  For a class $\mathcal C$ of graphs, we define $\mathcal C$-edge-brittleness
of a graph $G$ as the minimum $\ell$ such that the vertex set of $G$ can be
partitioned into sets inducing a subgraph in $\mathcal C$ and there are $\ell$
edges having ends in distinct parts. We characterize classes of graphs having
bounded $\mathcal C$-edge-brittleness for a class $\mathcal C$ of forests or a
class $\mathcal C$ of graphs with no $K_4\setminus e$ topological minors in
terms of forbidden obstructions. We also define $\mathcal C$-vertex-brittleness
of a graph $G$ as the minimum $\ell$ such that the edge set of $G$ can be
partitioned into sets inducing a subgraph in $\mathcal C$ and there are $\ell$
vertices incident with edges in distinct parts. We characterize classes of
graphs having bounded $\mathcal C$-vertex-brittleness for a class $\mathcal C$
of forests or a class $\mathcal C$ of outerplanar graphs in terms of forbidden
obstructions. We also investigate the relations between the new parameters and
the edit distance.


  VDN and QMIX are two popular value-based algorithms for cooperative MARL that
learn a centralized action value function as a monotonic mixing of per-agent
utilities. While this enables easy decentralization of the learned policy, the
restricted joint action value function can prevent them from solving tasks that
require significant coordination between agents at a given timestep. We show
that this problem can be overcome by improving the joint exploration of all
agents during training. Specifically, we propose a novel MARL approach called
Universal Value Exploration (UneVEn) that learns a set of related tasks
simultaneously with a linear decomposition of universal successor features.
With the policies of already solved related tasks, the joint exploration
process of all agents can be improved to help them achieve better coordination.
Empirical results on a set of exploration games, challenging cooperative
predator-prey tasks requiring significant coordination among agents, and
StarCraft II micromanagement benchmarks show that UneVEn can solve tasks where
other state-of-the-art MARL methods fail.


  Blockchain, an emerging decentralized security system, has been applied in
many applications, such as bitcoin, smart grid, and Internet-of-Things.
However, running the mining process may cost too much energy consumption and
computing resource usage on handheld devices, which restricts the use of
blockchain in mobile environments. In this paper, we consider deploying edge
computing service to support the mobile blockchain. We propose an auction-based
edge computing resource market of the edge computing service provider. Since
there is competition among miners, the allocative externalities (positive and
negative) are taken into account in the model. In our auction mechanism, we
maximize the social welfare while guaranteeing the truthfulness, individual
rationality and computational efficiency. Based on blockchain mining experiment
results, we define a hash power function that characterizes the probability of
successfully mining a block. Through extensive simulations, we evaluate the
performance of our auction mechanism which shows that our edge computing
resources market model can efficiently solve the social welfare maximization
problem for the edge computing service provider.


  Previous studies have shown that noise can induce coherence resonance in some
nonlinear dynamical systems close to a bifurcation of a periodic motion, such
as in excitable systems. We demonstrate that coherence resonance can be
observed in systems close to a {\sl blowout bifurcation}. It is shown that for
dynamical systems with an invariant subspace in which there is a phase-coherent
chaotic attractor, the interplay among the oscillation of local transverse
stability, noise and nonlinearity can lead to coherence resonance phenomenon.
The mechanism of coherence resonance in this type of system is different from
that in previously studied systems.


  We show that the Union-Closed Conjecture holds for the union-closed family
generated by the cyclic translates of any fixed set.


  The kagome Heisenberg antiferromagnet formed by frustrated spins arranged in
a lattice of corner-sharing triangles is a prime candidate for hosting a
quantum spin liquid (QSL) ground state consisting of entangled spin singlets.
But the existence of various competing states makes a convincing theoretical
prediction of the QSL ground state difficult, calling for experimental clues
from model materials. The kagome lattice materials Zn-barlowite
ZnCu$_{3}$(OD)$_{6}$FBr and herbertsmithite ZnCu$_{3}$(OD)$_{6}$Cl$_2$ do not
exhibit long range order, and they are considered the best realizations of the
kagome Heisenberg antiferromagnet known to date. Here we use $^{63}$Cu nuclear
quadrupole resonance combined with the inverse Laplace transform (ILT) to probe
locally the inhomogeneity of delicate quantum ground states affected by
disorder. We present direct evidence for the gradual emergence of spin singlets
with spatially varying excitation gaps, but even at temperatures far below the
super-exchange energy scale their fraction is limited to approximately 60\% of
the total spins. Theoretical models need to incorporate the role of disorder to
account for the observed inhomogeneously gapped behaviour.


  Three CP-violating phases of the $3\times 3$ lepton flavor mixing matrix $V$,
denoted as $\delta$, $\rho$ and $\sigma$ in a useful phase convention, are
entangled with one another in the one-loop renormalization-group equations. We
show that $\delta =90^\circ$ at the electroweak scale ($\Lambda_{\rm EW} \sim
10^{2}$ GeV) can be radiatively generated from $\delta =0^\circ$ at the seesaw
scale ($\Lambda_{\rm SS} \sim 10^{14}$ GeV) in the minimal supersymmetric
standard model, provided three neutrino masses are nearly degenerate. As for
the Majorana phases $\rho$ and $\sigma$, it is also possible to radiatively
generate $\rho =90^\circ$ or $\sigma = 90^\circ$ at $\Lambda_{\rm EW}$ from
$\rho =0^\circ$ or $\sigma = 0^\circ$ at $\Lambda_{\rm SS}$. This observation
opens a new and interesting window for model building, in order to understand
possible connection between the phenomena of CP violation at low- and
high-energy scales.


  This document is the final report of the ATLAS-CMS Dark Matter Forum, a forum
organized by the ATLAS and CMS collaborations with the participation of experts
on theories of Dark Matter, to select a minimal basis set of dark matter
simplified models that should support the design of the early LHC Run-2
searches. A prioritized, compact set of benchmark models is proposed,
accompanied by studies of the parameter space of these models and a repository
of generator implementations. This report also addresses how to apply the
Effective Field Theory formalism for collider searches and present the results
of such interpretations.


  We study superstring propagations on the Calabi-Yau manifold which develops
an isolated ADE singularity. This theory has been conjectured to have a
holographic dual description in terms of N=2 Landau-Ginzburg theory and
Liouville theory. If the Landau-Ginzburg description precisely reflects the
information of ADE singularity, the Landau-Ginzburg model of $D_4,E_6,E_8$ and
Gepner model of $A_2\otimes A_2, A_2\otimes A_3, A_2\otimes A_4$ should give
the same result. We compute the elements of $D_4,E_6,E_8$ modular invariants
for the singular Calabi-Yau compactification in terms of the spectral flow
invariant orbits of the tensor product theories with the theta function which
encodes the momentum mode of the Liouville theory. Furthermore we find the
interesting identity among characters in minimal models at different levels. We
give the complete proof for the identity.


  Recently, Hata and Kojita proposed a new energy formula for a class of
solutions in Witten's open string field theory based on a novel symmetry of
correlation functions they found. Their energy formula can be regarded as a
generalization of the conventional energy formula by Murata and Schnabl.
Following their proposal, we investigate their new ansatz for the classical
solution representing double D-branes. We present a regularized definition of
this solution and show that the solution satisfies the equation of motion when
it is contracted with the solution itself and when it is contracted with any
states in the Fock space. However, the Ellwood invariant and the boundary state
of the solution are the same as those for the perturbative vacuum. This result
disagrees with an expectation from the Ellwood conjecture.


  Two optimization algorithms are proposed for solving a stochastic programming
problem for which the objective function is given in the form of the
expectation of convex functions and the constraint set is defined by the
intersection of fixed point sets of nonexpansive mappings in a real Hilbert
space. This setting of fixed point constraints enables consideration of the
case in which the projection onto each of the constraint sets cannot be
computed efficiently. Both algorithms use a convex function and a nonexpansive
mapping determined by a certain probabilistic process at each iteration. One
algorithm blends a stochastic gradient method with the Halpern fixed point
algorithm. The other is based on a stochastic proximal point algorithm and the
Halpern fixed point algorithm; it can be applied to nonsmooth convex
optimization. Convergence analysis showed that, under certain assumptions, any
weak sequential cluster point of the sequence generated by either algorithm
almost surely belongs to the solution set of the problem. Convergence rate
analysis illustrated their efficiency, and the numerical results of convex
optimization over fixed point sets demonstrated their effectiveness.


  We study a clustering problem where the goal is to maximize the coverage of
the input points by $k$ chosen centers. Specifically, given a set of $n$ points
$P \subseteq \mathbb{R}^d$, the goal is to pick $k$ centers $C \subseteq
\mathbb{R}^d$ that maximize the service $ \sum_{p \in P}\mathsf{\varphi}\bigl(
\mathsf{d}(p,C) \bigr) $ to the points $P$, where $\mathsf{d}(p,C)$ is the
distance of $p$ to its nearest center in $C$, and $\mathsf{\varphi}$ is a
non-increasing service function $\mathsf{\varphi} : \mathbb{R}^+ \to
\mathbb{R}^+$. This includes problems of placing $k$ base stations as to
maximize the total bandwidth to the clients -- indeed, the closer the client is
to its nearest base station, the more data it can send/receive, and the target
is to place $k$ base stations so that the total bandwidth is maximized. We
provide an $n^{\varepsilon^{-O(d)}}$ time algorithm for this problem that
achieves a $(1-\varepsilon)$-approximation. Notably, the runtime does not
depend on the parameter $k$ and it works for an arbitrary non-increasing
service function $\mathsf{\varphi} : \mathbb{R}^+ \to \mathbb{R}^+$.


  Using the concept of a cohesive module defined by Block, we use the theory of
superconnections in the sense of Quillen to construct natural superconnections
on Hermitian cohesive modules. By the Chern-Weil construction, we obtain
characteristic classes with values in Bott-Chern cohomology which refines the
usual deRham cohomology. The main result of this paper shows that such
characteristic classes are independent of the Hermitian metric and only
dependent on the homotopy class of the cohesive module in the homotopy
category. This extends the Bott-Chern cohomology to the bounded derived
category of complexes of analytic sheaves with coherent cohomology. We also
constructed secondary Bott-Chern characteristic forms and the main technical
theorem proves that they are well defined.


