Electromagnetic processes in strong crystalline fields

As an addendum to the NA63 proposal cite{Ande05}, we propose to measure 1) the Landau-Pomeranchuk-Migdal (LPM) effect in low-$Z$ targets, 2) Magnetic suppression of incoherent bremsstrahlung resulting from exposure to an external field during the emission event, and 3) the bremsstrahlung emission from relativistic ($gamma=170$), fully stripped Pb nuclei penetrating various amorphous targets. Concerning the LPM effect, both the 'traditional' Migdal approach and the modern treatment by Baier and Katkov display inaccuracies, i.e. a possible lack of applicability in low-$Z$ targets. Moreover, the LPM effect has been shown to have a significant impact on giant air showers for energies in the EeV range - evidently processes in a low-$Z$ material. A measurement of magnetic suppression is demanding in terms of necessary accuracy (an expected $lesssim$15% effect), but would prove the existence of a basic interplay between coherent and incoherent processes, also believed to be significant in beamstrahlung emission. For bremsstrahlung from Pb$^{82+}$: In contrast to earlier expectations, recent investigations have shown that the bremsstrahlung emission from heavy, relativistic particles does not appear with constant power for all photon energies up to the end-point given by the energy of the incident ion, but instead the spectrum has a peaked shape, due to the finite size of the nucleus. Beyond an energy of about $2gammahbaromega_1$, wher e $hbaromega_1$ corresponds to the energy transfer above which the $Z$ protons in the nucleus can be considered quasi-free, the power-spectrum falls off quite steeply, eventually leaving pair production as the dominant energy loss mechanism for sufficiently high values of the Lorentz-factor

Contested Compliance Regimes in Global Production Networks: Insights from the Bangladesh Garment Industry

This article reports the findings of a field study on the emergence of collective agreements led by global brands enacting compliance measures to improve safety and working conditions in the Bangladesh garment industry. We explore how key actors in the Bangladesh garment sector who constitute the local production system of the global supply chain experienced the implementation of global agreements on factory safety. We argue that global safety compliance measures through multi-stakeholder initiatives provide legitimacy to multinational corporations and their global brands but do little to address the structural problems arising from exploitative pricing and procurement practices, which are the key reasons for deplorable working conditions in garment factories. Our findings indicate that neoliberal development policies of the state, where local economies are incorporated into global production networks, resulted in differential treatment and regulation of specific populations that comprise garment factory workers. The reconfiguration of state power to meet the demands of global supply chains also involved use of state violence to suppress dissent while undermining labour rights and working conditions. Our article contributes to the politicization of multinational corporations in global production chains by showing how contestations between workers, factory owners, the state, trade unions and multinational corporations create new private forms of governance and new regimes of compliance in the industr

Corporate governance and employees in South Africa.

Focusing on employees as stakeholders, we analyse corporate governance initiatives in South Africa encouraging and requiring companies to look beyond their shareholders' interests. Successive non-binding codes and the provisions of the recent Companies Act 2008 promoting this have been lauded by many commentators. The 2008 Act provides certain opportunities for employees and their representatives to exercise influence at the margins. We nevertheless question how far current corporate governance initiatives are adequate to promote employee interests. On the basis of three case studies of how companies have responded to employees as stakeholders, we conclude that in fact more stringent regulation is required

The optical afterglow and host galaxy of GRB 000926

We present the discovery of the Optical Transient (OT) of the long-duration gamma-ray burst GRB 000926. The optical transient was detected independently with the Nordic Optical Telescope and at Calar Alto 22.2 hours after the burst. At this time the magnitude of the transient was R = 19.36. The transient faded with a decay slope of about 1.7 during the first two days after which the slope increased abruptly (within a few hours) to about 2.4. The light-curve started to flatten off after about a week indicating the presence of an underlying extended object. This object was detected in a deep image obtained one month after the GRB at R=23.87+/-0.15 and consists of several compact knots within about 5 arcsec. One of the knots is spatially coincident with the position of the OT and hence most likely belongs to the host galaxy. Higher resolution imaging is needed to resolve whether all the compact knots belong to the host galaxy or to several independent objects. In a separate paper we present a discussion of the optical spectrum of the OT, and its inferred redshift (Møller et al., in prep.). Based on observations made with the Nordic Optical Telescope, operated on the island of La Palma jointly by Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. Based on observations made at the 2.2-m telescope of the German-Spanish Calar Alto Observatory. Based on observations made with the Isaac Newton Telescope operated on the island of La Palma by the Isaac Newton Group in the Spanish Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos of the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias