255 research outputs found
Does the executive dominate the Westminster legislative process?: Six reasons for doubt
The British Westminster parliament is frequently dismissed as a weak policy actor, in the face of dominant executive power. But through analysis of 4361 amendments to 12 government bills, and over 120 interviews, we suggest six reasons for doubting the orthodox view. These fall into three groups: overstating government success in making amendments, overstating non-government failure, and overlooking parliamentary influence before and after the formal passage of bills. We demonstrate that Westminster in fact has substantial influence in the policy process, not readily visible through commonly published data. Uncovering influence requires careful tracking of amendments, but also qualitative analysis of actorsâ motivations and the power of âanticipated reactionsâ. Because Westminster is often seen as being at the weak end of a comparative spectrum of parliamentary influence, these results are important for demonstrating both the dynamics of British politics, and of parliamentary systems more broadly
Actors, Motivations and Outcomes in the Legislative Process: Policy Influence at Westminster
Legislatures in parliamentary systems are frequently seen as weak policy actors, and this is nowhere more true than of the British Westminster parliament. But real-world changes, and recent research, suggest that Westminsterâs influence is significant and growing. This raises new questions about which non-government actors are influential, which we explore through analysing 4361 amendments proposed to 12 government bills. But assessing non-government amendment âsuccessâ presents challenges, since many such proposals are clearly not sincere attempts at legislative change. We thus make two substantive contributions. First, we quantitatively assess the influence of different groups at Westminster, showing both non-government influence and cross-party working to be more extensive than traditionally assumed. Second, we link predictions about opposition and backbench parliamentariansâ motivations to the legislative amendment process, proposing a typology of motivations for such amendments, with wider application. Overall, we argue that understanding non-government parliamentariansâ diverse motivations shows that they âfailâ far less than commonly assumed
A holonomy characterisation of Fefferman spaces
We prove that Fefferman spaces, associated to non--degenerate CR structures
of hypersurface type, are characterised, up to local conformal isometry, by the
existence of a parallel orthogonal complex structure on the standard tractor
bundle. This condition can be equivalently expressed in terms of conformal
holonomy. Extracting from this picture the essential consequences at the level
of tensor bundles yields an improved, conformally invariant analogue of
Sparling's characterisation of Fefferman spaces.Comment: AMSLaTeX, 15 page
Higher Spin Gravitational Couplings and the Yang--Mills Detour Complex
Gravitational interactions of higher spin fields are generically plagued by
inconsistencies. We present a simple framework that couples higher spins to a
broad class of gravitational backgrounds (including Ricci flat and Einstein)
consistently at the classical level. The model is the simplest example of a
Yang--Mills detour complex, which recently has been applied in the mathematical
setting of conformal geometry. An analysis of asymptotic scattering states
about the trivial field theory vacuum in the simplest version of the theory
yields a rich spectrum marred by negative norm excitations. The result is a
theory of a physical massless graviton, scalar field, and massive vector along
with a degenerate pair of zero norm photon excitations. Coherent states of the
unstable sector of the model do have positive norms, but their evolution is no
longer unitary and their amplitudes grow with time. The model is of
considerable interest for braneworld scenarios and ghost condensation models,
and invariant theory.Comment: 19 pages LaTe
Gravity, Two Times, Tractors, Weyl Invariance and Six Dimensional Quantum Mechanics
Fefferman and Graham showed some time ago that four dimensional conformal
geometries could be analyzed in terms of six dimensional, ambient, Riemannian
geometries admitting a closed homothety. Recently it was shown how conformal
geometry provides a description of physics manifestly invariant under local
choices of unit systems. Strikingly, Einstein's equations are then equivalent
to the existence of a parallel scale tractor (a six component vector subject to
a certain first order covariant constancy condition at every point in four
dimensional spacetime). These results suggest a six dimensional description of
four dimensional physics, a viewpoint promulgated by the two times physics
program of Bars. The Fefferman--Graham construction relies on a triplet of
operators corresponding, respectively to a curved six dimensional light cone,
the dilation generator and the Laplacian. These form an sp(2) algebra which
Bars employs as a first class algebra of constraints in a six-dimensional gauge
theory. In this article four dimensional gravity is recast in terms of six
dimensional quantum mechanics by melding the two times and tractor approaches.
