Write This Down: A Model Market-Share Liability Statute

The 1980s featured a remarkable series of lawsuits: the DES cases. The women who brought these cases had been harmed by a drug—DES—that their mothers had taken while the future plaintiffs were in utero. Hundreds of companies manufactured DES, each unit of DES sold was chemically identical, and the harmed women were generally unable to identify the manufacturer who had filled their mothers’ prescriptions. Many of the plaintiffs could not prove causation as to a specific manufacturer and so could not bring traditional tort suits. To provide relief, some courts forged ahead with a new tort theory: market-share liability. Under this theory, plaintiffs who were harmed by a fungible product and unable to identify the manufacturer who produced the unit that harmed them could sue all manufacturers of the product and collect from each of them according to their market share. But not every court recognized this new theory. And among the courts that did, disagreement emerged as to doctrinal determinations and mechanical considerations. This Note is the first survey of both the legal and practical questions surrounding claims based on market-share liability, from whether a prospective plaintiff qualifies for such a cause of action to determining the relevant market to pleading requirements. It asserts that market-share liability furthers the purposes of tort and products-liability law, critiques existing state statutory schemes, and proposes a model statute for state legislatures to consider

The mechanisms of stress corrosion of the titanium alloy Ti 8-1-1 exposed to salt environments at elevated temperatures Final report

Mechanisms of slat stress corrosion cracking of titanium alloys at high temperature

On the scaling spectrum of the Anderson impurity model

We consider the universal scaling behaviour of the Kondo resonance in the strong coupling limit of the symmetric Anderson impurity model, using a recently developed local moment approach. The resultant scaling spectrum is obtained in closed form, and is dominated by long tails that in contrast to previous work are found to exhibit a slow logarithmic decay rather than power-law form, crossing over to characteristic Fermi liquid behaviour on the lowest energy scales. The resultant theory, while naturally approximate, is found to give very good agreement for essentially all frequencies with numerical renormalization group calculations of both the single-particle scaling spectrum and the self-energy.Comment: 16 pages, 4 embedded figure

Magnetic properties of the Anderson model: a local moment approach

We develop a local moment approach to static properties of the symmetric Anderson model in the presence of a magnetic field, focussing in particular on the strong coupling Kondo regime. The approach is innately simple and physically transparent; but is found to give good agreement, for essentially all field strengths, with exact results for the Wilson ratio, impurity magnetization, spin susceptibility and related properties.Comment: 7 pages, 3 postscript figues. Latex 2e using the epl.cls Europhysics Letters macro packag

A spin-dependent local moment approach to the Anderson impurity model

We present an extension of the local moment approach to the Anderson impurity model with spin-dependent hybridization. By employing the two-self-energy description, as originally proposed by Logan and co-workers, we applied the symmetry restoration condition for the case with spin-dependent hybridization. Self-consistent ground states were determined through variational minimization of the ground state energy. The results obtained with our spin-dependent local moment approach applied to a quantum dot system coupled to ferromagnetic leads are in good agreement with those obtained from previous work using numerical renormalization group calculations

Cloud cover typing from environmental satellite imagery. Discriminating cloud structure with Fast Fourier Transforms (FFT)

The use of two dimensional Fast Fourier Transforms (FFTs) subjected to pattern recognition technology for the identification and classification of low altitude stratus cloud structure from Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) imagery was examined. The development of a scene independent pattern recognition methodology, unconstrained by conventional cloud morphological classifications was emphasized. A technique for extracting cloud shape, direction, and size attributes from GOES visual imagery was developed. These attributes were combined with two statistical attributes (cloud mean brightness, cloud standard deviation), and interrogated using unsupervised clustering amd maximum likelihood classification techniques. Results indicate that: (1) the key cloud discrimination attributes are mean brightness, direction, shape, and minimum size; (2) cloud structure can be differentiated at given pixel scales; (3) cloud type may be identifiable at coarser scales; (4) there are positive indications of scene independence which would permit development of a cloud signature bank; (5) edge enhancement of GOES imagery does not appreciably improve cloud classification over the use of raw data; and (6) the GOES imagery must be apodized before generation of FFTs

Spectral scaling and quantum critical behaviour in the pseudogap Anderson model

The pseudogap Anderson impurity model provides a classic example of an essentially local quantum phase transition. Here we study its single-particle dynamics in the vicinity of the symmetric quantum critical point (QCP) separating generalized Fermi liquid and local moment phases, via the local moment approach. Both phases are shown to be characterized by a low-energy scale that vanishes at the QCP; and the universal scaling spectra, on all energy scales, are obtained analytically. The spectrum precisely at the QCP is also obtained; its form showing clearly the non-Fermi liquid, interacting nature of the fixed point.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figure

Measuring the Lifetime of Trapped Sleptons Using the General Purpose LHC Detectors

In supergravity where the gravitino is the lightest supersymmetric particle (LSP), the next-to-lightest supersymmetric particle (NLSP) decays to the gravitino with a naturally long lifetime (10^4 - 10^8). However, cosmological constraints favour charged sleptons with lifetimes below a year as the natural NLSP candidate. For this scenario we report a method to accurately determine the slepton lifetime and SUSY cross-section from observation of the decays of sleptons trapped in the material comprising the main detector (ATLAS, CMS). A measurement of the lifetime to 5% is possible after 3 years at nominal luminosity and running conditions. This method is sensitive to the cosmologically preferred stau lifetime of ~37 days and does not require the use of ancillary trapping volumes