The political coordination of knowledge and innovation policies in Switzerland

The article highlights the main problems Switzerland faces in engaging in a more encompassing knowledge and innovation policy, an objective that is widely shared by the political elites. Two ‘coordination gaps' are highlighted in the context of Switzerland: the ‘federal divide' that structures political governance in the knowledge space in manifold ways and the ‘utilitarian divide' that is institutionalised within the federal administration. It is demonstrated that Swiss policy-makers have taken great pains to overcome the obstacles in the wake of the federal divide with some success, but have failed to do so with regard to the utilitarian divide. The lack of guiding and reflexive capacities at the cabinet level will make it difficult to overcome this divide in the future, though planned reforms at the agency level may help to build some bridges between at least basic and technological researc

Highly absorbing black Mg and rare-earth-Mg switchable mirrors

Apart from a reflecting and a transparent state, rare-earth-Mg alloys (RE-Mg) exhibit also a highly absorbing, black state during loading with hydrogen. The occurrence of such a black state is due to the disproportionation into subwavelength size RE

Identification of the vortex glass phase by harmonics of the AC magnetic susceptibility

We compared the AC magnetic susceptibility behaviour for the vortex glass phase and for the creep phenomena with an inhomogeneous pinning potential. The temperature dependence of the harmonics of the susceptibility have been numerically simulated with these two models, and we studied them as a function of the frequency, in terms of Cole-Cole plots. From our analysis we show that it is possible to distinguish between the two different phases, because of their clear differences in the Cole-Cole plots behaviour with the frequency.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figures to be published on "The Journal of Physics and Chemistry of Solids