Trace pollutants analysis in soil by a time-resolved laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy technique

The results of a joint experiment of IFAM-Pisa and ENEA-Frascati for the detection of traces of pollutants in soil by a time-resolved laser-induced spectroscopy technique are reported. Using samples of soil with known pollutants' concentration [Geochemical Exploration Reference (GXR) silicate from US Geological Survey], we were able to estimate the sensitivity of this Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS) technique to be of the order of some parts per million for a vast class of metallic pollutants, including extremely dangerous soil pollutants such as copper, lead and chromium.ENEA guest with HC&M fellowship     

A note on stability of the Douglas splitting method

In this note some stability results are derived for the Douglas splitting method. The relevance of the theoretical results is tested for an advection-reaction equation.

     

Allocation rules for hypergraph communication situations

This paper considers hypergraph communication situations, where for a group of agents the economic possibilities are described by a coalitional game and the communication possibilities are described by a hypergraph in which the nodes are the agents and the edges are the subgroups of agents who can effect communication. Axiomatic characterizations are provided for two allocation rules, the Myerson value and the position value.     

Mössbauer spectroscopic study of core and mantle of rattle stones

Mössbauer spectroscopy has been applied to two rattle stones found in the Netherlands, which have been formed under different pedoenvironment conditions in the past. Ultrafine particles of goethite are dominantly present in both core and mantle of these stones. The latter differs in both composition and mean particle size; this is related to the distinct manner of their formation.     

Tracking performance in LHCb

The European Physical Journal C - The tracking system of the LHCb detector has been re-optimised to reduce the amount of material which particles traverse. The different subcomponents involved in...     

Inventory strategies for systems with fast remanufacturing

We describe hybrid manufacturing/remanufacturing systems with a long lead time for manufacturing and a short lead time for remanufacturing. We review the classes of inventory strategies for hybrid systems in the literature. These are all based on equal lead times. For systems with slow manufacturing and fast remanufacturing, we propose a new class. An extensive numerical experiment shows that the optimal strategy in the new class almost always performs better and often much better than the optimal strategies in all other classes.