2,131 research outputs found
Anomalous Lattice Response at the Mott Transition in a Quasi-2D Organic Conductor
Discontinuous changes of the lattice parameters at the Mott metal-insulator
transition are detected by high-resolution dilatometry on deuterated crystals
of the layered organic conductor -(BEDT-TTF)Cu[N(CN)]Br.
The uniaxial expansivities uncover a striking and unexpected anisotropy,
notably a zero-effect along the in-plane c-axis along which the electronic
interactions are relatively strong. A huge thermal expansion anomaly is
observed near the end-point of the first-order transition line enabling to
explore the critical behavior with very high sensitivity. The analysis yields
critical fluctuations with an exponent 0.8 0.15
at odds with the novel criticality recently proposed for these materials
[Kagawa \textit{et al.}, Nature \textbf{436}, 534 (2005)]. Our data suggest an
intricate role of the lattice degrees of freedom in the Mott transition for the
present materials.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure
Carbon dioxide flux and net primary production of a boreal treed bog: Responses to warming and water-table-lowering simulations of climate change
Midlatitude treed bogs represent significant carbon (C) stocks and are highly sensitive to global climate change. In a dry continental treed bog, we compared three sites: control, recent (1–3 years; experimental) and older drained (10–13 years), with water levels at 38, 74 and 120 cm below the surface, respectively. At each site we measured carbon dioxide (CO2) fluxes and estimated tree root respiration (Rr; across hummock–hollow microtopography of the forest floor) and net primary production (NPP) of trees during the growing seasons (May to October) of 2011–2013. The CO2–C balance was calculated by adding the net CO2 exchange of the forest floor (NEff-Rr) to the NPP of the trees.
From cooler and wetter 2011 to the driest and the warmest 2013, the control site was a CO2–C sink of 92, 70 and 76 g m−2, the experimental site was a CO2–C source of 14, 57 and 135 g m−2, and the drained site was a progressively smaller source of 26, 23 and 13 g CO2–C m−2. The short-term drainage at the experimental site resulted in small changes in vegetation coverage and large net CO2 emissions at the microforms. In contrast, the longer-term drainage and deeper water level at the drained site resulted in the replacement of mosses with vascular plants (shrubs) on the hummocks and lichen in the hollows leading to the highest CO2 uptake at the drained hummocks and significant losses in the hollows. The tree NPP (including above- and below-ground growth and litter fall) in 2011 and 2012 was significantly higher at the drained site (92 and 83 g C m−2) than at the experimental (58 and 55 g C m−2) and control (52 and 46 g C m−2) sites.
We also quantified the impact of climatic warming at all water table treatments by equipping additional plots with open-top chambers (OTCs) that caused a passive warming on average of ~ 1 °C and differential air warming of ~ 6 °C at midday full sun over the study years. Warming significantly enhanced shrub growth and the CO2 sink function of the drained hummocks (exceeding the cumulative respiration losses in hollows induced by the lowered water level × warming). There was an interaction of water level with warming across hummocks that resulted in the largest net CO2 uptake at the warmed drained hummocks. Thus in 2013, the warming treatment enhanced the sink function of the control site by 13 g m−2, reduced the source function of the experimental by 10 g m−2 and significantly enhanced the sink function of the drained site by 73 g m−2. Therefore, drying and warming in continental bogs is expected to initially accelerate CO2–C losses via ecosystem respiration, but persistent drought and warming is expected to restore the peatland's original CO2–C sink function as a result of the shifts in vegetation composition and productivity between the microforms and increased NPP of trees over time
Frustration and glassiness in spin models with cavity-mediated interactions
We show that the effective spin-spin interaction between three-level atoms
confined in a multimode optical cavity is long-ranged and sign-changing, like
the RKKY interaction; therefore, ensembles of such atoms subject to frozen-in
positional randomness can realize spin systems having disordered and frustrated
interactions. We argue that, whenever the atoms couple to sufficiently many
cavity modes, the cavity-mediated interactions give rise to a spin glass. In
addition, we show that the quantum dynamics of cavity-confined spin systems is
that of a Bose-Hubbard model with strongly disordered hopping but no on-site
disorder; this model exhibits a random-singlet glass phase, absent in
conventional optical-lattice realizations. We briefly discuss experimental
signatures of the realizable phases.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figure
