Using survey participants to estimate the impact of nonparticipation

The authors evaluate the effectiveness of two models often used to measure the extent of nonparticipation bias in survey estimates. The first model establishes a "continuum of resistance" to being surveyed, placing people who were interviewed after one phone call on one end and nonparticipants on the other. The second assumes that there are "classes" of nonparticipants and that similar classes can be found among participants; it identifies groups of participants thought to be like nonparticipants and uses them as "proxies" to estimate the characteristics of nonparticipants. The authors use these models to examine how accurately they estimate the characteristics of nonparticipants and the impact of nonparticipation on survey estimates of means of child support awards and payments in Wisconsin. They find that neither model detects the true extent of nonparticipation bias.

Mass Spectrum and Bounds on the Couplings in Yukawa Models With Mirror-Fermions

The $\rm SU(2)_L\otimes SU(2)_R$ symmetric Yukawa model with mirror-fermions in the limit where the mirror-fermion is decoupled is studied both analytically and numerically. The bare scalar self-coupling $\lambda$ is fixed at zero and infinity. The phase structure is explored and the relevant phase transition is found to be consistent with a second order one. The fermionic mass spectrum close to that transition is discussed and a first non-perturbative estimate of the influence of fermions on the upper and lower bounds on the renormalized scalar self-coupling is given. Numerical results are confronted with perturbative predictions.Comment: 7 (Latex) page

Quantitative rescattering theory for laser-induced high-energy plateau photoelectron spectra

A comprehensive quantitative rescattering (QRS) theory for describing the production of high-energy photoelectrons generated by intense laser pulses is presented. According to the QRS, the momentum distributions of these electrons can be expressed as the product of a returning electron wave packet with the elastic differential cross sections (DCS) between free electrons with the target ion. We show that the returning electron wave packets are determined mostly by the lasers only, and can be obtained from the strong field approximation. The validity of the QRS model is carefully examined by checking against accurate results from the solution of the time-dependent Schr\"odinger equation for atomic targets within the single active electron approximation. We further show that experimental photoelectron spectra for a wide range of laser intensity and wavelength can be explained by the QRS theory, and that the DCS between electrons and target ions can be extracted from experimental photoelectron spectra. By generalizing the QRS theory to molecular targets, we discuss how few-cycle infrared lasers offer a promising tool for dynamic chemical imaging with temporal resolution of a few femtoseconds.Comment: 19 pages, 19 figure

An alternative model for the origin of gaps in circumstellar disks

Motivated by recent observational and numerical studies suggesting that collapsing protostellar cores may be replenished from the local environment, we explore the evolution of protostellar cores submerged in the external counter-rotating environment. These models predict the formation of counter-rotating disks with a deep gap in the gas surface density separating the inner disk (corotating with the star) and the outer counter-rotating disk. The properties of these gaps are compared to those of planet-bearing gaps that form in disks hosting giant planets. We employ numerical hydrodynamics simulations of collapsing cores that are replenished from the local counter-rotating environment, as well as numerical hydrodynamic simulations of isolated disks hosting giant planets, to derive the properties of the gaps that form in both cases. Our numerical simulations demonstrate that counter-rotating disks can form for a wide range of mass and angular momentum available in the local environment. The gap that separates both disks has a depletion factor smaller than 1%, can be located at a distance from ten to over a hundred AU from the star, and can propagate inward with velocity ranging from 1 AU/Myr to >100 AU/Myr. Unlike our previous conclusion, the gap can therefore be a long-lived phenomenon, comparable in some cases to the lifetime of the disk itself. For a proper choice of the planetary mass, the viscous \alpha-parameter and the disk mass, the planet-bearing gaps and the gaps in counter-rotating disks may show a remarkable similarity in the gas density profile and depletion factor, which may complicate their observational differentiation.Comment: 13 pages, 13 figures, accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysic

The Effects of Driving Restrictions on Air Quality: São Paulo, Bogotá, Beijing, and Tianjin

