Leading Sheep 2008-2011 WP 261 Final Report.

The second phase of Leading Sheep (2008-2011) aimed to increase the profitability and viability of Queensland wool producers through innovative approaches to extension and technology adoption. It is a partnership between the Department of Employment, Economic Development & Innovation (DEEDI, formerly DPI&F), Australian Wool Innovation (AWI), and AgForce. Leading Sheep supported a regionally specific program model based on four areas of Queensland: South-East (Traprock), Southern Inland (Box/Sandalwood), South-West (Mulga) and, North/Central-West (Mitchell Grass). Each of these regions had a dedicated coordinator, DEEDI extension officer and a regional committee to identify and prioritise issues and then plan, conduct and evaluate events based on these issues

Reconstructing a model of quintessential inflation

We present an explicit cosmological model where inflation and dark energy both could arise from the dynamics of the same scalar field. We present our discussion in the framework where the inflaton field $\phi$ attains a nearly constant velocity $m_P^{-1} |d\phi/dN|\equiv \alpha+\beta \exp(\beta N)$ (where $N\equiv \ln a$ is the e-folding time) during inflation. We show that the model with $|\alpha|<0.25$ and $\beta<0$ can easily satisfy inflationary constraints, including the spectral index of scalar fluctuations ($n_s=0.96\pm 0.013$), tensor-to-scalar ratio ($r<0.28$) and also the bound imposed on $\Omega_\phi$ during the nucleosynthesis epoch ($\Omega_\phi (1 {\rm MeV})<0.1$). In our construction, the scalar field potential always scales proportionally to the square of the Hubble expansion rate. One may thereby account for the two vastly different energy scales associated with the Hubble parameters at early and late epochs. The inflaton energy could also produce an observationally significant effective dark energy at a late epoch without violating local gravity tests.Comment: 18 pages, 7 figures; added refs, published versio

Comparing Brane Inflation to WMAP

We compare the simplest realistic brane inflationary model to recent cosmological data, including WMAP 3-year cosmic microwave background (CMB) results, Sloan Digital Sky Survey luminous red galaxies (SDSS LRG) power spectrum data and Supernovae Legacy Survey (SNLS) Type 1a supernovae distance measures. Here, the inflaton is simply the position of a $D3$-brane which is moving towards a $\bar{D}3$-brane sitting at the bottom of a throat (a warped, deformed conifold) in the flux compactified bulk in Type IIB string theory. The analysis includes both the usual slow-roll scenario and the Dirac-Born-Infeld scenario of slow but relativistic rolling. Requiring that the throat is inside the bulk greatly restricts the allowed parameter space. We discuss possible scenarios in which large tensor mode and/or non-Gaussianity may emerge. Here, the properties of a large tensor mode deviate from that in the usual slow-roll scenario, providing a possible stringy signature. Overall, within the brane inflationary scenario, the cosmological data is providing information about the properties of the compactification of the extra dimensions.Comment: 45 pages 11 figure

Leading Sheep 2008-2011 WP 261 Final Report.

The second phase of Leading Sheep (2008-2011) aimed to increase the profitability and viability of Queensland wool producers through innovative approaches to extension and technology adoption. It is a partnership between the Department of Employment, Economic Development & Innovation (DEEDI, formerly DPI&F), Australian Wool Innovation (AWI), and AgForce. Leading Sheep supported a regionally specific program model based on four areas of Queensland: South-East (Traprock), Southern Inland (Box/Sandalwood), South-West (Mulga) and, North/Central-West (Mitchell Grass). Each of these regions had a dedicated coordinator, DEEDI extension officer and a regional committee to identify and prioritise issues and then plan, conduct and evaluate events based on these issues

Chasing Brane Inflation in String-Theory

We investigate the embedding of brane anti-brane inflation into a concrete type IIB string theory compactification with all moduli fixed. Specifically, we are considering a D3-brane, whose position represents the inflaton $\phi$, in a warped conifold throat in the presence of supersymmetrically embedded D7-branes and an anti D3-brane localized at the tip of the warped conifold cone. After presenting the moduli stabilization analysis for a general D7-brane embedding, we concentrate on two explicit models, the Ouyang and the Kuperstein embeddings. We analyze whether the forces, induced by moduli stabilization and acting on the D3-brane, might cancel by fine-tuning such as to leave us with the original Coulomb attraction of the anti D3-brane as the driving force for inflation. For a large class of D7-brane embeddings we obtain a negative result. Cancelations are possible only for very small intervals of $\phi$ around an inflection point but not globally. For the most part of its motion the inflaton then feels a steep, non slow-roll potential. We study the inflationary dynamics induced by this potential.Comment: 34 pages, 4 figures. Final version published in JCA

Only the best? Exploring cross-border investor preferences in US gateway cities

Despite heady growth in cross-border investment into commercial real estate over recent decades, there are few studies that examine differences in investment preferences between domestic and cross-border investors at a micro level. We address the gap by examining the characteristics of assets acquired by cross border investors in six major US metro areas, comparing them with the purchases made by US investors in those same areas. Our study uses data on more than 67 500 transactions recorded by Real Capital Analytics (RCA) over the period from Q1 2003 to Q3 2016. As well as examining cross-border investors in aggregate, we isolate and examine purchases by investors from each of the four principal source nations for cross-border real estate investment in these cities. This is important since treating cross-border investors as a single group may obscure important differences between them. We employ multilevel logit techniques and we find across a number of specifications that cross-border investors prefer larger assets, newer assets and CBD locations regardless of nationality. However, temporal and sectoral patterns of investment, as well as evidence for return chasing behavior, vary with the nationality of investor being studied

On the Slow Roll Expansion for Brane Inflation

One possibility for identifying the inflaton in the framework of string theory is that it is a $D$-brane modulus. This option involves a specific, non-canonical form of the kinetic energy -- the Dirac-Born-Infeld action. This note investigates the applicability of the slow roll approximation in inflationary models of this type. To this end the slow roll expansion of Liddle, Parsons and Barrow is derived for the case of the DBI action. The resulting slow roll conditions augment the standard ones valid in the case of canonical kinetic terms. It is also shown that in DBI models inflation does not require that the potential dominate the energy density.Comment: References adde