Feeding and working strategies for oxen used for draft purposes in semi-arid West Africa

This study was conducted to determine the energy expenditure of draft oxen working on sandy soils, performing common agricultural tasks, so that energy requirements could be determined; to establish the relationships between work and intake and digestibility of roughages by draft oxen; to investigate the effect of body condition before work and liveweight losses during work on work performance, and to investigate the implications of heat stress on draft oxen in semi-arid areas. This information will allow informed decisions to be made on the feeding and management of draft animals in semi-arid areas. Four experiments were conducted. Experiment 1 investigated the energy costs of walking on soils of different consistencies and the efficiencies of doing work. Experiment 2 and 3 were designed to establish the effect of work on intake, digestibility and rate of passage of feeds (millet stover) in the digestive tract. Experiment 4 looked at the effect of body condition before work and weight losses during work on work performance. The effect of heat stress was also investigated in experiment 2, 3 and 4. This report gives details of these experiments, the results obtained and, based on these, the recommendations made regarding feeding and working strategies for draft oxen in semi-arid areas

Sound Emissions by a Laboratory Bubble Cloud

This paper presents the results obtained from a detailed study of the sound field within and around a cylindrical column of bubbles generated at the center of an experimental water tank. The bubbles were produced by forcing air through a circular array of hypodermic needles. As they separated from the needles the ‘‘birthing wails’’ produced were found to excite the column into normal modes of oscillation whose spatial pressure?amplitude distribution could be tracked in the vertical and horizontal directions. The frequencies of vibration were predicted from theoretical calculations based on a collective oscillation model and showed close agreement with the experimentally measured values. On the basis of a model of the column excitation, absolute sound levels were analytically calculated with results again in agreement with the measured values. These findings provide considerable new evidence to support the notion that bubble plumes can be a major source of underwater sound around frequencies of a few hundred hertz

Anomaly Cancellation in Supergravity with Fayet-Iliopoulos Couplings

We review and clarify the cancellation conditions for gauge anomalies which occur when N=1, D=4 supergravity is coupled to a Kahler non-linear sigma-model with gauged isometries and Fayet-Iliopoulos couplings. For a flat sigma-model target space and vanishing Fayet-Iliopoulos couplings, consistency requires just the conventional anomaly cancellation conditions. A consistent model with non-vanishing Fayet-Iliopoulos couplings is unlikely unless the Green-Schwarz mechanism is used. In this case the U(1) gauge boson becomes massive and the D-term potential receives corrections. A Green-Schwarz mechanism can remove both the abelian and certain non-abelian anomalies in models with a gauge non-invariant Kahler potential.Comment: 27 page

The rate of cosmic ray showers at large zenith angles: a step towards the detection of ultra-high energy neutrinos by the Pierre Auger Observatory

It is anticipated that the Pierre Auger Observatory can be used to detect cosmic neutrinos of >10^19 eV that arrive at very large zenith angles. However showers created by neutrino interactions close to the detector must be picked out against a background of similar events initiated by cosmic ray nuclei. As a step towards understanding this background, we have made the first detailed analysis of air showers recorded at Haverah Park (an array which used similar detectors to those planned for the Auger Observatory) with zenith angles above 60 degs. We find that the differential shower rate from 60 degs to 80 degs. can be predicted accurately when we adopt the known primary energy spectrum above 10^17 eV and assume the QGSJET model and proton primaries. Details of the calculation are given.Comment: 22 pages, 12 figures, to appear in Astroparticle Physic

Pressure Induced Change in the Magnetic Modulation of CeRhIn5

We report the results of a high pressure neutron diffraction study of the heavy fermion compound CeRhIn5 down to 1.8 K. CeRhIn5 is known to order magnetically below 3.8 K with an incommensurate structure. The application of hydrostatic pressure up to 8.6 kbar produces no change in the magnetic wave vector qm. At 10 kbar of pressure however, a sudden change in the magnetic structure occurs. Although the magnetic transition temperature remains the same, qm increases from (0.5, 0.5, 0.298) to (0.5, 0.5, 0.396). This change in the magnetic modulation may be the outcome of a change in the electronic character of this material at 10 kbar.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures include

The inverse moment problem for convex polytopes

The goal of this paper is to present a general and novel approach for the reconstruction of any convex d-dimensional polytope P, from knowledge of its moments. In particular, we show that the vertices of an N-vertex polytope in R^d can be reconstructed from the knowledge of O(DN) axial moments (w.r.t. to an unknown polynomial measure od degree D) in d+1 distinct generic directions. Our approach is based on the collection of moment formulas due to Brion, Lawrence, Khovanskii-Pukhikov, and Barvinok that arise in the discrete geometry of polytopes, and what variously known as Prony's method, or Vandermonde factorization of finite rank Hankel matrices.Comment: LaTeX2e, 24 pages including 1 appendi

Superstring partition functions in the doubled formalism

Computation of superstring partition function for the non-linear sigma model on the product of a two-torus and its dual within the scope of the doubled formalism is presented. We verify that it reproduces the partition functions of the toroidally compactified type--IIA and type--IIB theories for appropriate choices of the GSO projection.Comment: 15 page

Flux Compactifications of M-Theory on Twisted Tori

We find the bosonic sector of the gauged supergravities that are obtained from 11-dimensional supergravity by Scherk-Schwarz dimensional reduction with flux to any dimension D. We show that, if certain obstructions are absent, the Scherk-Schwarz ansatz for a finite set of D-dimensional fields can be extended to a full compactification of M-theory, including an infinite tower of Kaluza-Klein fields. The internal space is obtained from a group manifold (which may be non-compact) by a discrete identification. We discuss the symmetry algebra and the symmetry breaking patterns and illustrate these with particular examples. We discuss the action of U-duality on these theories in terms of symmetries of the D-dimensional supergravity, and argue that in general it will take geometric flux compactifications to M-theory on non-geometric backgrounds, such as U-folds with U-duality transition functions.Comment: Latex, 47 page

Reconnection of Colliding Cosmic Strings

For vortex strings in the Abelian Higgs model and D-strings in superstring theory, both of which can be regarded as cosmic strings, we give analytical study of reconnection (recombination, inter-commutation) when they collide, by using effective field theories on the strings. First, for the vortex strings, via a string sigma model, we verify analytically that the reconnection is classically inevitable for small collision velocity and small relative angle. Evolution of the shape of the reconnected strings provides an upper bound on the collision velocity in order for the reconnection to occur. These analytical results are in agreement with previous numerical results. On the other hand, reconnection of the D-strings is not classical but probabilistic. We show that a quantum calculation of the reconnection probability using a D-string action reproduces the nonperturbative nature of the worldsheet results by Jackson, Jones and Polchinski. The difference on the reconnection -- classically inevitable for the vortex strings while quantum mechanical for the D-strings -- is suggested to originate from the difference between the effective field theories on the strings.Comment: 29 pages, 14 eps figures, JHEP style; references added, typos correcte