  Generative AI has received much attention in the image and language domains,
with the transformer neural network continuing to dominate the state of the
art. Application of these models to time series generation is less explored,
however, and is of great utility to machine learning, privacy preservation, and
explainability research. The present survey identifies this gap at the
intersection of the transformer, generative AI, and time series data, and
reviews works in this sparsely populated subdomain. The reviewed works show
great variety in approach, and have not yet converged on a conclusive answer to
the problems the domain poses. GANs, diffusion models, state space models, and
autoencoders were all encountered alongside or surrounding the transformers
which originally motivated the survey. While too open a domain to offer
conclusive insights, the works surveyed are quite suggestive, and several
recommendations for best practice, and suggestions of valuable future work, are
provided.


  We studied rotation of a disk propelled by a number of camphor pills
symmetrically distributed at its edge. The disk was put on a water surface so
that it could rotate around a vertical axis located at the disk center. In such
a system, the driving torque originates from surface tension difference
resulting from inhomogeneous surface concentration of camphor molecules
released from the pills. Here we investigated the dependence of the stationary
angular velocity on the disk radius and on the number of pills. The work
extends our previous study on a linear rotor propelled by two camphor pills
[Phys. Rev. E, 96, 012609 (2017)]. It was observed that the angular velocity
dropped to zero after a critical number of pills was exceeded. Such behavior
was confirmed by a numerical model of time evolution of the rotor. The model
predicts that, for a fixed friction coefficient, the speed of pills can be
accurately represented by a function of the linear number density of pills. We
also present bifurcation analysis of the conditions at which the transition
between a standing and a rotating disk appears.


  The recent discoveries of Swift J1644+57 and J2058+05 show that tidal
disruption events (TDEs) can launch relativistic jets. Super-Eddington
accretion produces a strong radiation field of order Eddington luminosity. In a
jetted TDE, electrons in the jet will inverse-Compton scatter the external
radiation field from the accretion disk and wind. Motivated by observations of
thermal optical-UV spectra in Swift J2058+05 and several other TDEs, we assume
the spectrum of the external radiation field intercepted by the relativistic
jet to be blackbody. Hot electrons in the jet scatter this thermal radiation
and produce luminosities 10^45-10^48 erg/s in the X/gamma-ray band.
  This model of thermal plus inverse-Compton radiation is applied to Swift
J2058+05. First, we show that the blackbody component in the optical-UV
spectrum most likely has its origin in the super-Eddington wind from the disk.
Then, using the observed blackbody component as the external radiation field,
we show that the X-ray luminosity and spectrum are consistent with the
inverse-Compton emission, under the following conditions: (1) the jet Lorentz
factor is ~5-10; (2) electrons in the jet have a powerlaw distribution with
minimum Lorentz factor ~1 and powerlaw index p = 2.4; (3) the wind is mildly
relativistic (Lorentz factor >~1.5) and has isotropic-equivalent mass-loss rate
~5 M_sun/yr. We describe the implications for jet composition and the radius
where jet energy is converted to radiation.


  Many biochemical and industrial applications involve complicated networks of
simultaneously occurring chemical reactions. Under the assumption of mass
action kinetics, the dynamics of these chemical reaction networks are governed
by systems of polynomial ordinary differential equations. The steady states of
these mass action systems have been analysed via a variety of techniques,
including elementary flux mode analysis, algebraic techniques (e.g. Groebner
bases), and deficiency theory. In this paper, we present a novel method for
characterizing the steady states of mass action systems. Our method explicitly
links a network's capacity to permit a particular class of steady states,
called toric steady states, to topological properties of a related network
called a translated chemical reaction network. These networks share their
reaction stoichiometries with their source network but are permitted to have
different complex stoichiometries and different network topologies. We apply
the results to examples drawn from the biochemical literature.


  We present exact solutions of the non-linear {\sc bcre} model for granular
avalanches without diffusion. We assume a generic sandpile profile consisting
of two regions of constant but different slope. Our solution is constructed in
terms of characteristic curves from which several novel predictions for
experiments on avalanches are deduced: Analytical results are given for the
shock condition, shock coordinates, universal quantities at the shock, slope
relaxation at large times, velocities of the active region and of the sandpile
profile.


  A new model of nonlinear electrodynamics with three parameters is suggested.
The phenomena of vacuum birefringence takes place when there is the external
constant magnetic field. We calculate the indices of refraction for two
polarizations of electromagnetic waves, parallel and perpendicular to the
magnetic induction field. From the Bir\'{e}fringence Magn\'{e}tique du Vide
(BMV) experiment one of the coefficients, $\gamma\approx 10^{-20}$ T$^{-2}$,
was estimated. The canonical, symmetrical Belinfante energy-momentum tensors
and dilatation current were obtained. The dilatation symmetry and the dual
symmetry are broken in the model considered.


  We have developed a full numerical method to study the gas dynamics of
cometary ultra-compact (UC) H II regions, and associated photodissociation
regions (PDRs). The bow-shock and champagne-flow models with a $40.9/21.9
M_\odot$ star are simulated. In the bow-shock models, the massive star is
assumed to move through dense ($n=8000~cm^{-3}$) molecular material with a
stellar velocity of $15~km~s^{-1}$. In the champagne-flow models, an
exponential distribution of density with a scale height of 0.2 pc is assumed.
The profiles of the [Ne II] 12.81\mum and $H_2~S(2)$ lines from the ionized
regions and PDRs are compared for two sets of models. In champagne-flow models,
emission lines from the ionized gas clearly show the effect of acceleration
along the direction toward the tail due to the density gradient. The kinematics
of the molecular gas inside the dense shell is mainly due to the expansion of
the H II region. However, in bow-shock models the ionized gas mainly moves in
the same direction as the stellar motion. The kinematics of the molecular gas
inside the dense shell simply reflects the motion of the dense shell with
respect to the star. These differences can be used to distinguish two sets of
models.


  In this work we examine the small mass limit of black holes, with and without
spin, in theories where a scalar field is non-minimally coupled to a
Gauss-Bonnet term. First, we provide an analytical example for a theory where a
static closed-form solution with a small mass limit is known, and later use
analytical and numerical techniques to explore this limit in standard
scalar-Gauss-Bonnet theories with dilatonic, linear and quadratic-exponential
couplings. In most cases studied here, we find an inner singularity that
overlaps with the event horizon of the static black hole as the small mass
limit is reached. Moreover, since solutions in this limit possess a
non-vanishing Hawking temperature, a naked singularity is expected to be
reached through evaporation, raising questions concerning the consistency of
these theories altogether. On the other hand, we provide for the first time in
this context an example of a coupling where the small mass limit is never
reached, thus preferred from the point of view of cosmic censorship. Finally,
we consider black holes with spin and numerically investigate how this changes
the picture, using these to place the tightest upper bounds to date on the
coupling constant for the dilatonic and linear theories, with
$\sqrt{\overline{\alpha}} < 1$ km.


  We present a new analysis of NuSTAR and Suzaku observations of the black hole
Cygnus X-1 in the intermediate state. The analysis uses kerrC, a new model for
analyzing spectral and spectropolarimetric X-ray observations of black holes.
kerrC builds on a large library of simulated black holes in X-ray binaries. The
model accounts for the X-ray emission from a geometrically thin, optically
thick accretion disk, the propagation of the X-rays through the curved black
hole spacetime, the reflection off the accretion disk, and the Comptonization
of photons in coronae of different 3-D shapes and physical properties before
and after the reflection. We present the results from using kerrC for the
analysis of archival NuSTAR and Suzaku observations taken on May 27-28, 2015.
The best wedge-shaped corona gives a better fit than the cone-shaped corona.
Although we included cone-shaped coronae in the funnel regions above and below
the black hole to resemble to some degree the common assumption of a compact
lamppost corona hovering above and/or below the black hole, the fit chooses a
very large version of this corona that makes it possible to Comptonize a
sufficiently large fraction of the accretion disk photons to explain the
observed power law emission. The analysis indicates a dimensionless black hole
spin parameter a between 0.86 and 0.92. The kerrC model provides new insights
about the radial distribution of the energy flux of returning and coronal
emission irradiating the accretion disk. kerrC furthermore predicts small
polarization fractions around 1% in the 2-8 keV energy range of the recently
launched Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer.


  We apply the theory of Groebner bases to the computation of free resolutions
over a polynomial ring, the defining equations of a canonically embedded curve,
and the unirationality of the moduli space of curves of a fixed genus.


  The packet delivery fairness is critical in many applications in the cloud,
such as exchange systems, consensus protocols, and online gaming applications.
However, due to nonidentical and dynamic packet forwarding paths, as well as
many in-network queuing delays, supporting packet delivery fairness is
challenging in a shared compute environment. In this paper, we present Octopus,
the first general fair packet delivery service to achieve packet arrival time
variations smaller than tens of nanoseconds, with the existence of latency
variations in the network. The key ideas of Octopus to support such good
fairness come from repurposing hardware traffic shaping capabilities in modern
NICs, and deploying agents at local SmartNICs to minimize latency variations
from packet forwarding. Evaluation results show that Octopus has less than 40
ns unfairness for up to 99.97\% multicast packets.


  This article studies Volterra evolution equations from the point of view of
control theory, in the case that the generator of the underlying semigroup has
a Riesz basis of eigenvectors. Conditions for admissibility of the system's
control operator are given in terms of the Carleson embedding properties of
certain discrete measures. Moreover, exact and null controllability are
expressed in terms of a new interpolation question for analytic functions,
providing a generalization of results known to hold for the standard Cauchy
problem. The results are illustrated by examples involving heat conduction with
memory.


  In liquid helium 4, many features associated to Bose statistics have been
masked by the strongly interacting nature of the liquid. As an example of these
features, we examine the shear viscosity of liquid helium 4 above the lambda
point. Applying the linear-response theory to Poiseuille's formula for the
capillary flow, the reciprocal of the shear viscosity coefficient is considered
as a transport coefficient.
  Using the Kramers-Kronig relation, we relate a superfluid flow in a capillary
with that in a rotating bucket, and express the reciprocal of the shear
viscosity coefficient in terms of the susceptibility of the system. A formula
for the kinematic shear viscosity is obtained which describes the influence of
Bose statistics. Using this formula, we study the gradual fall of the kinematic
shear viscosity from 3.7K to the lambda point in liquid helium 4 at 1 atm.


