‘Giant’ magnetoresistance in obliquely co-evaporated Co-Ag films

Magnetoresistance (MR) measurements at room temperature have been performed on obliquely (co-) evaporated Ag-Co films deposited at room- and elevated-temperatures. The ‘giant’ magnetoresistance ratio (max. 13% for a composition of about Co35Ag65) over a wide range of compositions has been measured. The films are polycrystalline and grown in a columnar morphology. The columnar diameter depends on the thickness and is < 20 nm at 400 nm thickness. From XRD, NMR and saturation magnetization (Ms) vs. at% Ag, one can conclude that the films consist of Co-Co and Ag-Ag clusters. The coercivity depends on the thickness of the films (100–700 nm) and varies from 5 to 15 kA/m

Neutron reflectometry on Co-Cr layers

Polarized neutron reflection experiments were performed on a thin in-plane magnetized Co-Cr layer deposited on a quartz substrate. Data taken at a low magnetic field ( 0.1 T) clearly indicate the existence of an initial layer at the substrate side, whereas data at saturation ( 0.7 T) are consistent with a rather homogeneous magnetization

Market forces in European soccer

Recent decades have witnessed major changes in the market for European soccer. The most profound were the Bosman ruling, which lifted restrictions in the European labor market for soccer talent, and the introduction of the Champions’ League, a high-profile international competition that generates high revenues for participating clubs. This paper studies the effects of these changes on the closeness of national and international competitions, from both a theoretical and an empirical perspective. We show that competitive balance in national competitions has not been affected. International quality differences did increase, mainly as a result of the Bosman ruling.

Market forces in European soccer

Recent decades have witnessed major changes in the market for European soccer. The most profound were the Bosman ruling, which lifted restrictions in the European labor market for soccer talent, and the introduction of the Champions' League, a high-profile international competition that generates high revenues for participating clubs. This paper studies the effects of these changes on the closeness of national and international competitions, from both a theoretical and an empirical perspective. We show that competitive balance in national competitions has not been affected. International quality differences did increase, mainly as a result of the Bosman ruling.

In-plane Theory of Non-Sequential Triple Ionization

We describe first-principles in-plane calculations of non-sequential triple ionization (NSTI) of atoms in a linearly polarized intense laser pulse. In a fully classically correlated description, all three electrons respond dynamically to the nuclear attraction, the pairwise e-e repulsions and the laser force throughout the duration of a 780nm laser pulse. Nonsequential ejection is shown to occur in a multi-electron, possibly multi-cycle and multi-dimensional, rescattering sequence that is coordinated by a number of sharp transverse recollimation impacts.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

Exact Markovian kinetic equation for a quantum Brownian oscillator

We derive an exact Markovian kinetic equation for an oscillator linearly coupled to a heat bath, describing quantum Brownian motion. Our work is based on the subdynamics formulation developed by Prigogine and collaborators. The space of distribution functions is decomposed into independent subspaces that remain invariant under Liouville dynamics. For integrable systems in Poincar\'e's sense the invariant subspaces follow the dynamics of uncoupled, renormalized particles. In contrast for non-integrable systems, the invariant subspaces follow a dynamics with broken-time symmetry, involving generalized functions. This result indicates that irreversibility and stochasticity are exact properties of dynamics in generalized function spaces. We comment on the relation between our Markovian kinetic equation and the Hu-Paz-Zhang equation.Comment: A few typos in the published version are correcte

Visual pathways from the perspective of cost functions and multi-task deep neural networks

Vision research has been shaped by the seminal insight that we can understand the higher-tier visual cortex from the perspective of multiple functional pathways with different goals. In this paper, we try to give a computational account of the functional organization of this system by reasoning from the perspective of multi-task deep neural networks. Machine learning has shown that tasks become easier to solve when they are decomposed into subtasks with their own cost function. We hypothesize that the visual system optimizes multiple cost functions of unrelated tasks and this causes the emergence of a ventral pathway dedicated to vision for perception, and a dorsal pathway dedicated to vision for action. To evaluate the functional organization in multi-task deep neural networks, we propose a method that measures the contribution of a unit towards each task, applying it to two networks that have been trained on either two related or two unrelated tasks, using an identical stimulus set. Results show that the network trained on the unrelated tasks shows a decreasing degree of feature representation sharing towards higher-tier layers while the network trained on related tasks uniformly shows high degree of sharing. We conjecture that the method we propose can be used to analyze the anatomical and functional organization of the visual system and beyond. We predict that the degree to which tasks are related is a good descriptor of the degree to which they share downstream cortical-units.Comment: 16 pages, 5 figure

Political Violence and Excess Liquidity in Egypt

In this article we estimate a time-series model of excess liquidity in the Egyptian banking sector. While financial liberalisation and financial stability are found to have reduced excess liquidity, these effects have been offset by an increase in the number of violent political incidents arising from conflict between radical Islamic groups and the Egyptian state. The link between political events and financial outcomes provides a rationale for economic policy interventions by the international community in response to increases in political instability

Onder water, boven water. Relicten in een oude rivierpolder. Het verhaal van de polder van Kruibeke-Bazel-Rupelmonde (prov. Oost-Vl.)

Een van de streefdoelen van het geactualiseerde Sigmaplan is om het Zeescheldebekken in de toekomst beter te beveiligen tegen overstromingen. Vroeger ingedijkte valleigebieden worden daarom omgevormd tot gecontroleerde overstromingsgebieden (GOG), met natuur als nevenfunctie. De herinrichting van deze gebieden door Waterwegen en Zeekanaal (W&Z) is momenteel volop aan de gang. Hierdoor zal het voormalige cultuurhistorische landschap grondig veranderen. Rivierpolders stonden door hun lage ligging en het constante overstromingsrisico steeds weinig onder druk van bebouwing en infrastructuur en herbergen op die manier veel relicten uit vroegere tijdlagen. In opdracht van W&Z onderzocht het VIOE de overstromingsgeschiedenis en de cultuurhistorische ontwikkeling van de polder van Kruibeke, Bazel en Rupelmonde (KBR)