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Aerosols from biomass burning over the tropical South Atlantic region: Distributions and impacts
The NASA Global Tropospheric Experiment (GTE) Transport and Atmospheric Chemistry Near the Equator-Atlantic (TRACE A) expedition was conducted September 21 through October 26, 1992, to investigate factors responsible for creating the seasonal South Atlantic tropospheric ozone maximum. During these flights, fine aerosol (0.1-3.0 μm) number densities were observed to be enhanced roughly tenfold over remote regions of the tropical South Atlantic and greater over adjacent continental areas, relative to northern hemisphere observations and to measurements recorded in the same area during Ac wet season. Chemical and meteorological analyses as well as visual observations indicate that the primary source of these enhancements was biomass burning occurring within grassland regions of north central Brazil and southeastern Africa. These fires exhibited fine aerosol (N) emission ratios relative to CO (dN/dCO) of 22.5 ± 9.7 and 23.6 ± 15.1 cm-3 parts per billion by volume (ppbv)-1 over Brazil and Africa, respectively. Convection coupled with counterclockwise flow around the South Atlantic subtropical anticyclone subsequently distributed these aerosols throughout the remote South Atlantic troposphere. We calculate that dilute smoke from biomass burning produced an average tenfold enhancement in optical depth over the continental regions as well as a 50% increase in this parameter over the middle South Atlantic Ocean; these changes correspond to an estimated net cooling of up to 25 W m-2 and 2.4 W m-2 during clear-sky conditions over savannas and ocean respectively. Over the ocean our analyses suggest that modification of CCN concentrations within the persistent eastern Atlantic marine stratocumulus clouds by entrainment of subsiding haze layers could significantly increase cloud albedo resulting in an additional surface radiative cooling potentially greater in magnitude than that caused by direct extinction of solar radiation by the aerosol particles themselves
Magnetization Process of the S=1 and 1/2 Uniform and Distorted Kagome Heisenberg Antiferromagnets
The magnetization process of the S=1 and 1/2 kagome Heisenberg
antiferromagnet is studied by means of the numerical exact diagonalization
method. It is found that the magnetization curve at zero temperature has a
plateau at 1/3 of the full magnetization. In the presence of lattice distortion, this plateau is enhanced and eventually the
ferrimagnetic state is realized. There also appear the minor plateaux above the
main plateau. The physical origin of these phenomena is discussed.Comment: 5 pages, 10 figures included, to be published in J. Phys. Soc. Jp
Prospects for Spin Physics at RHIC
Colliding beams of 70% polarized protons at up to =500 GeV, with
high luminosity, L=2 cmsec, will represent a
new and unique laboratory for studying the proton. RHIC-Spin will be the first
polarized-proton collider and will be capable of copious production of jets,
directly produced photons, and and bosons. Features will include direct
and precise measurements of the polarization of the gluons and of ,
, , and quarks in a polarized proton. Parity violation searches
for physics beyond the standard model will be competitive with unpolarized
searches at the Fermilab Tevatron. Transverse spin will explore transversity
for the first time, as well as quark-gluon correlations in the proton. Spin
dependence of the total cross section and in the Coulomb nuclear interference
region will be measured at collider energies for the first time. These
qualitatively new measurements can be expected to deepen our understanding of
the structure of matter and of the strong interaction.Comment: 51 pages, 22 figures. Scheduled to appear in the Annual Review of
Nuclear and Particle Science Vol. 50, to be published in December 2000 by
Annual Reviews, http://AnnualReviews.or
Exponential renormalization
Moving beyond the classical additive and multiplicative approaches, we
present an "exponential" method for perturbative renormalization. Using Dyson's
identity for Green's functions as well as the link between the Faa di Bruno
Hopf algebra and the Hopf algebras of Feynman graphs, its relation to the
composition of formal power series is analyzed. Eventually, we argue that the
new method has several attractive features and encompasses the BPHZ method. The
latter can be seen as a special case of the new procedure for renormalization
scheme maps with the Rota-Baxter property. To our best knowledge, although very
natural from group-theoretical and physical points of view, several ideas
introduced in the present paper seem to be new (besides the exponential method,
let us mention the notions of counterfactors and of order n bare coupling
constants).Comment: revised version; accepted for publication in Annales Henri Poincar
Grand Challenges: Improving HIV Treatment Outcomes by Integrating Interventions for Co-Morbid Mental Illness.
In the fourth article of a five-part series providing a global perspective on integrating mental health, Sylvia Kaaya and colleagues discuss the importance of integrating mental health interventions into HIV prevention and treatment platforms. Please see later in the article for the Editors' Summary
Interpreting ambiguous ‘trace’ results in Schistosoma mansoni CCA Tests: Estimating sensitivity and specificity of ambiguous results with no gold standard
Background The development of new diagnostics is an important tool in the fight against disease. Latent Class Analysis (LCA) is used to estimate the sensitivity and specificity of tests in the absence of a gold standard. The main field diagnostic for Schistosoma mansoni infection, Kato-Katz (KK), is not very sensitive at low infection intensities. A point-of-care circulating cathodic antigen (CCA) test has been shown to be more sensitive than KK. However, CCA can return an ambiguous ‘trace’ result between ‘positive’ and ‘negative’, and much debate has focused on interpretation of traces results. Methodology/Principle findings We show how LCA can be extended to include ambiguous trace results and analyse S. mansoni studies from both Côte d’Ivoire (CdI) and Uganda. We compare the diagnostic performance of KK and CCA and the observed results by each test to the estimated infection prevalence in the population. Prevalence by KK was higher in CdI (13.4%) than in Uganda (6.1%), but prevalence by CCA was similar between countries, both when trace was assumed to be negative (CCAtn: 11.7% in CdI and 9.7% in Uganda) and positive (CCAtp: 20.1% in CdI and 22.5% in Uganda). The estimated sensitivity of CCA was more consistent between countries than the estimated sensitivity of KK, and estimated infection prevalence did not significantly differ between CdI (20.5%) and Uganda (19.1%). The prevalence by CCA with trace as positive did not differ significantly from estimates of infection prevalence in either country, whereas both KK and CCA with trace as negative significantly underestimated infection prevalence in both countries. Conclusions Incorporation of ambiguous results into an LCA enables the effect of different treatment thresholds to be directly assessed and is applicable in many fields. Our results showed that CCA with trace as positive most accurately estimated infection prevalence
NN interaction in a Goldstone boson exchange model
Adiabatic nucleon-nucleon potentials are calculated in a six-quark
nonrelativistic chiral constituent quark model where the Hamiltonian contains a
linear confinement and a pseudoscalar meson (Goldstone boson) exchange
interaction between quarks. Calculations are performed both in a cluster model
and a molecular orbital basis, through coupled channels. In both cases the
potentials present an important hard core at short distances, explained through
the dominance of the [51]_{FS} configuration, but do not exhibit an attractive
pocket. We add a scalar meson exchange interaction and show how it can account
for some middle-range attraction.Comment: 32 pages with 12 eps figures incorporated, RevTeX. Final version
published in PR
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