  Transfer of recent advances in deep reinforcement learning to real-world
applications is hindered by high data demands and thus low efficiency and
scalability. Through independent improvements of components such as replay
buffers or more stable learning algorithms, and through massively distributed
systems, training time could be reduced from several days to several hours for
standard benchmark tasks. However, while rewards in simulated environments are
well-defined and easy to compute, reward evaluation becomes the bottleneck in
many real-world environments, e.g., in molecular optimization tasks, where
computationally demanding simulations or even experiments are required to
evaluate states and to quantify rewards. Therefore, training might become
prohibitively expensive without an extensive amount of computational resources
and time. We propose to alleviate this problem by replacing costly ground-truth
rewards with rewards modeled by neural networks, counteracting non-stationarity
of state and reward distributions during training with an active learning
component. We demonstrate that using our proposed ACRL method (Actively
learning Costly rewards for Reinforcement Learning), it is possible to train
agents in complex real-world environments orders of magnitudes faster. By
enabling the application of reinforcement learning methods to new domains, we
show that we can find interesting and non-trivial solutions to real-world
optimization problems in chemistry, materials science and engineering.


  The VertexCover problem is proven to be computationally hard in different
ways: It is NP-complete to find an optimal solution and even NP-hard to find an
approximation with reasonable factors. In contrast, recent experiments suggest
that on many real-world networks the run time to solve VertexCover is way
smaller than even the best known FPT-approaches can explain. Similarly, greedy
algorithms deliver very good approximations to the optimal solution in
practice.
  We link these observations to two properties that are observed in many
real-world networks, namely a heterogeneous degree distribution and high
clustering. To formalize these properties and explain the observed behavior, we
analyze how a branch-and-reduce algorithm performs on hyperbolic random graphs,
which have become increasingly popular for modeling real-world networks. In
fact, we are able to show that the VertexCover problem on hyperbolic random
graphs can be solved in polynomial time, with high probability.
  The proof relies on interesting structural properties of hyperbolic random
graphs. Since these predictions of the model are interesting in their own
right, we conducted experiments on real-world networks showing that these
properties are also observed in practice. When utilizing the same structural
properties in an adaptive greedy algorithm, further experiments suggest that,
on real instances, this leads to better approximations than the standard greedy
approach within reasonable time.


  We present speculative sampling, an algorithm for accelerating transformer
decoding by enabling the generation of multiple tokens from each transformer
call. Our algorithm relies on the observation that the latency of parallel
scoring of short continuations, generated by a faster but less powerful draft
model, is comparable to that of sampling a single token from the larger target
model. This is combined with a novel modified rejection sampling scheme which
preserves the distribution of the target model within hardware numerics. We
benchmark speculative sampling with Chinchilla, a 70 billion parameter language
model, achieving a 2-2.5x decoding speedup in a distributed setup, without
compromising the sample quality or making modifications to the model itself.


  Epitaxial graphene films were grown in vacuo by silicon sublimation from the
(0001) and (000-1) faces of 4H- and 6H-SiC. Hall effect mobilities and sheet
carrier densities of the films were measured at 300 K and 77 K and the data
depended on the growth face. About 40% of the samples exhibited holes as the
dominant carrier, independent of face. Generally, mobilities increased with
decreasing carrier density, independent of carrier type and substrate polytype.
The contributions of scattering mechanisms to the conductivities of the films
are discussed. The results suggest that for near-intrinsic carrier densities at
300 K epitaxial graphene mobilities will be ~150,000 cm2V-1s-1 on the (000-1)
face and ~5,800 cm2V-1s-1 on the (0001) face.


  According to a conjecture of Lindenstrauss and Tsukamoto, a topological
system $(X,T)$ embeds in the $d$-dimensional cubical shift
$(([0,1]^d)^\mathbb{Z},$shift) if its mean dimension and periodic dimension
verify mdim$(X,T)<d/2$ and perdim$(X,T)<d/2$. If $(X,T)=(\prod\limits_{i\in
\mathbb{N}}X_i,\prod\limits_{i\in \mathbb{N}}T_i)$ ($(X_i, T_i)$ dynamical
systems), and $\liminf\limits_{n\to +\infty} {\rm perdim}(X^{(n)},T^{(n))}) <
\frac{d}{2}$, then $(X,T)$ embeds in $(([0,1]^d)^\mathbb{Z},$shift).


  Orbital angular momentum (OAM) of photons is carried upon the wave front of
an optical vortex and is important in physics research due to its fundamental
degree of freedom. As for the interaction with materials, the optical OAM was
shown to be transferred to the valence electron based on modified selection
rules where a single ion is carefully aligned to the center of a vortex
[Schmiegelow et al.(2016)]. We here demonstrate an elaborate way of extracting
the distributed OAMs in the two-dimensional x-ray wave field at the exit-face
of the specimen by a vorticity-sensitive microscopy, which detects vorticity in
the reciprocal-space wave field downstream of the optical vortices. This method
enables us to measure the distributed topological charges and OAMs by a single
image with the wide field of view over 300 $\mu$m. Among various wavelength,
the research of x-ray OAM is especially interesting since it could be closely
related to the predicted OAM-induced x-ray dichroism [Veenendaal et al.(2007)].


  We prove a stability estimate of logarithmic type for the inverse problem
consisting in the determination of the surface impedance of an obstacle from
the scattering amplitude. We present a simple and direct proof which is
essentially based on an elliptic Carleman inequality.


  We propose a scheme to implement quantum controlled SWAP gates by directing
single-photon pulses to a two-sided cavity with a single trapped atom. The
resultant gates can be used to realize quantum fingerprinting and universal
photonic quantum computation. The performance of the scheme is characterized
under realistic experimental noise with the requirements well within the reach
of the current technology.


  Let H(q,p) = p^2/2 + V(q) be a 1-degree of freedom mechanical Hamiltonian
with a C^n periodic potential V where n>4. The Nos\'e-thermostated system
associated to H is shown to have invariant tori near the infinite temperature
limit. This is shown to be true for all thermostats similar to Nos\'e's. These
results complement the result of Legoll, Luskin and Moeckel who proved the
existence of such tori near the decoupling limit.


  Recognizing Activities of Daily Living (ADLs) has a large number of health
applications, such as characterize lifestyle for habit improvement, nursing and
rehabilitation services. Wearable cameras can daily gather large amounts of
image data that provide rich visual information about ADLs than using other
wearable sensors. In this paper, we explore the classification of ADLs from
images captured by low temporal resolution wearable camera (2fpm) by using a
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) approach. We show that the classification
accuracy of a CNN largely improves when its output is combined, through a
random decision forest, with contextual information from a fully connected
layer. The proposed method was tested on a subset of the NTCIR-12 egocentric
dataset, consisting of 18,674 images and achieved an overall accuracy of 86%
activity recognition on 21 classes.


  Artificial Light pollution (AL) in Turkey and in Turkish observatories
between 2012--2020 have been studied using the archival data of Visible
Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) instrument. The astroGIS database has
been used in processing the data (https://www.astrogis.org)
\cite{2020MNRAS.493.1204A}. The total energy released to space from Turkey
increased by 80\% in 2019 with respect to 2012. In the span of the dataset, a
steady and continuous increase has been observed throughout all cities of the
country. On the other hand, Dark Sky Park locations, East and Southeast
Anatolian regions and mostly rural areas around the cities kept their AL level
constant. Four demographic parameters have been studied and they were found to
be correlated very well with AL: Population ($R \simeq 0.90$); GDP ($R \simeq
0.87$); Total Power Consumption ($R \simeq 0.66$) and Outdoor Lightening ($R
\simeq 0.67$). Contrary to countries acting to prevent AL increases, Turkey
seems to be at the beginning of an era where AL will arithmetically increase
throughout the country and enormous amount of energy will continuously escape
to space and therefore will be wasted. Therefore, a preventive legislation,
especially for invaluable astronomical site locations such as TURAG, TUG, DAG
and \c{C}AAM where each is counted as a truly dark site due to their SQM
values, has to be enacted in Turkey, in very near future.


  A new tracking detector will be installed as part of the Phase-2 upgrade of
the CMS detector for the high-luminosity LHC era. This tracking detector
includes the Inner Tracker, equipped with silicon pixel sensor modules, and the
Outer Tracker, consisting of modules with two parallel stacked silicon sensors.
The Outer Tracker front-end ASICs will be able to correlate hits from charged
particles in these two sensors to perform on-module discrimination of
transverse momenta $p_\mathrm{T}$. The $p_\mathrm{T}$ information is generated
at a frequency of 40 MHz and will be used in the Level-1 trigger decision of
CMS. Prototypes of the so-called 2S modules were tested at the Test Beam
Facility at DESY Hamburg between 2019 and 2020. These modules use the final
front-end ASIC, the CMS Binary Chip (CBC), and for the first time the
Concentrator Integrated Circuit (CIC), optical readout and on-module power
conversion. In total, seven modules were tested, one of which was assembled
with sensors irradiated with protons. An important aspect was to show that it
is possible to read out modules synchronously. A cluster hit efficiency of
about 99.75% was achieved for all modules. The CBC $p_\mathrm{T}$
discrimination mechanism has been verified to work together with the CIC and
optical readout. The measured module performance meets the requirements for
operation in the upgraded CMS tracking detector.


  The ``truncation procedure'' initiated by Weiss et al. is best understood as
a Darboux transformation. If it leads to the Lax pair of the PDE under study,
the B\"acklund transformation follows by an elimination, thus proving the
integrability. We present the state of the art of this powerful technique. The
easy situations were all handled by the WTC one-family truncation and its
homographically invariant version. An updated version of this method has been
recently developed, which is now able to handle the Kaup-Kupershmidt and
Tzitz\'eica equations. It incorporates a new feature, namely the distinction
between two entire functions usually mingled, which are shown to be linked by
formulae established by Gambier for his classification.


