Odour reduction of manure through addition of boracic charcoal

ArticleOdours released during the land application of manure results from different gases released from the liquid phase. These gases do create objectionable odours in the vicinity of the land - applied manure. In order to reduce the intensity of odour durin g manure application, we investigated the effectiveness of combining Borkohle with manure during land application. Boracic acid is widely used as a flame retardant in cellulose insulation. During demolition of existing buildings, this insulation is sorted into its own residual waste fraction. The cellulose fibres are extracted and pelletized on site. Subsequently, the pellets are charred in a pyrolysis furnace. The resulting Borkohle – charcoal containing boron in various compounds - can be used as a soil e nhancer and provides the trace element Boron to the fields. Furthermore, Borkohle provides long - term storage of carbon in the soil. Initial trials of combining boracic charcoal with manure additionally showed that odour emissions seemed to be significantly lower when manure was combined with Borkohle. This work presents methods to quantify the odour reductions resulting from the addition of Borkohle to manure as well as first results. Parameters like the influence of the amount of charcoal added and exposur e time have been investigated. Charcoal was added at concentrations between 5 and 250 g L - 1 . While applying typical amounts of charcoal, a reduction of odour concentration of up to 85% was observed . A positive correlation between odour reduction and the amount of charcoal added was observed. Charcoal has a negligible effect when exposure times are less than 30 minutes

The approach to a superconductor-to-Bose-insulator transition in disordered films

Through a detailed study of scaling near the magnetic field-tuned superconductor-to-insulator transition in strongly disordered films, we find that results for a variety of materials can be collapsed onto a single phase diagram. The data display two clear branches, one with weak disorder and an intervening metallic phase, the other with strong disorder. Along the strongly disordered branch, the resistance at the critical point approaches $R_Q = h/4e^2$ and the scaling of the resistance is consistent with quantum percolation, and therefore with the predictions of the dirty boson model.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

Possible field-tuned SIT in high-Tc superconductors: implications for pairing at high magnetic fields

The behavior of some high temperature superconductors (HTSC) such as $\rm La_{2-x}Sr_{x}CuO_{4}$ and $\rm Bi_{2}Sr_{2-x}La_xCuO_{6+\delta}$, at very high magnetic field, is similar to that of thin films of amorphous InOx near the magnetic field-tuned superconductor-insulator transition. Analyzing the InOx data at high fields in terms of persisting local pairing amplitude, we argue by analogy that local pairing amplitude also persists well into the dissipative state of the HTSCs, the regime commonly denoted as the "normal state" in very high magnetic field experiments.Comment: Revised figures and reference

Escape Orbits for Non-Compact Flat Billiards

It is proven that, under some conditions on $f$, the non-compact flat billiard $\Omega = \{ (x,y) \in \R_0^{+} \times \R_0^{+};\ 0\le y \le f(x) \}$ has no orbits going {\em directly} to $+\infty$. The relevance of such sufficient conditions is discussed.Comment: 9 pages, LaTeX, 3 postscript figures available at http://www.princeton.edu/~marco/papers/ . Minor changes since previously posted version. Submitted to 'Chaos

Curvature representation of the gonihedric action

We analyse the curvature representation of the gonihedric action $A(M)$ for the cases when the dependence on the dihedral angle is arbitrary.Comment: 10 pages, LaTeX, 3 embedded figures with psfig, submitted to Phys.Lett.

The equation of state of neutron star matter and the symmetry energy

We present an overview of microscopical calculations of the Equation of State (EOS) of neutron matter performed using Quantum Monte Carlo techniques. We focus to the role of the model of the three-neutron force in the high-density part of the EOS up to a few times the saturation density. We also discuss the interplay between the symmetry energy and the neutron star mass-radius relation. The combination of theoretical models of the EOS with recent neutron stars observations permits us to constrain the value of the symmetry energy and its slope. We show that astrophysical observations are starting to provide important insights into the properties of neutron star matter.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figure, talk given at the 11th International Conference on Nucleus-Nucleus Collisions (NN2012), San Antonio, Texas, USA, May 27-June 1, 2012. To appear in the NN2012 Proceedings in Journal of Physics: Conference Series (JPCS

Genralized Robustness of Entanglement

The robustness of entanglement results of Vidal and Tarrach considered the problem whereby an entangled state is mixed with a separable state so that the overall state becomes non-entangled. In general it is known that there are also cases when entangled states are mixed with other entangled states and where the sum is separable. In this paper, we treat the more general case where entangled states can be mixed with any states so that the resulting mixture is unentangled. It is found that entangled pure states for this generalized case have the same robustness as the restricted case of Vidal and Tarrach.Comment: Final version. Editorial changes and references added to independent wor

Categorification of persistent homology

We redevelop persistent homology (topological persistence) from a categorical point of view. The main objects of study are diagrams, indexed by the poset of real numbers, in some target category. The set of such diagrams has an interleaving distance, which we show generalizes the previously-studied bottleneck distance. To illustrate the utility of this approach, we greatly generalize previous stability results for persistence, extended persistence, and kernel, image and cokernel persistence. We give a natural construction of a category of interleavings of these diagrams, and show that if the target category is abelian, so is this category of interleavings.Comment: 27 pages, v3: minor changes, to appear in Discrete & Computational Geometr

Preparation and properties of amorphous MgB2_2/MgO superstructures: A new model disordered superconductor

In this paper we introduce a novel method for fabricating MgB$_2$/MgO multilayers and demonstrate the potential for using them as a new model for disordered superconductors. In this approach we control the annealing of the MgB$_2$ to yield an interesting new class of disordered (amorphous) superconductors with relatively high transition temperatures. The multilayers appear to exhibit quasi-two-dimensional superconductivity with controlled anisotropy. We discuss the properties of the multilayers as the thickness of the components of the bilayers vary.Comment: 7 pages, 8 figure