ASU Scholarship Showcase

Recently the domestic aviation industry has been influenced by rapidly growing ultra low-cost carriers (ULCCs). The pattern of airport markets served by ULCCs is incongruous with legacy carriers and low-cost airlines alike. Existing literature, however, is limited for North American ULCCs: research has only recently begun to identify them separately from mainstream low-cost carriers. This study sought to understand the market factors that influence ULCC service decisions. The relationship between ULCC operations and airport market factors was analyzed using three methods: mapping 2019 flight data for four ULCCs combined, two regression analyses to evaluate variables, and three case studies examining distinct scenarios through interviews with airport managers. Enplanement data were assembled for every domestic airport offering scheduled service in 2019. Independent variables were collected for each Part 139 airport. The first model estimated an ordinary least squares regression model to analyze ULCC enplanements. The second model estimated a binary logistic equation for presence of ULCC service. Case studies for Bellingham, Waco, and Lincoln were selected using compelling airport factors and relevant ULCC experience. Maps of ULCC enplanements revealed concentrations of operations on the East Coast. Both regression analyses showed strong relationships between population and non-ULCC enplanements (two measures of airport market size) and ULCC operations. A significant relationship also existed between tourism and enplanements. In the logit model, distance and competition variables were associated with ULCC presence. Case studies emphasized the importance of airport fees and competition in ULCC preferences, although aeronautical costs were generally not significant in the regressions.

Cities in the Global South face rapid urbanization challenges and often suffer an acute lack of infrastructure and governance capacities. Smart Cities Mission, in India, launched in 2015, aims to offer a novel approach for urban renewal of 100 cities following an area‐based development approach, where the use of ICT and digital technologies is particularly emphasized. This article presents a critical review of the design and implementation framework of this new urban renewal program across selected case‐study cities. The article examines the claims of the so‐called “smart cities” against actual urban transformation on‐ground and evaluates how “inclusive” and “sustainable” these developments are. We quantify the scale and coverage of the smart city urban renewal projects in the cities to highlight who the program includes and excludes. The article also presents a statistical analysis of the sectoral focus and budgetary allocations of the projects under the Smart Cities Mission to find an inherent bias in these smart city initiatives in terms of which types of development they promote and the ones it ignores. The findings indicate that a predominant emphasis on digital urban renewal of selected precincts and enclaves, branded as “smart cities,” leads to deepening social polarization and gentrification. The article offers crucial urban planning lessons for designing ICT‐driven urban renewal projects, while addressing critical questions around inclusion and sustainability in smart city ventures.`

Attitudes and habits are extremely resistant to change, but a disruption of the magnitude of the COVID-19 pandemic has the potential to bring long-term, massive societal changes. During the pandemic, people are being compelled to experience new ways of interacting, working, learning, shopping, traveling, and eating meals. Going forward, a critical question is whether these experiences will result in changed behaviors and preferences in the long term. This paper presents initial findings on the likelihood of long-term changes in telework, daily travel, restaurant patronage, and air travel based on survey data collected from adults in the United States in Spring 2020. These data suggest that a sizable fraction of the increase in telework and decreases in both business air travel and restaurant patronage are likely here to stay. As for daily travel modes, public transit may not fully recover its pre-pandemic ridership levels, but many of our respondents are planning to bike and walk more than they used to. These data reflect the responses of a sample that is higher income and more highly educated than the US population. The response of these particular groups to the COVID-19 pandemic is perhaps especially important to understand, however, because their consumption patterns give them a large influence on many sectors of the economy.

Recently fabricated two-dimensional phosphorene crystal structures have demonstrated great potential in applications of electronics. In this paper, strain effect on the electronic band structure of phosphorene was studied using first-principles methods including density functional theory (DFT) and hybrid functionals. It was found that phosphorene can withstand a tensile stress and strain up to 10 N/m and 30%, respectively. The band gap of phosphorene experiences a direct-indirect-direct transition when axial strain is applied. A moderate −2% compression in the zigzag direction can trigger this gap transition. With sufficient expansion (+11.3%) or compression (−10.2% strains), the gap can be tuned from indirect to direct again. Five strain zones with distinct electronic band structure were identified, and the critical strains for the zone boundaries were determined. Although the DFT method is known to underestimate band gap of semiconductors, it was proven to correctly predict the strain effect on the electronic properties with validation from a hybrid functional method in this work. The origin of the gap transition was revealed, and a general mechanism was developed to explain energy shifts with strain according to the bond nature of near-band-edge electronic orbitals. Effective masses of carriers in the armchair direction are an order of magnitude smaller than that of the zigzag axis, indicating that the armchair direction is favored for carrier transport. In addition, the effective masses can be dramatically tuned by strain, in which its sharp jump/drop occurs at the zone boundaries of the direct-indirect gap transition.

