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Flexural Creep Analysis Of Recycled Polymeric Structural Elements., Jose Noe Martinez-Guerrero Jan 1999

Flexural Creep Analysis Of Recycled Polymeric Structural Elements., Jose Noe Martinez-Guerrero

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

A structural product made of recycled plastics in standard sections similar to dimensional lumber is referred to as plastic lumber. The recycled plastics used in the manufacture of these members include high density polyethylene, polyethylene terephthalate and polystyrene. Plastic lumber is a viscoelastic material possessing mechanical properties that are time and temperature dependent. This structural product is currently used primarily in non-load-bearing and low-end structural applications because of the non availability of engineering data and concerns about its creep behavior. Creep, which is the time dependent deformation under constant stress, is high for plastic lumber and is temperature sensitive. A …

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Computational Approach For Determination Of The Hydraulic Conductivity Of Soils Using Continuous Intrusion Piezocone Penetration Test., Chung Rak Song Jan 1999

Computational Approach For Determination Of The Hydraulic Conductivity Of Soils Using Continuous Intrusion Piezocone Penetration Test., Chung Rak Song

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

In order to obtain the hydraulic conductivity or the coefficient of consolidation of the soil from PCPT, the pore pressure response during dissipation test is typically used. This method, however, requires the intermittent stopping of the advancement of the piezocone penetrometer for the dissipation test. Also, this method does not fully take into account the pore pressure interaction between near and far fields as pointed out by previous researchers (Kurup and Tumay, 1997). Thus a new rational approach is investigated here. The proposed method utilizes the pore water pressure during the penetration of the piezocone penetrometer. By its nature, the …

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Effects Of The 4 X 4 Block Schedule On Teacher Behavior And Student Engagement Rate At The High School Level., Karen Meredith Soniat Jan 1999

Effects Of The 4 X 4 Block Schedule On Teacher Behavior And Student Engagement Rate At The High School Level., Karen Meredith Soniat

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

Numerous educators have suggested that traditional scheduling practices in the nation's schools have contributed to the inability of teachers to utilize "proven" instructional techniques. This study examined the effects of the 4 x 4 block schedule on teaching behavior and student engagement rate in four core curriculum areas in 21 Louisiana high schools. This causal-comparative, ex-post facto study involved three group of schools matched to the extent possible on student population, free/reduced lunch, and community type. The 250 teachers in the Phase I (quantitative study) sample were randomly selected and measured via classroom observations. MANOVA results relating to differences on …

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Sire Selection And Mating Practices In United States Dairy Herd Improvement Association Holstein Herds., Asiye Yilmaz Jan 1999

Sire Selection And Mating Practices In United States Dairy Herd Improvement Association Holstein Herds., Asiye Yilmaz

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

Over two million Holstein mating records was used to investigate selection and mating practices. Population statistics revealed non-random mating and selection. Herd production level was associated with higher breeding value sires and price paid per unit of semen. The decision to use an Artificial Insemination (AI) sire or natural service sire was studied and a discriminant function was derived that accurately categorized matings in a test data set of 117,000 observations, with an error rate less than 2.5 percent. Discriminating variables were herd production level, lactation number, service number, breeding month, cow status code, and days in milk at breeding. …

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How The Villanelle's Form Got Fixed., Julie Ellen Kane Jan 1999

How The Villanelle's Form Got Fixed., Julie Ellen Kane

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

This work debunks the myth of the villanelle as a "fixed poetic form" dating back to the sixteenth century or earlier and replaces it with a new-historical account of how a semi-improvisatory musico-poetic genre, the choral-dance lyric, was "translated" across ruptures in lyric technology between oral, manuscript, and print cultures. The "fixity" of the villanelle's written form is shown to be not a matter of long-standing "heritage" or "tradition," but the result of deliberate actions taken by one eighteenth- and one nineteenth-century individual who inserted less-than-truthful passages into otherwise "authoritative" prosodic treatises. Chapter 1 identifies the literary sources responsible for …

