133 research outputs found
Extensive beef cattle production in Portugal
Portugal, located in the Mediterranean region, one of the "Hot Spot" of the planet, has a huge variability in terms of topography, soils, climate, agriculture, traditions, resulting in a high diversity of animal genetic resources, represented by 15 native cattle breeds, most of them threatened. A significant percentage of extensive beef cattle production in Portugal is based on the use of animals, differing from north to south region, with good maternal aptitude, hardiness, a low growth performance and exceptional adaptation to the environment where they live, and especially to the local feed, naturally produced. In the north of the country and the Azores, dairy breeds predominate, while in the south beef breeds are most prevalent. Portugal is not self-sufficient in beef production, however it is possible to appreciate an market for beef produced by indigenous breeds from extensive and organic production systems. Beef from indigenous breeds is considered to be a high quality product, mainly because of the superior taste and structure of the meat resulting from the production system: slow growth rate and type of vegetation consumed. This product differentiation has allowed the enlargement of small niche markets and has led to an increase in the value of meat with a Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) or with organic beef. Since portuguese agriculture cannot compete on quantity or production cost with other competitors, differentiation and quality seem to be the alternatives that may stimulate rural activities in Less Favoured Areas (LFAs) and create a regional added value able to contribute to sustainable development. Extensive animal production systems can be an important component of environmental and landscape protection, as well as contribute to the decrease of the human, physical desertification of our rural areas and animal genetic resources
Financial indicators to evaluate the economic performance of feedlot steers with different slaughter weights
Quantum Black Holes from Quantum Collapse
The Schwarzschild black hole can be viewed as the special case of the
marginally bound Lema\^\i tre-Tolman-Bondi models of dust collapse which
corresponds to a constant mass function. We have presented a midi-superspace
quantization of this model for an arbitrary mass-function in a separate
publication. In this communication we show that our solution leads both to
Bekenstein's area spectrum for black holes as well as to the black hole
entropy, which, in this context, is naturally interpreted as the loss of
information of the original matter distribution within the collapsing dust
cloud.Comment: LaTeX file, 6 pages, 1 figure, Paper re-written into sections, some
references added, some elaborations, conclusions unchanged, to appear in
Physical Review
Newtonian Analysis of Gravitational Waves from Naked Singularity
Spherical dust collapse generally forms a shell focusing naked singularity at
the symmetric center. This naked singularity is massless. Further the Newtonian
gravitational potential and speed of the dust fluid elements are everywhere
much smaller than unity until the central shell focusing naked singularity
formation if an appropriate initial condition is set up. Although such a
situation is highly relativistic, the analysis by the Newtonian approximation
scheme is available even in the vicinity of the space-time singularity. This
remarkable feature makes the analysis of such singularity formation very easy.
We investigate non-spherical even-parity matter perturbations in this scheme by
complementary using numerical and semi-analytical approaches, and estimate
linear gravitational waves generated in the neighborhood of the naked
singularity by the quadrupole formula. The result shows good agreement with the
relativistic perturbation analysis recently performed by Iguchi et al. The
energy flux of the gravitational waves is finite but the space-time curvature
carried by them diverges.Comment: 23 pages, 8 figure
Semiclassical Instability of the Cauchy Horizon in Self-Similar Collapse
Generic spherically symmetric self-similar collapse results in strong
naked-singularity formation. In this paper we are concerned with particle
creation during a naked-singularity formation in spherically symmetric
self-similar collapse without specifying the collapsing matter. In the generic
case, the power of particle emission is found to be proportional to the inverse
square of the remaining time to the Cauchy horizon (CH). The constant of
proportion can be arbitrarily large in the limit to marginally naked
singularity. Therefore, the unbounded power is especially striking in the case
that an event horizon is very close to the CH because the emitted energy can be
arbitrarily large in spite of a cutoff expected from quantum gravity. Above
results suggest the instability of the CH in spherically symmetric self-similar
spacetime from quantum field theory and seem to support the existence of a
semiclassical cosmic censor. The divergence of redshifts and blueshifts of
emitted particles is found to cause the divergence of power to positive or
negative infinity, depending on the coupling manner of scalar fields to
gravity. On the other hand, it is found that there is a special class of
self-similar spacetimes in which the semiclassical instability of the CH is not
efficient. The analyses in this paper are based on the geometric optics
approximation, which is justified in two dimensions but needs justification in
four dimensions.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figures, minor errors corrected and some sentences added
in the introduction, accepted for publication in Physical Review
Naked Singularity Explosion
It is known that the gravitational collapse of a dust ball results in naked
singularity formation from an initial density profile which is physically
reasonable. In this paper, we show that explosive radiation is emitted during
the formation process of the naked singularity.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, Accepted for Publication in Phys. Rev. D as a
Rapid Communicatio
Toward a Quantization of Null Dust Collapse
Spherically symmetric, null dust clouds, like their time-like counterparts,
may collapse classically into black holes or naked singularities depending on
their initial conditions. We consider the Hamiltonian dynamics of the collapse
of an arbitrary distribution of null dust, expressed in terms of the physical
radius, , the null coordinates, for a collapsing cloud or for an
expanding cloud, the mass function, , of the null matter, and their
conjugate momenta. This description is obtained from the ADM description by a
Kucha\v{r}-type canonical transformation. The constraints are linear in the
canonical momenta and Dirac's constraint quantization program is implemented.
