Innovations and Trends in Pension Plan Coverage, Pension Type and Plan Design

In this paper, we outline recent trends in employer pension pIan structure in the United States, focusing on plan coverage, plan type and pension plan design. We then identify the key factors that we believe will shape company-sponsored pension design in the future, drawing conclusions from a review of recent research and practice. Finally, we offer a cautious prognosis about the future of pension pIan coverage, pIan type and pIan design, focusing on the role of labor force aging, as well as anticipated developments in the business environment and anticipated changes in public policy

Aberration of the Cosmic Microwave Background

The motion of the solar system barycenter with respect to the cosmic microwave background (CMB) induces a very large apparent dipole component into the CMB brightness map at the 3 mK level. In this Letter we discuss another kinematic effect of our motion through the CMB: the small shift in apparent angular positions due to the aberration of light. The aberration angles are only of order beta ~0.001, but this leads to a potentially measurable compression (expansion) of the spatial scale in the hemisphere toward (away from) our motion through the CMB. In turn, this will shift the peaks in the acoustic power spectrum of the CMB by a factor of order 1 +/- beta. For current CMB missions, and even those in the foreseeable future, this effect is small, but should be taken into account. In principle, if the acoustic peak locations were not limited by sampling noise (i.e., the cosmic variance), this effect could be used to determine the cosmic contribution to the dipole term.Comment: 3 pages, 1 figure, comments welcome. Submitted to ApJ Letter

Temperature variations of the disorder-induced vortex-lattice melting landscape

Differential magneto-optical imaging of the vortex-lattice melting process in Bi_2Sr_2CaCu_2O_8 crystals reveals unexpected effects of quenched disorder on the broadening of the first-order phase transition. The melting patterns show that the disorder-induced melting landscape T_m(H,r) is not fixed, but rather changes dramatically with varying field and temperature along the melting line. The changes in both the scale and shape of the landscape are found to result from the competing contributions of different types of quenched disorder which have opposite effects on the local melting transition.Comment: 4 pages of text and 3 figures. Accepted for Publication in Physical Review Letter

Collisions of Free Floating Planets with Evolved Stars in Globular Clusters

We estimate the rate of collisions between stars and free-floating planets (FFPs) in globular clusters, in particular the collision of FFPs with red giant branch (RGB) stars. Recent dynamical simulations imply that the density of such objects could exceed million per cubic parsec near the cores of rich globular clusters. We show that in these clusters 5-10 per cents of all RGB stars near the core would suffer a collision with a FFP, and that such a collision can spin up the RGB star's envelope by an order of magnitude. In turn, the higher rotation rates may lead to enhanced mass-loss rates on the RGB, which could result in bluer horizontal branch (HB) stars. Hence, it is plausible that the presence of a large population of FFPs in a globular cluster can influence the distribution of stars on the HB of that cluster to a detectable degree.Comment: 10 pages, Accepted by ApJ Letter

Dynamic Creation and Annihilation of Metastable Vortex Phase as a Source of Excess Noise

The large increase in voltage noise, commonly observed in the vicinity of the peak-effect in superconductors, is ascribed to a novel noise mechanism. A strongly pinned metastable disordered vortex phase, which is randomly generated at the edges and annealed into ordered phase in the bulk, causes large fluctuations in the integrated critical current of the sample. The excess noise due to this dynamic admixture of two distinct phases is found to display pronounced reentrant behavior. In the Corbino geometry the injection of the metastable phase is prevented and, accordingly, the excess noise disappearsComment: 5 pages 3 figures. Accepted for publication in Europhysics letter

A lung retention model based on Michaelis-Menten-like kinetics.

A Michaelis-Menten (MM)-like kinetic model for pulmonary clearance and retention of insoluble dusts was developed and validated by comparing our predictions with experimental data from F344 rats. Published data from inhalation studies involving accumulation and elimination of photocopy test toner, antimony trioxide, carbon black, and diesel exhaust particles were investigated. Numerical integration techniques were used to solve mass balance relationships based upon dust retention in a single lung compartment and clearance via an MM-like kinetic process. The model fit most of the experimental data well. The parameters of MM-like clearance kinetics, which had been derived strictly from the elimination phase, accurately predicted dust retention during the elimination as well as accumulation phases. Furthermore, parameters estimated from one study could accurately predict retention of the same dust in other studies. Particle density and gender of the animals had no effect on the goodness of fit of model predictions. This study suggests that MM-like kinetics offer a reasonable description of particle clearance from the pulmonary region of the rat lung that is more parsimonious than existing particle-clearance models and therefore more suitable for use with small amounts of data

Production of Millisecond Dips in Sco X-1 Count Rates by Dead Time Effects

Chang et al. (2006) reported millisecond duration dips in the X-ray intensity of Sco X-1 and attributed them to occultations of the source by small trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs). We have found multiple lines of evidence that these dips are not astronomical in origin, but rather the result of high-energy charged particle events in the RXTE PCA detectors. Our analysis of the RXTE data indicates that at most 10% of the observed dips in Sco X-1 could be due to occultations by TNOs, and, furthermore, we find no positive or supporting evidence for any of them being due to TNOs. We therefore believe that it is a mistake to conclude that any TNOs have been detected via occultation of Sco X-1.Comment: Submitted to ApJ; uses emulateapj.cls, 8 pages with 8 figure