RMB Exchange Rate and Local Currency Price Stability : The Case of China and ASEAN+3

This paper uses Chinese and ASEAN+3 industry panel data to measure variations in mark-up adjustment behaviour that is associated with the exchange rate changes across export destination markets. Exports that are substitutes for local products exhibit a high degree of mark-up adjustment, which has the effect of stabilising prices in export destination countries. There is evidence of this behaviour in certain export products to China where the Chinese Government provides subsidies. When markup adjustment behaviour exists, the short-term dynamic mark-up adjustments are consistent with the long-term pricing behaviour in source countries.RMB Exchange Rate, Local Currency Price Stability, China, ASEAN, ASEAN+3

Magnetic-flux-controlled giant Fano factor for the coherent tunneling through a parallel double-quantum-dot

We report our studies of zero-frequency shot noise in tunneling through a parallel-coupled quantum dot interferometer by employing number-resolved quantum rate equations. We show that the combination of quantum interference effect between two pathways and strong Coulomb repulsion could result in a giant Fano factor, which is controllable by tuning the enclosed magnetic flux.Comment: 11 pages, 2 figure

On the non-thermal kappa-distributed electrons in planetary nebulae and HII regions: the kappa index and its correlations with other nebular properties

Recently, a suspicion arose that the free electrons in planetary nebulae (PNe) and HII regions might have non-thermal energy distributions. In this scenario, a kappa index is introduced to characterize the electron energy distributions, with smaller kappa values indicating larger deviations from Maxwell-Boltzmann distributions. Assuming that this is the case, we determine the kappa values for a sample of PNe and HII regions by comparing the intensities of [OIII] collisionally excited lines and the hydrogen Balmer jump. We find the average kappa indices of PNe and HII regions to be 27 and 32, respectively. Correlations between the resultant kappa values and various physical properties of the nebulae are examined to explore the potential origin of non-thermal electrons in photoionized gaseous nebulae. However, no positive result is obtained. Thus the current analysis does not lend to support to the idea that kappa-distributed electrons are present in PNe and HII regions.Comment: 23 pages, 6 figures, accepted for publication in Ap

H I Free-Bound Emission of Planetary Nebulae with Large Abundance Discrepancies: Two-Component Models versus Kappa-distributed electrons

The "abundance discrepancy" problem in the study of planetary nebulae (PNe), viz., the problem concerning systematically higher heavy-element abundances derived from optical recombination lines relative to those from collisionally excited lines, has been under discussion for decades, but no consensus on its solution has yet been reached. In this paper we investigate the hydrogen free-bound emission near the Balmer jump region of four PNe that are among those with the largest abundance discrepancies, aiming to examine two recently proposed solutions to this problem: two-component models and Kappa electron energy distributions. We find that the Balmer jump intensities and the spectrum slopes cannot be simultaneously matched by the theoretical calculations based upon single Maxwell-Boltzmann electron-energy distributions, whereas the fitting can be equally improved by introducing Kappa electron energy distributions or an additional Maxwell-Boltzmann component. We show that although H I free-bound emission alone cannot distinguish the two scenarios, it can provide important constraints on the electron energy distributions, especially for cold and low-Kappa plasmas.Comment: 23 pages, 10 figures, accepted for publication in Ap