Explicit solutions the constraints are obtained for both expanding and
contracting null dust clouds with arbitrary mass functions.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figures (eps), RevTeX4. The last two sections have been
revised and corrected. To appear in Phys. Rev.
Canonical theory of spherically symmetric spacetimes with cross-streaming null dusts
The Hamiltonian dynamics of two-component spherically symmetric null dust is
studied with regard to the quantum theory of gravitational collapse. The
components--the ingoing and outgoing dusts--are assumed to interact only
through gravitation. Different kinds of singularities, naked or "clothed", that
can form during collapse processes are described. The general canonical
formulation of the one-component null-dust dynamics by Bicak and Kuchar is
restricted to the spherically symmetric case and used to construct an action
for the two components. The transformation from a metric variable to the
quasilocal mass is shown to simplify the mathematics. The action is reduced by
a choice of gauge and the corresponding true Hamiltonian is written down.
Asymptotic coordinates and energy densities of dust shells are shown to form a
complete set of Dirac observables. The action of the asymptotic time
translation on the observables is defined but it has been calculated explicitly
only in the case of one-component dust (Vaidya metric).Comment: 15 pages, 3 figures, submitted to Phys. Rev.
Naked Singularity Formation In f(R) Gravity
We study the gravitational collapse of a star with barotropic equation of
state in the context of theories of gravity.
Utilizing the metric formalism, we rewrite the field equations as those of
Brans-Dicke theory with vanishing coupling parameter. By choosing the
functionality of Ricci scalar as , we
show that for an appropriate initial value of the energy density, if
and satisfy certain conditions, the resulting singularity would be naked,
violating the cosmic censorship conjecture. These conditions are the ratio of
the mass function to the area radius of the collapsing ball, negativity of the
effective pressure, and the time behavior of the Kretschmann scalar. Also, as
long as parameter obeys certain conditions, the satisfaction of the
weak energy condition is guaranteed by the collapsing configuration.Comment: 15 pages, 4 figures, to appear in GR
Radial asymptotics of Lemaitre-Tolman-Bondi dust models
We examine the radial asymptotic behavior of spherically symmetric
Lemaitre-Tolman-Bondi dust models by looking at their covariant scalars along
radial rays, which are spacelike geodesics parametrized by proper length
, orthogonal to the 4-velocity and to the orbits of SO(3). By introducing
quasi-local scalars defined as integral functions along the rays, we obtain a
complete and covariant representation of the models, leading to an initial
value parametrization in which all scalars can be given by scaling laws
depending on two metric scale factors and two basic initial value functions.
Considering regular "open" LTB models whose space slices allow for a diverging
, we provide the conditions on the radial coordinate so that its
asymptotic limit corresponds to the limit as . The "asymptotic
state" is then defined as this limit, together with asymptotic series expansion
around it, evaluated for all metric functions, covariant scalars (local and
quasi-local) and their fluctuations. By looking at different sets of initial
conditions, we examine and classify the asymptotic states of parabolic,
hyperbolic and open elliptic models admitting a symmetry center. We show that
in the radial direction the models can be asymptotic to any one of the
following spacetimes: FLRW dust cosmologies with zero or negative spatial
curvature, sections of Minkowski flat space (including Milne's space), sections
of the Schwarzschild--Kruskal manifold or self--similar dust solutions.Comment: 44 pages (including a long appendix), 3 figures, IOP LaTeX style.
Typos corrected and an important reference added. Accepted for publication in
General Relativity and Gravitatio
- …