Recruitment and retention of IT staff within a leading South African bank

The Information Technology (IT) industry is currently faced with a shrinking pool of skilled IT employees as a result of the increasing demand for these employees. This increasing demand has put organisations under pressure to start devising retention strategies in order to retain the targeted employees. This paper is based on the study that was done in the IT department of one of the leading banks in South Africa. The study was conducted in order to understand the leadership's view on employee attraction and retention, and how these can be used as tools for reducing skills shortages in the IT department of the understudied bank. Findings of this study, which followed a qualitative methodology, indicated that high employee turnover is the main contributor of the skills shortages within this department. The non-existence of a proper retention strategy is making it difficult for the leadership team to identify the type of skills that are critical to the organisation and to retain such skills

A quark model analysis of the charge symmetry breaking in nuclear force

In order to investigate the charge symmetry breaking (CSB) in the short range part of the nuclear force, we calculate the difference of the masses of the neutron and the proton, $\Delta {\rm M}$, the difference of the scattering lengths of the p-p and n-n scatterings, $\Delta a$, and the difference of the analyzing power of the proton and the neutron in the n-p scattering, $\Delta A(\theta)$, by a quark model. In the present model the sources of CSB are the mass difference of the up and down quarks and the electromagnetic interaction. We investigate how much each of them contributes to $\Delta {\rm M}$, $\Delta a$ and $\Delta A(\theta)$. It is found that the contribution of CSB of the short range part in the nuclear force is large enough to explain the observed $\Delta A(\theta)$, while $\Delta a$ is rather underestimated.Comment: 26 pages,6 figure

Invariance of Charge of Laughlin Quasiparticles

A Quantum Antidot electrometer has been used in the first direct observation of the fractionally quantized electric charge. In this paper we report experiments performed on the integer i = 1, 2 and fractional f = 1/3 quantum Hall plateaus extending over a filling factor range of at least 27%. We find the charge of the Laughlin quasiparticles to be invariantly e/3, with standard deviation of 1.2% and absolute accuracy of 4%, independent of filling, tunneling current, and temperature.Comment: 4 pages, 5 fig

Are Antiprotons Forever?

Up to one million antiprotons from a single LEAR spill have been captured in a large Penning trap. Surprisingly, when the antiprotons are cooled to energies significantly below 1 eV, the annihilation rate falls below background. Thus, very long storage times for antiprotons have been demonstrated in the trap, even at the compromised vacuum conditions imposed by the experimental set up. The significance for future ultra-low energy experiments, including portable antiproton traps, is discussed.Comment: 12 pages, latex; 4 figures, uufiled. Slightly expanded discussion of expected energy dependence of annihilation cross section and rate, and of estimates of trap pressure, plus minor text improvement

Off-shell Behavior of the π ⁣− ⁣η\pi\!-\!\eta Mixing Amplitude

We extend a recent calculation of the momentum dependence of the $\rho-\omega$ mixing amplitude to the pseudoscalar sector. The $\pi\!-\!\eta$ mixing amplitude is calculated in a hadronic model where the mixing is driven by the neutron-proton mass difference. Closed-form analytic expressions are presented in terms of a few nucleon-meson parameters. The observed momentum dependence of the mixing amplitude is strong enough as to question earlier calculations of charge-symmetry-breaking observables based on the on-shell assumption. The momentum dependence of the $\pi\!-\!\eta$ amplitude is, however, practically identical to the one recently predicted for $\rho-\omega$ mixing. Hence, in this model, the ratio of pseudoscalar to vector mixing amplitudes is, to a good approximation, a constant solely determined from nucleon-meson coupling constants. Furthermore, by selecting these parameters in accordance with charge-symmetry-conserving data and SU(3)-flavor symmetry, we reproduce the momentum dependence of the $\pi\!-\!\eta$ mixing amplitude predicted from chiral perturbation theory. Alternatively, one can use chiral-perturbation-theory results to set stringent limits on the value of the $NN\eta$ coupling constant.Comment: 13 pages, Latex with Revtex, 3 postscript figures (not included) available on request, SCRI-03089

Quark Coulomb Interactions and the Mass Difference of Mirror Nuclei

We study the Okamoto-Nolen-Schiffer (ONS) anomaly in the binding energy of mirror nuclei at high density by adding a single neutron or proton to a quark gluon plasma. In this high-density limit we find an anomaly equal to two-thirds of the Coulomb exchange energy of a proton. This effect is dominated by quark electromagnetic interactions---rather than by the up-down quark mass difference. At normal density we calculate the Coulomb energy of neutron matter using a string-flip quark model. We find a nonzero Coulomb energy because of the neutron's charged constituents. This effect could make a significant contribution to the ONS anomaly.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figs. sub. to Phys. Rev. Let

Isospin-Violating Meson-Nucleon Vertices as an Alternate Mechanism of Charge-Symmetry Breaking

We compute isospin-violating meson-nucleon coupling constants and their consequent charge-symmetry-breaking nucleon-nucleon potentials. The couplings result from evaluating matrix elements of quark currents between nucleon states in a nonrelativistic constituent quark model; the isospin violations arise from the difference in the up and down constituent quark masses. We find, in particular, that isospin violation in the omega-meson--nucleon vertex dominates the class IV CSB potential obtained from these considerations. We evaluate the resulting spin-singlet--triplet mixing angles, the quantities germane to the difference of neutron and proton analyzing powers measured in elastic $\vec{n}-\vec{p}$ scattering, and find them commensurate to those computed originally using the on-shell value of the $\rho$-$\omega$ mixing amplitude. The use of the on-shell $\rho$-$\omega$ mixing amplitude at $q^2=0$ has been called into question; rather, the amplitude is zero in a wide class of models. Our model possesses no contribution from $\rho$-$\omega$ mixing at $q^2=0$, and we find that omega-meson exchange suffices to explain the measured $n-p$ analyzing power difference~at~183 MeV.Comment: 20 pages, revtex, 3 uuencoded PostScript figure

Effective Functional Form of Regge Trajectories

We present theoretical arguments and strong phenomenological evidence that hadronic Regge trajectories are essentially nonlinear and can be well approximated, for phenomenological purposes, by a specific square-root form.Comment: 29 pages, LaTeX. Published versio

Higher Dimensional Dark Energy Investigation with Variable Λ\Lambda and GG

Time variable $\Lambda$ and $G$ are studied here under a phenomenological model of $\Lambda$ through an ($n+2$) dimensional analysis. The relation of Zeldovich (1968) $|\Lambda| = 8\pi G^2m_p^6/h^4$ between $\Lambda$ and $G$ is employed here, where $m_p$ is the proton mass and $h$ is Planck's constant. In the present investigation some key issues of modern cosmology, viz. the age problem, the amount of variation of $G$ and the nature of expansion of the Universe have been addressed.Comment: 7 Latex pages with few change

Extracting Br(omega->pi^+ pi^-) from the Time-like Pion Form-factor

We extract the G-parity-violating branching ratio Br(omega->pi^+ pi^-) from the effective rho-omega mixing matrix element Pi_{rho omega}(s), determined from e^+e^- -> pi^+ pi^- data. The omega->pi^+ pi^- partial width can be determined either from the time-like pion form factor or through the constraint that the mixed physical propagator D_{rho omega}^{mu nu}(s) possesses no poles. The two procedures are inequivalent in practice, and we show why the first is preferred, to find finally Br(omega->pi^+ pi^-) = 1.9 +/- 0.3%.Comment: 12 pages (published version