  The motion of planar ground vehicles is often non-holonomic, and as a result
may be modelled by the 2 DoF Ackermann steering model. We analyse the
feasibility of estimating such motion with a downward facing camera that exerts
fronto-parallel motion with respect to the ground plane. This turns the motion
estimation into a simple image registration problem in which we only have to
identify a 2-parameter planar homography. However, one difficulty that arises
from this setup is that ground-plane features are indistinctive and thus hard
to match between successive views. We encountered this difficulty by
introducing the first globally-optimal, correspondence-less solution to
plane-based Ackermann motion estimation. The solution relies on the
branch-and-bound optimisation technique. Through the low-dimensional
parametrisation, a derivation of tight bounds, and an efficient implementation,
we demonstrate how this technique is eventually amenable to accurate real-time
motion estimation. We prove its property of global optimality and analyse the
impact of assuming a locally constant centre of rotation. Our results on real
data finally demonstrate a significant advantage over the more traditional,
correspondence-based hypothesise-and-test schemes.


  We report on low resolution (R~3000) spectropolarimetry of the A0 supergiant
star HD 92207. This star is well-known for significant spectral variability.
The source was observed on seven different nights spanning approximately 3
months in time. With a rotation period of approximately 1 year, our data covers
approximately a quarter of the star's rotational phase. Variability in the
continuum polarization level is observed over this period of time. The
polarization across the Halpha line on any given night is typically different
from the degree and position angle of the polarization in the continuum.
Interestingly, Hbeta is not in emission and does not show polarimetric
variability. We associate the changes at Halpha as arising in the wind, which
is in accord with the observed changes in the profile shape and equivalent
width of Halpha along with the polarimetric variability. For the continuum
polarization, we explore a spiral shaped wind density enhancement in the
equatorial plane of the star, in keeping with the suggestion of Kaufer etal
(1997). Variable polarization signatures across Halpha are too complex to be
explained by this simple model and will require a more intensive polarimetric
follow-up study to interpret properly.


  Many real-world networks, including social and information networks, are
dynamic structures that evolve over time. Such dynamic networks are typically
visualized using a sequence of static graph layouts. In addition to providing a
visual representation of the network structure at each time step, the sequence
should preserve the mental map between layouts of consecutive time steps to
allow a human to interpret the temporal evolution of the network. In this
paper, we propose a framework for dynamic network visualization in the on-line
setting where only present and past graph snapshots are available to create the
present layout. The proposed framework creates regularized graph layouts by
augmenting the cost function of a static graph layout algorithm with a grouping
penalty, which discourages nodes from deviating too far from other nodes
belonging to the same group, and a temporal penalty, which discourages large
node movements between consecutive time steps. The penalties increase the
stability of the layout sequence, thus preserving the mental map. We introduce
two dynamic layout algorithms within the proposed framework, namely dynamic
multidimensional scaling (DMDS) and dynamic graph Laplacian layout (DGLL). We
apply these algorithms on several data sets to illustrate the importance of
both grouping and temporal regularization for producing interpretable
visualizations of dynamic networks.


  We construct a logic-enriched type theory LTTW that corresponds closely to
the predicative system of foundations presented by Hermann Weyl in Das
Kontinuum. We formalise many results from that book in LTTW, including Weyl's
definition of the cardinality of a set and several results from real analysis,
using the proof assistant Plastic that implements the logical framework LF.
This case study shows how type theory can be used to represent a
non-constructive foundation for mathematics.


  The formulation of the Gerasimov-Drell-Hearn sum rule is revisited, showing
its connection with other sum rules occurring in electron scattering and
discussing the problem of its saturation, both from the theoretical and
experimental point of v iew. The generalisation to other nuclear targets is
also reported.


  A small tabletop experiment for a direct measurement of the speed of light to
an accuracy of few percent is described. The experiment is accessible to a wide
spectrum of undergraduate students, in particular to students not majoring in
science or engineering. The experiment may further include a measurement of the
index of refraction of a sample. Details of the setup and equipment are given.
Results and limitations of the experiment are analyzed, partly based on our
experience in employing the experiment in our student laboratories. Safety
considerations are also discussed.


  This paper aims to develop a new deep learning-inspired gaming approach for
early detection of dementia. This research integrates a robust convolutional
neural network (CNN)-based model for early dementia detection using health
metrics data as well as facial image data through a cognitive assessment-based
gaming application. We have collected 1000 data samples of health metrics
dataset from Apollo Diagnostic Center Kolkata that is labeled as either
demented or non-demented for the training of MOD-1D-CNN for the game level 1
and another dataset of facial images containing 1800 facial data that are
labeled as either demented or non-demented is collected by our research team
for the training of MOD-2D-CNN model in-game level 2. In our work, the loss for
the proposed MOD-1D-CNN model is 0.2692 and the highest accuracy is 70.50% for
identifying the dementia traits using real-life health metrics data. Similarly,
the proposed MOD-2D-CNN model loss is 0.1755 and the highest accuracy is
obtained here 95.72% for recognizing the dementia status using real-life
face-based image data. Therefore, a rule-based weightage method is applied to
combine both the proposed methods to achieve the final decision. The MOD-1D-CNN
and MOD-2D-CNN models are more lightweight and computationally efficient
alternatives because they have a significantly lower number of parameters when
compared to the other state-of-the-art models. We have compared their
accuracies and parameters with the other state-of-the-art deep learning models.


  Metrics for merge trees that are simultaneously stable, informative, and
efficiently computable have so far eluded researchers. We show in this work
that it is possible to devise such a metric when restricting merge trees to
ordered domains such as the interval and the circle. We present the ``dynamic
ordered persistence editing'' (DOPE) distance, which we prove is stable and
informative while satisfying metric properties. We then devise a simple
$O(N^2)$ dynamic programming algorithm to compute it on the interval and an
$O(N^3)$ algorithm to compute it on the circle. Surprisingly, we accomplish
this by ignoring all of the hierarchical information of the merge tree and
simply focusing on a sequence of ordered critical points, which can be
interpreted as a time series. Thus our algorithm is more similar to string edit
distance and dynamic time warping than it is to more conventional merge tree
comparison algorithms. In the context of time series with the interval as a
domain, we show empirically on the UCR time series classification dataset that
DOPE performs better than bottleneck/Wasserstein distances between persistence
diagrams.


  In this paper we give an overview of Implicit-Explicit Runge-Kutta schemes
applied to hyperbolic systems with stiff relaxation. In particular, we focus on
some recent results on the uniform accuracy for hyperbolic systems with stiff
relaxation [6], and hyperbolic system with diffusive relaxation [7, 5, 4]. In
the latter case, we present an original application to a model problem arising
in Extended Thermodynamics.


  Causality has been recently introduced in databases, to model, characterize,
and possibly compute causes for query answers. Connections between QA-causality
and consistency-based diagnosis and database repairs (wrt. integrity constraint
violations) have already been established. In this work we establish precise
connections between QA-causality and both abductive diagnosis and the
view-update problem in databases, allowing us to obtain new algorithmic and
complexity results for QA-causality. We also obtain new results on the
complexity of view-conditioned causality, and investigate the notion of
QA-causality in the presence of integrity constraints, obtaining complexity
results from a connection with view-conditioned causality. The abduction
connection under integrity constraints allows us to obtain algorithmic tools
for QA-causality.


  University students' day-to-day lives largely depend on transportation.
Public transit alternatives are not widely available in the United States'
small-town, rural, and suburban collegiate environments (U.S.). This study
disseminated an online survey among international students studying at The
University of Alabama (UA) campus, a predominantly white institution in
Tuscaloosa, Alabama. The objective of this research was to investigate and
analyze international student travel experiences in a city with a significant
college-affiliated population and highlight particular transportation issues in
the area. The survey results show that international students find it difficult
to travel within Tuscaloosa without a personal vehicle, as other modes of
transportation, including walking, biking, and using public transportation, are
not always convenient or reliable. The study findings may be of interest to
transportation experts, city planners, university administrators, and college
students who want to better understand travel-related challenges experienced by
international students.


  We present a complete low-resolution (R~100) near-infrared spectrum of the
substellar object GY11, member of the rho-Ophiuchi young association. The
object is remarkable because of its low estimated mass and age and because it
is associated with a mid-infrared source, an indication of a surrounding dusty
disk. Based on the comparison of our spectrum with similar spectra of field
M-dwarfs and atmospheric models, we obtain revised estimates of the spectral
type, effective temperature and luminosity of the central object. These
parameters are used to place the object on a Hertzprung-Russell diagram and to
compare with the prediction of pre-main sequence evolutionary models. Our
analysis suggests that the central object has a very low mass, probably below
the deuterium burning limit and in the range 8-12MJupiter, and a young age,
less than 1Myr. The infrared excess is shown to be consistent with the emission
of a flared, irradiated disk similar to those found in more massive brown dwarf
and TTauri systems. This result suggests that substellar objects, even the
so-called isolated planetary mass objects, found in young stellar associations
are produced in a similar fashion as stars, by core contraction and
gravitational collapse.


  We aim at the discovery of new planetary systems by exploiting the transit
light curve results from TESS orbital observatory's Sector 1 and 2 observations
and validating them with precise Doppler measurements obtained from archival
HARPS data. Taking advantage of the reported TESS transit events around GJ143
(TOI 186) and HD23472 (TOI 174) we model their HARPS precise Doppler
measurements and derive orbital parameters for these two systems. For the GJ143
system TESS has reported only a single transit, and thus its period is
unconstrained from photometry. Our RV analysis of GJ143 reveal the full
Keplerian solution of the system, which is consistent with an eccentric planet
with a mass almost twice that of Neptune and a period of $P_{\rm b}$ =
$35.59_{-0.01}^{+0.01}$ days. Our estimates of the GJ143 b planet are fully
consistent with the transit timing from TESS. We confirm the two-planet system
around HD23472, which according to our analysis is composed of two Neptune mass
planets in a possible 5:3 MMR.


  We present a detailed study of the oscillations and optical properties for
vacuum, in a model for the dark sector that contains axion-like particles and
hidden photons. In this model, both can couple to photons. We provide bounds
for the couplings versus the mass, using current results from ALPS-I and PVLAS.
We also discuss the challenges for the detection of models with more than one
hidden particle in light shining trough wall-like experiments.


