Sports Retailinf in India: Opportunities, Constraints and Way Forward

Sports retail is a small but fast growing segment of modern retail in India. Recently, thecountry has been hosting many international sports and this has given a boost to thissector. Many foreign and domestic corporate retailers have entered sports retail. Sportsgoods manufacturing is a focus area in the Foreign Trade Policy (2009-2014) and thegovernment is taking a fresh look at the current foreign direct investment policy inretail.In the above context, this paper provides an overview of the sports retail sector in India.Specifically, it presents the different retail formats, consumer profile, retailers’ supplychain and sourcing. It also examines the retail and sports policies and their implicationsfor this segment of retail, analyses the barriers faced by this sector and suggests policyreforms.The study found that the policy of allowing 51 per cent FDI in the single-brand formathas not benefited this sector. The FDI ban on multi-brand retail is not an entry barriersince foreign retailers can establish their presence in India through other routes. Thestudy found that since this is a niche segment of retail, FDI would not have an adverseimpact on traditional retailers. It concludes that government should allow 51 per centFDI in multi-brand sports retail. This will increase sourcing from India, lead todiffusion of technology, proliferation of brands, investment in sports and sportspromotion, among others.Retail, Sports, Government Policy, Trade, Consumer Survey

Lifshitz-like transition and enhancement of correlations in a rotating bosonic ring lattice

We study the effects of rotation on one-dimensional ultra-cold bosons confined to a ring lattice. For commensurate systems, at a critical value of the rotation frequency, an infinitesimal interatomic interaction energy opens a gap in the excitation spectrum, fragments the ground state into a macroscopic superposition of two states with different circulation and generates a sudden change in the topology of the momentum distribution. These features are reminiscent of the topological changes in the Fermi surface that occurs in the Lifshitz transition in fermionic systems. The entangled nature of the ground state induces a strong enhancement of quantum correlations and decreases the threshold for the Mott insulator transition. In contrast to the commensurate case, the incommensurate lattice is rather insensitive to rotation. Our studies demonstrate the utility of noise correlations as a tool for identifying new physics in strongly correlated systems.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure

Plagiarism: an essay in terminology

The terminology on plagiarism is not hard and fast. It is fluid, a bit ambiguous, and still emerging. It may take some time to settle the terms more clearly, concretely and exhaustively. This paper aims to provide a terminological discussion of some important and current concepts related to plagiarism. It discusses key terms/concepts such as copyright, citation cartels, citing vs. quoting, compulsive thief, cryptomnesia, data fakery, ignorance of laws and codes of ethics, information literacy, lack of training, misattribution, fair use clause, paraphrasing, plagiarism, plagiarism detection software, publish or perish syndrome, PubPeer, retraction, retraction vs. correction, retraction watch, salami publication, similarity score, Society for Scientific Values, and source attribution. The explanation and definition of these terms/concepts can be useful for LIS scholars and professionals in their efforts to fight plagiarism. We expect this terminology can be referred in future discussions on the topic and also used to improve the communications between the actors involved

Engineering Time-Reversal Invariant Topological Insulators With Ultra-Cold Atoms

Topological insulators are a broad class of unconventional materials that are insulating in the interior but conduct along the edges. This edge transport is topologically protected and dissipationless. Until recently, all existing topological insulators, known as quantum Hall states, violated time-reversal symmetry. However, the discovery of the quantum spin Hall effect demonstrated the existence of novel topological states not rooted in time-reversal violations. Here, we lay out an experiment to realize time-reversal topological insulators in ultra-cold atomic gases subjected to synthetic gauge fields in the near-field of an atom-chip. In particular, we introduce a feasible scheme to engineer sharp boundaries where the "edge states" are localized. Besides, this multi-band system has a large parameter space exhibiting a variety of quantum phase transitions between topological and normal insulating phases. Due to their unprecedented controllability, cold-atom systems are ideally suited to realize topological states of matter and drive the development of topological quantum computing.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figure

A Tale of Two Fractals: The Hofstadter Butterfly and The Integral Apollonian Gaskets

