Feasibility Study: Vertical Farm EDEN

Hundreds of millions of people around the world do not have access to sufficient food. With the global population continuing to increase, the global food output will need to drastically increase to meet demands. At the same time, the amount of land suitable for agriculture is finite, so it is not possibly to meet the growing demand by simply increasing the use of land. Thus, to be able to feed the entire global population, and continue to do so in the future, it will be necessary to drastically increase the food output per land area. One idea which has been recently discussed in the scientific community is called Vertical Farming (VF), which cultivates food crops on vertically stacked levels in (high-rise) buildings. The Vertical Farm, so it is said, would allow for more food production in a smaller area. Additionally, a Vertical Farm could be situated in any place (e.g. Taiga- or desert regions, cities), which would make it possible to reduce the amount of transportation needed to deliver the crops to the supermarkets. The technologies required for the Vertical Farm are well-known and already being used in conventional terrestrial greenhouses, as well as in the designs of bioregenerative Life Support Systems for space missions. However, the economic feasibility of the Vertical Farm, which will determine whether this concept will be developed or not, has not yet been adequately assessed. Through a Concurrent Engineering (CE) process, the DLR Institute for Space Systems (RY) in Bremen, aims to apply its know-how of Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA) Technologies in space systems to provide valuable spin-off projects on Earth and to provide the first engineering study of a Vertical Farm to assess its economic feasibility

Showtime for Molecular Movies

Molecular movies of vibrating iodine molecules have been recorded in time- resolved x-ray and electron diffraction experiments

Tracing transient charges in expanding clusters

We study transient charges formed in methane clusters following ionization by intense near-infrared laser pulses. Cluster ionization by 400-fs (I=1×1014 W/cm2) pulses is highly efficient, resulting in the observation of a dominant C3+ ion contribution. The C4+ ion yield is very small but is strongly enhanced by applying a time-delayed weak near-infrared pulse. We conclude that most of the valence electrons are removed from their atoms during the laser-cluster interaction and that electrons from the nanoplasma recombine with ions and populate Rydberg states when the cluster expands, leading to a decrease of the average charge state of individual ions. Furthermore, we find clear bound-state signatures in the electron kinetic energy spectrum, which we attribute to Auger decay taking place in expanding clusters. Such nonradiative processes lead to an increase of the final average ion charge state that is measured in experiments. Our results suggest that it is crucial to include both recombination and nonradiative decay processes for the understanding of recorded ion charge spectra

Spatio-temporal characterisation of a 100 kHz 24 W sub-3-cycle NOPCPA laser system

In recent years, OPCPA and NOPCPA laser systems have shown the potential to supersede Ti:sapphire plus post-compression based laser systems to drive next generation attosecond light sources via direct amplification of few-cycle pulses to high pulse energies at high repetition rates. In this paper, we present a sub 3-cycle, 100 kHz, 24 W NOPA laser system and characterise its spatio-temporal properties using the SEA-F-SPIDER technique. Our results underline the importance of spatio-temporal diagnostics for these emerging laser systems

End-of-Life Decisions for Children: Empirical Studies on Physicians’ Practices and Attitudes

This thesis describes the practice of end-of-life decision-making in neonates and older children, the attitudes of paediatricians and other physicians towards physician-assisted dying and their opinion about the Euthanasia Act. The following research questions are formulated: 1. How often are end-of-life decisions made and what are the characteristics of end-of-life decision-making in neonates and infants? 2. How did the Dutch practice develop over time, and is it different from Belgium? 3. How often are end-of-life decisions made in older children and what are the characteristics of the decision-making process? 4. What are the attitudes of paediatricians and other physicians towards assisted death in children and what are their opinions about the Euthanasia Act? The first conclusion is that the practice of end-of-life decision-making in neonates seems stable. The frequency of end-of-life decisions has not risen significantly and decisions are in the large majority discussed with parents and physicians. Further, the practice is virtually similar to the Belgian practice. The frequency of end-of-life decisions for older children is lower than the frequency among deceased infants and is slightly lower than the frequency among adults. Decision-making takes place with parents, colleague-physicians and nurses in the majority of cases. About half of all physicians supported the Euthanasia Act and thinks it can contribute to the transparency and carefulness of the decision-making

Attosecond imaging

The natural timescale for electron dynamics reaches down to the attosecond domain. Following the discovery of attosecond laser pulses, about a decade ago, attosecond science has developed into a vibrant, new research field, where the motion of single or multiple electrons and, in molecules, the coupling of electronic and nuclear motion, can be investigated, on attosecond to few-femtosecond timescales. Attosecond experiments require suitable observables. This review describes how “attosecond imaging”, basing itself on kinetic energy and angle-resolved detection of photoelectrons and fragment ions using a velocity map imaging (VMI) spectrometer, has been exploited in a number of pump–probe experiments. The use of a VMI spectrometer in attosecond experiments has allowed the characterization of attosecond pulse trains and isolated attosecond pulses, the elucidation of continuum electron dynamics and wave packet interferometry in atomic photoionization and the observation of electron localization in dissociative molecular photoionization

Ion-photoelectron entanglement in photoionization with chirped laser pulses

The investigation of coherent dynamics induced by photoionization of atoms or molecules by extreme ultra-violet (XUV) attosecond laser pulses requires careful consideration of the degree of ion + photoelectron entanglement that results from the photoionization process. Here, we consider coherent H2+ vibrational dynamics induced by photoionization of neutral H2 by a chirped attosecond laser pulse. We show that chirping the attosecond laser pulse leads to ion + photoelectron entanglement and the transition from a pure to a mixed state. This transition is characterized by evaluating the purity, which is close to unity for a transform-limited attosecond laser pulse and which decreases to a value that is determined by the number of vibrational states populated in the photoionization process for increasing values of the chirp parameter. In the calculations, the vibrational dynamics is probed by calculating time-delayed dissociation of the H2+ cation by a short ultra-violet (UV) laser pulse. Independent of the magnitude of the chirp, the coherent vibrational dynamics can be recovered by recording the XUV-UV delay-dependent kinetic energy release in coincidence with the kinetic energy of the accompanying photoelectron

Numerical study of spatiotemporal distortions in noncollinear optical parametric chirped-pulse amplifiers

During amplification in a noncollinear optical parametric amplifier the spatial and temporal coordinates of the amplified field are inherently coupled. These couplings or distortions can limit the peak intensity, among other things. In this work, a numerical study of the spatiotemporal distortions in BBO-based noncollinear optical parametric chirped-pulse amplifiers (NOPCPAs) is presented for a wide range of parameters and for different amplification conditions. It is shown that for Gaussian pump beams, gain saturation introduces strong distortions and high conversion efficiency always comes at the price of strong spatiotemporal couplings which drastically reduce the peak intensity even when pulse fronts of the pump and the signal are matched. However, high conversion efficiencies with minimum spatiotemporal distortions can still be achieved with flat-top pump beam profiles