  In this paper, we present a semi-supervised learning algorithm for
classification of text documents. A method of labeling unlabeled text documents
is presented. The presented method is based on the principle of divide and
conquer strategy. It uses recursive K-means algorithm for partitioning both
labeled and unlabeled data collection. The K-means algorithm is applied
recursively on each partition till a desired level partition is achieved such
that each partition contains labeled documents of a single class. Once the
desired clusters are obtained, the respective cluster centroids are considered
as representatives of the clusters and the nearest neighbor rule is used for
classifying an unknown text document. Series of experiments have been conducted
to bring out the superiority of the proposed model over other recent state of
the art models on 20Newsgroups dataset.


  In this paper, we propose a robust low-order stabilization-free virtual
element method on quadrilateral meshes for linear elasticity that is based on
the stress-hybrid principle. We refer to this approach as the Stress-Hybrid
Virtual Element Method (SH-VEM). In this method, the Hellinger$-$Reissner
variational principle is adopted, wherein both the equilibrium equations and
the strain-displacement relations are variationally enforced. We consider
small-strain deformations of linear elastic solids in the compressible and
near-incompressible regimes over quadrilateral (convex and nonconvex) meshes.
Within an element, the displacement field is approximated as a linear
combination of canonical shape functions that are $\textit{virtual}$. The
stress field, similar to the stress-hybrid finite element method of Pian and
Sumihara, is represented using a linear combination of symmetric tensor
polynomials. A 5-parameter expansion of the stress field is used in each
element, with stress transformation equations applied on distorted
quadrilaterals. In the variational statement of the strain-displacement
relations, the divergence theorem is invoked to express the stress coefficients
in terms of the nodal displacements. This results in a formulation with solely
the nodal displacements as unknowns. Numerical results are presented for
several benchmark problems from linear elasticity. We show that SH-VEM is free
of volumetric and shear locking, and it converges optimally in the $L^2$ norm
and energy seminorm of the displacement field, and in the $L^2$ norm of the
hydrostatic stress.


  In this paper, we consider the chemotaxis-shallow water system in
$\mathbb{R}^2$. We establish the local existence of classical solution without
assuming the initial height is small or has a small perturbation near a
constant. The far field behavior of the height is a constant which could be
either vacuum or non-vacuum. The initial data is allowed vacuum and the spatial
measure of the set of vacuum can be arbitrarily large.


  Exactly solvable models have played an important role in establishing the
sophisticated modern understanding of equilibrium many-body physics. And
conversely, the relative scarcity of solutions for non-equilibrium models
greatly limits our understanding of systems away from thermal equilibrium. We
study a family of non-equilibrium models, some of which can be viewed as
dissipative analogues of the transverse-field Ising model, in that an
effectively classical Hamiltonian is frustrated by dissipative processes that
drive the system toward states that do not commute with the Hamiltonian.
Surprisingly, a broad and experimentally relevant subset of these models can be
solved efficiently in any number of spatial dimensions. We leverage these
solutions to prove a no-go theorem on steady-state phase transitions in a
many-body model that can be realized naturally with Rydberg atoms or trapped
ions, and to compute the effects of decoherence on a canonical
trapped-ion-based quantum computation architecture.


  Second-order two-scale expansions, a unified proof for the regularity of the
correctors based on the translation invariant and a lemma for extracting
$O(\epsilon)$ from the remainder term are presented for the second order
nonlinear elliptic equation with rapidly oscillating coefficients.
  If the data are smooth enough, the error of the zero-order (or energy) in
$L^\infty$, first-order in the H\"older norm, (linear periodic
case)second-order's(even first-order's) gradient (or flux) in the maximum
norm,are locally $O(\epsilon)$. It can be used in the parabolic equation.


  We present a considerably improved analysis of model-independent bounds on
new physics effects in non-leptonic tree-level decays of B-mesons. Our main
finding is that contributions of about $\pm 0.1 $ to the Wilson coefficient of
the colour-singlet operator $Q_2$ of the effective weak Hamiltonian and
contributions in the range of $\pm 0.5$ (both for real and imaginary part) to
$Q_1$ can currently not be excluded at the $90\%$ C.L.. Effects of such a size
can modify the direct experimental extraction of the CKM angle $\gamma$ by up
to $10^{\circ}$ and they could lead to an enhancement of the decay rate
difference $\Delta \Gamma_d$ of up to a factor of 5 over its SM value - a size
that could explain the D0 dimuon asymmetry. Future more precise measurements of
the semi-leptonic asymmetries $a_{sl}^q$ and the lifetime ratio $\tau (B_s) /
\tau (B_d)$ will allow to shrink the bounds on tree-level new physics effects
considerably. Due to significant improvements in the precision of the
non-perturbative input we update all SM predictions for the mixing obervables
in the course of this analysis, obtaining: $\Delta M_s = (18.77 \pm 0.86 ) \,
\mbox{ps}^{-1}$, $\Delta M_d = (0.543 \pm 0.029) \, \mbox{ps}^{-1}$, $\Delta
\Gamma_s = (9.1 \pm 1.3 ) \cdot 10^{-2} \, \mbox{ps}^{-1}$, $\Delta \Gamma_d =
(2.6 \pm 0.4 ) \cdot 10^{-3} \, \mbox{ps}^{-1}$, $a_{sl}^s = (2.06 \pm 0.18)
\cdot 10^{-5}$ and $a_{sl}^d = (-4.73 \pm 0.42) \cdot 10^{-4}$.


  We propose speeding up a single ion heat pump based on a tapered ion trap. If
a trapped ion is excited in an oscillatory motion axially the radial degrees of
freedom are cyclically expanded and compressed such that heat can be pumped
between two reservoirs coupled to the ion at the turning points of oscillation.
Through the use of invariant-based inverse engineering we can speed up the
process without sacrificing the efficiency of each heat pump cycle. This
additional control can be supplied with additional control electrodes or it can
be encoded into the geometry of the radial trapping electrodes. We present
novel insight how speed up can be achieved through the use of inverted harmonic
potentials and verified the stability of such trapping conditions.


  The FAC, GRASP2K, and MCDFGME codes are compared in three case study of
radiative transitions occurring in tungsten ions: (i) Ni1 and Ni2 lines in
Ni-like tungsten, (ii) $3p_{3/2}{-}3p_{1/2}$ fine splitting in Cl-like
tungsten, and (iii) $K\alpha_{1}$ and $K\alpha_{2}$ lines in W VIII. Various
approaches to including the Breit interaction term and QED corrections in
atomic calculations are examined. Electron correlation effects are also
investigated and compared to the Breit and QED contributions. The data
presented here may be used to estimate theoretical uncertainties relevant to
interpretation of high-resolution spectroscopic data.


  In recent years, deep neural networks (DNNs), have yielded strong results on
a wide range of applications. Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) have been one
key enabling factor leading to the current popularity of DNNs. However, despite
increasing hardware flexibility and software programming toolchain maturity,
high efficiency GPU programming remains difficult: it suffers from high
complexity, low productivity, and low portability. GPU vendors such as NVIDIA
have spent enormous effort to write special-purpose DNN libraries. However, on
other hardware targets, especially mobile GPUs, such vendor libraries are not
generally available. Thus, the development of portable, open, high-performance,
energy-efficient GPU code for DNN operations would enable broader deployment of
DNN-based algorithms. Toward this end, this work presents a framework to enable
productive, high-efficiency GPU programming for DNN computations across
hardware platforms and programming models. In particular, the framework
provides specific support for metaprogramming, autotuning, and DNN-tailored
data types. Using our framework, we explore implementing DNN operations on
three different hardware targets: NVIDIA, AMD, and Qualcomm GPUs. On NVIDIA
GPUs, we show both portability between OpenCL and CUDA as well competitive
performance compared to the vendor library. On Qualcomm GPUs, we show that our
framework enables productive development of target-specific optimizations, and
achieves reasonable absolute performance. Finally, On AMD GPUs, we show initial
results that indicate our framework can yield reasonable performance on a new
platform with minimal effort.


  The validity of the few-level approximation in dipole-dipole interacting
collective systems is discussed. As example system, we study the archetype case
of two dipole-dipole interacting atoms, each modelled by two complete sets of
angular momentum multiplets. We establish the breakdown of the few-level
approximation by first proving the intuitive result that the dipole-dipole
induced energy shifts between collective two-atom states depend on the length
of the vector connecting the atoms, but not on its orientation, if complete and
degenerate multiplets are considered. A careful analysis of our findings
reveals that the simplification of the atomic level scheme by artificially
omitting Zeeman sublevels in a few-level approximation generally leads to
incorrect predictions. We find that this breakdown can be traced back to the
dipole-dipole coupling of transitions with orthogonal dipole moments. Our
interpretation enables us to identify special geometries in which partial
few-level approximations to two- or three-level systems are valid.


  The spectral theory of the normalized Laplacian for chemical hypergraphs is
further investigated. The signless normalized Laplacian is introduced and it is
shown that its spectrum for classical hypergraphs coincides with the spectrum
of the normalized Laplacian for bipartite chemical hypergraphs. Furthermore,
the spectra of special families of hypergraphs are established.


  To meet the requirements of real-world applications, it is essential to
control generations of large language models (LLMs). Prior research has tried
to introduce reinforcement learning (RL) into controllable text generation
while most existing methods suffer from overfitting issues (finetuning-based
methods) or semantic collapse (post-processing methods). However, current RL
methods are generally guided by coarse-grained (sentence/paragraph-level)
feedback, which may lead to suboptimal performance owing to semantic twists or
progressions within sentences. To tackle that, we propose a novel reinforcement
learning algorithm named TOLE which formulates TOken-LEvel rewards for
controllable text generation, and employs a "first-quantize-then-noise"
paradigm to enhance the robustness of the RL algorithm.Furthermore, TOLE can be
flexibly extended to multiple constraints with little computational expense.
Experimental results show that our algorithm can achieve superior performance
on both single-attribute and multi-attribute control tasks. We have released
our codes at https://github.com/WindyLee0822/CTG


  Persistence of updates to remote byte-addressable persistent memory (PM),
using RDMA operations (RDMA updates), is a poorly understood subject.
Visibility of RDMA updates on the remote server is not the same as persistence
of those updates. The remote server's configuration has significant
implications on what it means for RDMA updates to be persistent on the remote
server. This leads to significant implications on methods needed to correctly
persist those updates. This paper presents a comprehensive taxonomy of system
configurations and the corresponding methods to ensure correct remote
persistence of RDMA updates. We show that the methods for correct, fast remote
persistence vary dramatically, with corresponding performance trade offs,
between different remote server configurations.


