Neutrinoless Double Beta Decay with SNO+

SNO+ will search for neutrinoless double beta decay by loading 780 tonnes of linear alkylbenzene liquid scintillator with O(tonne) of neodymium. Using natural Nd at 0.1% loading will provide 43.7 kg of 150Nd given its 5.6% abundance and allow the experiment to reach a sensitivity to the effective neutrino mass of 100-200 meV at 90% C.L in a 3 year run. The SNO+ detector has ultra low backgrounds with 7000 tonnes of water shielding and self-shielding of the scintillator. Distillation and several other purification techniques will be used with the aim of achieving Borexino levels of backgrounds. The experiment is fully funded and data taking with light-water will commence in 2012 with scintillator data following in 2013.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, prepared for TAUP 201

THE IMPACTS OF THE CONSERVATION RESERVE PROGRAM ON RURAL COMMUNITIES: THE CASE OF THREE OREGON COUNTIES

Using an economic input/output model, the community personal income impacts of participating in the Conservation Reserve Program were analyzed for three rural Oregon counties. While individual farmers may benefit from participation, there may be net adverse impact on the community if the retired land is relatively productive or if the inputs that are no longer purchased would have been purchased locally. These negative effects may be exacerbated if participating farmers quit farming and leave the local area or if the Conservation Reserve Program benefits go to absentee landowners. The Conservation Reserve Program may then represent a conflict between community and national policy objectives.Agricultural and Food Policy, Community/Rural/Urban Development,

Effect of rib roughness pitch on thermal and thermo-hydraulic performance of a solar air heater roughened artificially with arc rib having gap

This experimental study on a solar air heater having absorber plate roughened artificially by providing roughness in the form of arc ribs having gap was carried out in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana, India to study the effect of relative roughness pitch on thermal and thermohydraulic performance as well as to compare the performance of arc rib with gap roughened solar air heater with that of continuous arc rib roughened solar air heater. The roughness geometry parameters included relative roughness height of 0.043, angle of attack of 30 degree, relative gap position of 0.80, gap-width equal to the width of the rib and five values of relative roughness pitch ranging from 4 to 12 for flow Reynolds number range of 2000 to 16,000. The Nusselt number and friction factor were found to be more for relative roughness pitch value of 10 as compared to other values of relative roughness pitch. Thermo-hydraulic performance of solar air heaters roughened by arc with gap and continuous arc roughness geometries were found to be 1.91 times and 1.78 times respectively as compared to that of solar air heater having smooth absorber plate due to generation of turbulence in laminar sublayer region. However, improvement in thermo-hydraulic performance of solar air heater roughened by arc with gap geometry over continuous arc rib roughened solar air heater was attributed to generation of a region of turbulence on downstream side of the gap

Modeling electronic structure and transport properties of graphene with resonant scattering centers

We present a detailed numerical study of the electronic properties of single-layer graphene with resonant ("hydrogen") impurities and vacancies within a framework of noninteracting tight-binding model on a honeycomb lattice. The algorithms are based on the numerical solution of the time-dependent Schr\"{o}dinger equation and applied to calculate the density of states, \textit{quasieigenstates}, AC and DC conductivities of large samples containing millions of atoms. Our results give a consistent picture of evolution of electronic structure and transport properties of functionalized graphene in a broad range of concentration of impurities (from graphene to graphane), and show that the formation of impurity band is the main factor determining electrical and optical properties at intermediate impurity concentrations, together with a gap opening when approaching the graphane limit.Comment: 17 pages, 17 figures, expanded version to appear in PR

The right to health as the basis for universal health coverage:A cross-national analysis of national medicines policies of 71 countries

