The future of the Dutch egg processing industry

This research examines the competitiveness of the Dutch egg products industry, as well as the consequences of tightening up the laws concerning layer poultry on the competitive position of the Dutch egg production industry. A tightening of the laws has, in fact, the effect of raising the production cost, and in this research the central question revolves around whether animal welfare-friendly egg products are perceived as products with added value by the buyers of egg products (mainly industrial buyers) and will thus also be offered for sale at a higher price. Furthermore, it will be investigated what the probable developmental directions are in the egg products industry if this higher price cannot be realise

Solitary Waves in Discrete Media with Four Wave Mixing

In this paper, we examine in detail the principal branches of solutions that arise in vector discrete models with nonlinear inter-component coupling and four wave mixing. The relevant four branches of solutions consist of two single mode branches (transverse electric and transverse magnetic) and two mixed mode branches, involving both components (linearly polarized and elliptically polarized). These solutions are obtained explicitly and their stability is analyzed completely in the anti-continuum limit (where the nodes of the lattice are uncoupled), illustrating the supercritical pitchfork nature of the bifurcations that give rise to the latter two, respectively, from the former two. Then the branches are continued for finite coupling constructing a full two-parameter numerical bifurcation diagram of their existence. Relevant stability ranges and instability regimes are highlighted and, whenever unstable, the solutions are dynamically evolved through direct computations to monitor the development of the corresponding instabilities. Direct connections to the earlier experimental work of Meier et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 91}, 143907 (2003)] that motivated the present work are given.Comment: 13 pages, 10 figure

Evaluation of high pressure water blast with rotating spray bar for removing paint and rubber deposits from airport runways, and review of runway slipperiness problems created by rubber contamination

A high pressure water blast with rotating spray bar treatment for removing paint and rubber deposits from airport runways is studied. The results of the evaluation suggest that the treatment is very effective in removing above surface paint and rubber deposits to the point that pavement skid resistance is restored to trafficked but uncontaminated runway surface skid resistance levels. Aircraft operating problems created by runway slipperiness are reviewed along with an assessment of the contributions that pavement surface treatments, surface weathering, traffic polishing, and rubber deposits make in creating or alleviating runway slipperiness. The results suggest that conventional surface treatments for both portland cement and asphaltic concrete runways are extremely vulnerable to rubber deposit accretions which can produce runway slipperiness conditions for aircraft operations as or more slippery than many snow and ice-covered runway conditions. Pavement grooving surface treatments are shown to be the least vulnerable to rubber deposits accretion and traffic polishing of the surface treatments examined

Interference and complementarity for two-photon hybrid entangled states

In this work we generate two-photon hybrid entangled states (HES), where the polarization of one photon is entangled with the transverse spatial degree of freedom of the second photon. The photon pair is created by parametric down-conversion in a polarization-entangled state. A birefringent double-slit couples the polarization and spatial degrees of freedom of these photons and finally, suitable spatial and polarization projections generate the HES. We investigate some interesting aspects of the two-photon hybrid interference, and present this study in the context of the complementarity relation that exists between the visibilities of the one- and two-photon interference patterns.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures. Accepted in Physical Review

The Millennium Galaxy Catalogue: Star counts and the Structure of the Galactic Stellar Halo

We derive a star catalogue generated from the images taken as part of the 37.5 sq. deg Millennium Galaxy Catalogue. These data, alone and together with colours gained from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Early Data Release, allow the analysis of faint star counts (B(MGC) < 20) at high Galactic latitude (41 < b < 63), as a function of Galactic longitude (239 < l < 353). We focus here on the inner stellar halo, providing robust limits on the amplitude of substructure and on the large-scale flattening. In line with previous results, the thick disk, an old, intermediate-metallicity population, is clearly seen in the colour-magnitude diagram. We find that the Galactic stellar halo within ~10 kpc (the bulk of the stellar mass) is significantly flattened, with an axial ratio of (c/a) =0.56 +/- 0.01, again consistent with previous results. Our analysis using counts-in-cells, angular correlation functions and the Lee 2D statistic, confirms tidal debris from the Sagittarius dwarf but finds little evidence for other substructure in the inner halo, at heliocentric distances of < 5 kpc. This new quantification of the smoothness in coordinate space limits the contribution of recent accretion/disruption to the build-up of the bulk of the stellar halo.Comment: Accepted for publication in MNRAS (figs 16 and 17 degraded here

Class of Einstein--Maxwell Dilatons

Three different classes of static solutions of the Einstein--Maxwell equations non--minimally coupled to a dilaton field are presented. The solutions are given in general in terms of two arbitrary harmonic functions and involve among others an arbitrary parameter which determines their applicability as charged black holes, dilaton black holes or strings. Most of the known solutions are contained as special cases and can be non--trivially generalized in different ways.Comment: Published in Physical Review D, R310 (1995

Rotating Dilaton Black Holes

It is shown that an arbitrarily small amount of angular momentum can qualitatively change the properties of extremal charged black holes coupled to a dilaton. In addition, the gyromagnetic ratio of these black holes is computed and an exact rotating black string solution is presented.Comment: 14 page