Changes in the Lepidoptera of Monks Wood NNR (1974-2003)

Introduction Monks Wood has been noted for the richness of its Lepidoptera, particularly butterflies, sinceat least the middle of the 19th century. In 1828 the black hairstreak was discovered for the first time in Britain in Monks Wood. A total of 48 butterfly species have been recorded in the Monks Wood area but today only 30 species (including two non-resident migrants) can be found there. Most of the losses had occurred by the time the Monks Wood book (Steele & Welch 1973) was published (Table 1). Less is known historically about the moth fauna. Steele & Welch (1973) listed some 129 microlepidoptera and 332 macrolepidoptera (hereafter referred to as macro-moths). These records came from variety of sources collated from the many collectors who had visited Monks Wood for well over a century. The list includes some species that have not been recorded in recent decades, some of which are almost certainly extinct in the wood (Table 2). The number of microlepidoptera recorded in the wood has greatly increased but no current list has been compiled. The current list of macro-moths stands at 460 species. Monks Wood has contributed to national recording schemes for both butterflies (Butterfly Monitoring Scheme – BMS) and moths (Rothamsted Insect Survey) for three decades and it is these standardised observations that allow an examination of change within Monks Wood and a comparison with national statistics. An earlier study by Pollard and others (1998), using these data, concluded that an increase in coarse grasses had benefited Lepidoptera feeding on them at the expense of those feeding on finer grasses. Several possible causes included ride management practices, the colonisation of the wood by muntjac, and an increase in atmospheric nitrogen deposition. In the current study we examine both the butterfly transect data and the Rothamsted Insect Survey (light trap) moth data for changes over the last 30 year

Processing experiments on non-Czochralski silicon sheet

A program is described which supports and promotes the development of processing techniques which may be successfully and cost-effectively applied to low-cost sheets for solar cell fabrication. Results are reported in the areas of process technology, cell design, cell metallization, and production cost simulation

Polarization Diagnostics for Cool Core Cluster Emission Lines

The nature of the interaction between low-excitation gas filaments at ~104 K, seen in optical line emission, and diffuse X-ray emitting coronal gas at ~107 K in the centers of galaxy clusters remains a puzzle. The presence of a strong, empirical correlation between the two gas phases is indicative of a fundamental relationship between them, though as yet of undetermined cause. The cooler filaments, originally thought to have condensed from the hot gas, could also arise from a merger or the disturbance of cool circumnuclear gas by nuclear activity. Here, we have searched for intrinsic line emission polarization in cool core galaxy clusters as a diagnostic of fundamental transport processes. Drawing on developments in solar astrophysics, direct energetic particle impact induced polarization holds the promise to definitively determine the role of collisional processes such as thermal conduction in the ISM physics of galaxy clusters, while providing insight into other highly anisotropic excitation mechanisms such as shocks, intense radiation fields, and suprathermal particles. Under certain physical conditions, theoretical calculations predict of the order of 10% polarization. Our observations of the filaments in four nearby cool core clusters place stringent upper limits ( 0.1%) on the presence of emission line polarization, requiring that if thermal conduction is operative, the thermal gradients are not in the saturated regime. This limit is consistent with theoretical models of the thermal structure of filament interfacesPeer reviewe

Electronic structure of NiS1−x_{1-x}Sex_x across the phase transition

We report very highly resolved photoemission spectra of NiS(1-x)Se(x) across the so-called metal-insulator transition as a function of temperature as well as composition. The present results convincingly demonstrate that the low temperature, antiferromagnetic phase is metallic, with a reduced density of states at E$_F$. This decrease is possibly due to the opening of gaps along specific directions in the Brillouin zone caused by the antiferromagnetic ordering.Comment: Revtex, 4 pages, 3 postscript figure

Symplectic potentials and resolved Ricci-flat ACG metrics

We pursue the symplectic description of toric Kahler manifolds. There exists a general local classification of metrics on toric Kahler manifolds equipped with Hamiltonian two-forms due to Apostolov, Calderbank and Gauduchon(ACG). We derive the symplectic potential for these metrics. Using a method due to Abreu, we relate the symplectic potential to the canonical potential written by Guillemin. This enables us to recover the moment polytope associated with metrics and we thus obtain global information about the metric. We illustrate these general considerations by focusing on six-dimensional Ricci flat metrics and obtain Ricci flat metrics associated with real cones over L^{pqr} and Y^{pq} manifolds. The metrics associated with cones over Y^{pq} manifolds turn out to be partially resolved with two blowup parameters taking special (non-zero)values. For a fixed Y^{pq} manifold, we find explicit metrics for several inequivalent blow-ups parametrised by a natural number k in the range 0<k<p. We also show that all known examples of resolved metrics such as the resolved conifold and the resolution of C^3/Z_3 also fit the ACG classification.Comment: LaTeX, 34 pages, 4 figures (v2)presentation improved, typos corrected and references added (v3)matches published versio

