  The electronic structure of recently discovered $\beta$-Fe$_4$Se$_5$ with
$\sqrt{5} \times \sqrt{5}$ ordered Fe vacancies is calculated using
first-principles density functional theory. We find that the ground state is an
antiferromagnetic (AFM) insulator in agreement with the experimental
observation. In K$_2$Fe$_4$Se$_5$, it is known that the ground state is
$\sqrt{5} \times \sqrt{5}$-blocked-checkerboard AFM ordered. But for this
material, we find that the ground state is $\sqrt{5} \times
\sqrt{5}$-pair-checkerboard AFM ordered, in which the intrablock four Fe spins
exhibit the collinear AFM order and the interblock spins on any two
nearest-neighboring sites are antiparallel aligned. This state is about 130
meV/Fe lower in energy than the $\sqrt{5} \times \sqrt{5}$-blocked-checkerboard
AFM one. Electron doping can lower the energy of the $\sqrt{5} \times
\sqrt{5}$-blocked-checkerboard AFM state and introduce a transition between
these two states, suggesting that there is strong AFM fluctuation in FeSe-based
materials upon doping. This provides a unified picture to understand the AFM
orders in $\beta$-Fe$_4$Se$_5$ and in alkali-metal intercalated FeSe materials.


  Jet modification in heavy-ion collisions is an important probe of the nature
and structure of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) produced in these collisions and
also encodes information about how the wakes that jets excite in a droplet of
QGP form and relax. However, in experiment, one cannot know what a particular
jet in a heavy ion collision would have looked like without quenching, making
it difficult to interpret measurements in terms of individual jet modification.
The goal of this Monte Carlo study is to gain insight into the modification of
jet observables using the hybrid strong/weak coupling model of jet quenching as
a test bed. In this Monte Carlo study (but not in experiment) it is possible to
watch $\textit{the same jet}$ as it evolves in vacuum or in QGP. We use this
ability to disentangle the effects of modification of individual jets in heavy
ion collisions vs. the effects of differing selection bias on the distribution
of two observables: fractional energy loss and groomed $\Delta R$. We find that
in the hybrid model the distribution of groomed $\Delta R$ appears to be
unmodified in a sample of jets selected after quenching, as in heavy ion
collisions, and confirm that this lack of modification arises because of a
selection bias toward jets that lose only a small fraction of their energy. If
instead we select jets in a way that avoids this bias, and then follow these
selected jets as they are quenched, we show that there is, in fact, a
substantial modification of the $\Delta R$ of individual jets. We show that
this jet modification is principally due to the incorporation of particles
coming from the wake that the parton shower excites in the plasma as a
component of what an experimentalist reconstructs as a jet. The effects we
discuss are substantial in magnitude, suggesting that our qualitative
conclusions are more general than the Monte Carlo study in which we obtain
them.


  Commuting is an important property in many cases of investigation of
properties of operators as well as in various applications, especially in
quantum physics. Using the observation that the generalized weighted
differential operator of order $k$ and the weighted Hardy-type operator commute
we derive a number of new and interesting identities involving some functions
of mathematical physics.


  Employing the concept of three-body radial distribution function and using
the two-body correlation functions, calculated based on the lowest order
constrained variational method, we investigated the effect of the three-body
force (TBF) on the nuclear matter properties, for Argonne and Urbana
$\it{v_{14}}$ potentials. As such, the results for nuclear matter density,
incompressibility, energy per nucleon, and symmetry energy are presented at the
saturation point. The inclusion of a phenomenological TBF resulted in closer
values of the saturation density, incompressibility, and symmetry energy to the
empirical ones for the symmetric nuclear matter. This is especially the case
for the Urbana $\it{v_{14}}$ potential. In addition, an empirically-verified
parabolic approximation of the interaction energy was utilized to perform an
approximate study of the nuclear matter with neutron excess. Hence, at
densities higher than about 0.3~fm$^{-3}$ and for proton-to-neutron density
ratios close to the symmetric nuclear matter, the inclusion of TBF resulted in
an extra attraction for the Argonne as compared to the Urbana $\it{v_{14}}$
potential.


  Recently, it has been shown that CSMA algorithms which use queue length-based
link weights can achieve throughput optimality in wireless networks. In
particular, a key result by Rajagopalan, Shah, and Shin (2009) shows that, if
the link weights are chosen to be of the form log(log(q)) (where q is the
queue-length), then throughput optimality is achieved. In this paper, we
tighten their result by showing that throughput optimality is preserved even
with weight functions of the form log(q)/g(q), where g(q) can be a function
that increases arbitrarily slowly. The significance of the result is due to the
fact that weight functions of the form log(q)/g(q) seem to achieve the best
delay performance in practice.


  We report our investigation of 1SWASP J234401.81-212229.1, a variable with a
18461.6 s period. After identification in a 2011 search of the SuperWASP
archive for main-sequence eclipsing binary candidates near the distribution's
short-period limit of approx. 0.20 d, it was measured to be undergoing rapid
period decrease in our earlier work, though later observations supported a
cyclic variation in period length. Spectroscopic data obtained in 2012 with the
Southern African Large Telescope did not, however, support the interpretation
of the object as a normal eclipsing binary. Here, we consider three possible
explanations consistent with the data: a single-star oblique rotator model in
which variability results from stable cool spots on opposite magnetic poles; a
two-star model in which the secondary is a brown dwarf; and a three-star model
involving a low-mass eclipsing binary in a hierarchical triple system. We
conclude that the latter is the most likely model.


