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Space shuttle high pressure auxiliary propulsion subsystem definition study Summary report
Space shuttle high pressure hydrogen oxygen auxiliary propulsion subsystem conceptual and design study summar
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Effects of urbanisation and landscape heterogeneity mediated by feeding guild and body size in a community of coprophilous beetles
Although the impacts of urbanisation on biodiversity are well studied, the precise response of some invertebrate groups remains poorly known. Dung-associated beetles are little studied in an urban context, especially in temperate regions. We considered how landscape heterogeneity, assessed at three spatial scales (250, 500 and 1000 metre radius), mediates the community composition of coprophilous beetles on a broad urban gradient. Beetles were sampled using simple dung-baited traps, placed at 48 sites stratified across three distance bands around a large urban centre in England. The most urban sites hosted the lowest abundance of saprophagous beetles, with a lower mean body length relative to the least urban sites. Predicted overall species richness and the richness of saprophagous species were also lowest at the most urban sites. Ordination analyses followed by variation partitioning revealed that landscape heterogeneity across the urban gradient explained a small but significant proportion of community composition. Heterogeneity data for a 500-metre radius around each site provided the best fit with beetle community data. Larger saprophagous species were associated with lower amounts of manmade surface and improved grassland. Some individual species, particularly predators, appeared to be positively associated with urban or urban fringe sites. This study is probably the first to examine the response of the whole coprophilous beetle community to urbanisation. Our results suggest that the response of this community to urbanisation matches expectations based on other taxonomic groups, whilst emphasising the complex nature of this response, with some smaller-bodied species potentially benefitting from urbanisation
Non-collinear Magnetoelectronics
The electron transport properties of hybrid ferromagnetic|normal metal
structures such as multilayers and spin valves depend on the relative
orientation of the magnetization direction of the ferromagnetic elements.
Whereas the contrast in the resistance for parallel and antiparallel
magnetizations, the so-called Giant Magnetoresistance, is relatively well
understood for quite some time, a coherent picture for non-collinear
magnetoelectronic circuits and devices has evolved only recently. We review
here such a theory for electron charge and spin transport with general
magnetization directions that is based on the semiclassical concept of a vector
spin accumulation. In conjunction with first-principles calculations of
scattering matrices many phenomena, e.g. the current-induced spin-transfer
torque, can be understood and predicted quantitatively for different material
combinations.Comment: 163 pages, to be published in Physics Report
Device for measuring the contour of a surface
Light from a source is imaged by a lens onto a surface so that the energy from the source is concentrated into a spot. As the spot across the surface is scanned, the surface moves relative to the point of perfect focus. When the surface moves away from perfect focus the spot increases in size, while the total energy in the spot remains virtually constant. The lens then reimages the light reflected by the surface onto two detectors through two different sized apertures. The light energy going to the two detectors is separated by a beam splitter. This second path of the light energy through the lens further defocuses the spot, but as a result of the different sizes of the apertures in each light detector path, the amount of defocus for each is different. The ratio of the outputs of the two detectors which are indicative of the contour of the surface is obtained by a divider
Thermal Spin-Transfer Torques in Magnetoelectronic Devices
We predict that the magnetization direction of a ferromagnet can be reversed
by the spin-transfer torque accompanying spin-polarized thermoelectric heat
currents. We illustrate the concept by applying a finite-element theory of
thermoelectric transport in disordered magnetoelectronic circuits and devices
to metallic spin valves. When thermalization is not complete, a spin heat
accumulation vector is found in the normal metal spacer, i.e., a directional
imbalance in the temperature of majority and minority spins.Comment: Accepted for publication by Physical Review Letter
State space collapse and diffusion approximation for a network operating under a fair bandwidth sharing policy
We consider a connection-level model of Internet congestion control,
introduced by Massouli\'{e} and Roberts [Telecommunication Systems 15 (2000)
185--201], that represents the randomly varying number of flows present in a
network. Here, bandwidth is shared fairly among elastic document transfers
according to a weighted -fair bandwidth sharing policy introduced by Mo
and Walrand [IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking 8 (2000) 556--567] []. Assuming Poisson arrivals and exponentially distributed document
sizes, we focus on the heavy traffic regime in which the average load placed on
each resource is approximately equal to its capacity. A fluid model (or
functional law of large numbers approximation) for this stochastic model was
derived and analyzed in a prior work [Ann. Appl. Probab. 14 (2004) 1055--1083]
by two of the authors. Here, we use the long-time behavior of the solutions of
the fluid model established in that paper to derive a property called
multiplicative state space collapse, which, loosely speaking, shows that in
diffusion scale, the flow count process for the stochastic model can be
approximately recovered as a continuous lifting of the workload process.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/08-AAP591 the Annals of
Applied Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aap/) by the Institute of
Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
Interface resistance of disordered magnetic multilayers
We study the effect of interface disorder on the spin-dependent interface
resistances of Co/Cu, Fe/Cr and Au/Ag multilayers using a newly developed
method for calculating transmission matrices from first-principles. The
efficient implementation using tight-binding linear-muffin-tin orbitals allows
us to model interface disorder using large lateral supercells whereby specular
and diffuse scattering are treated on an equal footing. Without introducing any
free parameters, quantitative agreement with experiment is obtained. We predict
that disorder {\it reduces} the majority-spin interface resistance of
Fe/Cr(100) multilayers by a factor 3.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, submitted to PR
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