On the road to prosperity? The economic geography of China's national expressway network

Over the past two decades, China has embarked on an ambitious program of expressway network expansion. By facilitating market integration, this program aims both to promote efficiency at the national level and to contribute to the catch-up of lagging inland regions with prosperous Eastern ones. This paper evaluates the aggregate and spatial economic impacts of China's newly constructed National Expressway Network, focussing, in particular, on its short-run impacts. To achieve this aim, the authors adopt a counterfactual approach based on the estimation and simulation of a structural "new economic geography" model. Overall, they find that aggregate Chinese real income was approximately 6 percent higher than it would have been in 2007 had the expressway network not been built. Although there is considerable heterogeneity in the results, the authors do not find evidence of a significant reduction in disparities across prefectural level regions or of a reduction in urban-rural disparities. If anything, the expressway network appears to have reinforced existing patterns of spatial inequality, although, over time, these will likely be reduced by enhanced migration

Theoretical Predictions of Superconductivity in Alkali Metals under High Pressure

We calculated the superconductivity properties of alkali metals under high pressure using the results of band theory and the rigid-muffin-tin theory of Gaspari and Gyorffy. Our results suggest that at high pressures Lithium, Potassium, Rubidium and Cesium would be superconductors with transition temperatures approaching $5-20 K$. Our calculations also suggest that Sodium would not be a superconductor under high pressure even if compressed to less than half of its equilibrium volume. We found that the compression of the lattice strengthens the electron-phonon coupling through a delicately balanced increase of both the electronic and phononic components of this coupling. This increase of the electron-phonon coupling in Li is due to an enhancement of the $s$-$p$ channel of the interaction, while in the heavier elements the $p$-$d$ channel is the dominant component.Comment: 6 pages, 8 figure

Polarizabilities of the 87Sr Clock Transition

In this paper, we propose an in-depth review of the vector and tensor polarizabilities of the two energy levels of the 87Sr clock transition whose measurement was reported in [P. G. Westergaard et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 106, 210801 (2011)]. We conduct a theoretical calculation that reproduces the measured coefficients. In addition, we detail the experimental conditions used for their measurement in two Sr optical lattice clocks, and exhibit the quadratic behaviour of the vector and tensor shifts with the depth of the trapping potential and evaluate their impact on the accuracy of the clock

Protected nodes and the collapse of the Fermi arcs in high Tc cuprates

Angle resolved photoemission on underdoped Bi2Sr2CaCu2O8 reveals that the magnitude and d-wave anisotropy of the superconducting state energy gap are independent of temperature all the way up to Tc. This lack of T variation of the entire k-dependent gap is in marked contrast to mean field theory. At Tc the point nodes of the d-wave gap abruptly expand into finite length ``Fermi arcs''. This change occurs within the width of the resistive transition, and thus the Fermi arcs are not simply thermally broadened nodes but rather a unique signature of the pseudogap phase.Comment: Accepted by Phys. Rev. Let

Non-Markovian Fermionic Stochastic Schr\"{o}dinger Equation for Open System Dynamics

In this paper we present an exact Grassmann stochastic Schr\"{o}dinger equation for the dynamics of an open fermionic quantum system coupled to a reservoir consisting of a finite or infinite number of fermions. We use this stochastic approach to derive the exact master equation for a fermionic system strongly coupled to electronic reservoirs. The generality and applicability of this Grassmann stochastic approach is justified and exemplified by several quantum open system problems concerning quantum decoherence and quantum transport for both vacuum and finite-temperature fermionic reservoirs. We show that the quantum coherence property of the quantum dot system can be profoundly modified by the environment memory.Comment: 10.5 pages, 3 figure

Machine Learning based Trust Computational Model for IoT Services

The Internet of Things has facilitated access to a large volume of sensitive information on each participating object in an ecosystem. This imposes many threats ranging from the risks of data management to the potential discrimination enabled by data analytics over delicate information such as locations, interests, and activities. To address these issues, the concept of trust is introduced as an important role in supporting both humans and services to overcome the perception of uncertainty and risks before making any decisions. However, establishing trust in a cyber world is a challenging task due to the volume of diversified influential factors from cyber-physical-systems. Hence, it is essential to have an intelligent trust computation model that is capable of generating accurate and intuitive trust values for prospective actors. Therefore, in this paper, a quantifiable trust assessment model is proposed. Built on this model, individual trust attributes are then calculated numerically. Moreover, a novel algorithm based on machine learning principles is devised to classify the extracted trust features and combine them to produce a final trust value to be used for decision making. Finally, our model’s effectiveness is verified through a simulation. The results show that our method has advantages over other aggregation methods

Exact solution of the open XXZ chain with general integrable boundary terms at roots of unity

We propose a Bethe-Ansatz-type solution of the open spin-1/2 integrable XXZ quantum spin chain with general integrable boundary terms and bulk anisotropy values i \pi/(p+1), where p is a positive integer. All six boundary parameters are arbitrary, and need not satisfy any constraint. The solution is in terms of generalized T - Q equations, having more than one Q function. We find numerical evidence that this solution gives the complete set of 2^N transfer matrix eigenvalues, where N is the number of spins.Comment: 22 page

Minicells as a Damage Disposal Mechanism in Escherichia coli

Many bacteria produce small, spherical minicells that lack chromosomal DNA and therefore are unable to proliferate. Although minicells have been used extensively by researchers as a molecular tool, nothing is known about why bacteria produce them. Here, we show that minicells help Escherichia coli cells to rid themselves of damaged proteins induced by antibiotic stress. By comparing the survival and growth rates of wild-type strains with the E. coliΔminC mutant, which produces excess minicells, we found that the mutant was more resistant to streptomycin. To determine the effects of producing minicells at the single-cell level, we also tracked the growth of ΔminC lineages by microscopy. We were able to show that the mutant increased the production of minicells in response to a higher level of the antibiotic. When we compared two sister cells, in which one produced minicells and the other did not, the daughters of the former had a shorter doubling time at this higher antibiotic level. Additionally, we found that minicells were more likely produced at the mother's old pole, which is known to accumulate more aggregates. More importantly, by using a fluorescent IbpA chaperone to tag damage aggregates, we found that polar aggregates were contained by and ejected with the minicells produced by the mother bacterium. These results demonstrate for the first time the benefit to bacteria for producing minicells.IMPORTANCE Bacteria have the ability to produce minicells, or small spherical versions of themselves that lack chromosomal DNA and are unable to replicate. A minicell can constitute as much as 20% of the cell's volume. Although molecular biology and biotechnology have used minicells as laboratory tools for several decades, it is still puzzling that bacteria should produce such costly but potentially nonfunctional structures. Here, we show that bacteria gain a benefit by producing minicells and using them as a mechanism to eliminate damaged or oxidated proteins. The elimination allows the bacteria to tolerate higher levels of stress, such as increasing levels of streptomycin. If this mechanism extends from streptomycin to other antibiotics, minicell production could be an overlooked pathway that bacteria are using to resist antimicrobials

Extremely high magnetoresistance and conductivity in the type-II Weyl semimetals WP2 and MoP2

The peculiar band structure of semimetals exhibiting Dirac and Weyl crossings can lead to spectacular electronic properties such as large mobilities accompanied by extremely high magnetoresistance. In particular, two closely neighbouring Weyl points of the same chirality are protected from annihilation by structural distortions or defects, thereby significantly reducing the scattering probability between them. Here we present the electronic properties of the transition metal diphosphides, WP2 and MoP2, that are type-II Weyl semimetals with robust Weyl points. We present transport and angle resolved photoemission spectroscopy measurements, and first principles calculations. Our single crystals of WP2 display an extremely low residual low-temperature resistivity of 3 nohm-cm accompanied by an enormous and highly anisotropic magnetoresistance above 200 million % at 63 T and 2.5 K. These properties are likely a consequence of the novel Weyl fermions expressed in this compound. We observe a large suppression of charge carrier backscattering in WP2 from transport measurements.Comment: Appeared in Nature Communication