6,132 research outputs found
Legal Issues Pertaining to Community Based Fisheries Management
National and intergovernmental regulation of fisheries has not prevented many failures of fisheries management around the world. New approaches to improving the environmental sustainability of fisheries have included the certification of fisheries harvested by sustainable means, and the ecolabelling of fish and seafood products from certified fisheries. The intention is to use the power of markets as an incentive to induce more sustainable fisheries. To date, only a relatively small number of fisheries have been certified, and these have been predominantly in developed countries. Critiques from developing countries of ecolabelling, as currently formulated, focus on five general areas: a) legitimacy and credibility; b) a mismatch between certification requirements and the reality of tropical small-scale fisheries; c) potential distortions to existing practices and livelihoods; d) equity and feasibility; and e) perceived barriers to trade.This paper reviews these developing country concerns on the basis of already certified fisheries, and on experiences from forestry, aquaculture and the aquarium industry, and also examines precedents and trends in international environmental and trade issues. It suggests that ecolabelling as currently practiced is unlikely to be widely adopted in Asian countries. Certification may have sporadic success in some eco-conscious, or niche, markets but it is unlikely to stimulate global improvement of fisheries management.The paper argues that to avoid the controversy that accompanies ecolabelling, the focus should be on revision of national fisheries management and not on an ad hoc approach to individual fisheries. Improvements in fisheries management, the equitable treatment of fishing sub-sectors and stakeholders within management schemes, and the prospect of reaping increased value-added from fisheries all require government acceptance of needs and actions. Governments should be encouraged to enter into broad coalitions to improve aspects of fisheries management, and to enhance efforts to develop locally relevant indicator systems for fisheries and for the ecosystem approach. Governments of developing countries must also first address the difficult questions of access to and tenure arrangements for their fisheries, as these are essential prerequisites for successful certification and product labeling. They will also need to legislate on the form and conduct of the postharvest chain and product control, as, in export markets, these are outside the control ofthe fishing communities. International agreement and clarity on trade, environmental (and health) standards affecting fisheries will augment national efforts. Advocacy coalitions that include governments, rather than extraterritorial imposition of labelling schemes, are required
Nuclear quantum effects in solids using a colored-noise thermostat
We present a method, based on a non-Markovian Langevin equation, to include
quantum corrections to the classical dynamics of ions in a quasi-harmonic
system. By properly fitting the correlation function of the noise, one can vary
the fluctuations in positions and momenta as a function of the vibrational
frequency, and fit them so as to reproduce the quantum-mechanical behavior,
with minimal a priori knowledge of the details of the system. We discuss the
application of the thermostat to diamond and to ice Ih. We find that results in
agreement with path-integral molecular dynamics can be obtained using only a
fraction of the computational effort.Comment: submitted for publicatio
Scalable quantum field simulations of conditioned systems
We demonstrate a technique for performing stochastic simulations of
conditional master equations. The method is scalable for many quantum-field
problems and therefore allows first-principles simulations of multimode bosonic
fields undergoing continuous measurement, such as those controlled by
measurement-based feedback. As examples, we demonstrate a 53-fold speed
increase for the simulation of the feedback cooling of a single trapped
particle, and the feedback cooling of a quantum field with 32 modes, which
would be impractical using previous brute force methods.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figure
Quantum turbulence and correlations in Bose-Einstein condensate collisions
We investigate numerically simulated collisions between experimentally
realistic Bose-Einstein condensate wavepackets, within a regime where highly
populated scattering haloes are formed. The theoretical basis for this work is
the truncated Wigner method, for which we present a detailed derivation, paying
particular attention to its validity regime for colliding condensates. This
paper is an extension of our previous Letter [A. A. Norrie, R. J. Ballagh, and
C. W. Gardiner, Phys. Rev. Lett. 94, 040401 (2005)] and we investigate both
single-trajectory solutions, which reveal the presence of quantum turbulence in
the scattering halo, and ensembles of trajectories, which we use to calculate
quantum-mechanical correlation functions of the field
Number-Phase Wigner Representation for Scalable Stochastic Simulations of Controlled Quantum Systems
Simulation of conditional master equations is important to describe systems
under continuous measurement and for the design of control strategies in
quantum systems. For large bosonic systems, such as BEC and atom lasers, full
quantum field simulations must rely on scalable stochastic methods whose
convergence time is restricted by the use of representations based on coherent
states. Here we show that typical measurements on atom-optical systems have a
common form that allows for an efficient simulation using the number-phase
Wigner (NPW) phase-space representation. We demonstrate that a stochastic
method based on the NPW can converge over an order of magnitude longer and more
precisely than its coherent equivalent. This opens the possibility of realistic
simulations of controlled multi-mode quantum systems.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figur
Thermal effects on chaotic directed transport
We study a chaotic ratchet system under the influence of a thermal
environment. By direct integration of the Lindblad equation we are able to
analyze its behavior for a wide range of couplings with the environment, and
for different finite temperatures. We observe that the enhancement of the
classical and quantum currents due to temperature depend strongly on the
specific properties of the system. This makes difficult to extract universal
behaviors. We have also found that there is an analogy between the effects of
the classical thermal noise and those of the finite size. These results
open many possibilities for their testing and implementation in kicked BECs and
cold atoms experiments.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure
Disruption of reflecting Bose-Einstein condensates due to inter-atomic interactions and quantum noise
We perform fully three-dimensional simulations, using the truncated Wigner
method, to investigate the reflection of Bose-Einstein condensates from abrupt
potential barriers. We show that the inter-atomic interactions can disrupt the
internal structure of a cigar-shaped cloud with a high atom density at low
approach velocities, damping the center-of-mass motion and generating vortices.
