Explore the vast range of titles available.

The mitigation of air pollution in megacities remains a great challenge because of the complex sources and formation mechanisms of aerosol particles. The 2014 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Beijing serves as a unique experiment to study the impacts of emission controls on aerosol composition, size distributions, and oxidation properties. Herein, a high-resolution time-of-flight aerosol mass spectrometer was deployed in urban Beijing for real-time measurements of size-resolved non-refractory submicron aerosol (NR-PM1) species from 14 October to 12 November 2014, along with a range of collocated measurements. The average (±σ) PM1 was 41.6 (±38.9) μg m−3 during APEC, which was decreased by 53 % compared with that before APEC. The aerosol composition showed substantial changes owing to emission controls during APEC. Secondary inorganic aerosol (SIA: sulfate + nitrate + ammonium) showed significant reductions of 62–69 %, whereas organics presented much smaller decreases (35 %). The results from the positive matrix factorization of organic aerosol (OA) indicated that highly oxidized secondary organic aerosol (SOA) showed decreases similar to those of SIA during APEC. However, primary organic aerosol (POA) from cooking, traffic, and biomass-burning sources were comparable to those before APEC, indicating the presence of strong local source emissions. The oxidation properties showed corresponding changes in response to OA composition. The average oxygen-to-carbon level during APEC was 0.36 (±0.10), which is lower than the 0.43 (±0.13) measured before APEC, demonstrating a decrease in the OA oxidation degree. The changes in size distributions of primary and secondary species varied during APEC. SIA and SOA showed significant reductions in large accumulation modes with peak diameters shifting from ~ 650 to 400 nm during APEC, whereas those of POA remained relatively unchanged. The changes in aerosol composition, size distributions, and oxidation degrees during the aging processes were further illustrated in a case study of a severe haze episode. Our results elucidated a complex response of aerosol chemistry to emission controls, which has significant implications that emission controls over regional scales can substantially reduce secondary particulates. However, stricter emission controls for local source emissions are needed for further mitigating air pollution in the megacity of Beijing.

The complex socio-economic and environmental challenges of the 21st century must be tackled by placing faith in the power of mankind to integrate established wisdom and new knowledge, and in our ability to collaborate for a sustainable future. Departing from this, a global 2011 conference debating papers devoted to the impact of ancient philosophy, focusing on Confucius and Aristotle, in modern leadership and management was organized by Hanban, the Athens University of Economics & Business, and the University of International Economics & Business, Beijing, China. This volume presents the wide array of conference contributions by international thought-leaders.

Land-surface models (LSMs) are increasingly called upon to represent not only the exchanges of energy, water and momentum across the land–atmosphere interface (their original purpose in climate models), but also how ecosystems and water resources respond to climate, atmospheric environment, land-use and land-use change, and how these responses in turn influence land–atmosphere fluxes of carbon dioxide (CO2), trace gases and other species that affect the composition and chemistry of the atmosphere. However, the LSMs embedded in state-of-the-art climate models differ in how they represent fundamental aspects of the hydrological and carbon cycles, resulting in large inter-model differences and sometimes faulty predictions. These \"third-generation\" LSMs respect the close coupling of the carbon and water cycles through plants, but otherwise tend to be under-constrained, and have not taken full advantage of robust hydrological parameterizations that were independently developed in offline models. Benchmarking, combining multiple sources of atmospheric, biospheric and hydrological data, should be a required component of LSM development, but this field has been relatively poorly supported and intermittently pursued. Moreover, benchmarking alone is not sufficient to ensure that models improve. Increasing complexity may increase realism but decrease reliability and robustness, by increasing the number of poorly known model parameters. In contrast, simplifying the representation of complex processes by stochastic parameterization (the representation of unresolved processes by statistical distributions of values) has been shown to improve model reliability and realism in both atmospheric and land-surface modelling contexts. We provide examples for important processes in hydrology (the generation of runoff and flow routing in heterogeneous catchments) and biology (carbon uptake by species-diverse ecosystems). We propose that the way forward for next-generation complex LSMs will include: (a) representations of biological and hydrological processes based on the implementation of multiple internal constraints; (b) systematic application of benchmarking and data assimilation techniques to optimize parameter values and thereby test the structural adequacy of models; and (c) stochastic parameterization of unresolved variability, applied in both the hydrological and the biological domains.

Quantum electrodynamics is generally extended to a nonlocal QED by introducing the correlation functions. The gauge link is introduced to guarantee that the nonlocal QED is locally U (1) gauge invariant. The corresponding Feynman rules as well as the proof of Ward–Takahashi identity are presented. As an example, the anomalous magnetic moments of leptons are studied in nonlocal QED. At one-loop level, besides the ordinary diagrams, there are many additional Feynman diagrams which are generated from the gauge link. It shows the nonlocal QED can provide a reasonable explanation for lepton g - 2 anomalies.

The study of non-Hermitian systems with parity–time (PT) symmetry is a rapidly developing frontier. Realized in recent experiments, PT-symmetric classical optical systems with balanced gain and loss hold great promise for future applications. Here we report the experimental realization of passive PT-symmetric quantum dynamics for single photons by temporally alternating photon losses in the quantum walk interferometers. The ability to impose PT symmetry allows us to realize and investigate Floquet topological phases driven by PT-symmetric quantum walks. We observe topological edge states between regions with different bulk topological properties and confirm the robustness of these edge states with respect to PT-symmetry-preserving perturbations and PT-symmetry-breaking static disorder. Our results contribute towards the realization of quantum mechanical PT-synthetic devices and suggest exciting possibilities for the exploration of the topological properties of non-Hermitian systems using discrete-time quantum walks. Spontaneous parity–time-symmetry breaking and topological edge states are observed in a photonic non-Hermitian system — a quantum walk interferometer.

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are millisecond-duration radio transients of unknown physical origin observed at extragalactic distances 1 – 3 . It has long been speculated that magnetars are the engine powering repeating bursts from FRB sources 4 – 13 , but no convincing evidence has been collected so far 14 . Recently, the Galactic magnetar SRG 1935+2154 entered an active phase by emitting intense soft γ-ray bursts 15 . One FRB-like event with two peaks (FRB 200428) and a luminosity slightly lower than the faintest extragalactic FRBs was detected from the source, in association with a soft γ-ray/hard-X-ray flare 18 – 21 . Here we report an eight-hour targeted radio observational campaign comprising four sessions and assisted by multi-wavelength (optical and hard-X-ray) data. During the third session, 29 soft-γ-ray repeater (SGR) bursts were detected in γ-ray energies. Throughout the observing period, we detected no single dispersed pulsed emission coincident with the arrivals of SGR bursts, but unfortunately we were not observing when the FRB was detected. The non-detection places a fluence upper limit that is eight orders of magnitude lower than the fluence of FRB 200428. Our results suggest that FRB–SGR burst associations are rare. FRBs may be highly relativistic and geometrically beamed, or FRB-like events associated with SGR bursts may have narrow spectra and characteristic frequencies outside the observed band. It is also possible that the physical conditions required to achieve coherent radiation in SGR bursts are difficult to satisfy, and that only under extreme conditions could an FRB be associated with an SGR burst. An 8-hour radio observational campaign of the Galactic magnetar SGR 1935+2154, assisted by multi-wavelength data, indicates that associations between fast radio bursts and soft γ-ray bursts are rare.