754 research outputs found

    Strategies to Mitigate the Effects of Soil Physical Disturbances Caused by Forest Machinery: a Comprehensive Review

    Get PDF
    Purpose of Review: Ground-based mechanized forest operations can cause severe soil disturbances that are often long lasting and detrimental to the health of forested ecosystems. To reduce these soil disturbances, focus is being increasingly directed at identifying and using appropriate mitigation techniques. This systematic review considered 104 scientific articles and reported the main findings according to four core themes: terrain-related factors, operational planning, machine modifications, and types of amendments used to mitigate machine-induced soil impacts. Recent Findings: For terrain-related factors, most severe disturbances occur on machine operating trails exceeding 20% slope and that soil bulk density and rut depth show greater increases in fine-textured soils. When considering operational planning, trafficability maps proved to be helpful in reducing the frequency and magnitude of soil damages as well as the length of trails needed within harvest sites, especially if they are regularly updated with weather information. Machine modifications, through high flotation tires, use of extra bogie axle, lower inflation pressure, and use of steel flexibles tracks, are highly researched topics because of the considerable upside in terms of machine ground pressure distribution and increased traction. Two main types of amendments emerged to mitigate soil disturbances: brush mats and mulch cover. Brush mats created from harvesting debris can spread the load of a machine to a greater area thereby lowering peak loads transferred to the soil. Brush mats of 15–20 kg m−2 are being recommended for adequate soil protection from harvesting operations. Summary: To conclude, we outline recommendations and strategies on the use of soil mitigation techniques within cut-to-length forest operations. New research opportunities are also identified and discussed. Considering single factors causing machine-induced soil disturbances remains important but there is a pressing need for having a multi-disciplinary approach to tackle the complex problems associated with machine/soil/plant interactions

    The flavor symmetry in the standard model and the triality symmetry

    Full text link
    A Dirac fermion is expressed by a 4 component spinor which is a combination of two quaternions and which can be treated as an octonion. The octonion possesses the triality symmetry, which defines symmetry of fermion spinors and bosonic vector fields. The triality symmetry relates three sets of spinors and two sets of vectors, which are transformed among themselves via transformations G23,G12,G13G_{23}, G_{12}, G_{13}, G123G_{123} and G132G_{132}. If the electromagnetic (EM) interaction is sensitive to the triality symmetry, i.e. EM probe selects one triality sector, EM signals from the 5 transformed world would not be detected, and be treated as the dark matter. According to an astrophysical measurement, the ratio of the dark to ordinary matter in the universe as a whole is almost exactly 5. We expect quarks are insensitive to the triality, and triality will appear as three times larger flavor degrees of freedom in the lattice simulation.Comment: 16 pages 8 figures, To be published in International Journal of Modern Physics

    Effective field theories for QED bound states: extending Nonrelativistic QED to study retardation effects

    Full text link
    Nonrelativistic QED bound states are difficult to study because of the presence of at least three widely different scales: the masses, three-momenta (pip_i) and kinetic energies (KiK_i) of the constituents. Nonrelativistic QED (NRQED), an effective field theory developed by Caswell and Lepage, simplifies greatly bound state calculations by eliminating the masses as dynamical scales. As we demonstrate, NRQED diagrams involving only photons of energy EγpiE_\gamma \simeq p_i contribute, in any calculation, to a unique order in α\alpha. This is not the case, however, for diagrams involving photons with energies EγKiE_\gamma \simeq K_i (``retardation effects"), for which no simple counting counting rules can be given. We present a new effective field theory in which the contribution of those ultra-soft photons can be isolated order by order in α\alpha. This is effectively accomplished by performing a multipole expansion of the NRQED vertices.Comment: 39 pages, 9 Postscript figures, uses Rev.tex V3.0 and epsf.te

    Division Algebras and Extended N=2,4,8 SuperKdVs

    Full text link
    The first example of an N=8 supersymmetric extension of the KdV equation is here explicitly constructed. It involves 8 bosonic and 8 fermionic fields. It corresponds to the unique N=8 solution based on a generalized hamiltonian dynamics with (generalized) Poisson brackets given by the Non-associative N=8 Superconformal Algebra. The complete list of inequivalent classes of parametric-dependent N=3 and N=4 superKdVs obtained from the ``Non-associative N=8 SCA" is also furnished. Furthermore, a fundamental domain characterizing the class of inequivalent N=4 superKdVs based on the "minimal N=4 SCA" is given.Comment: 14 pages, LaTe

