40,788 research outputs found
Vulnerability assessment and protective effects of coastal vegetation during the 2004 tsunami in Sri Lanka
The tsunami of December 2004 caused extensive human and economic losses along many parts of the Sri Lankan coastline. Thanks to extensive national and international solidarity and support in the aftermath of the event, most people managed to restore their livelihoods completely but some households did not manage to recover completely from the impacts of the event. The differential in recovery highlighted the various vulnerabilities and coping capacities of communities exposed to the tsunami. Understanding the elements causing different vulnerabilities is crucial to reducing the impact of future events, yet capturing them comprehensively at the local level is a complex task. This research was conducted in a tsunami-affected area in southwestern Sri Lanka to evaluate firstly the role of coastal vegetation in buffering communities against the tsunami and secondly to capture the elements of vulnerability of affected communities. The area was chosen because of its complex landscape, including the presence of an inlet connecting the Maduganga estuary with the sea, and because of the presence of remaining patches of coastal vegetation. The vulnerability assessment was based on a comprehensive vulnerability framework and on the Sustainable Livelihoods Framework in order to detect inherent vulnerabilities of different livelihood groups. Our study resulted in the identification of fishery and labour-led households as the most vulnerable groups. Unsurprisingly, analyses showed that damages to houses and assets decreased quickly with increasing distance from the sea. It could also be shown that the Maduganga inlet channelled the energy of the waves, so that severe damages were observed at relatively large distances from the sea. Some reports after the tsunami stated that mangroves and other coastal vegetation protected the people living behind them. Detailed mapping of the coastal vegetation in the study area and subsequent linear regression revealed significant differences between three vegetation classes present in the area with regard to water level and damages to houses. As our region showed homogeneity in some important factors such as coastal topography, our results should only be generalised to comparable regions
Investigation of line-of-sight propagation in dense atmosphere, phase 3, part 1
The investigation of microwave absorption in the 1 to 10 GHz frequency band by the Jovian atmosphere has continued, and an estimate of the strength of signal fading at these frequencies due to layers of turbulence in Jupiter's atmosphere is given. The microwave absorption due to gaseous ammonia is estimated both in terms of a power loss in dB/km, and in total power loss in dB for slant-path communication with a probe at altitudes down to pressures of several tens of atmospheres. The graphs indicate a frequency-squared scaling of the absorption, and appreciable losses at altitudes where the pressure is several atmospheres. An estimate of turbulence strength is given. This may turn out to be quite crude considering the absence of any relevant data. A planetary scaling law which appears to hold reasonably well for Earth to Venus, is extrapolated to Jupiter. No reasonable modifications of the estimate can alter the conclusion that direct-path fading is negligible for pressure regimes up to 20 atm
Low-momentum effective theory for nucleons
Starting from a precise two-nucleon potential, we use the method of unitary
transformations to construct an effective potential that involves only momenta
less than a given maximal value. We describe this method for an S-wave
potential of the Malfliet-Tjon type. It is demonstrated that the bound and
scattering state spectrum calculated within the effective theory agrees exactly
with the one based on the original potential. This might open an avenue for the
construction of effective chiral few-nucleon forces and for a systematic
treatment of relativistic effects in few-body systems.Comment: 10 pp, LaTeX file, 4 figures (uses epsf), extended version, accepted
for publiaction in Phys.Lett.
A simple derivation of the Overlap Dirac Operator
We derive the vector-like four dimensional overlap Dirac operator starting
from a five dimensional Dirac action in the presence of a delta-function
space-time defect. The effective operator is obtained by first integrating out
all the fermionic modes in the fixed gauge background, and then identifying the
contribution from the localized modes as the determinant of an operator in one
dimension less. We define physically relevant degrees of freedom on the defect
by introducing an auxiliary defect-bound fermion field and integrating out the
original five dimensional bulk field.Comment: 9 pages, LaTe
Gradient Catastrophe and Fermi Edge Resonances in Fermi Gas
A smooth spatial disturbance of the Fermi surface in a Fermi gas inevitably
becomes sharp. This phenomenon, called {\it the gradient catastrophe}, causes
the breakdown of a Fermi sea to disconnected parts with multiple Fermi points.
We study how the gradient catastrophe effects probing the Fermi system via a
Fermi edge singularity measurement. We show that the gradient catastrophe
transforms the single-peaked Fermi-edge singularity of the tunneling (or
absorption) spectrum to a set of multiple asymmetric singular resonances. Also
we gave a mathematical formulation of FES as a matrix Riemann-Hilbert problem
Progress in Electroweak Baryogenesis
Recent work on generating the excess of matter over antimatter in the early
universe during the electroweak phase transition is reviewed.Comment: 50 pages (figures on request), uses harvmac (table of contents
correct for "l" format), UCSD-93-2,BU-HEP-93-
Optimal Dephasing for Ballistic Energy Transfer in Disordered Linear Chains
We study the interplay between dephasing, disorder, and openness on transport
efficiency in a one-dimensional chain of finite length , and in particular
the beneficial or detrimental effect of dephasing on transport. The excitation
moves along the chain by coherent nearest-neighbor hopping , under the
action of static disorder and dephasing . The system is open due to
the coupling of the last site with an external acceptor system (sink), where
the excitation can be trapped with a rate , which determines
the opening strength. While it is known that dephasing can help transport in
the localized regime, here we show that dephasing can enhance energy transfer
even in the ballistic regime. Specifically, in the localized regime we recover
previous results, where the optimal dephasing is independent of the chain
length and proportional to or . In the ballistic regime, the
optimal dephasing decreases as or respectively for weak and
moderate static disorder. When focusing on the excitation starting at the
beginning of the chain, dephasing can help excitation transfer only above a
critical value of disorder , which strongly depends on the opening
strength . Analytic solutions are obtained for short chains.Comment: 16 pages, inlcuding 9 figure
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