Recent Developments in Trade Between the U.S. and the P.R.C.: A Legal and Economic Perspective

This paper presents the life story of a single small-business owner of immigrant background who wants his companyto grow. His business strategies are analysed both as a part of his own biographical work, and as they wereinfluenced and framed by broader political, economic and social processes. It is shown how his own personalqualities in combination with opportunity structures in the local market provided favourable conditions for hisbreak-in. Breaking out, however, seems to be presented with different types of barriers, such as lack of access tocapital, discrimination, and the fact that new markets may consist of different sorts of network that are in its turnmore difficult for new actors to enter. But even if newcomers often find these barriers difficult for to overcome,individuals are not just passive objects but also have the opportunity to realize their lives according to their own lifeplans

Stability of 2pi domain walls in ferromagnetic nanorings

The stability of 2pi domain walls in ferromagnetic nanorings is investigated via calculation of the minimum energy path that separates a 2pi domain wall from the vortex state of a ferromagnetic nanoring. Trapped domains are stable when they exist between certain types of transverse domain walls, i.e., walls in which the edge defects on the same side of the magnetic strip have equal sign and thus repel. Here the energy barriers between these configurations and vortex magnetization states are obtained using the string method. Due to the geometry of a ring, two types of 2pi walls must be distinguished that differ by their overall topological index and exchange energy. The minimum energy path corresponds to the expulsion of a vortex. The energy barrier for annihilation of a 2pi wall is compared to the activation energy for transitions between the two ring vortex states.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure

Fluctuation Bounds For Interface Free Energies in Spin Glasses

We consider the free energy difference restricted to a finite volume for certain pairs of incongruent thermodynamic states (if they exist) in the Edwards-Anderson Ising spin glass at nonzero temperature. We prove that the variance of this quantity with respect to the couplings grows proportionally to the volume in any dimension greater than or equal to two. As an illustration of potential applications, we use this result to restrict the possible structure of Gibbs states in two dimensions.Comment: 19 pages, 0 figure

Asymptotic Exit Location Distributions in the Stochastic Exit Problem

Consider a two-dimensional continuous-time dynamical system, with an attracting fixed point $S$. If the deterministic dynamics are perturbed by white noise (random perturbations) of strength $\epsilon$, the system state will eventually leave the domain of attraction $\Omega$ of $S$. We analyse the case when, as $\epsilon\to0$, the exit location on the boundary $\partial\Omega$ is increasingly concentrated near a saddle point $H$ of the deterministic dynamics. We show that the asymptotic form of the exit location distribution on $\partial\Omega$ is generically non-Gaussian and asymmetric, and classify the possible limiting distributions. A key role is played by a parameter $\mu$, equal to the ratio $|\lambda_s(H)|/\lambda_u(H)$ of the stable and unstable eigenvalues of the linearized deterministic flow at $H$. If $\mu<1$ then the exit location distribution is generically asymptotic as $\epsilon\to0$ to a Weibull distribution with shape parameter $2/\mu$, on the $O(\epsilon^{\mu/2})$ length scale near $H$. If $\mu>1$ it is generically asymptotic to a distribution on the $O(\epsilon^{1/2})$ length scale, whose moments we compute. The asymmetry of the asymptotic exit location distribution is attributable to the generic presence of a `classically forbidden' region: a wedge-shaped subset of $\Omega$ with $H$ as vertex, which is reached from $S$, in the $\epsilon\to0$ limit, only via `bent' (non-smooth) fluctuational paths that first pass through the vicinity of $H$. We deduce from the presence of this forbidden region that the classical Eyring formula for the small-$\epsilon$ exponential asymptotics of the mean first exit time is generically inapplicable.Comment: This is a 72-page Postscript file, about 600K in length. Hardcopy requests to [email protected] or [email protected]