Between a rock and a hard place: Vulnerability and precarity in rural Nepal

Drawing on a local study on Nepal’s Terai, this paper explores the nature of livelihood exposure to shocks and stresses among rural households in two Village Development Committees in Sunsari District. The primary data are derived from a 117 household survey supplemented by 19 purposefully sampled follow-up interviews. The paper opens with a discussion of the changing nature of exposure in the global South, distinguishing between inherited vulnerability and produced precarity. We then provide background to the research site and the research methods. In the core empirical part of the paper we unravel and distinguish between the livelihood threats and opportunities faced by households in the area and use these to reflect on the nature of ’exposure’, its historical origins and contemporary (re)production. The final part of the paper uses the Nepal case to build a more general argument, proposing that if we are to understand the puzzle of continued livelihood exposure and uncertainty in the context of aggregate economic expansion we need to identify and interrogate the processes that may, at the same time, produce wealth and reduce vulnerability, while also generating precarity

Fully Differential Investigation of Two-Center Interference in Dissociative Capture in p + H₂ Collisions

We have measured and calculated fully differential cross sections for vibrational dissociation following capture in 75-keV p + H2 collisions. For a molecular orientation perpendicular to the projectile beam axis and parallel to the transverse momentum transfer we observe a pronounced interference structure. The positions of the interference extrema suggest that the interference term is afflicted with a phase shift which depends on the projectile scattering angle. However, no significant dependence on the kinetic-energy release was observed. Considerable discrepancies between our calculations and experimental data were found

Fully Differential Study of Interference Effects in the Ionization of H₂ by Proton Impact

We have measured fully differential cross sections for ionization of H2 by 75-keV proton impact. The coherence length of the projectile beam was varied by changing the distance between a collimating slit and the target. By comparing the cross sections measured for large and small coherence lengths pronounced interference effects could be identified in the data. A surprising result is that the phase angle in the interference term is primarily determined by the momentum transfer and only to a lesser extent by the recoil-ion momentum

Complete Momentum Balance in Ionization of H₂ by 75-keV-Proton Impact for Varying Projectile Coherence

We report on a kinematically complete experiment on ionization of H2 by proton impact. While a significant impact of the projectile coherence properties on the scattering-angle dependence of double-differential cross sections (DDCSs), reported earlier, is confirmed by the present data, only weak coherence effects are found in the electron and recoil-ion momentum dependence of the DDCSs. This suggests that the phase angle in the interference term is determined primarily by the projectile momentum transfer rather than by the recoil-ion momentum. We therefore cannot rule out the possibility that the interference observed in our data is not primarily due to a two-center effect

Technical Efficiency of Hybrid Maize Production in Eastern Terai of Nepal: a Stochastic Frontier Approach

Maize is the second most important crop after rice in terms of area and production in Nepal. This article analyzes the technical efficiency and its determinants of hybrid maize production in eastern Nepal. Using a randomly selected data from 98 farmers (41 from Morang and 57 from Sunsari) in eastern Nepal, the study employed a stochastic frontier production model to find the production elasticity coefficients of inputs, determinants of efficiency and technical efficiency of hybrid maize farmers. The results showed that maize production responds positively to increase in amount of urea, DAP and the area planted, where as it is negative to seed quantity. The study indicate that farmers are not technically efficient with a mean technical efficiency 79 %. Socioeconomic variable age had a negative and significant while the household size had a positive and significant related to maize output. The younger farmers were observed more technically efficient than older farmers. Larger the members in the household higher the maize production. It is recommended that farmers should increase their fertilizer dose and farm size while they should decrease their seed rate for efficient production

A Search for Dark Higgs Bosons

Recent astrophysical and terrestrial experiments have motivated the proposal of a dark sector with GeV-scale gauge boson force carriers and new Higgs bosons. We present a search for a dark Higgs boson using 516 fb-1 of data collected with the BABAR detector. We do not observe a significant signal and we set 90% confidence level upper limits on the product of the Standard Model-dark sector mixing angle and the dark sector coupling constant.Comment: 7 pages, 5 postscript figures, published version with improved plots for b/w printin

Search for the standard model Higgs boson in the H to ZZ to 2l 2nu channel in pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 7 TeV

A search for the standard model Higgs boson in the H to ZZ to 2l 2nu decay channel, where l = e or mu, in pp collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 7 TeV is presented. The data were collected at the LHC, with the CMS detector, and correspond to an integrated luminosity of 4.6 inverse femtobarns. No significant excess is observed above the background expectation, and upper limits are set on the Higgs boson production cross section. The presence of the standard model Higgs boson with a mass in the 270-440 GeV range is excluded at 95% confidence level.Comment: Submitted to JHE

Search for anomalous t t-bar production in the highly-boosted all-hadronic final state

A search is presented for a massive particle, generically referred to as a Z', decaying into a t t-bar pair. The search focuses on Z' resonances that are sufficiently massive to produce highly Lorentz-boosted top quarks, which yield collimated decay products that are partially or fully merged into single jets. The analysis uses new methods to analyze jet substructure, providing suppression of the non-top multijet backgrounds. The analysis is based on a data sample of proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 7 TeV, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 5 inverse femtobarns. Upper limits in the range of 1 pb are set on the product of the production cross section and branching fraction for a topcolor Z' modeled for several widths, as well as for a Randall--Sundrum Kaluza--Klein gluon. In addition, the results constrain any enhancement in t t-bar production beyond expectations of the standard model for t t-bar invariant masses larger than 1 TeV.Comment: Submitted to the Journal of High Energy Physics; this version includes a minor typo correction that will be submitted as an erratu