Index to Library Trends Volume 11

published or submitted for publicatio

Demographic Change, Social Security Systems, and Savings

In theory, improvements in healthy life expectancy should generate increases in the average age of retirement, with little effect on savings rates. In many countries, however, retirement incentives in social security programs prevent retirement ages from keeping pace with changes in life expectancy, leading to an increased need for life-cycle savings. Analyzing a cross-country panel of macroeconomic data, we find that increased longevity raises aggregate savings rates in countries with universal pension coverage and retirement incentives, though the effect disappears in countries with pay-as-you-go systems and high replacement rates

Topological Twistons in Crystalline Polyethylene

We introduce an alternate model to describe twistons in crystalline polyethylene. The model couples torsional and longitudinal degrees of freedom and appears as an extension of a model that describes only the torsional motion. We find exact solutions that describe stable topological twistons, in good agreement with the torsional and longitudinal interactions in polyethylene.Comment: Latex, 10 pages; some stylistic corrections, to appear in Chemical Physics Letter

Tsirelson's bound and Landauer's principle in a single-system game

We introduce a simple single-system game inspired by the Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt (CHSH) game. For qubit systems subjected to unitary gates and projective measurements, we prove that any strategy in our game can be mapped to a strategy in the CHSH game, which implies that Tsirelson's bound also holds in our setting. More generally, we show that the optimal success probability depends on the reversible or irreversible character of the gates, the quantum or classical nature of the system and the system dimension. We analyse the bounds obtained in light of Landauer's principle, showing the entropic costs of the erasure associated with the game. This shows a connection between the reversibility in fundamental operations embodied by Landauer's principle and Tsirelson's bound, that arises from the restricted physics of a unitarily-evolving single-qubit system.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures, typos correcte

A Reexamination of the Temporal Dimension in Property and Takings

Prof. Marla Mansfield, Professor of Law and NELPI Fellow The University of Tulsa College of Law, discusses the time aspects of takings