Mine water outbreak and stability risks : examples and challenges from England and Wales

Abstract Although their frequency of occurrence is rare, the sudden outbreak of mine water from abandoned mines, or collapse of waste rock stores can be environmentally significant and represent significant postclosure legacies. This paper reports on a national survey of abandoned non-coal mine sites where concerns over mine water outbreak or stability are apparent across England and Wales. A range of respondents across environmental regulators and local authorities were consulted to populate a geodatabase. Outbreak risk was highlighted as a documented or suspected concern at 19 mine sites. Typical issues were related to adit blockages and associated perched mine water alongside issues of sudden ingress of surface waters into mines under high flow conditions. The majority of the responses concerning stability issues (72 sites in total) were related to fluvial erosion of riparian waste rock heaps. While successful management of such issues is highlighted in some cases, these are generally isolated examples. In both cases, the fact that stability or outbreak issues are often caused or exacerbated by extreme rainfall events highlights a potential future management issue with the predicted effects of climate change in north west Europe

Models of f(R) Cosmic Acceleration that Evade Solar-System Tests

We study a class of metric-variation f(R) models that accelerates the expansion without a cosmological constant and satisfies both cosmological and solar-system tests in the small-field limit of the parameter space. Solar-system tests alone place only weak bounds on these models, since the additional scalar degree of freedom is locked to the high-curvature general-relativistic prediction across more than 25 orders of magnitude in density, out through the solar corona. This agreement requires that the galactic halo be of sufficient extent to maintain the galaxy at high curvature in the presence of the low-curvature cosmological background. If the galactic halo and local environment in f(R) models do not have substantially deeper potentials than expected in LCDM, then cosmological field amplitudes |f_R| > 10^{-6} will cause the galactic interior to evolve to low curvature during the acceleration epoch. Viability of large-deviation models therefore rests on the structure and evolution of the galactic halo, requiring cosmological simulations of f(R) models, and not directly on solar-system tests. Even small deviations that conservatively satisfy both galactic and solar-system constraints can still be tested by future, percent-level measurements of the linear power spectrum, while they remain undetectable to cosmological-distance measures. Although we illustrate these effects in a specific class of models, the requirements on f(R) are phrased in a nearly model-independent manner.Comment: 13 pages, 10 figures. Submitted to Phys. Rev.

Visualizing classification of natural video sequences using sparse, hierarchical models of cortex.

Recent work on hierarchical models of visual cortex has reported state-of-the-art accuracy on whole-scene labeling using natural still imagery. This raises the question of whether the reported accuracy may be due to the sophisticated, non-biological back-end supervised classifiers typically used (support vector machines) and/or the limited number of images used in these experiments. In particular, is the model classifying features from the object or the background? Previous work (Landecker, Brumby, et al., COSYNE 2010) proposed tracing the spatial support of a classifier’s decision back through a hierarchical cortical model to determine which parts of the image contributed to the classification, compared to the positions of objects in the scene. In this way, we can go beyond standard measures of accuracy to provide tools for visualizing and analyzing high-level object classification. We now describe new work exploring the extension of these ideas to detection of objects in video sequences of natural scenes

Testing Alternative Theories of Gravity using LISA

We investigate the possible bounds which could be placed on alternative theories of gravity using gravitational wave detection from inspiralling compact binaries with the proposed LISA space interferometer. Specifically, we estimate lower bounds on the coupling parameter \omega of scalar-tensor theories of the Brans-Dicke type and on the Compton wavelength of the graviton \lambda_g in hypothetical massive graviton theories. In these theories, modifications of the gravitational radiation damping formulae or of the propagation of the waves translate into a change in the phase evolution of the observed gravitational waveform. We obtain the bounds through the technique of matched filtering, employing the LISA Sensitivity Curve Generator (SCG), available online. For a neutron star inspiralling into a 10^3 M_sun black hole in the Virgo Cluster, in a two-year integration, we find a lower bound \omega > 3 * 10^5. For lower-mass black holes, the bound could be as large as 2 * 10^6. The bound is independent of LISA arm length, but is inversely proportional to the LISA position noise error. Lower bounds on the graviton Compton wavelength ranging from 10^15 km to 5 * 10^16 km can be obtained from one-year observations of massive binary black hole inspirals at cosmological distances (3 Gpc), for masses ranging from 10^4 to 10^7 M_sun. For the highest-mass systems (10^7 M_sun), the bound is proportional to (LISA arm length)^{1/2} and to (LISA acceleration noise)^{-1/2}. For the others, the bound is independent of these parameters because of the dominance of white-dwarf confusion noise in the relevant part of the frequency spectrum. These bounds improve and extend earlier work which used analytic formulae for the noise curves.Comment: 16 pages, 9 figures, submitted to Classical & Quantum Gravit

