2,042 research outputs found
Matching Grants and Charitable Giving: Why People Sometimes Provide a Helping Hand to Fund Environmental Goods
Matching grants are a prevalent mechanism for funding environmental, conservation, and natural resource projects. However, economists have largely been silent regarding the potential benefits of these mechanisms at increasing voluntary contributions. To examine the behavioral responses to different match levels, this research uses controlled laboratory experiments with generically framed instructions and introduces a general-form matching-grant mechanism, referred to as the proportional contribution mechanism (PCM). Results show that contributions are positively correlated with both the match and the induced value of the public good even when a dominant strategy is free-riding. An implication of this partial demand revelation result is that manifestations of this type of “helping hand†social preference should be counted in benefit-cost analysis.matching grants, public goods, charitable giving, voluntary contributions, experimental economics, warm glow, helping hand, Environmental Economics and Policy, Public Economics,
Quasiparticle Self-Consistent GW Theory
In past decades the scientific community has been looking for a reliable
first-principles method to predict the electronic structure of solids with high
accuracy. Here we present an approach which we call the quasiparticle
self-consistent GW approximation (QpscGW). It is based on a kind of
self-consistent perturbation theory, where the self-consistency is constructed
to minimize the perturbation. We apply it to selections from different classes
of materials, including alkali metals, semiconductors, wide band gap
insulators, transition metals, transition metal oxides, magnetic insulators,
and rare earth compounds. Apart some mild exceptions, the properties are very
well described, particularly in weakly correlated cases. Self-consistency
dramatically improves agreement with experiment, and is sometimes essential.
Discrepancies with experiment are systematic, and can be explained in terms of
approximations made.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figure
Gamma-ray variability from wind clumping in HMXBs with jets
In the subclass of high-mass X-ray binaries known as "microquasars",
relativistic hadrons in the jets launched by the compact object can interact
with cold protons from the star's radiatively driven wind, producing pions that
then quickly decay into gamma rays. Since the resulting gamma-ray emissivity
depends on the target density, the detection of rapid variability in
microquasars with GLAST and the new generation of Cherenkov imaging arrays
could be used to probe the clumped structure of the stellar wind. We show here
that the fluctuation in gamma rays can be modeled using a "porosity length"
formalism, usually applied to characterize clumping effects. In particular, for
a porosity length defined by h=l/f, i.e. as the ratio of the characteristic
size l of clumps to their volume filling factor f, we find that the relative
fluctuation in gamma-ray emission in a binary with orbital separation a scales
as sqrt(h/pi a) in the "thin-jet" limit, and is reduced by a factor 1/sqrt(1 +
phi a/(2 l)) for a jet with a finite opening angle phi. For a thin jet and
quite moderate porosity length h ~ 0.03 a, this implies a ca. 10 % variation in
the gamma-ray emission. Moreover, the illumination of individual large clumps
might result in isolated flares, as has been recently observed in some massive
gamma-ray binaries.Comment: Accepted for publication in ApJ; 5 pages, 1 figur
Theoretical study of resonant x-ray emission spectroscopy of Mn films on Ag
We report a theoretical study on resonant x-ray emission spectra (RXES) in
the whole energy region of the Mn white lines for three prototypical
Mn/Ag(001) systems: (i) a Mn impurity in Ag, (ii) an adsorbed Mn monolayer on
Ag, and (iii) a thick Mn film. The calculated RXES spectra depend strongly on
the excitation energy. At excitation, the spectra of all three systems
are dominated by the elastic peak. For excitation energies around , and
between and , however, most of the spectral weight comes from
inelastic x-ray scattering. The line shape of these inelastic ``satellite''
structures changes considerably between the three considered Mn/Ag systems, a
fact that may be attributed to changes in the bonding nature of the Mn-
orbitals. The system-dependence of the RXES spectrum is thus found to be much
stronger than that of the corresponding absorption spectrum. Our results
suggest that RXES in the Mn region may be used as a sensitive probe
of the local environment of Mn atoms.Comment: 9 pages, 11 figure
Adequacy of Approximations in GW Theory
We use an all-electron implementation of the GW approximation to analyze
several possible sources of error in the theory and its implementation. Among
these are convergence in the polarization and Green's functions, the dependence
of QP levels on choice of basis sets, and differing approximations for dealing
with core levels. In all GW calculations presented here, G and W are generated
from the local-density approximation (LDA), which we denote as the \GLDA\WLDA
approximation. To test its range of validity, the \GLDA\WLDA approximation is
applied to a variety of materials systems. We show that for simple sp
semiconductors, \GLDA\WLDA always underestimates bandgaps; however, better
agreement with experiment is obtained when the self-energy is not renormalized,
and we propose a justification for it. Some calculations for Si are compared to
pseudopotential-based \GLDA\WLDA calculations, and some aspects of the
suitability of pseudopotentials for GW calculations are discussed.Comment: 38 pages,6 figures. Minor Revision
Electronic structure investigation of CeB6 by means of soft X-ray scattering
The electronic structure of the heavy fermion compound CeB6 is probed by
resonant inelastic soft X-ray scattering using photon energies across the Ce 3d
and 4d absorption edges. The hybridization between the localized 4f orbitals
and the delocalized valence-band states is studied by identifying the different
spectral contributions from inelastic Raman scattering and normal fluorescence.
