38,871 research outputs found
Mainstreaming Safety Nets in the Social Protection Policy Agenda: A New Vision or the Same Old Perspective?
Social protection aims to provide a national platform for smoothly transitioning from a chaotic collection of shock responses to an institutionalized system for risk and non-risk management. For the poorest, the transition aims to move away from ad hoc, unpredictable relief to national safety nets that deliver timely, multi-year, guaranteed and predictable transfers. Social protection has to face particular challenges in chronically poor, shock-prone countries where the distinction between the chronic and transitory poor is often blurred. Other conceptual and programmatic issues also need further investigation. For filling these gaps, a research agenda articulated in ten thematic areas is proposed.vulnerability, risk, shocks, social protection, safety nets, Agricultural and Food Policy,
Pairing gaps in Hartree-Fock Bogoliubov theory with the Gogny D1S interaction
As part of a program to study odd-A nuclei in the Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov
(HFB) theory, we have developed a new calculational tool to find the HFB minima
of odd-A nuclei based on the gradient method and using interactions of Gogny's
form. The HFB minimization includes both time-even and time-odd fields in the
energy functional, avoiding the commonly used "filling approximation". Here we
apply the method to calculate neutron pairing gaps in some representative
isotope chains of spherical and deformed nuclei, namely the Z=8,50 and 82
spherical chains and the Z=62 and 92 deformed chains. We find that the gradient
method is quite robust, permitting us to carry out systematic surveys involving
many nuclei. We find that the time-odd field does not have large effect on the
pairing gaps calculated with the Gogny D1S interaction. Typically, adding the
T-odd field as a perturbation increases the pairing gap by ~100 keV, but the
re-minimization brings the gap back down. This outcome is very similar to
results reported for the Skyrme family of nuclear energy density functionals.
Comparing the calculated gaps with the experimental ones, we find that the
theoretical errors have both signs implying that the D1S interaction has a
reasonable overall strength. However, we find some systematic deficiencies
comparing spherical and deformed chains and comparing the lighter chains with
the heavier ones. The gaps for heavy spherical nuclei are too high, while those
for deformed nuclei tend to be too low. The calculated gaps of spherical nuclei
show hardly any A-dependence, contrary to the data. Inclusion of the T-odd
component of the interaction does not change these qualitative findings
Stripes, Pseudogaps, and Van Hove Nesting in the Three-band tJ Model
Slave boson calculations have been carried out in the three-band tJ model for
the high-T_c cuprates, with the inclusion of coupling to oxygen breathing mode
phonons. Phonon-induced Van Hove nesting leads to a phase separation between a
hole-doped domain and a (magnetic) domain near half filling, with long-range
Coulomb forces limiting the separation to a nanoscopic scale. Strong
correlation effects pin the Fermi level close to, but not precisely at the Van
Hove singularity (VHS), which can enhance the tendency to phase separation. The
resulting dispersions have been calculated, both in the uniform phases and in
the phase separated regime. In the latter case, distinctly different
dispersions are found for large, random domains and for regular (static)
striped arrays, and a hypothetical form is presented for dynamic striped
arrays. The doping dependence of the latter is found to provide an excellent
description of photoemission and thermodynamic experiments on pseudogap
formation in underdoped cuprates. In particular, the multiplicity of observed
gaps is explained as a combination of flux phase plus charge density wave (CDW)
gaps along with a superconducting gap. The largest gap is associated with VHS
nesting. The apparent smooth evolution of this gap with doping masks a
crossover from CDW-like effects near optimal doping to magnetic effects (flux
phase) near half filling. A crossover from large Fermi surface to hole pockets
with increased underdoping is found. In the weakly overdoped regime, the CDW
undergoes a quantum phase transition (), which could be obscured
by phase separation.Comment: 15 pages, Latex, 18 PS figures Corrects a sign error: major changes,
esp. in Sect. 3, Figs 1-4,6 replace
Spin and valley quantum Hall ferromagnetism in graphene
In a graphene Landau level (LL), strong Coulomb interactions and the fourfold
spin/valley degeneracy lead to an approximate SU(4) isospin symmetry. At
partial filling, exchange interactions can spontaneously break this symmetry,
manifesting as additional integer quantum Hall plateaus outside the normal
sequence. Here we report the observation of a large number of these quantum
Hall isospin ferromagnetic (QHIFM) states, which we classify according to their
real spin structure using temperature-dependent tilted field magnetotransport.
