11,393 research outputs found
Lowering Consumer Search Costs Can Lead To Higher Prices
We demonstrate that regulations that lower consumer search costs and make them less heterogeneous across consumers can lead to higher prices charged by firms. We estimate the distribution of consumer search costs for 366 isolated retail gasoline markets, and find that reducing the mean and standard deviation by 20% and 48%, respectively, leads to price increases in 32% of markets and an average price increase of 5.2 cents per gallon across all markets. Thus, price transparency regulation that results in higher prices may not stem from collusion, but from an equilibrium with less consumer search
BCS-BEC crossover in a relativistic superfluid and its significance to quark matter
The character change of a superfluid state due to the variation of the
attractive force is investigated in the relativistic framework with a massive
fermion. Two crossovers are found. One is a crossover from the usual BCS state
to the Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC) of bound fermion pairs. The other is
from the BEC to the relativistic Bose-Einstein condensation (RBEC) of nearly
massless bound pairs where antiparticles as well as particles dominate the
thermodynamics. Possible realization of the BEC and RBEC states in the quark
matter is also pointed out.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure, revtex4; (v2) text has been clarified, references
updated; (v3) final version to appear in Phys. Rev.
Liberating Efimov physics from three dimensions
When two particles attract via a resonant short-range interaction, three
particles always form an infinite tower of bound states characterized by a
discrete scaling symmetry. It has been considered that this Efimov effect
exists only in three dimensions. Here we review how the Efimov physics can be
liberated from three dimensions by considering two-body and three-body
interactions in mixed dimensions and four-body interaction in one dimension. In
such new systems, intriguing phenomena appear, such as confinement-induced
Efimov effect, Bose-Fermi crossover in Efimov spectrum, and formation of
interlayer Efimov trimers. Some of them are observable in ultracold atom
experiments and we believe that this study significantly broadens our horizons
of universal Efimov physics.Comment: 17 pages, 5 figures, contribution to a special issue of Few-Body
Systems devoted to Efimov Physic
Unitary Fermi gas, epsilon expansion, and nonrelativistic conformal field theories
We review theoretical aspects of unitary Fermi gas (UFG), which has been
realized in ultracold atom experiments. We first introduce the epsilon
expansion technique based on a systematic expansion in terms of the
dimensionality of space. We apply this technique to compute the thermodynamic
quantities, the quasiparticle spectrum, and the critical temperature of UFG. We
then discuss consequences of the scale and conformal invariance of UFG. We
prove a correspondence between primary operators in nonrelativistic conformal
field theories and energy eigenstates in a harmonic potential. We use this
correspondence to compute energies of fermions at unitarity in a harmonic
potential. The scale and conformal invariance together with the general
coordinate invariance constrains the properties of UFG. We show the vanishing
bulk viscosities of UFG and derive the low-energy effective Lagrangian for the
superfluid UFG. Finally we propose other systems exhibiting the nonrelativistic
scaling and conformal symmetries that can be in principle realized in ultracold
atom experiments.Comment: 44 pages, 15 figures, contribution to Lecture Notes in Physics
"BCS-BEC crossover and the Unitary Fermi Gas" edited by W. Zwerge
Prospective associations between adolescent mental health problems and positive mental wellbeing in early old age
Background
Mental health problems in adolescence are predictive of future mental distress and psychopathology; however, few studies investigated adolescent mental health problems in relation to future mental wellbeing and none with follow-up to older age.
Aims
To test prospective associations between adolescent mental health problems and mental wellbeing and life satisfaction in early old age.
Methods
A total of 1561 men and women were drawn from the Medical Research Council National Survey of Health and Development (the British 1946 birth cohort). Teachers had previously completed rating scales to assess emotional adjustment and behaviours, which allowed us to extract factors of mental health problems measuring self-organisation, behavioural problems, and emotional problems during adolescence. Between the ages of 60–64 years, mental wellbeing was assessed using the Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-being Scale (WEMWBS) and life satisfaction was self-reported using the Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS).
Results
After controlling for gender, social class of origin, childhood cognitive ability, and educational attainment, adolescent emotional problems were independently inversely associated with mental wellbeing and with life satisfaction. Symptoms of anxiety/depression at 60–64 years explained the association with life satisfaction but not with mental wellbeing. Associations between adolescent self-organisation and conduct problems and mental wellbeing and life satisfaction were of negligible magnitude, but higher childhood cognitive ability significantly predicted poor life satisfaction in early old age.
Conclusions
Adolescent self-organisation and conduct problems may not be predictive of future mental wellbeing and life satisfaction. Adolescent emotional problems may be inversely associated with future wellbeing, and may be associated with lower levels of future life satisfaction through symptoms of anxiety/depression in early old age. Initiatives to prevent and treat emotional problems in adolescence may have long-term benefits which extend into older age
Design, construction and evaluation of a 12.045 GHz, 2.0 kW-cw permanent-magnet focused klystron amplifier
An analytical and experimental program to demonstrate the technical feasibility of a lightweight, high-efficiency, 1-2 kW cw, permanent magnet focused klystron operating at 12.0 GHz was described. The design is based on use of a samarium-cobalt permanent magnet for focusing of the electron beam and choice of the most optimum parameters for maximum efficiency. A filter-loaded output circuit is used for the required bandwidth. The design incorporates a collector which is demountable from the tube to facilitate multistage depressed collector experiments, permitting replacement with a NASA-designed axisymmetric, electrostatic collector for linear beam microwave tubes. A further requirement is that the focusing field between the last interaction gap and the collector decay in a prescribed manner referred to as adiabatic expansion
A Phase-Space Approach to Collisionless Stellar Systems Using a Particle Method
A particle method for reproducing the phase space of collisionless stellar
systems is described. The key idea originates in Liouville's theorem which
states that the distribution function (DF) at time t can be derived from
tracing necessary orbits back to t=0. To make this procedure feasible, a
self-consistent field (SCF) method for solving Poisson's equation is adopted to
compute the orbits of arbitrary stars. As an example, for the violent
relaxation of a uniform-density sphere, the phase-space evolution which the
current method generates is compared to that obtained with a phase-space method
for integrating the collisionless Boltzmann equation, on the assumption of
spherical symmetry. Then, excellent agreement is found between the two methods
if an optimal basis set for the SCF technique is chosen. Since this
reproduction method requires only the functional form of initial DFs but needs
no assumptions about symmetry of the system, the success in reproducing the
phase-space evolution implies that there would be no need of directly solving
the collisionless Boltzmann equation in order to access phase space even for
systems without any special symmetries. The effects of basis sets used in SCF
simulations on the reproduced phase space are also discussed.Comment: 16 pages w/4 embedded PS figures. Uses aaspp4.sty (AASLaTeX v4.0). To
be published in ApJ, Oct. 1, 1997. This preprint is also available at
http://www.sue.shiga-u.ac.jp/WWW/prof/hozumi/papers.htm
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