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A Matrix-Based Approach To Global Locality Optimization, Mahmut Kandemir, Alok Choudhary, J. Ramanujam, Prith Banerjee Jan 1999

A Matrix-Based Approach To Global Locality Optimization, Mahmut Kandemir, Alok Choudhary, J. Ramanujam, Prith Banerjee

Faculty Publications

Global locality optimization is a technique for improving the cache performance of a sequence of loop nests through a combination of loop and data layout transformations. Pure loop transformations are restricted by data dependencies and may not be very successful in optimizing imperfectly nested loops and explicitly parallelized programs. Although pure data transformations are not constrained by data dependencies, the impact of a data transformation on an array might be program-wide; that is, it can affect all the references to that array in all the loop nests. Therefore, in this paper we argue for an integrated approach that employs both …

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Magnetism Of Magnets: The Impact Of High School Magnet Programs On Desegregation And School Improvement In East Baton Rouge Parish., Alonzo Ray Luce Jan 1999

Magnetism Of Magnets: The Impact Of High School Magnet Programs On Desegregation And School Improvement In East Baton Rouge Parish., Alonzo Ray Luce

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

The movement of school desegregation plans from mandatory means to voluntary means has led to a fierce debate. The school desegregation problem is encapsulated by two competing strategies: making a plan that enforces racial balance, and making a plan that stops white flight. The purpose of this study was to describe how high schools in East Baton Rouge Parish implemented court approved magnet programs, and to examine the results brought about at each of the high schools in terms of desegregation and school improvement. The study was designed to answer the following research questions: (1) How have high schools in …

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Petroleum Reservoir Simulation Using 3-D Finite Element Method With Parallel Implementation., Husam M. Yaghi Jan 1999

Petroleum Reservoir Simulation Using 3-D Finite Element Method With Parallel Implementation., Husam M. Yaghi

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

Modeling fluid flow around wellbores with conventional reservoir simulators is inaccurate because radial flow occurs in the vicinity of the wellbore and these simulators use cartesian coordinates. In this research, we present a more accurate wellbore simulation by incorporating the finite element method (FEM) to simulate the radial flow in the vicinity of the wellbore and interfacing this finite element wellbore model with an existing finite difference method (FDM) reservoir simulator. Although this technique was developed for a vertical well, it could also be used to accurately model a horizontal wellbore. This "hybrid" solution is for three dimensional---triphasic fluid flow …

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A Novel Approach To Dna Sequencing Employing Near -Ir Fluorescence Detection Coupled With Microscale Reaction Vessels With Capillary Gel Separations., Daryl Clifford Williams Jan 1999

A Novel Approach To Dna Sequencing Employing Near -Ir Fluorescence Detection Coupled With Microscale Reaction Vessels With Capillary Gel Separations., Daryl Clifford Williams

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

Electropherograms of oligonucleotides labeled with near-IR fluorescent dyes, separated by capillary gel electrophoresis (CGE) and detected using an ultrasensitive near-IR fluorescence detection system will be presented. A Universal M13 sequencing primer was labeled on the 5' end with a near-IR dye containing an isothiocyanate functional group. Comparison of the on-column detection limits in capillary gel electrophoresis for the near-IR-labeled sequencing primer to that of a visible fluorescein-labeled primer indicated improved sensitivity for the near-IR case. The detection limit was found to be 3.4 x 10-20 moles (SNR = 3) for the near-IR-labeled primer while the on-column detection limit for the …

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Executive Compensation And The Investment Opportunity Sets Of Initial Public Offerings., Tanya S. Nowlin Jan 1999

Executive Compensation And The Investment Opportunity Sets Of Initial Public Offerings., Tanya S. Nowlin

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

This study examines how the components of CEO compensation contracts vary with characteristics of initial public offering firms (IPOs). There are two major steps in the analysis. The first step investigates whether IPOs exhibit variation in characteristics that theory predicts affect compensation contracts. The second step investigates whether these differences across firms are related to the use of accounting versus non-accounting performance evaluation measures, levels of base salary and cash bonuses, and the value of stock options for CEOs. Results from this study support the importance of modeling compensation components separately. Theoretical constructs differ depending on the type of compensation …