  The conducting states, recently discovered at the surface of two special
class of insulators -- topological insulators and topological crystalline
insulators - are distinguished by their insensitivity to local and non-magnetic
surface defects at a level of disorder, sufficiently small to be described
within the perturbation theory. However, the behavior of the surface states in
case of non local macroscopic imperfections is not clear. Here, we propose a
systematic study of the topological surface states on vicinal planes
(deviations from perfect surface cleavage) in a topological crystalline
insulator of the tin telluride family, by using realistic
first-principles-derived tight-binding models. The theoretical framework
proposed is quite general and easily permits the extensions to other
topological insulator families.


  We give an excluded-minor characterization for the class of matroids M in
which M\e or M/e is binary for all e in E(M). This class is closely related to
the class of matroids in which every member is binary or can be obtained from a
binary matroid by relaxing a circuit-hyperplane. We also provide an
excluded-minor characterization for the second class.


  We show that if a separable space X has a meager open subset containing a
copy of the Cantor set 2^\omega, then X has $\frak{c}$ types of countable dense
subsets. We suggest a generalization of the \lambda-set for non-separable
spaces. Let X be an h-homogeneous \Lambda-set. Then X is densely homogeneous
and (X \setminus A) is homeomorphic to X for every \sigma-discrete A \subset X.


  We are interested in the Klein-Gordon-Zakharov system in $\mathbb{R}^{1+2}$,
which is an important model in plasma physics with extensive mathematical
studies. The system can be regarded as semilinear coupled wave and Klein-Gordon
equations with nonlinearities violating the null conditions. Without the
compactness assumptions on the initial data, we aim to establish the existence
of small global solutions, and in addition, we want to illustrate the optimal
pointwise decay of the solutions. Furthermore, we show that the Klein-Gordon
part of the system enjoys linear scattering while the wave part has uniformly
bounded low-order energy. None of these goals is easy because of the slow
pointwise decay nature of the linear wave and Klein-Gordon components in
$\mathbb{R}^{1+2}$. We tackle the difficulties by carefully exploiting the
properties of the wave and the Klein-Gordon components, and by relying on the
ghost weight energy estimates to close higher-order energy estimates. This
appears to be the first pointwise decay result and the first scattering result
for the Klein-Gordon-Zakharov system in $\mathbb{R}^{1+2}$ without compactness
assumptions.


  In applications of clinical trials, tested hypotheses are often grouped as
multiple hierarchically ordered families. To test such structured hypotheses,
various gatekeeping strategies have been developed in the literature, such as
series gatekeeping, parallel gatekeeping, tree-structured gatekeeping
strategies, etc. However, these gatekeeping strategies are often either
non-intuitive or less flexible when addressing increasingly complex logical
relationships among families of hypotheses. In order to overcome the issue, in
this paper, we develop a new family-based graphical approach, which can easily
derive and visualize different gatekeeping strategies. In the proposed
approach, a directed and weighted graph is used to represent the generated
gatekeeping strategy where each node corresponds to a family of hypotheses and
two simple updating rules are used for updating the critical value of each
family and the transition coefficient between any two families. Theoretically,
we show that the proposed graphical approach strongly controls the overall
familywise error rate at a pre-specified level. Through some case studies and a
real clinical example, we demonstrate simplicity and flexibility of the
proposed approach.


  Deep neural networks (DNNs) are powerful tools in computer vision tasks.
However, in many realistic scenarios label noise is prevalent in the training
images, and overfitting to these noisy labels can significantly harm the
generalization performance of DNNs. We propose a novel technique to identify
data with noisy labels based on the different distributions of the predictive
uncertainties from a DNN over the clean and noisy data. Additionally, the
behavior of the uncertainty over the course of training helps to identify the
network weights which best can be used to relabel the noisy labels. Data with
noisy labels can therefore be cleaned in an iterative process. Our proposed
method can be easily implemented, and shows promising performance on the task
of noisy label detection on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100.


  The plot of allowed p and D values for p-brane solitons in D-dimensional
supergravity is the same whether the solitons are extremal or non-extremal. One
of the useful tools for relating different points on the plot is vertical
dimensional reduction, which is possible if periodic arrays of p-brane solitons
can be constructed. This is straightforward for extremal p-branes, since the
no-force condition allows arbitrary multi-centre solutions to be constructed in
terms of a general harmonic function on the transverse space. This has also
been shown to be possible in the special case of non-extremal black holes in
D=4 arrayed along an axis. In this paper, we extend previous results to include
multi-scalar black holes, and dyonic black holes. We also consider their
oxidation to higher dimensions, and we discuss general procedures for
constructing the solutions, and studying their symmetries.


  Given an abelian category with arbitrary products, arbitrary coproducts, and
a generator, we show that the closed subspaces (in the sense of A. L.
Rosenberg) are parameterized by a suitably defined poset of ideals in the
generator. In particular, the collection of closed subspaces is itself a small
poset.


  Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are astrophysical transients of currently unknown
origin, and so far several events have been detected at extragalactic
distances. The dispersion measure (DM) of the radio signal is a probe of the
integrated electron density along the line of sight and therefore allows to map
the electron distribution within the large-scale structure. Since a fraction of
electrons gets expelled from galaxies by feedback, they are anticorrelated with
halos at large scales and hence the angular DM correlations show a
scale-dependent bias caused by primordial non-Gaussianity. Although the signal
is weaker than in other probes like galaxy clustering, FRBs can potentially
probe considerably larger volumes. We show that while studying the FRB
clustering signal requires very large samples, correlations in the DM are
cosmic-variance limited on large angular scales with only $\sim 10^{3-4}$
events. A tomographic analysis of the angular DM correlation function can
constrain the local primordial bispectrum shape parameter $f_\mathrm{NL}$ to a
precision down to ${f_\mathrm{NL}}\sim \mathcal{O}(1)$ depending on assumptions
about the FRB redshift distribution and the astrophysical feedback on large
scales. This makes FRBs a competitive probe to constrain inflationary physics.


  Dimensional confinement has shown to be an effective strategy to tune
competing degrees of freedom in complex oxides. Here, we achieved atomic
layered growth of trigonal vanadium sesquioxide (V2O3) by means of
oxygen-assisted molecular beam epitaxy. This led to a series of high-quality
epitaxial ultrathin V2O3 films down to unit cell thickness, enabling the study
of the intrinsic electron correlations upon confinement. By electrical and
optical measurements, we demonstrate a dimensional confinement-induced
metal-insulator transition in these ultrathin films. We shed light on the
Mott-Hubbard nature of this transition, revealing an abrupt vanishing of the
quasiparticle weight as demonstrated by photoemission spectroscopy.
Furthermore, we prove that dimensional confinement acts as an effective
out-of-plane stress. This highlights the structural component of correlated
oxides in a confined architecture, while opening an avenue to control both
in-plane and out-of-plane lattice components by epitaxial strain and
confinement, respectively.


  Various corrections to the eikonal approximations are studied for two- and
three-body nuclear collisions with the goal to extend the range of validity of
this approximation to beam energies of 10 MeV/nucleon. Wallace's correction
does not improve much the elastic-scattering cross sections obtained at the
usual eikonal approximation. On the contrary, a semiclassical approximation
that substitutes the impact parameter by a complex distance of closest approach
computed with the projectile-target optical potential efficiently corrects the
eikonal approximation. This opens the possibility to analyze data measured down
to 10 MeV/nucleon within eikonal-like reaction models.


  Deep ReLU networks trained with the square loss have been observed to perform
well in classification tasks. We provide here a theoretical justification based
on analysis of the associated gradient flow. We show that convergence to a
solution with the absolute minimum norm is expected when normalization
techniques such as Batch Normalization (BN) or Weight Normalization (WN) are
used together with Weight Decay (WD). The main property of the minimizers that
bounds their expected error is the norm: we prove that among all the
close-to-interpolating solutions, the ones associated with smaller Frobenius
norms of the unnormalized weight matrices have better margin and better bounds
on the expected classification error. With BN but in the absence of WD, the
dynamical system is singular. Implicit dynamical regularization -- that is
zero-initial conditions biasing the dynamics towards high margin solutions --
is also possible in the no-BN and no-WD case. The theory yields several
predictions, including the role of BN and weight decay, aspects of Papyan, Han
and Donoho's Neural Collapse and the constraints induced by BN on the network
weights.


  Optical microresonators have proven powerful in a wide range of applications,
including cavity quantum electrodynamics, biosensing, microfludics, and cavity
optomechanics. Their performance depends critically on the exact distribution
of optical energy, confined and shaped by the nanoscale device geometry.
Near-field optical probes can image this distribution, but the physical probe
necessarily perturbs the near field, which is particularly problematic for
sensitive high quality factor resonances. We present a new approach to mapping
nanophotonic modes that uses a controllably small and local optomechanical
perturbation introduced by a focused lithium ion beam. An ion beam (radius
about 50 nm) induces a picometer-scale dynamic deformation of the resonator
surface, which we detect through a shift in the optical resonance wavelength.
We map five modes of a silicon microdisk resonator (Q > 20,000) with both high
spatial and spectral resolution. Our technique also enables in-situ observation
of ion implantation damage and relaxation dynamics in a silicon lattice.


  We consider the problem of preference based reinforcement learning (PbRL),
where, unlike traditional reinforcement learning, an agent receives feedback
only in terms of a 1 bit (0/1) preference over a trajectory pair instead of
absolute rewards for them. The success of the traditional RL framework
crucially relies on the underlying agent-reward model, which, however, depends
on how accurately a system designer can express an appropriate reward function
and often a non-trivial task. The main novelty of our framework is the ability
to learn from preference-based trajectory feedback that eliminates the need to
hand-craft numeric reward models. This paper sets up a formal framework for the
PbRL problem with non-markovian rewards, where the trajectory preferences are
encoded by a generalized linear model of dimension $d$. Assuming the transition
model is known, we then propose an algorithm with almost optimal regret
guarantee of $\tilde {\mathcal{O}}\left( SH d \log (T / \delta) \sqrt{T}
\right)$. We further, extend the above algorithm to the case of unknown
transition dynamics, and provide an algorithm with near optimal regret
guarantee $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}((\sqrt{d} + H^2 + |\mathcal{S}|)\sqrt{dT}
+\sqrt{|\mathcal{S}||\mathcal{A}|TH} )$. To the best of our knowledge, our work
is one of the first to give tight regret guarantees for preference based RL
problems with trajectory preferences.


