Damage to metallic samples produced by measured lightning currents

A total of 10 sample disks of 2024-T3 aluminum and 4130 ferrous steel were exposed to rocket-triggered lightning currents at the Kennedy Space Center test site. The experimental configuration was arranged so that the samples were not exposed to the preliminary streamer, wire-burn, or following currents that are associated with an upward-initiated rocket-triggered flash but which are atypical of naturally initiated lightning. Return-stroke currents and continuing currents actually attaching to the sample were measured, augmented by close-up video recordings of approximately 3 feet of the channel above the sample and by 16-mm movies with 5-ms resolution. From these data it was possible to correlate individual damage spots with streamer, return-stroke, and continuing currents that produced them. Substantial penetration of 80-mil aluminum was produced by a continuing current of submedian amplitude and duration, and full penetration of a 35-mil steel sample occurred under an eightieth percentile continuing current. The primary purpose of the data acquired in these experiments is for use in improving and quantifying the fidelity of laboratory simulations of lightning burnthrough

The Sandia transportable triggered lightning instrumentation facility

Development of the Sandia Transportable Triggered Lightning Instrumentation Facility (SATTLIF) was motivated by a requirement for the in situ testing of a munitions storage bunker. Transfer functions relating the incident flash currents to voltages, currents, and electromagnetic field values throughout the structure will be obtained for use in refining and validating a lightning response computer model of this type of structure. A preliminary shakedown trial of the facility under actual operational conditions was performed during summer of 1990 at the Kennedy Space Center's (KSC) rocket-triggered lightning test site. A description is given of the SATTLIF, which is readily transportable on a single flatbed truck of by aircraft, and its instrumentation for measuring incident lightning channel currents and the responses of the systems under test. Measurements of return-stroke current peaks obtained with the SATTLIF are presented. Agreement with data acquired on the same flashes with existing KSC instrumentation is, on average, to within approximately 7 percent. Continuing currents were measured with a resolution of approximately 2.5 A. This field trial demonstrated the practicality of using a transportable triggered lightning facility for specialized test applications

Growth and the Ageing Joneses

We incorporate Keeping-up-with-the-Joneses (KUJ) preferences into the Blanchard-Yaari(BY) framework and develop, using an AK technology, a model of balanced growth. In this context we investigate status preference, demographic, and pension policy shocks. We find that a higher degree of KUJ lowers economic growth, while, in contrast, a decrease in the fertility and mortality rates increase it. In the second part of the paper we extend the model by incorporating a Pay-as-you-go (PAYG) pension system with a statutory retirement date. This introduces a life-cycle in human wealth earnings and implies that the growth rate is higher under PAYG. We also consider the implications of an increase in the retirement date under both defined benefit and defined contribution schemes.relative consumption, OLG, endogenous growth, pension reform

Keeping up with the Ageing Joneses

In this paper we consider the implications of relative consumption externalities in the Blanchard-Yaari overlapping generations framework. Unlike most of the macroeconomic literature that studies this question, the differences between agents, and, thus, in their relative position, persist in equilibrium. We show in our fixed employment model that consumption externalities lower consumption and the capital stock in long-run equilibrium, a result in sharp contrast to the recent findings of Liu and Turnovsky (2005). In addition, we solve for the intertemporal path of the economy to investigate its response to demographic shocks, specifically, to permanent changes in the birth and death rates.Relative consumption, Overlapping generations, Demographic shocks

Extended Hubbard model for mesoscopic transport in donor arrays in silicon

Arrays of dopants in silicon are promising platforms for the quantum simulation of the Fermi-Hubbard model. We show that the simplest model with only on-site interaction is insufficient to describe the physics of an array of phosphorous donors in silicon due to the strong intersite interaction in the system. We also study the resonant tunneling transport in the array at low temperature as a mean of probing the features of the Hubbard physics, such as the Hubbard bands and the Mott gap. Two mechanisms of localization which suppresses transport in the array are investigated: The first arises from the electron-ion core attraction and is significant at low filling; the second is due to the sharp oscillation in the tunnel coupling caused by the intervalley interference of the donor electron's wavefunction. This disorder in the tunnel coupling leads to a steep exponential decay of conductance with channel length in one-dimensional arrays, but its effect is less prominent in two-dimensional ones. Hence, it is possible to observe resonant tunneling transport in a relatively large array in two dimensions

