A study of the impact of monetary policy on long-term interest rates in New Zealand : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Business Studies in Financial Economics at Massey University

This paper examines the impact of monetary policy on the daily long-term interest rate (the 10 year government bond rate) in New Zealand. An attempt is also made to compare the impact of international long-term interest rates (the 10 year bond rate) on domestic long-term rates. The Monetary Condition Index (MCI) and 90 day bill rates are used as proxies for the Reserve Bank's monetary stance over the period 3 October 1994 to 30 September 1997. In the empirical literature, it is common to use the benchmark short-term interest rate as the monetary policy proxy. However, this paper argues that using the MCI as the proxy is more appropriate, as it incorporates the effect of the exchange rate, and in part reflects the monetary policy stance of the Reserve Bank. The study finds that the impact of domestic monetary policy on daily long-term interest rates is limited compared to the impact of international interest rates on those same rates. New Zealand long-term interest rates seem not only to move with international rates, but seem to be largely driven by them

A Lower Bound on the Ground State Energy of Dilute Bose Gas

Consider an N-Boson system interacting via a two-body repulsive short-range potential $V$ in a three dimensional box $\Lambda$ of side length $L$. We take the limit $N, L \to \infty$ while keeping the density $\rho = N / L^3$ fixed and small. We prove a new lower bound for its ground state energy per particle $$\frac{E(N, \Lambda)}{N} \geq 4 \pi a \rho [ 1 - O(\rho^{1/3} |\log \rho|^3) ],$$ as $\rho \to 0$, where $a$ is the scattering length of $V$.Comment: 26 pages, AMS LaTe

Gaps between classes of matrix monotone functions

We prove the existence of gaps between all the different classes of matrix monotone functions defined on an interval, provided the interval is non trivial and different from the whole real line. We then show how matrix monotone functions may be used in the characterization of certain C*-algebras as an alternative to the study of the matricial structure by positive linear maps

Three photon absorption in ZnO and ZnS crystals

We report a systematic investigation of both three-photon absorption (3PA)spectra and wavelength dispersions of Kerr-type nonlinear refraction in wide-gap semiconductors. The Z-scan measurements are recorded for both ZnO and ZnS with femtosecond laser pulses. While the wavelength dispersions of the Kerr nonlinearity are in agreement with a two-band model, the wavelength dependences of the 3PA are found to be given by (3Ephoton/Eg-1)5/2(3Ephoton/Eg)-9. We also evaluate higher-order nonlinear optical effects including the fifth-order instantaneous nonlinear refraction associated with virtual three-photon transitions, and effectively seventh-order nonlinear processes induced by three-photon-excited free charge carriers. These higher-order nonlinear effects are insignificant with laser excitation irradiances up to 40 GW/cm2. Both pump-probe measurements and three-photon figures of merits demonstrate that ZnO and ZnS should be a promising candidate for optical switching applications at telecommunication wavelengths.Comment: 13 pages, 7 figure

Noiseless coding for the magnetometer

Future unmanned space missions will continue to seek a full understanding of magnetic fields throughout the solar system. Severely constrained data rates during certain portions of these missions could limit the possible science return. This publication investigates the application of universal noiseless coding techniques to more efficiently represent magnetometer data without any loss in data integrity. Performance results indicated that compression factors of 2:1 to 6:1 can be expected. Feasibility for general deep space application was demonstrated by implementing a microprocessor breadboard coder/decoder using the Intel 8086 processor. The Comet Rendezvous Asteroid Flyby mission will incorporate these techniques in a buffer feedback, rate-controlled configuration. The characteristics of this system are discussed

Hybrid Spam Filtering for Mobile Communication

Spam messages are an increasing threat to mobile communication. Several mitigation techniques have been proposed, including white and black listing, challenge-response and content-based filtering. However, none are perfect and it makes sense to use a combination rather than just one. We propose an anti-spam framework based on the hybrid of content-based filtering and challenge-response. There is the trade-offs between accuracy of anti-spam classifiers and the communication overhead. Experimental results show how, depending on the proportion of spam messages, different filtering %%@ parameters should be set.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures, 1 tabl

Valley Carrier Dynamics in Monolayer Molybdenum Disulphide from Helicity Resolved Ultrafast Pump-probe Spectroscopy

We investigate the valley related carrier dynamics in monolayer MoS2 using helicity resolved non-degenerate ultrafast pump-probe spectroscopy at the vicinity of the high-symmetry K point under the temperature down to 78 K. Monolayer MoS2 shows remarkable transient reflection signals, in stark contrast to bilayer and bulk MoS2 due to the enhancement of many-body effect at reduced dimensionality. The helicity resolved ultrafast time-resolved result shows that the valley polarization is preserved for only several ps before scattering process makes it undistinguishable. We suggest that the dynamical degradation of valley polarization is attributable primarily to the exciton trapping by defect states in the exfoliated MoS2 samples. Our experiment and a tight-binding model analysis also show that the perfect valley CD selectivity is fairly robust against disorder at the K point, but quickly decays from the high-symmetry point in the momentum space in the presence of disorder.Comment: 15 pages,Accepted by ACS Nan