4,865 research outputs found
Flight Tests of Various Tail Modifications on the Brewster XSBA-1 Airplane I : Measurements of Flying Qualities with Original Tail Surfaces
Danish Stable Schools for Experiential Common Learning in Groups of Organic Dairy Farmers
The farmer field school (FFS) is a concept for farmersâ learning, knowledge exchange, and empowerment that has been developed and used in developing countries. In Denmark, a research project focusing on explicit nonantibiotic strategies involves farmers who have actively expressed an interest in phasing out antibiotics from their herds through promotion of animal health. One way of reaching this goal was to form participatory focused farmer groups in an FFS approach, which was adapted to Danish conditions and named âstable schools.â Four stable schools were established and went through a 1-yr cycle with 2 visits at each of the 5 or 6 farms connected to each group. A facilitator was connected to each group whose role was to write the meeting agenda together with the host farmer, direct the meeting, and write the minutes to send to the group members ater the meeting. Through group focus interviews and individual semistructured qualitative interviews of all participants, the approach of the farmersâ goal-directed work toward a common goal was judged to be very valuable and fruitful and based on a common learning process. Complex farming situations were the focus of all groups and in this context, problems were identified and solutions proposed based on each farmerâs individual goals. In this article, we describe the experiences of 4 stable school groups (each comprising farmers and a facilitator), and the common process of building a concept that is suitable for Danish organic dairy farming
Observations of spatial and velocity structure in the Orion Molecular Cloud
Observations are reported of H2 IR emission in the S(1) v=1-0 line at 2.121
microns in the Orion Molecular Cloud, OMC1, using the GriF instrument on the
Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope. GriF is a combination of adaptive optics and
Fabry-Perot interferometry, yielding a spatial resolution of 0.15" to 0.18" and
a velocity discrimination as high as 1 km/s. Thanks to the high spatial and
velocity resolution of the GriF data, 193 bright H2 emission regions can be
identified in OMC1. The general characteristics of these features are described
in terms of radial velocities, brightness and spatial displacement of maxima of
velocity and brightness, the latter to yield the orientation of flows in the
plane of the sky. Strong spatial correlation between velocity and bright H2
emission is found and serves to identify many features as shocks. Important
results are: (i) velocities of the excited gas illustrate the presence of a
zone to the south of BN-IRc2 and Peak 1, and the west of Peak 2, where there is
a powerful blue-shifted outflow with an average velocity of -18 km/s. This is
shown to be the NIR counterpart of an outflow identified in the radio from
source I, a very young O-star. (ii) There is a band of weak velocity features
(<5 km/s) in Peak 1 which may share a common origin through an explosive event,
in the BN-IRc2 region, with the fast-moving fingers (or bullets) to the NW of
OMC1. (iii) A proportion of the flows are likely to represent sites of low mass
star formation and several regions show multiple outflows, probably indicative
of multiple star formation within OMC1. The high spatial and velocity
resolution of the GriF data show these and other features in more detail than
has previously been possible.Comment: 27 pages, 19 figures, submitted to A&A Version 2: Several additions,
including a section on protostellar candidates in OMC1, have been made based
on the referee's suggestions v3: corrected typograph
The First Galaxies: Clues from Element Abundances
It has recently become possible to measure directly the abundances of several
chemical elements in a variety of environments at redshifts up to z = 5. In
this review I summarise the latest observations of Lyman break galaxies, damped
Lyman alpha systems and the Lyman alpha forest with a view to uncovering any
clues which these data may offer to the first episodes of star formation. The
picture which is emerging is one where the universe at z = 3 already included
many of the components of today's galaxies--even at these early times we see
evidence for Populations I and II stars, while the `smoking gun' for Population
III objects may be hidden in the chemical composition of the lowest density
regions of the IGM, yet to be deciphered.Comment: 15 pages, LaTex, 8 Postscript Figures. To appear in the Philosophical
Transactions of The Royal Society, Series
IVUS-based imaging modalities for tissue characterization: similarities and differences
Gray-scale intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) is the modality that has been established as the golden standard for in vivo imaging of the vessel wall of the coronary arteries. The use of IVUS in clinical practice is an important diagnostic tool used for quantitative assessment of coronary artery disease. This has made IVUS the de-facto invasive imaging method to evaluate new interventional therapies such as new stent designs and for atherosclerosis progression-regression studies. However, the gray-scale representation of the coronary vessel wall and plaque morphology in combination with the limited resolution of the current IVUS catheters makes it difficult, if not impossible, to identify qualitatively (e.g. visually) the plaque morphology similar as that of histopathology, the golden standard to characterize and quantify coronary plaque tissue components. Meanwhile, this limitation has been partially overcome by new innovative IVUS-based post-processing methods such as: virtual histology IVUS (VH-IVUS, Volcano Therapeutics, Rancho Cordova, CA, USA), iMAP-IVUS (Bostoc Scientific, Santa Clara, CA, USA), Integrated Backscatter IVUS (IB-IVUS) and Automated Differential Echogenicity (ADE)
Reappraising the Spite Lithium Plateau: Extremely Thin and Marginally Consistent with WMAP
The lithium abundance in 62 halo dwarfs is determined from accurate
equivalent widths reported in the literature and an improved infrared flux
method (IRFM) temperature scale. The Li abundance of 41 plateau stars (those
with Teff > 6000 K) is found to be independent of temperature and metallicity,
with a star-to-star scatter of only 0.06 dex over a broad range of temperatures
(6000 K < Teff < 6800 K) and metallicities (-3.4 < [Fe/H] < -1), thus imposing
stringent constraints on depletion by mixing and production by Galactic
chemical evolution. We find a mean Li plateau abundance of A(Li) = 2.37 dex
(7Li/H = 2.34 X 10^{-10}), which, considering errors of the order of 0.1 dex in
the absolute abundance scale, is just in borderline agreement with the
constraints imposed by the theory of primordial nucleosynthesis and WMAP data
(2.51 < A(Li)[WMAP] < 2.66 dex).Comment: ApJ Letters, in pres
The [Y/Mg] clock works for evolved solar metallicity stars
Previously [Y/Mg] has been proven to be an age indicator for solar twins.
