Heat and electricity from the Sun using parabolic dish collector systems

Point focus distributed receiver solar thermal technology for the production of electric power and of industrial process heat is addressed. The thermal power systems project which emphasizes the development of cost effective systems which will accelerate the commercialization and industrialization of plants up to 10 MWe, using parabolic dish collectors is described. The projected size of the isolated load market in the 1990-2000 time period is 300 to 1000 MW/year. Although this market is small in comparison to the grid connected utility market, it is indicated that by assuming only a 20 percent market penetration, up to 10,000 power modules per year would be required to meet this need. At a production rate of 25,000 units/year and assuming no energy storage, levelized bus bar energy costs of 75 mills/kWeh are projected. These numbers are based on what is believed to be a conservative estimate regarding engine-generator conversion efficiency (40 percent) for the 1990 time period. With a more optimistic estimate of efficiency (i.e., 45 percent), the bus bar cost decreases to about 67 mills/kWeh. At very large production rates (400,000 modules/years), the costs decrease to 58 mills/kWeh. Finally, the present status of the technology development effort is discussed

Creation of a molecular condensate by dynamically melting a Mott-insulator

We propose creation of a molecular Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) by loading an atomic BEC into an optical lattice and driving it into a Mott insulator (MI) with exactly two atoms per site. Molecules in a MI state are then created under well defined conditions by photoassociation with essentially unit efficiency. Finally, the MI is melted and a superfluid state of the molecules is created. We study the dynamics of this process and photoassociation of tightly trapped atoms.Comment: minor revisions, 5 pages, 3 figures, REVTEX4, accepted by PRL for publicatio

A Transdisciplinary Approach to Landscape Transformation Towards Perennial, Diverse, Circular Systems: Why and How

Prevailing agricultural systems in the U.S. are dominated by intensification through annual crop monocultures and high amounts of external inputs. Increased yields per unit of land have resulted but many undesirable environmental, ecological, and socioeconomic outcomes have co-occurred. Lack of resilience within intensified agricultural systems is a factor in these outcomes. Redesign of agricultural systems and changes in federal policy are needed to better support resilience in agriculture. Redesign for greater resilience must encourage adoption of agricultural systems that are diverse, perennial, circular, and include forages. We developed a transdisciplinary framework within a project orientation with a focus on crops and forages as agents of landscape transformation, and a diverse team of researchers, stakeholders and agency personnel. Our framework features a national network of farmers engaged in prevailing agriculture and practices of diverse, perennial, circular forage systems. Network farmers are collaborating with project scientists to gather on-farm data for better understanding of the opportunities and challenges to greater agricultural resilience. Over the next five years we aim to analyze the economic conditions, social structures, and public policies that prevent wider adoption of diverse perennial circular forage systems, and develop strategies to overcome these constraints

Advances in experimental technique for quantitative two dimensional dopant profiling by scanning capacitance microscopy

Journal ArticleSeveral advances have been made toward the achievement of quantitative two-dimensional dopant and carrier profiling. To improve the dielectric and charge properties of the oxide-silicon interface, a method of low temperature heat treatment has been developed which produces an insulating layer with consistent quality and reproducibility. After a standard polishing procedure is applied to cross-sectional samples, the samples are heated to 300°C for 30 min under ultraviolet illumination. This additional surface treatment dramatically improves dielectric layer uniformity, scanning capacitance microscopy (SCM) signal to noise ratio, and C-V curve flat band offset. Examples of the improvement in the surface quality and comparisons of converted SCM data with secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS) data are shown. A SCM tip study has also been performed that indicates significant tip depletion problems can occur. It is shown that doped silicon tips are often depleted by the applied SCM bias voltage causing errors in the SCM measured profile. Worn metal coated and silicided silicon tips also can cause similar problems. When these effects are tested for and eliminated, excellent agreement can be achieved between quantitative SCM profiles and SIMS data over a five-decade range of dopant density using a proper physical model. The impact of the tip size and shape on SCM spatial accuracy is simulated. A flat tip model gives a good agreement with experimental data. It is found that the dc offset used to compensate the C-V curve flat band shift has a consistently opposite sign on p- and n-type substrates. This corresponds to a positive surface on p-type silicon and to a negative surface on n-type silicon. Rectification of the large capacitance probing voltage is considered as a mechanism responsible for the apparent flat band shift of (0.4-1) V measured on the samples after heating under UV irradiation. To explain the larger flat band shift of (1-5) V, tip induced charging of water-related traps is proposed and discussed