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Scaling Simulations Of Reconfigurable Meshes., Jose Alberto Fernandez Zepeda Jan 1999

Scaling Simulations Of Reconfigurable Meshes., Jose Alberto Fernandez Zepeda

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

This dissertation deals with reconfigurable bus-based models, a new type of parallel machine that uses dynamically alterable connections between processors to allow efficient communication and to perform fast computations. We focus this work on the Reconfigurable Mesh (R-Mesh), one of the most widely studied reconfigurable models. We study the ability of the R-Mesh to adapt an algorithm instance of an arbitrary size to run on a given smaller model size without significant loss of efficiency. A scaling simulation achieves this adaptation, and the simulation overhead expresses the efficiency of the simulation. We construct a scaling simulation for the Fusing-Restricted Reconfigurable …

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Preparing New Teachers To Use Technology: A Comparative Study Of Preservice Teacher Education Programs., Patricia Ann Duhon Jan 1999

Preparing New Teachers To Use Technology: A Comparative Study Of Preservice Teacher Education Programs., Patricia Ann Duhon

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

The purpose of this descriptive study was to describe and analyze the technology components in three teacher education programs, and to investigate the technological preparedness of recently graduated first-year elementary (K--5) teachers. The research questions addressed were: (a) How are the teacher education programs at each university in this study preparing students to integrate technology into their classrooms and instruction, and how do the programs compare? (b) How do recently graduated first-year teachers at each university rate their skills in using technology, and how do their ratings compare? (c) How and to what extent do recently graduated first-year teachers at …

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Relating Process Philosophy To The Classroom: An Exploration Of Alfred North Whitehead's Educational Vision., Janis Pardue Hill Jan 1999

Relating Process Philosophy To The Classroom: An Exploration Of Alfred North Whitehead's Educational Vision., Janis Pardue Hill

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

This dissertation is an exploration of the connections between the process philosophy and the educational thinking of Alfred North Whitehead. It develops the theory that Whitehead's philosophy of process is evident in "embryonic" form in his earlier educational writings, as well as The Aims of Education and Other Essays (1929), and that the complexities of process thinking are as intertwined and interconnected with the principles of process educational thought as the actual entity is intertwined and interconnected with the complex relations involved in its concrescence. The ultimate aim is to provide a clear picture of Whitehead's vision of education and …

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College Choice: Psychological Factors Influencing *Postsecondary Aspirations And Expectations Of Ninth-Grade Students., Stuart Earle Johnson Jan 1999

College Choice: Psychological Factors Influencing *Postsecondary Aspirations And Expectations Of Ninth-Grade Students., Stuart Earle Johnson

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

The purpose of this study was to explore relationships between several variables which help to explain the process by which adolescents decide to pursue a college education. Previous models were enhanced by including important theoretical constructs well documented in social cognitive and attributional theories as elements of human agency. The psychological constructs, self-efficacy and locus of control were the primary focus of attention as independent variables and for their significance as mediating variables affecting the relationship between previously identified factors attributed to students' postsecondary attendance decisions, and students' college aspirations and expectations. Particular attention was given to the college choice …

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The Effect Of Accurate/Inaccurate Teacher Instruction, High/Low Teacher Delivery, And On - /Off -Task Student Behavior On Musicians' Evaluation Of Teacher Effectiveness., Melissa Katia Madsen Jan 1999

The Effect Of Accurate/Inaccurate Teacher Instruction, High/Low Teacher Delivery, And On - /Off -Task Student Behavior On Musicians' Evaluation Of Teacher Effectiveness., Melissa Katia Madsen

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

The primary purpose of this investigation was to determine the effect of accurate/inaccurate teacher instruction, high/low teacher delivery and on-/off-task student behavior on musicians' evaluations of teaching effectiveness. An additional purpose of this study was to determine whether differences in the musicians' evaluative responses of teacher effectiveness would occur due to differences in their experience level. Subjects (N = 168) were musicians and were grouped accordingly: (1) grades 6--8; (2) grades 9--12; (3) undergraduate; and (4) experienced teacher. The subjects viewed and evaluated a videotape of eight teaching segments for teacher effectiveness. The segments had been simulated by the investigator …

