Life cycle assessment of white roof and sedum-tray garden roof for office buildings in China

White roof (WR) and Sedum lineare tray garden roof (STGR) have been convinced to improve the energy-efficiency and provide various benefits for conventional impervious grey roofs. Some national and local standards have standardized and recommended these technologies in existing building retrofits, however, they do not include assessment and choice of a particular roof retrofit in different climates. This paper presents a 40-year life-cycle cost analysis (LCCA) of an office building roof retrofitted by adding either WR or STGR over an existing grey roof in five cities, located in four Chinese climate zones. The LCCA find that the WR retrofits exhibit positive life-cycle net savings (NS) in warm winter zones, ranging 5.7–35.1 CNY/m 2 , and STGR retrofits have negative NS of -81.3– -16.7 CNY/m 2 in all climate zones. The NS of both WR and STGR generally tend to improve as one moves from the coldest cities to the warmest cities. LCCA results suggest that adding new building codes concerning crediting or prescribing WR and STGR retrofits into office buildings with grey roofs in hot summer climate zones and warm winter zone in China, respectively. And featured by more specific requirements, the localized Technical Norms help promote the implementation of new building codes

Quantum dot dephasing by edge states

We calculate the dephasing rate of an electron state in a pinched quantum dot, due to Coulomb interactions between the electron in the dot and electrons in a nearby voltage biased ballistic nanostructure. The dephasing is caused by nonequilibrium time fluctuations of the electron density in the nanostructure, which create random electric fields in the dot. As a result, the electron level in the dot fluctuates in time, and the coherent part of the resonant transmission through the dot is suppressed

Giant isotope effect in the incoherent tunneling specific heat of the molecular nanomagnet Fe8

Time-dependent specific heat experiments on the molecular nanomagnet Fe8 and the isotopic enriched analogue 57Fe8 are presented. The inclusion of the 57Fe nuclear spins leads to a huge enhancement of the specific heat below 1 K, ascribed to a strong increase in the spin-lattice relaxation rate Gamma arising from incoherent, nuclear-spin-mediated magnetic quantum tunneling in the ground-doublet. Since Gamma is found comparable to the expected tunneling rate, the latter process has to be inelastic. A model for the coupling of the tunneling levels to the lattice is presented. Under transverse field, a crossover from nuclear-spin-mediated to phonon-induced tunneling is observed.Comment: Replaced with version accepted for publication in Physical Review Letter

Diffuse emission in the presence of inhomogeneous spin-orbit interaction for the purpose of spin filtration

A lateral interface connecting two regions with different strengths of the Bychkov-Rashba spin-orbit interaction can be used as a spin polarizer of electrons in two dimensional semiconductor heterostructures. [Khodas \emph{et al.}, Phys. Rev. Lett. \textbf{92}, 086602 (2004)]. In this paper we consider the case when one of the two regions is ballistic, while the other one is diffusive. We generalize the technique developed for the solution of the problem of the diffuse emission to the case of the spin dependent scattering at the interface, and determine the distribution of electrons emitted from the diffusive region. It is shown that the diffuse emission is an effective way to get electrons propagating at small angles to the interface that are most appropriate for the spin filtration and a subsequent spin manipulation. Finally, a scheme is proposed of a spin filter device, see Fig. 9, that creates two almost fully spin-polarized beams of electrons.Comment: 11 pages, 9 figure

Probing Micro-quasars with TeV Neutrinos

The jets associated with Galactic micro-quasars are believed to be ejected by accreting stellar mass black-holes or neutron stars. We show that if the energy content of the jets in the transient sources is dominated by electron-proton plasma, then a several hour outburst of 1--100 TeV neutrinos produced by photo- meson interactions should precede the radio flares associated with major ejection events. Several neutrinos may be detected during a single outburst by a 1km^2 detector, thereby providing a powerful probe of micro-quasars jet physics.Comment: Accepted to PRL. More detailed discussion of particle acceleratio

