On-the-ground fieldwork elevates community voices in energy access research
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Decarbonizing urban residential communities with green hydrogen systems
Community green hydrogen systems, typically consisting of rooftop photovoltaic panels paired with hybrid hydrogen-battery storage, offer urban environments with improved access to clean, on-site energy. However, economically viable pathways for deploying hydrogen storage within urban communities remain unclear. Here we develop a bottom-up energy model linking climate, human behavior and community characteristics to assess the impacts of pathways for deploying community green hydrogen systems in North America from 2030 to 2050. We show that for the same community conditions, the cost difference between the best and worst pathways can be as high as 60%. In particular, the household centralized option emerges as the preferred pathway for most communities. Furthermore, enhancing energy storage demands within these deployment pathways can reduce system design costs up to fourfold. To achieve cost-effective urban decarbonization, the study underscores the critical role of selecting the right deployment pathway and prioritizing the integration of increased energy storage in pathway designs.
Predicting global distributions of eukaryotic plankton communities from satellite data
Satellite remote sensing is a powerful tool to monitor the global dynamics of marine plankton. Previous research has focused on developing models to predict the size or taxonomic groups of phytoplankton. Here, we present an approach to identify community types from a global plankton network that includes phytoplankton and heterotrophic protists and to predict their biogeography using global satellite observations. Six plankton community types were identified from a co-occurrence network inferred using a novel rDNA 18 S V4 planetary-scale eukaryotic metabarcoding dataset. Machine learning techniques were then applied to construct a model that predicted these community types from satellite data. The model showed an overall 67% accuracy in the prediction of the community types. The prediction using 17 satellite-derived parameters showed better performance than that using only temperature and/or the concentration of chlorophyll a. The constructed model predicted the global spatiotemporal distribution of community types over 19 years. The predicted distributions exhibited strong seasonal changes in community types in the subarctic–subtropical boundary regions, which were consistent with previous field observations. The model also identified the long-term trends in the distribution of community types, which suggested responses to ocean warming.
Collective quantum enhancement in critical quantum sensing
Critical systems represent a valuable resource in quantum sensing and metrology. Critical quantum sensing (CQS) protocols can be realized using finite-component phase transitions, where criticality arises from the rescaling of system parameters rather than the thermodynamic limit. Here, we show that a collective quantum advantage can be achieved in a multipartite CQS protocol using a chain of parametrically coupled critical resonators in the weak-nonlinearity limit. We derive analytical solutions for the low-energy spectrum of this unconventional quantum many-body system, which is composed of locally critical elements. We then assess the scaling of the quantum Fisher information with respect to fundamental resources. We demonstrate that the coupled chain outperforms an equivalent ensemble of independent critical sensors, achieving quadratic scaling in the number of resonators. Finally, we show that even with finite Kerr nonlinearity or Markovian dissipation, the critical chain retains its advantage, making it relevant for implementing quantum sensors with current microwave superconducting technologies.
Management practices and manufacturing firm responses to a randomized energy audit
Increasing the efficiency of industrial energy use is widely considered important for mitigating climate change. We randomize assignment of an energy audit intervention aimed at improving energy efficiency and reducing energy expenditures of small- and medium-sized metal processing firms in Shandong Province, China, and examine impacts on energy outcomes and interactions with firms’ management practices. We find that the intervention reduced firms’ unit cost of electricity by 8% on average. Firms with more developed structured management practices showed higher rates of recommendation adoption. However, the post-intervention electricity unit cost reduction is larger in firms with less developed practices, primarily driven by a single recommendation that corrected managers’ inaccurate reporting of transformer usage at baseline, lowering their electricity costs. By closing management-associated gaps in awareness of energy expenditures, energy audit programmes may reduce a firm’s unit cost of energy but have an ambiguous impact on energy use and climate change.
Efficiently preparing chiral states via fermionic cooling on bosonic quantum hardware
Simulating many-body systems is one of the most promising applications of near-term quantum computers. An important open question is how to efficiently prepare the ground states of arbitrary fermionic Hamiltonians, especially those with nontrivial topology. Here, we propose an efficient protocol for preparing low-energy states of fermionic Hamiltonians on a noisy bosonic quantum simulator by adiabatic cooling using a simulated bath. We arrange the couplings such that the simulated system and bath together obtain a local fermionic description in which fermionic excitations can be extracted individually, via coherent hopping to the bath, rather than in pairs as would otherwise be required by fermion parity conservation. This approach thus achieves a linear (rather than quadratic) scaling of the cooling rate vs. excitation density at low densities. We show that certain topological phases such as the chiral (non-Abelian) phase of the Kitaev honeycomb model can be prepared efficiently using our protocol. Our protocol performs favorably in the presence of noise, making it suitable for execution on near-term quantum devices.
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