How can organic agriculture contribute to long-term climate goals?

The EU countries aim to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG) by 80-95% by 2050 (European Commission, 2011). The food sector accounts today for 25% of Swedish greenhouse gas emissions, most of which arise in agricultural production, so there is a need for radical reduction of GHG emissions in this sector. For organic farming in Sweden, this implies that it is time to move beyond the discussion on whether organic products have a lower or higher life-cycle climate impact than conventional products (Cederberg et al 2011). Instead, the interesting question is: What can and should be done to drastically reduce the climate impact of organic agriculture? The science-based response to that question is relevant for Swedish agriculture as a whole. Development towards lower climate impact from organic agriculture requires further monitoring and technology development to reduce emissions of nitrous oxide, methane and carbon dioxide. But it also involves developing production systems that are more efficient in the use of nutrients, energy and land, as well as shifting focus from producing animal food towards more legume, grain, vegetable and fruit products

Scattering properties of weakly bound dimers of fermionic atoms

We consider weakly bound diatomic molecules (dimers) formed in a two-component atomic Fermi gas with a large positive scattering length for the interspecies interaction. We develop a theoretical approach for calculating atom-dimer and dimer-dimer elastic scattering and for analyzing the inelastic collisional relaxation of the molecules into deep bound states. This approach is based on the single-channel zero range approximation, and we find that it is applicable in the vicinity of a wide two-body Feshbach resonance. Our results draw prospects for various interesting manipulations of weakly bound dimers of fermionic atoms.Comment: extended version of cond-mat/030901

A cesium gas strongly confined in one dimension : sideband cooling and collisional properties

We study one-dimensional sideband cooling of Cesium atoms strongly confined in a far-detuned optical lattice. The Lamb-Dicke regime is achieved in the lattice direction whereas the transverse confinement is much weaker. The employed sideband cooling method, first studied by Vuletic et al.\cite{Vule98}, uses Raman transitions between Zeeman levels and produces a spin-polarized sample. We present a detailed study of this cooling method and investigate the role of elastic collisions in the system. We accumulate $83(5)$ of the atoms in the vibrational ground state of the strongly confined motion, and elastic collisions cool the transverse motion to a temperature of $2.8 \mu$K=$0.7 \hbar\omega_{\rm osc}/k_{\rm B}$, where $\omega_{\rm osc}$ is the oscillation frequency in the strongly confined direction. The sample then approaches the regime of a quasi-2D cold gas. We analyze the limits of this cooling method and propose a dynamical change of the trapping potential as a mean of cooling the atomic sample to still lower temperatures. Measurements of the rate of thermalization between the weakly and strongly confined degrees of freedom are compatible with the zero energy scattering resonance observed previously in weak 3D traps. For the explored temperature range the measurements agree with recent calculations of quasi-2D collisions\cite{Petr01}. Transparent analytical models reproduce the expected behavior for $k_{\rm B}T \gg \hbar \omega_{\rm osc}$ and also for $k_{\rm B}T \ll \hbar \omega_{\rm osc}$ where the 2D features are prominent.Comment: 18 pages, 12 figure

Cold Atom Clock Test of Lorentz Invariance in the Matter Sector

We report on a new experiment that tests for a violation of Lorentz invariance (LI), by searching for a dependence of atomic transition frequencies on the orientation of the spin of the involved states (Hughes-Drever type experiment). The atomic frequencies are measured using a laser cooled $^{133}$Cs atomic fountain clock, operating on a particular combination of Zeeman substates. We analyze the results within the framework of the Lorentz violating standard model extension (SME), where our experiment is sensitive to a largely unexplored region of the SME parameter space, corresponding to first measurements of four proton parameters and improvements by 11 and 13 orders of magnitude on the determination of four others. In spite of the attained uncertainties, and of having extended the search into a new region of the SME, we still find no indication of LI violation.Comment: 4 pages, accepted for Physical Review Letter

Sub-Doppler laser cooling of fermionic 40K atoms in three-dimensional gray optical molasses

We demonstrate sub-Doppler cooling of 40K on the D_1 atomic transition. Using a gray molasses scheme, we efficiently cool a compressed cloud of 6.5x10^8 atoms from ~ 4\mK to 20uK in 8 ms. After transfer in a quadrupole magnetic trap, we measure a phase space density of ~10^-5. This technique offers a promising route for fast evaporation of fermionic 40K.Comment: 6 pages; 7 figures; submitted to EP

Crystalline phase of strongly interacting Fermi mixtures

We show that the system of weakly bound molecules of heavy and light fermionic atoms is characterized by a long-range intermolecular repulsion and can undergo a gas-crystal quantum transition if the mass ratio exceeds a critical value. For the critical mass ratio above 100 obtained in our calculations, this crystalline order can be observed as a superlattice in an optical lattice for heavy atoms with a small filling factor. We also find that this novel system is sufficiently stable with respect to molecular relaxation into deep bound states and to the process of trimer formation.Comment: 4 pages, 1 color figure, published versio