Towards a Common Language of Infrastructure Interdependency

Infrastructure systems can exist interdependently with one another either by design, necessity or evolution. There is evidence that interdependencies can be the source of emergent benefits and hazards, and therefore there is value in their identification and management. Achieving this requires collaboration and communication between infrastructure stakeholders across all relevant sectors. Recognising, developing and sharing multiple understandings of infrastructure interdependency and dependency will facilitate a wide range of multi-disciplinary and cross-sectorial work and support productive stakeholder dialogues. This paper therefore aims to initiate discussion around the nature of infrastructure interdependency and dependency in order to establish the basis of a useful, coherent and complete conceptual taxonomy. It sets out an approach for locating this taxonomy and language within a framework of commonplace stakeholder viewpoints. The paper looks at the potential structural arrangements of infrastructure interdependencies before exploring the qualitative ways in which the relationships can be characterised. This builds on the existing body of knowledge as well as experience through case studies in developing an Interdependency Planning and Management Framework for Infrastructure

Surface magnetic ordering in topological insulators with bulk magnetic dopants

We show that a three dimensional topological insulator doped with magnetic impurities in the bulk can have a regime where the surface is magnetically ordered but the bulk is not. This is in contrast to conventional materials where bulk ordered phases are typically more robust than surface ordered phases. The difference originates from the topologically protected gapless surface states characteristic of topological insulators. We study the problem using a mean field approach in two concrete models that give the same qualitative result, with some interesting differences. Our findings could help explain recent experimental results showing the emergence of a spectral gap in the surface state of Bi2Se3 doped with Mn or Fe atoms, but with no measurable bulk magnetism.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figure

Noise-free high-efficiency photon-number-resolving detectors

High-efficiency optical detectors that can determine the number of photons in a pulse of monochromatic light have applications in a variety of physics studies, including post-selection-based entanglement protocols for linear optics quantum computing and experiments that simultaneously close the detection and communication loopholes of Bell's inequalities. Here we report on our demonstration of fiber-coupled, noise-free, photon-number-resolving transition-edge sensors with 88% efficiency at 1550 nm. The efficiency of these sensors could be made even higher at any wavelength in the visible and near-infrared spectrum without resulting in a higher dark-count rate or degraded photon-number resolution.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures Published in Physical Review A, Rapid Communications, 17 June 200

The Diverse Infrared Properties of a Complete Sample of Star-Forming Dwarf Galaxies

We present mid-infrared Spitzer Space Telescope observations of a complete sample of star-forming dwarf galaxies selected from the KPNO International Spectroscopic Survey. The galaxies span a wide range in mid-infrared properties. Contrary to expectations, some of the galaxies emit strongly at 8 micron indicating the presence of hot dust and/or PAHs. The ratio of this mid-infrared dust emission to the stellar emission is compared with the galaxies' luminosity, star-formation rate, metallicity, and optical reddening. We find that the strength of the 8.0 micron dust emission to the stellar emission ratio is more strongly correlated with the star-formation rate than it is with the metallicity or the optical reddening in these systems. Nonetheless, there is a correlation between the 8.0 micron luminosity and metallicity. The slope of this luminosity-metallicity correlation is shallower than corresponding ones in the B-band and 3.6 micron. The precise nature of the 8.0 micron emission seen in these galaxies (i.e., PAH versus hot dust or some combination of the two) will require future study, including deep mid-IR spectroscopy.Comment: 14 pages, accepted Ap

Human endogenous retrovirus K106 (HERV-K106) was infectious after the emergence of anatomically modern humans.

