Control of the apple sawfly Hoplocampa testudinea Klug in organic fruit growing and possible side effects of control strategies on Aphelinus mali Haldeman and other beneficial insects

The effect of Quassia extract on eggs and larvae of the apple sawfly Hoplocampa testudinea was studied. The efficacy of this extract is mainly due to an oral toxicity to the neonate sawfly larvae. The main active ingredients, Quassin and Neoquassin, were tested separately. Wheras Quassin has a considerable efficacy also on older larvae, Neoquassin is less efficient in this case. While Quassin and Neoquassin are found in different Quassia sources in varying relations to each other and have different efficacy, they have to be considered separately in the definition of extract quality by the content of active ingredients. These findings mean, that the “egg maturity” is not important for application date. Nevertheless, the application must take place before the larvae hatch. It was shown that low rates of Quassin (4-6 g/ha) can show very good results in the field, in other cases the rates necessary for good efficacy are much higher. This corresponds to farmers experience. Several factors as application technique and the condition of the blossom must be taken in consideration and will be object of further studies. The side effects of Quassin, Neoquassin and Quassia extract on Aphelinus mali and other beneficial arthropods were tested. Quassia is harmless to all organisms tested

Hamiltonian approach to QCD in Coulomb gauge - a survey of recent results

I report on recent results obtained within the Hamiltonian approach to QCD in Coulomb gauge. Furthermore this approach is compared to recent lattice data, which were obtained by an alternative gauge fixing method and which show an improved agreement with the continuum results. By relating the Gribov confinement scenario to the center vortex picture of confinement it is shown that the Coulomb string tension is tied to the spatial string tension. For the quark sector a vacuum wave functional is used which explicitly contains the coupling of the quarks to the transverse gluons and which results in variational equations which are free of ultraviolet divergences. The variational approach is extended to finite temperatures by compactifying a spatial dimension. The effective potential of the Polyakov loop is evaluated from the zero-temperature variational solution. For pure Yang--Mills theory, the deconfinement phase transition is found to be second order for SU(2) and first order for SU(3), in agreement with the lattice results. The corresponding critical temperatures are found to be $275 \, \mathrm{MeV}$ and $280 \, \mathrm{MeV}$, respectively. When quarks are included, the deconfinement transition turns into a cross-over. From the dual and chiral quark condensate one finds pseudo-critical temperatures of $198 \, \mathrm{MeV}$ and $170 \, \mathrm{MeV}$, respectively, for the deconfinement and chiral transition.Comment: Talk given by H. Reinhardt at "5th Winter Workshop on Non-Perturbative Quantum Field Theory", 22-24 March 2017, Sophia-Antipolis, France. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1609.09370, arXiv:1510.03286, arXiv:1607.0814

The physics and kinematics of the evolved, interacting planetary nebula PN G342.0-01.7

Here we aim to study the physical and kinematical characteristics of the unstudied old planetary nebula (PN) PN G342.0-01.7, which shows evidence of interaction with its surrounding interstellar medium. We used Integral Field Spectra from the Wide Field Spectrograph on the ANU 2.3 m telescope to provide spectroscopy across the whole object covering the spectral range 3400-7000 {\AA}. We formed narrow-band images to investigate the excitation structure. The spectral analysis shows that the object is a distant Peimbert Type I PN of low excitation, formally of excitation class of 0.5. The low electron density, high dynamical age, and low surface brightness of the object confirm that it is observed fairly late in its evolution. It shows clear evidence for dredge-up of CN-processed material characteristic of its class. In addition, the low peculiar velocity of 7 km s$^{-1}$ shows it to be a member of the young disk component of our Galaxy. We built a self-consistent photoionisation model for the PNe matching the observed spectrum, the H$\beta$ luminosity, and the diameter. On the basis of this we derive an effective temperature $\log T_{\rm eff} \sim 5.05$ and luminosity $1.85 < \log L < 2.25$. The temperature is much higher than might have been expected using the excitation class, proving that this can be misleading in classifying evolved PNe. PN G342.0-01.7 is in interaction with its surrounding interstellar medium through which the object is moving in the south-west direction. This interaction drives a slow shock into the outer PN ejecta. A shock model suggests that it only accounts for about 10\% of the total luminosity, but has an important effect on the global spectrum of the PN.Comment: 15 pages, 6 figures, A&A accepted 201

An interval logic for higher-level temporal reasoning

Prior work explored temporal logics, based on classical modal logics, as a framework for specifying and reasoning about concurrent programs, distributed systems, and communications protocols, and reported on efforts using temporal reasoning primitives to express very high level abstract requirements that a program or system is to satisfy. Based on experience with those primitives, this report describes an Interval Logic that is more suitable for expressing such higher level temporal properties. The report provides a formal semantics for the Interval Logic, and several examples of its use. A description of decision procedures for the logic is also included

New Models of General Relativistic Static Thick Disks

New families of exact general relativistic thick disks are constructed using the ``displace, cut, fill and reflect'' method. A class of functions used to ``fill'' the disks is derived imposing conditions on the first and second derivatives to generate physically acceptable disks. The analysis of the function's curvature further restrict the ranges of the free parameters that allow phisically acceptable disks. Then this class of functions together with the Schwarzschild metric is employed to construct thick disks in isotropic, Weyl and Schwarzschild canonical coordinates. In these last coordinates an additional function must be added to one of the metric coefficients to generate exact disks. Disks in isotropic and Weyl coordinates satisfy all energy conditions, but those in Schwarzschild canonical coordinates do not satisfy the dominant energy condition.Comment: 27 pages, 14 figure