Bulletin No. 346 - Irrigation Waters of Utah

Irrigation waters are never pure. All contain some dissolved salts. The amount may vary from a trace to concentrations so great that the water is unfit for use. The kind of salt in irrigation water may be even more important than the total amount. Borates in extremely low quantities, for example, may injure or kill crop plants. If the proportion of sodium in irrigation water is high, the soil may be gradually rendered unproductive. On the other hand, the salts may consist in part of essential plant nutrients or other helpful salts that aid in keeping soils productive

The Effect of LHC Jet Data on MSTW PDFs

We consider the effect on LHC jet cross sections on partons distribution functions (PDFs), in particular the MSTW2008 set of PDFs. We first compare the published inclusive jet data to the predictions using MSTW2008, finding a very good description. We also use the parton distribution reweighting procedure to estimate the impact of these new data on the PDFs, finding that the combined ATLAS 2.76 TeV and 7 TeV data, and CMS 7 TeV data have some significant impact. We then also investigate the impact of ATLAS, CMS and D0 dijet data using the same techniques. In this case we investigate the effect of using different scale choices for the NLO cross section calculation. We find that the dijet data is generally not completely compatible with the corresponding inclusive jet data, often tending to pull PDFs, particularly the gluon distribution, away from the default values. However, the effect depends on the dijet data set used as well as the scale choice. We also note that conclusions may be affected by limiting the pull on the data luminosity chosen by the best fit, which is sometimes a number of standard deviations. Finally we include the inclusive jet data in a new PDF fit explicitly. This enables us to check the consistency of the exact result with that obtained from the reweighting procedure. There is generally good, but not full quantitative agreement. Hence, the conclusion remains that MSTW2008 PDFs already fit the published jet data well, but the central values and uncertainties are altered and improved respectively by significant, but not dramatic extent by inclusion of these data.Comment: 63 pages, 50 figures. Final version. Some added discussion and improved figure

High Resolution Ionization of Ultracold Neutral Plasmas

Collective effects, such as waves and instabilities, are integral to our understanding of most plasma phenomena. We have been able to study these in ultracold neutral plasmas by shaping the initial density distribution through spatial modulation of the ionizing laser intensity. We describe a relay imaging system for the photoionization beam that allows us to create higher resolution features and its application to extend the observation of ion acoustic waves to shorter wavelengths. We also describe the formation of sculpted density profiles to create fast expansion of plasma into vacuum and streaming plasmas

Relationship between Hawking Radiation and Gravitational Anomalies

We show that in order to avoid a breakdown of general covariance at the quantum level the total flux in each outgoing partial wave of a quantum field in a black hole background must be equal to that of a (1+1)-dimensional blackbody at the Hawking temperature.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure; v2: typo corrected, reference added; v3: comment added, minor editorial changes to agree with published versio

What is the maximum rate at which entropy of a string can increase?

According to Susskind, a string falling toward a black hole spreads exponentially over the stretched horizon due to repulsive interactions of the string bits. In this paper such a string is modeled as a self-avoiding walk and the string entropy is found. It is shown that the rate at which information/entropy contained in the string spreads is the maximum rate allowed by quantum theory. The maximum rate at which the black hole entropy can increase when a string falls into a black hole is also discussed.Comment: 11 pages, no figures; formulas (18), (20) are corrected (the quantum constant is added), a point concerning a relation between the Hawking and Hagedorn temperatures is corrected, conclusions unchanged; accepted by Physical Review D for publicatio

Bayesian non-parametric approaches to reconstructing oscillatory systems and the Nyquist limit

Reconstructing continuous signals from discrete time-points is a challenging inverse problem encountered in many scientific and engineering applications. For oscillatory signals classical results due to Nyquist set the limit below which it becomes impossible to reliably reconstruct the oscillation dynamics. Here we revisit this problem for vector-valued outputs and apply Bayesian non-parametric approaches in order to solve the function estimation problem. The main aim of the current paper is to map how we can use of correlations among different outputs to reconstruct signals at a sampling rate that lies below the Nyquist rate. We show that it is possible to use multiple-output Gaussian processes to capture dependences between outputs which facilitate reconstruction of signals in situation where conventional Gaussian processes (i.e. this aimed at describing scalar signals) fail, and we delineate the phase and frequency dependence of the reliability of this type of approach. In addition to simple toy-models we also consider the dynamics of the tumour suppressor gene p53, which exhibits oscillations under physiological conditions, and which can be reconstructed more reliably in our new framework. © 2014 Published by Elsevier B.V

Ehrlichia chaffeensis antibodies in white-tailed deer, Iowa, 1994 and 1996.

Surveillance of 2,277 white-tailed deer for antibodies against Ehrlichia chaffeensis in Iowa showed seropositivity rates of 12.5% in 1994 and 13.9% in 1996. From 1994 to 1996, the estimated number of seropositive deer increased to 54,701 (28%). The increasing deer population and expanding tick distribution may increase risk for human monocytic ehrlichiosis

Non-spherical collapse of a two fluid star

We obtain the analogue of collapsing Vaidya-like solution to include both a null fluid and a string fluid, with a linear equation of state ($p_{\bot} = k \rho$), in non-spherical (plane symmetric and cylindrically symmetric) anti-de Sitter space-timess. It turns out that the non-spherical collapse of two fluid in anti-de Sitter space-times, in accordance with cosmic censorship, proceed to form black holes, i.e., on naked singularity ever forms, violating hoop conjecture.Comment: 7 pages, RevTeX 4, minor correction

Anomalous Hydrodynamics

Our goal is to examine the role of anomalies in the hydrodynamic regime of field theories. We employ methods based on gauge/gravity duality to examine R-charge anomalies in the hydrodynamic regime of stronly t'Hooft coupled, large N, N = 4 Super Yang-Mills. We use a single particle spectrum treatment based on the familiar "level crossing" picture of chiral anomalies to investigate thermalized, massless QED. In each case, we work in the presence of a homogeneous background magnetic field, and find the same result. Regardless of whether a paricular current is anomalously non-conserved or not, as long as it participates in an anomalous 3-pt. correlator, its constitutive relation recieves a new term, proportional to a product of the anomaly coefficient, the magnetic field, and any charge density participating in the anomaly. This agrees with results found by Alekseev et.al. for QED. We include a general, symmetry based argument for the presence of such terms, and use linear response theory to determine their coefficients in a model with anomalous global charges. This last method we apply to briefly examine baryon transport in chiral QCD in a strong magnetic field.Comment: 23 pages, 2 figures. To be submitted to JHE

BFKL at next-to-leading order

This is a summary of the contributions on the next-to-leading order corrections to the BFKL equation which were presented to the `Small-x and Diffraction' working group at the 1998 Durham Workshop on HERA Physics.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figure