7,461 research outputs found
Does China Still Have A Labor Cost Advantage?
In recent years wages in China have been rising and the yuan has appreciated, potentially eroding China’s cost advantage in manufactures. This paper explores the evolution of China’s relative unit labor costs in manufacturing over 1998-2009. Between 1998 and 2003 China’s unit labor costs fell, but since 2003 they have increased both absolutely and relative to US unit labor costs. Much of the rise in China’s relative unit labor costs can be traced to a real appreciation of the yuan against the dollar. Despite the recent rise, China’s unit labor costs remain low relative to those in most other countries
Green-Function-Based Monte Carlo Method for Classical Fields Coupled to Fermions
Microscopic models of classical degrees of freedom coupled to non-interacting
fermions occur in many different contexts. Prominent examples from solid state
physics are descriptions of colossal magnetoresistance manganites and diluted
magnetic semiconductors, or auxiliary field methods for correlated electron
systems. Monte Carlo simulations are vital for an understanding of such
systems, but notorious for requiring the solution of the fermion problem with
each change in the classical field configuration. We present an efficient,
truncation-free O(N) method on the basis of Chebyshev expanded local Green
functions, which allows us to simulate systems of unprecedented size N.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure
Test-engine and inlet performance of an aircraft used for investigating flight effects on fan noise
As part of the NASA Flight Effects on Fan Noise Program, a Grumman OV-1B Mohawk aircraft was modified to carry a modified and instrumented Pratt & Whitney JT15D-1 turbofan engine. Onboard flight data, together with simultaneously measured farfield acoustic data, comprise a flight data base to which JT15D-1 static and wind-tunnel data are compared. The overall objective is to improve the ability to use ground-based facilities for the prediction of flight inlet radiated noise. This report describes the hardware and presents performance results for the research engine
Approximation of the scattering amplitude
The simultaneous solution of Ax=b and ATy=g is required in a number of situations. Darmofal and Lu have proposed a method based on the Quasi-Minimal residual algorithm (QMR). We will introduce a technique for the same purpose based on the LSQR method and show how its performance can be improved when using the Generalized LSQR method. We further show how preconditioners can be introduced to enhance the speed of convergence and discuss different preconditioners that can be used. The scattering amplitude gTx, a widely used quantity in signal processing for example, has a close connection to the above problem since x represents the solution of the forward problem and g is the right hand side of the adjoint system. We show how this quantity can be efficiently approximated using Gauss quadrature and introduce a Block-Lanczos process that approximates the scattering amplitude and which can also be used with preconditioners
Quaternion Singular Value Decomposition based on Bidiagonalization to a Real Matrix using Quaternion Householder Transformations
We present a practical and efficient means to compute the singular value
decomposition (svd) of a quaternion matrix A based on bidiagonalization of A to
a real bidiagonal matrix B using quaternionic Householder transformations.
Computation of the svd of B using an existing subroutine library such as lapack
provides the singular values of A. The singular vectors of A are obtained
trivially from the product of the Householder transformations and the real
singular vectors of B. We show in the paper that left and right quaternionic
Householder transformations are different because of the noncommutative
multiplication of quaternions and we present formulae for computing the
Householder vector and matrix in each case
Parallel density matrix propagation in spin dynamics simulations
Several methods for density matrix propagation in distributed computing
environments, such as clusters and graphics processing units, are proposed and
evaluated. It is demonstrated that the large communication overhead associated
with each propagation step (two-sided multiplication of the density matrix by
an exponential propagator and its conjugate) may be avoided and the simulation
recast in a form that requires virtually no inter-thread communication. Good
scaling is demonstrated on a 128-core (16 nodes, 8 cores each) cluster.Comment: Submitted for publicatio
Gravitationally enhanced depolarization of ultracold neutrons in magnetic-field gradients
Trapped ultracold neutrons (UCN) have for many years been the mainstay of experiments to search for the electric dipole moment (EDM) of the neutron, a critical parameter in constraining scenarios of new physics beyond the Standard Model. Because their energies are so low, UCN preferentially populate the lower region of their physical enclosure, and do not sample uniformly the ambient magnetic field throughout the storage volume. This leads to a substantial increase in the rate of depolarization, as well as to shifts in the measured frequency of the stored neutrons. Consequences for EDM measurements are discussed
Fluctuation-induced interactions between dielectrics in general geometries
We study thermal Casimir and quantum non-retarded Lifshitz interactions
between dielectrics in general geometries. We map the calculation of the
classical partition function onto a determinant which we discretize and
evaluate with the help of Cholesky factorization. The quantum partition
function is treated by path integral quantization of a set of interacting
dipoles and reduces to a product of determinants. We compare the approximations
of pairwise additivity and proximity force with our numerical methods. We
propose a ``factorization approximation'' which gives rather good numerical
results in the geometries that we study
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