Pronounced energy-loss structures are observed below the elastic peak at both
the 3d and 4d thresholds. The origin and character of the inelastic scattering
structures are discussed in terms of charge-transfer excitations in connection
to the dipole allowed transitions with 4f character. Calculations within the
single impurity Anderson model with full multiplet effects are found to yield
consistent spectral functions to the experimental data.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures, 1 table,
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevB.63.07510
Optimized Effective Potential Model for the Double Perovskites Sr2-xYxVMoO6 and Sr2-xYxVTcO6
In attempt to explore half-metallic properties of the double perovskites
Sr2-xYxVMoO6 and Sr2-xYxVTcO6, we construct an effective low-energy model,
which describes the behavior of the t2g-states of these compounds. All
parameters of such model are derived rigorously on the basis of
first-principles electronic structure calculations. In order to solve this
model we employ the optimized effective potential method and treat the
correlation interactions in the random phase approximation. Although
correlation interactions considerably reduce the intraatomic exchange splitting
in comparison with the Hartree-Fock method, this splitting still substantially
exceeds the typical values obtained in the local-spin-density approximation
(LSDA), which alters many predictions based on the LSDA. Our main results are
summarized as follows: (i) all ferromagnetic states are expected to be
half-metallic. However, their energies are generally higher than those of the
ferrimagnetic ordering between V- and Mo/Tc-sites (except Sr2VMoO6); (ii) all
ferrimagnetic states are metallic (except fully insulating Y2VTcO6) and no
half-metallic antiferromagnetism has been found; (iii) moreover, many of the
ferrimagnetic structures appear to be unstable with respect to the spin-spiral
alignment. Thus, the true magnetic ground state of the most of these systems is
expected to be more complex. In addition, we discuss several methodological
issues related to the nonuniqueness of the effective potential for the magnetic
half-metallic and insulating states.Comment: 15 pages, 9 figure
Many-body Electronic Structure of Metallic alpha-Uranium
We present results for the electronic structure of alpha uranium using a
recently developed quasiparticle self-consistent GW method (QSGW). This is the
first time that the f-orbital electron-electron interactions in an actinide has
been treated by a first-principles method beyond the level of the generalized
gradient approximation (GGA) to the local density approximation (LDA). We show
that the QSGW approximation predicts an f-level shift upwards of about 0.5 eV
with respect to the other metallic s-d states and that there is a significant
f-band narrowing when compared to LDA band-structure results. Nonetheless,
because of the overall low f-electron occupation number in uranium,
ground-state properties and the occupied band structure around the Fermi energy
is not significantly affected. The correlations predominate in the unoccupied
part of the f states. This provides the first formal justification for the
success of LDA and GGA calculations in describing the ground-state properties
of this material.Comment: 4 pages, 3 fihgure
A Massive Jet Ejection Event from the Microquasar SS 433 Accompanying Rapid X-Ray Variability
Microquasars occasionally exhibit massive jet ejections which are distinct
from the continuous or quasi-continuous weak jet ejections. Because those
massive jet ejections are rare and short events, they have hardly been observed
in X-ray so far. In this paper, the first X-ray observation of a massive jet
ejection from the microquasar SS 433 with the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer
(RXTE) is reported. SS 433 undergoing a massive ejection event shows a variety
of new phenomena including a QPO-like feature near 0.1 Hz, rapid time
variability, and shot-like activities. The shot-like activity may be caused by
the formation of a small plasma bullet. A massive jet may be consist of
thousands of those plasma bullets ejected from the binary system. The size,
mass, internal energy, and kinetic energy of the bullets and the massive jet
are estimated.Comment: 21 pages including 5 figures, submitted to Ap
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