    Relativistic and Binding Energy Corrections to Direct Photon Production In Upsilon Decay

    Get PDF
    A systematic gauge-invariant method is used to calculate the rate for an upsilon meson to decay inclusively into a prompt photon. An expansion is made in the quark relative velocity v, which is a small natural parameter for heavy quark systems. Inclusion of these O(v^2) corrections tends to increase the photon rate in the middle z range and to lower it for larger z, a feature supported by the data.Comment: 13 pages, LateX, One figure (to be published in Phys. Rev. D, Sept. 1, 1996

    Underground tales, overground lives: mobile work identities through to post-retirement

    Get PDF
    Although there has been recent attention given to the subject of mobile work, there has been less focus, within mobility studies, on the work of those who enable movement: the job of the transport worker. This article takes this incarnation of mobile workers as the basis for understanding the ways in which mobile work identities are pulled through into retirement. The article firstly proposes that transport workers, as movement enablers, have particular identities, and are an important and neglected topic of study within mobilities. Secondly, it suggests that the post-work identities of mobile workers are contingent on their experiences during their working lives and that these are particular to mobile work. The article is evidenced through data gathered during a mobile ethnographic study with two retired London Underground employees. The participants joined the researchers on a walking tour of a disused underground railway station in London, ‘Hidden London’, organised by the London Transport Museum and their experiences and emotional responses were recorded and analysed. Understanding post-work identities through the embodied and spatial experiences of the present, the research sought insights of the past and future; the continuity and fluidity of working identities that permeated through to post-work lives. This article argues that mobile work identities are specific identities that shape a distinct post-retirement identity

    Colour-Octet Effects in Radiative Υ\Upsilon Decays

    Full text link
    We investigate the effects of colour-octet contributions to the radiative Υ\Upsilon decay within the Bodwin, Braaten and Lepage NRQCD factorization framework. Photons coming both from the coupling to hard processes (`direct') and by collinear emission from light quarks (`fragmentation') are consistently included at next-to-leading order (NLO) in αs\alpha_s. An estimate for the non-perturbative matrix elements which enter in the final result is then obtained. By comparing the NRQCD prediction at NLO for total decay rates with the experimental data, it is found that the non-perturbative parameters must be smaller than expected from the na\"\i ve scaling rules of NRQCD. Nevertheless, colour-octet contributions to the shape of the photon spectrum turn out to be significant.Comment: 25 pages, Latex, 8 figure

    Auroral Ion Outflow: Low Altitude Energization

    Get PDF
    The SIERRA nightside auroral sounding rocket made observations of the origins of ion upflow, at topside F-region altitudes (below 700 km), comparatively large topside plasma densities (above 20 000/cc), and low energies (10 eV). Upflowing ions with bulk velocities up to 2 km/s are seen in conjunction with the poleward edge of a nightside substorm arc. The upflow is limited within the poleward edge to a region (a) of northward convection, (b) where Alfvenic ´ and Pedersen conductivities are well-matched, leading to good ionospheric transmission of Alfvenic power, and (c) of ´ soft electron precipitation (below 100 eV). Models of the effect of the soft precipitation show strong increases in electron temperature, increasing the scale height and initiating ion upflow. Throughout the entire poleward edge, precipitation of moderate-energy (100s of eV) protons and oxygen is also observed. This ion precipitation is interpreted as reflection from a higher-altitude, time-varying field-aligned potential of upgoing transversely heated ion conics seeded by the low altitude upflow

    Multivariate Lagrange inversion formula and the cycle lemma

    No full text
    International audienceWe give a multitype extension of the cycle lemma of (Dvoretzky and Motzkin 1947). This allows us to obtain a combinatorial proof of the multivariate Lagrange inversion formula that generalizes the celebrated proof of (Raney 1963) in the univariate case, and its extension in (Chottin 1981) to the two variable case. Until now, only the alternative approach of (Joyal 1981) and (Labelle 1981) via labelled arborescences and endofunctions had been successfully extended to the multivariate case in (Gessel 1983), (Goulden and Kulkarni 1996), (Bousquet et al. 2003), and the extension of the cycle lemma to more than 2 variables was elusive. The cycle lemma has found a lot of applications in combinatorics, so we expect our multivariate extension to be quite fruitful: as a first application we mention economical linear time exact random sampling for multispecies trees
    corecore