HERV-K113 and HERV-K115 have been considered to be among the youngest HERVs because they are the only known full-length proviruses that are insertionally polymorphic and maintain the open reading frames of their coding genes. However, recent data suggest that HERV-K113 is at least 800,000 years old, and HERV-K115 even older. A systematic study of HERV-K HML2 members to identify HERVs that may have infected the human genome in the more recent evolutionary past is lacking. Therefore, we sought to determine how recently HERVs were exogenous and infectious by examining sequence variation in the long terminal repeat (LTR) regions of all full-length HERV-K loci. We used the traditional method of inter-LTR comparison to analyze all full length HERV-Ks and determined that two insertions, HERV-K106 and HERV-K116 have no differences between their 5' and 3' LTR sequences, suggesting that these insertions were endogenized in the recent evolutionary past. Among these insertions with no sequence differences between their LTR regions, HERV-K106 had the most intact viral sequence structure. Coalescent analysis of HERV-K106 3' LTR sequences representing 51 ethnically diverse individuals suggests that HERV-K106 integrated into the human germ line approximately 150,000 years ago, after the emergence of anatomically modern humans

Levinson's theorem for the Schr\"{o}dinger equation in two dimensions

Levinson's theorem for the Schr\"{o}dinger equation with a cylindrically symmetric potential in two dimensions is re-established by the Sturm-Liouville theorem. The critical case, where the Schr\"{o}dinger equation has a finite zero-energy solution, is analyzed in detail. It is shown that, in comparison with Levinson's theorem in non-critical case, the half bound state for $P$ wave, in which the wave function for the zero-energy solution does not decay fast enough at infinity to be square integrable, will cause the phase shift of $P$ wave at zero energy to increase an additional $\pi$.Comment: Latex 11 pages, no figure and accepted by P.R.A (in August); Email: [email protected], [email protected]

Dogs with macroadenomas have lower body temperature and heart rate than dogs with microadenomas

Pituitary macroadenomas compress the hypothalamus, which partly regulates heart rate and body temperature. The aim of this study was to investigate whether heart rate and/or body temperature could aid in clinically differentiating dogs with macroadenomas from dogs with microadenomas (i.e. small non-compressive pituitary mass). Two groups of dogs diagnosed with pituitary-dependent hyperadrenocorticism (i.e. Cushing’s disease) were included. Heart rate and body temperature were collected on initial presentation before any procedure. Dogs with macroadenoma had a significantly lower heart rate and body temperature (P < 0.01) compared to dogs with microadenoma. We suggest that the combined cut-off values of 84 beats per minutes and 38.3 °C in dogs with Cushing’s disease, especially with vague neurological signs (nine of 12 dogs = 75%), might help to suspect the presence of a macroadenoma

Quantum Equivalence of Massive Antisymmetric Tensor Field Models in Curved Space

We study the effective actions for massive rank-2 and rank-3 antisymmetric tensor field models in curved space-time. These models are classically equivalent to massive vector field and massive scalar field with minimal coupling to gravity respectively. We prove that effective action for massive rank-2 antisymmetric tensor field is exactly equal to one for massive vector field and effective action for massive rank-3 antisymmetric tensor field is exactly equal to one for massive scalar field. Prove is based on an identity for mass-dependent zeta-functions associated with Laplacians acting on $p$-forms.Comment: 8 pages, REVTeX fil

Stability analysis of dynamical regimes in nonlinear systems with discrete symmetries

We present a theorem that allows to simplify linear stability analysis of periodic and quasiperiodic nonlinear regimes in N-particle mechanical systems (both conservative and dissipative) with different kinds of discrete symmetry. This theorem suggests a decomposition of the linearized system arising in the standard stability analysis into a number of subsystems whose dimensions can be considerably less than that of the full system. As an example of such simplification, we discuss the stability of bushes of modes (invariant manifolds) for the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam chains and prove another theorem about the maximal dimension of the above mentioned subsystems

High rate, long-distance quantum key distribution over 250km of ultra low loss fibres

We present a fully automated quantum key distribution prototype running at 625 MHz clock rate. Taking advantage of ultra low loss fibres and low-noise superconducting detectors, we can distribute 6,000 secret bits per second over 100 km and 15 bits per second over 250km