  Symmetry-protected topological (SPT) phases are gapped short-range-entangled
quantum phases with a symmetry $G$, which can all be smoothly connected to the
trivial product states if we break the symmetry. It has been shown that a large
class of interacting bosonic SPT phases can be systematically described by
group cohomology theory. In this paper, we introduce a (special) group
supercohomology theory which is a generalization of the standard group
cohomology theory. We show that a large class of short-range interacting
fermionic SPT phases can be described by the group supercohomology theory.
Using the data of super cocycles, we can obtain the ideal ground state wave
function for the corresponding fermionic SPT phase. We can also obtain the bulk
Hamiltonian that realizes the SPT phase, as well as the anomalous (ie,
non-on-site) symmetry for the boundary effective Hamiltonian. The anomalous
symmetry on the boundary implies that the symmetric} boundary must be gapless
for 1+1D boundary, and must be gapless or topologically ordered beyond 1+1D. As
an application of this general result, we construct a new SPT phase in 3D, for
interacting fermionic superconductors with coplanar spin order (which have
$T^2=1$ time-reversal $Z_2^T$ and fermion-number parity $Z_2^f$ symmetries
described by a full symmetry group $Z_2^T\times Z_2^f$). Such a fermionic SPT
state can neither be realized by free fermions nor by interacting bosons
(formed by fermion-pairs), and thus are not included in the K-theory
classification for free fermions or group cohomology description for
interacting bosons. We also construct three interacting fermionic SPT phases in
2D with a full symmetry group $Z_2\times Z_2^f$. Those 2D fermionic SPT phases
all have central-charge $c=1$ gapless edge excitations, if the symmetry is not
broken.


  We derive the explicit form of the (g-2)(g-3)/2 linearly independent
relations among the products of pairs in a basis of holomorphic abelian
differentials in the case of canonical curves of genus g greater than 3. It
turns out that Petri's relations remarkably match in determinantal conditions.
We explicitly express the volume form on the moduli space M_g of canonical
curves induced by the Siegel metric, in terms of the period Riemann matrix
only. By the Kodaira-Spencer map, the relations lead to an expression of the
induced Siegel metric on M_g, that corresponds to the square of the Bergman
reproducing kernel. A key role is played by distinguished bases for holomorphic
differentials whose properties also lead to an immediate derivation of Fay's
trisecant identity.


  This paper applies Algorithmic Information Theory to simple examples of
replication processes to illustrate how replicating structures can generate and
maintain order in a non equilibrium system. Variation in replicating structures
enhances the system's ability to maintain homeostasis in a changing environment
by allowing it to evolve to a more restricted region of its state space.
Stability is further enhanced when replicating systems develop dependencies, by
sharing information or resources. Such systems co-evolve, becoming more
independent of the external environment. Nested systems have a hierarchy of
dependency but have low algorithmic entropy as they are in principle simpler to
describe algorithmically. Nesting of replicating systems offsets the need for
increased variety by allowing the structures to increase in organizational
complexity with little increase in algorithmic entropy. Chaitin's d-diameter
complexity provides a measure of the level of order in nested replicating
systems.


  We prove that the convex least squares estimator (LSE) attains a $n^{-1/2}$
pointwise rate of convergence in any region where the truth is linear. In
addition, the asymptotic distribution can be characterized by a modified
invelope process. Analogous results hold when one uses the derivative of the
convex LSE to perform derivative estimation. These asymptotic results
facilitate a new consistent testing procedure on the linearity against a convex
alternative. Moreover, we show that the convex LSE adapts to the optimal rate
at the boundary points of the region where the truth is linear, up to a log-log
factor. These conclusions are valid in the context of both density estimation
and regression function estimation.


  We study the potentialities of a 50 liter liquid argon TPC prototype operated
at the CERN WANF neutrino beam. We concentrate on the selection and
reconstruction of quasi-elastic events and measure the cross section for this
reaction.


  We present a detailed analysis of the unjamming transition in 2D frictionless
disk packings using a static correlation function that has been widely used to
study disordered systems. We show that this point-to-set (PTS) correlation
function exhibits a dominant length scale that diverges as the unjamming
transition is approached through decompression. In addition, we identify
deviations from meanfield predictions, and present detailed analysis of the
origin of non-meanfield behavior. A mean-field bulk-surface argument is
reviewed. Corrections to this argument are identified, which lead to a change
in the functional form of the critical PTS boundary size. An entropic
description of the origin of the correlations is presented, and simple rigidity
assumptions are shown to predict the functional form of the critical PTS
boundary size as a function of the pressure.


  The amplitude of the Dalitz decay pi0 -> e+ e gamma is studied and its
model-independent properties are discussed in detail. A calculation of
radiative corrections is performed within the framework of two-flavour chiral
perturbation theory, enlarged by virtual photons and leptons. The lowest meson
dominance approximation, motivated by large N\_C considerations, is used for
the description of the pi0 - gamma* - gamma* transition form factor and for the
estimate of the NLO low energy constants involved in the analysis. The two
photon reducible contributions is included and discussed. Previous calculations
are extended to the whole kinematical range of the soft-photon approximation,
thus allowing for the possibility to consider various experimental situations
and observables.