Landauer Conductance of Luttinger Liquids with Leads

We show that the dc conductance of a quantum wire containing a Luttinger liquid and attached to non-interacting leads is given by $e^2/h$ per spin orientation, regardless of the interactions in the wire. This explains the recent observations of the absence of conductance renormalization in long high-mobility $GaAs$ wires by Tarucha, Honda and Saku (Solid State Communications {\bf 94}, 413 (1995)).Comment: 4 two-column pages, RevTeX + 1 uuencoded figure

Relativistic Photon Mediated Shocks

A system of equations governing the structure of a steady, relativistic radiation dominated shock is derived, starting from the general form of the transfer equation obeyed by the photon distribution function. Closure is obtained by truncating the system of moment equations at some order. The anisotropy of the photon distribution function inside the shock is shown to increase with increasing shock velocity, approaching nearly perfect beaming at upstream Lorentz factors $\Gamma_{-}>>1$. Solutions of the shock equations are presented for some range of upstream conditions. These solutions are shown to converge as the truncation order is increased.Comment: 5 pages, a shorter version will appear in PR

Induced scattering of short radio pulses

Effect of the induced Compton and Raman scattering on short, bright radio pulses is investigated. It is shown that when a single pulse propagates through the scattering medium, the effective optical depth is determined by the duration of the pulse but not by the scale of the medium. The induced scattering could hinder propagation of the radio pulse only if close enough to the source a dense enough plasma is presented. The induced scattering within the relativistically moving source places lower limits on the Lorentz factor of the source. The results are applied to the recently discovered short extragalactic radio pulse.Comment: submitted to Ap

Theory and astrophysical consequences of a magnetized torus around a rapidly rotating black hole

(Abbrev.) We analyze the topology, lifetime, and emissions of a torus around a black hole formed in hypernovae and black hole-neutron star coalescence. The torus is ab initio uniformly magnetized, represented by two counter oriented current-rings, and develops a state of suspended accretion against a "magnetic wall" around the black hole. Magnetic stability of the torus gives rise to a new fundamental limit EB/Ek<0.1 for the ratio of poloidal magnetic field energy-to-kinetic energy. The lifetime of rapid spin of the black hole is effectively defined by the timescale of dissipation of black hole-spin energy in the horizon, and satisfies T= 40s (MH/7MSun)(R/6MH)^4(0.03MH/MT) for a black hole of mass MH surrounded by a torus of mass MT and radius R. The torus converts a major fraction Egw/Erot=0.1 into gravitational radiation through a finite number of multipole mass-moments, and a smaller fraction into MeV neutrinos and baryon-rich winds. At a source distance of 100Mpc, these emissions over N=2e4 periods give rise to a characteristic strain amplitude \sqrt{N}hchar=6e-21. We argue that torus winds create an open magnetic flux-tube on the black hole, which carries a minor and standard fraction Ej/Erot=1e-3 in baryon-poor outflows to infinity. We identify this baryon poor output of tens of seconds with GRBs with contemporaneous and strongly correlated emissions in gravitational radiation, conceivably at multiple frequencies. Ultimately, this leaves a black hole binary surrounded by a supernova remnant.Comment: To appear in ApJ (44p

A Mesoscopic Quantum Eraser

Motivated by a recent experiment by Buks et al. [Nature 391, 871 (1998)] we consider electron transport through an Aharonov-Bohm interferometer with a quantum dot in one of its arms. The quantum dot is coupled to a quantum system with a finite number of states acting as a which-path detector. The Aharonov-Bohm interference is calculated using a two-particle scattering approach for the joint transitions in detector and quantum dot. Tracing over the detector yields dephasing and a reduction of the interference amplitude. We show that the interference can be restored by a suitable measurement on the detector and propose a mesoscopic quantum eraser based on this principle.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures, to appear in Europhys. Lett., uses EuroPhys.sty and EuroMacro.tex (included