Convergence and divergence dynamics in British and French business schools: how will the pressure for accreditation influence these dynamics?

This paper focuses on convergence and divergence dynamics among leading British and French business schools and explores how the pressure for accreditation influences these dynamics. We illustrate that despite historical differences in approaches to management education in Britain and France, these approaches have converged partly based on the influence of the American model of management education but more recently through the pursuit of accreditation, in particular AASCB and EQUIS. We explore these dynamics through the application of the resource-based view of the firm and institutional theory and suggest that whilst achieving accreditation is a necessary precursor for international competition, it is no longer a form of competitive advantage. The pursuit of accreditation has fostered a form of competitive mimicry reducing national distinctiveness. The resource-based view of the firm suggests that the top schools need a more heterogeneous approach that is not easily replicable if they are to outperform the competitors. Consequently, the convergence of management education in Britain and France will become a new impetus for divergence. We assert that future growth and competitive advantage might be better achieved through the reassertion of national, regional and local cultural characteristics

Quantum dissipative effects in moving mirrors: a functional approach

We use a functional approach to study various aspects of the quantum effective dynamics of moving, planar, dispersive mirrors, coupled to scalar or Dirac fields, in different numbers of dimensions. We first compute the Euclidean effective action, and use it to derive the imaginary part of the `in-out' effective action. We also obtain, for the case of the real scalar field in 1+1 dimensions, the Schwinger-Keldysh effective action and a semiclassical Langevin equation that describes the motion of the mirror including noise and dissipative effects due to its coupling to the quantum fields.Comment: References added. Version to appear in Phys. Rev.

Stress Tensor Correlators in the Schwinger-Keldysh Formalism

We express stress tensor correlators using the Schwinger-Keldysh formalism. The absence of off-diagonal counterterms in this formalism ensures that the +- and -+ correlators are free of primitive divergences. We use dimensional regularization in position space to explicitly check this at one loop order for a massless scalar on a flat space background. We use the same procedure to show that the ++ correlator contains the divergences first computed by `t Hooft and Veltman for the scalar contribution to the graviton self-energy.Comment: 14 pages, LaTeX 2epsilon, no figures, revised for publicatio

Science Learning+ Youth Equity Pathways in Informal Science Learning: Survey findings

This document presents an overview of the quantitative survey data findings from the SL+ Equity Pathways in Informal Science Learning project. Further qualitative analysis on some of the open response data is yet to be completed. Findings are grouped into four areas: about the individuals taking part in the survey; their definitions and understanding of equity and related terms; their current equity practice; and their practices around equity work including reading, talking with colleagues and evaluation

Levy distribution in many-particle quantum systems

Levy distribution, previously used to describe complex behavior of classical systems, is shown to characterize that of quantum many-body systems. Using two complimentary approaches, the canonical and grand-canonical formalisms, we discovered that the momentum profile of a Tonks-Girardeau gas, -- a one-dimensional gas of $N$ impenetrable (hard-core) bosons, harmonically confined on a lattice at finite temperatures, obeys Levy distribution. Finally, we extend our analysis to different confinement setups and demonstrate that the tunable Levy distribution properly reproduces momentum profiles in experimentally accessible regions. Our finding allows for calibration of complex many-body quantum states by using a unique scaling exponent.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figures, results are generalized, new examples are adde

Photon creation from vacuum and interactions engineering in nonstationary circuit QED

We study theoretically the nonstationary circuit QED system in which the artificial atom transition frequency, or the atom-cavity coupling, have a small periodic time modulation, prescribed externally. The system formed by the atom coupled to a single cavity mode is described by the Rabi Hamiltonian. We show that, in the dispersive regime, when the modulation periodicity is tuned to the `resonances', the system dynamics presents the dynamical Casimir effect, resonant Jaynes-Cummings or resonant Anti-Jaynes-Cummings behaviors, and it can be described by the corresponding effective Hamiltonians. In the resonant atom-cavity regime and under the resonant modulation, the dynamics is similar to the one occurring for a stationary two-level atom in a vibrating cavity, and an entangled state with two photons can be created from vacuum. Moreover, we consider the situation in which the atom-cavity coupling, the atomic frequency, or both have a small nonperiodic time modulation, and show that photons can be created from vacuum in the dispersive regime. Therefore, an analog of the dynamical Casimir effect can be simulated in circuit QED, and several photons, as well as entangled states, can be generated from vacuum due to the anti-rotating term in the Rabi Hamiltonian.Comment: 14 pages, 6 figures. Talk presented at the International Workshop "60 Years of Casimir Effect", 23 - 27 June, 2008, Brasili

Coherent radiation from neutral molecules moving above a grating

We predict and study the quantum-electrodynamical effect of parametric self-induced excitation of a molecule moving above the dielectric or conducting medium with periodic grating. In this case the radiation reaction force modulates the molecular transition frequency which results in a parametric instability of dipole oscillations even from the level of quantum or thermal fluctuations. The present mechanism of instability of electrically neutral molecules is different from that of the well-known Smith-Purcell and transition radiation in which a moving charge and its oscillating image create an oscillating dipole. We show that parametrically excited molecular bunches can produce an easily detectable coherent radiation flux of up to a microwatt.Comment: 4 page

Quantum radiation in a plane cavity with moving mirrors

We consider the electromagnetic vacuum field inside a perfect plane cavity with moving mirrors, in the nonrelativistic approximation. We show that low frequency photons are generated in pairs that satisfy simple properties associated to the plane geometry. We calculate the photon generation rates for each polarization as functions of the mechanical frequency by two independent methods: on one hand from the analysis of the boundary conditions for moving mirrors and with the aid of Green functions; and on the other hand by an effective Hamiltonian approach. The angular and frequency spectra are discrete, and emission rates for each allowed angular direction are obtained. We discuss the dependence of the generation rates on the cavity length and show that the effect is enhanced for short cavity lengths. We also compute the dissipative force on the moving mirrors and show that it is related to the total radiated energy as predicted by energy conservation.Comment: 17 pages, 1 figure, published in Physical Review

Photon Green's function and the Casimir energy in a medium

A new expansion is established for the Green's function of the electromagnetic field in a medium with arbitrary $\epsilon$ and $\mu$. The obtained Born series are shown to consist of two types of interactions - the usual terms (denoted $\cal P$) that appear in the Lifshitz theory combined with a new kind of terms (which we denote by $\cal Q$) associated with the changes in the permeability of the medium. Within this framework the case of uniform velocity of light ($\epsilon\mu={\rm const}$) is studied. We obtain expressions for the Casimir energy density and the first non-vanishing contribution is manipulated to a simplified form. For (arbitrary) spherically symmetric $\mu$ we obtain a simple expression for the electromagnetic energy density, and as an example we obtain from it the Casimir energy of a dielectric-diamagnetic ball. It seems that the technique presented can be applied to a variety of problems directly, without expanding the eigenmodes of the problem and using boundary condition considerations