  A magnetic susceptibility which decreases with decreasing temperature is
observed in all $CuO_2$ based superconductors with less than optimal doping. We
propose that in $La_{2-x} Sr_x CuO_4$ this is due to antiferromagnetic ordering
which is prevented by the low spatial dimensionality while in $YBa_2 Cu_3
O_{6.6}$ it is due to the interplay between antiferromagnetic fluctuations
within a plane and singlet pairing of electrons between nearest neighbor
planes.


  In a couple of articles (Ford G W and O'Connell R F 1996 Nature 380 113 and
2002 J. Phys. A: Math. Gen. 35 4183) it was argued that the standard result for
the derivative of the hyperbolic cotangent in the literature, d \coth y/dy =
-{csch}^2 y is incomplete and the correct expression should have an additional
term proportional to the Dirac delta function. The purpose of this paper is to
demonstrate that this claim is incorrect.


  We study periodic arrays of impurities that create localized regions of
expansion, embedded in two-dimensional crystalline membranes. These arrays
provide a simple elastic model of shape memory. As the size of each dilational
impurity increases (or the relative cost of bending to stretching decreases),
it becomes energetically favorable for each of the $M$ impurities to buckle up
or down into the third dimension, thus allowing for of order $2^M$ metastable
surface configurations corresponding to different impurity "spin"
configurations. With both discrete simulations and the nonlinear continuum
theory of elastic plates, we explore the buckling of both isolated dilations
and dilation arrays at zero temperature, guided by analogies with Ising
antiferromagnets. We conjecture ground states for systems with triangular and
square impurity superlattices, and comment briefly on the possible behaviors at
finite temperatures.


  We investigate the effect of statistical post-processing on the probabilistic
skill of discomfort index (DI) and indoor wet-bulb globe temperature (WBGTid)
ensemble forecasts, both calculated from the corresponding forecasts of
temperature and dew point temperature. Two different methodological approaches
to calibration are compared. In the first case, we start with joint
post-processing of the temperature and dew point forecasts and then create
calibrated samples of DI and WBGTid using samples from the obtained bivariate
predictive distributions. This approach is compared with direct post-processing
of the heat index ensemble forecasts. For this purpose, a novel ensemble model
output statistics model based on a generalized extreme value distribution is
proposed. The predictive performance of both methods is tested on the
operational temperature and dew point ensemble forecasts of the European Centre
for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts and the corresponding forecasts of DI and
WBGTid. For short lead times (up to day 6), both approaches significantly
improve the forecast skill. Among the competing post-processing methods, direct
calibration of heat indices exhibits the best predictive performance, very
closely followed by the more general approach based on joint calibration of
temperature and dew point temperature. Additionally, a machine learning
approach is tested and shows comparable performance for the case when one is
interested only in forecasting heat index warning level categories.


  Measuring functional connectivity from fMRI is important in understanding
processing in cortical networks. However, because brain's connection pattern is
complex, currently used methods are prone to produce false connections. We
introduce here a new method that uses derivative for estimating functional
connectivity. Using simulations, we benchmarked our method with other commonly
used methods. Our method achieves better results in complex network
simulations. This new method provides an alternative way to estimate functional
connectivity.


  The conspicuous threshold enhancement has been observed in the
baryon-antibaryon subchannels of many three-body B decay modes. By examining
the partial waves of baryon-antibaryon, we first show for B- -->pp-bar K- that
the pK- angular correlation rules out dominance of a single pp-bar partial wave
for the enhancement, for instance, the resonance hypothesis or the strong
final-state interaction in a single channel. The measured pK- angular
correlation turns out to be opposite to the naive expectation of the
short-distance picture. We study the origin of this reversed angular
correlation in the context of the pp-bar partial waves and argue that NN-bar
bound states may be the cause of this sign reversal. Dependence of the angular
correlation on the pp-bar invariant mass is very important to probe the
underlying problem from the experimental side.


  Gizatullin surfaces of type $[[0,0,-r_2,-r_3]]$ can be described by the
equations $yu = x P(x)$, $xv = u Q(u)$ and $yv = P(x) Q(u)$ in
$\mathbb{C}^4_{x,y,u,v}$ where $P$ and $Q$ are non-constant polynomials. We
establish the algebraic density property for smooth Gizatullin surfaces of this
type. Moreover we also prove the density property for smooth surfaces given by
these equations when $P$ and $Q$ are holomorphic functions.


