Sea ice working group (SIP)

The sea ice is a crucial component of the polar climate system, and has an impact on albedo, heat and gas ex- change, primary productivity and car- bon export, atmospheric and ocean circulation, freshwater budget, ocean stratification, and deep water mass for- mation. It is therefore critical that it is correctly specified as a forcing or pre- dicted as a feedback in modeling stud- ies

Solid Surface Structure Affects Liquid Order at the Polystyrene/SAM Interface

We present a combined x-ray and neutron reflectivity study characterizing the interface between polystyrene (PS) and silanized surfaces. Motivated by the large difference in slip velocity of PS on top of dodecyl-trichlorosilane (DTS) and octadecyl-trichlorosilane (OTS) found in previous studies, these two systems were chosen for the present investigation. The results reveal the molecular conformation of PS on silanized silicon. Differences in the molecular tilt of OTS and DTS are replicated by the adjacent phenyl rings of the PS. We discuss our findings in terms of a potential link between the microscopic interfacial structure and dynamic properties of polymeric liquids at interfaces

3D Spin Glass and 2D Ferromagnetic XY Model: a Comparison

We compare the probability distributions and Binder cumulants of the overlap in the 3D Ising spin glass with those of the magnetization in the ferromagnetic 2D XY model. We analyze similarities and differences. Evidence for the existence of a phase transition in the spin glass model is obtained thanks to the crossing of the Binder cumulant. We show that the behavior of the XY model is fully compatible with the Kosterlitz-Thouless scenario. Finite size effects have to be dealt with by using great care in order to discern among two very different physical pictures that can look very similar if analyzed without large attention.Comment: 14 pages and 6 figures. Also available at http://chimera.roma1.infn.it/index_papers_complex.htm

Spin-orbit coupled particle in a spin bath

We consider a spin-orbit coupled particle confined in a quantum dot in a bath of impurity spins. We investigate the consequences of spin-orbit coupling on the interactions that the particle mediates in the spin bath. We show that in the presence of spin-orbit coupling, the impurity-impurity interactions are no longer spin-conserving. We quantify the degree of this symmetry breaking and show how it relates to the spin-orbit coupling strength. We identify several ways how the impurity ensemble can in this way relax its spin by coupling to phonons. A typical resulting relaxation rate for a self-assembled Mn-doped ZnTe quantum dot populated by a hole is 1 $\mu$s. We also show that decoherence arising from nuclear spins in lateral quantum dots is still removable by a spin echo protocol, even if the confined electron is spin-orbit coupled.Comment: 18 pages, 1 figur

A new baculovirus isolate that does not cause the liquefaction of the integument in Spodoptera frugiperda dead larvae.

The large-scale production of Baculovirus to control fall armyworm, Spodoptera frugiperda, presents many limitations. The most important limiting factor is that the baculovirus, which infects fall armyworm, causes liquefaction of the integument immediately after death. This disruption of the integument difficultates the large scale production because dead insect must be frozen before being harvested. This fact implies in high lab work need, increasing the cost of the biopesticide. This problem was overcome by the discovery of a new baculovirus nucleopolyhedrovirus (NPV) isolate in Cascavel/PR, that doesn?t cause liquefaction of the integument (isolate 6NR) immediately after the insect death. This is an extremely important factor in a large-scale baculovirus production. In addition, mortality caused by isolate 6NR on 6-day-old-larvae was above 93% (SEM=0.7%), the average weight dead larva was 116.21 mg (SEM=22.9), the larval equivalent and weight equivalent/ha were 15.04 g (SEM=1.2) and 140.32 larvae (SEM=20.1), respectively

Ising Model Coupled to Three-Dimensional Quantum Gravity

We have performed Monte Carlo simulations of the Ising model coupled to three-dimensional quantum gravity based on a summation over dynamical triangulations. These were done both in the microcanonical ensemble, with the number of points in the triangulation and the number of Ising spins fixed, and in the grand canoncal ensemble. We have investigated the two possible cases of the spins living on the vertices of the triangulation (``diect'' case) and the spins living in the middle of the tetrahedra (``dual'' case). We observed phase transitions which are probably second order, and found that the dual implementation more effectively couples the spins to the quantum gravity.Comment: 11 page

Transition Matrix Monte Carlo Reweighting and Dynamics

We study an induced dynamics in the space of energy of single-spin-flip Monte Carlo algorithm. The method gives an efficient reweighting technique. This dynamics is shown to have relaxation times proportional to the specific heat. Thus, it is plausible for a logarithmic factor in the correlation time of the standard 2D Ising local dynamics.Comment: RevTeX, 5 pages, 3 figure