Did the price control achieve its goal?

As a result of the 1973 oil embargo and the subsequent increase of world oil prices, the oil price control program took place in order to reduce the impact of sharply higher external oil prices. In this regard, since the domestic price for oil was below that of the world market, the price control effort seemed to be regarded as successful. Did the oil price control achieve its goal? Maybe not. This study shows that the price control for the domestically produced crude oil was ineffective and enhanced the ability of external suppliers to manipulate prices.Oil Price Price Control

Income Inequality and Marriage

This study examines the extent to which changes in household formation exacerbated income inequality in the United States during the last two generations. Using a time-varying parameter model, the impact on how marriage decisions, changes in human capital, and fertility choices influence inequality are estimated. The estimation results show that marital sorting evolves over time and positively and increasingly affects the degree of income inequality and intergenerational human capital transmission induces path-dependent income distribution dynamics. This suggests that intrahousehold choices explain a substantial proportion of income distribution dynamics.

Study of Abnormal Group Velocities in Flexural Metamaterials

Generally, it has been known that the optical branch of a simple one-dimensional periodic structure has a negative group velocity at the first Brillouin zone due to the band-folding effect. However, the optical branch of the flexural wave in one-dimensional periodic structure doesn't always have negative group velocity. The problem is that the condition whether the group velocity of the flexural optical branch is negative, positive or positive-negative has not been studied yet. In consequence, who try to achieve negative group velocity has suffered from trial-error process without an analytic guideline. In this paper, the analytic investigation for this abnormal behavior is carried out. In particular, we discovered that the group velocity of the optical branch in flexural metamaterials is determined by a simple condition expressed in terms of a stiffness ratio and inertia ratio of the metamaterial. To derive the analytic condition, an extended mass-spring system is used to calculate the wave dispersion relationship in flexural metamaterials. For the validation, various numerical simulations are carried out, including a dispersion curve calculation and three-dimensional wave simulation. The results studied in this paper are expected to provide new guidelines in designing flexural metamaterials to have desired wave dispersion curves

Electron Beam Supercollimation in Graphene Superlattices

Although electrons and photons are intrinsically different, importing useful concepts in optics to electronics performing similar functions has been actively pursued over the last two decades. In particular, collimation of an electron beam is a long-standing goal. We show that ballistic propagation of an electron beam with virtual no spatial spreading or diffraction, without a waveguide or external magnetic field, can be achieved in graphene under an appropriate class of experimentally feasible one-dimensional external periodic potentials. The novel chiral quasi-one-dimensional metallic state that the charge carriers are in originates from a collapse of the intrinsic helical nature of the charge carriers in graphene owing to the superlattice potential. Beyond providing a new way to constructing chiral one-dimensional states in two dimensions, our findings should be useful in graphene-based electronic devices (e.g., for information processing) utilizing some of the highly developed concepts in optics.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures (including supporting online material), published online in Nano Letter

Mid-Holocene Northern Hemisphere warming driven by Arctic amplification.

The Holocene thermal maximum was characterized by strong summer solar heating that substantially increased the summertime temperature relative to preindustrial climate. However, the summer warming was compensated by weaker winter insolation, and the annual mean temperature of the Holocene thermal maximum remains ambiguous. Using multimodel mid-Holocene simulations, we show that the annual mean Northern Hemisphere temperature is strongly correlated with the degree of Arctic amplification and sea ice loss. Additional model experiments show that the summer Arctic sea ice loss persists into winter and increases the mid- and high-latitude temperatures. These results are evaluated against four proxy datasets to verify that the annual mean northern high-latitude temperature during the mid-Holocene was warmer than the preindustrial climate, because of the seasonally rectified temperature increase driven by the Arctic amplification. This study offers a resolution to the "Holocene temperature conundrum", a well-known discrepancy between paleo-proxies and climate model simulations of Holocene thermal maximum

New Generation of Massless Dirac Fermions in Graphene under External Periodic Potentials

We show that new massless Dirac fermions are generated when a slowly varying periodic potential is applied to graphene. These quasiparticles, generated near the supercell Brillouin zone boundaries with anisotropic group velocity, are different from the original massless Dirac fermions. The quasiparticle wavevector (measured from the new Dirac point), the generalized pseudospin vector, and the group velocity are not collinear. We further show that with an appropriate periodic potential of triangular symmetry, there exists an energy window over which the only available states are these quasiparticles, thus, providing a good system to probe experimentally the new massless Dirac fermions. The required parameters of external potentials are within the realm of laboratory conditions.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

The impact of Arctic sea ice loss on mid-Holocene climate.

Mid-Holocene climate was characterized by strong summer solar heating that decreased Arctic sea ice cover. Motivated by recent studies identifying Arctic sea ice loss as a key driver of future climate change, we separate the influences of Arctic sea ice loss on mid-Holocene climate. By performing idealized climate model perturbation experiments, we show that Arctic sea ice loss causes zonally asymmetric surface temperature responses especially in winter: sea ice loss warms North America and the North Pacific, which would otherwise be much colder due to weaker winter insolation. In contrast, over East Asia, sea ice loss slightly decreases the temperature in early winter. These temperature responses are associated with the weakening of mid-high latitude westerlies and polar stratospheric warming. Sea ice loss also weakens the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, although this weakening signal diminishes after 150-200 years of model integration. These results suggest that mid-Holocene climate changes should be interpreted in terms of both Arctic sea ice cover and insolation forcing