  The intrinsic noncollinear spin patterns in rare-earth pyrochlore are
physically interesting, hosting many emergent properties, e.g. spin ice and
monopole-type excitation. Recently, the magnetic monopole excitation of spin
ice systems was predicted to be magnetoelectric active, while rare experimental
works have directly confirmed this scenario. In this work, we performed
systematic experimental investigation on the magnetoelectricity of
Dy$_2$Ti$_2$O$_7$ by probing the ferroelectricity, spin dynamics, and
dielectric behaviors. Two ferroelectric transitions at $T_{c1}$=25 K and
$T_{c2}$=13 K have been observed. Remarkable magnetoelectric coupling is
identified below the lower transition temperature, with a significant
suppression of the electric polarization upon applied magnetic field. It is
surprised that the lower ferroelectric transition temperature just coincides
with the Ising-spin paramagnetic transition point, below which the
quasi-particle-like monopoles are populated, indicating implicit correlation
between electric dipoles and spin moments. The possible magnetoelectric
mechanisms have also been discussed although a decent theory remains
unavailable up to date. Our results will stimulate more investigations to
explore multiferroicity in these spin ice systems and other frustrated magnets.


  Over 80% of wireless traffic already takes place in buildings. Like water,
gas, and electricity, wireless communication is becoming one of the most
fundamental utilities of a building. It is well known that building structures
have a significant impact on in-building wireless networks. If we seek to
achieve the optimal network performance indoors, the buildings should be
designed with the objective of maximizing wireless performance. So far,
wireless performance has not yet been considered when designing a building. In
this paper, we introduce a novel and interdisciplinary concept of building
wireless performance (BWP) to a wide audience in both wireless communications
and building design, emphasizing its broad impacts on wireless network
development and deployment, and on building layout/material design. We first
give an overview of the BWP evaluation framework proposed in our
state-of-the-art works and explain their interconnections. Then, we outline the
potential research directions in this exciting research area to encourage
further interdisciplinary research.


  Thermally reduced QCD leads to three dimensional SU(3) gaugefields coupled to
an adjoint scalar field $A_0$. We compute the effective potential in the
one-loop approximation and evaluate the VEV's of $TrA_0^2$ and $TrA_0^3$. In
the Higgs phase not only the former, but also the latter has a VEV. This
happens where the SU(3) gauge symmetry is broken minimally with U(2) still
unbroken. The VEV of the cubic invariant breaks charge conjugation and CP. It
is plausible that in the Higgs phase one has a transition for large enough
Higgs selfcoupling to a region where $TrA_0^3$ has no VEV and where the
gaugesymmetry is broken maximally to $U(1)\times U(1)$. For a number of colours
larger than 3 an even richer phase structure is possible.


  Crossover motifs are integral components for designing DNA based
nanostructures and nanomechanical devices due to their enhanced rigidity
compared to the normal B-DNA. Although the structural rigidity of the double
helix B-DNA has been investigated extensively using both experimental and
theoretical tools, to date there is no quantitative information about
structural rigidity and the mechanical strength of parallel crossover DNA
motifs. We have used fully atomistic molecular dynamics simulations in explicit
solvent to get the force-extension curve of parallel DNA nanostructures to
characterize their mechanical rigidity. In the presence of mono-valent Na+
ions, we find that the stretch modulus (\gamma_1) of the paranemic crossover
(PX) and its topo-isomer JX DNA structure is significantly higher (~ 30%)
compared to normal B-DNA of the same sequence and length. However, this is in
contrast to the original expectation that these motifs are almost twice rigid
compared to the double-stranded B-DNA. When the DNA motif is surrounded by a
solvent with Mg2+ counterions, we find an enhanced rigidity compared to Na+
environment due to the electrostatic screening effects arising from the
divalent nature of Mg2+ ions. This is the first direct determination of the
mechanical strength of these crossover motifs which can be useful for the
design of suitable DNA for DNA based nanostructures and nanomechanical devices
with improved structural rigidity.


  This paper studies an extremely large-scale reconfigurable intelligent
surface (XL-RIS) empowered covert communication system in the near-field
region. Alice covertly transmits messages to Bob with the assistance of the
XL-RIS, while evading detection by Willie. To enhance the covert communication
performance, we maximize the achievable covert rate by jointly optimizing the
hybrid analog and digital beamformers at Alice, as well as the reflection
coefficient matrix at the XL-RIS. An alternating optimization algorithm is
proposed to solve the joint beamforming design problem. For the hybrid
beamformer design, a semi-closed-form solution for fully digital beamformer is
first obtained by a weighted minimum mean-square error based algorithm, then
the baseband digital and analog beamformers at Alice are designed by
approximating the fully digital beamformer via manifold optimization. For the
XL-RIS's reflection coefficient matrix design, a low-complexity alternating
direction method of multipliers based algorithm is proposed to address the
challenge of large-scale variables and unit-modulus constraints. Numerical
results unveil that i) the near-field communications can achieve a higher
covert rate than the far-field covert communications in general, and still
realize covert transmission even if Willie is located at the same direction as
Bob and closer to the XL-RIS; ii) the proposed algorithm can enhance the covert
rate significantly compared to the benchmark schemes; iii) the proposed
algorithm leads to a beam diffraction pattern that can bypass Willie and
achieve high-rate covert transmission to Bob.


  Context. Multi-dimensional solar flare simulations have not yet included
detailed analysis of the lower atmospheric responses such as down-flowing
chromospheric compressions and chromospheric evaporation processes.
  Aims. We present an analysis of multi-dimensional flare simulations,
including analysis of chromospheric up-flows and down-flows that provide
important groundwork for comparing 1D and multi-dimensional models.
  Methods. We follow the evolution of an MHD standard solar flare model
including electron beams, where localized anomalous resistivity initiates
magnetic reconnection. We vary the background magnetic field strength, to
produce simulations that cover a large span of observationally reported solar
flare strengths. Chromospheric energy fluxes, and energy density maps are used
to analyse the transport of energy from the corona to the lower atmosphere, and
the resultant evolution of the flare. Quantities traced along 1D field-lines
allow for detailed comparison with 1D evaporation models.


  Unambiguous discrimination and exact cloning reduce the square-overlap
between quantum states, exemplifying the more general type of procedure we term
state separation. We obtain the maximum probability with which two equiprobable
quantum states can be separated by an arbitrary degree, and find that the
established bounds on the success probabilities for discrimination and cloning
are special cases of this general bound. The latter also gives the maximum
probability of successfully producing N exact copies of a quantum system whose
state is chosen secretly from a known pair, given M initial realisations of the
state, where N>M. We also discuss the relationship between this bound and that
on unambiguous state discrimination.


  This paper studies the computational offloading of video action recognition
in edge computing. To achieve effective semantic information extraction and
compression, following semantic communication we propose a novel spatiotemporal
attention-based autoencoder (STAE) architecture, including a frame attention
module and a spatial attention module, to evaluate the importance of frames and
pixels in each frame. Additionally, we use entropy encoding to remove
statistical redundancy in the compressed data to further reduce communication
overhead. At the receiver, we develop a lightweight decoder that leverages a
3D-2D CNN combined architecture to reconstruct missing information by
simultaneously learning temporal and spatial information from the received data
to improve accuracy. To fasten convergence, we use a step-by-step approach to
train the resulting STAE-based vision transformer (ViT_STAE) models.
Experimental results show that ViT_STAE can compress the video dataset HMDB51
by 104x with only 5% accuracy loss, outperforming the state-of-the-art baseline
DeepISC. The proposed ViT_STAE achieves faster inference and higher accuracy
than the DeepISC-based ViT model under time-varying wireless channel, which
highlights the effectiveness of STAE in guaranteeing higher accuracy under time
constraints.


  Monte Carlo simulation, experiment and continuum theory are used to examine
the anchoring exhibited by a nematic liquid crystal at a patterned substrate
comprising a periodic array of rectangles that, respectively, promote vertical
and planar alignment. It is shown that the easy axis and effective anchoring
energy promoted by such surfaces can be readily controlled by adjusting the
design of the pattern. The calculations reveal rich behavior: for strong
anchoring, as exhibited by the simulated system, for rectangle ratios $\geq 2$
the nematic aligns in the direction of the long edge of the rectangles, the
azimuthal anchoring coefficient changing with pattern shape. In weak anchoring
scenarios, however, including our experimental systems, preferential anchoring
is degenerate between the two rectangle diagonals. Bistability between
diagonally-aligned and edge-aligned arrangement is predicted for intermediate
combinations of anchoring coefficient and system length-scale.


  We introduce the public computer code HiggsSignals, which can be used to test
the predictions from models with arbitrary Higgs sectors against experimental
measurements. Following a brief description of the code, several examples of
HiggsSignals applications are given. We derive constraints on extended Higgs
sectors taking into account the measured rates for the observed LHC Higgs
signal in all available channels. The results are presented both in a
model-independent framework with coupling scale factors that parametrize
deviations from the Standard Model, and in a model-dependent example where we
analyze a specific benchmark scenario of the minimal supersymmetric standard
model.


  Droplet solitons are a strongly nonlinear, inherently dynamic structure in
the magnetization of ferromagnets, balancing dispersion (exchange energy) with
focusing nonlinearity (strong perpendicular anisotropy). Large droplet solitons
have the approximate form of a circular domain wall sustained by precession
and, in contrast to single magnetic vortices, are predicted to propagate in an
extended, homogeneous magnetic medium. In this work, multiscale perturbation
theory is utilized to develop an analytical framework for investigating the
impact of additional physical effects on the behavior of a propagating droplet.
After first developing soliton perturbation theory in the general context of
Hamiltonian systems, a number of physical phenomena of current interest are
investigated. These include droplet-droplet and droplet-boundary interactions,
spatial magnetic field inhomogeneities, spin transfer torque induced forcing in
a nanocontact device, and damping. Their combined effects demonstrate the
fundamental mechanisms for a previously observed droplet drift instability and
under what conditions a slowly propagating droplet can be supported by the
nanocontact, important considerations for applications. This framework
emphasizes the particle-like dynamics of the droplet, providing analytically
tractable and practical predictions for modern experimental configurations.