Furthermore, by incorporating quantum noise we show that scattering halos form
at high approach velocities, causing an associated condensate depletion. We
compare our results to recent experimental observations.Comment: 5 figure
Effects of Measurement back-action in the stabilization of a Bose-Einstein condensate through feedback
We apply quantum filtering and control to a particle in a harmonic trap under
continuous position measurement, and show that a simple static feedback law can
be used to cool the system. The final steady state is Gaussian and dependent on
the feedback strength and coupling between the system and probe. In the limit
of weak coupling this final state becomes the ground state. An earlier model by
Haine et. al. (PRA 69, 2004) without measurement back-action showed dark
states: states that did not display error signals, thus remaining unaffected by
the control. This paper shows that for a realistic measurement process this is
not true, which indicates that a Bose-Einstein condensate may be driven towards
the ground state from any arbitrary initial state.Comment: 1 Tex, 4 PS pictures, 1 bbl fil
On the optimal feedback control of linear quantum systems in the presence of thermal noise
We study the possibility of taking bosonic systems subject to quadratic
Hamiltonians and a noisy thermal environment to non-classical stationary states
by feedback loops based on weak measurements and conditioned linear driving. We
derive general analytical upper bounds for the single mode squeezing and
multimode entanglement at steady state, depending only on the Hamiltonian
parameters and on the number of thermal excitations of the bath. Our findings
show that, rather surprisingly, larger number of thermal excitations in the
bath allow for larger steady-state squeezing and entanglement if the efficiency
of the optimal continuous measurements conditioning the feedback loop is high
enough. We also consider the performance of feedback strategies based on
homodyne detection and show that, at variance with the optimal measurements, it
degrades with increasing temperature.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figures. v2: minor changes to the letter; better
explanation of the necessary and sufficient conditions to achieve the bounds
(in the supplemental material); v3: title changed; comparison between optimal
general-dyne strategy and homodyne strategy is discussed; supplemental
material included in the manuscript and few references added. v4: published
versio
Exact and approximate many-body dynamics with stochastic one-body density matrix evolution
We show that the dynamics of interacting fermions can be exactly replaced by
a quantum jump theory in the many-body density matrix space. In this theory,
jumps occur between densities formed of pairs of Slater determinants, , where each state evolves according to the Stochastic
Schr\"odinger Equation (SSE) given in ref. \cite{Jul02}. A stochastic
Liouville-von Neumann equation is derived as well as the associated
Bogolyubov-Born-Green-Kirwood-Yvon (BBGKY) hierarchy. Due to the specific form
of the many-body density along the path, the presented theory is equivalent to
a stochastic theory in one-body density matrix space, in which each density
matrix evolves according to its own mean field augmented by a one-body noise.
Guided by the exact reformulation, a stochastic mean field dynamics valid in
the weak coupling approximation is proposed. This theory leads to an
approximate treatment of two-body effects similar to the extended
Time-Dependent Hartree-Fock (Extended TDHF) scheme. In this stochastic mean
field dynamics, statistical mixing can be directly considered and jumps occur
on a coarse-grained time scale. Accordingly, numerical effort is expected to be
significantly reduced for applications.Comment: 12 pages, 1 figur
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