3,378 research outputs found
Design concepts for bioreactors in space
Microbial food sources are becoming viable and more efficient alternatives to conventional food sources especially in the context of Closed Ecological Life Support Systems (CELSS) in space habitats. Since bioreactor designs for terrestrial operation will not readily apply to conditions of microgravity, there is an urgent need to learn about the differences. These differences cannot be easily estimated due to the complex nature of the mass transport and mixing mechanisms in fermenters. Therefore, a systematic and expeditious experimental program must be undertaken to obtain the engineering data necessary to lay down the foundations of designing bioreactors for microgravity. Two bioreactor design concepts presented represent two dissimilar approaches to grappling with the absence of gravity in space habitats and deserve to be tested for adoption as important components of the life support function aboard spacecrafts, space stations and other extra-terrestrial habitats
Rain: Relaxations in the sky
We demonstrate how, from the point of view of energy flow through an open
system, rain is analogous to many other relaxational processes in Nature such
as earthquakes. By identifying rain events as the basic entities of the
phenomenon, we show that the number density of rain events per year is
inversely proportional to the released water column raised to the power 1.4.
This is the rain-equivalent of the Gutenberg-Richter law for earthquakes. The
event durations and the waiting times between events are also characterised by
scaling regions, where no typical time scale exists. The Hurst exponent of the
rain intensity signal . It is valid in the temporal range from
minutes up to the full duration of the signal of half a year. All of our
findings are consistent with the concept of self-organised criticality, which
refers to the tendency of slowly driven non-equilibrium systems towards a state
of scale free behaviour.Comment: 9 pages, 8 figures, submitted to PR
Quantum Monte Carlo Study on Magnetization Processes
A quantum Monte Carlo method combining update of the loop algorithm with the
global flip of the world line is proposed as an efficient method to study the
magnetization process in an external field, which has been difficult because of
inefficiency of the update of the total magnetization. The method is
demonstrated in the one dimensional antiferromagnetic Heisenberg model and the
trimer model. We attempted various other Monte Carlo algorithms to study
systems in the external field and compared their efficiency.Comment: 5 pages, 9 figures; added references for section 1, corrected typo
Meron-Cluster Solution of Fermion and Other Sign Problems
Numerical simulations of numerous quantum systems suffer from the notorious
sign problem. Important examples include QCD and other field theories at
non-zero chemical potential, at non-zero vacuum angle, or with an odd number of
flavors, as well as the Hubbard model for high-temperature superconductivity
and quantum antiferromagnets in an external magnetic field. In all these cases
standard simulation algorithms require an exponentially large statistics in
large space-time volumes and are thus impossible to use in practice.
Meron-cluster algorithms realize a general strategy to solve severe sign
problems but must be constructed for each individual case. They lead to a
complete solution of the sign problem in several of the above cases.Comment: 15 pages,LATTICE9
Design concepts for bioreactors in space
Microbial food sources are becoming viable and more efficient alternatives to conventional food sources, especially in the context of closed ecological life support systems (CELSS) in space habitats. Two bioreactor design concepts presented represent two dissimilar approaches to grappling with the absence of gravity in space habitats and deserve to be tested for adoption as important components of the life support function aboard spacecraft, space stations and other extra-terrestrial habitats
The Two-Dimensional S=1 Quantum Heisenberg Antiferromagnet at Finite Temperatures
The temperature dependence of the correlation length, susceptibilities and
the magnetic structure factor of the two-dimensional spin-1 square lattice
quantum Heisenberg antiferromagnet are computed by the quantum Monte Carlo loop
algorithm (QMC). In the experimentally relevant temperature regime the
theoretically predicted asymptotic low temperature behavior is found to be not
valid. The QMC results however, agree reasonably well with the experimental
measurements of La2NiO4 even without considering anisotropies in the exchange
interactions.Comment: 4 Pages, 1 table, 4 figure
QCD as a Quantum Link Model
QCD is constructed as a lattice gauge theory in which the elements of the
link matrices are represented by non-commuting operators acting in a Hilbert
space. The resulting quantum link model for QCD is formulated with a fifth
Euclidean dimension, whose extent resembles the inverse gauge coupling of the
resulting four-dimensional theory after dimensional reduction. The inclusion of
quarks is natural in Shamir's variant of Kaplan's fermion method, which does
not require fine-tuning to approach the chiral limit. A rishon representation
in terms of fermionic constituents of the gluons is derived and the quantum
link Hamiltonian for QCD with a U(N) gauge symmetry is expressed in terms of
glueball, meson and constituent quark operators. The new formulation of QCD is
promising both from an analytic and from a computational point of view.Comment: 27 pages, including three figures. ordinary LaTeX; Submitted to Nucl.
Phys.
New Experimental limit on Optical Photon Coupling to Neutral, Scalar Bosons
We report on the first results of a sensitive search for scalar coupling of
photons to a light neutral boson in the mass range of approximately 1.0
milli-electron volts and coupling strength greater than 10 GeV using
optical photons. This was a photon regeneration experiment using the "light
shining through a wall" technique in which laser light was passed through a
strong magnetic field upstream of an optical beam dump; regenerated laser light
was then searched for downstream of a second magnetic field region optically
shielded from the former. Our results show no evidence for scalar coupling in
this region of parameter space.Comment: pdf-file, 10 pages, 4 figures, submitted to Physical Review Letter
Turn-Taking and the Local Management of Conversation in a Highly Simultaneous Computer-Mediated Communication System
Ongoing inquiry in communication technology research includes the questions of whether and how users adapt communication to the relatively restricted codes provided by text-based computer-mediated communication (CMC). This study proposes that adaptations may be affected by the level of simultaneity in messaging that CMC systems afford users. This suggestion is examined through an analysis of the particular conversational management strategies afforded by a fully synchronous computer-mediated communication system in which message transmission is keystroke-by-keystroke. Conversation analyses performed on the transcript of a three-person online conversation suggest several conclusions: Despite the novelty of the system, the CMC users appropriated and adapted many techniques from face-to-face conversations for the local management of conversations, including turn taking, turn allocation, and explicit interruption management. At the time, turn exchange was accomplished by the use of overlapping intermittent talk followed by lengthy strategic pauses, rather than according to the âno gap, no overlapâ ideal of spoken conversation. Overall, the computer-mediated exchanges appeared resilient to modality change, and users spontaneously and creatively employed both traditional and technical features of conversation management
Elementary excitations of the symmetric spin-orbital model: The XY limit
The elementary excitations of the 1D, symmetric, spin-orbital model are
investigated by studying two anisotropic versions of the model, the pure XY and
the dimerized XXZ case, with analytical and numerical methods. While they
preserve the symmetry between spin and orbital degrees of freedom, these models
allow for a simple and transparent picture of the low--lying excitations: In
the pure XY case, a phase separation takes place between two phases with
free--fermion like, gapless excitations, while in the dimerized case, the
low-energy effective Hamiltonian reduces to the 1D Ising model with gapped
excitations. In both cases, all the elementary excitations involve simultaneous
flips of the spin and orbital degrees of freedom, a clear indication of the
breakdown of the traditional mean-field theory.Comment: Revtex, two figure
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