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Classification Of Text Documents Using A Logical Analysis Approach., Salvador Nieto Sanchez Jan 1999

Classification Of Text Documents Using A Logical Analysis Approach., Salvador Nieto Sanchez

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

The main problem investigated in this dissertation is as follows: Given are two samples of documents each from one of two disjoint collections of documents. The question is how to obtain a set of patterns of text features that make a document in the two samples (and other unclassified documents) to be classified correctly in one and only one document class. A sample of 2,897 documents from the TIPSTER collection was used to investigate this problem. This problem was divided into the following four subproblems. The first subproblem consists of identifying the set keywords to describe the documents' content. Computational …

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Out Of Sight, Out Of Mind: A Gis Study Of Changes In Cemetery Locations In Southeastern Louisiana From An Archaeological And Geographical Perspective, 1930--1997., Cindy Ann Nance Jan 1999

Out Of Sight, Out Of Mind: A Gis Study Of Changes In Cemetery Locations In Southeastern Louisiana From An Archaeological And Geographical Perspective, 1930--1997., Cindy Ann Nance

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

Cemeteries in southeastern Louisiana are in varying stages of use---from presently in use and maintained to no longer visible on the surface. The abandonment of traditional cemeteries in southeastern Louisiana illustrates evolving settlement patterns. Earlier settlement patterns were dependent on physiographic and cultural landscape features. As settlement patterns evolve, the preferred locations of cemeteries change. As a recent participant in the nationwide preference for urban-associated Memorial Parks, is Louisiana in the process of abandoning traditional cemetery landscapes? Six factors that contribute to the abandonment of traditional cemeteries from 1930 to 1997 are presented in this study. Evolving communities, demographic shifts, …

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Instantaneous Learning Neural Networks., Kun Won Tang Jan 1999

Instantaneous Learning Neural Networks., Kun Won Tang

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

Instantaneous learning is a desirable feature in neural networks. This type of learning enables the network to be trained very quickly, typically in just one or two passes of the training set as opposed to hundreds or even thousands of passes for networks trained by an iterative process, such as the error backpropagation (BP) algorithm. This dissertation first reviews several existing types of neural networks with instantaneous learning capability. It then proposes a new network called the Fuzzy Classification (FC) Neural Network that can be trained with two passes of the training samples. The first pass assigns the synaptic weights …

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Multimillion Atom Molecular Dynamics Simulations Of Adhesion And Nanoindentation Of Silicon Nitride., Phillip Judson Walsh Jan 1999

Multimillion Atom Molecular Dynamics Simulations Of Adhesion And Nanoindentation Of Silicon Nitride., Phillip Judson Walsh

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

Multi-million atom molecular dynamics (MD) simulations of nanoindentation of silicon nitride and amorphization and fracture of silicon diselenide nanowires are performed on massively parallel architectures. System sizes range from 75,803 atoms to over 10 million atoms. The process of amorphization and fracture in silicon diselenide nanowires is followed using configuration space images in smaller wires and local stress and temperature calculations in larger wires. A structural transformation in the nanowire cross sections is investigated. The nanowires are found to contract in one direction perpendicular to the applied strain while expanding in the other, so that initially circular nanowires are transformed …

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Design Recovery And Data Mining: A Methodology That Identifies Data-Cohesive Subsystems Based On Mining Association Rules., Carlos Montes De Oca Jan 1999

Design Recovery And Data Mining: A Methodology That Identifies Data-Cohesive Subsystems Based On Mining Association Rules., Carlos Montes De Oca

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

Software maintenance is both a technical and an economic concern for organizations. Large software systems are difficult to maintain due to their intrinsic complexity, and their maintenance consumes between 50% and 90% of the cost of their complete life-cycle. An essential step in maintenance is reverse engineering, which focuses on understanding the system. This system understanding is critical to avoid the generation of undesired side effects during maintenance. The objective of this research is to investigate the potential of applying data mining to reverse engineering. This research was motivated by the following: (1) data mining can process large volumes of …