  Let $\left\{\sum_{i=1}^n \lambda_i X_i(t), t\in [0,T]\right\}$ be an
aggregate Gaussian risk process with $X_i, i\leq n$ independent Gaussian
processes satisfying Piterbarg conditions and $\lambda_i$'s given positive
weights. In this paper we derive exact asymptotics of the finite-time ruin
probability given by $$\mathbb{P}\left(\sup_{t\in[0,T]}\left(\sum_{i=1}^n
\lambda_i X_i(t)- g(t) \right)>u\right)$$ as $u\to\infty$ for some general
trend function $g$. Further, we derive asymptotic results for the finite-time
ruin probabilities of risk processes perturbed by an aggregate Gaussian
process.


  We study the spin-1 pyrochlore material NaCaNi$_2$F$_7$ with a combination of
molecular dynamics simulations, stochastic dynamical theory and linear spin
wave theory. The dynamical structure factor from inelastic neutron scattering
is well described with a near-ideal Heisenberg Hamiltonian incorporating small
anisotropic terms {and weak second-neighbor interactions}. We find that all
three approaches reproduce remarkably well the momentum dependence of the
scattering intensity as well as its energy dependence with the exception of the
lowest energies. These results are notable in that (i) the data show a complete
lack of sharp quasiparticle excitations in momentum space over much, if not
all, of the energy range; (ii) linear spin-wave theory appears to apply in a
regime where it would be expected to fail for a number of reasons. We elucidate
what underpins these surprises, and note that basic questions about the nature
of quantum spin liquidity in such systems pose themselves as a result.


  We consider the perturbed sine-Gordon equation $\theta_{tt}-\theta_{xx}+\sin
\theta=
  \varepsilon^2 f(\varepsilon x)$, where the external perturbation
$\varepsilon^2 f(\varepsilon x)$ corresponds to a small, slowly varying
electric field. We show that the initial value problem with an appropriate
initial state close enough to the solitary manifold has a unique solution,
which follows up to time $1/{\varepsilon}$ and errors of order $\varepsilon^{
3/4}$ a trajectory on the solitary manifold. The trajectory on the solitary
manifold is described by ODEs, which agree approximately up to errors of order
$\varepsilon^3$ with Hamilton equations for the restricted to the solitary
manifold sine-Gordon Hamiltonian.


  We systematically derive an action for a nonrelativistic spinning partile in
flat background and discuss its canonical formulation in both Lagrangian and
Hamiltonian approaches. This action is taken as the starting point for deriving
the corresponding action in a curved background. It is achieved by following
our recently developed technique of localising the flat space galilean symmetry
\cite{BMM1, BMM3, BMM2}. The coupling of the spinning particle to a
Newton-Cartan background is obtained naturally. The equation of motion is found
to differ from the geodesic equation, in agreement with earlier findings.
Results for both the flat space limit and the spinless theory (in curved
background) are reproduced. Specifically, the geodesic equation is also
obtained in the latter case.


  The 21 cm signal from the Epoch of Reionization should be observed within the
next decade. While a simple statistical detection is expected with SKA
pathfinders, the SKA will hopefully produce a full 3D mapping of the signal. To
extract from the observed data constraints on the parameters describing the
underlying astrophysical processes, inversion methods must be developed. For
example, the Markov Chain Monte Carlo method has been successfully applied.
Here we test another possible inversion method: artificial neural networks
(ANN). We produce a training set which consists of 70 individual sample. Each
sample is made of the 21 cm power spectrum at different redshifts produced with
the 21cmFast code plus the value of three parameters used in the semi-numerical
simulations that describe astrophysical processes. Using this set we train the
network to minimize the error between the parameter values it produces as an
output and the true values. We explore the impact of the architecture of the
network on the quality of the training. Then we test the trained network on the
new set of 54 test samples with different values of the parameters. We find
that the quality of the parameter reconstruction depends on the sensitivity of
the power spectrum to the different parameters at a given redshift, that
including thermal noise and sample variance decreases the quality of the
reconstruction and that using the power spectrum at several redshifts as an
input to the ANN improves the quality of the reconstruction. We conclude that
ANNs are a viable inversion method whose main strength is that they require a
sparse exploration of the parameter space and thus should be usable with full
numerical simulations.


  If the excess events from the CoGeNT experiment arise from elastic
scatterings of a light dark matter off the nuclei, crossing symmetry implies
non-vanishing annihilation cross-sections of the light dark matter into
hadronic final states inside the galactic halo, which we confront with the
anti-proton spectrum measured by the PAMELA collaboration. We consider two
types of effective interactions between the dark matter and the quarks: 1)
contact interactions from integrating out heavy particles and 2) long-range
interactions due to the electromagnetic properties of the dark matter. The lack
of excess in the anti-proton spectrum results in tensions for a scalar and, to
a less extent, a vector dark matter interacting with the quarks through the
Higgs portal.


  Random networks are widely used to model complex networks and research their
properties. In order to get a good approximation of complex networks
encountered in various disciplines of science, the ability to tune various
statistical properties of random networks is very important. In this manuscript
we present an algorithm which is able to construct arbitrarily degree-degree
correlated networks with adjustable degree-dependent clustering. We verify the
algorithm by using empirical networks as input and describe additionally a
simple way to fix a degree-dependent clustering function if degree-degree
correlations are given.


  Using the atmosphere as a detector volume, Imaging Air Cherenkov Telescopes
(IACTs) depend highly on the properties and the condition of the air mass above
the telescope. On the Canary Island of La Palma, where the Major Atmospheric
Gamma-ray Imaging Cherenkov telescope (MAGIC) is situated, the Saharan Air
Layer (SAL) can cause strong atmospheric absorption affecting the data quality
and resulting in a reduced gamma flux. To correlate IACT data with other
measurements, e.g. long-term monitoring or Multi-Wavelength (MWL) studies, an
accurate flux determination is mandatory. Therefore, a method to correct the
data for the effect of the SAL is needed. Three different measurements of the
atmospheric absorption are performed on La Palma. From the determined
transmission, a correction factor is calculated and applied to the MAGIC data.
The different transmission measurements from optical and IACT data provide
comparable results. MAGIC data of PG 1553+113, taken during a MWL campaign in
July 2006, have been analyzed using the presented method, providing a corrected
flux measurement for the study of the spectral energy distribution of the
source.


  The following discussion is inspired by the paper Nonparametric generalized
fiducial inference for survival functions under censoring by Cui and Hannig.
The discussion consists of comments on the results, but also indicates it's
importance more generally in the context of fiducial inference. A two page
introduction to fiducial inference is given to provide a context.


  In this work, we propose a radical, incrementally-deployable Internet routing
paradigm in which the control plane of multiple networks is centralized. This
follows the Software Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm, although at the
inter-domain level involving multiple Autonomous Systems (AS). Multi-domain SDN
centralization can be realized by outsourcing routing functions to an external
contractor, which provides inter-domain routing services facilitated through a
multi-AS network controller. The proposed model promises to become a vehicle
for evolving BGP and uses the bird's eye view over several networks to benefit
aspects of inter-domain routing, such as convergence properties, policy
conflict resolution, inter-domain troubleshooting, and collaborative security.
In addition to the proposed paradigm, we introduce a publicly available
emulation platform built on top of Mininet and the Quagga routing software, for
experimenting in hybrid BGP-SDN AS-level networks. As a proof of concept we
focus specifically on exploiting multi-domain centralization to improve BGP's
slow convergence. We build and make publicly available a first multi-AS
controller tailored to this use case and demonstrate experimentally that SDN
centralization helps to linearly reduce BGP convergence times and churn rates
with expanding SDN deployments.


  Given an infinite connected regular graph $G=(V,E)$, place at each vertex
Pois($\lambda$) walkers performing independent lazy simple random walks on $G$
simultaneously. When two walkers visit the same vertex at the same time they
are declared to be acquainted. We show that when $G$ is vertex-transitive and
amenable, for all $\lambda>0$ a.s. any pair of walkers will eventually have a
path of acquaintances between them. In contrast, we show that when $G$ is
non-amenable (not necessarily transitive) there is always a phase transition at
some $\lambda_{c}(G)>0$. We give general bounds on $\lambda_{c}(G)$ and study
the case that $G$ is the $d$-regular tree in more details. Finally, we show
that in the non-amenable setup, for every $\lambda$ there exists a finite time
$t_{\lambda}(G)$ such that a.s. there exists an infinite set of walkers having
a path of acquaintances between them by time $t_{\lambda}(G)$.


  We demonstrate that stacking layered materials allows a novel type of strain
engineering where each layer is strained independently, which we call
heterostrain. We combine detailed structural and spectroscopic measurements
with tight-binding calculations to show that small uniaxial heterostrain
suppresses Dirac cones and leads to the emergence of flat bands in twisted
graphene layers (TGLs). Moreover, we demonstrate that heterostrain reconstructs
much more severely the energy spectrum of TGLs than homostrain for which both
layers are strained identically ; a result which should apply to virtually all
van der Waals structure opening exciting possibilities for straintronics with
2D materials.


  Health metrics from wrist-worn devices demand an automatic dominant hand
prediction to keep an accurate operation. The prediction would improve
reliability, enhance the consumer experience, and encourage further development
of healthcare applications. This paper aims to evaluate the use of
physiological and spatiotemporal context information from a two-hand experiment
to predict the wrist placement of a commercial smartwatch. The main
contribution is a methodology to obtain an effective model and features from
low sample rate physiological sensors and a self-reported context survey.
Results show an effective dominant hand prediction using data from a single
subject under real-life conditions.


  In this paper we study a type of model for closed inflationary universe
models using the Jordan-Brans-Dicke theory. Herein we determine and
characterize the existence of $\Omega>$1, together with the period of
inflation. We have found that our model, which takes into account a
Jordan-Brans-Dicke type of theory, is less restrictive than the one used in
Einstein's theory of general relativity. Our results are compared to those
found in Einstein's theory of Relativity.


