Seniority in quantum many-body systems. I. Identical particles in a single shell

A discussion of the seniority quantum number in many-body systems is presented. The analysis is carried out for bosons and fermions simultaneously but is restricted to identical particles occupying a single shell. The emphasis of the paper is on the possibility of {\em partial} conservation of seniority which turns out to be a peculiar property of spin-9/2 fermions but prevalent in systems of interacting bosons of any spin. Partial conservation of seniority is at the basis of the existence of seniority isomers, frequently observed in semi-magic nuclei, and also gives rise to peculiar selection rules in one-nucleon transfer reactions.Comment: 41 pages, 7 figures, 1 tables, submitted to Annals of Physic

Intramolecular Imino Diels-Alder Reaction: Progress toward the Synthesis of Uncialamycin

We herein described an intramolecular imino Diels-Alder reaction promoted with BF3.OEt2/DDQ affording substituted quinolines. Using this procedure, we prepared the chiral quitioline moiety of the uncialamycin, a new enediyne natural product

Orbital Dependent Exchange-Only Methods for Periodic Systems

Various orbital-dependent exchange-only potentials are studied which exhibit correct long-range asymptotic behaviour. We present the first application of these potentials for polymers and by one of these potentials for molecules. Kohn-Sham type calculations have been carried out for polyethylene in order to make valuable comparison of these potentials with each other as well as with Hartree-Fock and exchange-only LDA methods. The Kohn-Sham band gap obtained with the optimized effective potetial method is corrected with the exchange contribution to the derivative discontinuity of the exchange-correlation potential. The corrected band gap obtained with the Slater's exchange potential is 9.7 eV close to the experiment.Comment: 11 pages, 2 figures. Phys. Rev. B60, 1999, in pres

Contact Changes of Sheared Systems: Scaling, Correlations, and Mechanisms

We probe the onset and effect of contact changes in 2D soft harmonic particle packings which are sheared quasistatically under controlled strain. First, we show that in the majority of cases, the first contact changes correspond to the creation or breaking of contacts on a single particle, with contact breaking overwhelmingly likely for low pressures and/or small systems, and contact making and breaking equally likely for large pressures and in the thermodynamic limit. The statistics of the corresponding strains are near-Poissonian. The mean characteristic strains exhibit scaling with the number of particles N and pressure P, and reveal the existence of finite size effects akin to those seen for linear response quantities. Second, we show that linear response accurately predicts the strains of the first contact changes, which allows us to study the scaling of the characteristic strains of making and breaking contacts separately. Both of these show finite size scaling, and we formulate scaling arguments that are consistent with the observed behavior. Third, we probe the effect of the first contact change on the shear modulus G, and show in detail how the variation of G remains smooth and bounded in the large system size limit: even though contact changes occur then at vanishingly small strains, their cumulative effect, even at a fixed value of the strain, are limited, so that effectively, linear response remains well-defined. Fourth, we explore multiple contact changes under shear, and find strong and surprising correlations between alternating making and breaking events. Fifth, we show that by making a link with extremal statistics, our data is consistent with a very slow crossover to self averaging with system size, so that the thermodynamic limit is reached much more slowly than expected based on finite size scaling of elastic quantities or contact breaking strains

East African governments' responses to high cereal prices

This study analyses the responses of governments in four East African countries (Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Ethiopia) with respect to price formation and price transmission in the cereal sector. All four countries were confronted with high cereal prices in 2008. Government policies applied largely pursued consumer price reduction, but such short-term price policies did not encourage farmers to respond with increasing production, the more so because farmers were facing very high fertiliser prices. The report concludes by discussing policy options to help improve market functioning which supports agricultural productivity growt

Reverse Line Graph Construction: The Matrix Relabeling Algorithm MARINLINGA Versus Roussopoulos's Algorithm

We propose a new algorithm MARINLINGA for reverse line graph computation, i.e., constructing the original graph from a given line graph. Based on the completely new and simpler principle of link relabeling and endnode recognition, MARINLINGA does not rely on Whitney's theorem while all previous algorithms do. MARINLINGA has a worst case complexity of O(N^2), where N denotes the number of nodes of the line graph. We demonstrate that MARINLINGA is more time-efficient compared to Roussopoulos's algorithm, which is well-known for its efficiency.Comment: 30 pages, 24 figure

An Application-Tailored MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

We describe a data management framework suitable for wireless sensor networks that can be used to adapt the performance of a medium access control (MAC) protocol depending on the query injected into the network. The framework has a\ud completely distributed architecture and only makes use of information available locally to capture information about network traffic patterns. It allows\ud nodes not servicing a query to enter a dormant mode which minimizes transmissions and yet maintain an updated view of the network. We then introduce an Adaptive, Information-centric and Lightweight MAC\ud (AI-LMAC) protocol that adapts its operation depending on the information presented by the framework. Our results demonstrate how transmissions are greatly reduced during the dormant mode. During the active mode, the MAC\ud protocol adjusts fairness to match the expected requirements of the query thus reducing latency. Thus such a data management framework allows the MAC to operate more efficiently by tailoring its needs to suit the requirements of the application

Consistent description of nuclear charge radii and electric monopole transitions

A systematic study of energy spectra throughout the rare-earth region (even-even nuclei from $_{58}$Ce to $_{74}$W) is carried out in the framework of the interacting boson model (IBM), leading to an accurate description of the spherical-to-deformed shape transition in the different isotopic chains. The resulting IBM Hamiltonians are then used for the calculation of nuclear charge radii (including isotope and isomer shifts) and electric monopole transitions with consistent operators for the two observables. The main conclusion of this study is that an IBM description of charge radii and electric monopole transitions is possible for most of the nuclei considered but that it breaks down in the tungsten isotopes. It is suggested that this failure is related to hexadecapole deformation.Comment: 13 pages, 5 tables, 3 figures, accepted for publication in Physical Review