Drought Risk and Drought Response in Morocco: Vulnerability, Risk Perceptions and Drought Coping Among Rainfed Cereal Farmers

drought, coping, vulnerability, risk, Community/Rural/Urban Development, Food Security and Poverty, Risk and Uncertainty,

Gender dimensions of social networks and technology adoption: Evidence from a field experiment in Uttar Pradesh

The CSISA project was launched in 2009 with the goal of reducing food andincome insecurity in South Asia through accelerated development and deployment of new cereal varieties, sustainable crop and resource systems management practices, and better access to information. The project includes widespread delivery and adaptation of production and postharvest technologies to increase cereal production and raise income; and promotion of (i) crop and resource manag-ement practices, and (ii) high-¬yielding, stress tolerant and disease-and insect resistant rice, wheat and maize varieties and hybrids. GAAP looked at two different CSISA projects. This project focused on how gendered social networks affect how men and women within the same household acquire information about agricutural technologies, using the technology of laser land leveling (LLL) as an example

A low-steering piezo-driven mirror

We present a piezo-driven translatable mirror with excellent pointing stability, capable of driving at frequencies up to tens of kilohertz. Our system uses a tripod of piezo actuators with independently controllable drive voltages, where the ratios of the individual drive voltages are tuned to minimize residual tilting. Attached to a standard {\varnothing}= 12.7mm mirror, the system has a resonance-free mechanical bandwidth up to 51kHz, with displacements up to 2{\mu}m at 8kHz. The maximum static steering error is 5.5rad per micrometer displaced and the dynamic steering error is lower than 0.6rad/{\mu}m. This simple design should be useful for a large set of optical applications where tilt-free displacements are required, and we demonstrate its application in an ensemble of cold atoms trapped in periodically driven optical lattices

Surface composition of BaTiO3/SrTiO3(001) films grown by atomic oxygen plasma assisted molecular beam epitaxy

We have investigated the growth of BaTiO3 thin films deposited on pure and 1% Nb-doped SrTiO3(001) single crystals using atomic oxygen assisted molecular beam epitaxy (AO-MBE) and dedicated Ba and Ti Knudsen cells. Thicknesses up to 30 nm were investigated for various layer compositions. We demonstrate 2D growth and epitaxial single crystalline BaTiO3 layers up to 10 nm before additional 3D features appear; lattice parameter relaxation occurs during the first few nanometers and is completed at {\guillemotright}10 nm. The presence of a Ba oxide rich top layer that probably favors 2D growth is evidenced for well crystallized layers. We show that the Ba oxide rich top layer can be removed by chemical etching. The present work stresses the importance of stoichiometry and surface composition of BaTiO3 layers, especially in view of their integration in devices.Comment: In press in J. Appl. Phy

Crystallographic structure of ultrathin Fe films on Cu(100)

We report bcc-like crystal structures in 2-4 ML Fe films grown on fcc Cu(100) using scanning tunneling microscopy. The local bcc structure provides a straightforward explanation for their frequently reported outstanding magnetic properties, i.e., ferromagnetic ordering in all layers with a Curie temperature above 300 K. The non-pseudomorphic structure, which becomes pseudomorphic above 4 ML film thickness is unexpected in terms of conventional rules of thin film growth and stresses the importance of finite thickness effects in ferromagnetic ultrathin films.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, RevTeX/LaTeX2.0

Determination of the cation site distribution of the spinel in multiferroic CoFe2O4 / BaTiO3 layers by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy

International audienceThe properties of CoFe2O4/BaTiO3 artificial multiferroic multilayers strongly depend on the crystalline structure, the stoichiometry and the cation distribution between octahedral (Oh) and tetrahedral (Td) sites (inversion factor). In the present study, we have investigated epitaxial CoFe2O4 layers grown on BaTiO3, with different Co/Fe ratios. We determined the cation distribution in our samples by X-ray magnetic circular dichroism (XMCD), a well accepted method to do so, and by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), using a fitting method based on physical considerations. We observed that our XPS approach converged on results consistent with XMCD measurements made on the same samples. Thus, within a careful decomposition based on individual chemical environments it is shown that XPS is fully able to determine the actual inversion factor