  We prove that for monic polynomials $f, g \in \mathbb{C}[x]$ such that $g$
divides $f$, the $\ell_2$-norm of the quotient polynomial $f/g$ is bounded by
$\lVert f \rVert_1 \cdot \tilde{O}(\lVert{g}\rVert_0^3\text{deg}^2{
f})^{\lVert{g}\rVert_0 - 1}$. This improves upon the previously known
exponential (in $\text{deg}{ f}$) bounds for general polynomials. Our results
implies that the trivial long division algorithm runs in quasi-linear time
relative to the input size and number of terms of the quotient polynomial
$f/g$, thus solving a long-standing problem on exact divisibility of sparse
polynomials.
  We also study the problem of bounding the number of terms of $f/g$ in some
special cases. When $f, g \in \mathbb{Z}[x]$ and $g$ is a cyclotomic-free
(i.e., it has no cyclotomic factors) trinomial, we prove that
$\lVert{f/g}\rVert_0 \leq O(\lVert{f}\rVert_0 \text{size}({f})^2 \cdot
\log^6{\text{deg}{ g}})$. When $g$ is a binomial with $g(\pm 1) \neq 0$, we
prove that the sparsity is at most $O(\lVert{f}\rVert_0 (
\log{\lVert{f}\rVert_0} + \log{\lVert{f}\rVert_{\infty}}))$. Both upper bounds
are polynomial in the input-size. We leverage these results and give a
polynomial time algorithm for deciding whether a cyclotomic-free trinomial
divides a sparse polynomial over the integers.
  As our last result, we present a polynomial time algorithm for testing
divisibility by pentanomials over small finite fields when $\text{deg}{ f} =
\tilde{O}(\text{deg}{ g})$.


  In this paper we describe a stretchable solid-state electronic switching
material that operates at high voltage potentials, as well as a switch material
benchmarking technique that utilizes a modular dielectric elastomer (artificial
muscle) ring oscillator. The solid-state switching material was integrated into
our oscillator, which self-started after 16s and performed 5 oscillations at a
frequency of 1.05Hz with 3.25kV DC input. Our materials-by-design approach for
the nickel filled polydimethysiloxane (Ni-PDMS) based switch has resulted in
significant improvements over previous carbon-grease based switches in four key
areas, namely sharpness of switching behavior upon applied stretch, magnitude
of electrical resistance change, ease of manufacture, and rate of production.
Switch lifetime was demonstrated to be in the range of tens to hundreds of
cycles with the current process. An interesting and potentially useful
strain-based switching hysteresis behavior is also presented.


  We derive fundamental parameters of the embedded cluster DBSB48 in the
southern nebula Hoffleit18 and the very young open cluster Trumpler14, by means
of deep JHKs infrared photometry. We build colour-magnitude and colour-colour
diagrams to derive reddening and age, based on main sequence and pre-main
sequence distributions. Radial stellar density profiles are used to study
cluster structure and guide photometric diagram extractions. Field-star
decontamination is applied to uncover the intrinsic cluster sequences in the
diagrams. Ages are inferred from K-excess fractions. A prominent
pre-main-sequence population is present in DBSB48, and the K-excess fraction
f_K=55+/-6% gives an age of 1.1+/-0.5Myr. A mean reddening of A_K_s=0.9+/-0.03
was found, corresponding to $A_V=8.2\pm0.3$. The cluster CMD is consistent with
the far kinematic distance of 5 kpc for Hoffleit 18. For Trumpler 14 we derived
similar parameters as in previous studies in the optical, in particular an age
of $1.7\pm0.7$ Myr. The fraction of stars with infrared excess in Trumpler 14
is $f_K=28\pm4%$. Despite the young ages, both clusters are described by a King
profile with core radii $\rc=0.46\pm0.05$ pc and $\rc=0.35\pm0.04$ pc,
respectively for DBSB 48 and Trumpler 14. Such cores are smaller than those of
typical open clusters. Small cores are probably related to the cluster
formation and/or parent molecular cloud fragmentation. In DBSB 48, the
magnitude extent of the upper main sequence is $\Delta \ks\approx2$ mag, while
in Trumpler 14 it is $\Delta \ks\approx5$ mag, consistent with the estimated
ages.


  The difficult problem of relating the static structure of glassy liquids and
their dynamics is a good target for Machine Learning, an approach which excels
at finding complex patterns hidden in data. Indeed, this approach is currently
a hot topic in the glassy liquids community, where the state of the art
consists in Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), which have great expressive power but
are heavy models and lack interpretability. Inspired by recent advances in the
field of Machine Learning group-equivariant representations, we build a GNN
that learns a robust representation of the glass' static structure by
constraining it to preserve the roto-translation (SE(3)) equivariance. We show
that this constraint significantly improves the predictive power at comparable
or reduced number of parameters but most importantly, improves the ability to
generalize to unseen temperatures. While remaining a Deep network, our model
has improved interpretability compared to other GNNs, as the action of our
basic convolution layer relates directly to well-known rotation-invariant
expert features. Through transfer-learning experiments displaying unprecedented
performance, we demonstrate that our network learns a robust representation,
which allows us to push forward the idea of a learned structural order
parameter for glasses.


  Let F be the cubic field of discriminant -23 and let O be its ring of
integers. By explicitly computing cohomology of congruence subgroups of
GL(2,O), we computationally investigate modularity of elliptic curves over F.


  We calculate the low temperature properties of an acoustic polaron in three
dimensions in thermal equilibrium at a given temperature using a specialized
path integral Monte Carlo method. In particular we find numerical evidence that
the chosen Hamiltonian for the acoustic polaron describes a phase transition
from a localized state to an unlocalized state for the electron as the
phonons-electron coupling constant decreases. The phase transition manifests
itself with a jump discontinuity in the potential energy as a function of the
coupling constant. In the weak coupling regime the electron is in an extended
state whereas in the strong coupling regime it is found in a self-trapped
state.