The relation between flux and fluctuation is fundamental to complex physical systems that support and transport flows. A recently obtained law predicts monotonous enhancement of fluctuation as the average flux is increased, which in principle is valid but only for large systems. For realistic complex systems of small sizes, this law breaks down when both the average flux and fluctuation become large. Here we demonstrate the failure of this law in small systems using real data and model complex networked systems, derive analytically a modified flux-fluctuation law, and validate it through computations of a large number of complex networked systems. Our law is more general in that its predictions agree with numerics and it reduces naturally to the previous law in the limit of large system size, leading to new insights into the flow dynamics in small-size complex systems with significant implications for the statistical and scaling behaviors of small systems, a topic of great recent interest.

The role of ambiguity tolerance in career decision making was examined in a sample of college students (n = 275). Three hypotheses were proposed regarding the direct prediction of ambiguity tolerance on career indecision, the indirect prediction of ambiguity tolerance on career indecision through environmental and self explorations, and the moderation effect of ambiguity tolerance on the link of environmental and self explorations with career indecision. Results supported the significance of ambiguity tolerance with respect to career indecision, finding that it directly predicted general indecisiveness, dysfunctional beliefs, lack of information, and inconsistent information, and moderated the prediction of environmental exploration on inconsistent information. The implications of this study are discussed and suggestions for future research are provided.

An outstanding and fundamental problem in contemporary physics is to include and probe the many-body effect in the study of relativistic quantum manifestations of classical chaos. We address this problem using graphene systems described by the Hubbard Hamiltonian in the setting of resonant tunneling. Such a system consists of two symmetric potential wells separated by a potential barrier, and the geometric shape of the whole domain can be chosen to generate integrable or chaotic dynamics in the classical limit. Employing a standard mean-field approach to calculating a large number of eigenenergies and eigenstates, we uncover a class of localized states with near-zero tunneling in the integrable systems. These states are not the edge states typically seen in graphene systems, and as such they are the consequence of many-body interactions. The physical origin of the non-edge-state type of localized states can be understood by the one-dimensional relativistic quantum tunneling dynamics through the solutions of the Dirac equation with appropriate boundary conditions. We demonstrate that, when the geometry of the system is modified to one with chaos, the localized states are effectively removed, implying that in realistic situations where many-body interactions are present, classical chaos is capable of facilitating greatly quantum tunneling. This result, besides its fundamental importance, can be useful for the development of nanoscale devices such as graphene-based resonant-tunneling diodes.

Dynamical systems based on the minority game (MG) have been a paradigm for gaining significant insights into a variety of social and biological behaviors. Recently, a grouping phenomenon has been unveiled in MG systems of multiple resources (strategies) in which the strategies spontaneously break into an even number of groups, each exhibiting an identical oscillation pattern in the attendance of game players. Here we report our finding of spontaneous breakup of resources into three groups, each exhibiting period-three oscillations. An analysis is developed to understand the emergence of the striking phenomenon of triple grouping and period-three oscillations. In the presence of random disturbances, the triple-group/period-three state becomes transient, and we obtain explicit formula for the average transient lifetime using two methods of approximation. Our finding indicates that, period-three oscillation, regarded as one of the most fundamental behaviors in smooth nonlinear dynamical systems, can also occur in much more complex, evolutionary-game dynamical systems. Our result also provides a plausible insight for the occurrence of triple grouping observed, for example, in the U.S. housing market.

Understanding the dynamics of human movements is key to issues of significant current interest such as behavioral prediction, recommendation, and control of epidemic spreading. We collect and analyze big data sets of human movements in both cyberspace (through browsing of websites) and physical space (through mobile towers) and find a superlinear scaling relation between the mean frequency of visit〈f〉and its fluctuation σ : σ ∼〈f⟩^β with β ≈ 1.2. The probability distribution of the visiting frequency is found to be a stretched exponential function. We develop a model incorporating two essential ingredients, preferential return and exploration, and show that these are necessary for generating the scaling relation extracted from real data. A striking finding is that human movements in cyberspace and physical space are strongly correlated, indicating a distinctive behavioral identifying characteristic and implying that the behaviors in one space can be used to predict those in the other.

The phenomenon of Fano resonance is ubiquitous in a large variety of wave scattering systems, where the resonance profile is typically asymmetric. Whether the parameter characterizing the asymmetry should be complex or real is an issue of great experimental interest. Using coherent quantum transport as a paradigm and taking into account of the collective contribution from all available scattering channels, we derive a universal formula for the Fano-resonance profile. We show that our formula bridges naturally the traditional Fano formulas with complex and real asymmetry parameters, indicating that the two types of formulas are fundamentally equivalent (except for an offset). The connection also reveals a clear footprint for the conductance resonance during a dephasing process. Therefore, the emergence of complex asymmetric parameter when fitting with experimental data needs to be properly interpreted. Furthermore, we have provided a theory for the width of the resonance, which relates explicitly the width to the degree of localization of the close-by eigenstates and the corresponding coupling matrices or the self-energies caused by the leads. Our work not only resolves the issue about the nature of the asymmetry parameter, but also provides deeper physical insights into the origin of Fano resonance. Since the only assumption in our treatment is that the transport can be described by the Green’s function formalism, our results are also valid for broad disciplines including scattering problems of electromagnetic waves, acoustics, and seismology.