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Beyond financial repression and regulatory capture. The recomposition of European financial ecosystems after the crisis
The financial crisis has radically and rapidly changed the political economy of the European financial system. The evolution of relations between European states and their respective financial systems has given rise to two competing narratives. On the one hand, government agencies are often described as being at the mercy of the financial sector, regularly highjacking political, regulatory and supervisory processes. This trend is often referred to as "regulatory capture" and would explain the "soft touch" regulation and bank bailout. On the other hand, governments are portrayed as subverting markets and abusing the financial system for their benefit, mainly to obtain better financing conditions and allocate credit to the economy on preferential terms, a trend called "financial repression" that is considered corrosive to the proper functioning of free markets and a source of capital misallocation. This paper takes a critical look at this debate in the European context. First, he argues that the relationship between governments and financial systems in Europe cannot be reduced to the polar notions of "capture" and "repression", but that the channels of pressure and influence between governments and their financial systems have often been two-way. Secondly, it puts these issues in a historical perspective and shows that the current reconfiguration of national financial systems in Europe is not simply a return to the "interventionist" policies of the past, although it is influenced by the path-dependency of national institutions and characterised by a broader political and economic role for public bodies (public credit institutions, financial supervision agencies, central bank, European relief fund, etc.)
Generation and near-field imaging of Airy surface plasmons
We demonstrate experimentally the generation and near-field imaging of
nondiffracting surface waves - plasmonic Airy beams, propagating on the surface
of a gold metal film. The Airy plasmons are excited by an engineered nanoscale
phase grating, and demonstrate significant beam bending over their propagation.
We show that the observed Airy plasmons exhibit self-healing properties,
suggesting novel applications in plasmonic circuitry and surface optical
manipulation.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure
The relativistic massless harmonic oscillator
A detailed study of the relativistic classical and quantum mechanics of the
massless harmonic oscillator is presented.Comment: 15 pages, 4 figure
Temperature dependence of the thermal boundary resistivity of glass-embedded metal nanoparticles
The temperature dependence of the thermal boundary resistivity is
investigated in glass-embedded Ag particles of radius 4.5 nm, in the
temperature range from 300 to 70 K, using all-optical time-resolved
nanocalorimetry. The present results provide a benchmark for theories aiming at
explaining the thermal boundary resistivity at the interface between metal
nanoparticles and their environment, a topic of great relevance when tailoring
thermal energy delivery from nanoparticles as for applications in nanomedicine
and thermal management at the nanoscaleComment: 4 pages, 3 figure
Fronts and interfaces in bistable extended mappings
We study the interfaces' time evolution in one-dimensional bistable extended
dynamical systems with discrete time. The dynamics is governed by the
competition between a local piece-wise affine bistable mapping and any
couplings given by the convolution with a function of bounded variation. We
prove the existence of travelling wave interfaces, namely fronts, and the
uniqueness of the corresponding selected velocity and shape. This selected
velocity is shown to be the propagating velocity for any interface, to depend
continuously on the couplings and to increase with the symmetry parameter of
the local nonlinearity. We apply the results to several examples including
discrete and continuous couplings, and the planar fronts' dynamics in
multi-dimensional Coupled Map Lattices. We eventually emphasize on the
extension to other kinds of fronts and to a more general class of bistable
extended mappings for which the couplings are allowed to be nonlinear and the
local map to be smooth.Comment: 27 pages, 3 figures, submitted to Nonlinearit
On the Detection of Magnetic Helicity
Magnetic fields in various astrophysical settings may be helical and, in the
cosmological context, may provide a measure of primordial CP violation during
baryogenesis. Yet it is difficult, even in principle, to devise a scheme by
which magnetic helicity may be detected, except in some very special systems.
We propose that charged cosmic rays originating from known sources may be
useful for this purpose. We show that the correlator of the arrival momenta of
the cosmic rays is sensitive to the helicity of an intervening magnetic field.
If the sources themselves are not known, the method may still be useful
provided we have some knowledge of their spatial distribution.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure, discussions and references added, submited to
Phys. Rev.
Temperature dependence of polarization relaxation in semiconductor quantum dots
The decay time of the linear polarization degree of the luminescence in
strongly confined semiconductor quantum dots with asymmetrical shape is
calculated in the frame of second-order quasielastic interaction between
quantum dot charge carriers and LO phonons. The phonon bottleneck does not
prevent significantly the relaxation processes and the calculated decay times
can be of the order of a few tens picoseconds at temperature K,
consistent with recent experiments by Paillard et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett.
{\bf86}, 1634 (2001)].Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure
Point-like gamma ray sources as signatures of distant accelerators of ultra high energy cosmic rays
We discuss the possibility of observing distant accelerators of ultra high
energy cosmic rays in synchrotron gamma rays. Protons propagating away from
their acceleration sites produce extremely energetic electrons during
photo-pion interactions with cosmic microwave background photons. If the
accelerator is embedded in a magnetized region, these electrons will emit high
energy synchrotron radiation. The resulting synchrotron source is expected to
be point-like and detectable in the GeV-TeV energy range if the magnetic field
is at the nanoGauss level.Comment: 4 pages 2 figures. To be published in PR
Multidomain spectral method for the Gauss hypergeometric function
We present a multidomain spectral approach for Fuchsian ordinary differential equations in the particular case of the hypergeometric equation. Our hybrid approach uses Frobeniusâ method and Moebius transformations in the vicinity of each of the singular points of the hypergeometric equation, which leads to a natural decomposition of the real axis into domains. In each domain, solutions to the hypergeometric equation are constructed via the well-conditioned ultraspherical spectral method. The solutions are matched at the domain boundaries to lead to a solution which is analytic on the whole compactified real line RâȘâ , except for the singular points and cuts of the Riemann surface on which the solution is defined. The solution is further extended to the whole Riemann sphere by using the same approach for ellipses enclosing the singularities. The hypergeometric equation is solved on the ellipses with the boundary data from the real axis. This solution is continued as a harmonic function to the interior of the disk by solving the Laplace equation in polar coordinates with an optimal complexity Fourierâultraspherical spectral method. In cases where logarithms appear in the solution, a hybrid approach involving an analytical treatment of the logarithmic terms is applied. We show for several examples that machine precision can be reached for a wide class of parameters, but also discuss almost degenerate cases where this is not possible
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