868 research outputs found
Saltmarsh resilience to periodic shifts in tidal channels
Resilience of coastal ecosystems to climate change is largely determined by the interaction between plants and the surrounding tidal environment. Research has tended to focus on processes operating at the local scale to explain resilience mechanisms, overlooking potentially important landscape-scale processes and patterns. We show from aerial images spanning 67 years across 3 estuaries that saltmarsh loss was compensated by expansion elsewhere in the estuary when tidal channels shifted position. Compensatory expansion rates were as high as 6 m/yr. This phenomenon of “geomorphic compensation” represents a hitherto overlooked large-scale self-organizing pattern that facilitates the long-term persistence of marshes in estuaries. The geomorphic compensation pattern likely also occurs in other hydrological systems including mangrove forests, and seagrass meadows, and river islands. Compensatory erosion-expansion patterns occurred at the same time as net marsh extent increased by between 120 and 235% across all three estuaries. Marsh expansion mostly occurred in the lower parts of each estuary, where channel migration and compensatory expansion was less evident. Patterns of geomorphic compensation therefore appear to operate at discrete spatio-temporal scales, nested within a hierarchy of coastal morphodynamic processes that govern longer-term patterns of either net marsh gain or loss. Coastal ecosystem resilience can therefore only be fully appreciated when examining erosion and expansion patterns at both local and landscape scales. The intrinsic dynamics of marshes described here have important implications for the long-term delivery of ecosystem services
Surface Polymer Network Model and Effective Membrane Curvature Elasticity
A microscopic model of a surface polymer network - membrane system is
introduced, with contact polymer surface interactions that can be either
repulsive or attractive and sliplinks of functionality four randomly
distributed over the supporting membrane surface anchoring the polymers to it.
For the supporting surface perturbed from a planar configuration and a small
relative number of surface sliplinks, we investigate an expansion of the free
energy in terms of the local curvatures of the surface and the surface density
of sliplinks, obtained through the application of the Balian - Bloch -
Duplantier multiple surface scattering method. As a result, the dependence of
the curvature elastic modulus, the Gaussian modulus as well as of the
spontaneous curvature of the "dressed" membrane, ~{\sl i.e.} polymer network
plus membrane matrix, is obtained on the mean polymer bulk end to end
separation and the surface density of sliplinks.Comment: 15 pages with one included compressed uuencoded figure
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Defense Waste Processing Facility Radioactive Operations - Year Two
The Savannah River Site`s Defense Waste Processing Facility (DWPF) near Aiken, SC is the nation`s first high-level radioactive waste vitrification facility. This waste (130 million liters) which has been stored in carbon steel underground tanks and is now being pretreated, melted into a highly durable borosilicate glass and poured into stainless steel canisters for eventual disposal in a geologic repository. Following a ten-year construction period and nearly three-year nonradioactive test program, the DWPF began radioactive operations in March 1996. The first nine months of radioactive operations have been reported previously. As with any complex technical facility, difficulties were encountered during the transition to radioactive operations. Results of the second year of radioactive operations are presented in this paper. The discussion includes: feed preparation and glass melting, resolution of the melter pouring issues, improvements in processing attainment and throughput, and planned improvements in laboratory attainment and throughput
Surface tension in the dilute Ising model. The Wulff construction
We study the surface tension and the phenomenon of phase coexistence for the
Ising model on \mathbbm{Z}^d () with ferromagnetic but random
couplings. We prove the convergence in probability (with respect to random
couplings) of surface tension and analyze its large deviations : upper
deviations occur at volume order while lower deviations occur at surface order.
We study the asymptotics of surface tension at low temperatures and relate the
quenched value of surface tension to maximal flows (first passage
times if ). For a broad class of distributions of the couplings we show
that the inequality -- where is the surface
tension under the averaged Gibbs measure -- is strict at low temperatures. We
also describe the phenomenon of phase coexistence in the dilute Ising model and
discuss some of the consequences of the media randomness. All of our results
hold as well for the dilute Potts and random cluster models
Aharonov-Bohm oscillations of a particle coupled to dissipative environments
The amplitude of the Bohm-Aharonov oscillations of a particle moving around a
ring threaded by a magnetic flux and coupled to different dissipative
environments is studied. The decay of the oscillations when increasing the
radius of the ring is shown to depend on the spatial features of the coupling.
