Australian National University

About: Australian National University is a education organization based out in Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, Australia. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Galaxy. The organization has 34419 authors who have published 109261 publications receiving 4315448 citations. The organization is also known as: The Australian National University & ANU.

Nitrogen-vacancy center in diamond: Model of the electronic structure and associated dynamics

Abstract: Symmetry considerations are used in presenting a model of the electronic structure and the associated dynamics of the nitrogen-vacancy center in diamond. The model accounts for the occurrence of optically induced spin polarization, for the change of emission level with spin polarization and for new experimental measurements of transient emission. The rate constants given are in variance to those reported previously.

The control of stomata by water balance.

Abstract: It is clear that stomata play a critical role in regulating water loss from terrestrial vegetation. What is not clear is how this regulation is achieved. Stomata appear to respond to perturbations of many aspects of the soil-plant-atmosphere hydraulic continuum, but there is little agreement regarding the mechanism (or mechanisms) by which stomata sense such perturbations. This review discusses feedback and feedforward mechanisms by which hydraulic perturbations are putatively transduced into stomatal movements, in relation to generic empirical features of those responses. It is argued that a metabolically mediated feedback response of stomatal guard cells to the water status in their immediate vicinity ('hydro-active local feedback') remains the best explanation for many well-known features of hydraulically related stomatal behaviour, such as transient 'wrong-way' responses and the equivalence of hydraulic supply and demand as stomatal effectors. Furthermore, many curious phenomena that appear inconsistent with feedback, such as 'apparent feedforward' humidity responses and 'isohydric' behaviour (water potential homeostasis), are in fact expected to emerge from the juxtaposition of hydro-active local feedback and the well-known hysteretic and threshold-like effect of water potential on xylem hydraulic resistance.

The Dawes Review 2: Nucleosynthesis and stellar yields of low-and intermediate-mass single stars

Abstract: The chemical evolution of the Universe is governed by the chemical yields from stars, which in turn are determined primarily by the initial stellar mass. Even stars as low as 0.9 M⊙ can, at low metallicity, contribute to the chemical evolution of elements. Stars less massive than about 10 M⊙ experience recurrent mixing events that can significantly change the surface composition of the envelope, with observed enrichments in carbon, nitrogen, fluorine, and heavy elements synthesized by the slow neutron capture process (the s-process). Low- and intermediate-mass stars release their nucleosynthesis products through stellar outflows or winds, in contrast to massive stars that explode as core-collapse supernovae. Here we review the stellar evolution and nucleosynthesis for single stars up to ~ 10 M⊙ from the main sequence through to the tip of the asymptotic giant branch (AGB). We include a discussion of the main uncertainties that affect theoretical calculations and review the latest observational data, which are used to constrain uncertain details of the stellar models. We finish with a review of the stellar yields available for stars less massive than about 10 M⊙ and discuss efforts by various groups to address these issues and provide homogeneous yields for low- and intermediate-mass stars covering a broad range of metallicities.

Integrable structure of conformal field theory, quantum KdV theory and thermodynamic Bethe ansatz

Abstract: We construct the quantum versions of the monodromy matrices of KdV theory. The traces of these quantum monodromy matrices, which will be called as “T-operators,” act in highest weight Virasoro modules. TheT-operators depend on the spectral parameter λ and their expansion around λ=∞ generates an infinite set of commuting Hamiltonians of the quantum KdV system. TheT-operators can be viewed as the continuous field theory versions of the commuting transfermatrices of integrable lattice theory. In particular, we show that for the values\(c = 1 - 3\frac{{3(2n + 1)^2 }}{{2n + 3}}\),n=1,2,3 .... of the Virasoro central charge the eigenvalues of theT-operators satisfy a closed system of functional equations sufficient for determining the spectrum. For the ground-state eigenvalue these functional equations are equivalent to those of the massless Thermodynamic Bethe Ansatz for the minimal conformal field theoryM2,2n+3; in general they provide a way to generalize the technique of the Thermodynamic Bethe Ansatz to the excited states. We discuss a generalization of our approach to the cases of massive field theories obtained by perturbing these Conformal Field Theories with the operator Φ1,3. The relation of theseT-operators to the boundary states is also briefly described.