223 research outputs found
Integration without Membership: Switzerland's Bilateral Agreements with the EU. CEPS Paperbacks. March 2006
No full textSurrounded by European Union member states on all sides, Switzerland is one of the great anomalies of European integration. Although it is one of very few countries in Western Europe that has chosen to remain outside the EU, Switzerland is closely integrated with the EU. Two sets of recently negotiated bilateral sectoral agreements with the Union provide further integration between Switzerland and the EU.
These agreements are being implemented amidst a crisis in the EU following the French and Dutch rejection of the Constitutional Treaty in 2005. ‘Enlargement fatigue’ is generally considered a key element of the EU’s current predicament, and Switzerland is touted by some as a possible model for a close relationship with the EU short of full membership. But what exactly is the ‘Swiss model’?
This study analyses the functioning of the bilateral agreements between Switzerland and the EU, focusing on the agreements that entered into force in 2002. Particular attention is paid to the institutional arrangements and their ability to adapt to new legal and political developments in the EU, the impact of the agreements on the functioning of Swiss democracy and how the Swiss political system affects the implementation of the bilateral sectoral agreements. A comparison is also made with the experiences of the European Economic Area, the only arrangement for integration without membership that is more extensive than the Swiss model. The study concludes with an assessment of the future prospects of EU-Swiss relations
X-ray absorption linear dichroism at the Ti K edge of anatase TiO2 single crystals
No full textAnatase TiO2 (a-TiO2) exhibits a strong x-ray absorption linear dichroism in the pre-edge, the XANES and the EXAFS at the titanium K edge. In the pre-edge region, the behavior of the A1-A3 and B peaks originating from the 1s-3d transitions is due to the strong p-orbital polarization and strong p-d orbital mixing. An unambiguous assignment of the pre-edge peak transitions is made in the monoelectronic approximation with the support of ab initio finite difference method calculations and spherical tensor analysis in quantitative agreement with the experiment. Our results suggest that several previous studies relying on octahedral crystal field splitting assignments are in accurate due to the significant p-d orbital hybridization induced by the broken inversion symmetry in a-TiO2. It is found that A1 is mostly an on-site 3d-4p hybridized transition, while peaks A3 and B are nonlocal transitions, with A3 being mostly dipolar and influenced by the 3d-4p intersite hybridization, while B is due to interactions at longer range. Peak A2, which was previously assigned to a transition involving pentacoordinated titanium atoms, is shown to exhibit a quadrupolar angular evolution with incidence angle, which implies that its origin is primarily related to a transition to bulk energy levels of a-TiO2 and not to defects, in agreement with theoretical predictions [Vorwerk, Phys. Rev. B 95, 155121 (2017)2469-995010.1103/PhysRevB.95.155121]. Finally, ab initio calculations show that the occurence of an enhanced absorption at peak A2 in defect-rich a-TiO2 materials originates from defect-related p density of states due to the formation of doubly ionized oxygen vacancies. The formation of peak A2 at almost the same energy for single crystals and nanomaterials is a coincidence while the origin is different. These results pave the way to the use of the pre-edge peaks at the Ti K edge of a-TiO2 to characterize the electronic structure of related materials and in the field of ultrafast x-ray absorption spectroscopy where the linear dichroism can be used to compare the photophysics along different axes
Schiedsklausel und ihre Bedeutung für den Immunitätsverzicht sowie für die Voraussetzung der Binnenbeziehung im Erkenntnis- und Vollstreckungsverfahren
No full textX-ray absorption linear dichroism at the TiK-edge of rutile (001) TiO2 single crystal
No full textX-ray absorption linear dichroism of rutile TiO2 at the Ti K-edge provides information about the electronic states involved in the pre-edge transitions. Here, linear dichroism with high energy resolution is analyzed in combination with abinitio finite difference method calculations and spherical tensor analysis. It provides an assignment of the three pre-edge peaks beyond the octahedral crystal field splitting approximation and estimates the spatial extension of the corresponding final states. It is then discussed for the first time the X-ray absorption (XAS) of pentacoordinated titanium atoms due to oxygen vacancies and it is found that, similarly to anatase TiO2, rutile is expected to exhibit a transition on the low-energy side of peak A3. Its apparent absence in the experiment is related to the degree of p-d orbital mixing which is small in rutile due to its centrosymmetric point group. A recent XAS linear dichroism study on anatase TiO2 single crystals has shown that peak A2 has an intrinsic origin and is due to a quadrupolar transition to the 3d energy levels. In rutile, due to its centrosymmetric point group, the corresponding peak A2 has a small dipole moment explaining the weak transition. The results are confronted with recent picosecond X-ray absorption spectroscopy on rutile TiO2 nanoparticles
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