Baryon asymmetry of the Universe from evaporation of primordial black holes

The process of baryogenesis through the evaporation of black holes formed at the end of inflation phase is considered. The increase of black hole mass due to accretion from the surrounding radiation after the reheating is taken into account. It is shown that the influence of the accretion on the baryogenesis is important only in the case when the initial values of black hole mass are larger than $\sim 10^{4}{g}$. The behavior of calculated baryon asymmetry, as a function of model parameters, is studied.Comment: 5 pages (including 6 .eps files

Multifaceted value profiles of forest owner categories in South Sweden: The river helge å catchment as a case study

Forest landscapes provide benefits from a wide range of goods, function and intangible values. But what are different forest owner categories\u27 profiles of economic use and non-use values? This study focuses on the complex forest ownership pattern of the River Helge å catchment including the Kristianstad Vattenrike Biosphere Reserve in southern Sweden. We made 89 telephone interviews with informants representing the four main forest owner categories. Our mapping included consumptive and non-consumptive direct use values, indirect use values, and non-use values such as natural and cultural heritage. While the value profiles of non-industrial forest land owners and municipalities included all value categories, the forest companies focused on wood production, and the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency on nature protection. We discuss the challenges of communicating different forest owners\u27 economic value profiles among stakeholders, the need for a broader suite of forest management systems, and fora for collaborative planning. © 2013 The Author(s)

Climate policy and ancillary benefits : a survey and integration into the modelling of international negotiations on climate change

Currently informal and formal international negotiations on climate change take place in an intensive way since the Kyoto Protocol expires already in 2012. A post-Kyoto regulation to combat global warming is not yet stipulated. Due to rapidly increasing greenhouse gas emission levels, industrialized countries urge major polluters from the developing world like China and India to participate in a future agreement. Whether these developing countries will do so, depends on the prevailing incentives to participate in international climate protection efforts. This paper identifies ancillary benefits of climate policy to provide important incentives to attend a new international protocol and to positively affect the likelihood of accomplishing a post-Kyoto agreement which includes commitments of developing countries

Nonzero-sum Stochastic Games

This paper treats of stochastic games. We focus on nonzero-sum games and provide a detailed survey of selected recent results. In Section 1, we consider stochastic Markov games. A correlation of strategies of the players, involving ``public signals'', is described, and a correlated equilibrium theorem proved recently by Nowak and Raghavan for discounted stochastic games with general state space is presented. We also report an extension of this result to a class of undiscounted stochastic games, satisfying some uniform ergodicity condition. Stopping games are related to stochastic Markov games. In Section 2, we describe a version of Dynkin's game related to observation of a Markov process with random assignment mechanism of states to the players. Some recent contributions of the second author in this area are reported. The paper also contains a brief overview of the theory of nonzero-sum stochastic games and stopping games which is very far from being complete

Climate Smart Pest Management

One of the consequences of projected climatic changes is potentially increase in frequency and intensity of regional agricultural pest outbreaks. This requires new way of analytical thinking, pest management practice, and up-to-date regulation, which we call climate smart pest management. This paper provides an integrated stochastic dynamic framework to examines the use of weather and pest infestation forecasts in agricultural pest management. First, we analytically demonstrate the role of the correlation between weather and pest infestation forecast in pest management using a stochastic optimal control framework. Next, using stochastic dynamic programming we empirically simulate optimal pest management trajectory taking into account correlation between weather and pest population predictions. The empirical case study results illustrate our theoretical inferences and show that 1. Due to faster pest infestation under climate change, farmers are forced to spray earlier in the growing season so that severe cumulative future damage on the biomass is prevented. 2. Pea production profit in the Palouse area of northern Idaho and eastern Washington can be increased by 8.5% if pea aphid management accounts for potential correlation between weather and aphid forecast errors. Acknowledgement