  We construct a diffeormorphism invariant operator that is sensitive to how
far we are from the black hole horizon. Its expectation value blows up on the
horizon and it is small away from the horizon. Using this operator, we propose
a non-standard effective action that, we argue, captures some of the relevant
physics of quantum black holes, including the absence of the horizon at the
full quantum level. With the help of a toy version of this effective action, we
speculate on a possible connection between UV/IR mixing and the cosmological
constant problem.


  We present in this paper all the details for a complete description of the
Lie algebra a in the split case at any characteristic. We finish with the
determination of the expression of a generic element of this algebra. First of
all is necessary to implement its quadratic Jordan structure (see the O. Loss'
server http://mathematik.uibk.ac.at/jordan for our preprint). We write in this
file only the computational details.


  Modern biomedical studies often collect multi-view data, that is, multiple
types of data measured on the same set of objects. A popular model in
high-dimensional multi-view data analysis is to decompose each view's data
matrix into a low-rank common-source matrix generated by latent factors common
across all data views, a low-rank distinctive-source matrix corresponding to
each view, and an additive noise matrix. We propose a novel decomposition
method for this model, called decomposition-based generalized canonical
correlation analysis (D-GCCA). The D-GCCA rigorously defines the decomposition
on the L2 space of random variables in contrast to the Euclidean dot product
space used by most existing methods, thereby being able to provide the
estimation consistency for the low-rank matrix recovery. Moreover, to well
calibrate common latent factors, we impose a desirable orthogonality constraint
on distinctive latent factors. Existing methods, however, inadequately consider
such orthogonality and may thus suffer from substantial loss of undetected
common-source variation. Our D-GCCA takes one step further than generalized
canonical correlation analysis by separating common and distinctive components
among canonical variables, while enjoying an appealing interpretation from the
perspective of principal component analysis. Furthermore, we propose to use the
variable-level proportion of signal variance explained by common or distinctive
latent factors for selecting the variables most influenced. Consistent
estimators of our D-GCCA method are established with good finite-sample
numerical performance, and have closed-form expressions leading to efficient
computation especially for large-scale data. The superiority of D-GCCA over
state-of-the-art methods is also corroborated in simulations and real-world
data examples.


  Time-dependent femtosecond pump-probe spectroscopic ellipsometry studies on
zincblende gallium-nitride (zb-GaN) are performed and analyzed between
2.9-3.7eV. An ultra-fast change of the absorption onset (3.23eV for zb-GaN) is
observed by investigating the imaginary part of the dielectric function. The
266nm (4.66eV) pump pulses induce a large free-carrier concentration up to
$4\times 10^{20}$cm$^{-3}$, influencing the transition energy between
conduction and valence bands due to many-body effects, like band filling and
band gap renormalization, up to $\approx$500meV. Additionally, the absorption
of the pump-beam creates a free-carrier profile within the 605nm zb-GaN layer.
This leads to varying optical properties from sample surface to substrate,
which are taken into account by grading analysis for an accurate description of
the experimental data. A temporal resolution of 100fs allows in-depth
investigations of occurring ultra-fast relaxation and recombination processes.
We provide a quantitative description of the free-carrier concentration and
absorption onset at the sample surface as a function of relaxation,
recombination, and diffusion yielding a characteristic relaxation time of
0.19ps and a recombination time of 26.1ps.


  We address the Poincar\'e-Perron's classical problem of approximation for
high order linear differential equations in the class of almost periodic type
functions, extending the results for a second order linear differential
equation in [23]. We obtain explicit formulae for solutions of these equations,
for any fixed order $n\ge 3$, by studying a Riccati type equation associated
with the logarithmic derivative of a solution. Moreover, we provide sufficient
conditions to ensure the existence of a fundamental system of solutions. The
fixed point Banach argument allows us to find almost periodic and
asymptotically almost periodic solutions to this Riccati type equation. A
decomposition property of the perturbations induces a decomposition on the
Riccati type equation and its solutions. In particular, by using this
decomposition we obtain asymptotically almost periodic and also $p$-almost
periodic solutions to the Riccati type equation. We illustrate our results for
a third order linear differential equation.


  Numerical simulations are a highly valuable tool to evaluate the impact of
the uncertainties of various modelparameters, and to optimize e.g.
injection-production scenarios in the context of underground storage (of
CO2typically). Finite volume approximations of Darcy's parabolic model for
flows in porous media are typically runmany times, for many values of
parameters like permeability and porosity, at costly computational efforts.We
study the relevance of reduced basis methods as a way to lower the overall
simulation cost of finite volumeapproximations to Darcy's parabolic model for
flows in porous media for different values of the parameters suchas
permeability. In the context of underground gas storage (of CO2 typically) in
saline aquifers, our aim isto evaluate quickly, for many parameter values, the
flux along some interior boundaries near the well injectionarea-regarded as a
quantity of interest-. To this end, we construct reduced bases by a standard
POD-Greedyalgorithm. Our POD-Greedy algorithm uses a new goal-oriented error
estimator designed from a discrete space-time energy norm independent of the
parameter. We provide some numerical experiments that validate theefficiency of
the proposed estimator.