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Spatial Modeling Of Coastal Landscapes: Methodological And Scientific Applications., Mary Louise White Jan 1999

Spatial Modeling Of Coastal Landscapes: Methodological And Scientific Applications., Mary Louise White

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

A number of issues related to landscape scale ecological modeling of the wetlands of southern Louisiana are examined in this study. First, using geostatistical methods, a new contour map of the wetland habitats in the Terrebonne basin of southern Louisiana is constructed from data collected in 1994. This map is proposed as the best field verified habitat map of the Terrebonne basin and contains statistical confidence intervals associated with the habitat contours. Second, the problem of how to evaluate the success of a landscape model prediction is investigated. The multiple resolution goodness of fit parameter Ft(k) is evaluated in detail …

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Enhancing The Process Of Testing Object -Oriented Systems., Ihssan Salim Alkadi Jan 1999

Enhancing The Process Of Testing Object -Oriented Systems., Ihssan Salim Alkadi

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

Testing is a crucial step in the overall system development process. Using testing techniques that support features of the underlying software paradigm more effectively tests program than do testing techniques that support features of other paradigms. Systems developed with the object-oriented paradigm require techniques that support object-oriented features such as inheritance, data abstraction, encapsulation, and dynamic binding. Many techniques that are used to test systems developed with the structured paradigm are not sufficient for the testing of object-oriented systems. The goal of this research is to develop methods that will improve the process of testing object-oriented systems. Specifically, emphasis is …

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Looking For Leadership: Searching In A Middle School For Reactions To Stimuli In Social Environments., Lucy Gremillion Begnaud Jan 1999

Looking For Leadership: Searching In A Middle School For Reactions To Stimuli In Social Environments., Lucy Gremillion Begnaud

LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses

Leadership development lies at the heart of establishing a meaningful legacy for students. More important than subject matter and curriculum content, the affective traits we instill in our students will guide them. Such traits are at the core of leadership development, the focus of this qualitative research case study. An eight-month immersion in a fifth grade gifted enrichment program addressed the following questions: (a) What leadership opportunities do students have in a gifted enrichment program at the fifth grade level? (b) What could enrichment programs do to foster leadership development in their gifted students? Four themes emerged during this study: …

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An Estimation Of Rough Rice Basis In Southwest Louisiana (Bulletin #865), G. Grant Giesler, Wayne M. Gauthier, Michael E. Salassi Dec 1998

An Estimation Of Rough Rice Basis In Southwest Louisiana (Bulletin #865), G. Grant Giesler, Wayne M. Gauthier, Michael E. Salassi

LSU AgCenter Bulletins

This report presents basis estimates for long grain rough rice in Southwest Louisiana for each of six marketing years from 1991-92 through 1996-97. The primary goal of this study is to enhance the understanding of basis movements in Southwest Louisiana, thereby increasing the likelihood that sound marketing decisions will be made by market participants.

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The Upper Interval Topology, Property M, And Compactness, Jimmie Lawson Dec 1998

The Upper Interval Topology, Property M, And Compactness, Jimmie Lawson

Faculty Publications

The use of intrinsic topology such as interval topology and order topology that were typically symmetric was discussed. The theory of continuous lattices provided strong motivation for the consideration of such topologies such as the Scott topology or the hull-kernel topology which were not symmetric. Another approach to the study of topology on ordered structures was to begin with a set X equipped both with a partial order ≤ and a topology. The results show that these orders were called as closed order and the resulting ordered topological space was called as pospace, when the assumption was satisfied.

