5,445 research outputs found
Detection of bottom ferromagnetic electrode oxidation in magnetic tunnel junctions by magnetometry measurements
Surface oxidation of the bottom ferromagnetic (FM) electrode, one of the
major detrimental factors to the performance of a Magnetic Tunnel Junction
(MTJ), is difficult to avoid during the fabrication process of the MTJ's tunnel
barrier. Since Co rich alloys are commonly used for the FM electrodes in MTJs,
over-oxidation of the tunnel barrier results in the formation of a CoO
antiferromagnetic (AF) interface layer which couples with the bottom FM
electrode to form a typical AF/FM exchange bias (EB) system. In this work,
surface oxidation of the CoFe and CoFeB bottom electrodes was detected via
magnetometry measurements of exchange-bias characterizations including the EB
field, training effect, uncompensated spin density, and coercivity. Variations
of these parameters were found to be related to the surface oxidation of the
bottom electrode, among them the change of coercivity is most sensitive.
Annealed samples show evidence for an oxygen migration back to the MgO tunnel
barrier by annealing.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figues, submitted to J. Appl. Phy
Thermodynamically stable noncomposite vortices in mesoscopic two-gap superconductors
In mesoscopic two-gap superconductors with sizes of the order of the
coherence length noncomposite vortices are found to be thermodynamically stable
in a large domain of the phase diagram. In these phases the vortex
cores of one condensate are spatially separated from the other condensate ones,
and their respective distributions can adopt distinct symmetries. The
appearance of these vortex phases is caused by a non-negligible effect of the
boundary of the sample on the superconducting order parameter and represents
therefore a genuine mesoscopic effect. For low values of interband Josephson
coupling vortex patterns with can arise in addition to the
phases with , where and are total vorticities in the two
condensates. The calculations show that noncomposite vortices could be observed
in thin mesoscopic samples of MgB.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, to be published in Europhysics Letter
Assessing banks’ resilience: A complementary approach to stress testing using fair values from banks’ financial statements
For more than a decade, supervisory banking authorities in Europe and the United States have sought to assess the resilience of banks to adverse economic episodes to safeguard the financial system's stability. They rely on regulatory capital measures like Common Equity Tier 1 (CET1) relative to risk-weighted assets in the aftermath of potential economic crises. We propose a new measure of banks' resilience based on financial statements. The fair value margin (FVM) is estimated as the difference between the fair value of assets and the book value of liabilities, scaled by the book value of equity. We find that FVM is positively associated with the surplus or shortfall of CET1 resulting from the stress testing results from 2014, 2016 and 2018. To corroborate the relevance of FVM for supervisory authorities, we compare the ability of the loan component of FVM to predict future credit losses with the capital surplus/shortfall metric derived from the stress test. The findings indicate that the fair value of loans predicts net charge-offs better than stress test outcomes. Therefore, we suggest that FVM could be used as a readily available and relatively low-cost tool to assess bank resilience, thus complementing the stress test exercises
Type-1.5 Superconductors
We demonstrate the existence of a novel superconducting state in high quality
two-component MgB2 single crystalline superconductors where a unique
combination of both type-1 (kappa_1 0.707)
superconductor conditions is realized for the two components of the order
parameter. This condition leads to a vortex-vortex interaction attractive at
long distances and repulsive at short distances, which stabilizes
unconventional stripe- and gossamer-like vortex patterns that we have
visualized in this type-1.5 superconductor using Bitter decoration and also
reproduced in numerical simulations.Comment: accepted in Phys. Rev. Let
Precautionary Measures for Credit Risk Management in Jump Models
Sustaining efficiency and stability by properly controlling the equity to
asset ratio is one of the most important and difficult challenges in bank
management. Due to unexpected and abrupt decline of asset values, a bank must
closely monitor its net worth as well as market conditions, and one of its
important concerns is when to raise more capital so as not to violate capital
adequacy requirements. In this paper, we model the tradeoff between avoiding
costs of delay and premature capital raising, and solve the corresponding
optimal stopping problem. In order to model defaults in a bank's loan/credit
business portfolios, we represent its net worth by Levy processes, and solve
explicitly for the double exponential jump diffusion process and for a general
spectrally negative Levy process.Comment: 31 pages, 4 figure
Three-body decays of sleptons in models with non-universal Higgs masses
We compute the three-body decays of charged sleptons and sneutrinos into
other sleptons. These decays are of particular interest in SUSY-breaking models
with non-universal Higgs mass parameters, where the left-chiral sleptons can be
lighter than the right-chiral ones, and lighter than the lightest neutralino.
We present the formulas for the three-body decay widths together with a
numerical analysis in the context of gaugino-mediated SUSY breaking with a
gravitino LSP.Comment: Version published in JHEP. See http://cern.ch/kraml/papers/ for
high-res figure
Control of non-controllable quantum systems: A quantum control algorithm based on Grover iteration
A new notion of controllability, eigenstate controllability, is defined for
finite-dimensional bilinear quantum mechanical systems which are neither
strongly completely controllably nor completely controllable. And a quantum
control algorithm based on Grover iteration is designed to perform a quantum
control task of steering a system, which is eigenstate controllable but may not
be (strongly) completely controllable, from an arbitrary state to a target
state.Comment: 7 pages, no figures, submitte
Edge states and topological orders in the spin liquid phases of star lattice
A group of novel materials can be mapped to the star lattice, which exhibits
some novel physical properties. We give the bulk-edge correspondence theory of
the star lattice and study the edge states and their topological orders in
different spin liquid phases. The bulk and edge-state energy structures and
Chern number depend on the spin liquid phases and hopping parameters because
the local spontaneous magnetic flux in the spin liquid phase breaks the time
reversal and space inversion symmetries. We give the characteristics of bulk
and edge energy structures and their corresponding Chern numbers in the
uniform, nematic and chiral spin liquids. In particular, we obtain analytically
the phase diagram of the topological orders for the chiral spin liquid states
SL[\phi,\phi,-2\phi], where \phi is the magnetic flux in two triangles and a
dodecagon in the unit cell. Moreover, we find the topological invariance for
the spin liquid phases, SL[\phi_{1},\phi_{2},-(\phi_{1}+\phi_{2})] and
SL[\phi_{2},\phi_{1},-(\phi_{1}+\phi_{2})]. The results reveal the relationship
between the energy-band and edge-state structures and their topological orders
of the star lattice.Comment: 7 pages, 8 figures, 1 tabl
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