  In large and complicated stellar systems like galaxies it is difficult to
predict the number and characteristics of a black hole population. Such
populations may be modelled as an aggregation of homogeneous (i.e. having
uniform star formation history and the same initial chemical composition)
stellar populations. Using realistic evolutionary models we predict the
abundances and properties of black holes formed from binaries in these
environments. We show that the black hole population will be dominated by
single black holes originating from binary disruptions and stellar mergers.
Furthermore, we discuss how black hole populations are influenced by such
factors as initial parameters, metallicity, initial mass function, and natal
kick models. As an example application of our results, we estimate that about
26 microlensing events to happen every year in the direction of the Galactic
Bulge due to black holes in a survey like OGLE-IV. Our results may be used to
perform in-depth studies related to realistic black hole populations, e.g.
observational predictions for space survey missions like Gaia, or Einstein
Probe. We prepared a publicly available database with the raw data from our
simulations to be used for more in-depth studies.


  We study the dynamics and indications of the flows with all the eigenvalues
of the velocity gradients being real, thus `lone', \textit{i.e.}, without
forming the complex conjugate pairs associated to the swirls. A generic
prototype is the `lone Schur flow (LSF)' whose velocity gradient tensor is
uniformly of Schur form but free of complex eigenvalues. A (partial)
integral-differential equation governing such LSF is established, and a
semi-analytical algorithm is accordingly designed for computation. Simulated
evolutions of example LSFs in 2- and 3-spaces show rich dynamics and vortical
structures, but no obvious swirls (nor even the homoclinic loops in whatever
distorted forms) could be found. We discovered the flux loop scenario and the
anisotropic analogy of the incompressible turbulence at or close to the
critical dimension $D_c =4/3$ decimated from 2-space.


  The demand for higher resolution telescopes leads to segmented primary
mirrors which need to be phased for operation. A phasing sensor applying a
wavelength sweep technique provides a large capture range without modulating
the position of individual mirror segments. This technique offers the potential
to monitor the phasing state of a segmented telescope in parallel to the
science observations. We evaluate the performance of the wavelength sweep
technique using a Zernike phase contrast sensor for coarse phasing. Tests
results on a dedicated bench show 112 nm rms precision. With the help of a
simulation, we explain a known error of the method and we suggest ways for
improvements.


  45-degree rotated epitaxial diamond nucleation on both (001) and {111} planes
of a silicon substrate was observed using chemical vapor deposition with
nucleation enhancement by electron emission. The epitaxial relationship between
diamond and Si is D(001)//Si(001) and D<100>//Si<110> in both cases. While the
case of diamond nucleation on Si(001) may be explained in Verwoerd's model, the
other case has no theoretical model as yet. The as-grown diamond was
characterized by scanning electron microscopy and Raman spectroscopy. It is
speculated that a suitable combination of low temperature and low CH_4
concentration leading to low nucleation rate favors the 45-degree rotated
epitaxy over those in parallel registry. This observation sheds light on the
mechanism of epitaxy of diamond on Si substrates, and has great significance in
parameter control in achieving single-crystal epitaxial diamond films.


  This is the third paper of a series (started by arXiv:0711.2083,
arXiv:0908.3390) which describes a conjectural analog of the affine
Grassmannian for affine Kac-Moody groups (also known as the double affine
Grassmannian). The current paper is dedicated to describing a conjectural
analog of the convolution diagram for the double affine Grassmannian and affine
Zastava.


  Comparing and recognizing metrics can be extraordinarily difficult because of
the group of diffeomorphisms. Two metrics, that could even be the same, could
look completely different in different coordinates. This is the gauge problem.
The general gauge problem is extremely subtle for non-compact spaces. Often it
can be avoided if one uses some additional structure of the particular
situation. However, in many problems there is no additional structure. Instead
we solve the gauge problem directly in great generality.
  The techniques and ideas apply to many problems. We use them to solve a
well-known open problem in Ricci flow: Strong rigidity of cylinders. Strong
rigidity is an illustration of a {\it shrinker principle} that uniqueness
radiates out from a compact set. It implies that if one tangent flow at a
future singular point is a cylinder, then all tangent flows are.
  We solve the gauge problem by solving a nonlinear system of PDEs. The PDE
produces a diffeomorphism that fixes an appropriate gauge in the spirit of the
slice theorem for group actions. We then show optimal bounds for the
displacement function of the diffeomorphism. Strong rigidity relies on gauge
fixing and several other new ideas. One of these is "propagation of almost
splitting", another is quadratic rigidity in the right gauge, and a third is an
optimal polynomial growth bound for PDEs that holds in great generality.


  Motivated by the recent experimental realization of synthetic gauge fields in
ultracold atoms, we investigate one-dimensional attractive Fermi gases with a
time-dependent gauge flux on the spin sector. By combining the methods of the
Bethe ansatz with complex twists and Landau-Dykhne, it is shown that a
spin-depairing transition occurs, which may represent a nonequilibrium
transition from fermionic superfluids to normal states with spin currents
caused by a many-body quantum tunneling. For the case of the Hubbard ring at
half filling, our finding forms a dual concept with the dielectric breakdown of
the Mott insulator discussed in Phys. Rev. B 81, 033103 (2010). We analyze
cases of arbitrary filling and continuum model, and show how the filling
affects the transition probability.


  We examine the total mixed scalar curvature of a fixed distribution as a
functional of a pseudo-Riemannian metric. We develop variational formulas for
quantities of extrinsic geometry of the distribution to find the critical
points of this action. Together with the arbitrary variations of the metric, we
consider also variations that preserve the volume of the manifold or partially
preserve the metric (e.g. on the distribution). For each of those cases we
obtain the Euler-Lagrange equation and its several solutions. The examples of
critical metrics that we find are related to various fields of geometry such as
contact and 3-Sasakian manifolds, geodesic Riemannian flows and codimension-one
foliations of interesting geometric properties (e.g. totally umbilical,
minimal).


  For a continued progress in the pursuit of neutrino oscillation parameters,
we require to have a precise knowledge of the pion production processes which
act as a source of backgrounds and systematic uncertainties in neutrino
oscillation experiments because pions can mimic a final state electron
(positron). Therefore a pion production principal interaction may appear to be
quasi-elastic if the pion is absorbed in the final state interactions.
Charged-current single pion production processes induced by $\nu_{\mu}$ and
$\bar{\nu_{\mu}}$ interactions with hydrocarbon target $(CH_{2})$ has been
studied using NuWro event generator and the cross-sections so obtained have
been compared with the results of Miner$\nu$A experiment.


  A charged particle moving through a plasma experiences a friction force that
commonly acts antiparallel to its velocity. It was recently predicted that in
strongly magnetized plasmas, in which the plasma particle gyro-frequency
exceeds the plasma frequency, the friction also includes a transverse component
that is perpendicular to both the velocity and Lorentz force. Here, this
prediction is confirmed using molecular dynamics simulations, and it is shown
that the relative magnitude of the transverse component increases with plasma
coupling strength. This result influences single particle motion and
macroscopic transport in strongly magnetized plasmas found in a broad range of
applications.


  Since Kolmogorov proposed his phenomenological theory of hydrodynamic
turbulence in 1941, the description of mechanism leading to the energy cascade
and anomalous scaling remains an open problem in fluid mechanics. Soon after,
in 1949 Onsager noticed that the scaling properties in inertial range imply
non-differentiability of the velocity field in the limit of vanishing
viscosity. This observation suggests that the turbulence mechanism may be
related to a finite-time singularity (blowup) of incompressible Euler
equations. However, the existence of such blowup is still an open problem too.
In this paper, we show that the blowup indeed represents the driving mechanism
of inertial range for a simplified (shell) model of turbulence. Here, blowups
generate coherent structures (instantons), which travel through the inertial
range in finite time and are described by universal self-similar statistics.
The anomaly (deviation of scaling exponents of velocity moments from the
Kolmogorov theory) is related analytically to the process of instanton creation
using the large deviation principle. The results are confirmed by numerical
simulations.


  The crossing matrix of a braid on $N$ strands is the $N\times N$ integer
matrix with zero diagonal whose $i,j$ entry is the algebraic number (positive
minus negative) of crossings by strand $i$ over strand $j$ . When restricted to
the subgroup of pure braids, this defines a homomorphism onto the additive
subgroup of $N\times N$ symmetric integer matrices with zero diagonal--in fact,
it represents the abelianization of this subgroup. As a function on the whole
$N$-braid group, it is a derivation defined by the action of the symmetric
group on square matrices. The set of all crossing matrices can be described
using the natural decomposition of any braid as the product of a pure braid
with a `permutation braid' in the sense of Thurston, but the subset of crossing
matrices for positive braids is harder to describe. We formulate a finite
algorithm which exhibits all positive braids with a given crossing matrix, if
any exist, or declares that there are none.


  Holes in nanowires have drawn significant attention in recent years because
of the strong spin-orbit interaction, which plays an important role in
constructing Majorana zero modes and manipulating spin-orbit qubits. Here, from
the strongly anisotropic leakage current in the spin blockade regime for a
double dot, we extract the full g-tensor and find that the spin-orbit field is
in plane with an azimuthal angle of 59{\deg} to the axis of the nanowire. The
direction of the spin-orbit field indicates a strong spin-orbit interaction
along the nanowire, which may have originated from the interface inversion
asymmetry in Ge hut wires. We also demonstrate two different spin relaxation
mechanisms for the holes in the Ge hut wire double dot: spin-flip cotunneling
to the leads, and spin-orbit interaction within the double dot. These results
help establish feasibility of a Ge-based quantum processor.


  3D dense reconstruction refers to the process of obtaining the complete shape
and texture features of 3D objects from 2D planar images. 3D reconstruction is
an important and extensively studied problem, but it is far from being solved.
This work systematically introduces classical methods of 3D dense
reconstruction based on geometric and optical models, as well as methods based
on deep learning. It also introduces datasets for deep learning and the
performance and advantages and disadvantages demonstrated by deep learning
methods on these datasets.


  Let $G$ be a finite group acting linearly on the vector space $V$ over a
field of arbitrary characteristic. The action is called {\em coregular} if the
invariant ring is generated by algebraically independent homogeneous invariants
and the {\em direct summand property} holds if there is a surjective
$k[V]^G$-linear map $\pi:k[V]\to k[V]^G$. The following
Chevalley--Shephard--Todd type theorem is proved. Suppose $G$ is abelian, then
the action is coregular if and only if $G$ is generated by pseudo-reflections
and the direct summand property holds.


