De Jure School Segregation as the Result of Racist Housing Policies

It is no secret that African Americans have been and continue to be marginalized in American society. A revival of racial justice movements and protests have brought the issue back into the public eye across the country and even here at UVM. As this is being written, black lives matter flags fly high across campus and the Waterman building is serving as the epicenter of a demonstration motivated by the unfair treatment of minority students in a university setting. While black lives matter movements and others like it have been helpful in bringing to light the current position of minorities in America, understanding how it is that the state of affairs got to where they are is paramount. A commonly believed narrative is that the rising levels of segregation since the end of court ordered integration are the result of innocent private decisions, otherwise known as de facto or voluntary segregation. This paper will argue that modern segregation is in some significant parts the result of a combination of court decisions and discriminatory housing policies that have had long-term detrimental consequences for the education of African American Youth

Superconducting proximity effect and Majorana fermions at the surface of a topological insulator

We study the proximity effect between an s-wave superconductor and the surface states of a strong topological insulator. The resulting two dimensional state resembles a spinless p_x+ip_y superconductor, but does not break time reversal symmetry. This state supports Majorana bound states at vortices. We show that linear junctions between superconductors mediated by the topological insulator form a non chiral 1 dimensional wire for Majorana fermions, and that circuits formed from these junctions provide a method for creating, manipulating and fusing Majorana bound states.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, published versio