  Offline-to-online Reinforcement Learning (O2O RL) aims to improve the
performance of offline pretrained policy using only a few online samples. Built
on offline RL algorithms, most O2O methods focus on the balance between RL
objective and pessimism, or the utilization of offline and online samples. In
this paper, from a novel perspective, we systematically study the challenges
that remain in O2O RL and identify that the reason behind the slow improvement
of the performance and the instability of online finetuning lies in the
inaccurate Q-value estimation inherited from offline pretraining. Specifically,
we demonstrate that the estimation bias and the inaccurate rank of Q-value
cause a misleading signal for the policy update, making the standard offline RL
algorithms, such as CQL and TD3-BC, ineffective in the online finetuning. Based
on this observation, we address the problem of Q-value estimation by two
techniques: (1) perturbed value update and (2) increased frequency of Q-value
updates. The first technique smooths out biased Q-value estimation with sharp
peaks, preventing early-stage policy exploitation of sub-optimal actions. The
second one alleviates the estimation bias inherited from offline pretraining by
accelerating learning. Extensive experiments on the MuJoco and Adroit
environments demonstrate that the proposed method, named SO2, significantly
alleviates Q-value estimation issues, and consistently improves the performance
against the state-of-the-art methods by up to 83.1%.


  The reference-based object segmentation tasks, namely referring image
segmentation (RIS), few-shot image segmentation (FSS), referring video object
segmentation (RVOS), and video object segmentation (VOS), aim to segment a
specific object by utilizing either language or annotated masks as references.
Despite significant progress in each respective field, current methods are
task-specifically designed and developed in different directions, which hinders
the activation of multi-task capabilities for these tasks. In this work, we end
the current fragmented situation and propose UniRef++ to unify the four
reference-based object segmentation tasks with a single architecture. At the
heart of our approach is the proposed UniFusion module which performs
multiway-fusion for handling different tasks with respect to their specified
references. And a unified Transformer architecture is then adopted for
achieving instance-level segmentation. With the unified designs, UniRef++ can
be jointly trained on a broad range of benchmarks and can flexibly complete
multiple tasks at run-time by specifying the corresponding references. We
evaluate our unified models on various benchmarks. Extensive experimental
results indicate that our proposed UniRef++ achieves state-of-the-art
performance on RIS and RVOS, and performs competitively on FSS and VOS with a
parameter-shared network. Moreover, we showcase that the proposed UniFusion
module could be easily incorporated into the current advanced foundation model
SAM and obtain satisfactory results with parameter-efficient finetuning. Codes
and models are available at \url{https://github.com/FoundationVision/UniRef}.


  We investigate chiral superconductivity which occurs in the electronic
nematic state. A vortex state in a $c$-axis magnetic field is studied on the
basis of the two-component Ginzburg-Landau model for nematic-chiral
superconductors. It is shown that various vortex lattice structures are
stabilized by nontrivial cooperation of nematicity and chirality in
superconductors. In particular, the vortex lattice structural transition occurs
when a square anisotropy parameter $\nu$ is positive (negative) and the
nematicity is induced along the [110] axis ([100] axis). We discuss
nematic-chiral superconductivity in URu$_2$Si$_2$, Sr$_2$RuO$_4$, and UPt$_3$.
An experimental test for the examination of nematic order and chiral
superconductivity is proposed.


  We consider a continuous time random walk on the rooted binary tree of depth
$n$ with all transition rates equal to one and study its cover time, namely the
time until all vertices of the tree have been visited. We prove that,
normalized by $2^{n+1} n$ and then centered by $(\log 2) n - \log n$, the cover
time admits a weak limit as the depth of the tree tends to infinity. The
limiting distribution is identified as that of a Gumbel random variable with
rate one, shifted randomly by the logarithm of the sum of the limits of the
derivative martingales associated with two negatively correlated discrete
Gaussian free fields on the infinite version of the tree. The existence of the
limit and its overall form were conjectured in the literature. Our approach is
quite different from those taken in earlier works on this subject and relies in
great part on a comparison with the extremal landscape of the discrete Gaussian
free field on the tree.


  A central theme in phylogenetics is the reconstruction and analysis of
evolutionary trees from a given set of data. To determine the optimal search
methods for reconstructing trees, it is crucial to understand the size and
structure of the neighbourhoods of trees under tree rearrangement operations.
The diameter and size of the immediate neighbourhood of a tree has been
well-studied, however little is known about the number of trees at distance
two, three or (more generally) $k$ from a given tree. In this paper we provide
a number of exact and asymptotic results concerning these quantities, and
identify some key aspects of tree shape that play a role in determining these
quantities. We obtain several new results for two of the main tree
rearrangement operations - Nearest Neighbour Interchange and Subtree Prune and
Regraft -- as well as for the Robinson-Foulds metric on trees.