Some factors influencing populations of the European corn borer, Ostrinia nubilalis (Hubner) in the north central states: Resistance of corn, time of planting and weather conditions Part II, 1958-1962

A cooperative project was conducted by the agricultural experiment stations of Iowa, Minnesota and Ohio and the U. S. Department of Agriculture to study the effects of weather, planting date and resistant hybrids as factors influencing populations of the European com borer, Ostrinia nubilalis (Hübner). Identical studies were carried out at Ankeny, Iowa; Waseca, Minnesota; and Wooster, Ohio, during a 10-year period, 1953-1962. The first 4 years of the study (1953-56) were reported by Everett et al. (1958). The work reported herein is a companion bulletin to the Everett et al. (1958) publication and deals with the results of experiments conducted during 1958-1962. The experimental design was a randomized block, split plot with five replications. The whole plot treatments were four hybrid-planting date combinations consisting of early- or late-planting dates and susceptible or resistant hybrids. The subplot treatments consisted of a factorial arrangement of all possible combinations of three levels of infestation (zero, natural and natural + 3 egg masses) by first brood and the same three levels of infestation by second-brood borers. Temperature and rainfall records were kept at each of the three stations. Borer population and injury to the plant were recorded at the end of the first brood and in the fall. Yield data were collected

Supergravity Instabilities of Non-Supersymmetric Quantum Critical Points

Motivated by the recent use of certain consistent truncations of M-theory to study condensed matter physics using holographic techniques, we study the SU(3)-invariant sector of four-dimensional, N=8 gauged supergravity and compute the complete scalar spectrum at each of the five non-trivial critical points. We demonstrate that the smaller SU(4)^- sector is equivalent to a consistent truncation studied recently by various authors and find that the critical point in this sector, which has been proposed as the ground state of a holographic superconductor, is unstable due to a family of scalars that violate the Breitenlohner-Freedman bound. We also derive the origin of this instability in eleven dimensions and comment on the generalization to other embeddings of this critical point which involve arbitrary Sasaki-Einstein seven manifolds. In the spirit of a resurging interest in consistent truncations, we present a formal treatment of the SU(3)-invariant sector as a U(1)xU(1) gauged N=2 supergravity theory coupled to one hypermultiplet.Comment: 46 page

Observations of Lensed Relativistic Jets as a Tool of Constraining Lens Galaxy Parameters

The possibility of using lensed relativistic jets on very small angular scales to construct proper models of spiral lens galaxies and to independently determine the Hubble constant is considered. The system B0218+357 is used as an example to illustrate that there exists a great choice of model parameters adequately reproducing its observed large-scale properties but leading to a significant spread in the Hubble constant. The jet image position angle is suggested as an additional parameter that allows the range of models under consideration to be limited. It is shown that the models for which the jet image position angles differ by at least $40^o$ can be distinguished between themselves during observations on very small angular scales. The possibility of observing the geometric properties of lensed relativistic jets and measuring the superluminal velocities of knot images on time scales of several months with very long baseline space interferometers is discussed.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figures, Will be published in the Astronomy Letters, V.37, PP.483-490, 201

Supersymmetric AdS_5 Solutions of Type IIB Supergravity

We analyse the most general bosonic supersymmetric solutions of type IIB supergravity whose metrics are warped products of five-dimensional anti-de Sitter space AdS_5 with a five-dimensional Riemannian manifold M_5. All fluxes are allowed to be non-vanishing consistent with SO(4,2) symmetry. We show that the necessary and sufficient conditions can be phrased in terms of a local identity structure on M_5. For a special class, with constant dilaton and vanishing axion, we reduce the problem to solving a second order non-linear ODE. We find an exact solution of the ODE which reproduces a solution first found by Pilch and Warner. A numerical analysis of the ODE reveals an additional class of local solutions.Comment: 33 page