Critical loads for nutrient nitrogen for soil-vegetation systems

Members of the UK Critical Loads Advisory Group (CLAG) have calculated critical loads for nutrient nitrogen to produce maps for Great Britain. The results of three methods, based upon the conclusions from the Lokeberg workshop are described below. Two of these methods use the empirical approachand the other the steady state equation ("mass balance") for nitrogen saturation

A daily representation of Great Britain's energy vectors : Natural gas, electricity and transport fuels

In much of Europe there is a strong push to decarbonise energy demands, including the largest single end-use demand – heat. Moving heat demands over to the electrical network poses significant challenges and the use of hybrid energy vector and storage systems (heat and electrical storage) will be a critical component in managing this transition. As an example of these challenges (facing many developed countries), the scale of recently available daily energy flows through the UK’s electrical, gas and transport systems are presented. When this data is expressed graphically it illustrates important differences in the demand characteristics of these different vectors; these include the quantity of energy delivered through the networks on a daily basis, and the scale of variability in the gas demand over multiple timescales (seasonal, weekly and daily). As the UK proceeds to migrate heating demands to the electrical network in its drive to cut carbon emissions, electrical demand will significantly increase. Additionally, the greater variability and uncertainty shown in the gas demand will also migrate to the electrical demand posing significant difficulties for the maintenance of a secure and reliable electrical system in the coming decades. The paper concludes an analysis of the different means of accommodating increasingly volatile electricity demands in future energy networks

A Need for a Paradigm Shift in the Spanish Banking Sector? The Evolution from Regional to Multinational Banks in Spain.

Since the approval of Spain¿s 2012 National Budget on March 30, 2012, some doubts and controversies have added up to many fears in the private sector regarding the measures and stimuli that the Spanish government was going to undertake. At the same time, this situation was in some measure aggravated by the financial backlog of many small and medium companies, which are and will continue, in the following years to be completely unable to comply with their financial requirements. In line with Boronat Ombuena¿s (2009a, 2009b, 2010, 2012) requirements in his new approach to finance and private sector liaisons, the purpose of this paper is to analyze the recent years of the credit sector in Spain as well as its direct and mid-term effects that its mergers and acquisitions (M&A) have contributed up to date, and will still produce in the near future. We will take a closer look at the evolution of the banking sector in Spain from 1995 to 2012 through a historically-based methodology, compiling and synthesizing the existing financial and risk market information and analyzing its evolution. We shall observe that in a single year, the total number of savings banks in Spain decreased from 45 to only 15 entities and that the risks the financial system took over these last few years were not equally distributed across the entities, resulting in an advanced foreclosure of the regional savings banks and in a market-share growth for the commercial banking entities. This process has resulted in creating larger entities and, in some cases, a vacuum of regional and local credit entities that in the mid-long term will eventually end up in a representative loss on credit availability. These circumstances call into question the need for a paradigm change and most importantly, new approaches to solve the new challenges that can result in the financial fluidity of the system and the eventual recovery of the economic structure

Proteus: A Hierarchical Portfolio of Solvers and Transformations

In recent years, portfolio approaches to solving SAT problems and CSPs have become increasingly common. There are also a number of different encodings for representing CSPs as SAT instances. In this paper, we leverage advances in both SAT and CSP solving to present a novel hierarchical portfolio-based approach to CSP solving, which we call Proteus, that does not rely purely on CSP solvers. Instead, it may decide that it is best to encode a CSP problem instance into SAT, selecting an appropriate encoding and a corresponding SAT solver. Our experimental evaluation used an instance of Proteus that involved four CSP solvers, three SAT encodings, and six SAT solvers, evaluated on the most challenging problem instances from the CSP solver competitions, involving global and intensional constraints. We show that significant performance improvements can be achieved by Proteus obtained by exploiting alternative view-points and solvers for combinatorial problem-solving.Comment: 11th International Conference on Integration of AI and OR Techniques in Constraint Programming for Combinatorial Optimization Problems. The final publication is available at link.springer.co

Split vortices in optically coupled Bose-Einstein condensates

We study a rotating two-component Bose-Einstein condensate in which an optically induced Josephson coupling allows for population transfer between the two species. In a regime where separation of species is favored, the ground state of the rotating system displays domain walls with velocity fields normal to them. Such a configuration looks like a vortex split into two halves, with atoms circulating around the vortex and changing their internal state in a continuous way.Comment: 4 EPS pictures, 4 pages; Some errata have been corrected and thep resentation has been slightly revise

Approximate Deadline-Scheduling with Precedence Constraints

We consider the classic problem of scheduling a set of n jobs non-preemptively on a single machine. Each job j has non-negative processing time, weight, and deadline, and a feasible schedule needs to be consistent with chain-like precedence constraints. The goal is to compute a feasible schedule that minimizes the sum of penalties of late jobs. Lenstra and Rinnoy Kan [Annals of Disc. Math., 1977] in their seminal work introduced this problem and showed that it is strongly NP-hard, even when all processing times and weights are 1. We study the approximability of the problem and our main result is an O(log k)-approximation algorithm for instances with k distinct job deadlines