  Bright and dark solitons of the cubic nonlinear Schrodinger equation are used
to construct complex-valued potentials with all-real spectrum. The real part of
these potentials is equal to the intensity of a bright soliton while their
imaginary part is defined by the product of such soliton with its concomitant,
a dark soliton. Considering light propagation in Kerr media, the real part of
the potential refers to the self-focusing of the signal and the imaginary one
provides the system with balanced gain-and-loss rates.


  A search for time-directional coincidences of ultra-high-energy (UHE) photons
above 10 EeV with gravitational wave (GW) events from the LIGO/Virgo runs O1 to
O3 is conducted with the Pierre Auger Observatory. Due to the distinctive
properties of photon interactions and to the background expected from hadronic
showers, a subset of the most interesting GW events is selected based on their
localization quality and distance. Time periods of 1000 s around and 1 day
after the GW events are analyzed. No coincidences are observed. Upper limits on
the UHE photon fluence from a GW event are derived that are typically at
$\sim$7 MeV cm$^{-2}$ (time period 1000~s) and $\sim$35 MeV cm$^{-2}$ (time
period 1 day). Due to the proximity of the binary neutron star merger GW170817,
the energy of the source transferred into UHE photons above 40 EeV is
constrained to be less than 20% of its total gravitational wave energy. These
are the first limits on UHE photons from GW sources.


  This study explores the potential of crowdfunding as a tool for achieving
citizen co-funding of public projects. Focusing on philanthropic crowdfunding,
we examine whether collaborative projects between public and private
organizations are more successful in fundraising than projects initiated solely
by private organizations. We argue that government involvement in crowdfunding
provides some type of accreditation or certification that attests to a project
aim to achieve public rather than private goals, thereby mitigating information
asymmetry and improving mutual trust between creators (i.e., private sector
organizations) and funders (i.e., crowd). To support this argument, we show
that crowdfunding projects with government involvement achieved a greater
success rate and attracted a greater amount of funding than comparable projects
without government involvement. This evidence shows that governments may take
advantage of crowdfunding to co-fund public projects with the citizenry for
addressing the complex challenges that we face in the twenty-first century.


  The complex problem of when and how galaxies formed has not until recently
been susceptible of direct attack. It has been known for some time that the
excessive number of blue galaxies counted at faint magnitudes implies that a
considerable fraction of the massive star formation in the universe occurred at
z < 3, but, surprisingly, spectroscopic studies of galaxies down to a B
magnitude of 24 found little sign of the expected high-z progenitors of current
massive galaxies, but rather, in large part, small blue galaxies at modest
redshifts z \sim 0.3. This unexpected population has diverted attention from
the possibility that early massive star-forming galaxies might also be found in
the faint blue excess. From KECK spectroscopic observations deep enough to
encompass a large population of z > 1 field galaxies, we can now show directly
that in fact these forming galaxies are present in substantial numbers at B
\sim 24, and that the era from redshifts 1 to 2 was clearly a major period of
galaxy formation. These z > 1 galaxies have very unusual morphologies as seen
in deep HST WFPC2 images.


  We realize on an Atom-Chip a practical, experimentally undemanding,
tomographic reconstruction algorithm relying on the time-resolved measurements
of the atomic population distribution among atomic internal states. More
specifically, we estimate both the state density matrix as well as the
dephasing noise present in our system by assuming complete knowledge of the
Hamiltonian evolution. The proposed scheme is based on routinely performed
measurements and established experimental procedures, hence providing a
simplified methodology for quantum technological applications.


  The spreading of a cap-shaped spherical droplet on a completely wettable
spherical substrate is studied. The non-equilibrium thermodynamic formulation
is used to derive the thermodynamic driving force of spreading including the
line-tension effect. Then the energy balance approach is adopted to derive the
evolution equation of the spreading droplet. The time evolution of the contact
angle $\theta$ of a droplet obeys a power law $\theta \sim t^{-\alpha}$ with
the exponent $\alpha$, which is different from that derived from Tanner's law
on a flat substrate. Furthermore, the line tension must be positive to promote
complete wetting on a spherical substrate, while it must be negative on a flat
substrate.


  I review all the new features of the HERWIG event generator which are
relevant to Linear Collider (LC) physics starting from version 6.1


  A set of Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics simulations of the influence of
photoionising radiation and stellar winds on a series of 10$^{4}$M$_{\odot}$
turbulent molecular clouds with initial virial ratios of 0.7, 1.1, 1.5, 1.9 and
2.3 and initial mean densities of 136, 1135 and 9096\,cm$^{-3}$ are presented.
Reductions in star formation efficiency rates are found to be modest, in the
range $30\%-50\%$ and to not vary greatly across the parameter space. In no
case was star formation entirely terminated over the $\approx3$\,Myr duration
of the simulations. The fractions of material unbound by feedback are in the
range $20-60\%$, clouds with the lowest escape velocities being the most
strongly affected.\\ Leakage of ionised gas leads to the HII regions rapidly
becoming underpressured. The destructive effects of ionisation are thus largely
not due to thermally--driven expansion of the HII regions, but to momentum
transfer by photoevaporation of fresh material. Our simulations have similar
global ionisation rates and we show that the effects of feedback upon them can
be adequately modelled as a steady injection of momentum, resembling a
momentum--conserving wind.


  The Gamma-Ray burst (GRB) - afterglow transition is one of the most
interesting and least studied GRB phases. During this phase the relativistic
ejecta begins interacting with the surrounding matter. A strong short lived
reverse shock propagates into the ejecta (provided that it is baryonic) while
the forward shock begins to shape the surrounding matter into a Blandford-McKee
profile. We suggest a parametrization of the early afterglow light curve and we
calculate (analytically and numerically) the observed parameters that results
from a reverse shock emission (in an interstellar medium [ISM] environment). We
present a new fingerprint of the reverse shock emission that is added to the
well known $t^{-2}$ optical decay. Observation of this signature would indicate
that the reverse shock dominates the emission during the early afterglow. The
existence of a reverse shock will in turn imply that the relativistic ejecta
contains a significant baryonic component. This signature would also imply that
the surrounding medium is an ISM. We further show that: (i) The reverse shock
optical flash depends strongly on initial conditions of the relativistic
ejecta. (ii) Previous calculations have generally overestimated the strength of
this optical flash. (iii) If the reverse shock dominates the optical flash then
detailed observations of the early afterglow light curve would possibly enable
us to determine the initial physical conditions within the relativistic ejecta
and specifically to estimate its Lorentz factor and its width.


  We discuss the quantum numbers of domain walls of minimal length induced by
doping Mott insulators, carefully distinguishing between holon and hole walls.
We define a minimal wall hypothesis that uniquely correlates the observed
spatial structure with the doping level for the low-temperature commensurate
insulating state of La$_{2-x}$Ba$_x$CuO$_4$ and related materials at $x={1\over
8}$. We remark that interesting walls can be supported not only by conventional
antiferromagnetic but also by orbital antiferromagnetic (staggered flux phase,
$d$-density) bulk order. We speculate on the validity of the minimal wall
hypothesis more generally, and argue that it plausibly explains several of the
most striking anomalous features of the cuprate high-temperature
superconductors.


  We report the detection of a new satellite of M31, projected close to M32.
And VIII is tidally distorted, with length ~10 kpc and width a few kpc. It
contains 5-12 planetary nebulae (PNe) and 1-3 globular clusters, and has a
velocity of -204 km/s with respect to M31, some 350 km/s away from M32's
velocity. There are also about 4 x 10^5 solar masses of HI, well-separated from
the disk, at the same position and velocity. The satellite has luminosity of
1.2-2.4 x 10^8 solar luminosities, and a central surface brightness of order
\mu_V=24. Both these values are typical of Local Group dwarf galaxies. Its
surface brightness is some 6 magnitudes brighter than any of the stellar
streams found in the Milky Way or M31. The three associated globular clusters
have reddening consistent with foreground reddening from the Milky Way only,
making it likely that the satellite is in front of M31, unlike the giant tidal
stream of Ibata et al.(2001), which is behind M31 in the SE quadrant. However,
the major axis of And VIII is aligned with the western edge of this giant
stream, and we suggest that its unusual fan shape is caused by superposition of
two streams, the westernmost of which was tidally stripped from And VIII.


  We show that the standing accretion shock instability (SASI) that has been
used to ease the shock revival in core collapse supernovae (CCSNe)
neutrino-driven explosion models, might play a much more decisive role in
supplying the stochastic angular momentum required to trigger an explosion with
jittering jets. We find that if the kinetic energy associated with the
transverse (non radial) motion of the SASI is larger than about ten percent of
the energy associated with the energy of the accreted gas, then the stochastic
angular momentum can reach about five percent of the Keplerian specific angular
momentum around the newly born neutron star. Such an accretion flow leaves an
open conical region along the poles with an average opening angle of about 5
degrees. The outflow from the open polar regions powers an explosion according
to the jittering-jets model.


  This paper applies risk analysis to medical problems, through the properties
of nonlinear responses (convex or concave). It shows 1) necessary relations
between the nonlinearity of dose-response and the statistical properties of the
outcomes, particularly the effect of the variance (i.e., the expected frequency
of the various results and other properties such as their average and
variations); 2) The description of "antifragility" as a mathematical property
for local convex response and its generalization and the designation
"fragility" as its opposite, locally concave; 3) necessary relations between
dosage, severity of conditions, and iatrogenics. Iatrogenics seen as the tail
risk from a given intervention can be analyzed in a probabilistic
decision-theoretic way, linking probability to nonlinearity of response. There
is a necessary two-way mathematical relation between nonlinear response and the
tail risk of a given intervention. In short we propose a framework to integrate
the necessary consequences of nonlinearities in evidence-based medicine and
medical risk management.
  Keywords: evidence based medicine, risk management, nonlinear responses


  Evolution of gravitational perturbations, both in time and frequency domains,
is considered for a spherically symmetric black hole in the non-reduced
Einstein-Aether theory. It is shown that real oscillation frequency and damping
rate are larger for the Einstein-Aether black hole than for the Schwarzschild
black hole. This may provide an opportunity to observe aether in the
forthcoming experiments with new generation of gravitational antennas.


