Dynamical mean-field approach to materials with strong electronic correlations

We review recent results on the properties of materials with correlated electrons obtained within the LDA+DMFT approach, a combination of a conventional band structure approach based on the local density approximation (LDA) and the dynamical mean-field theory (DMFT). The application to four outstanding problems in this field is discussed: (i) we compute the full valence band structure of the charge-transfer insulator NiO by explicitly including the p-d hybridization, (ii) we explain the origin for the simultaneously occuring metal-insulator transition and collapse of the magnetic moment in MnO and Fe2O3, (iii) we describe a novel GGA+DMFT scheme in terms of plane-wave pseudopotentials which allows us to compute the orbital order and cooperative Jahn-Teller distortion in KCuF3 and LaMnO3, and (iv) we provide a general explanation for the appearance of kinks in the effective dispersion of correlated electrons in systems with a pronounced three-peak spectral function without having to resort to the coupling of electrons to bosonic excitations. These results provide a considerable progress in the fully microscopic investigations of correlated electron materials.Comment: 24 pages, 14 figures, final version, submitted to Eur. Phys. J. for publication in the Special Topics volume "Cooperative Phenomena in Solids: Metal-Insulator Transitions and Ordering of Microscopic Degrees of Freedom

Childhood aggression and the co-occurrence of behavioural and emotional problems

Childhood aggression and its resulting consequences inflict a huge burden on affected children, their relatives, teachers, peers and society as a whole. Aggression during childhood rarely occurs in isolation and is correlated with other symptoms of childhood psychopathology. In this paper, we aim to describe and improve the understanding of the co-occurrence of aggression with other forms of childhood psychop

E-retailing ethics in Egypt and its effect on customer repurchase intention

The theoretical understanding of online shopping behaviour has received much attention. Less focus has been given to the formation of the ethical issues that result from online shopper interactions with e-retailers. The vast majority of earlier research on this area is conceptual in nature and limited in scope by focusing on consumers’ privacy issues. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to propose a theoretical model explaining what factors contribute to online retailing ethics and its effect on customer repurchase intention. The data were analysed using variance-based structural equation modelling, employing partial least squares regression. Findings indicate that the five factors of the online retailing ethics (security, privacy, non- deception, fulfilment/reliability, and corporate social responsibility) are strongly predictive of online consumers’ repurchase intention. The results offer important implications for e-retailers and are likely to stimulate further research in the area of e-ethics from the consumers’ perspective

Algorithmic aspects of proportional symbol maps

Proportional symbol maps visualize numerical data associated with point locations by placing a scaled symbol—typically opaque disks or squares—at the corresponding point on a map. Overlapping symbols need to be drawn in such a way that the user can still judge their relative sizes accurately. We identify two types of suitable drawings: physically realizable drawings and stacking drawings. For these we study the following two problems: Max-Min—maximize the minimum visible boundary length of each symbol—and Max-Total—maximize the total visible boundary length over all symbols. We show that both problems are NP-hard for physically realizable drawings. Max-Min can be solved in O(n2 log n) time for stacking drawings, which can be improved to O(n log n) or O(n log2 n) time when the input has certain properties. We also experimented with four methods to compute stacking drawings: our solution to the Max-Min problem performs best on the data sets considered

Theory and application of width bounded geometric separator

Abstract. We introduce the notion of the width bounded geometric separator and develop the techniques for the existence of the width bounded separator in any d-dimensional Euclidean space. The separator is applied in obtaining 2 O( √ n) time exact algorithms for a class of NPcomplete geometric problems, whose previous algorithms take n O( √ n) time [2,5,1]. One of those problems is the well known disk covering problem, which seeks to determine the minimal number of fixed size disks to cover n points on a plane [10]. They also include some NP-hard problems on disk graphs such as the maximum independent set problem, the vertex cover problem, and the minimum dominating set problem.