This "parent" formulation of gravity is built from an infinite set of six
dimensional fields. Successively integrating out these fields yields various
novel descriptions of gravity including a new four dimensional one built from a
scalar doublet, a tractor vector multiplet and a conformal class of metrics.Comment: 27 pages, LaTe
A classification of local Weyl invariants in D=8
Following a purely algebraic procedure, we provide an exhaustive
classification of local Weyl-invariant scalar densities in dimension D=8.Comment: LaTeX, 19 pages, typos corrected, one reference adde
Zirconium trisulfide as a promising cathode material for Li primary thermal batteries
In this work ZrS3 has been synthesized by solid state reaction in a sealed quartz tube and investigated as a candidate cathode material in Li thermal batteries. The structure of ZrS3 before and after cell testing has been studied using powder X-ray diffraction. A new spinel related material, LiZr2S4, has been identified as the product of the electrochemical process, which can be indexed to a = 10.452(8) Ă
cubic unit cell. The electrochemical properties of the batteries were investigated at 500 °C against Li13Si4 by galvanostatic discharge and galvanostatic intermittent titration technique (GITT). In a thermal Li cell at 500 °C a single voltage plateau of 1.70 V at a current density of 11 mA/cm2 was achieved with capacity of 357 mA h g-1. Therefore ZrS3 material has some promise as a cathode for Li thermal batteries.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe
Piecing Together Large Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons and Fullerenes: A Combined ChemTEM Imaging and MALDI-ToF Mass Spectrometry Approach
Motivated by their importance in chemistry, physics, astronomy and materials science, we investigate routes to the formation of large polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) molecules and the fullerene C60 from specific smaller PAH building blocks. The behaviour of selected PAH molecules under electron (using transmission electron microscopy, TEM) and laser irradiation is examined, where four specific PAHsâanthracene, pyrene, perylene and coroneneâare assembling into larger structures and fullerenes. This contrasts with earlier TEM studies in which large graphene flakes were shown to transform into fullerenes via a top-down route. A new combined approach is presented in which spectrometric and microscopic experimental techniques exploit the stabilisation of adsorbed molecules through supramolecular interactions with a graphene substrate and enable the molecules to be characterised and irradiated sequentially. Thereby allowing initiation of transformation and characterisation of the resultant species by both mass spectrometry and direct-space imaging. We investigate the types of large PAH molecule that can form from smaller PAHs, and discuss the potential of a âbottom-upâ followed by âtop-downâ mechanism for forming C60
Non-linear Realizations of Conformal Symmetry and Effective Field Theory for the Pseudo-Conformal Universe
The pseudo-conformal scenario is an alternative to inflation in which the
early universe is described by an approximate conformal field theory on flat,
Minkowski space. Some fields acquire a time-dependent expectation value, which
breaks the flat space so(4,2) conformal algebra to its so(4,1) de Sitter
subalgebra. As a result, weight-0 fields acquire a scale invariant spectrum of
perturbations. The scenario is very general, and its essential features are
determined by the symmetry breaking pattern, irrespective of the details of the
underlying microphysics. In this paper, we apply the well-known coset technique
to derive the most general effective lagrangian describing the Goldstone field
and matter fields, consistent with the assumed symmetries. The resulting action
captures the low energy dynamics of any pseudo-conformal realization, including
the U(1)-invariant quartic model and the Galilean Genesis scenario. We also
derive this lagrangian using an alternative method of curvature invariants,
consisting of writing down geometric scalars in terms of the conformal mode.
Using this general effective action, we compute the two-point function for the
Goldstone and a fiducial weight-0 field, as well as some sample three-point
functions involving these fields.Comment: 49 pages. v2: minor corrections, added references. v3: minor edits,
version appearing in JCA
Galileons as Wess-Zumino Terms
We show that the galileons can be thought of as Wess-Zumino terms for the
spontaneous breaking of space-time symmetries. Wess-Zumino terms are terms
which are not captured by the coset construction for phenomenological
Lagrangians with broken symmetries. Rather they are, in d space-time
dimensions, d-form potentials for (d+1)-forms which are non-trivial co-cycles
in Lie algebra cohomology of the full symmetry group relative to the unbroken
symmetry group. We introduce the galileon algebras and construct the
non-trivial (d+1)-form co-cycles, showing that the presence of galileons and
multi-galileons in all dimensions is counted by the dimensions of particular
Lie algebra cohomology groups. We also discuss the DBI and conformal galileons
from this point of view, showing that they are not Wess-Zumino terms, with one
exception in each case.Comment: 49 pages. v2 minor changes, version appearing in JHE
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