  Reasoning over semantically annotated data is an emerging trend in stream
processing aiming to produce sound and complete answers to a set of continuous
queries. It usually comes at the cost of finding a trade-off between data
throughput and the cost of expressive inferences. Strider-lsa proposes such a
trade-off and combines a scalable RDF stream processing engine with an
efficient reasoning system. The main reasoning tasks are based on a query
rewriting approach for SPARQL that benefits from an intelligent encoding of
RDFS+ (RDFS + owl:sameAs) ontology elements. Strider-lsa runs in production at
a major international water management company to detect anomalies from sensor
streams. The system is evaluated along different dimensions and over multiple
datasets to emphasize its performance.


  Matrix string theory is equivalent to type IIA superstring theory in the
light-cone gauge, together with extra degrees of freedom representing D-brane
states. It is therefore the appropriate framework in which to study systems of
multiple fundamental strings expanding into higher-dimensional D-branes.
Starting from Matrix theory in a weakly curved background, we construct the
linear couplings of closed string fields to type IIA Matrix strings. As a
check, we show that at weak coupling the resulting action reproduces light-cone
gauge string theory in a weakly curved background. Further dualities give a
type IIB Matrix string theory and a type IIA theory of Matrix strings with
winding. We comment on the dielectric effect in each of these theories, giving
some explicit solutions describing fundamental strings expanding into various
Dp-branes.


  Using a novel approach to ultrafast resonant pump-probe spectroscopy we
investigate the spectral shape and dynamics of absorption features related to
the A exciton in an hBN/MoSe$_2$/hBN van der Waals heterostructure. While in a
pure two-level system a pump-probe experiment measures the occupation or the
polarization dynamics, depending on the time ordering of the pulse pair, in the
transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD) system both quantities get thoroughly
mixed by strong exciton-exciton interaction. We find that for short positive
delays the spectral lines experience pronounced changes in their shape and
energy and they relax to the original situation on a picosecond time scale. For
negative delays distinctive spectral oscillations appear indicating the
first-time observation of perturbed free induction decay for a TMD system. The
comparison between co-circular and cross-circular excitation schemes further
allows us to investigate the rapid inter-valley scattering. By considering a
three-level system as a minimal model including the local field effect,
excitation induced dephasing and scattering between the excited states we
explain all phenomena observed in the experiment with excellent consistency.
Our handy model can be even further reduced to two levels in the case of a
co-circular excitation, for which we derive analytic expressions to describe
the detected signals. This allows us to trace back the spectral shapes and
shifts to the impact of local field effect and excitation induced dephasing
thus fully reproducing the complex behavior of the observed effects.


  Elucidating the nature of the magnetic ground state of iron-based
superconductors is of paramount importance in unveiling the mechanism behind
their high temperature superconductivity. Until recently, it was thought that
superconductivity emerges only from an orthorhombic antiferromagnetic stripe
phase, which can in principle be described in terms of either localized or
itinerant spins. However, we recently reported that tetragonal symmetry is
restored inside the magnetically ordered state of a hole-doped BaFe2As2. This
observation was interpreted as indirect evidence of a new double-Q magnetic
structure, but alternative models of orbital order could not be ruled out.
Here, we present Mossbauer data that show unambiguously that half of the iron
sites in this tetragonal phase are non-magnetic, establishing conclusively the
existence of a novel magnetic ground state with a non-uniform magnetization
that is inconsistent with localized spins. We show that this state is naturally
explained as the interference between two spin-density waves, demonstrating the
itinerant character of the magnetism of these materials and the primary role
played by magnetic over orbital degrees of freedom.


  Discovery of a novel thermodynamic aspect of nonrelativistic gravity is
reported. Here, initially, an unspecified scalar field potential is considered
and treated not as an externally applied field but as a thermodynamic variable
on an equal footing with the fluid variables. It is shown that the second law
of thermodynamics imposes a stringent constraint on the field, and, quite
remarkably, the allowable field turns out to be only of gravity. The resulting
field equation for the gravitational potential derived from the analysis of the
entropy production rate contains a dissipative term due to irreversibility. It
is found that the system relaxes to the conventional theory of Newtonian
gravity up to a certain spatial scale, whereas on the larger scale there
emerges non-Newtonian gravity described by a nonlinear field equation
containing a single coefficient. A comment is made on an estimation of the
coefficient that has its origin in the thermodynamic property of the system.


  We present a new method to reconstruct and manipulate the spectral properties
of human skin from simple RGB albedo captures. To this end, we leverage Monte
Carlo light simulation over an accurate biophysical human skin layering model
parameterized by its most important components, thereby covering a plausible
range of colors. The practical complexity of the model allows us to learn the
inverse mapping from any albedo to its most probable associated skin
properties. Our technique can faithfully reproduce any skin type, being
expressive enough to automatically handle more challenging areas like the lips
or imperfections in the face. Thanks to the smoothness of the skin parameters
maps recovered, the albedo can be robustly edited through meaningful
biophysical properties.


  In this report, we describe the technical details of oursubmission to the
EPIC-Kitchens Object Detection Challenge.Duck filling and mix-up techniques are
firstly introduced to augment the data and significantly improve the robustness
of the proposed method. Then we propose GRE-FPN and Hard IoU-imbalance Sampler
methods to extract more representative global object features. To bridge the
gap of category imbalance, Class Balance Sampling is utilized and greatly
improves the test results. Besides, some training and testing strategies are
also exploited, such as Stochastic Weight Averaging and multi-scale testing.
Experimental results demonstrate that our approach can significantly improve
the mean Average Precision (mAP) of object detection on both the seen and
unseen test sets of EPICKitchens.


  The theory of superconductivity can be divided into two groups depending on
whether it has multi-kink solutions. For example, the BCS theory and the
Gross-Neveu model have metastable multi-kink solutions whereas the conventional
Ginzburg-Landau theory without higher-derivative interactions does not have any
multi-kink solutions. In this paper, we systematically examine the solutions of
the holographic superconductor model to find out which group the model falls
into. We show that the holographic superconductor model has metastable
multi-kink solutions. In this sense, we find that the holographic
superconductor model falls into the category of the BCS theory and the
Gross-Neveu model. We also find that the holographic superconductor model has
kink crystalline condensates which are well-fitted by the Jacobi elliptic
functions.


  The radiative decay of the massive neutrino $\nu_i \rightarrow \nu_j \gamma$
is investigated in the framework of the Standard Model in external
electromagnetic fields of various configurations: constant crossed field,
constant uniform magnetic field, plane monochromatic wave's field. The effect
of significant enhancement of the neutrino decay probability by the external
field (electromagnetic catalysis) is discussed. An especially strong
enhancement occurs in the case of the ultrarelativistic neutrino decay, since
in this case the decay probability does not contain suppression caused by the
smallness of the decaying neutrino mass. The ultrarelativistic neutrino decay
catalysis is significant even in a relatively weak external field ($F/F_e <<
1$, where $F_e$ is the critical Schwinger value). The expression for the photon
splitting probability into the neutrino pair $\gamma \rightarrow \nu_i
\bar\nu_j$ in the wave field is given. The estimations of a number of
gamma-quanta produced in a volume filled with an electromagnetic field and the
neutrino lifetime in a strong magnetic field are presented.


  An analogy is drawn between version of non-equilibrium thermodynamics a
distribution-based containing an additional thermodynamic first-passage time
parameter, nonequilibrium statistical operator method and extended irreversible
thermodynamics with flows as an additional thermodynamic parameter.
Thermodynamics containing an additional thermodynamic first-passage time
parameter maps to extended irreversible thermodynamics. Various conditions for
the dependence of the distribution parameters of the first-passage time on the
random value of energy, the first thermodynamic parameter, are considered. Time
parameter relaxation time {\tau} of extended irreversible thermodynamics is
replaced by the average first-passage time. Expressions are obtained for the
thermodynamic parameter, the conjugate of the first passage time through the
entropy change, and for the average first passage time through the flows.


  The \minerva experiment reports double-differential cross-section
measurements for $\nu_{\mu}$-carbon interactions with three-momentum transfer
$|\vec{q}| < 1.2$ GeV obtained with medium energy exposures in the NuMI beam.
These measurements are performed as a function of the three-momentum transfer
and an energy transfer estimator called the available energy defined as the
energy that would be visible in the detector. The double differential cross
sections are compared to the GENIE and NuWro predictions along with the
modified version of GENIE which incorporates new models for better agreement
with earlier measurements from MINERvA. In these measurements, the
quasi-elastic, resonance, and multi-nucleon knockout processes appear at
different kinematics in this two-dimensional space. The results can be used to
improve models for neutrino interactions needed by neutrino oscillation
experiments.


  To an extent, the 1966 congress was a hole in the iron curtain. At least that
how a young Soviet mathematician saw it.


  We provide an alternative proof for the capacity region of the degraded
Gaussian multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) broadcast channel. Our proof
does not use the channel enhancement technique as opposed to the original proof
of Weingertan {\it et. al.} and the alternative proof of Liu {\it et. al}. Our
proof starts with the single-letter description of the capacity region of the
degraded broadcast channel, and directly evaluates it for the degraded Gaussian
MIMO broadcast channel by using two main technical tools. The first one is the
generalized de Bruijn identity due to Palomar \emph{et. al.} which provides a
connection between the differential entropy and the Fisher information matrix.
The second tool we use is an inequality due to Dembo which lower bounds the
differential entropy in terms of the Fisher information matrix.


  We explore a solution for learning disease signatures from weakly, yet easily
obtainable, annotated volumetric medical imaging data by analyzing 3D volumes
as a sequence of 2D images. We demonstrate the performance of our solution in
the detection of emphysema in lung cancer screening low-dose CT images. Our
approach utilizes convolutional long short-term memory (LSTM) to "scan"
sequentially through an imaging volume for the presence of disease in a portion
of scanned region. This framework allowed effective learning given only
volumetric images and binary disease labels, thus enabling training from a
large dataset of 6,631 un-annotated image volumes from 4,486 patients. When
evaluated in a testing set of 2,163 volumes from 2,163 patients, our model
distinguished emphysema with area under the receiver operating characteristic
curve (AUC) of .83. This approach was found to outperform 2D convolutional
neural networks (CNN) implemented with various multiple-instance learning
schemes (AUC=0.69-0.76) and a 3D CNN (AUC=.77).


