16,642 research outputs found
The Apparent Fractal Conjecture
This short communication advances the hypothesis that the observed fractal
structure of large-scale distribution of galaxies is due to a geometrical
effect, which arises when observational quantities relevant for the
characterization of a cosmological fractal structure are calculated along the
past light cone. If this hypothesis proves, even partially, correct, most, if
not all, objections raised against fractals in cosmology may be solved. For
instance, under this view the standard cosmology has zero average density, as
predicted by an infinite fractal structure, with, at the same time, the
cosmological principle remaining valid. The theoretical results which suggest
this conjecture are reviewed, as well as possible ways of checking its
validity.Comment: 6 pages, LaTeX. Text unchanged. Two references corrected. Contributed
paper presented at the "South Africa Relativistic Cosmology Conference in
Honour of George F. R. Ellis 60th Birthday"; University of Cape Town,
February 1-5, 199
Scaling laws and universality in the choice of election candidates
Nowadays there is an increasing interest of physicists in finding
regularities related to social phenomena. This interest is clearly motivated by
applications that a statistical mechanical description of the human behavior
may have in our society. By using this framework, we address this work to cover
an open question related to elections: the choice of elections candidates
(candidature process). Our analysis reveals that, apart from the social
motivations, this system displays features of traditional out-of-equilibrium
physical phenomena such as scale-free statistics and universality. Basically,
we found a non-linear (power law) mean correspondence between the number of
candidates and the size of the electorate (number of voters), and also that
this choice has a multiplicative underlying process (lognormal behavior). The
universality of our findings is supported by data from 16 elections from 5
countries. In addition, we show that aspects of network scale-free can be
connected to this universal behavior.Comment: Accepted for publication in EP
Spatial accessibility and social inclusion: The impact of Portugal's last health reform
Health policies seek to promote access to health care and should provide appropriate geographical accessibility to each demographical functional group. The dispersal demand of healthâcareservices and the provision for such services atfixed locations contribute to the growth of inequality intheir access. Therefore, the optimal distribution of health facilities over the space/area can lead toaccessibility improvements and to the mitigation of the social exclusion of the groups considered mostvulnerable. Requiring for such, the use of planning practices joined with accessibility measures. However,the capacities of Geographic Information Systems in determining and evaluating spatial accessibility inhealth system planning have not yet been fully exploited. This paper focuses on healthâcare services planningbased on accessibility measures grounded on the network analysis. The case study hinges on mainlandPortugal. Different scenarios were developed to measure and compare impact on the population'saccessibility. It distinguishes itself from other studies of accessibility measures by integrating network data ina spatial accessibility measure: the enhanced twoâstepfloating catchment area. The convenient location forhealthâcare facilities can increase the accessibility standards of the population and consequently reducethe economic and social costs incurred. Recently, the Portuguese government implemented a reform thataimed to improve, namely, the access and equity in meeting with the most urgent patients. It envisaged,in terms of equity, the allocation of 89 emergency network points that ensured more than 90% of thepopulation be within 30 min from any one point in the network. Consequently, several emergency serviceswere closed, namely, in rural areas. This reform highlighted the need to improve the quality of the emergencycare, accessibility to each care facility, and equity in their access. Hence, accessibility measures becomean efficient decisionâmaking tool, despite its absence in effective practice planning. According to anapplication of this type of measure, it was possible to verify which levels of accessibility were decreased,including the most disadvantaged people, with a larger time of dislocation of 12 min between 2001 and 2011
Extended excitons and compact heliumlike biexcitons in type-II quantum dots.
We have used magneto-photoluminescence measurements to establish that InP/GaAs quantum dots have a type-II band (staggered) alignment. The average excitonic Bohr radius and the binding energy are estimated to be 15 nm and 1.5 meV respectively. When compared to bulk InP, the excitonic binding is weaker due to the repulsive (type-II) potential at the hetero-interface. The measurements are extended to over almost six orders of magnitude of laser excitation powers and to magnetic fields of up to 50 tesla. It is shown that the excitation power can be used to tune the average hole occupancy of the quantum dots, and hence the strength of the electron-hole binding. The diamagnetic shift coe±cient is observed to drastically reduce as the quantum dot ensemble makes a gradual transition from a regime where the emission is from (hydrogen-like) two-particle excitonic states to a regime where the emission from (helium-like) four-particle biexcitonic states also become significant
A conjugate for the Bargmann representation
In the Bargmann representation of quantum mechanics, physical states are
mapped into entire functions of a complex variable z*, whereas the creation and
annihilation operators and play the role of
multiplication and differentiation with respect to z*, respectively. In this
paper we propose an alternative representation of quantum states, conjugate to
the Bargmann representation, where the roles of and
are reversed, much like the roles of the position and momentum operators in
their respective representations. We derive expressions for the inner product
that maintain the usual notion of distance between states in the Hilbert space.
Applications to simple systems and to the calculation of semiclassical
propagators are presented.Comment: 15 page
- âŠ