Responses of carbon dioxide flux and plant biomass to water table drawdown in a treed peatland in northern Alberta: a climate change perspective
Northern peatland ecosystems represent large carbon (C) stocks that are susceptible to changes such as accelerated mineralization due to water table lowering expected under a climate change scenario. During the growing seasons (1 May to 31 October) of 2011 and 2012 we monitored CO2 fluxes and plant biomass along a microtopographic gradient (hummocks-hollows) in an undisturbed dry continental boreal treed bog (control) and a nearby site that was drained (drained) in 2001. Ten years of drainage in the bog significantly increased coverage of shrubs at hummocks and lichens at hollows. Considering measured hummock coverage and including tree incremental growth, we estimate that the control site was a sink of −92 in 2011 and −70 g C m−2 in 2012, while the drained site was a source of 27 and 23 g C m−2 over the same years. We infer that, drainage-induced changes in vegetation growth led to increased biomass to counteract a portion of soil carbon losses. These results suggest that spatial variability (microtopography) and changes in vegetation community in boreal peatlands will affect how these ecosystems respond to lowered water table potentially induced by climate chang
Determining ethylene group disorder levels in -(BEDT-TTF)Cu[N(CN)]Br
We present a detailed structural investigation of the organic superconductor
-(BEDT-TTF)Cu[N(CN)]Br at temperatures from 9 to 300 K.
Anomalies in the dependence of the lattice parameters are associated with a
glass-like transition previously reported at = 77 K. From structure
refinements at 9, 100 and 300 K, the orthorhombic crystalline symmetry, space
group {\it Pnma}, is established at all temperatures. Further, we extract the
dependence of the occupation factor of the eclipsed conformation of the
terminal ethylene groups of the BEDT-TTF molecule. At 300 K, we find 67(2) %,
with an increase to 97(3) % at 9 K. We conclude that the glass-like transition
is not primarily caused by configurational freezing-out of the ethylene groups
Ferromagnetism in Correlated Electron Systems: Generalization of Nagaoka's Theorem
Nagaoka's theorem on ferromagnetism in the Hubbard model with one electron
less than half filling is generalized to the case where all possible
nearest-neighbor Coulomb interactions (the density-density interaction ,
bond-charge interaction , exchange interaction , and hopping of double
occupancies ) are included. It is shown that for ferromagnetic exchange
coupling () ground states with maximum spin are stable already at finite
Hubbard interaction . For non-bipartite lattices this requires a hopping
amplitude . For vanishing one obtains as in
Nagaoka's theorem. This shows that the exchange interaction is important
for stabilizing ferromagnetism at finite . Only in the special case
the ferromagnetic state is stable even for , provided the lattice allows
the hole to move around loops.Comment: 13 pages, uuencoded postscript, includes 1 table and 2 figure
Unveiling ethical product features: The importance of an elaborated information presentation
© 2017 Elsevier Ltd Despite growing consumer awareness of ethical consumption, market sales are not growing accordingly. Because the presentation of appropriate ethical product information may influence consumers to choose ethical products, this paper analyses the requirements necessary for the successful communication of ethical product features. Based on McGuire's (1976) information-processing model, and a review of current literature, the information's comprehensibility, meaningfulness, and credibility are investigated in an online survey of US American citizens (n = 595) for two product categories representing Fast Moving Consumer Goods, and durable goods. A generalized mixed logit model revealed that all three communication factors affect consumers' choices. The more concerns about, or expertise in, organic production and fair trade purchase the consumers expressed, the less important their price sensibility and the more they preferred a comprehensive addendum and credible sources (e.g., government certificate or traceability). The results strongly suggest that advertisers and marketers can customize product communications in order to better engage both the mass market, and ethically oriented consumers
The Phase Diagram of Correlated Electrons in a Lattice of Berry Molecules
A model for correlated electrons in a lattice with local additional spin--1
degrees of freedom inducing constrained hopping, is studied both in the low
density limit and at quarter filling. We show that in both 1D and 2D two
particles form a bound state even in presence of a repulsive U<U_c. A picture
of a dilute Bose gas, leading to off-diagonal long range order (LRO) in 2D
(quasi-LRO in 1D), is supported by quantitative calculations in 1D which allow
for a determination of the phase diagram.Comment: 7 pages + 2 ps figures, published versio
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