  Medical image segmentation is crucial for the development of computer-aided
diagnostic and therapeutic systems, but still faces numerous difficulties. In
recent years, the commonly used encoder-decoder architecture based on CNNs has
been applied effectively in medical image segmentation, but has limitations in
terms of learning global context and spatial relationships. Some researchers
have attempted to incorporate transformers into both the decoder and encoder
components, with promising results, but this approach still requires further
improvement due to its high computational complexity. This paper introduces
Dilated-UNet, which combines a Dilated Transformer block with the U-Net
architecture for accurate and fast medical image segmentation. Image patches
are transformed into tokens and fed into the U-shaped encoder-decoder
architecture, with skip-connections for local-global semantic feature learning.
The encoder uses a hierarchical Dilated Transformer with a combination of
Neighborhood Attention and Dilated Neighborhood Attention Transformer to
extract local and sparse global attention. The results of our experiments show
that Dilated-UNet outperforms other models on several challenging medical image
segmentation datasets, such as ISIC and Synapse.


  Solvable loop quantum cosmology provides a simple model of spatially flat,
homogeneous, and isotropic quantum cosmology where the initial singularity is
resolved. A close inspection of the literature reveals that there exist two
different proposals for a scalar product that are usually assumed to be
identical, but agree only in the large volume limit. The small volume limit,
and thus the reported difference, turns out to be important for questions such
as coarse graining fundamental quantum states in full theory embeddings of
these cosmological models.


  Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) time-domain signals exhibit
high peak-to-average (power) ratio (PAR), which requires linear radio-frequency
chains to avoid an increase in error-vector magnitude (EVM) and out-of-band
(OOB) emissions. In this paper, we propose a novel joint PAR reduction and
precoding algorithm that relaxes these linearity requirements in massive
multiuser (MU) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless systems.
Concretely, we develop a novel alternating projections method, which limits the
PAR and transmit power increase while simultaneously suppressing MU
interference. We provide a theoretical foundation of our algorithm and provide
simulation results for a massive MU-MIMO-OFDM scenario. Our results demonstrate
significant PAR reduction while limiting the transmit power, without causing
EVM or OOB emissions.


  Let $G$ be a locally compact group and let $C^*(G)$ and $C^*_r(G)$ be the
full group $C^*$-algebra and the reduced group $C^*$-algebra of $G$. We
investigate the relationship between Property $(T)$ for $G$ and Property $(T)$
as well as its strong version for $C^*(G)$ and $C^*_r(G)$. We show that $G$ has
Property $(T)$ if (and only if) $C^*(G)$ has Property $(T)$. In the case where
$G$ is a locally compact IN-group, we prove that $G$ has Property $(T)$ if and
only if $C^*_r(G)$ has strong Property $(T)$. We also show that $C^*_r(G)$ has
strong Property $(T)$ for every non-amenable locally compact group $G$ for
which $C^*_r(G)$ is nuclear. Some of these groups (as for instance
$G=SL_2(\mathbf{R})$) do not have Property $T$.


  We investigate the Mott transitions in two-orbital Hubbard systems. Applying
the dynamical mean field theory and the self-energy functional approach, we
discuss the stability of itinerant quasi-particle states in each band. It is
shown that separate Mott transitions occur at different Coulomb interaction
strengths in general. On the other hand, if some special conditions are
satisfied for the interactions, spin and orbital fluctuations are equally
enhanced at low temperatures, resulting in a single Mott transition. The phase
diagrams are obtained at zero and finite temperatures. We also address the
effect of the hybridization between two orbitals, which induces the Kondo-like
heavy fermion states in the intermediate orbital-selective Mott phase.


  The Latin language has received attention from the computational linguistics
research community, which has built, over the years, several valuable
resources, ranging from detailed annotated corpora to sophisticated tools for
linguistic analysis. With the recent advent of large language models,
researchers have also started developing models capable of generating vector
representations of Latin texts. The performances of such models remain behind
the ones for modern languages, given the disparity in available data. In this
paper, we present the LiMe dataset, a corpus of 325 documents extracted from a
series of medieval manuscripts called Libri sententiarum potestatis Mediolani,
and thoroughly annotated by experts, in order to be employed for masked
language model, as well as supervised natural language processing tasks.


  The rate-distortion-perception function (RDPF; Blau and Michaeli, 2019) has
emerged as a useful tool for thinking about realism and distortion of
reconstructions in lossy compression. Unlike the rate-distortion function,
however, it is unknown whether encoders and decoders exist that achieve the
rate suggested by the RDPF. Building on results by Li and El Gamal (2018), we
show that the RDPF can indeed be achieved using stochastic, variable-length
codes. For this class of codes, we also prove that the RDPF lower-bounds the
achievable rate


  We introduce complex cones and associated projective gauges, generalizing a
real Birkhoff cone and its Hilbert metric to complex vector spaces. We deduce a
variety of spectral gap theorems in complex Banach spaces. We prove a dominated
complex cone-contraction Theorem and use it to extend the classical
Perron-Frobenius Theorem to complex matrices, Jentzsch's Theorem to complex
integral operators, a Krein-Rutman Theorem to compact and quasi-compact complex
operators and a Ruelle-Perron-Frobenius Theorem to complex transfer operators
in dynamical systems.
  In the simplest case of a complex n by n matrix A we have the following
statement: Suppose that 0 < c < +infinity is such that |Im A_{ij} \bar{A}_{mn}|
< c < Re A_{ij} \bar{A}_{mn} for all indices. Then A has a `spectral gap'.


  The possible formation of tensor condensates originated from a tensor-type
interaction between quarks is investigated in the three-flavor
Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model including the Kobayashi-Maskawa-'t Hooft interaction,
which leads to flavor mixing. It is shown that independent two tensor
condensates appear and a tensor condensate related to the strange quark easily
occurs by the effect of the flavor mixing compared with one related to light
quarks. Also, it is shown that the tensor condensate related to the strange
quark appears at a slightly smaller chemical potential if the
Kobayashi-Maskawa-'t Hooft interaction is included, due to the flavor mixing
effect. It is also shown that the two kinds of tensor condensates may coexist
in a certain quark chemical potential due to the flavor mixing.


  We explore the prospects for Advanced LIGO to detect gravitational waves from
neutron stars and stellar mass black holes spiraling into intermediate-mass
($M\sim 50 M_\odot$ to $350 M_\odot$) black holes. We estimate an event rate
for such \emph{intermediate-mass-ratio inspirals} (IMRIs) of up to $\sim
10$--$30 \mathrm{yr}^{-1}$. Our numerical simulations show that if the central
body is not a black hole but its metric is stationary, axisymmetric, reflection
symmetric and asymptotically flat then the waves will likely be tri-periodic,
as for a black hole. We report generalizations of a theorem due to Ryan (1995)
which suggest that the evolutions of the waves' three fundamental frequencies
and of the complex amplitudes of their spectral components encode (in
principle) a full map of the central body's metric, full details of the energy
and angular momentum exchange between the central body and the orbit, and the
time-evolving orbital elements. We estimate that Advanced LIGO can measure or
constrain deviations of the central body from a Kerr black hole with modest but
interesting accuracy.


  We consider a family of integer sequences generated by nonlinear recurrences
of the second order, which have the curious property that the terms of the
sequence, and integer multiples of the ratios of successive terms (which are
also integers), appear interlaced in the continued fraction expansion of the
sum of the reciprocals of the terms. Using the rapid (double exponential)
growth of the terms, for each sequence it is shown that the sum of the
reciprocals is a transcendental number.


  Bayesian optimization (BO) is a class of global optimization algorithms,
suitable for minimizing an expensive objective function in as few function
evaluations as possible. While BO budgets are typically given in iterations,
this implicitly measures convergence in terms of iteration count and assumes
each evaluation has identical cost. In practice, evaluation costs may vary in
different regions of the search space. For example, the cost of neural network
training increases quadratically with layer size, which is a typical
hyperparameter. Cost-aware BO measures convergence with alternative cost
metrics such as time, energy, or money, for which vanilla BO methods are
unsuited. We introduce Cost Apportioned BO (CArBO), which attempts to minimize
an objective function in as little cost as possible. CArBO combines a
cost-effective initial design with a cost-cooled optimization phase which
depreciates a learned cost model as iterations proceed. On a set of 20
black-box function optimization problems we show that, given the same cost
budget, CArBO finds significantly better hyperparameter configurations than
competing methods.


  We construct a special embedding of the translation quiver $\mathbb{Z}Q$ in
the three-dimensional affine space $\mathbb{R}^{3}$ where $Q$ is a finite
connected acyclic quiver and $\mathbb{Z}Q$ contains a local slice whose quiver
is isomorphic to the opposite quiver $Q^{op}$ of $Q.$ Via this embedding, we
show that there exists an involutive anti-automorphism of the translation
quiver $\mathbb{Z}Q.$ As an immediate consequence, we characterize explicitly
the group of cluster automorphisms of the cluster algebras of seed $(X,Q)$,
where $Q$ and $Q^{op}$ are mutation equivalent.


  We show that the spin liquid phase of the half-filled Hubbard model on the
triangular lattice can be described by a pure spin model. This is based on a
high-order strong coupling expansion (up to order 12) using perturbative
continuous unitary transformations. The resulting spin model is consistent with
a transition from three-sublattice long-range magnetic order to an insulating
spin liquid phase, and with a jump of the double occupancy at the transition.
Exact diagonalizations of both models show that the effective spin model is
quantitatively accurate well into the spin liquid phase, and a comparison with
the Gutzwiller projected Fermi sea suggests a gapless spectrum and a spinon
Fermi surface.


  In this letter, we argue and show numerically that the threshold to form
primordial black holes from an initial spherically symmetric perturbation is,
to an excellent approximation, universal, whenever given in terms of the
compaction function averaged over a sphere of radius $r_m$, where $r_m$ is the
scale on which the compaction function is maximum. This can be understood as
the requirement that, for a black hole to form, each shell of the averaged
compaction function should have an amplitude exceeding the so-called
Harada-Yoo-Kohri limit. For a radiation dominated universe we argued, supported
by the numerical simulations, that this limit is $\delta_c = 0.40$, which is
slightly below the one quoted in the literature. Additionally, we show that the
profile dependence of the threshold for the compaction function is only
sensitive to its curvature at the maximum. We use these results to provide an
analytic formula for the threshold amplitude of the compaction function at its
maximum in terms of the normalised compaction function curvature at $r_m$.


