Markups and Oil Prices in Canada

The markup (the ratio of price to marginal cost) in Canada has risen steadily since the early 1990s suggesting a widening gap between the actual and the efficient level of output and a declining share of labour income in GDP. It exhibits non-stationary movements over the sample period 1982Q1 to 2009Q4, allowing us to identify a permanent markup shock. We provide evidence that oil price movements are important for understanding the behaviour of the markup, and separately identify both oil price shocks and permanent non-oil markup shocks. Our key findings are: (1) oil price shocks and non-oil markup shocks account for 50 to 80 percent of the variation in the markup, with the former dominating at shorter horizons; (2) the role of oil price shocks is prominent in accounting for the upward trend in the markup since the mid-1990s; (3) the direct effects of oil prices on the markup in the mining sector (which includes the oil-producing sector) have contributed the most to the upward trend in the aggregate markup; and (4) other explanations such as market structure shifts, trend inflation movements and the falling relative price of investment do not appear to account for the behaviour of the markup

The dynamics of quark-gluon plasma and AdS/CFT

In these pedagogical lectures, we present the techniques of the AdS/CFT correspondence which can be applied to the study of real time dynamics of a strongly coupled plasma system. These methods are based on solving gravitational Einstein's equations on the string/gravity side of the AdS/CFT correspondence. We illustrate these techniques with applications to the boost-invariant expansion of a plasma system. We emphasize the common underlying AdS/CFT description both in the large proper time regime where hydrodynamic dynamics dominates, and in the small proper time regime where the dynamics is far from equilibrium. These AdS/CFT methods provide a fascinating arena interrelating General Relativity phenomenae with strongly coupled gauge theory physics.Comment: 35 pages, 3 figures. Lectures at the 5th Aegean summer school, `From gravity to thermal gauge theories: the AdS/CFT correspondence'. To appear in the proceedings in `Lecture Notes in Physics

antiSMASH 3.0—a comprehensive resource for the genome mining of biosynthetic gene clusters

Microbial secondary metabolism constitutes a rich source of antibiotics, chemotherapeutics, insecticides and other high-value chemicals. Genome mining of gene clusters that encode the biosynthetic pathways for these metabolites has become a key methodology for novel compound discovery. In 2011, we introduced antiSMASH, a web server and stand-alone tool for the automatic genomic identification and analysis of biosynthetic gene clusters, available at http://antismash.secondarymetabolites.org. Here, we present version 3.0 of antiSMASH, which has undergone major improvements. A full integration of the recently published ClusterFinder algorithm now allows using this probabilistic algorithm to detect putative gene clusters of unknown types. Also, a new dereplication variant of the ClusterBlast module now identifies similarities of identified clusters to any of 1172 clusters with known end products. At the enzyme level, active sites of key biosynthetic enzymes are now pinpointed through a curated pattern-matching procedure and Enzyme Commission numbers are assigned to functionally classify all enzyme-coding genes. Additionally, chemical structure prediction has been improved by incorporating polyketide reduction states. Finally, in order for users to be able to organize and analyze multiple antiSMASH outputs in a private setting, a new XML output module allows offline editing of antiSMASH annotations within the Geneious software

Green function techniques in the treatment of quantum transport at the molecular scale

The theoretical investigation of charge (and spin) transport at nanometer length scales requires the use of advanced and powerful techniques able to deal with the dynamical properties of the relevant physical systems, to explicitly include out-of-equilibrium situations typical for electrical/heat transport as well as to take into account interaction effects in a systematic way. Equilibrium Green function techniques and their extension to non-equilibrium situations via the Keldysh formalism build one of the pillars of current state-of-the-art approaches to quantum transport which have been implemented in both model Hamiltonian formulations and first-principle methodologies. We offer a tutorial overview of the applications of Green functions to deal with some fundamental aspects of charge transport at the nanoscale, mainly focusing on applications to model Hamiltonian formulations.Comment: Tutorial review, LaTeX, 129 pages, 41 figures, 300 references, submitted to Springer series "Lecture Notes in Physics