Translated points and Rabinowitz Floer homology

We prove that if a contact manifold admits an exact filling then every local contactomorphism isotopic to the identity admits a translated point in the interior of its support, in the sense of Sandon [San11b]. In addition we prove that if the Rabinowitz Floer homology of the filling is non-zero then every contactomorphism isotopic to the identity admits a translated point, and if the Rabinowitz Floer homology of the filling is infinite dimensional then every contactmorphism isotopic to the identity has either infinitely many translated points, or a translated point on a closed leaf. Moreover if the contact manifold has dimension greater than or equal to 3, the latter option generically doesn't happen. Finally, we prove that a generic contactomorphism on $\mathbb{R}^{2n+1}$ has infinitely many geometrically distinct iterated translated points all of which lie in the interior of its support.Comment: 13 pages, v2: numerous corrections, results unchange

Latent solitons, black strings, black branes, and equations of state in Kaluza-Klein models

In Kaluza-Klein models with an arbitrary number of toroidal internal spaces, we investigate soliton solutions which describe the gravitational field of a massive compact object. We single out the physically interesting solution corresponding to a point-like mass. For the general solution we obtain equations of state in the external and internal spaces. These equations demonstrate that the point-like mass soliton has dust-like equations of state in all spaces. We also obtain the PPN parameters, which give the possibility to obtain the formulas for perihelion shift, deflection of light and time delay of radar echoes. Additionally, the gravitational experiments lead to a strong restriction on the parameter of the model: $\tau = -(2.1\pm 2.3)\times 10^{-5}$. The point-like mass solution contradicts this restriction. The condition $\tau=0$ satisfies the experimental limitation and defines a new class of solutions which are indistinguishable from general relativity. We call such solutions latent solitons. Black strings and black branes belong to this class. Moreover, the condition of stability of the internal spaces singles out black strings/branes from the latent solitons and leads uniquely to the black string/brane equations of state $p_i=-\epsilon/2$, in the internal spaces and to the number of the external dimensions $d_0=3$. The investigation of multidimensional static spherically symmetric perfect fluid with dust-like equation of state in the external space confirms the above results.Comment: 8 pages, Revtex4, no figures, minor changes adde

Kaluza-Klein models: can we construct a viable example?

In Kaluza-Klein models, we investigate soliton solutions of Einstein equation. We obtain the formulas for perihelion shift, deflection of light, time delay of radar echoes and PPN parameters. We find that the solitonic parameter k should be very big: |k|\geq 2.3\times10^4. We define a soliton solution which corresponds to a point-like mass source. In this case the soliton parameter k=2, which is clearly contrary to this restriction. Similar problem with the observations takes place for static spherically symmetric perfect fluid with the dust-like equation of state in all dimensions. The common for both of these models is the same equations of state in our three dimensions and in the extra dimensions. All dimensions are treated at equal footing. To be in agreement with observations, it is necessary to break the symmetry between the external/our and internal spaces. It takes place for black strings which are particular examples of solitons with k\to \infty. For such k, black strings are in concordance with the observations. Moreover, we show that they are the only solitons which are at the same level of agreement with the observations as in general relativity. Black strings can be treated as perfect fluid with dust-like equation of state p_0=0 in the external/our space and very specific equation of state p_1=-(1/2)\epsilon in the internal space. The latter equation is due to negative tension in the extra dimension. We also demonstrate that dimension 3 for the external space is a special one. Only in this case we get the latter equation of state. We show that the black string equations of state satisfy the necessary condition of the internal space stabilization. Therefore, black strings are good candidates for a viable model of astrophysical objects (e.g., Sun) if we can provide a satisfactory explanation of negative tension for particles constituting these objects.Comment: 11 pages, Revtex4, no figures, appendix and references adde

Lorentz-covariant quantum mechanics and preferred frame

In this paper the relativistic quantum mechanics is considered in the framework of the nonstandard synchronization scheme for clocks. Such a synchronization preserves Poincar{\'e} covariance but (at least formally) distinguishes an inertial frame. This enables to avoid the problem of a noncausal transmision of information related to breaking of the Bell's inequalities in QM. Our analysis has been focused mainly on the problem of existence of a proper position operator for massive particles. We have proved that in our framework such an operator exists for particles with arbitrary spin. It fulfills all the requirements: it is Hermitean and covariant, it has commuting components and moreover its eigenvectors (localised states) are also covariant. We have found the explicit form of the position operator and have demonstrated that in the preferred frame our operator coincides with the Newton--Wigner one. We have also defined a covariant spin operator and have constructed an invariant spin square operator. Moreover, full algebra of observables consisting of position operators, fourmomentum operators and spin operators is manifestly Poincar\'e covariant in this framework. Our results support expectations of other authors (Bell, Eberhard) that a consistent formulation of quantum mechanics demands existence of a preferred frame.Comment: 21 pages, LaTeX file, no figure