Growth and the Ageing Joneses

We incorporate Keeping-up-with-the-Joneses (KUJ) preferences into the Blanchard-Yaari (BY) framework and develop, using an AK technology, a model of balanced growth. In this context we investigate status preference, demographic, and pension policy shocks. We find that a higher degree of KUJ lowers economic growth, while, in contrast, a decrease in the fertility and mortality rates increase it. In the second part of the paper we extend the model by incorporating a Pay-as-you-go (PAYG) pension system with a statutory retirement date. This introduces a life-cycle in human wealth earnings and implies that the growth rate is higher under PAYG. We also consider the implications of an increase in the retirement date under both defined benefit and defined contribution schemes.Relative consumption, OLG, Endogenous growth, Pension reform

Congestion and Public Capital

This paper analyzes the impact of public investment on the dynamics of private capital formation in an intertemporal optimizing market-clearing framework. The key feature characterizing the analysis is that the public good is treated as a durable capital good, subject to congestion. We show how in the presence of congestion the effect of government investment on private capital formation involves a tradeoff between the degree of substitution between private and public capital in production and the degree of congestion. Both lump-sum and distortionary tax financing are considered, with this tradeoff being tightened in the latter case.Congestion, Public Capital

Entanglement in general two-mode continuous-variable states: local approach and mapping to a two-qubit system

We present a new approach to the analysis of entanglement in smooth bipartite continuous-variable states. One or both parties perform projective filterings via preliminary measurements to determine whether the system is located in some region of space; we study the entanglement remaining after filtering. For small regions, a two-mode system can be approximated by a pair of qubits and its entanglement fully characterized, even for mixed states. Our approach may be extended to any smooth bipartite pure state or two-mode mixed state, leading to natural definitions of concurrence and negativity densities. For Gaussian states both these quantities are constant throughout configuration space.Comment: 4 pages, RevTeX 4, one figure. Further modifications in response to journal referees, correction to expression for negativit

The Small Scale Velocity Dispersion of Galaxies: A Comparison of Cosmological Simulations

The velocity dispersion of galaxies on small scales ($r\sim1h^{-1}$ Mpc), $\sigma_{12}(r)$, can be estimated from the anisotropy of the galaxy-galaxy correlation function in redshift space. We apply this technique to ``mock-catalogs'' extracted from N-body simulations of several different variants of Cold Dark Matter dominated cosmological models to obtain results which may be consistently compared to similar results from observations. We find a large variation in the value of $\sigma_{12}(1 h^{-1} Mpc)$ in different regions of the same simulation. We conclude that this statistic should not be considered to conclusively rule out any of the cosmological models we have studied. We attempt to make the statistic more robust by removing clusters from the simulations using an automated cluster-removing routine, but this appears to reduce the discriminatory power of the statistic. However, studying $\sigma_{12}$ as clusters with different internal velocity dispersions are removed leads to interesting information about the amount of power on cluster and subcluster scales. We also compute the pairwise velocity dispersion directly and compare this to the values obtained using the Davis-Peebles method, and find that the agreement is fairly good. We evaluate the models used for the mean streaming velocity and the pairwise peculiar velocity distribution in the original Davis-Peebles method by comparing the models with the results from the simulations.Comment: 20 pages, uuencoded (Latex file + 8 Postscript figures), uses AAS macro

Fractal Droplets in Two Dimensional Spin Glasses

The two-dimensional Edwards-Anderson model with Gaussian bond distribution is investigated at T=0 with a numerical method. Droplet excitations are directly observed. It turns out that the averaged volume of droplets is proportional to l^D with D = 1.80(2) where l is the spanning length of droplets, revealing their fractal nature. The exponent characterizing the l dependence of the droplet excitation energy is estimated to be -0.42(4), clearly different from the stiffness exponent for domain wall excitations.Comment: 4 pages 4 figure