Active Brownian Particles. From Individual to Collective Stochastic Dynamics

We review theoretical models of individual motility as well as collective dynamics and pattern formation of active particles. We focus on simple models of active dynamics with a particular emphasis on nonlinear and stochastic dynamics of such self-propelled entities in the framework of statistical mechanics. Examples of such active units in complex physico-chemical and biological systems are chemically powered nano-rods, localized patterns in reaction-diffusion system, motile cells or macroscopic animals. Based on the description of individual motion of point-like active particles by stochastic differential equations, we discuss different velocity-dependent friction functions, the impact of various types of fluctuations and calculate characteristic observables such as stationary velocity distributions or diffusion coefficients. Finally, we consider not only the free and confined individual active dynamics but also different types of interaction between active particles. The resulting collective dynamical behavior of large assemblies and aggregates of active units is discussed and an overview over some recent results on spatiotemporal pattern formation in such systems is given.Comment: 161 pages, Review, Eur Phys J Special-Topics, accepte

Antiprotons in cosmic rays from neutralino annihilation

We calculate the antiproton flux due to relic neutralino annihilations, in a two-dimensional diffusion model compatible with stable and radioactive cosmic ray nuclei. We find that the uncertainty in the primary flux induced by the propagation parameters alone is about two orders of magnitude at low energies, and it is mainly determined by the lack of knowledge on the thickness of the diffusive halo. On the contrary, different dark matter density profiles do not significantly alter the flux: a NFW distribution produces fluxes which are at most 20% higher than an isothermal sphere. The most conservative choice for propagation parameters and dark matter distribution normalization, together with current data on cosmic antiprotons, cannot lead to any definitive constraint on the supersymmetric parameter space, neither in a low-energy effective MSSM, or in a minimal SUGRA scheme. However, if the best choice for propagation parameters - corresponding to a diffusive halo of L=4 kpc - is adopted, some supersymmetric configurations with the neutralino mass of about 100 GeV should be considered as excluded. An enhancement flux factor - due for instance to a clumpy dark halo or to a higher local dark matter density - would imply a more severe cut on the supersymmetric parameters.Comment: 23 pages, 2 tables and 19 figures, typeset with ReVTeX4. The paper may also be found at http://www.to.infn.it/~fornengo/papers/pbar03.ps.gz or through http://www.to.infn.it/astropart/index.html A subsection added. Final version to appear in PR

7th Drug hypersensitivity meeting: part two

No abstract availabl

A search for the decay B+→K+ννˉB^+ \to K^+ \nu \bar{\nu}

We search for the rare flavor-changing neutral-current decay $B^+ \to K^+ \nu \bar{\nu}$ in a data sample of 82 fb$^{-1}$ collected with the {\sl BABAR} detector at the PEP-II B-factory. Signal events are selected by examining the properties of the system recoiling against either a reconstructed hadronic or semileptonic charged-B decay. Using these two independent samples we obtain a combined limit of ${\mathcal B}(B^+ \to K^+ \nu \bar{\nu})<5.2 \times 10^{-5}$ at the 90% confidence level. In addition, by selecting for pions rather than kaons, we obtain a limit of ${\mathcal B}(B^+ \to \pi^+ \nu \bar{\nu})<1.0 \times 10^{-4}$ using only the hadronic B reconstruction method.Comment: 7 pages, 8 postscript figures, submitted to Phys. Rev. Let

High-reflectivity broadband distributed Bragg reflector lattice matched to ZnTe

We report on the realization of a high quality distributed Bragg reflector with both high and low refractive index layers lattice matched to ZnTe. Our structure is grown by molecular beam epitaxy and is based on binary compounds only. The high refractive index layer is made of ZnTe, while the low index material is made of a short period triple superlattice containing MgSe, MgTe, and ZnTe. The high refractive index step of Delta_n=0.5 in the structure results in a broad stopband and the reflectivity coefficient exceeding 99% for only 15 Bragg pairs.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure