Doping a correlated band insulator: A new route to half metallic behaviour

We demonstrate in a simple model the surprising result that turning on an on-site Coulomb interaction U in a doped band insulator leads to the formation of a half-metallic state. In the undoped system, we show that increasing U leads to a first order transition between a paramagnetic, band insulator and an antiferomagnetic Mott insulator at a finite value U_{AF}. Upon doping, the system exhibits half metallic ferrimagnetism over a wide range of doping and interaction strengths on either side of U_{AF}. Our results, based on dynamical mean field theory, suggest a novel route to half-metallic behavior and provide motivation for experiments on new materials for spintronics.Comment: 5 pages, 7 figure

Set Membership with Non-Adaptive Bit Probes

We consider the non-adaptive bit-probe complexity of the set membership problem, where a set S of size at most n from a universe of size m is to be represented as a short bit vector in order to answer membership queries of the form "Is x in S?" by non-adaptively probing the bit vector at t places. Let s_N(m,n,t) be the minimum number of bits of storage needed for such a scheme. In this work, we show existence of non-adaptive and adaptive schemes for a range of t that improves an upper bound of Buhrman, Miltersen, Radhakrishnan and Srinivasan (2002) on s_N(m,n,t). For three non-adaptive probes, we improve the previous best lower bound on s_N(m,n,3) by Alon and Feige (2009)

Can correlations drive a band insulator metallic?

We analyze the effects of the on-site Coulomb repulsion U on a band insulator using dynamical mean field theory (DMFT). We find the surprising result that the gap is suppressed to zero at a critical Uc1 and remains zero within a metallic phase. At a larger Uc2 there is a second transition from the metal to a Mott insulator, in which the gap increases with increasing U. These results are qualitatively different from Hartree-Fock theory which gives a monotonically decreasing but non-zero insulating gap for all finite U.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figure

The Design and Regulation of Exchanges: A Formal Approach

We use formal methods to specify, design, and monitor continuous double auctions, which are widely used to match buyers and sellers at exchanges of foreign currencies, stocks, and commodities. We identify three natural properties of such auctions and formally prove that these properties completely determine the input-output relationship. We then formally verify that a natural algorithm satisfies these properties. All definitions, theorems, and proofs are formalized in an interactive theorem prover. We extract a verified program of our algorithm to build an automated checker that is guaranteed to detect errors in the trade logs of exchanges if they generate transactions that violate any of the natural properties

Matching Augmentation via Simultaneous Contractions

We consider the matching augmentation problem (MAP), where a matching of a graph needs to be extended into a 2-edge-connected spanning subgraph by adding the minimum number of edges to it. We present a polynomial-time algorithm with an approximation ratio of 13/8 = 1.625 improving upon an earlier 5/3-approximation. The improvement builds on a new ?-approximation preserving reduction for any ? ? 3/2 from arbitrary MAP instances to well-structured instances that do not contain certain forbidden structures like parallel edges, small separators, and contractible subgraphs. We further introduce, as key ingredients, the technique of repeated simultaneous contractions and provide improved lower bounds for instances that cannot be contracted

Publication delay of manuscripts in periodicals published by Indian Academy of Sciences

240-245The present study examines the publication delay in 10 scholarly journals published by the Indian Academy of Sciences. The study examined 2986 articles published in these ten journals in the years 2014 and 2018. The analysis shows that the publication delay varied with discipline and from one journal to another journal. The highest time delay was for the Proceedings of Mathematical Sciences (PMS) in 2014 as well as in 2018 and lowest for Current Science (7.1 ± 3.2 months) in 2014 and Journal of Chemical Science (JCS) in 2018. The total publication delay varied between (11.1± 5.3 months) and (12.8 ± 7.0 months) in 2014 and 2018, respectively. In most of the journals, the reason for the delay was editorial (delays between receipt of the manuscript and its revision) in 2014 and technical (revision and its later publication) in 2018