  Ba2CoWO6 (BCoW) has been synthesized in polycrystalline form by solid state
reaction at 1200C. Structural characterization of the compound was done through
X-ray diffraction (XRD) followed by Rietveld analysis of the XRD pattern. The
crystal structure is cubic, space group Fm-3m (No 225) with the lattice
parameter, a=8.210A. Optical band-gap of the present system has been calculated
using the UV-Vis Spectroscopy and Kubelka-Munk function, its value being 2.45
eV. A detailed study of the electronic properties has also been carried out
using the density functional theory (DFT) techniques implemented on WIEN2k.
Importance of electron-electron interaction between the Co ions leading to
half-metallic behavior, crystal and exchange splitting together with the
hybridization between O and Co, W has been investigated using the total and
partial density of states.


  We consider the model of auto-ignition (thermal explosion) of a free round
reactive turbulent jet. This model falls into the general class of Gelfand-type
problems and constitutes a boundary value problem for a certain semi-linear
elliptic equation that depends on two parameters: $\alpha$ characterizing the
flow rate and $\lambda$ (Frank-Kamentskii parameter) characterizing the
strength of the reaction. Similarly to the classical Gelfand problem, this
equation admits a solution when the Frank-Kametskii parameter $\lambda$ does
not exceed some critical value $\lambda^*(\alpha)$ and admits no solutions for
larger values of $\lambda$. We obtain the sharp asymptotic behavior of the
critical Frank-Kamenetskii parameter in the strong flow limit ($\alpha\gg1$).
We also provide a detailed description of the extremal solution (i.e., the
solution corresponding to $\lambda^*$) in this regime.


  Breakdown of Stokes-Einstein relation in supercooled liquids is believed to
be one of the hallmarks of glass transition. The phenomena is studied in depth
over many years to understand the microscopic mechanism without much success.
Recently it was found that violation of Stokes-Einstein relation in supercooled
liquids can be tuned very systematically by pinning randomly a set of particles
in their equilibrium positions. This observation suggested a possible framework
where breakdown of Stokes-Einstein relation in the dynamics of supercooled
liquids can be studied with precise control. We have done extensive molecular
dynamics simulations to understand this phenomena by analyzing the structure of
appropriately defined set of dynamically slow and fast particles clusters. We
have shown that the Stokes-Einstein breakdown actually become predominant once
the cluster formed by the slow particles percolate the entire system size.
Finally we proposed a possible close connection between fractal dimensions of
these clusters and the exponents associated with the fractional Stokes-Einstein
relation.


  Over the last thirty years, numerous consistency conditions for replicated
data have been proposed and implemented. Popular examples of such conditions
include linearizability (or atomicity), sequential consistency, causal
consistency, and eventual consistency. These consistency conditions are usually
defined independently from the computing entities (nodes) that manipulate the
replicated data; i.e., they do not take into account how computing entities
might be linked to one another, or geographically distributed. To address this
lack, as a first contribution, this paper introduces the notion of proximity
graph between computing nodes. If two nodes are connected in this graph, their
operations must satisfy a strong consistency condition, while the operations
invoked by other nodes are allowed to satisfy a weaker condition. The second
contribution is the use of such a graph to provide a generic approach to the
hybridization of data consistency conditions into the same system. We
illustrate this approach on sequential consistency and causal consistency, and
present a model in which all data operations are causally consistent, while
operations by neighboring processes in the proximity graph are sequentially
consistent. The third contribution of the paper is the design and the proof of
a distributed algorithm based on this proximity graph, which combines
sequential consistency and causal consistency (the resulting condition is
called fisheye consistency). In doing so the paper not only extends the domain
of consistency conditions, but provides a generic provably correct solution of
direct relevance to modern georeplicated systems.


  Practically measurable quantities resulting from quantum field theory are not
described by hermitian operators, contradicting one of the cornerstone axioms
of orthodox quantum theory. This could be a sign that some of the axioms of
orthodox quantum theory should be reformulated. A non-orthodox reformulation of
quantum theory based on integral curves of particle currents is advocated and
possible measurable manifestations are discussed. The consistency with particle
creation and destruction requires particles to be extended objects, which can
be viewed as a new derivation of string theory. Within this reformulation, an
indirect low-energy test of string theory is also possible.


  This paper presents Graph-of-Thought (GoT), a new model for workflow
automation that enhances the flexibility and efficiency of Large Language
Models (LLMs) in complex task execution. GoT advances beyond traditional linear
and tree-like cognitive models with a graph structure that enables dynamic path
selection. The open-source engine GoTFlow demonstrates the practical
application of GoT, facilitating automated, data-driven decision-making across
various domains. Despite challenges in complexity and transparency, GoTFlow's
potential for improving business processes is significant, promising
advancements in both efficiency and decision quality with continuous
development.


  We update cosmological hot dark matter constraints on neutrinos and hadronic
axions. Our most restrictive limits use 7-year data from the Wilkinson
Microwave Anisotropy Probe for the cosmic microwave background anisotropies,
the halo power spectrum (HPS) from the 7th data release of the Sloan Digital
Sky Survey, and the Hubble constant from Hubble Space Telescope observations.
We find 95% C.L. upper limits of \sum m_\nu<0.44 eV (no axions), m_a<0.91 eV
(assuming \sum m_\nu=0), and \sum m_\nu<0.41 eV and m_a<0.72 eV for two hot
dark matter components after marginalising over the respective other mass. CMB
data alone yield \sum m_\nu<1.19 eV (no axions), while for axions the HPS is
crucial for deriving m_a constraints. This difference can be traced to the fact
that for a given hot dark matter fraction axions are much more massive than
neutrinos.


