Climate Policy under Sustainable Discounted Utilitarianism

Empirical evaluation of policies to mitigate climate change has been largely confined to the application of discounted utilitarianism (DU). DU is controversial, both due to the conditions through which it is justified and due to its consequences for climate policies, where the discounting of future utility gains from present abatement efforts makes it harder for such measures to justify their present costs. In this paper, we propose sustainable discounted utilitarianism (SDU) as an alternative principle for evaluation of climate policy. Unlike undiscounted utilitarianism, which always assigns zero relative weight to present utility, SDU is an axiomatically based criterion, which departs from DU by assigning zero weight to present utility if and only if the present is better off than the future. Using the DICE integrated assessment model to run risk analysis, we show that it is possible for the future to be worse off than the present along a ‘business as usual’ development path. Consequently SDU and DU differ, and willingness to pay for emissions reductions is (sometimes significantly) higher under SDU than under DU. Under SDU, stringent schedules of emissions reductions increase social welfare, even for a relatively high utility discount rate.climate change, discounted utilitarianism, intergenerational equity, sustainable development, sustainable discounted utilitarianism

Development and parametric evaluation of the prototype 2 and 3 flash evaporators

Development of the Prototype 2 and 3 flash evaporator heat sinks which vaporize an expendable fluid to cool a heat transport fluid loop is reported. The units utilize Freon 21 as the heat transport fluid and water as the expendable fluid to meet the projected performance requirements of the space shuttle for both on-orbit and ascent/reentry operations. The evaporant is pulse-sprayed by on-off control onto heat transfer surfaces containing the transport fluid and exhausted to the vacuum environment through fixed area exhaust ducts

Static axisymmetric spacetimes with non-generic world-line SUSY

The conditions for the existence of Killing-Yano tensors, which are closely related to the appearance of non-generic world-line SUSY, are presented for static axisymmetric spacetimes. Imposing the vacuum Einstein equation, the set of solutions admitting Killing-Yano tensors is considered. In particular, it is shown that static, axisymmetric and asymptotically flat vacuum solutions admitting Killing-Yano tensors are only the Schwarzschild solution.Comment: 10 pages (RevTeX), TIT/HEP-253/COSMO-4

Extremal transmission through a microwave photonic crystal and the observation of edge states in a rectangular Dirac billiard

This article presents experimental results on properties of waves propagating in an unbounded and a bounded photonic crystal consisting of metallic cylinders which are arranged in a triangular lattice. First, we present transmission measurements of plane waves traversing a photonic crystal. The experiments are performed in the vicinity of a Dirac point, i.e., an isolated conical singularity of the photonic band structure. There, the transmission shows a pseudodiffusive 1/L dependence, with $L$ being the thickness of the crystal, a phenomenon also observed in graphene. Second, eigenmode intensity distributions measured in a microwave analog of a relativistic Dirac billiard, a rectangular microwave billiard that contains a photonic crystal, are discussed. Close to the Dirac point states have been detected which are localized at the straight edge of the photonic crystal corresponding to a zigzag edge in graphene

Cross-section Fluctuations in Open Microwave Billiards and Quantum Graphs: The Counting-of-Maxima Method Revisited

The fluctuations exhibited by the cross-sections generated in a compound-nucleus reaction or, more generally, in a quantum-chaotic scattering process, when varying the excitation energy or another external parameter, are characterized by the width Gamma_corr of the cross-section correlation function. In 1963 Brink and Stephen [Phys. Lett. 5, 77 (1963)] proposed a method for its determination by simply counting the number of maxima featured by the cross sections as function of the parameter under consideration. They, actually, stated that the product of the average number of maxima per unit energy range and Gamma_corr is constant in the Ercison region of strongly overlapping resonances. We use the analogy between the scattering formalism for compound-nucleus reactions and for microwave resonators to test this method experimentally with unprecedented accuracy using large data sets and propose an analytical description for the regions of isolated and overlapping resonances

Classical gravitational spin-spin interaction

I obtain an exact, axially symmetric, stationary solution of Einstein's equations for two massless spinning particles. The term representing the spin-spin interaction agrees with recently published approximate work. The spin-spin force appears to be proportional to the inverse fourth power of the coordinate distance between the particles.Comment: six pages, no figures, journal ref:accepted for Classical and Quantum Gravit

Spectral theorem for the Lindblad equation for quadratic open fermionic systems

The spectral theorem is proven for the quantum dynamics of quadratic open systems of n fermions described by the Lindblad equation. Invariant eigenspaces of the many-body Liouvillean dynamics and their largest Jordan blocks are explicitly constructed for all eigenvalues. For eigenvalue zero we describe an algebraic procedure for constructing (possibly higher dimensional) spaces of (degenerate) non-equilibrium steady states.Comment: 19 pages, no figure