The large measured activation gaps confirm the Coulomb origin of the broken
symmetry states, but the order is strongly dependent on LL index. In the high
energy LLs, the Zeeman effect is the dominant aligning field, leading to real
spin ferromagnets with Skyrmionic excitations at half filling, whereas in the
`relativistic' zero energy LL, lattice scale anisotropies drive the system to a
spin unpolarized state, likely a charge- or spin-density wave.Comment: Supplementary information available at http://pico.phys.columbia.ed
Nature of the insulating phases in the half-filled ionic Hubbard model
We investigate the ground-state phase diagram of the one-dimensional "ionic"
Hubbard model with an alternating periodic potential at half-filling by
numerical diagonalization of finite systems with the Lanczos and density matrix
renormalization group (DMRG) methods. We identify an insulator-insulator phase
transition from a band to a correlated insulator with simultaneous charge and
bond-charge order. The transition point is characterized by the vanishing of
the optical excitation gap while simultaneously the charge and spin gaps remain
finite and equal. Indications for a possible second transition into a
Mott-insulator phase are discussed.Comment: final for
A method for filling gaps in solar irradiance and in solar proxy data
Data gaps are ubiquitous in spectral irradiance data, and yet, little effort
has been put into finding robust methods for filling them. We introduce a
data-adaptive and nonparametric method that allows us to fill data gaps in
multi-wavelength or in multichannel records. This method, which is based on the
iterative singular value decomposition, uses the coherency between simultaneous
measurements at different wavelengths (or between different proxies) to fill
the missing data in a self-consistent way. The interpolation is improved by
handling different time scales separately.
Two major assets of this method are its simplicity, with few tuneable
parameters, and its robustness. Two examples of missing data are given: one
from solar EUV observations, and one from solar proxy data. The method is also
appropriate for building a composite out of partly overlapping records.Comment: to appear in Astronomy & Astrophysics (2011
Pinned Balseiro-Falicov Model of Tunneling and Photoemission in the Cuprates
The smooth evolution of the tunneling gap of Bi_2Sr_2CaCu_2O_8 with doping
from a pseudogap state in the underdoped cuprates to a superconducting state at
optimal and overdoping, has been interpreted as evidence that the pseudogap
must be due to precursor pairing. We suggest an alternative explanation, that
the smoothness reflects a hidden SO(N) symmetry near the (pi,0) points of the
Brillouin zone (with N = 3, 4, 5, or 6). Because of this symmetry, the
pseudogap could actually be due to any of a number of nesting instabilities,
including charge or spin density waves or more exotic phases. We present a
detailed analysis of this competition for one particular model: the pinned
Balseiro-Falicov model of competing charge density wave and (s-wave)
superconductivity. We show that most of the anomalous features of both
tunneling and photoemission follow naturally from the model, including the
smooth crossover, the general shape of the pseudogap phase diagram, the
shrinking Fermi surface of the pseudogap phase, and the asymmetry of the
tunneling gap away from optimal doping. Below T_c, the sharp peak at Delta_1
and the dip seen in the tunneling and photoemission near 2Delta_1 cannot be
described in detail by this model, but we suggest a simple generalization to
account for inhomogeneity, which does provide an adequate description. We show
that it should be possible, with a combination of photoemission and tunneling,
to demonstrate the extent of pinning of the Fermi level to the Van Hove
singularity. A preliminary analysis of the data suggests pinning in the
underdoped, but not in the overdoped regime.Comment: 18 pages LaTeX, 26 ps. figure
Observation of a new phase transition between fully and partially polarized quantum Hall states with charge and spin gaps at
The average electron spin-polarization of two-dimensional electron
gas confined in multiple quantum-wells was measured by
nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) near the fractional quantum Hall state with
filling factor . Above this filling factor (), a strong depolarization is observed corresponding to two spin flips per
additional flux quantum. The most remarkable behavior of the polarization is
observed at , where a quantum phase transition from a partially
polarized () to a fully polarized ()
state can be driven by increasing the ratio between the Zeeman and the Coulomb
energy above a critical value .Comment: 4 pages including 4 figure
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