From car to bike. Marketing and dialogue as a driver of change

The Paris Climate Agreement has sent a key message to the international community regarding the need to increase efforts to move towards a low-carbon economy and help slow climate change, while underpinning global long-term economic growth and sustainable development. COP 21 recognizes the social, economic and environmental value of voluntary mitigation actions and their co-benefits for adaptation, health and sustainable development. In this framework, the PTP Cycle project, running from 2013 to 2016 and funded by the European Commission through the Intelligent Energy Europe program, introduces a non-market approach through voluntary participation in the adoption of sustainable transport modes such as cycling, based on marketing to potential customers through Personalized Travel Plans. The medium-sized city of Burgos (Spain) and the cities of Ljubljana, Riga, Antwerp and London (boroughs of Haringey and Greenwich) developed a new policy instrument (Personalized Travel Plans) in order to increase bike patronage. Beyond potential savings of CO2, the results show that PTP as a form of Active Mobility Consultancy is a suitable instrument to influence modal shift to public transport, walking and cycling, and to address the challenges of climate change, while fostering sustainable transportation by changing mobility behaviour. These results, matching with the state-of-the-art of studies and pilot applications in other countries, allows deriving differentiated results for medium-size and large urban areas

Near-IR internetwork spectro-polarimetry at different heliocentric angles

The analysis of near infrared spectropolarimetric data at the internetwork at different regions on the solar surface could offer constraints to reject current modeling of these quiet areas. We present spectro-polarimetric observations of very quiet regions for different values of the heliocentric angle for the Fe I lines at 1.56 micron, from disc centre to positions close to the limb. The spatial resolution of the data is 0.7-1". We analyze direct observable properties of the Stokes profiles as the amplitude of circular and linear polarization as well as the total degree of polarization. Also the area and amplitude asymmetries are studied. We do not find any significant variation of the properties of the polarimetric signals with the heliocentric angle. This means that the magnetism of the solar internetwork remains the same regardless of the position on the solar disc. This observational fact discards the possibility of modeling the internetwork as a Network-like scenario. The magnetic elements of internetwork areas seem to be isotropically distributed when observed at our spatial resolution.Comment: Sorry, this is the version with the correct bibliography. Some figures had to be compressed. Accepted for publication in A&

A near-IR line of Mn I as a diagnostic tool of the average magnetic energy in the solar photosphere

We report on spectropolarimetric observations of a near-IR line of Mn I located at 15262.702 A whose intensity and polarization profiles are very sensitive to the presence of hyperfine structure. A theoretical investigation of the magnetic sensitivity of this line to the magnetic field uncovers several interesting properties. The most important one is that the presence of strong Paschen-Back perturbations due to the hyperfine structure produces an intensity line profile whose shape changes according to the absolute value of the magnetic field strength. A line ratio technique is developed from the intrinsic variations of the line profile. This line ratio technique is applied to spectropolarimetric observations of the quiet solar photosphere in order to explore the probability distribution function of the magnetic field strength. Particular attention is given to the quietest area of the observed field of view, which was encircled by an enhanced network region. A detailed theoretical investigation shows that the inferred distribution yields information on the average magnetic field strength and the spatial scale at which the magnetic field is organized. A first estimation gives ~250 G for the mean field strength and a tentative value of ~0.45" for the spatial scale at which the observed magnetic field is horizontally organized.Comment: 42 pages, 17 figures, accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal. Figures 1 and 9 are in JPG forma

Strange matter in the universe

The strange quark matter hypothesis is one of the most exciting speculations of the XX Century Physics. If this hypothesis is correct, the ground state of the matter would be the strange matter, which could form the core of compact objects like neutron stars or even more exotic objects like quarks stars. Due to the high-density and low-temperature regime in these stars, the interaction between quarks through gluon exchange could favor the appearance of a color superconducting state, significantl modifying the equation of state of the system. In this paper we present a general overview of this Subject, taking also into account the effect of strong magnetic field in the quark stars