Do environmental and task characteristics matter in the control of externalized local public services? Unveiling the relevance of party characteristics and citizens’ offstage voice

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate the mechanisms adopted by cities to control the provision of externalized public services and to explore the determinants of such control choices.

Design/methodology/approach: The paper presents the results of a multiple case study based on the experiences of three cities and three public services (transport, solid waste collection and home care services for the elderly), where control mechanisms and their possible antecedents were analyzed.

Findings: The results show that the control models found in the cases analyzed do not correspond to the "pure" patterns described in the private sector literature and that the factors identified by management control contributions do not seem to be exhaustive in explaining the configuration of control systems in the public sector. While environmental and task characteristics only partially explain the adoption of certain configurations of control, the features of the control systems seem to be rather influenced by variables that are related to party characteristics.

Originality/value: The paper shows that the combinations of control mechanisms are more multifaceted than those presented in the literature, and that the factors identified in the private sector literature do not seem to explain comprehensively the configuration of control systems in the public sector. © Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

Vortex entanglement in Bose-Einstein condensates coupled to Laguerre-Gauss beams

We study the establishment of vortex entanglement in remote Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs). We consider a two-mode photonic resource entangled in its orbital angular momentum (OAM) degree of freedom and, by exploiting the process of light-to-BEC OAM transfer, demonstrate that such entanglement can be efficiently passed to the matterlike systems. Our proposal thus represents a building block for novel dissipation-free and long-memory communication channels based on OAM. We discuss issues of practical realizability, stressing the feasibility of our scheme, and present an operative technique for the indirect inference of the set vortex entanglement.

Matter

Poem.

Detection of improper installation from the sensor signal of vortex flowmeters

Effects of inappropriate installation can bias the measurements of flowmeters. For vortex flowmeters, a method is proposed to detect inappropriate installation of the flowmeter from the oscillatory signal of the vortex sensor. The method is based on assuming the process of vortex generation to be a generic, noisy, nonlinear oscillation, describable by a noisy Stuart-Landau equation, with a corresponding sensor signal that also contains higher harmonic excitations. By making use of the scaling properties of the Navier-Stokes Equation, the method was designed to be robust with respect to uncertainties in the fluid properties. The diagnostic functionality is demonstrated on measurement data. In the experiments, installation effects that lead to more than 0.5% error in the output of the flowmeter could clearly be detected. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Discrete breathers in hexagonal dusty plasma lattices

The occurrence of single-site or multisite localized vibrational modes, also called discrete breathers, in two-dimensional hexagonal dusty plasma lattices is investigated. The system is described by a Klein-Gordon hexagonal lattice characterized by a negative coupling parameter epsilon in account of its inverse dispersive behavior. A theoretical analysis is performed in order to establish the possibility of existence of single as well as three-site discrete breathers in such systems. The study is complemented by a numerical investigation based on experimentally provided potential forms. This investigation shows that a dusty plasma lattice can support single-site discrete breathers, while three-site in phase breathers could exist if specific conditions, about the intergrain interaction strength, would hold. On the other hand, out of phase and vortex three-site breathers cannot be supported since they are highly unstable.

Vortex line and ring dynamics in trapped Bose-Einstein condensates

Vortex dynamics in inhomogeneous Bose-Einstein condensates are studied numerically in two and three dimensions. We simulate the precession of a single vortex around the center of a trapped condensate, and use the Magnus force to estimate the precession frequency. Vortex ring dynamics in a spherical trap are also simulated, and we discover that a ring undergoes oscillatory motion around a circle of maximum energy. The position of this locus is calculated as a function of the number of condensed atoms. In the presence of dissipation, the amplitude of the oscillation will increase, eventually resulting in self-annihilation of the ring.

Vortex shedding and drag in dilute Bose-Einstein condensates

Above a critical velocity, the dominant mechanism of energy transfer between a moving object and a dilute Bose-Einstein condensate is vortex formation. In this paper, we discuss the critical velocity for vortex formation and the link between vortex shedding and drag in both homogeneous and inhomogeneous condensates. We find that at supersonic velocities sound radiation also contributes significantly to the drag force.

Dissipation and vortex creation in Bose-Einstein condensed gases

We solve the Gross-Pitaevskii equation to study energy transfer from an oscillating

Structural change of vortex patterns in anisotropic Bose-Einstein condensates

We study the changes in the spatial distribution of vortices in a rotating Bose-Einstein condensate due to an increasing eccentricity of the trapping potential. By breaking the rotational symmetry, the vortex system undergoes a rich variety of structural changes, including the formation of zigzag and linear configurations. These spatial rearrangements are well signaled by the change in the behavior of the vortex-pattern eigenmodes against the eccentricity parameter. This behavior allows to actively control the distribution of vorticity in many-body systems and opens the possibility of studying interactions between quantum vortices over a large range of parameters.