When the environment is modelled by the Caldeira-Leggett bath of oscillators,
or the particle is coupled by the Coulomb potential to a dirty electron gas,
interference effects are suppressed beyond a finite length, even at zero
temperature. A finite renormalization of the Aharonov-Bohm oscillations is
found for other models of the environment.Comment: 6 page
Depinning with dynamic stress overshoots: A hybrid of critical and pseudohysteretic behavior
A model of an elastic manifold driven through a random medium by an applied
force F is studied focussing on the effects of inertia and elastic waves, in
particular {\it stress overshoots} in which motion of one segment of the
manifold causes a temporary stress on its neighboring segments in addition to
the static stress. Such stress overshoots decrease the critical force for
depinning and make the depinning transition hysteretic. We find that the steady
state velocity of the moving phase is nevertheless history independent and the
critical behavior as the force is decreased is in the same universality class
as in the absence of stress overshoots: the dissipative limit which has been
studied analytically. To reach this conclusion, finite-size scaling analyses of
a variety of quantities have been supplemented by heuristic arguments.
If the force is increased slowly from zero, the spectrum of avalanche sizes
that occurs appears to be quite different from the dissipative limit. After
stopping from the moving phase, the restarting involves both fractal and
bubble-like nucleation. Hysteresis loops can be understood in terms of a
depletion layer caused by the stress overshoots, but surprisingly, in the limit
of very large samples the hysteresis loops vanish. We argue that, although
there can be striking differences over a wide range of length scales, the
universality class governing this pseudohysteresis is again that of the
dissipative limit. Consequences of this picture for the statistics and dynamics
of earthquakes on geological faults are briefly discussed.Comment: 43 pages, 57 figures (yes, that's a five followed by a seven), revte
Diffusion and Localization of Cold Atoms in 3D Optical Speckle
In this work we re-formulate and solve the self-consistent theory for
localization to a Bose-Einstein condensate expanding in a 3D optical speckle.
The long-range nature of the fluctuations in the potential energy, treated in
the self-consistent Born approximation, make the scattering strongly velocity
dependent, and its consequences for mobility edge and fraction of localized
atoms have been investigated numerically.Comment: 8 pages, 11 figure
Finite temperature mobility of a particle coupled to a fermion environment
We study numerically the finite temperature and frequency mobility of a
particle coupled by a local interaction to a system of spinless fermions in one
dimension. We find that when the model is integrable (particle mass equal to
the mass of fermions) the static mobility diverges. Further, an enhanced
mobility is observed over a finite parameter range away from the integrable
point. We present a novel analysis of the finite temperature static mobility
based on a random matrix theory description of the many-body Hamiltonian.Comment: 11 pages (RevTeX), 5 Postscript files, compressed using uufile
Effective Non-Hermitian Hamiltonians for Studying Resonance Statistics in Open Disordered Systems
We briefly discuss construction of energy-dependent effective non-hermitian
hamiltonians for studying resonances in open disordered systemsComment: Latex, 20 pages, 1 fig. Expanded version of a talk at the Workshop on
Pseudo-Hermitian Hamiltonians in Quantum Physics IX, June 21-24 2010,
Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China. Accepted for publication in the
Internationa Journal of Theoretical Physics (Springer Verlag
Missing Outcome Data in Epidemiologic Studies
Missing data are pandemic and a central problem for epidemiology. Missing data reduce precision and can cause notable bias. There remain too few simple published examples detailing types of missing data and illustrating their possible impact on results. Here we take an example randomized trial that was not subject to missing data and induce missing data to illustrate 4 scenarios in which outcomes are 1) missing completely at random, 2) missing at random with positivity, 3) missing at random without positivity, and 4) missing not at random. We demonstrate that accounting for missing data is generally a better strategy than ignoring missing data, which unfortunately remains a standard approach in epidemiology
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