1,715 research outputs found
Carbon Capture Clustering: the Case for Coordinated Approaches to Address Freshwater Use Concerns
Carbon capture and storage (CCS) will be a key technology for reducing emissions from fossil-fuelled electricity
generation. The UK is developing demonstration plants and UK Government strategy proposes the clustering of
CCS facilities, having identified significant cost-savings from shared pipeline infrastructure. However, cooling water
use from CCS power plants are almost double those of conventional plants. There are concerns about the volumes
of freshwater used and vulnerability to low river flows, particularly in areas identified for CCS clusters. Two innovative
approaches may reduce water use in CCS clusters by exploiting synergies with other infrastructures; district heating
and municipal wastewater. Our analysis indicates that cooling water reductions from district heating may be feasible
in the northwest, but less likely in Yorkshire. We also find that across the UK there are numerous, sufficiently large
wastewater treatment plants capable of providing alternative cooling water sources for large power plants. Feasibility
of these promising options will be highly contextual, require detailed analysis and may face economic and regulatory
barriers. Historically, ad-hoc development of energy infrastructure has struggled to exploit such synergies, but may
now be facilitated by the clustering of CCS facilities
About the stability of the dodecatoplet
A new investigation is done of the possibility of binding the "dodecatoplet",
a system of six top quarks and six top antiquarks, using the Yukawa potential
mediated by Higgs exchange. A simple variational method gives a upper bound
close to that recently estimated in a mean-field calculation. It is
supplemented by a lower bound provided by identities among the Hamiltonians
describing the system and its subsystems.Comment: 5 pages, two figures merged, refs. added, typos correcte
Quantum gates with neutral atoms: Controlling collisional interactions in time dependent traps
We theoretically study specific schemes for performing a fundamental
two-qubit quantum gate via controlled atomic collisions by switching
microscopic potentials. In particular we calculate the fidelity of a gate
operation for a configuration where a potential barrier between two atoms is
instantaneously removed and restored after a certain time. Possible
implementations could be based on microtraps created by magnetic and electric
fields, or potentials induced by laser light.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figure
Monotonicity of quantum ground state energies: Bosonic atoms and stars
The N-dependence of the non-relativistic bosonic ground state energy is
studied for quantum N-body systems with either Coulomb or Newton interactions.
The Coulomb systems are "bosonic atoms," with their nucleus fixed, and the
Newton systems are "bosonic stars". In either case there exists some third
order polynomial in N such that the ratio of the ground state energy to the
respective polynomial grows monotonically in N. Some applications of these new
monotonicity results are discussed
Migration promotes plasmid stability under spatially heterogeneous positive selection
Bacteria-plasmid associations can be mutualistic or antagonistic depending on the strength of positive selection for plasmid-encoded genes, with contrasting outcomes for plasmid stability. In mutualistic environments, plasmids are swept to high frequency by positive selection, increasing the likelihood of compensatory evolution to ameliorate the plasmid cost, which promotes long-term stability. In antagonistic environments, plasmids are purged by negative selection, reducing the probability of compensatory evolution and driving their extinction. Here we show, using experimental evolution of Pseudomonas fluorescens and the mercury-resistance plasmid, pQBR103, that migration promotes plasmid stability in spatially heterogeneous selection environments. Specifically, migration from mutualistic environments, by increasing both the frequency of the plasmid and the supply of compensatory mutations, stabilized plasmids in antagonistic environments where, without migration, they approached extinction. These data suggest that spatially heterogeneous positive selection, which is common in natural environments, coupled with migration helps to explain the stability of plasmids and the ecologically important genes that they encode
Competitive species interactions constrain abiotic adaptation in a bacterial soil community
Studies of abiotic adaptation often consider single species in isolation, yet natural communities contain many coexisting species which could limit or promote abiotic adaptation. Here we show, using soil bacterial communities, that evolving in the presence of a competitor constrained abiotic adaptation. Specifically, Pseudomonas fluorescens evolved alone was fitter than P. fluorescens evolved alongside Pseudomonas putida, when P. putida was absent. Genome analyses indicated this was due to mutation of the acetate scavenger actP, which occurred exclusively, and almost universally, in singleâspeciesâevolved clones. actP disruption was associated with increased growth in soil compared with wildâtype actP, but this benefit was abolished when P. putida was present, suggesting a role for carbon scavenging transporters in species interactions, possibly through nutrient competition. Our results show that competitive species interactions can limit the evolutionary response to abiotic selection, because the fitness benefits of abiotic adaptive mutations were negated in more complex communities
Coherence as ultrashort pulse train generator
Intense, well-controlled regular light pulse trains start to play a crucial
role in many fields of physics. We theoretically demonstrate a very simple and
robust technique for generating such periodic ultrashort pulses from a
continuous probe wave which propagates in a dispersive thermal gas media
Anomalies on orbifolds with gauge symmetry breaking
We embed two 4D chiral multiplets of opposite representations in the 5D N=2
gauge theory compactified on an orbifold .
There are two types of orbifold boundary conditions in the extra dimension to
obtain the 4D N=1 gauge theory from the bulk: in
Type I, one has the bulk gauge group at and the unbroken gauge group at
while in Type II, one has the unbroken gauge group at both fixed
points. In both types of orbifold boundary conditions, we consider the zero
mode(s) as coming from a bulk -plet and brane fields at the fixed
point(s) with the unbroken gauge group. We check the consistency of this
embedding of fields by the localized anomalies and the localized FI terms. We
show that the localized anomalies in Type I are cancelled exactly by the
introduction of a bulk Chern-Simons term. On the other hand, in some class of
Type II, the Chern-Simons term is not enough to cancel all localized anomalies
even if they are globally vanishing. We also find that for the consistent
embedding of brane fields, there appear only the localized log FI terms at the
fixed point(s) with a U(1) factor.Comment: LaTeX file of 19 pages with no figure, published versio
Rearranging Edgeworth-Cornish-Fisher Expansions
This paper applies a regularization procedure called increasing rearrangement
to monotonize Edgeworth and Cornish-Fisher expansions and any other related
approximations of distribution and quantile functions of sample statistics.
Besides satisfying the logical monotonicity, required of distribution and
quantile functions, the procedure often delivers strikingly better
approximations to the distribution and quantile functions of the sample mean
than the original Edgeworth-Cornish-Fisher expansions.Comment: 17 pages, 3 figure
Weakly-Bound Three-Body Systems with No Bound Subsystems
We investigate the domain of coupling constants which achieve binding for a
3-body system, while none of the 2-body subsystems is bound. We derive some
general properties of the shape of the domain, and rigorous upper bounds on its
size, using a Hall--Post decomposition of the Hamiltonian. Numerical
illustrations are provided in the case of a Yukawa potential, using a simple
variational method.Comment: gzipped ps with 11 figures included. To appear in Phys. Rev.
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