonic lattices

We demonstrate experimentally all-optical beam steering in modulated photonic lattices induced optically by three beam interference in a biased photorefractive crystal. We identify and characterize the key physical parameters governing the beam steering, and show that the spatial resolution can be enhanced by the additional effect of nonlinear beam self-localization.Comment: 3 pages, 3 figure

Hubble Space Telescope Near-IR Transmission Spectroscopy of the Super-Earth HD 97658b

Recent results from the Kepler mission indicate that super-Earths (planets with masses between 1-10 times that of the Earth) are the most common kind of planet around nearby Sun-like stars. These planets have no direct solar system analogue, and are currently one of the least well-understood classes of extrasolar planets. Many super-Earths have average densities that are consistent with a broad range of bulk compositions, including both water-dominated worlds and rocky planets covered by a thick hydrogen and helium atmosphere. Measurements of the transmission spectra of these planets offer the opportunity to resolve this degeneracy by directly constraining the scale heights and corresponding mean molecular weights of their atmospheres. We present Hubble Space Telescope near-infrared spectroscopy of two transits of the newly discovered transiting super-Earth HD 97658b. We use the Wide Field Camera 3's scanning mode to measure the wavelength-dependent transit depth in thirty individual bandpasses. Our averaged differential transmission spectrum has a median 1 sigma uncertainty of 23 ppm in individual bins, making this the most precise observation of an exoplanetary transmission spectrum obtained with WFC3 to date. Our data are inconsistent with a cloud-free solar metallicity atmosphere at the 10 sigma level. They are consistent at the 0.4 sigma level with a flat line model, as well as effectively flat models corresponding to a metal-rich atmosphere or a solar metallicity atmosphere with a cloud or haze layer located at pressures of 10 mbar or higher.Comment: ApJ in press; revised version includes an updated orbital ephemeris for the plane

Innovative strategies related to forage production, utilization and feeding for dairy cow productivity

The SOLID project (Sustainable Organic Low-Input Dairying) carried out research to improve the sustainability of low-input/organic dairy systems in different ways. This deliverable is one of the three that are resulting from the WP1 of the SOLID project and presents and discusses a series of participatory on-farm studies that were conducted to test innovative approaches related to forage production, utilization and feeding in organic and low-input dairying systems. Specifically, the participatory studies focus on a) improvement of soil organic matter through grazing management and establishment of diverse swards b) on-farm strategies for the improvement of forage yield and protein content of the pasture c) utilisation of industrial by-products for dairy cow nutrition and d) the effects of dietary mineral supplementation on mineral concentrations in milk, with particular focus on iodine supplementation

Principal toroidal bundles over Cauchy-Riemann products

The main result we obtain is that given π:N→M a Ts-subbundle of the generalized Hopf fibration π¯:H2n+s→ℂPn over a Cauchy-Riemann product i:M⊆ℂPn, i.e. j:N⊆H2n+s is a diffeomorphism on fibres and π¯∘j=i∘π, if s is even and N is a closed submanifold tangent to the structure vectors of the canonical ℊ-structure on H2n+s then N is a Cauchy-Riemann submanifold whose Chen class is non-vanishing

Nonlinear Aharonov-Bohm scattering by optical vortices

We study linear and nonlinear wave scattering by an optical vortex in a self-defocusing nonlinear Kerr medium. In the linear case, we find a splitting of a plane-wave front at the vortex proportional to its circulation, similar to what occurs in the scattered wave of electrons for the Aharonov-Bohm effect. For larger wave amplitudes, we study analytically and numerically the scattering of a dark-soliton stripe (a nonlinear analog of a small-amplitude wavepacket) by a vortex and observe a significant asymmetry of the scattered wave. Subsequently, a wavefront splitting of the scattered wave develops into transverse modulational instability, ``unzipping'' the stripe into trains of vortices with opposite charges.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

Separability problem for multipartite states of rank at most four

One of the most important problems in quantum information is the separability problem, which asks whether a given quantum state is separable. We investigate multipartite states of rank at most four which are PPT (i.e., all their partial transposes are positive semidefinite). We show that any PPT state of rank two or three is separable and has length at most four. For separable states of rank four, we show that they have length at most six. It is six only for some qubit-qutrit or multiqubit states. It turns out that any PPT entangled state of rank four is necessarily supported on a 3x3 or a 2x2x2 subsystem. We obtain a very simple criterion for the separability problem of the PPT states of rank at most four: such a state is entangled if and only if its range contains no product vectors. This criterion can be easily applied since a four-dimensional subspace in the 3x3 or 2x2x2 system contains a product vector if and only if its Pluecker coordinates satisfy a homogeneous polynomial equation (the Chow form of the corresponding Segre variety). We have computed an explicit determinantal expression for the Chow form in the former case, while such expression was already known in the latter case.Comment: 19 page