6,450 research outputs found
The Cost of Caring for Young Children
This study examines the "cost burden" of child care, defined as day care expenses divided by after-tax income. Data are from the wave 10 core and child care topical modules to the 1996 Survey of Income and Program Participation. We estimate that the average child under six years of age lives in a family that spends 4.9 percent of after-tax income on day care. However, this conceals wide variation: 63 percent of such children reside in families with no child care expenses and 10 percent are in families where the cost burden exceeds 16 percent. The burden is typically greater in single-parent than married-couple families but is not systematically related to a measure of socioeconomic status that we construct. One reason for this is that disadvantaged families use lower cost modes and pay less per hour for given types of care. The cost burden would be much less equal without low cost (presumably subsidized) formal care focused on needy families, as well as government tax and transfer policies that redistribute income towards them.
Barkhausen noise in the Random Field Ising Magnet NdFeB
With sintered needles aligned and a magnetic field applied transverse to its
easy axis, the rare-earth ferromagnet NdFeB becomes a
room-temperature realization of the Random Field Ising Model. The transverse
field tunes the pinning potential of the magnetic domains in a continuous
fashion. We study the magnetic domain reversal and avalanche dynamics between
liquid helium and room temperatures at a series of transverse fields using a
Barkhausen noise technique. The avalanche size and energy distributions follow
power-law behavior with a cutoff dependent on the pinning strength dialed in by
the transverse field, consistent with theoretical predictions for Barkhausen
avalanches in disordered materials. A scaling analysis reveals two regimes of
behavior: one at low temperature and high transverse field, where the dynamics
are governed by the randomness, and the second at high temperature and low
transverse field where thermal fluctuations dominate the dynamics.Comment: 16 pages, 7 figures. Under review at Phys. Rev.
Magnetism, structure, and charge correlation at a pressure-induced Mott-Hubbard insulator-metal transition
We use synchrotron x-ray diffraction and electrical transport under pressure
to probe both the magnetism and the structure of single crystal NiS2 across its
Mott-Hubbard transition. In the insulator, the low-temperature
antiferromagnetic order results from superexchange among correlated electrons
and couples to a (1/2, 1/2, 1/2) superlattice distortion. Applying pressure
suppresses the insulating state, but enhances the magnetism as the
superexchange increases with decreasing lattice constant. By comparing our
results under pressure to previous studies of doped crystals we show that this
dependence of the magnetism on the lattice constant is consistent for both band
broadening and band filling. In the high pressure metallic phase the lattice
symmetry is reduced from cubic to monoclinic, pointing to the primary influence
of charge correlations at the transition. There exists a wide regime of phase
separation that may be a general characteristic of correlated quantum matter.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure
Strongly-coupled quantum critical point in an all-in-all-out antiferromagnet
Dimensionality and symmetry play deterministic roles in the laws of Nature.
They are important tools to characterize and understand quantum phase
transitions, especially in the limit of strong correlations between spin,
orbit, charge, and structural degrees of freedom. Using newly-developed,
high-pressure resonant x-ray magnetic and charge diffraction techniques, we
have discovered a quantum critical point in Cd2Os2O7 as the all-in-all-out
(AIAO) antiferromagnetic order is continuously suppressed to zero temperature
and, concomitantly, the cubic lattice structure continuously changes from space
group Fd-3m to F-43m. Surrounded by three phases of different time reversal and
spatial inversion symmetries, the quantum critical region anchors two phase
lines of opposite curvature, with striking departures from a mean-field form at
high pressure. As spin fluctuations, lattice breathing modes, and quasiparticle
excitations interact in the quantum critical region, we argue that they present
the necessary components for strongly-coupled quantum criticality in this
three-dimensional compound
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