In a typical driving restriction, vehicle use is restricted based on the vehicle’s license plate; one cannot drive vehicles with certain license plate numbers on certain days. Driving restrictions have been used as a method to reduce urban air pollution or traffic congestion because they are easy and inexpensive to implement. We investigate whether driving restrictions introduced in São Paulo, Bogotá, Beijing and Tianjin have improved air quality. Across different versions of the driving restrictions there is no evidence that the overall air quality at different places has been improved. However, several important results show up in this extensive analysis. Temporal shifting of driving is likely to appear when the restrictions are only effective during certain hours of weekdays. Driving restrictions could potentially reduce the extreme concentrations of air pollutants. Driving restrictions can only be expected to alleviate air pollution when implemented with an extended schedule or in an extended region. The effects of the driving restrictions are primarily on the concentrations of CO and PM10.driving restriction, air quality, Environmental Economics and Policy,

Vacuum polarization for neutral particles in 2+1 dimensions

In 2+1 dimensions there exists a duality between a charged Dirac particle coupled minimally to a background vector potential and a neutral one coupled nonminimally to a background electromagnetic field strength. A constant uniform background electric current induces in the vacuum of the neutral particle a fermion current which is proportional to the background one. A background electromagnetic plane wave induces no current in the vacuum. For constant but nonuniform background electric charge, known results for charged particles can be translated to give the induced fermion number. Some new examples with infinite background electric charge are presented. The induced spin and total angular momentum are also discussed.Comment: REVTeX, 7 pages, no figur

Toward a Deterministic Model of Planetary Formation IV: Effects of Type-I Migration

In a further development of a deterministic planet-formation model (Ida & Lin 2004), we consider the effect of type-I migration of protoplanetary embryos due to their tidal interaction with their nascent disks. During the early embedded phase of protostellar disks, although embryos rapidly emerge in regions interior to the ice line, uninhibited type-I migration leads to their efficient self-clearing. But, embryos continue to form from residual planetesimals at increasingly large radii, repeatedly migrate inward, and provide a main channel of heavy element accretion onto their host stars. During the advanced stages of disk evolution (a few Myr), the gas surface density declines to values comparable to or smaller than that of the minimum mass nebula model and type-I migration is no longer an effective disruption mechanism for mars-mass embryos. Over wide ranges of initial disk surface densities and type-I migration efficiency, the surviving population of embryos interior to the ice line has a total mass several times that of the Earth. With this reservoir, there is an adequate inventory of residual embryos to subsequently assemble into rocky planets similar to those around the Sun. But, the onset of efficient gas accretion requires the emergence and retention of cores, more massive than a few M_earth, prior to the severe depletion of the disk gas. The formation probability of gas giant planets and hence the predicted mass and semimajor axis distributions of extrasolar gas giants are sensitively determined by the strength of type-I migration. We suggest that the observed fraction of solar-type stars with gas giant planets can be reproduced only if the actual type-I migration time scale is an order of magnitude longer than that deduced from linear theories.Comment: 32 pages, 8 figures, 1 table, accepted for publication in Ap

Exact Scaling Functions for Self-Avoiding Loops and Branched Polymers

It is shown that a recently conjectured form for the critical scaling function for planar self-avoiding polygons weighted by their perimeter and area also follows from an exact renormalization group flow into the branched polymer problem, combined with the dimensional reduction arguments of Parisi and Sourlas. The result is generalized to higher-order multicritical points, yielding exact values for all their critical exponents and exact forms for the associated scaling functions.Comment: 5 pages; v2: factors of 2 corrected; v.3: relation with existing theta-point results clarified, some references added/update

Configuration-Space Location of the Entanglement between Two Subsystems

In this paper we address the question: where in configuration space is the entanglement between two particles located? We present a thought-experiment, equally applicable to discrete or continuous-variable systems, in which one or both parties makes a preliminary measurement of the state with only enough resolution to determine whether or not the particle resides in a chosen region, before attempting to make use of the entanglement. We argue that this provides an operational answer to the question of how much entanglement was originally located within the chosen region. We illustrate the approach in a spin system, and also in a pair of coupled harmonic oscillators. Our approach is particularly simple to implement for pure states, since in this case the sub-ensemble in which the system is definitely located in the restricted region after the measurement is also pure, and hence its entanglement can be simply characterised by the entropy of the reduced density operators. For our spin example we present results showing how the entanglement varies as a function of the parameters of the initial state; for the continuous case, we find also how it depends on the location and size of the chosen regions. Hence we show that the distribution of entanglement is very different from the distribution of the classical correlations.Comment: RevTex, 12 pages, 9 figures (28 files). Modifications in response to journal referee