  In this note, we analyze the classification problem for compact metrizable
$G$-ambits for a countable discrete group $G$ from the point of view of
descriptive set theory. More precisely, we prove that the topological conjugacy
relation on the standard Borel space of compact metrizable $G$-ambits is Borel
for every countable discrete group $G$.


  Randomized rumor spreading is a classical protocol to disseminate information
across a network. At SODA 2008, a quasirandom version of this protocol was
proposed and competitive bounds for its run-time were proven. This prompts the
question: to what extent does the quasirandom protocol inherit the second
principal advantage of randomized rumor spreading, namely robustness against
transmission failures?
  In this paper, we present a result precise up to $(1 \pm o(1))$ factors. We
limit ourselves to the network in which every two vertices are connected by a
direct link. Run-times accurate to their leading constants are unknown for all
other non-trivial networks.
  We show that if each transmission reaches its destination with a probability
of $p \in (0,1]$, after $(1+\e)(\frac{1}{\log_2(1+p)}\log_2n+\frac{1}{p}\ln n)$
rounds the quasirandom protocol has informed all $n$ nodes in the network with
probability at least $1-n^{-p\e/40}$. Note that this is faster than the
intuitively natural $1/p$ factor increase over the run-time of approximately
$\log_2 n + \ln n $ for the non-corrupted case.
  We also provide a corresponding lower bound for the classical model. This
demonstrates that the quasirandom model is at least as robust as the fully
random model despite the greatly reduced degree of independent randomness.


  The rise of quantum computers exposes vulnerabilities in current public key
cryptographic protocols, necessitating the development of secure post-quantum
(PQ) schemes. Hence, we conduct a comprehensive study on various PQ approaches,
covering the constructional design, structural vulnerabilities, and offer
security assessments, implementation evaluations, and a particular focus on
side-channel attacks. We analyze global standardization processes, evaluate
their metrics in relation to real-world applications, and primarily focus on
standardized PQ schemes, selected additional signature competition candidates,
and PQ-secure cutting-edge schemes beyond standardization. Finally, we present
visions and potential future directions for a seamless transition to the PQ
era.


  Spatial self-phase modulation (SSPM) is the optical nonlinear process and is
a result of spatially varying refractive index profile along the line of
propagation in a medium. SSPM is proved to be a method to demonstrate different
photonic functionalities. Transition metal dichalcogenides play a key role in
2D nanophononics due to their unique and fascinating properties. MoS2 is the
widely studied layered TMDs among all other 2D materials. This paper
demonstrates such photonic functionality using thermally induced nonlinear
optical response SSPM method, of MoS2 nano bottles. Thermally induced nonlinear
optical parameters have been estimated by utilizing the saturable absorption
response of h- BN, the nonreciprocal light propagation has been achieved. The
diode actions have also been demonstrated in liquid-solid and solid-solid
devices with the help of passive elements.


  We propose an ab-initio combination of the Linear Muffin-Tin Orbital and the
Recursion Methods to study the effect of extended Stone-Wales defects in single
layer Carbon nanotubes. We have successfully applied this to zigzag and
armchair tubes. The methodology involves no intrinsic mean-field like
assumptions or external parameter fitting. As defects proliferate, the low
density of states near the Fermi levels of the pristine tubes is filled with
defect states. The increase of DOS at the Fermi level leads to enhanced
conduction, which indicates enhanced metallicity due to SW defects in the
nanotubes.


  Swarming or collective motion of living entities is one of the most common
and spectacular manifestations of living systems having been extensively
studied in recent years. A number of general principles have been established.
The interactions at the level of cells are quite different from those among
individual animals therefore the study of collective motion of cells is likely
to reveal some specific important features which are overviewed in this paper.
In addition to presenting the most appealing results from the quickly growing
related literature we also deliver a critical discussion of the emerging
picture and summarize our present understanding of collective motion at the
cellular level. Collective motion of cells plays an essential role in a number
of experimental and real-life situations. In most cases the coordinated motion
is a helpful aspect of the given phenomenon and results in making a related
process more efficient (e.g., embryogenesis or wound healing), while in the
case of tumor cell invasion it appears to speed up the progression of the
disease. In these mechanisms cells both have to be motile and adhere to one
another, the adherence feature being the most specific to this sort of
collective behavior. One of the central aims of this review is both presenting
the related experimental observations and treating them in the light of a few
basic computational models so as to make an interpretation of the phenomena at
a quantitative level as well.


  We investigate the in-medium masses of a $\bar{D} (0^-)$ meson and a
$\bar{D}_0^* (0^+)$ meson and spectral functions for $\bar{D}$ and
$\bar{D}_0^*$ meson channels in nuclear matter. These mesons are introduced as
chiral partner in the chiral symmetry broken vacuum, hence they are useful to
explore the partial restoration of the broken chiral symmetry in nuclear
matter. We consider the linear sigma model to describe the chiral symmetry
breaking. Our study shows that the loop corrections to $\bar{D}$ and
$\bar{D}_0^*$ meson masses provide a smaller mass splitting at finite density
than that in vacuum, whose result indicates a tendency of the restoration of
the chiral symmetry. We investigate also the spectral function for
$\bar{D}_0^*$ meson channel, and find three peaks. The first peak which
corresponds to the resonance of $\bar{D}_0^*$ meson is broadened by collisions
with nucleons in medium, and the peak position shifts to lower mass due to the
partial restoration of chiral symmetry as the density increases. The second
peak is identified as a threshold enhancement which shows a remarkable
enhancement as the density increase. The third peak is Landau damping. The
obtained properties of $\bar{D}$ and $\bar{D}_0^*$ mesons in nuclear matter
will provide useful information for experiments.


  This paper presents a distributed solution for the problem of collaborative
collision avoidance for autonomous inland waterway ships. A two-layer collision
avoidance framework that considers inland waterway traffic regulations is
proposed to increase navigational safety for autonomous ships. Our approach
allows for modifying traffic rules without changing the collision avoidance
algorithm, and is based on a novel formulation of model predictive control
(MPC) for collision avoidance of ships. This MPC formulation is designed for
inland waterway traffic and can handle complex scenarios. The alternating
direction method of multipliers is used as a scheme for exchanging and
negotiating intentions among ships. Simulation results show that the proposed
algorithm can comply with traffic rules. Furthermore, the proposed algorithm
can safely deviate from traffic rules when necessary to increase efficiency in
complex scenarios.


  The equations for spin evolution of a particle in a storage ring are obtained
considering contributions from the tensor electric and magnetic
polarizabilities of the particle along with the contributions from spin
rotation and birefringence effect in polarized matter of an internal target. %
Study of the spin rotation and birefringence effects for a particle in a high
energy storage ring provides for measurement both the spin-dependent real part
of the coherent elastic zero-angle scattering amplitude and tensor electric
(magnetic) polarizabilities.


  Carpi (1993) and Lepisto (1994) proved independently that smooth words are
cube-free for the alphabet {1, 2}, but nothing is known on whether for the
other 2-letter alphabets, smooth words are k-power-free for some suitable
positive integer k. In this paper, we first establish the derivative formula of
the concatenation of two smooth words and power derivative formula of smooth
words over arbitrary 2-letter alphabets. Then by making use of power derivative
formula, for arbitrary 2-letter alphabet {a, b} with a, b being positive
integers and a<b, we prove that smooth words are (b+1)-power-free except for
a=1 and b=3; and smooth words are quintic-free and there are infinitely many
smooth biquadrates for the alphabet {1, 3}. Moreover, we give the number of
smooth words of form w^n with a and b having the same parity.


  In this work, we investigate how a smooth transition from a constant-roll to
a slow-roll inflationary era may be realized, in the context of a canonical
scalar field theory. We study in some detail the dynamical evolution of the
cosmological system, and we investigate whether a stable attractor exists, both
numerically and analytically. We also investigate the slow-roll era and as we
demonstrate, partially compatibility of the resulting scalar theory, may be
achieved, with the potential of the latter belonging to a class of modular
inflationary potentials. The novel features of the constant-roll to slow-roll
transition which we achieved, are firstly that the it is not compelling for the
slow-roll era to last for $N\sim 50-60$ $e$-foldings, but it may last for a
smaller number of $e$-foldings, since some $e$-foldings may occur during the
constant-roll era. Secondly, when the slow-roll era occurs after the
constant-roll era, the graceful exit from inflation may occur, a feature absent
in the constant-roll scenario, due to the stability properties of the final
attractor in the constant-roll case.


  We study the problem of supervised linear dimensionality reduction, taking an
information-theoretic viewpoint. The linear projection matrix is designed by
maximizing the mutual information between the projected signal and the class
label (based on a Shannon entropy measure). By harnessing a recent theoretical
result on the gradient of mutual information, the above optimization problem
can be solved directly using gradient descent, without requiring simplification
of the objective function. Theoretical analysis and empirical comparison are
made between the proposed method and two closely related methods (Linear
Discriminant Analysis and Information Discriminant Analysis), and comparisons
are also made with a method in which Renyi entropy is used to define the mutual
information (in this case the gradient may be computed simply, under a special
parameter setting). Relative to these alternative approaches, the proposed
method achieves promising results on real datasets.


  A theoretical scheme for an experimental implementation involving bisolitonic
matter waves from an attractive Bose-Einstein condensate, is considered within
the framework of a non-perturbative approach to the associate Gross-Pitaevskii
equation. The model consists of a single condensate subjected to an expulsive
harmonic potential creating a double-condensate structure, and a gravitational
potential that induces atomic exchanges between the two overlapping post
condensates. Using a non-isospectral scattering transform method, exact
expressions for the bright-matter-wave bisolitons are found in terms of
double-lump envelopes with the co-propagating pulses displaying more or less
pronounced differences in their widths and tails depending on the mass of atoms
composing the condensate.


