Sustainability of small reservoirs and large scale water availability under current conditions and climate change

Semi-arid river basins often rely on reservoirs for water supply. Small reservoirs may impact on large-scale water availability both by enhancing availability in a distributed sense and by subtracting water for large downstream user communities, e.g. served by large reservoirs. Both of these impacts of small reservoirs are subject to climate change. Using a case-study on North-East Brazil, this paper shows that climate change impacts on water availability may be severe, and impacts on distributed water availability from small reservoirs may exceed impacts on centralised water availability from large reservoirs. Next, the paper shows that the effect of small reservoirs on water availability from large reservoirs may be significant, and increase both in relative and absolute sense under unfavourable climate change

Quantum phase transitions and Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless temperature in a two-dimensional spin-orbit-coupled Fermi gas

We study the effect of spin-orbit coupling on both the zero-temperature and non-zero temperature behavior of a two-dimensional (2D) Fermi gas. We include a generic combination of Rashba and Dresselhaus terms into the system Hamiltonian, which allows us to study both the experimentally relevant equal-Rashba-Dresselhaus (ERD) limit and the Rashba-only (RO) limit. At zero temperature, we derive the phase diagram as a function of the two-body binding energy and Zeeman field. In the ERD case, this phase diagram reveals several topologically distinct uniform superfluid phases, classified according to the nodal structure of the quasiparticle excitation energies. Furthermore, we use a momentum dependent SU(2)-rotation to transform the system into a generalized helicity basis, revealing that spin-orbit coupling induces a triplet pairing component of the order parameter. At non-zero temperature, we study the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless (BKT) phase transition by including phase fluctuations of the order parameter up to second order. We show that the superfluid density becomes anisotropic due to the presence of spin-orbit coupling (except in the RO case). This leads both to elliptic vortices and antivortices, and to anisotropic sound velocities. The latter prove to be sensitive to quantum phase transitions between topologically distinct phases. We show further that at a fixed non-zero Zeeman field, the BKT critical temperature is increased by the presence of ERD spin-orbit coupling. Subsequently, we demonstrate that the Clogston limit becomes infinite: $T_{\rm{BKT}}$ remains non-zero at all finite values of the Zeeman field. We conclude by extending the quantum phase transition lines to non-zero temperature, using the nodal structure of the quasiparticle spectrum, thus connecting the BKT critical temperature with the zero-temperature results.Comment: 17 pages, 7 figure

Effects of spin-orbit coupling on the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless transition and the vortex-antivortex structure in two-dimensional Fermi gases

We investigate the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless (BKT) transition in a two-dimensional (2D) Fermi gas with spin-orbit coupling (SOC), as a function of the two-body binding energy and a perpendicular Zeeman field. By including a generic form of the SOC, as a function of Rashba and Dresselhaus terms, we study the evolution between the experimentally relevant equal Rashba-Dresselhaus (ERD) case and the Rashba-only (RO) case. We show that in the ERD case, at fixed non-zero Zeeman field, the BKT transition temperature $T_{BKT}$ is increased by the effect of SOC for all values of the binding energy. We also find a significant increase in the value of the Clogston limit compared to the case without SOC. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the superfluid density tensor becomes anisotropic (except in the RO case), leading to an anisotropic phase-fluctuation action that describes elliptic vortices and antivortices, which become circular in the RO limit. This deformation constitutes an important experimental signature for superfluidity in a 2D Fermi gas with ERD SOC. Finally, we show that the anisotropic sound velocities exhibit anomalies at low temperatures, in the vicinity of quantum phase transitions between topologically distinct uniform superfluid phases.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure

Genetic control of purothionins in wheat: problems of the aneuploid analysis when searching for regulatory genes

The study of the genetic control of purothionins in wheat endosperm illustrates some of the problems and pitfalls faced in aneuploid analysis of regulatory effects. Biochemical and genetic evidence is presented indicating that the possible regulatory effect of genes located in group 5 chromosomes on the expression of the purothionin structural genes located in group 1 chromosomes is not actually operating "in vivo"