Here, we investigate if this relation also holds for helium-core-burning stars
of solar metallicity. High resolution and high signal-to-noise ratio (S/N)
spectroscopic data of stars in the helium-core-burning phase have been obtained
with the FIES spectrograph on the NOT 2.56m telescope and the HIRES
spectrograph on the Keck I 10 m telescope. They have been analyzed to determine
the chemical abundances of four open clusters with close to solar metallicity;
NGC 6811, NGC 6819, M67 and NGC 188. The abundances are derived from equivalent
widths of spectral lines using ATLAS9 model atmospheres with parameters
determined from the excitation and ionization balance of Fe lines. Results from
asteroseismology and binary studies were used as priors on the atmospheric
parameters, where especially the is determined to much higher
precision than what is possible with spectroscopy. It is confirmed that the
four open clusters are close to solar metallicity and they follow the [Y/Mg]
vs. age trend previously found for solar twins. The [Y/Mg] vs. age clock also
works for giant stars in the helium-core burning phase, which vastly increases
the possibilities to estimate the age of stars not only in the solar
neighborhood, but in large parts of the Galaxy, due to the brighter nature of
evolved stars compared to dwarfs.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication as a Letter to A&
Symmetric Operation of the Resonant Exchange Qubit
We operate a resonant exchange qubit in a highly symmetric triple-dot
configuration using IQ-modulated RF pulses. At the resulting three-dimensional
sweet spot the qubit splitting is an order of magnitude less sensitive to all
relevant control voltages, compared to the conventional operating point, but we
observe no significant improvement in the quality of Rabi oscillations. For
weak driving this is consistent with Overhauser field fluctuations modulating
the qubit splitting. For strong driving we infer that effective voltage noise
modulates the coupling strength between RF drive and the qubit, thereby
quickening Rabi decay. Application of CPMG dynamical decoupling sequences
consisting of up to n = 32 {\pi} pulses significantly prolongs qubit coherence,
leading to marginally longer dephasing times in the symmetric configuration.
This is consistent with dynamical decoupling from low frequency noise, but
quantitatively cannot be explained by effective gate voltage noise and
Overhauser field fluctuations alone. Our results inform recent strategies for
the utilization of partial sweet spots in the operation and long-distance
coupling of triple-dot qubits.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figure
Negative spin exchange in a multielectron quantum dot
By operating a one-electron quantum dot (fabricated between a multielectron
dot and a one-electron reference dot) as a spectroscopic probe, we study the
spin properties of a gate-controlled multielectron GaAs quantum dot at the
transition between odd and even occupation number. We observe that the
multielectron groundstate transitions from spin-1/2-like to singlet-like to
triplet-like as we increase the detuning towards the next higher charge state.
The sign reversal in the inferred exchange energy persists at zero magnetic
field, and the exchange strength is tunable by gate voltages and in-plane
magnetic fields. Complementing spin leakage spectroscopy data, the inspection
of coherent multielectron spin exchange oscillations provides further evidence
for the sign reversal and, inferentially, for the importance of non-trivial
multielectron spin exchange correlations.Comment: 8 pages, including 4 main figures and 2 supplementary figurure
Cosmic Ray Production of Lithium-6 by Structure Formation Shocks in the Early Milky Way: A Fossil Record of Dissipative Processes during Galaxy Formation
While the abundances of Be and B observed in metal-poor halo stars are well
explained as resulting from spallation of CNO-enriched cosmic rays (CRs)
accelerated by supernova shocks, accounting for the observed Li in such
stars with supernova CRs is more problematic. Here we propose that
gravitational shocks induced by infalling and merging sub-Galactic clumps
during hierarchical structure formation of the Galaxy should dissipate enough
energy at early epochs, and CRs accelerated by such shocks can provide a
natural explanation of the observed Li. In clear constrast to supernovae,
structure formation shocks do not eject freshly synthesized CNO nor Fe, so that
the only effective production channel at low metallicity is
fusion, capable of generating sufficient Li with no accompanying Be or B
and no direct correspondence with Fe. Correlations between the Li abundance
and the kinematic properties of the halo stars may also be expected in this
scenario. Further, more extensive observations of Li in metal-poor halo
stars, e.g. by the Subaru HDS or VLT/UVES, may offer us an invaluable fossil
record of dissipative dynamical processes which occurred during the formation
of our Galaxy.Comment: Ap.J. in press; 6 pages, 1 figur
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