Vertical and interhemispheric links in the stratosphere-mesosphere as revealed by the day-to-day variability of Aura-MLS temperature data

The coupling processes in the middle atmosphere have been a subject of intense research activity because of their effects on atmospheric circulation, structure, variability, and the distribution of chemical constituents. In this study, the day-to-day variability of Aura-MLS (Microwave Limb Sounder) temperature data are used to reveal the vertical and interhemispheric coupling processes in the stratosphere-mesosphere during four Northern Hemisphere winters (2004/2005–2007/2008). The UKMO (United Kingdom Meteorological Office) assimilated data and mesospheric winds from MF (medium frequency) radars are also applied to help highlight the coupling processes. In this study, a clear vertical link can be seen between the stratosphere and mesosphere during winter months. The coolings and reversals of northward meridional winds in the polar winter mesosphere are often observed in relation to warming events (Sudden Stratospheric Warming, SSW for short) and the associated changes in zonal winds in the polar winter stratosphere. An upper-mesospheric cooling usually precedes the beginning of the warming in the stratosphere by 1–2 days. Inter-hemispheric coupling has been identified initially by a correlation analysis using the year-to-year monthly zonal mean temperature. Then the correlation analyses are performed based upon the daily zonal mean temperature. From the original time sequences, significant positive (negative) correlations are generally found between zonal mean temperatures at the Antarctic summer mesopause and in the Arctic winter stratosphere (mesosphere) during northern mid-winters, although these correlations are dominated by the low frequency variability (i.e. the seasonal trend). Using the short-term oscillations (less than 15 days), the statistical result, by looking for the largest magnitude of correlation within a range of time-lags (0 to 10 days; positive lags mean that the Antarctic summer mesopause is lagging), indicates that the temporal variability of zonal mean temperature at the Antarctic summer mesopause is also positively (negatively) correlated with the polar winter stratosphere (mesosphere) during three (2004/2005, 2005/2006, and 2007/2008) out of the four winters. The highest value of the correlation coefficient is over 0.7 in the winter-stratosphere for the three winters. The remaining winter (2006/2007) has more complex correlations structures; correspondingly the polar vortex was distinguished this winter. The time-lags obtained for 2004/2005 and 2006/2007 are distinct from 2005/2006 and 2007/2008 where a 6-day lag dominates for the coupling between the winter stratosphere and the summer mesopause. The correlations are also provided using temperatures in northern longitudinal sectors in a comparison with the Antarctic-mesopause zonal mean temperature. For northern mid-high latitudes (~50–70° N), temperatures in Scandinavia-Eastern Europe and in the Pacific-Western Canada longitudinal sectors often have opposite signs of correlations with zonal mean temperatures near the Antarctic summer mesopause during northern mid-winters. The statistical results are shown to be associated with the Northern Hemisphere's polar vortex characteristics

Slepton Oscillation at Large Hadron Collider

Measurement of Lepton-Flavor Violation (LFV) in the minimal SUSY Standard Model (MSSM) at Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is studied based on a realistic simulation. We consider the LFV decay of the second-lightest neutralino, $\tilde{\chi}^0_2 \to \tilde{l} l' \to l l' \tilde{\chi}^0_1$, in the case where the flavor mixing exists in the right-handed sleptons. We scan the parameter space of the minimal supergravity model (MSUGRA) and a more generic model in which we take the Higgsino mass $\mu$ as a free parameter. We find that the possibility of observing LFV at LHC is higher if $\mu$ is smaller than the MSUGRA prediction; the LFV search at LHC can cover the parameter range where the $\mu \to e \gamma$ decay can be suppressed by the cancellation among the diagrams for this case.Comment: 29 pages, 10 figure

Nearly degenerate neutrinos, Supersymmetry and radiative corrections

If neutrinos are to play a relevant cosmological role, they must be essentially degenerate with a mass matrix of the bimaximal mixing type. We study this scenario in the MSSM framework, finding that if neutrino masses are produced by a see-saw mechanism, the radiative corrections give rise to mass splittings and mixing angles that can accommodate the atmospheric and the (large angle MSW) solar neutrino oscillations. This provides a natural origin for the $\Delta m^2_{sol} << \Delta m^2_{atm}$ hierarchy. On the other hand, the vacuum oscillation solution to the solar neutrino problem is always excluded. We discuss also in the SUSY scenario other possible effects of radiative corrections involving the new neutrino Yukawa couplings, including implications for triviality limits on the Majorana mass, the infrared fixed point value of the top Yukawa coupling, and gauge coupling and bottom-tau unification.Comment: 32 pages, 12 Postscript figures, uses psfig.st