9,433 research outputs found
Organic farming without fossil fuels - life cycle assessment of two Swedish cases
Organic agriculture is dependent on fossil fuels, just like conventional agriculture, but this can be reduced by the use of on-farm biomass resources. The energy efficiency and environmental impacts of different alternatives can be assessed by life cycle assessment (LCA), which we have done in this project. Swedish organic milk production can become self-sufficient in energy by using renewable sources available on the farm, with biogas from manure as the main energy source. Thereby greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from the production system can be reduced, both by substituting fossil fuels and by reducing methane emissions from manure. The arable organic farm studied in the project could be self-sufficient in energy by using the residues available in the crop rotation. Because of soil carbon losses, the greenhouse gas emission savings were lower with the use of straw ethanol, heat and power (9%) than by using ley for biogas production (35%).
In this research project, the system boundaries were set at energy self-sufficiency at farm or farm-cluster level. Heat and fuel were supplied as needed, and electricity production was equal to use on an annual basis. In practice, however, better resource efficiency can be achieved by making full use of available energy infrastructure, and basing production on resource availability and economic constraints, rather than a narrow self-sufficiency approach
Are there sharp fractional charges in Luttinger liquids?
We examine charge fractionalization by chiral separation in a one-dimensional
fermion system described by Luttinger liquid theory. The focus is on the
question of whether the fractional charges are quantum mechanically sharp, and
in the analysis we make a distinction between the global charge, which is
restricted by boundary conditions, and the local charge where a background
contribution is subtracted. We show, by way of examples, that fractional
charges of arbitrary values, all which are quantum mechanically sharp, can be
introduced by different initial conditions. Since the system is gapless,
excitations of arbitrary low frequency contribute to the fluctuations, it is
important to make a precise definition of sharp charges, and this we we do by
subtraction of the ground state contribution. We very briefly comment on the
relevance of our analysis for proposed experiments.Comment: One reference update
Microscopic theory of the quantum Hall hierarchy
We solve the quantum Hall problem exactly in a limit and show that the ground
states can be organized in a fractal pattern consistent with the
Haldane-Halperin hierarchy, and with the global phase diagram. We present wave
functions for a large family of states, including those of Laughlin and Jain
and also for states recently observed by Pan {\it et. al.}, and show that they
coincide with the exact ones in the solvable limit. We submit that they
establish an adiabatic continuation of our exact results to the experimentally
accessible regime, thus providing a unified approach to the hierarchy states.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures. Publishe
Charge Fractionalization on Quantum Hall Edges
We discuss the propagation and fractionalization of localized charges on the
edges of quantum Hall bars of variable widths, where interactions between the
edges give rise to Luttinger liquid behavior with a non-trivial interaction
parameter g. We focus in particular on the separation of an initial charge
pulse into a sharply defined front charge and a broader tail. The front pulse
describes an adiabatically dressed electron which carries a non-integer charge,
which is \sqrt{g} times the electron charge. We discuss how the presence of
this fractional charge can, in principle, be detected through measurements of
the noise in the current created by tunneling of electrons into the system. The
results are illustrated by numerical simulations of a simplified model of the
Hall bar.Comment: 15 page
Solitons and Quasielectrons in the Quantum Hall Matrix Model
We show how to incorporate fractionally charged quasielectrons in the finite
quantum Hall matrix model.The quasielectrons emerge as combinations of BPS
solitons and quasiholes in a finite matrix version of the noncommutative
theory coupled to a noncommutative Chern-Simons gauge field. We also
discuss how to properly define the charge density in the classical matrix
model, and calculate density profiles for droplets, quasiholes and
quasielectrons.Comment: 15 pages, 9 figure
Edge Theories for Polarized Quantum Hall States
Starting from recently proposed bosonic mean field theories for fully and
partially polarized quantum Hall states, we construct corresponding effective
low energy theories for the edge modes. The requirements of gauge symmetry and
invariance under global O(3) spin rotations, broken only by a Zeeman coupling,
imply boundary conditions that allow for edge spin waves. In the generic case,
these modes are chiral, and the spin stiffness differs from that in the bulk.
For the case of a fully polarized state, our results agree with
previous Hartree-Fock calculations.Comment: 15 pages (number of pages has been reduced by typesetting in RevTeX);
2 references adde
Does export dependency hurt economic development? Empirical evidence from Singapore
A rapid export growth in East Asia was once identified as a source of the sustainable economic development that the region enjoyed. However, the current global recession has turned exports from an economic virtue to a vice. There is a growing awareness that a heavy reliance on exports has caused a serious economic downturn in the region. The present paper chooses Singapore as a case study to examine the relationship between the origin of the East Asian Miracle (i.e. export dependency) and the economic growth. For this purpose, the study employs a causality test developed by Toda and Yamamoto. The empirical findings indicate that despite a negative long-run relationship between export dependency and economic growth, Singapore's heavy reliance on exports does not seem to have produced negative effects on the nation's economic growth. This is because the increase in export dependency was an effect, and not a cause, of the country's output expansion.
Enabling application-level performance guarantees in network-based systems on chip by applying dataflow analysis
A growing number of applications, often with real-time requirements, are integrated on the same system on chip (SoC), in the form of hardware and software intellectual property (IP). To facilitate real-time applications, networks on chip (NoC) guarantee bounds on latency and throughput. These bounds, however, only extend to the network interfaces (NI), between the IP and the NoC. To give performance guarantees on the application level, the buffers in the NIs must be sufficiently large for the particular application. At the same time, it is imperative to minimise the size of the NI buffers, as they are major contributors to the area and power consumption of the NoC. Existing buffer-sizing methods use coarse-grained application models, based on linear traffic bounds or periodic producers and consumers, thus severely limiting their applicability. In this work, the authors propose to capture the behaviour of the NoC and the applications using a dataflow model. This enables one to verify the temporal behaviour and to compute buffer sizes using existing dataflow analysis techniques. The authors show what is required from the NoC architecture and demonstrate how to construct an NoC model, with multiple levels of detail. Using the proposed model, buffer sizes are determined for a range of SoC designs with a run time comparable to existing analytical methods, and results comparable to exhaustive simulation. For an application case study, where existing buffer-sizing methods are not applicable, the proposed model enables the verification of end-to-end temporal behaviour
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