This paper unveils a mapping between a quantum fractal that describes a physical phenomena, and an abstract geometrical fractal. The quantum fractal is the Hofstadter butterfly discovered in 1976 in an iconic condensed matter problem of electrons moving in a two-dimensional lattice in a transverse magnetic field. The geometric fractal is the integer Apollonian gasket characterized in terms of a 300 BC problem of mutually tangent circles. Both of these fractals are made up of integers. In the Hofstadter butterfly, these integers encode the topological quantum numbers of quantum Hall conductivity. In the Apollonian gaskets an infinite number of mutually tangent circles are nested inside each other, where each circle has integer curvature. The mapping between these two fractals reveals a hidden threefold symmetry embedded in the kaleidoscopic images that describe the asymptotic scaling properties of the butterfly. This paper also serves as a mini review of these fractals, emphasizing their hierarchical aspects in terms of Farey fractions

Phase transitions, entanglement and quantum noise interferometry in cold atoms

We show that entanglement monotones can characterize the pronounced enhancement of entanglement at a quantum phase transition if they are sensitive to long-range high order correlations. These monotones are found to develop a sharp peak at the critical point and to exhibit universal scaling. We demonstrate that similar features are shared by noise correlations and verify that these experimentally accessible quantities indeed encode entanglement information and probe separability.Comment: 4 pages 4 figure

Hanbury Brown-Twiss Interferometry for Fractional and Integer Mott Phases

Hanbury-Brown-Twiss interferometry (HBTI) is used to study integer and fractionally filled Mott Insulator (MI) phases in period-2 optical superlattices. In contrast to the quasimomentum distribution, this second order interferometry pattern exhibits high contrast fringes in the it insulating phases. Our detailed study of HBTI suggests that this interference pattern signals the various superfluid-insulator transitions and therefore can be used as a practical method to determine the phase diagram of the system. We find that in the presence of a confining potential the insulating phases become robust as they exist for a finite range of atom numbers. Furthermore, we show that in the trapped case the HBTI interferogram signals the formation of the MI domains and probes the shell structure of the system.Comment: 13 pages, 15 figure

Ordering of localized moments in Kondo lattice models

We describe the transition from a ferromagnetic phase, to a disordered para- magnetic phase, which occurs in one-dimensional Kondo lattice models with partial conduction band filling. The transition is the quantum order-disorder transition of the transverse-field Ising chain, and reflects double-exchange ordered regions of localized spins being gradually destroyed as the coupling to the conduction electrons is reduced. For incommensurate conduction band filling, the low-energy properties of the localized spins near the transition are dominated by anomalous ordered (disordered) regions of localized spins which survive into the paramagnetic (ferromagnetic) phase. Many interesting properties follow, including a diverging susceptibility for a finite range of couplings into the paramagnetic phase. Our critical line equation, together with numerically determined transition points, are used to determine the range of the double-exchange interaction. Models we consider are the spin 1/2 Kondo lattices with antiferromagnetic (Kondo) coupling, with ferromagnetic (Hund's rule) coupling, and the Kondo lattice with repulsive interactions between the conduction electrons.Comment: 18 pages, 6 embedded eps figures. To appear in Phys Rev

Coherent matter waves emerging from Mott-insulators

We study the formation of (quasi-)coherent matter waves emerging from a Mott insulator for strongly interacting bosons on a one-dimensional lattice. It has been shown previously that a quasi-condensate emerges at momentum k=\pi/2a, where a is the lattice constant, in the limit of infinitely strong repulsion (hard-core bosons). Here we show that this phenomenon persists for all values of the repulsive interaction that lead to a Mott insulator at a commensurate filling. The non-equilibrium dynamics of hard-core bosons is treated exactly by means of a Jordan-Wigner transformation, and the generic case is studied using a time-dependent density matrix renormalization group technique. Different methods for controlling the emerging matter wave are discussed.Comment: 20 pages, 11 figures. Published versio

Transport properties of one-dimensional interacting fermions in aperiodic potentials

Motivated by the existence of metal-insulator transition in one-dimensional non-interacting fermions in quasiperiodic and pseudorandom potentials, we studied interacting spinless fermion models using exact many-body Lanczos diagonalization techniques. Our main focus was to understand the effect of the fermion-fermion interaction on the transport properties of aperiodic systems. We calculated the ground state energy and the Kohn charge stiffness Dc. Our numerical results indicate that there exists a region in the interaction strength parameter space where the system may behave differently from the metallic and insulating phases. This intermediate phase may be characterized by a power law scaling of the charge stiffness constant in contrast to the localized phase where Dc scales exponentially with the size of the system.Comment: 11 pages LaTex document with 5 eps figures. Uses revtex style file