  Given a graph $G$, its Ramsey number $r(G)$ is the minimum $N$ so that every
two-coloring of $E(K_N)$ contains a monochromatic copy of $G$. It was
conjectured by Conlon, Fox, and Sudakov that if one deletes a single vertex
from $G$, the Ramsey number can change by at most a constant factor. We
disprove this conjecture, exhibiting an infinite family of graphs such that
deleting a single vertex from each decreases the Ramsey number by a
super-constant factor.
  One consequence of this result is the following. There exists a family of
graphs $\{G_n\}$ so that in any Ramsey coloring for $G_n$ (that is, a coloring
of a clique on $r(G_n)-1$ vertices with no monochromatic copy of $G_n$), one of
the color classes has density $o(1)$.


  In the last three decades or so, we have witnessed an extraordinary progress
in the research and technology of carbon-based nanomaterials. Among the
peculiar highlights are the discoveries of fullerene, the carbon nanotubes and
the magnificent simple scotch tape exfoliated graphene. The unique
photophysical properties of these different allotropic forms of the nanocarbon
have opened up vast application possibilities in many fields of science and
technology, with particular emphasis on optoelectronics and photonics. A
prerequisite for many of these applications is a thorough understanding of the
nature of the elementary and coupled excitations and also various dynamical
processes involving them. Here, we present an overview of the recent excitement
with the carbon nanostructures, in particular, the quantum dots, nanotubes and
graphene. We discuss some of their very interesting properties investigated
through optical and THz spectroscopic tools. At optical frequencies, the light
emitting properties, the nonlinearities and ultrafast response have been
presented, while, the low-energy response has been considered in terms of
studies obtained by using THz time-domain spectroscopy. Finally, we conclude
with some of the future prospects on the photophysics of carbon nanosystems in
realistic applications.


  We present sets of parton distribution functions (PDFs), based on the
NNPDF3.0 family, which include the photon PDF from the NNPDF2.3QED sets, and
leading-order QED contributions to the DGLAP evolution as implemented in the
public code APFEL. The aim is to combine our state-of-the-art determination of
quark and gluon PDFs with the so far only direct determination of the photon
PDF from LHC data. In addition, the use of APFEL allowed us to employ a
solution of the DGLAP equation that, differently from that used for the
NNPDF2.3QED sets, includes QED corrections in a more accurate way. We briefly
discuss how these sets are constructed and investigate the effect of the
inclusion of the QED corrections on PDFs and parton luminosities. Finally, we
compare the resulting sets, which we dubbed NNPDF3.0QED, to the older
NNPDF2.3QED sets and to all presently available PDF sets that include QED
corrections, namely CT14QED and MRST2004QED.


  Online social networks have become an integral aspect of our daily lives and
play a crucial role in shaping our relationships with others. However, bugs and
glitches, even minor ones, can cause anything from frustrating problems to
serious data leaks that can have farreaching impacts on millions of users. To
mitigate these risks, fuzz testing, a method of testing with randomised inputs,
can provide increased confidence in the correct functioning of a social
network. However, implementing traditional fuzz testing methods can be
prohibitively difficult or impractical for programmers outside of the social
network's development team. To tackle this challenge, we present Socialz, a
novel approach to social fuzz testing that (1) characterises real users of a
social network, (2) diversifies their interaction using evolutionary
computation across multiple, non-trivial features, and (3) collects performance
data as these interactions are executed. With Socialz, we aim to put social
testing tools in everybody's hands, thereby improving the reliability and
security of social networks used worldwide. In our study, we came across (1)
one known limitation of the current GitLab CE and (2) 6,907 errors, of which
40.16% are beyond our debugging skills.


  Using a high cadence imaging spectropolarimetric observation of a sunspot and
its surroundings in magnetically sensitive (FeI 6173 A) and insensitive (FeI
7090 A) upper photospheric absorption lines, we map the instantaneous wave
phases and helioseismic travel times as a function of observation height and
inclination of magnetic field to the vertical. We confirm the magnetic
inclination angle dependent transmission of incident acoustic waves into upward
propagating waves, and derive (1) proof that helioseismic travel times receive
direction dependent contributions from such waves and hence cause errors in
conventional flow inferences, (2) evidences for acoustic wave sources beneath
the umbral photosphere, and (3) significant differences in travel times
measured from the chosen magnetically sensitive and insensitive spectral lines.


  The vibrational spectra of glass formers follow different laws with respect
to crystals. A rationale for their anomalous behaviour is provided by the
euclidean random matrix theory. Experiments on glass formers at different
densities might be a suitable route to test the prediction of the theory.


  We introduce the definition of the typical irreducible modules of the
generalized quantum groups, and prove the Weyl-Kac-type formulas of their
characters. As a by-product, we obtain the Weyl-Kac-type character formulas of
the typical irreducible modules of the quantum superalgebras associated with
the basic classical Lie superalgebras, which is explained in Introduction.


  We compare the fully nonlinear and perturbative evolution of nonrotating
black holes with odd-parity distortions utilizing the perturbative results to
interpret the nonlinear results. This introduction of the second polarization
(odd-parity) mode of the system, and the systematic use of combined techniques
brings us closer to the goal of studying more complicated systems like
distorted, rotating black holes, such as those formed in the final inspiral
stage of two black holes. The nonlinear evolutions are performed with the 3D
parallel code for Numerical Relativity, {Cactus}, and an independent
axisymmetric code, {Magor}. The linearized calculation is performed in two
ways: (a) We treat the system as a metric perturbation on Schwarzschild, using
the Regge-Wheeler equation to obtain the waveforms produced. (b) We treat the
system as a curvature perturbation of a Kerr black hole (but here restricted to
the case of vanishing rotation parameter a) and evolve it with the Teukolsky
equation The comparisons of the waveforms obtained show an excellent agreement
in all cases.


  It was empirically determined that the umbra-penumbra boundaries of stable
sunspots are characterized by a constant value of the vertical magnetic field.
We analyzed the evolution of the photospheric magnetic field properties of a
decaying sunspot belonging to NOAA 11277 between August 28 - September 3, 2011.
The observations were acquired with the spectropolarimeter on-board of the
Hinode satellite. We aim to proof the validity of the constant vertical
magnetic-field boundary between the umbra and penumbra in decaying sunspots. A
spectral-line inversion technique was used to infer the magnetic field vector
from the full-Stokes profiles. In total, eight maps were inverted and the
variation of the magnetic properties in time were quantified using linear or
quadratic fits. We found a linear decay of the umbral vertical magnetic field,
magnetic flux, and area. The penumbra showed a linear increase of the vertical
magnetic field and a sharp decay of the magnetic flux. In addition, the
penumbral area quadratically decayed. The vertical component of the magnetic
field is weaker on the umbra-penumbra boundary of the studied decaying sunspot
compared to stable sunspots. Its value seem to be steadily decreasing during
the decay phase. Moreover, at any time of the shown sunspot decay, the inner
penumbra boundary does not match with a constant value of the vertical magnetic
field, contrary to what was seen in stable sunspots. During the decaying phase
of the studied sunspot, the umbra does not have a sufficiently strong vertical
component of the magnetic field and is thus unstable and prone to be
disintegrated by convection or magnetic diffusion. No constant value of the
vertical magnetic field was found for the inner penumbral boundary.


  We present an integrated architecture for word-level and sentence-level
processing in a unification-based paradigm. The core of the system is a CLP
implementation of a unification engine for feature structures supporting
relational values. In this framework an HPSG-style grammar is implemented.
Word-level processing uses X2MorF, a morphological component based on an
extended version of two-level morphology. This component is tightly integrated
with the grammar as a relation. The advantage of this approach is that
morphology and syntax are kept logically autonomous while at the same time
minimizing interface problems.


  We discuss the appearance of relativistic geometric quantum phases for a
Dirac neutral particle based on possible scenarios of the Lorentz symmetry
violation background in the CPT-even gauge sector of Standard Model Extension.
Relativistic analogues of the Anandan quantum phase [J. Anandan, Phys. Lett. A
138, 347 (1989)] are obtained based on the the parity-even and parity-odd
sectors of the tensor $\left(K_{F}\right)_{\mu\nu\alpha\beta}$.


  Decays of neutral D-mesons are considered phenomenologically without invoking
any particular models. Special attention is given to cascade decays with
intermediate neutral kaons where coherent double-flavor oscillations (CDFO)
become possible. We show necessity and unique possibilities of experiments on
CDFO. They allow to relate with each other widths and masses of D-meson
eigenstates, to separate interference effects due to $D^0 - \bar D^0$ mixing
and/or Cabibbo-favored vs. doubly-suppressed transitions. Such experiments
provide the only known ways to unambiguous model-independent measurements of
all CP-violating parameters and of Cabibbo-doubly-suppressed amplitudes, where
the New Physics may have more prominent manifestations. Similar experiments
would be useful and interesting also for charged $D$-meson decays to neutral
kaons.


  Let $G$ be a graph on $n\geq 3$ vertices. A graph $G$ is almost
distance-hereditary if each connected induced subgraph $H$ of $G$ has the
property $d_{H}(x,y)\leq d_{G}(x,y)+1$ for any pair of vertices $x,y\in V(H)$.
A graph $G$ is called 1-heavy (2-heavy) if at least one (two) of the end
vertices of each induced subgraph of $G$ isomorphic to $K_{1,3}$ (a claw) has
(have) degree at least $n/2$, and called claw-heavy if each claw of $G$ has a
pair of end vertices with degree sum at least $n$. Thus every 2-heavy graph is
claw-heavy. In this paper we prove the following two results: (1) Every
2-connected, claw-heavy and almost distance-hereditary graph is Hamiltonian.
(2) Every 3-connected, 1-heavy and almost distance-hereditary graph is
Hamiltonian. In particular, the first result improves a previous theorem of
Feng and Guo. Both results are sharp in some sense.