Place and Special Places: Innovations in Conservation Practice in Northern Ireland

The sense of place that relates human beings to their environment is under threat from the rising tide of placelessness which can result from potentially positive forces such as urban regeneration as well as negative ones such as incremental degradation. The concept of sense of place, and the need to protect and enhance special places, has underpinned UK conservation legislation and policy in the post-war era. In Northern Ireland, due to its distinctive settlement tradition, its troubled political circumstances and its centralised administrative system, a unique hierarchy of special places has evolved, involving areas of townscape and village character as well as conventional conservation areas. For the first time a comprehensive comparative survey of the townscape quality of most of these areas has been carried out in order to test the hypothesis that too many conservation area designations may devalue the conservation coinage. It also assesses the contribution that areas of townscape character can make in this situation, as potential conservation areas or as second-level local amenity designations. Its findings support the initial hypothesis: assessment of townscape quality on the basis of consistent criteria demonstrates a decline in the quality of more recent conservation area designations, and hence some devaluation of the coinage. However, the need for local discretion in the protection of local amenity supports the concept of areas of townscape and village character as an additional and distinct designation. This contradicts recent policy recommendations from the Northern Ireland Planning Commission and contains valuable lessons for conservation policy and practice in other parts of the UK.

Perspectives for quantum state engineering via high nonlinearity in a double-EIT regime

We analyse the possibilities for quantum state engineering offered by a model for Kerr-type nonlinearity enhanced by electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT), which was recently proposed by Petrosyan and Kurizki [2002, Phys. Rev. A, 65, 33833]. We go beyond the semiclassical treatment and derive a quantum version of the model with both a full Hamiltonian approach and an analysis in terms of dressed states. The preparation of an entangled coherent state via a cross-phase modulation effect is demonstrated. We briefly show that the violation of locality for such an entangled coherent state is robust against low detection efficiency. Finally, we investigate the possibility of a bi-chromatic photon blockade realized via the interaction of a low density beam of atoms with a bi-modal electromagnetic cavity which is externally driven. We show the effectiveness of the blockade effect even when more than a single atom is inside the cavity. The possibility to control two different cavity modes allows some insights into the generation of an entangled state of cavity modes.

A Universal Flow Regime Map for Horizontal Two-Phase Flow in Pipes

A new universal flow map has been developed for two-phase co-current flow. The map has been successfully tested against wide variety of data. Flow regime transition predictors suggested by other authors have been shown to be useful. New transitional models are proposed for the stratified to annular regimes, blow through slug and intermittent regimes.