Tax Reform and Corporate Acquisitions

This Article focuses on two tax reform proposals: the Nunn-Domenici bill (USA Tax) and the Armey flat tax. It explores the effect of these two types of tax reform proposals on purchases and sales of corporate businesses. The Article addresses the purchase and sale of only incorporated businesses, and explores the way that the proposed tax systems would operate when applied to these corporate transactions. The author concludes that if these tax proposals became law, it is likely that a large part of tax planning for corporate acquisitions would shift from the federal to the state and local level

Field Strength and Monopoles in Dual U(1) Lattice Gauge Theory

In any Abelian gauge theory with an action periodic in the link variables one can perform a duality transformation not only in the partition function, but also in correlation functions including Polyakov loops. The calculation of expectation values in the confinement phase, like electric field strength or monopole currents in the presence of external charges, becomes significantly more efficient simulating the dual theory. We demonstrate this using the ordinary Wilson action. This approach also allows a quantitative analysis of the dual superconductor model, because the dual transformed U(1) theory can be regarded as limit of a dual non-compact Abelian Higgs model. In this way we also try to interpret the behaviour of monopole condensate and string fluctuations. Finally we present some applications for simulating the dual U(1) gauge theory.Comment: Talk presented at LATTICE96(topology) ; 3 pages, latex, 4 figures; complete postscript file also available at ftp://is1.kph.tuwien.ac.at/pub/zach/stl96.ps.g

Controlling colloidal phase transitions with critical Casimir forces

The critical Casimir effect provides a thermodynamic analogue of the well-known quantum mechanical Casimir effect. It acts between two surfaces immersed in a critical binary liquid mixture, and results from the confinement of concentration fluctuations of the solvent. Unlike the quantum mechanical effect, the magnitude and range of this attraction can be adjusted with temperature via the solvent correlation length, thus offering new opportunities for the assembly of nano and micron-scale structures. Here, we demonstrate the active assembly control of equilibrium phases using critical Casimir forces. We guide colloidal particles into analogues of molecular liquid and solid phases via exquisite control over their interactions. By measuring the critical Casimir particle pair potential directly from density fluctuations in the colloidal gas, we obtain insight into liquefaction at small scales: We apply the Van der Waals model of molecular liquefaction and show that the colloidal gas-liquid condensation is accurately described by the Van der Waals theory, even on the scale of a few particles. These results open up new possibilities in the active assembly control of micro and nanostructures