A lightning initiation mechanism: application to a thunderstorm electrification model

The use of numerical models has greatly increased our understanding of the electrical and microphysical process within electrified clouds. We use the University of Washington, 1.5-dimensional thunderstorm model to examine the effects of including a runaway electron based lightning initiation mechanism. We find that this mechanism can significantly alter the electrification history of modeled storms and produce vertical electric field profiles that are very similar to those of observed storms. To cite this article: R. Solomon et al., C. R. Physique 3 (2002) 1325–1333.     

A Bruen chain forq=19

The one-to-one correspondence between the class of two-dimensional translation planes of orderq ² and the collection of spreads ofPG(3,q) has long provided a natural context for describing new planes. The method often used for constructing interesting spreads is to start with a regular spread, corresponding to a desarguesian plane, and then replace some nice subset of lines by another partial spread covering the same set of points. Indeed the first approach was replacing the lines of a regulus by the lines of its opposite regulus, or doing this process for a set of disjoint reguli. Nontrivial generalizations of this idea include thechains of Bruen and thenests of Baker and Ebert. In this paper we construct a replaceable subset of a regular spread ofPG (3, 19) which is the union of 11 reguli double covering the lines in their union, hence is a chain in the terminology of Bruen or a 11-nest in the Baker-Ebert terminology.     

Cost Comparisons for Out-of-Phase Inventory Models

Inventory costs for a fixed time period have traditionally been determined by allocating total costs per cycle uniformly throughout that cycle as well as any partial cycles. This procedure for cost allocation has led to the solution of numerous inventory problems, most notable of which is the anticipated price-increase model. When comparing two out-of-phase inventory models, if costs are accounted for when they occur over a fixed planning horizon, inventory policies should be changed to reflect the impact of this different cost-allocation procedure. For the anticipated price-increase model, the ‘optimal’ order quantity as well as the implied savings in inventory costs will be different when cost models are developed based on these different cost-allocation methods. If the objective is to maximize over a fixed planning horizon the actual savings in inventory costs as they occur, the cost models presented here should be used.     

Intermediate changes in high energy elastic scattering from atoms

Correction of the Glaubner T-matrix to account for target particle motion and energy change in elastic scattering of charged particles from atomic systems is found to vanish to leading order.     

Pediatric Laryngotracheal Stenosis and Airway Reconstruction: A Review of Voice Outcomes, Assessment, and Treatment Issues

Laryngotracheal stenosis is defined as a congenital or acquired narrowing of the airway. Congenital causes may include subglottic membranous or cartilaginous narrowing. Acquired causes may include trauma due to prolonged endotracheal or tracheal intubation or laryngotracheal injury. Although advances have been made over the past 30 years in reconstructive surgeries to improve airway patency in these patients, long-term laryngeal function for voice production is not well defined in this population. This review examines causes, symptoms and signs, and methods for diagnosing laryngotracheal stenosis. Surgical management procedures are briefly summarized. The current literature on voice outcomes is summarized. The predominant voice characteristics in the population are presented, although results are challenged by the heterogeneity of voice presentation and paucity of data from instrumental measures. Considerations for subjective and instrumental assessment, measures of quality of life, instrumental methods, and treatment options specific to the needs of this population are discussed. Research strategies to identify long-term outcomes of surgical and behavioral treatments in this population are posed.     

Spinup from Rest of Immiscible Fluids

We investigate the spinup from rest of two immiscible fluids of different densities and kinematic viscosities in a vertically mounted cylinder. Our attention is restricted to small internal rotational Froude numbers, in which case the interface remains essentially horizontal. By requiring small enough Ekman numbers, Wedemeyer's (1964) approximation may be used to obtain partial differential equations describing the inward convection and diffusion of the azimuthal velocity in both layers. Solutions are found illustrating the effects of varying the density, viscosity, and height of each layer. Qualitative agreement with experiment is reported.     

Monte carlo calculations of the conformal charge

The conformal charge is an important quantity which characterizes the nature of the two-dimensional phase transition. We report a first attempt to use a new numerical method to calculate the conformal charge. In this paper, we apply our method to the 2-dimensional, ⁴, continuous-spin Ising model. By varying the parameters in the Hamiltonian, one can change continuously from the known Gaussian limit to the Ising limit. It is well known that the critical points for these two systems are not in the same universality class. We study this behavior for the Gaussian model, the single-well ⁴ model, the border model, and the double-well ⁴ model for a large lattice. Our results, while giving a good general picture, are not so far sufficient to differentiate whether the non-Gaussian cases studied belong to the Ising model universality class or not. Further studies of other lattice sizes should serve to improve greatly our conclusions.