  The physiological and behavioral trait is employed to develop biometric
authentication systems. The proposed work deals with the authentication of iris
and signature based on minimum variance criteria. The iris patterns are
preprocessed based on area of the connected components. The segmented image
used for authentication consists of the region with large variations in the
gray level values. The image region is split into quadtree components. The
components with minimum variance are determined from the training samples. Hu
moments are applied on the components. The summation of moment values
corresponding to minimum variance components are provided as input vector to
k-means and fuzzy kmeans classifiers. The best performance was obtained for MMU
database consisting of 45 subjects. The number of subjects with zero False
Rejection Rate [FRR] was 44 and number of subjects with zero False Acceptance
Rate [FAR] was 45. This paper addresses the computational load reduction in
off-line signature verification based on minimal features using k-means, fuzzy
k-means, k-nn, fuzzy k-nn and novel average-max approaches. FRR of 8.13% and
FAR of 10% was achieved using k-nn classifier. The signature is a biometric,
where variations in a genuine case, is a natural expectation. In the genuine
signature, certain parts of signature vary from one instance to another. The
system aims to provide simple, fast and robust system using less number of
features when compared to state of art works.


  The dynamical friction and diffusion coefficients are derived for a massive
binary that moves against a uniform background of stars. The random impulses
exerted on the binary's center of mass by the field stars are greater than
those exerted on a point particle due to inelastic scattering. The frictional
force acting on the binary is less than that acting on a point particle due to
randomization of the trajectories of field stars that pass near the binary.
Both effects tend to increase the random motion of a binary compared with that
of a point mass. If the maximum effective impact parameter for gravitational
encounters is comparable to the radius of gravitational influence of the
binary, its Brownian velocity can be increased by a modest factor compared with
that of a single particle. This condition is probably fulfilled in the case of
binary supermassive black holes in galactic nuclei.


  In federated learning (FL), clients usually have diverse participation
statistics that are unknown a priori, which can significantly harm the
performance of FL if not handled properly. Existing works aiming at addressing
this problem are usually based on global variance reduction, which requires a
substantial amount of additional memory in a multiplicative factor equal to the
total number of clients. An important open problem is to find a lightweight
method for FL in the presence of clients with unknown participation rates. In
this paper, we address this problem by adapting the aggregation weights in
federated averaging (FedAvg) based on the participation history of each client.
We first show that, with heterogeneous participation statistics, FedAvg with
non-optimal aggregation weights can diverge from the optimal solution of the
original FL objective, indicating the need of finding optimal aggregation
weights. However, it is difficult to compute the optimal weights when the
participation statistics are unknown. To address this problem, we present a new
algorithm called FedAU, which improves FedAvg by adaptively weighting the
client updates based on online estimates of the optimal weights without knowing
the statistics of client participation. We provide a theoretical convergence
analysis of FedAU using a novel methodology to connect the estimation error and
convergence. Our theoretical results reveal important and interesting insights,
while showing that FedAU converges to an optimal solution of the original
objective and has desirable properties such as linear speedup. Our experimental
results also verify the advantage of FedAU over baseline methods with various
participation patterns.


  By abstracting Grid middleware specific considerations from clinical research
applications, re-usable services should be developed that will provide generic
functionality aimed specifically at medical applications. In the scope of the
neuGRID project, generic services are being designed and developed which will
be applied to satisfy the requirements of neuroscientists. These services will
bring together sources of data and computing elements into a single view as far
as applications are concerned, making it possible to cope with centralised,
distributed or hybrid data and provide native support for common medical file
formats. Services will include querying, provenance, portal, anonymization and
pipeline services together with a 'glueing' service for connection to Grid
services. Thus lower-level services will hide the peculiarities of any specific
Grid technology from upper layers, provide application independence and will
enable the selection of 'fit-for-purpose' infrastructures. This paper outlines
the design strategy being followed in neuGRID using the glueing and pipeline
services as examples.


  Let $d >1$. In this paper we show that for an irreducible permutation $\pi$
which is not a rotation, the set of $[\lambda]\in \mathbb{P}_+^{d-1}$ such that
the interval exchange transformation $f([\lambda],\pi)$ is not weakly mixing
does not have full Hausdorff dimension. We also obtain an analogous statement
for translation flows. In particular, it strengthens the result of almost sure
weak mixing proved by G. Forni and the first author. We adapt here the
probabilistic argument developed in their paper in order to get some large
deviation results. We then show how the latter can be converted into estimates
on the Hausdorff dimension of the set of "bad" parameters in the context of
fast decaying cocycles, following a strategy developed by V. Delecroix and the
first author.


  Using symmetry properties, we determine the mixing pattern of a class of
nonlocal quark bilinear operators containing a straight Wilson line along a
spatial direction. We confirm the previous study that mixing among the lowest
dimensional operators, which have mass dimension equals three, can occur if
chiral symmetry is broken in the lattice action. For higher dimensional
operators, we find that the dimension three operators will always mix with
dimension four operators even if chiral symmetry is preserved. Also, the number
of dimension four operators involved in the mixing is large hence it is
impractical to remove the mixing by the improvement procedure. Our result is
important to determining the Bjorken-$x$ dependence parton distribution
functions using the quasi-distribution method on a Euclidean lattice. The
requirement of using large hadron momentum in this approach makes the control
of errors from dimension four operators even more important.


  We calculate the most general effective potential for the massless Thirring
model in dependence of the local fields of all fermion-antifermion collective
excitations. We analyse the minima of this potential describing different vacua
of the quantum system. We confirm the existence of the absolute minimum found
in EPJC 20, 723 (2001) corresponding to the chirally broken phase of the
massless Thirring model. As has been shown in EPJC 20, 723 (2001) this minimum
is stable under quantum fluctuations.


  High flux of hyperentangled photons entails collecting the two-photon
emission over relatively wide extent in frequency and transverse space within
which the photon pairs are simultaneously entangled in multiple degrees of
freedom. In this paper, we present a numerical approach to determining the
spatial-spectral relative-phase and time-delay maps of hyperentangled photons
all over the spontaneous parametric down conversion (SPDC) emission cone. We
consider the hyperentangled-photons produced by superimposing noncollinear SPDC
emissions of two crossed and coherently-pumped nonlinear crystals. We adopt a
vectorial representation for all parameters of concern. This enables us to
study special settings such as the self-compensation via oblique pump
incidence. While rigorous quantum treatment of SPDC emission requires Gaussian
state representation, in low-gain regime (like the case of the study), it is
well approximated to the first order to superposition of vacuum and two-photon
states. The relative phase and time-delay maps are then calculated between the
two-photon wavepackets created along symmetrical locations of the crystals.
Assuming monochromatic plane-wave pump field, the mutual signal-idler relations
like energy conservation and transverse-momentum conservation define well one
of the two-photon with reference to its conjugate. The weaker conservation of
longitudinal momentum (due to relatively thin crystals) allows two-photon
emission directions coplanar with the pump beam while spreading around the
perfect phase-matching direction. While prior works often adopt first-order
approximation, it is shown that the relative-phase map is a very well
approximated to a quadratic function in the polar angle of the two-photon
emission while negligibly varying with the azimuthal angle.


  As a generalization of holomorphic submersions, anti-invariant submersions
and slant submersions, we introduce slant Riemannian maps from almost Hermitian
manifolds to Riemannian manifolds. We give examples, obtain the existence
conditions of slant Riemannian maps and investigate harmonicity of such maps.
We also obtain necessary and sufficient conditions for slant Riemannian maps to
be totally geodesic and give a decomposition theorem for the total manifold.


  The skew Schubert polynomials are those which are indexed by skew elements of
the Weyl group, in the sense of arXiv:0812.0639. We obtain tableau formulas for
the double versions of these polynomials in all four classical Lie types, where
the tableaux used are fillings of the associated skew Young diagram. These are
the first such theorems for symplectic and orthogonal Schubert polynomials,
even in the single case. We also deduce tableau formulas for double Schur,
double theta, and double eta polynomials, in their specializations as double
Grassmannian Schubert polynomials. The latter results generalize the tableau
formulas for symmetric (and single) Schubert polynomials due to Littlewood (in
type A) and the author (in types B, C, and D).


  Human emotions unfold over time, and more affective computing research has to
prioritize capturing this crucial component of real-world affect. Modeling
dynamic emotional stimuli requires solving the twin challenges of time-series
modeling and of collecting high-quality time-series datasets. We begin by
assessing the state-of-the-art in time-series emotion recognition, and we
review contemporary time-series approaches in affective computing, including
discriminative and generative models. We then introduce the first version of
the Stanford Emotional Narratives Dataset (SENDv1): a set of rich, multimodal
videos of self-paced, unscripted emotional narratives, annotated for emotional
valence over time. The complex narratives and naturalistic expressions in this
dataset provide a challenging test for contemporary time-series emotion
recognition models. We demonstrate several baseline and state-of-the-art
modeling approaches on the SEND, including a Long Short-Term Memory model and a
multimodal Variational Recurrent Neural Network, which perform comparably to
the human-benchmark. We end by discussing the implications for future research
in time-series affective computing.


  We study the geometry of domains in complete metric measure spaces equipped
with a doubling measure supporting a $1$-Poincar\'e inequality. We propose a
notion of \emph{domain with boundary of positive mean curvature} and prove
that, for such domains, there is always a solution to the Dirichlet problem for
least gradients with continuous boundary data. Here \emph{least gradient} is
defined as minimizing total variation (in the sense of BV functions) and
boundary conditions are satisfied in the sense that the \emph{boundary trace}
of the solution exists and agrees with the given boundary data. This extends
the result of Sternberg, Williams and Ziemer to the non-smooth setting. Via
counterexamples we also show that uniqueness of solutions and existence of
\emph{continuous} solutions can fail, even in the weighted Euclidean setting
with Lipschitz weights.


  Modulation of the properties of AMPA receptors at the post-synaptic membrane
is one of the main suggested mechanisms behind synaptic plasticity in the
central nervous system of vertebrates. Electrophysiological recordings of
single channels stimulated with agonists showed that both recombinant and
native AMPA receptors visit multiple conductance states in an agonist
concentration dependent manner. We propose an allosteric model of the multiple
conductance states based on concerted conformational transitions of the four
subunits, as an iris diaphragm. Our model predicts that the thermodynamic
behaviour of the conductance states upon full and partial agonist stimulations
can be described with increased affinity of receptors as they progress to
higher conductance states. The model also predicts existence of AMPA receptors
in non-liganded conductive substates. However, spontaneous openings probability
decreases with increasing conductances. Finally, we predict that the large
conductance states are stabilized within the rise phase of a whole-cell EPSC in
glutamatergic hippocampal neurons. Our model provides a mechanistic link
between ligand concentration and conductance states that can explain
thermodynamic and kinetic features of AMPA receptor gating.


