Evaluating Alumni Publications: A Readership Survey of the Graduates of an Agricultural College

Faced with budget cuts, schools and colleges of agriculture find it difficult to sustain their quality of service

Josep M. Armengol, Masculinities in Black and White: Manliness and Whiteness in (African) American Literature

“One cannot be black without blacks and without the constant disavowal of his relation to them” states Judith Butler, as cited by Armengol in this last chapter of Masculinities in Black and White (134), and it is this affirmation that would probably constitute the case of every discourse upon black and white masculinities in this book. Armengol’s study, winner of the 2015 Javier Coy Research Award for Best Monograph (SAAS-Spanish Association for American Studies), explores hegemonic structure..

Carcerals and Olympic Masculinities in Christos Tsiolkas’s Barracuda

In an effort to draw attention to the masculine crisis occurring in the era of globalisation, this paper elaborates on Australian author Christos Tsiolkas’s novel Barracuda and the central character’s self-discipline and struggle into reaching Olympic achievement. The course of his rise as a potential Olympic athlete but also his fall and crisis within an institutional framework of disciplines, which often symbolically turn into nightmarish prisons, resonate with Michel Foucault’s 1975 work Discipline and Punish. The latter’s ideas about discipline and the “carceral” will help interpret Tsiolkas’s novel and further understand how the Olympics work as a mechanism of discipline and compliance towards a kind of hegemonic masculinity and its inevitable crisis

Controlling and probing molecular motion with optical lattices

This thesis describes the further improvement of an already developed by our group laser system capable of delivering high energy, frequency agile, flat-top pulses and its uses in non-resonant molecular scattering diagnostics in the form of coherent Rayleigh-Brillouin scattering, as well as for optical Stark deceleration of neutral H2 molecules. This laser system is capable of delivering two computer controlled flat-top pulses of variable duration (20~1000 ns) with energies up to 700 mJ per pulse and with linearly chirped frequencies up to 1.5 GHz. With the use of constant velocity lattices driven by this system we were able to accurately obtain coherent Brillouin scattering spectra of purified air in the hydrodynamic regime where, for the first time, we observed additional spectral peaks to the main Brillouin peak, as well as up to 40% reduction of the peak due to the interaction of the laser driven electrostrictive grating with the acoustic which was launched in the gas due to its thermalisation by the optical field. Furthermore, by utilising chirped frequency optical lattices, we were able to obtain accurate coherent Rayleigh-Brillouin spectra with signal-to-noise ratios in excess of 100, in a single laser shot ( 140ns) thus reducing the acquisition times needed for such spectra by ten orders of magnitude, rendering the technique ideal for combustion and transient flow diagnostics. Finally, we report on the use of this laser system as a tool for optical Stark deceleration of neutral H2 molecules, where through a Raman tagging scheme of the interacting molecules we are proposing an efficient way to monitor the interactions occurring within the decelerating optical lattice. We hope that this technique will pave the way for the production of narrow velocity spread molecular ensembles to be used in cold collisional studies as well as sympathetic cooling