Persistent barriers to universal access to medicines are limited social protection in the event of illness, inadequate financing for essential medicines, frequent stock-outs in the public sector, and high prices in the private sector. We argue that greater coherence between human rights law, national medicines policies, and universal health coverage schemes can address these barriers. We present a cross-national content analysis of national medicines policies from 71 countries published between 1990-2016. The World Health Organization's ( WHO) 2001 guidelines for developing and implementing a national medicines policy and all 71 national medicines policies were assessed on 12 principles, linking a health systems approach to essential medicines with international human rights law for medicines affordability and financing for vulnerable groups. National medicines policies most frequently contain measures for medicines selection and efficient spending/cost-effectiveness. Four principles ( legal right to health; government financing; efficient spending; and financial protection of vulnerable populations) are significantly stronger in national medicines policies published after 2004 than before. Six principles have remained weak or absent: pooling user contributions, international cooperation, and four principles for good governance. Overall, South Africa ( 1996), Indonesia and South Sudan ( 2006), Philippines ( 2011-2016), Malaysia ( 2012), Somalia ( 2013), Afghanistan ( 2014), and Uganda ( 2015) include the most relevant texts and can be used as models for other settings. We conclude that WHO's 2001 guidelines have guided the content and language of many subsequent national medicines policies. WHO and national policy makers can use these principles and the practical examples identified in our study to further align national medicines policies with human rights law and with Target 3.8 for universal access to essential medicines in the Sustainable Development Goals

Magnetization damping in a local-density approximation

The linear response of itinerant transition metal ferromagnets to transverse magnetic fields is studied in a self-consistent adiabatic local-density approximation. The susceptibility is calculated from a microscopic Hamiltonian, including spin-conserving impurities, impurity induced spin-orbit interaction and magnetic impurities using the Keldysh formalism. The Gilbert damping constant in the Landau-Lifshitz-Gilbert equation is identified, parametrized by an effective transverse spin dephasing rate, and is found to be inversely proportional to the exchange splitting. Our result justify the phenomenological treatment of transverse spin dephasing in the study of current-induced magnetization dynamics in weak, itinerant ferromagnets by Tserkovnyak \textit{et al.}. We show that neglect of gradient corrections in the quasiclassical transport equations leads to incorrect results when the exchange potential becomes of the order of the Fermi energy.Comment: 11 pages, 41 references, no figure

A two-dimensional representation of four-dimensional gravitational waves

The Einstein equation in D dimensions, if restricted to the class of space-times possessing n = D - 2 commuting hypersurface-orthogonal Killing vectors, can be equivalently written as metric-dilaton gravity in 2 dimensions with n scalar fields. For n = 2, this results reduces to the known reduction of certain 4-dimensional metrics which include gravitational waves. Here, we give such a representation which leads to a new proof of the Birkhoff theorem for plane-symmetric space--times, and which leads to an explanation, in which sense two (spin zero-) scalar fields in 2 dimensions may incorporate the (spin two-) gravitational waves in 4 dimensions. (This result should not be mixed up with well--known analogous statements where, however, the 4-dimensional space-time is supposed to be spherically symmetric, and then, of course, the equivalent 2-dimensional picture cannot mimic any gravitational waves.) Finally, remarks on hidden symmetries in 2 dimensions are made.Comment: 12 pages, LaTeX, no figures, Int. J. Mod. Phys. D in prin

Gauss-Bonnet lagrangian G ln G and cosmological exact solutions

For the lagrangian L = G ln G where G is the Gauss-Bonnet curvature scalar we deduce the field equation and solve it in closed form for 3-flat Friedman models using a statefinder parametrization. Further we show, that among all lagrangians F(G) this L is the only one not having the form G^r with a real constant r but possessing a scale-invariant field equation. This turns out to be one of its analogies to f(R)-theories in 2-dimensional space-time. In the appendix, we systematically list several formulas for the decomposition of the Riemann tensor in arbitrary dimensions n, which are applied in the main deduction for n=4.Comment: 18 pages, amended version, accepted by Phys. Rev.

Generating and sustaining long-lived spin states in 15N,15N′-azobenzene

Long-Lived spin States (LLSs) hold a great promise for sustaining non-thermal spin order and investigating various slow processes by Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy. Of special interest for such application are molecules containing nearly equivalent magnetic nuclei, which possess LLSs even at high magnetic fields. In this work, we report an LLS in trans-15N,15N′-azobenzene. The singlet state of the 15N spin pair exhibits a long-lived character. We solve the challenging problem of generating and detecting this LLS and further increase the LLS population by converting the much higher magnetization of protons into the 15N singlet spin order. As far as the longevity of this spin order is concerned, various schemes have been tested for sustaining the LLS. Lifetimes of 17 minutes have been achieved at 16.4 T, a value about 250 times longer than the longitudinal relaxation time of 15N in this magnetic field. We believe that such extended relaxation times, along with the photochromic properties of azobenzene, which changes conformation upon light irradiation and can be hyperpolarized by using parahydrogen, are promising for designing new experiments with photo-switchable long-lived hyperpolarization