Superfluid and Mott Insulating shells of bosons in harmonically confined optical lattices

Weakly interacting atomic or molecular bosons in quantum degenerate regime and trapped in harmonically confined optical lattices, exhibit a wedding cake structure consisting of insulating (Mott) shells. It is shown that superfluid regions emerge between Mott shells as a result of fluctuations due to finite hopping. It is found that the order parameter equation in the superfluid regions is not of the Gross-Pitaeviskii type except near the insulator to superfluid boundaries. The excitation spectra in the Mott and superfluid regions are obtained, and it is shown that the superfluid shells posses low energy sound modes with spatially dependent sound velocity described by a local index of refraction directly related to the local superfluid density. Lastly, the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless transition and vortex-antivortex pairs are discussed in thin (wide) superfluid shells (rings) limited by three (two) dimensional Mott regions.Comment: 11 pages, 9 figures

Evolutional Entanglement in Nonequilibrium Processes

Entanglement in nonequilibrium systems is considered. A general definition for entanglement measure is introduced, which can be applied for characterizing the level of entanglement produced by arbitrary operators. Applying this definition to reduced density matrices makes it possible to measure the entanglement in nonequilibrium as well as in equilibrium statistical systems. An example of a multimode Bose-Einstein condensate is discussed.Comment: 10 pages, Late

Nonlinear Breathing-like Localized Modes in C60 Nanocrystals

We study the dynamics of nanocrystals composed of C60 fullerene molecules. We demonstrate that such structures can support long-lived strongly localized nonlinear oscillatory modes, which resemble discrete breathers in simple lattices. We reveal that at room temperatures the lifetime of such nonlinear localized modes may exceed tens of picoseconds; this suggests that C60 nanoclusters should demonstrate anomalously slow thermal relaxation when the temperature gradient decays in accord to a power law, thus violating the Cattaneo-Vernotte law of thermal conductivity.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figure

Evidence for two electronic components in high-temperature superconductivity from NMR

A new analysis of 63Cu and 17O NMR shift data on La1.85Sr0.15CuO4 is reported that supports earlier work arguing for a two-component description of this material, but conflicts with the widely held view that the cuprates are a one-component system. The data are analyzed in terms of two components A and B with susceptibilities Chi(A), Chi(B), and Chi(AB)=Chi(BA) . We find that above Tc, Chi(AB) and Chi(BB) are independent of temperature and obtain for the first time the temperature dependence of all three susceptibilities above Tc as well as the complete temperature dependence of Chi(AA)+Chi(AB) and of Chi(AB)+Chi(BB) below Tc. The form of the results agrees with that recently proposed by Barzykin and Pines.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figure

On the "Fake" Inferred Entanglement Associated with the Maximum Entropy Inference of Quantum States

The inference of entangled quantum states by recourse to the maximum entropy principle is considered in connection with the recently pointed out problem of fake inferred entanglement [R. Horodecki, {\it et al.}, Phys. Rev. A {\it 59} (1999) 1799]. We show that there are operators $\hat A$, both diagonal and non diagonal in the Bell basis, such that when the expectation value $$ is taken as prior information the problem of fake entanglement is not solved by adding a new constraint associated with the mean value of $\hat A^2$ (unlike what happens when the partial information is given by the expectation value of a Bell operator). The fake entanglement generated by the maximum entropy principle is also studied quantitatively by comparing the entanglement of formation of the inferred state with that of the original one.Comment: 25 Revtex pages, 5 Postscript figures, submitted to J. Phys. A (Math. Gen.