Effective electromagnetic and chiral parameters of chiral composite material

The effective parameters of chiral composite are studied using a simple model, that is, randomly oriented non-interacting wire helices embedded in a nonchiral host medium. It is found that both the effective permittivity and permeability are independent on the handedness of the chiral objects while the effective chirality admittance is dependent. It is also found that when the ratio of the radius of the chiral helix to its pitch is about 0.23, maximum chirality admittance is achieved. The effective parameters of equichiral sample are also discussed.     

Incomplete idempotent Schröder quasigroups and related packing designs

Summary In this paper it is proved that, for any positive integern 2, 3 (mod 4),n 7, there exists an incomplete idempotent Schröder quasigroup with one hole of size two IISQ(n, 2) except forn = 10. It is also proved that for any positive integern 0, 1 (mod 4), there exists an idempotent Schröder quasigroup ISQ(n) except forn = 5 and 9. These results completely determine the spectrum of ISQ(n) and provide an application to the packing of a class of edge-coloured block designs.Research supported by NSERC grant A-5320.Research supported by NSFC grant 19231060-2.     

Chapter 15 DEA/AR analysis of the 1988–1989 performance of the Nanjing textiles corporation

This article employs new data envelopment analysis/assurance region (DEA/AR) methods to evaluate the efficiency of the 35 textile factories of the Nanjing Textiles Corporation (NTC), Nanjing, China. The returns to scale (RTS) of these factories were studied without assuming that the optimal DEA solutions were unique. All DMUs are identified with pointsE (Extreme Efficient),E (Efficient but not an extreme point) andF (Frontier but not efficient). We then further identify the nonfrontier DMUs with pointsNE, NE andNF according to whether they are projected onto a point inE, E, orF en route to evaluating their performances. All of the inefficient factories were in classNF and had unique optimal primal-dual solution pairs. Consequently, the solution pairs satisfy the strong complementary slackness condition (SCSC). Application of cone-ratio (CR) ARs reduced significantly the number of factories in classE, and showed that some AR-efficient factories were more flexible in adopting the mixture of central planning and market economies that China currently is trying to use. Also, linked-cone (LC) ARs were applied to measure maximum and minimum profit ratios. The SCSC multiplier space approach was utilized to analyze the sensitivity of the efficiency results to potential errors in the data with and without ARs. The results in this article suggest that collective units had a better performance than state-owned units in the two consecutive years analyzed.This paper was written while the author was at the School of Economics and Management, Southeast University, Nanjing 210018, P.R. China.     

Duality and Polynomial Testing of Tree Homomorphisms

Let be a fixed digraph. We consider the -colouring problem, i.e., the problem of deciding which digraphs admit a homomorphism to . We are interested in a characterization in terms of the absence in of certain tree-like obstructions. Specifically, we say that has tree duality if, for all digraphs , is not homomorphic to if and only if there is an oriented tree which is homomorphic to but not to . We prove that if has tree duality then the -colouring problem is polynomial. We also generalize tree duality to bounded treewidth duality and prove a similar result. We relate these duality concepts to the notion of the -property studied by Gutjahr, Welzl, and Woeginger.

We then focus on the case when itself is an oriented tree. In fact, we are particularly interested in those trees that have exactly one vertex of degree three and all other vertices of degree one or two. Such trees are called triads. We have shown in a companion paper that there exist oriented triads for which the -colouring problem is -complete. We contrast these with several families of oriented triads which have tree duality, or bounded treewidth duality, and hence polynomial -colouring problems. If , then no oriented triad with an -complete -colouring problem can have bounded treewidth duality; however no proof of this is known, for any oriented triad . We prove that none of the oriented triads with -complete -colouring problems given in the companion paper has tree duality.

     

Coil-to-globule transitions of interfacial copolymers in better than theta-solvents

Experimental studies of the coil-to-globule transitions exhibited in better than -solvents by interfacial copolymers ofN-isopropylacrylamide and acrylamide imply that a lower bound for the value of n in then-clusters of poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) (PNIPAM) is 3. The corresponding upper bound is therefore likely to be 5 or 6. Statistical copolymers of PNIPAM containing upwards of 0.75 mole fraction of acrylamide (whose homopolymer does not itself displayn-clustering) exhibited this transition, which disappeared at higher mole fractions of acrylamide. Interfacial homopolymers ofN-ethylacrylamide and its statistical copolymers withN-isopropylacrylamide exhibitedn-clustering at all compositions.