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Vassiliev Invariants: A New Framework For Quantum Gravity, Rodolfo Gambini, Jorge Griego, Jorge Pullin Nov 1998

Vassiliev Invariants: A New Framework For Quantum Gravity, Rodolfo Gambini, Jorge Griego, Jorge Pullin

Faculty Publications

We show that Vassiliev invariants of knots, appropriately generalized to the spin network context, are loop differentiable in spite of being diffeomorphism invariant. This opens the possibility of defining rigorously the constraints of quantum gravity as geometrical operators acting on the space of Vassiliev invariants of spin nets. We show how to explicitly realize the diffeomorphism constraint on this space and present proposals for the construction of Hamiltonian constraints. © 1998 Published by Elsevier Science B.V.

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Analytical Solution Of The Generalized Discrete Poisson Equation, G. Y. Hu, Jai Yon Ryu, R. F. O'Connell Nov 1998

Analytical Solution Of The Generalized Discrete Poisson Equation, G. Y. Hu, Jai Yon Ryu, R. F. O'Connell

Faculty Publications

We present an analytical solution to the generalized discrete Poisson equation, a matrix equation which has a tridiagonal matrix with fringes having an arbitrary value for the diagonal elements. The results are of relevance to a variety of physical problems, which require the numerical solution of the Poisson equation. As examples, the formula has been applied to the solution of the electrostatic problem of tunnelling junction arrays with two and three rows.

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Exact Relations For Effective Tensors Of Polycrystals. Ii. Applications To Elasticity And Piezoelectricity, Yury Grabovsky, Daniel S. Sage Oct 1998

Exact Relations For Effective Tensors Of Polycrystals. Ii. Applications To Elasticity And Piezoelectricity, Yury Grabovsky, Daniel S. Sage

Faculty Publications

An important necessary condition for an exact relation for effective moduli of polycrystals to hold is stability of that relation under lamination. This requirement is so restrictive that it is possible (if not always feasible) to find all such relations explicitly. In order to do this one needs to combine the results developed in Part I of this paper and the representation theory of the rotation groups SO(2) and SO(3). More precisely, one needs to know all rotationally invariant subspaces of the space of material moduli. This paper presents an algorithm for finding all such subspaces. We illustrate the workings …

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The Induced Representations Of Brauer Algebras And The Clebsch-Gordan Coefficients Of So(N), Feng Pan, Shihai Dong, J. P. Draayer Oct 1998

The Induced Representations Of Brauer Algebras And The Clebsch-Gordan Coefficients Of So(N), Feng Pan, Shihai Dong, J. P. Draayer

Faculty Publications

Induced representations of Df(n) from Sf1 × Sf2 with f1 + f2 = f are discussed. The induction coefficients (IDCs) or the outer-product reduction coefficients of Sf1 × Sf2 ↑ Df (n ) with f ≤ 4 up to a normalization factor are derived by using the linear equation method. Weyl tableaux for the corresponding Gel'fand basis of SO(n) are defined. The assimilation method for obtaining Clebsch-Gordan coefficients of SO(n) in the Gel'fand basis for no modification rule involved couplings from IDCs of Brauer algebras is proposed. Some isoscalar factors of SO(n) ⊃ SO(n - 1) for the resulting irrep …

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Unitary Representations Of Lie Groups With Reflection Symmetry, Palle E.T. Jorgensen, Gestur Ólafsson Sep 1998

Unitary Representations Of Lie Groups With Reflection Symmetry, Palle E.T. Jorgensen, Gestur Ólafsson

Faculty Publications

We consider the following class of unitary representationsπof some (real) Lie groupGwhich has a matched pair of symmetries described as follows: (i) SupposeGhas a period-2 automorphismτ, and that the Hilbert spaceH(π) carries a unitary operatorJsuch thatJπ=(πτ)J(i.e.,selfsimilarity). (ii) An added symmetry is implied ifH(π) further contains a closed subspaceK0having a certainorder-covarianceproperty, and satisfying theK0-restricted positivity : vJv≥0, ∀v∈K0, where ·· is the inner product inH(π). From (i)-(ii), we get an induced dual representation of an associated dual groupGc. All three properties, selfsimilarity, order-covariance, and positivity, are satisfied in a natural context whenGis semisimple and hermitean; but whenGis the (ax+b)-group, or the …

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