  We consider the Navier-Stokes system solution, based at parametric
representation of desired function. This solution is unique and it show the
velocity of a stream element as its density structure [{\rho}_S
(x,y,z,t);{\rho}^\to_L (x,y,z,t)] function. The solution is smooth, defining
conditions of turbulence occurrence and supersonic shock waves in the viscous
substance. Given solution brings to light the genesis of earthquakes and
volcanic activity, of turbulence phenomenon and possible stave off natural and
anthropogenic catastrophes, connecting with this effect. Given solution allows
to evaluate the Bernoulli's law {\guillemotleft}line density{\guillemotright}
mechanism for aerodynamical airplanes checkouts and hydromechanical tests
correlation, for high-speed extension flood river compensation. In addition
given function allows to apply {\guillemotleft}isostatic
breakdown{\guillemotright} mechanism for resolution of the Gulf of Mexico and
similar problem.


  The Unruh vacuum is widely used as quantum state to describe black hole
evaporation since near the horizon it reproduces the physical state of a
quantum field, the so called in-vacuum, in the case the black hole is formed by
gravitational collapse. We examine the relation between these two quantum
states in the background spacetime of a Reissner-Nordstr\"om black hole (both
extremal and not) highlighting similarities and striking differences.


  The observation of neutrinoless double-beta ($0\nu\beta\beta$) decay would
offer proof of lepton number violation, demonstrating that neutrinos are
Majorana particles, while also helping us understand why there is more matter
than antimatter in the Universe. If the decay is driven by the exchange of the
three known light neutrinos, a discovery would, in addition, link the observed
decay rate to the neutrino mass scale through a theoretical quantity known as
the nuclear matrix element (NME). Accurate values of the NMEs for all nuclei
considered for use in $0\nu\beta\beta$ experiments are therefore crucial for
designing and interpreting those experiments. Here, we report the first
comprehensive ab initio uncertainty quantification of the
$0\nu\beta\beta$-decay NME, in the key nucleus $^{76}$Ge. Our method employs
nuclear strong and weak interactions derived within chiral effective field
theory and recently developed many-body emulators. Our result, with a
conservative treatment of uncertainty, is an NME of $2.60^{+1.28}_{-1.36}$,
which, together with the best-existing half-life sensitivity and phase-space
factor, sets an upper limit for effective neutrino mass of $187^{+205}_{-62}$
meV. The result is important for designing next-generation germanium detectors
aiming to cover the entire inverted hierarchy region of neutrino masses.


  In recent years, the paradigm of neural implicit representations has gained
substantial attention in the field of Simultaneous Localization and Mapping
(SLAM). However, a notable gap exists in the existing approaches when it comes
to scene understanding. In this paper, we introduce NIS-SLAM, an efficient
neural implicit semantic RGB-D SLAM system, that leverages a pre-trained 2D
segmentation network to learn consistent semantic representations.
Specifically, for high-fidelity surface reconstruction and spatial consistent
scene understanding, we combine high-frequency multi-resolution
tetrahedron-based features and low-frequency positional encoding as the
implicit scene representations. Besides, to address the inconsistency of 2D
segmentation results from multiple views, we propose a fusion strategy that
integrates the semantic probabilities from previous non-keyframes into
keyframes to achieve consistent semantic learning. Furthermore, we implement a
confidence-based pixel sampling and progressive optimization weight function
for robust camera tracking. Extensive experimental results on various datasets
show the better or more competitive performance of our system when compared to
other existing neural dense implicit RGB-D SLAM approaches. Finally, we also
show that our approach can be used in augmented reality applications. Project
page:
\href{https://zju3dv.github.io/nis_slam}{https://zju3dv.github.io/nis\_slam}.


  We developed a new microwave Hall effect measurement method for materials in
the skin depth region at low temperatures using a cross-shaped bimodal cavity.
We analytically calculated electromagnetic fields in the cross-shaped cavity,
and the response of the cavity including the sample, whose property is
represented by the surface impedance tensor; further, we constructed the method
to obtain the Hall component of the surface impedance tensor in terms of the
change in resonance characteristics. To confirm the validity of the new method,
we applied our method to measure the Hall effect in metallic Bi single crystals
at low temperatures, and we confirmed that the microwave Hall angles coincide
with the DC Hall angle. Thus, it becomes clear that the Hall angle measurement
under cryogenic conditions becomes possible without any complicated tuning
mechanisms, and our bimodal cavity method can be used to measure the microwave
Hall effect on materials in the skin depth region. The result opens a new
approach to discuss the Hall effect in condensed matter physics such as the
microwave flux-flow Hall effect in superconductors.


  Under the unified model for active galactic nuclei (AGNs), narrow-line (Type
2) AGNs are, in fact, broad-line (Type 1) AGNs but each with a heavily obscured
accretion disk. We would therefore expect the optical continuum emission from
Type 2 AGN to be composed mainly of stellar light and non-variable on the
time-scales of months to years. In this work we probe the spectroscopic
variability of galaxies and narrow-line AGNs using the multi-epoch data in the
Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Data Release 6. The sample contains 18,435
sources for which there exist pairs of spectroscopic observations (with a
maximum separation in time of ~700 days) covering a wavelength range of
3900-8900 angstrom. To obtain a reliable repeatability measurement between each
spectral pair, we consider a number of techniques for spectrophotometric
calibration resulting in an improved spectrophotometric calibration of a factor
of two. From these data we find no obvious continuum and emission-line
variability in the narrow-line AGNs on average -- the spectroscopic variability
of the continuum is 0.07+/-0.26 mag in the g band and, for the emission-line
ratios log10([NII]/Halpha) and log10([OIII]/Hbeta), the variability is
0.02+/-0.03 dex and 0.06+/-0.08 dex, respectively. From the continuum
variability measurement we set an upper limit on the ratio between the flux of
varying spectral component, presumably related to AGN activities, and that of
host galaxy to be ~30%. We provide the corresponding upper limits for other
spectral classes, including those from the BPT diagram, eClass galaxy
classification, stars and quasars.


  We prove the multiplicity of spike-layer type solutions to the Dirichlet
problem for the equation $-\Delta_p u = u^{q-1}$ in expanding annuli.


  We investigate the growth rate of structures in the local Universe. For this,
we use as a cosmological tracer the HI line extra-galactic sources from the
Arecibo Legacy Fast ALFA (ALFALFA) survey to obtain a measurement of the
normalized growth rate parameter, $f \sigma_{8}$, considered a powerful tool to
constrain alternative models of gravity. For these analyses, we calculate the
Local Group velocity due to the matter structures distribution in the ALFALFA
catalogue and compare it with the Local Group velocity relative to the Cosmic
Microwave Background frame to obtain the velocity scale parameter, $\beta$.
Using Monte Carlo realizations and log-normal simulations, our methodology
quantifies the errors introduced by shot-noise and partial sky coverage of the
analysed data. The measurement of the velocity scale parameter $\beta$, and the
calculation of the matter fluctuation of the cosmological tracer,
$\sigma_{8}^{\text{tr}}$, lead us to $f \sigma_{8} = 0.46 \pm 0.06$ at $\bar{z}
= 0.013$, in good agreement (at $1 \sigma$ level) with the value expected in
the $\Lambda$CDM concordance model. In addition, our analyses of the ALFALFA
sample also provide a measurement of the growth rate of structures $f \,=\,
0.56 \pm 0.07$, at $\bar{z} = 0.013$.


  In this paper, we report theoretical investigation on excitation of surface
plexciton wave at interface of a metal and a columnar thin film infiltrated
with J-aggregate dyes using transfer matrix method in Kretschmann
configuration. The results reveal the regime of the plasmon - exciton
interaction can change from weak to strong by tuning structural parameters. We
find Rabi splitting energies between 204 -378 meV corresponding to the time
period 11-20 fs which includes to the fast energy transfer from surface plasmon
polaritons to excitons. The phase speed and propagation length of surface
plexcitonic waves were in the range of 0.4 to 0.9c and 0.4 to 6 {\mu}m. The
time-averaged Poynting vector of surface plexciton waves shows the localization
of them at interface of plasmonic and excitonic mediums.


  As the integration of wind power accelerates, wind power plants (WPPs) are
expected to play a crucial role in ensuring stability in future power grids.
This paper examines the nonlinear stability boundary of a multi-converter
system in a wind power plant (WPP) connected to an AC power grid via a long
HVAC cable. Traditionally, for nonlinear analysis of WPPs, a simplification is
adopted wherein the WPP is treated as an aggregation of individual wind
turbines (WTs), with a simplified portrayal of the collector network. However,
in the presence of different technologies, such as STATCOM, that are placed
away from the WTs, the model aggregation will not hold. This paper presents a
unified methodology to model and investigate the high-dimensional stability
boundary of a WPP with a STATCOM. The stability region of the system, i.e. the
region of attraction (RoA), is determined by the reverse time (backwards)
trajectory technique. Furthermore, the estimated stability boundary is verified
using time-domain simulation studies in PSCAD.


  We theoretically and empirically study portfolio optimization under
transaction costs and establish a link between turnover penalization and
covariance shrinkage with the penalization governed by transaction costs. We
show how the ex ante incorporation of transaction costs shifts optimal
portfolios towards regularized versions of efficient allocations. The
regulatory effect of transaction costs is studied in an econometric setting
incorporating parameter uncertainty and optimally combining predictive
distributions resulting from high-frequency and low-frequency data. In an
extensive empirical study, we illustrate that turnover penalization is more
effective than commonly employed shrinkage methods and is crucial in order to
construct empirically well-performing portfolios.


  The long-range electrostatic interactions between molecules depend strongly
on their relative orientation, which manifests as a rotational state
dependence. Interactions between molecules in the same rotational quantum state
are well-known attractive rotational van der Waals interactions. Interactions
in rotational states that differ by one quantum show resonant dipole-dipole
interactions. We show that where molecules are in rotational states that differ
by more than one quantum, they exhibit repulsive van der Waals interactions. At
temperatures below a millikelvin, this effect can reduce collisional loss by
multiple orders of magnitude. These repulsive interactions lead to applications
in quantum simulation and impurity physics with ultracold polar molecules.