Railway Reform in China.

The purpose of this working paper is to consider the current situation of Chinese Railways, the progress of reforms to date, and possible future developments. The first section describes the current problems of Chinese Railways, as a vast organisation subject to strong central control, facing enormous and rapidly growing demands which it is unable to satisfy. The progress of reform in Chinese Railways to date, and in particular the Economic Contract Responsibility System instituted in the late 1980's and the development of joint venture companies to build new lines, are then described. In the following section the key reform models found in other countries - deregulation and privatisation of vertically integrated regional companies; separation of infrastructure from operations with open access andlor franchising competitors; or reorganisation on the basis of business sectors - are then described. None is fully suitable for China, but it is suggested that a combination of sectorisation, more commercial independence, further development of joint public/private partnerships and more contracting out, is the most likely way forward

Creep recovery and stress relaxation tests of 6061-0 aluminum

The investigation of creep recovery and stress relaxation in aluminum using a closed loop servo-hydraulic test system is described. The practicality of a computer controlled test system for constant plastic strain rate tension tests is demonstrated. The plastic strain rate and the magnitude of the initial strain are shown to have a noticeable effect on subsequent creep behavior of aluminum

Optimal boundary control of a simplified Ericksen--Leslie system for nematic liquid crystal flows in 2D2D

In this paper, we investigate an optimal boundary control problem for a two dimensional simplified Ericksen--Leslie system modelling the incompressible nematic liquid crystal flows. The hydrodynamic system consists of the Navier--Stokes equations for the fluid velocity coupled with a convective Ginzburg--Landau type equation for the averaged molecular orientation. The fluid velocity is assumed to satisfy a no-slip boundary condition, while the molecular orientation is subject to a time-dependent Dirichlet boundary condition that corresponds to the strong anchoring condition for liquid crystals. We first establish the existence of optimal boundary controls. Then we show that the control-to-state operator is Fr\'echet differentiable between appropriate Banach spaces and derive first-order necessary optimality conditions in terms of a variational inequality involving the adjoint state variables

Electron spin relaxation in n-type InAs quantum wires

We investigate the electron spin relaxation of $n$-type InAs quantum wires by numerically solving the fully microscopic kinetic spin Bloch equations with the relevant scattering explicitly included. We find that the quantum-wire size and the growth direction influence the spin relaxation time by modulating the spin-orbit coupling. Due to inter-subband scattering in connection with the spin-orbit interaction, spin-relaxation in quantum wires can show different characteristics from those in bulk or quantum wells and can be effectively manipulated by various means.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figure

High Dynamic Range RF Front End with Noise Cancellation and Linearization for WiMAX Receivers

This research deals with verification of the high dynamic range for a heterodyne radio frequency (RF) front end. A 2.6 GHz RF front end is designed and implemented in a hybrid microwave integrated circuit (HMIC) for worldwide interoperability for microwave access (WiMAX) receivers. The heterodyne RF front end consists of a low-noise amplifier (LNA) with noise cancellation, an RF bandpass filter (BPF), a downconverter with linearization, and an intermediate frequency (IF) BPF. A noise canceling technique used in the low-noise amplifier eliminates a thermal noise and then reduces the noise figure (NF) of the RF front end by 0.9 dB. Use of a downconverter with diode linearizer also compensates for gain compression, which increases the input-referred third-order intercept point (IIP3) of the RF front end by 4.3 dB. The proposed method substantially increases the spurious-free dynamic range (DRf) of the RF front end by 3.5 dB

Complementarity of information sent via different bases

We discuss quantitatively the complementarity of information transmitted by a quantum system prepared in a basis state in one out of several different mutually unbiased bases (MUBs). We obtain upper bounds on the information available to a receiver who has no knowledge of which MUB was chosen by the sender. These upper bounds imply a complementarity of information encoded via different MUBs and ultimately ensure the security in quantum key distribution protocols.Comment: 9 pages, references adde

Quantum nonlocality of four-qubit entangled states

Quantum nonlocality of several four-qubit states is investigated by constructing a new Bell inequality. These include the Greenberger-Zeilinger-Horne (GHZ) state, W state, cluster state, and the state $|\chi>$ that has been recently proposed in [PRL, {\bf 96}, 060502 (2006)]. The Bell inequality is optimally violated by $|\chi>$ but not violated by the GHZ state. The cluster state also violates the Bell inequality though not optimally. The state $|\chi>$ can thus be discriminated from the cluster state by using the inequality. Different aspects of four-partite entanglement are also studied by considering the usefulness of a family of four-qubit mixed states as resources for two-qubit teleportation. Our results generalize those in [PRL, {\bf 72}, 797 (1994)].Comment: 13 pages, 1 figur

Fluctuations of the Hawking Flux

The fluctuations of the flux radiated by an evaporating black hole will be discussed. Two approaches to this problem will be adopted. In the first, the squared flux operator is defined by normal ordering. In this case, both the mean flux and the mean squared flux are well defined local quantites. It is shown that the flux undergoes large fluctuations on a time scale of the order of the black hole's mass. Thus the semiclassical theory of gravity, in which a classical gravitational field is coupled to the expectation value of the stress tensor, breaks down below this time scale. In the second approach, one does not attempt to give meaning to the squared flux as a local quantity, but only as a time-averaged quantity. In both approaches, the mean squared mass minus the square of the mean mass grows linearly in time, but four times as fast in the second approach as in the first.Comment: 25 pages, LaTeX, with 3 figures, uses eps