Varying Formats for Two-Year-College Honors Seminars

Honors programs at two-year colleges vary substantially in scope, size, and structure depending on an individual college’s mission, campus culture, and budget. One common curricular feature, however, is the honors seminar. Scholarly resources for creating honors seminars at two-year colleges include Luke Vassiliou’s 2008 essay “Learning by Leading and Leading by Teaching,” which provides an excellent discussion of constructing a two-seminar sequence in which the first seminar prepares the students to run a completely student-led second seminar (111). Directors wishing to develop seminars can also turn to the brief discussion of introductory interdisciplinary classes in two-year-college honors programs in Theresa A. James’s A Handbook for Honors Programs at Two-Year Colleges (28–29). Additionally, they can adapt information from considerations of four-year college honors seminars such as Anne Marie Merline’s discussion of guidelines for communication skills (81) and Samuel Schuman’s description of courses that are often interdisciplinary, sometimes team-taught, and “frequently . . . conducted on some variant of the graduate seminar model” (33–34). Overall, however, little information is available on creating honors seminars at two-year schools. Our essay responds to this deficit by considering two seminar formats: the three-credit interdisciplinary courses offered at Mt. San Jacinto College and the four-credit, team-taught interdisciplinary seminars at Lane Community College. These formats address needs specific to the two-year-college honors population, which largely comprises returning students, veterans, parents, and economically disadvantaged members of the community who often are considering transfer to a four-year school and in many cases plan to attend graduate school. The seminar formats presented here were designed to support the students’ success at transfer institutions by addressing several obstacles they face, including unfamiliarity with academic research, limited exposure to university campuses and resources, lack of confidence, and a limited sense of themselves as scholars

A Mesoscopic Quantum Eraser

Motivated by a recent experiment by Buks et al. [Nature 391, 871 (1998)] we consider electron transport through an Aharonov-Bohm interferometer with a quantum dot in one of its arms. The quantum dot is coupled to a quantum system with a finite number of states acting as a which-path detector. The Aharonov-Bohm interference is calculated using a two-particle scattering approach for the joint transitions in detector and quantum dot. Tracing over the detector yields dephasing and a reduction of the interference amplitude. We show that the interference can be restored by a suitable measurement on the detector and propose a mesoscopic quantum eraser based on this principle.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures, to appear in Europhys. Lett., uses EuroPhys.sty and EuroMacro.tex (included

Scanning Gate Spectroscopy of transport across a Quantum Hall Nano-Island

We explore transport across an ultra-small Quantum Hall Island (QHI) formed by closed quan- tum Hall edge states and connected to propagating edge channels through tunnel barriers. Scanning gate microscopy and scanning gate spectroscopy are used to first localize and then study a single QHI near a quantum point contact. The presence of Coulomb diamonds in the spectroscopy con- firms that Coulomb blockade governs transport across the QHI. Varying the microscope tip bias as well as current bias across the device, we uncover the QHI discrete energy spectrum arising from electronic confinement and we extract estimates of the gradient of the confining potential and of the edge state velocity.Comment: 13 pages, 3 figure

Nonlinear ac conductivity of one-dimensional Mott insulators

We discuss a semiclassical calculation of low energy charge transport in one-dimensional (1d) insulators with a focus on Mott insulators, whose charge degrees of freedom are gapped due to the combination of short range interactions and a periodic lattice potential. Combining RG and instanton methods, we calculate the nonlinear ac conductivity and interpret the result in terms of multi-photon absorption. We compare the result of the semiclassical calculation for interacting systems to a perturbative, fully quantum mechanical calculation of multi-photon absorption in a 1d band insulator and find good agreement when the number of simultaneously absorbed photons is large.Comment: Dedicated to Thomas Nattermann on the occasion of his 60th birthday. To appear in JSTAT. 5 pages, 2 figure

Evidence for non-linear quasiparticle tunneling between fractional quantum Hall edges

Remarkable nonlinearities in the differential tunneling conductance between fractional quantum Hall edge states at a constriction are observed in the weak-backscattering regime. In the $\nu$ = 1/3 state a peak develops as temperature is increased and its width is determined by the fractional charge. In the range $2/3 \le \nu \le 1/3$ this width displays a symmetric behavior around $\nu$ = 1/2. We discuss the consistency of these results with available theoretical predictions for inter-edge quasiparticle tunneling in the weak-backscattering regime

The pathway to net zero heating in the UK

This is the final version. Available from UKERC via the DOI in this record. The heating of homes is a major contributor to the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions accounting for 13% of total emissions.  This is comparable to the carbon emissions of all petrol and diesel cars in the UK. 2 Meeting the UK government’s net zero emissions goal for 2050 will only be possible by complete decarbonisation of the building stock (both existing and new). While emissions from heating have fallen by 11% since 1990, much of which was driven by efficiency programmes and regulation in the period 2002-2012 3, continuing decarbonisation at this pace would get us to zero emissions from buildings in 235 years and fall far short of meeting the 2050 target

Selforganized 3-band structure of the doped fermionic Ising spin glass

The fermionic Ising spin glass is analyzed for arbitrary filling and for all temperatures. A selforganized 3-band structure of the model is obtained in the magnetically ordered phase. Deviation from half filling generates a central nonmagnetic band, which becomes sharply separated at T=0 by (pseudo)gaps from upper and lower magnetic bands. Replica symmetry breaking effects are derived for several observables and correlations. They determine the shape of the 3-band DoS, and, for given chemical potential, influence the fermion filling strongly in the low temperature regime.Comment: 13 page

The UK market for energy service contracts in 2014–2015

This paper provides an overview of the UK market for energy service contracts in 2014 and highlights the growing role of intermediaries. Using information from secondary literature and interviews, it identifies the businesses offering energy service contracts, the sectors and organisations that are purchasing those contracts, the types of contract that are available, the areas of market growth and the reasons for that growth. The paper finds that the UK market is relatively large, highly diverse, concentrated in particular sectors and types of site and overwhelmingly focused upon established technologies with high rates of return. A major driver is the emergence of procurement frameworks for energy service contracts in the public sector. These act as intermediaries between clients and contractors, thereby lowering transaction costs and facilitating learning. The market is struggling to become established in commercial offices, largely as a result of split incentives, and is unlikely to develop further in this sector without different business models, tenancy arrangements and policy initiatives. Overall, the paper concludes that energy service contracts can play an important role in the transition to a low-carbon economy, especially when supported by intermediaries, but their potential is still limited by high transaction costs

Quantum Zeno effect and parametric resonance in mesoscopic physics

As a realization of the quantum Zeno effect, we consider electron tunneling between two quantum dots with one of the dots coupled to a quantum point contact detector. The coupling leads to decoherence and to the suppression of tunneling. When the detector is driven with an ac voltage, a parametric resonance occurs which strongly counteracts decoherence. We propose a novel experiment with which it is possible to observe both the quantum Zeno effect and the parametric resonance in electric transport.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure