Meeting the Kyoto Targets: the importance of developing country participation

This paper investigates the implications of progressively broadening the scope of the market of tradable permits from no emissions trading to full global trading. We start with the no emissions trading case where each Annex I country must individually meet its Kyoto targets. Next, we consider a case where trading of emissions permits is limited to Annex I countries only. We then expand the scope of the market to include all the non-Annex I countries but China. Finally, to investigate the role China plays in bringing down Annex I countries' compliance costs, we further broaden the market to include China into full global trading. Our results clearly demonstrate that the gain of the OECD as a whole increases as the market expands. Our results also show that developing countries themselves benefit from such an expansion too because it not only provides them for additional financial resources, but also helps to cut their baseline carbon emissions by a big margin. By contrast, the former Soviet Union tends to become worse off as the market expands. The potential conflict of interest between the former Soviet Union and developing countries underlines the importance of establishing clear rules of procedure about admitting new entrants before emissions trading begins.

Hamiltonian lattice quantum chromodynamics at finite density with Wilson fermions

Quantum chromodynamics (QCD) at sufficiently high density is expected to undergo a chiral phase transition. Understanding such a transition is of particular importance for neutron star or quark star physics. In Lagrangian SU(3) lattice gauge theory, the standard approach breaks down at large chemical potential $\mu$, due to the complex action problem. The Hamiltonian formulation of lattice QCD doesn't encounter such a problem. In a previous work, we developed a Hamiltonian approach at finite chemical potential $\mu$ and obtained reasonable results in the strong coupling regime. In this paper, we extend the previous work to Wilson fermions. We study the chiral behavior and calculate the vacuum energy, chiral condensate and quark number density, as well as the masses of light hadrons. There is a first order chiral phase transition at zero temperature.Comment: 23 pages. Version accepted for publication in Physical Review

Protecting Two-Qubit Quantum States by π\pi-Phase Pulses

We study the state decay of two qubits interacted with a common harmonic oscillator reservoir. There are both decoherence error and the error caused by the amplitude change of the superradiant state. We show that frequent $\pi$-phase pulses can eliminate both typpes of errors therefore protect a two-qubit odd-parity state more effectively than the frequent measurement method. This shows that the the methods using dynamical decoupling and the quantum Zeno effects actually can give rather {\em different} results when the operation frequency is finite