436 research outputs found
Productivity Growth and Levels in France, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States in the Twentieth Century.
This study compares labor and total factor productivity (TFP) in France, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States in the very long (since 1890) and medium (since 1980) runs. During the past century, the United States has overtaken the United Kingdom and become the leading world economy. During the past 25 years, the four countries have also experienced contrasting advances in productivity, in particular as a result of unequal investment in information and communication technology (ICT). The past 120 years have been characterized by: (i) rapid economic growth and large productivity gains in all four countries; (ii) a long decline in productivity in the United Kingdom relative to the United States, and to a lesser extent also relative to France and Japan, a relative decline that was interrupted by the second world war (WW2); (iii) the remarkable catching-up to the United States by France and Japan after WW2, interrupted in the case of Japan during the 1990s. Capital deepening (at least to the extent this can be measured) accounts for a large share of the variations in performance; increasingly during the past 25 years, this has meant ICT capital deepening. However, the capital contribution to growth varies considerably over time and across the four countries, and it is always less important, except in Japan, than the contribution of the various other factors underlying TFP growth, such as, among others, labor skills, technical and organizational changes and knowledge spillovers. Most recently (in 2006), before the current financial world crisis, hourly labor productivity levels were slightly higher in France than in the United States, and noticeably lower in the United Kingdom (by roughly 10%) and even lower in Japan (30%), while TFP levels are very close in France, the United Kingdom and the United States, but much lower (40%) in Japan.Productivity, growth accounting, macro-economic history.
exploding clusters dynamics probed by XUV fluorescence
Clusters excited by intense laser pulses are a unique source of warm dense
matter, that has been the subject of intensive experimental studies. The
majority of those investigations concerns atomic clusters, whereas the
evolution of molecular clusters excited by intense laser pulses is less
explored. In this work we trace the dynamics of clusters
triggered by a few-cycle 1.45-m driving pulse through the detection of XUV
fluorescence induced by a delayed 800-nm ignition pulse. Striking differences
among fluorescence dynamics from different ionic species are observed
Near-threshold high-order harmonic spectroscopy with aligned molecules
We study high-order harmonic generation in aligned molecules close to the
ionization threshold. Two distinct contributions to the harmonic signal are
observed, which show very different responses to molecular alignment and
ellipticity of the driving field. We perform a classical electron trajectory
analysis, taking into account the significant influence of the Coulomb
potential on the strong-field-driven electron dynamics. The two contributions
are related to primary ionization and excitation processes, offering a deeper
understanding of the origin of high harmonics near the ionization threshold.
This work shows that high harmonic spectroscopy can be extended to the
near-threshold spectral range, which is in general spectroscopically rich.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure
High-harmonic generation: taking control of polarization
The ability to control the polarization of short-wavelength radiation generated by high-harmonic generation is useful not only for applications but also for testing conservation laws in physics
Sum of exit times in series of metastable states in probabilistic cellular automata
Reversible Probabilistic Cellular Automata are a special class
of automata whose stationary behavior is described by Gibbs--like
measures. For those models the dynamics can be trapped for a very
long time in states which are very different from the ones typical
of stationarity.
This phenomenon can be recasted in the framework of metastability
theory which is typical of Statistical Mechanics.
In this paper we consider a model presenting two not degenerate in
energy
metastable states which form a series, in the sense that,
when the dynamics is started at one of them, before reaching
stationarity, the system must necessarily visit the second one.
We discuss a rule for combining the exit times
from each of the metastable states
The direct evaluation of attosecond chirp from a streaking measurement
We derive an analytical expression, from classical electron trajectories in a
laser field, that relates the breadth of a streaked photoelectron spectrum to
the group-delay dispersion of an isolated attosecond pulse. Based on this
analytical expression, we introduce a simple, efficient and robust procedure to
instantly extract the attosecond pulse's chirp from the streaking measurement.Comment: 4 figure
Nonsequential Double Ionization with Polarization-gated Pulses
We investigate laser-induced nonsequential double ionization by a
polarization-gated laser pulse, constructed employing two counter-rotating
circularly polarized few cycle pulses with a time delay . We address the
problem within a classical framework, and mimic the behavior of the
quantum-mechanical electronic wave packet by means of an ensemble of classical
electron trajectories. These trajectories are initially weighted with the
quasi-static tunneling rate, and with suitably chosen distributions for the
momentum components parallel and perpendicular to the laser-field polarization,
in the temporal region for which it is nearly linearly polarized. We show that,
if the time delay is of the order of the pulse length, the
electron-momentum distributions, as functions of the parallel momentum
components, are highly asymmetric and dependent on the carrier-envelope (CE)
phase. As this delay is decreased, this asymmetry gradually vanishes. We
explain this behavior in terms of the available phase space, the quasi-static
tunneling rate and the recollision rate for the first electron, for different
sets of trajectories. Our results show that polarization-gating technique may
provide an efficient way to study the NSDI dynamics in the single-cycle limit,
without employing few-cycle pulses.Comment: 17 pages, 6 figure
High-order harmonic generation with a strong laser field and an attosecond-pulse train: the Dirac Delta comb and monochromatic limits
In recent publications, it has been shown that high-order harmonic generation
can be manipulated by employing a time-delayed attosecond pulse train
superposed to a strong, near-infrared laser field. It is an open question,
however, which is the most adequate way to approximate the attosecond pulse
train in a semi-analytic framework. Employing the Strong-Field Approximation
and saddle-point methods, we make a detailed assessment of the spectra obtained
by modeling the attosecond pulse train by either a monochromatic wave or a
Dirac-Delta comb. These are the two extreme limits of a real train, which is
composed by a finite set of harmonics. Specifically, in the monochromatic
limit, we find the downhill and uphill sets of orbits reported in the
literature, and analyze their influence on the high-harmonic spectra. We show
that, in principle, the downhill trajectories lead to stronger harmonics, and
pronounced enhancements in the low-plateau region. These features are analyzed
in terms of quantum interference effects between pairs of quantum orbits, and
compared to those obtained in the Dirac-Delta limit.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures (eps files). To appear in Laser Physic
When does an electron exit a tunneling barrier?
We probe the dynamics of tunnel ionization via high harmonic generation. We characterize the ionization dynamics in helium atoms, and apply our approach to resolve subtle differences in ionization from different orbitals of a CO 2 molecule
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