6,971 research outputs found
Growth, profits and technological choice: The case of the Lancashire cotton textile industry
Using Lancashire textile industry company case studies and financial records, mainly from the period just before the First World War, the processes of growth and decline are re-examined. These are considered by reference to the nature of Lancashire entrepreneurship and the impact on technological choice. Capital accumulation, associated wealth distributions and the character of Lancashire business organisation were sybiotically linked to the success of the industry before 1914. However, the legacy of that accumulation in later decades, chronic overcapacity, formed a barrier to reconstruction and enhanced the preciptious decline of a once great industry
Effective action for the Yukawa model in curved spacetime
We consider the one-loop renormalization of a real scalar field interacting
with a Dirac spinor field in curved spacetime. A general Yukawa interaction is
considered which includes both a scalar and a pseudoscalar coupling. The scalar
field is assumed to be non-minimally coupled to the gravitational field and to
have a general quartic self-interaction potential. All of the one-loop
renormalization group functions are evaluated and in the special case where
there is no mass scale present in the classical theory (apart from the fields)
we evaluate the one-loop effective action up to and including order in
the curvature. In the case where the fermion is massive we include a chiral
term in and we show that although the term can be removed
by a redefinition of the spinor field an anomaly in the effective action arises
that is related to the familiar axial current anomaly.Comment: 28 page
Renormalization and vacuum energy for an interacting scalar field in a \delta-function potential
We study a self-interacting scalar field theory in the presence of a
\delta-function background potential. The role of surface interactions in
obtaining a renormalizable theory is stressed and demonstrated by a two-loop
calculation. The necessary counterterms are evaluated by adopting dimensional
regularization and the background field method. We also calculate the effective
potential for a complex scalar field in a non-simply connected spacetime in the
presence of a \delta-function potential. The effective potential is evaluated
as a function of an arbitrary phase factor associated with the choice of
boundary conditions in the non-simply connected spacetime. We obtain asymptotic
expansions of the results for both large and small \delta-function strengths,
and stress how the non-analytic nature of the small strength result vitiates
any analysis based on standard weak field perturbation theory.Comment: To appear in the special issue of J. Phys. A to honour J. S. Dowke
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