Crystal chemistry of three-component white dwarfs and neutron star crusts: phase stability, phase stratification, and physical properties

A systematic search for multicomponent crystal structures is carried out for five different ternary systems of nuclei in a polarizable background of electrons, representative of accreted neutron star crusts and some white dwarfs. Candidate structures are "bred" by a genetic algorithm, and optimized at constant pressure under the assumption of linear response (Thomas-Fermi) charge screening. Subsequent phase equilibria calculations reveal eight distinct crystal structures in the $T=0$ bulk phase diagrams, five of which are complicated multinary structures not before predicted in the context of compact object astrophysics. Frequent instances of geometrically similar but compositionally distinct phases give insight into structural preferences of systems with pairwise Yukawa interactions, including and extending to the regime of low density colloidal suspensions made in a laboratory. As an application of these main results, we self-consistently couple the phase stability problem to the equations for a self-gravitating, hydrostatically stable white dwarf, with fixed overall composition. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to incorporate complex multinary phases into the equilibrium phase layering diagram and mass-radius-composition dependence, both of which are reported for He-C-O and C-O-Ne white dwarfs. Finite thickness interfacial phases ("interphases") show up at the boundaries between single-component bcc crystalline regions, some of which have lower lattice symmetry than cubic. A second application -- quasi-static settling of heavy nuclei in white dwarfs -- builds on our equilibrium phase layering method. Tests of this nonequilibrium method reveal extra phases which play the role of transient host phases for the settling species.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figures, 1 table. Submitted to Ap

Fishery resources and some economic aspects of four fishing villages on Lakes George and Edward in the Queen Elizabeth National Park, Uganda

The fishery resources of Lake George and Ugandan waters of Lake Edward are described. The main fish species currently observed in the commercial catches were determined and the reasons of changes in species composition of the catches. that occurred in the recent years, are explained. The fishing activity and some economic and nutritional aspects of four fishing villages, selected among the ten present within the Queen Elizabeth National Park boundaries, are analyzed, In the end some suggestions are given for management of the fishery resources of these lakes

First-Order Logic Definability of Free Languages

Operator Precedence Grammars (OPGs) define a deterministic class of context-free languages, which extend input-driven languages and still enjoy many properties: they are closed w.r.t. Boolean operations, concatenation and Kleene star; the emptiness problem is decidable; they are recognized by a suitable model of pushdown automaton; they can be characterized in terms of a monadic second-order logic. Also, they admit efficient parallel parsing. In this paper we introduce a subclass of OPGs, namely Free Grammars (FrGs); we prove some of its basic properties, and that, for each such grammar G, a first-order logic formula ψ can effectively be built so that L(G) is the set of all and only strings satisfying ψ. FrGs were originally introduced for grammatical inference of programming languages. Our result can naturally boost their applicability; to this end, a tool is made freely available for the semiautomatic construction of FrGs

Logic Characterization of Invisibly Structured Languages: The Case of Floyd Languages

Operator precedence grammars define a classical Boolean and deterministic context-free language family (called Floyd languages or FLs). FLs have been shown to strictly include the well-known Visibly Pushdown Languages, and enjoy the same nice closure properties. In this paper we provide a complete characterization of FLs in terms of a suitable Monadic Second-Order Logic. Traditional approaches to logic characterization of formal languages refer explicitly to the structures over which they are interpreted - e.g, trees or graphs - or to strings that are isomorphic to the structure, as in parenthesis languages. In the case of FLs, instead, the syntactic structure of input strings is “invisible” and must be reconstructed through parsing. This requires that logic formulae encode some typical context-free parsing actions, such as shift-reduce ones

Monitoring urban heat island through google earth engine. Potentialities and difficulties in different cities of the United States

The aim of this work is to exploit the large-scale analysis capabilities of the innovative Google Earth Engine platform in order to investigate the temporal variations of the Urban Heat Island phenomenon as a whole. A intuitive methodology implementing a large-scale correlation analysis between the Land Surface Temperature and Land Cover alterations was thus developed. The results obtained for the Phoenix MA are promising and show how the urbanization heavily affects the magnitude of the UHI effects with significant increases in LST. The proposed methodology is therefore able to efficiently monitor the UHI phenomenon

Discrete transverse superconducting modes in nano-cylinders

Spatial variation in the superconducting order parameter becomes significant when the system is confined at dimensions well below the typical superconducting coherence length. Motivated by recent experimental success in growing single-crystal metallic nanorods, we study quantum confinement effects on superconductivity in a cylindrical nanowire in the clean limit. For large diameters, where the transverse level spacing is smaller than superconducting order parameter, the usual approximations of Ginzburg-Landau theory are recovered. However, under external magnetic field the order parameter develops a spatial variation much stronger than that predicted by Ginzburg-Landau theory, and gapless superconductivity is obtained above a certain field strength. At small diameters, the discrete nature of the transverse modes produces significant spatial variations in the order parameter with increased average magnitude and multiple shoulders in the magnetic response.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figure