Determinising Parity Automata

Parity word automata and their determinisation play an important role in automata and game theory. We discuss a determinisation procedure for nondeterministic parity automata through deterministic Rabin to deterministic parity automata. We prove that the intermediate determinisation to Rabin automata is optimal. We show that the resulting determinisation to parity automata is optimal up to a small constant. Moreover, the lower bound refers to the more liberal Streett acceptance. We thus show that determinisation to Streett would not lead to better bounds than determinisation to parity. As a side-result, this optimality extends to the determinisation of B\"uchi automata

Resistive Switching in Memristive Electrochemical Metallization Devices

We report on resistive switching of memristive electrochemical metallization devices using 3D kinetic Monte Carlo simulations describing the transport of ions through a solid state electrolyte of an Ag/TiO$_{\text{x}}$/Pt thin layer system. The ion transport model is consistently coupled with solvers for the electric field and thermal diffusion. We show that the model is able to describe not only the formation of conducting filaments but also its dissolution. Furthermore, we calculate realistic current-voltage characteristics and resistive switching kinetics. Finally, we discuss in detail the influence of both the electric field and the local heat on the switching processes of the device

Light-Quark Decays in Heavy Hadrons

We consider weak decays of heavy hadrons (bottom and charmed) where the heavy quark acts as a spectator. Theses decays are heavily phase-space suppressed but may become experimentally accessible in the near future. These decays are interesting as a QCD laboratory to study the behaviour of the light quarks in the colour-background field of the heavy spectator.Comment: 11 pages, 6 table

Public Goods, Unemployment and Policy Coordination

Earlier literature on tax competition and policy coordination typically assumes that the labor market is competitive; a description less suitable for Europe, where trade unions have had a strong position in the labor market for a long time. This paper concerns factor income taxation and public good provision in small open economies characterized by capital mobility and imperfect competition in the labor market. We assume that each national government collects public revenues via taxes on labor, capital and profit income, and that the revenues are spent on a public consumption good and a public input good, where the latter enters the economic system in terms of an `externality production factor'. The overall purposes are to characterize the tax and expenditure policies, if decided upon at the national level, and analyze the welfare effects of policy coordination with respect to taxes and public expenditures. Among the results, we show that tax coordination contributes to higher welfare if it reduces the net interest rate and the wage rate, and that the relative overprovision of the public input good derived by Keen and Marchand (1997) in the context of a competitive economy may no longer hold, if the labor market is non-competitive.optimal taxation; wage bargaining; public goods; policy coordination

Effects of Prenatal and Early Life Malnutrition: Evidence from the Greek Famine

This paper examines the long run education and labor market effects from early-life exposure to the Greek 1941-42 famine. Given the short duration of the famine, we can separately identify the famine effects for cohorts exposed in utero, during infancy and at one year of age. We find that adverse outcomes due to the famine are largest for infants. Further, in our regression analysis we exploit the fact that the famine was more severe in urban than in rural areas. Consistent with our prediction, we find that urban-born cohorts show larger negative impacts on educational outcomes than the rural-born cohorts.famine, health, regression discontinuity, Greece

Precision Physics with B^0_s -> J/psi phi at the LHC: The Quest for New Physics

CP-violating effects in the time-dependent angular distribution of the B^0_s -> J/psi[-> ell^+ ell^-] phi[-> K^+K^-] decay products play a key role for the search of new physics. The hadronic Standard-Model uncertainties are related to doubly Cabibbo-suppressed penguin contributions and are usually assumed to be negligibly small. In view of recent results from the Tevatron and the quickly approaching start of the data taking at the LHC, we have a critical look at the impact of these terms, which could be enhanced through long-distance QCD phenomena, and explore the associated uncertainty for the measurement of the CP-violating B^0_s-\bar B^0_s mixing phase. We point out that these effects can actually be controlled by means of an analysis of the time-dependent angular distribution of the B^0_s -> J/psi[-> ell^+ ell^-] \bar K^{*0}[-> pi^+ K^-] decay products, and illustrate this through numerical studies. Moreover, we discuss SU(3)-breaking effects, which limit the theoretical accuracy of our method, and suggest internal consistency checks of SU(3).Comment: 28 pages, 10 figure