Change of nuclear configurations in the neutrinoless double-β\beta decay of 130^{130}Te →\rightarrow 130^{130}Xe and 136^{136}Xe →\rightarrow 136^{136}Ba

The change in the configuration of valence protons between the initial and final states in the neutrinoless double-$\beta$ decay of $^{130}$Te $\rightarrow$ $^{130}$Xe and of $^{136}$Xe $\rightarrow$ $^{136}$Ba has been determined by measuring the cross sections of the ($d$,$^3$He) reaction with 101-MeV deuterons. Together with our recent determination of the relevant neutron configurations involved in the process, a quantitative comparison with the latest shell-model and interacting-boson-model calculations reveals significant discrepancies. These are the same calculations used to determine the nuclear matrix elements governing the rate of neutrinoless double-$\beta$ decay in these systems.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, 9 table

UKGEOS: Glasgow Geothermal Energy Research Field Site (GGERFS): initial summary of the geological platform

The preferred second UKGEOS site is at Clyde Gateway, in the east end of Glasgow, Scotland. The focus of this, the Glasgow Geothermal Energy Research Field Site (GGERFS), is on characterising and monitoring the subsurface for minewater and hot sedimentary aquifer geothermal energy, and for cooling and heat storage. This report details BGS data and knowledge at late 2016, to define initial characterisation of the ‘geological platform’ relevant for the planning of a geothermal research facility and associated environmental baseline monitoring. The report covers knowledge of the bedrock and superficial deposits geology, abandoned coal mines, hydrogeology, geothermal datasets, geochemistry, remote sensed data, seismicity, stress fields, engineering geology and rock property datasets. BGS holds a great deal of legacy borehole, mining and geochemistry data and has updated existing bedrock and superficial deposits models of the area. However, deep borehole and seismic data are lacking to define the geology and structure of the area below a few hundred metres. Hydrogeological and temperature data are also lacking for the bedrock strata. Regional datasets and knowledge have (and can be further) used to reduce uncertainty and risk in these aspects of the geological characterisation

Emergence of good conduct, scaling and Zipf laws in human behavioral sequences in an online world

We study behavioral action sequences of players in a massive multiplayer online game. In their virtual life players use eight basic actions which allow them to interact with each other. These actions are communication, trade, establishing or breaking friendships and enmities, attack, and punishment. We measure the probabilities for these actions conditional on previous taken and received actions and find a dramatic increase of negative behavior immediately after receiving negative actions. Similarly, positive behavior is intensified by receiving positive actions. We observe a tendency towards anti-persistence in communication sequences. Classifying actions as positive (good) and negative (bad) allows us to define binary 'world lines' of lives of individuals. Positive and negative actions are persistent and occur in clusters, indicated by large scaling exponents alpha~0.87 of the mean square displacement of the world lines. For all eight action types we find strong signs for high levels of repetitiveness, especially for negative actions. We partition behavioral sequences into segments of length n (behavioral `words' and 'motifs') and study their statistical properties. We find two approximate power laws in the word ranking distribution, one with an exponent of kappa-1 for the ranks up to 100, and another with a lower exponent for higher ranks. The Shannon n-tuple redundancy yields large values and increases in terms of word length, further underscoring the non-trivial statistical properties of behavioral sequences. On the collective, societal level the timeseries of particular actions per day can be understood by a simple mean-reverting log-normal model.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figure

A coupled food security and refugee movement model for the south Sudan conflict

VECMA; HiDALGO projects; European Union Horizon 2020 research and innovation programm

The merger of vertically offset quasi-geostrophic vortices

We examine the critical merging distance between two equal-volume, equal-potential-vorticity quasi-geostrophic vortices. We focus on how this distance depends on the vertical offset between the two vortices, each having a unit mean height-to-width aspect ratio. The vertical direction is special in the quasi-geostrophic model (used to capture the leading-order dynamical features of stably stratified and rapidly rotating geophysical flows) since vertical advection is absent. Nevertheless vortex merger may still occur by horizontal advection. In this paper, we first investigate the equilibrium states for the two vortices as a function of their vertical and horizontal separation. We examine their basic properties together with their linear stability. These findings are next compared to numerical simulations of the nonlinear evolution of two spheres of potential vorticity. Three different regimes of interaction are identified, depending on the vertical offset. For a small offset, the interaction differs little from the case when the two vortices are horizontally aligned. On the other hand, when the vertical offset is comparable to the mean vortex radius, strong interaction occurs for greater horizontal gaps than in the horizontally aligned case, and therefore at significantly greater full separation distances. This perhaps surprising result is consistent with the linear stability analysis and appears to be a consequence of the anisotropy of the quasi-geostrophic equations. Finally, for large vertical offsets, vortex merger results in the formation of a metastable tilted dumbbell vortex.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

ATU-DSS: Knowledge-Driven Data Integration and Reasoning for Sustainable Subsurface Inter-Asset Management

Urban infrastructure assets perform critical functions to the health and well-being of the society. In this paper, we present a prototype decision support system for sustainable subsurface inter-asset management. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this work is the first on assessing the underground space by considering the inter-asset dependencies using semantic technologies. Based on a family of interlinked city infrastructure asset ontologies describing the ground, roads and buried utilities (e.g. water pipes), various datasets are integrated and logical rules are developed to describe the intra-asset and inter-asset relationships. An inference engine is employed to exploit the knowledge and data for assessing the potential impact of an event. This system can be beneficial to a wide range of stakeholders (e.g. utility incident managers) for quickly gathering of the localised contextual data and identifying potential consequences from what may appear as an insignificant trigger. A video demonstrating the prototype is available at: http://bit.ly/2mdyIY4

City infrastructure ontologies

Sustainable urban infrastructure planning and maintenance require an integrated approach that considers various infrastructure assets (e.g., the ground, roads, and buried pipes) and their inter-linkages as a holistic system. To facilitate the usage of this integrated approach, we propose a model of city infrastructure assets and their interdependencies, providing details on how asset properties and processes affect each other. This model is represented as ontologies in OWL 2 Web Ontology Language Manchester Syntax, which can be read and interpreted by machines automatically. These ontologies cover the classifications, properties and processes of the ground, roads and buried water pipes, as well as some related human activities and natural phenomena (e.g., precipitation). The ontologies not only provide a foundation for integrating various types of infrastructure and environmental data, but also for understanding the potential knock-on effects of asset failures. The ontologies have been utilised in a decision support system for integrated urban inter-asset management