Two Kinds of Economy, Two Kinds of Self—Toward More Manageable, Hence More Sustainable and Just Supply Chains

Contemporary systems of production, distribution, and retail provide many end-consumers, although certainly not all, with an unprecedentedly wide choice of cheap, high quality goods and services. Yet this bounty comes at ever higher, ultimately unsustainable environmental and social cost. Something must change but what and how? Simply how production, distribution and retail are organized? Simply patterns of consumption, that is, overconsumption on the part of some, who must be convinced to consume less? Or must the target be production, distribution, retail, and consumption in their totality, that is, economic life as a whole? This paper sketches a basis and general framework for answering these questions

Measuring the hadronic spectrum of the quark plasma

Journal ArticleIn an effort to characterize the large-scale structure and composition of the Q C D plasma at zero baryon-number density in the vicinity of the high-temperature phase transition, we have carried out a numerical simulation in SU(3) lattice gauge theory with four flavors of low-mass staggered fermions on a 6 x 103 lattice. A small data sample was also collected on 6 x 102 X 20 lattices. The simulation uses the Illinois hybrid microcanonical algorithm, adapted for measurements of hadronic screening lengths. Measurements were carried out at three values of the gauge coupling B and at three values each of the bare quark mass. The principal quantities measured are the static screening masses in several color-singlet channels with quark valence qq and qqq. Clear evidence for a hadronic screening spectrum is found, suggesting the presence of hadronic plasma modes. The spectral multiplets, extrapolated to zero quark mass, are consistent with a restoration of the SU (N) X SU (N) chiral symmetry

Heavy-quark meson spectrum tests of the Oktay-Kronfeld action

The Oktay-Kronfeld (OK) action extends the Fermilab improvement program for massive Wilson fermions to higher order in suitable power-counting schemes. It includes dimension-six and -seven operators necessary for matching to QCD through order ${\mathrm{O}}(\Lambda^3/m_Q^3)$ in HQET power counting, for applications to heavy-light systems, and ${\mathrm{O}}(v^6)$ in NRQCD power counting, for applications to quarkonia. In the Symanzik power counting of lattice gauge theory near the continuum limit, the OK action includes all ${\mathrm{O}}(a^2)$ and some ${\mathrm{O}}(a^3)$ terms. To assess whether the theoretical improvement is realized in practice, we study combinations of heavy-strange and quarkonia masses and mass splittings, designed to isolate heavy-quark discretization effects. We find that, with one exception, the results obtained with the tree-level-matched OK action are significantly closer to the continuum limit than the results obtained with the Fermilab action. The exception is the hyperfine splitting of the bottom-strange system, for which our statistical errors are too large to draw a firm conclusion. These studies are carried out with data generated with the tadpole-improved Fermilab and OK actions on 500 gauge configurations from one of MILC's $a\approx0.12$~fm, $N_f=2+1$-flavor, asqtad-staggered ensembles.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figure