  The mathematical physics of mechanical systems in thermal equilibrium is a
well studied, and relatively easy, subject, because the Gibbs distribution is
in general an adequate guess for the equilibrium state. On the other hand, the
mathematical physics of {\em non-equilibrium} systems, such as that of a chain
of masses connected with springs to two (infinite) heat reservoirs is more
difficult, precisely because no such {\em a priori} guess exists. Recent work
has, however, revealed that under quite general conditions, such states can not
only be shown to exist, but are {\em unique}, using the H\"ormander conditions
and controllability. Furthermore, interesting properties, such as energy flux,
exponentially fast convergence to the unique state, and fluctuations of that
state have been successfully studied. Finally, the ideas used in these studies
can be extended to certain stochastic PDE's using Malliavin calculus to prove
regularity of the process.


  In recent years, Text-to-Image (T2I) models have seen remarkable
advancements, gaining widespread adoption. However, this progress has
inadvertently opened avenues for potential misuse, particularly in generating
inappropriate or Not-Safe-For-Work (NSFW) content. Our work introduces
MMA-Diffusion, a framework that presents a significant and realistic threat to
the security of T2I models by effectively circumventing current defensive
measures in both open-source models and commercial online services. Unlike
previous approaches, MMA-Diffusion leverages both textual and visual modalities
to bypass safeguards like prompt filters and post-hoc safety checkers, thus
exposing and highlighting the vulnerabilities in existing defense mechanisms.


  In this paper, we study the chemical properties of the stars in the dwarf
satellites around the MW-like host galaxies, and explore the possible effects
of several baryonic processes, including supernova (SN) feedback, the
reionization of the universe and H$_2$ cooling, on them and how current and
future observations may put some constraints on these processes. We use a
semi-analytical model to generate MW-like galaxies, for which a fiducial model
can reproduce the luminosity function and the stellar metallicity--stellar mass
correlation of the MW dwarfs. Using the simulated MW-like galaxies, we focus on
investigating three metallicity properties of their dwarfs: the stellar
metallicity--stellar mass correlation of the dwarf population, and the
metal-poor and metal-rich tails of the stellar metallicity distribution in
individual dwarfs. We find that (1) the slope of the stellar
metallicity--stellar mass correlation is sensitive to the SN feedback strength
and the reionization epoch; (2) the extension of the metal-rich tails is mainly
sensitive to the SN feedback strength; (3) the extension of the metal-poor
tails is mainly sensitive to the reionization epoch; (4) none of the three
chemical properties are sensitive to the H$_2$ cooling process; and (5)
comparison of our model results with the current observational slope of the
stellar metallicity--stellar mass relation suggests that the local universe is
reionized earlier than the cosmic average and local sources may have a
significant contribution to the reionization in the local region, and an
intermediate to strong SN feedback strength is preferred. Future observations
of metal-rich and metal-poor tails of stellar metallicity distributions will
put further constraints on the SN feedback and the reionization processes.


  Thomas proved that every undirected graph admits a linked tree decomposition
of width equal to its treewidth. In this paper, we generalize Thomas's theorem
to digraphs. We prove that every digraph G admits a linked directed path
decomposition and a linked DAG decomposition of width equal to its directed
pathwidth and DAG-width respectively.


  We have investigated the productivity and impact of the Canada-France-Hawaii
Telescope (CFHT) during its twenty-year history. CFHT has maintained a database
of refereed publications based on data obtained with CFHT since first light in
1979. For each paper, we analysed the cumulative number of citations and the
citation counts for each year, from data supplied by the NASA Astrophysics Data
System (ADS). We have compared citation counts retrieved from the ADS with
those from the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) for a small sample of
papers. We have developed a procedure that allows us to compare citation counts
between older and newer papers in order to judge their relative impact. We
looked at the number of papers and citations not only by year, but also by the
instrument used to obtain the data. We also provide a preliminary look as to
whether programs given a higher ranking by the Time Allocation Committee (TAC)
produced papers with a higher number of citations.


  The primitive model of ionic systems is investigated within a field-theoretic
description for the whole range of size-, \lambda, and charge, Z, ratios of the
two ionic species. Two order parameters (OP) are identified, and their
relations to physically relevant quantities are described for various values of
\lambda and Z. Instabilities of the disordered phase associated with the two
OP's are determined in the mean-field approximation.
  A gas-liquid separation occurs for any Z and \lambda different from 1. In
addition, an instability with respect to various types of periodic ordering of
the two kinds of ions is found.


  We show with the help of Fermat's principle that every lightlike geodesic in
the NUT metric projects to a geodesic of a two-dimensional Riemannian metric
which we call the optical metric. The optical metric is defined on a
(coordinate) cone whose opening angle is determined by the impact parameter of
the lightlike geodesic. We show that, surprisingly, the optical metrics on
cones with different opening angles are locally (but not globally) isometric.
With the help of the Gauss-Bonnet theorem we demonstrate that the deflection
angle of a lightlike geodesic is determined by an area integral over the
Gaussian curvature of the optical metric. A similar result is known to be true
for static and spherically symmetric spacetimes. The generalisation to the NUT
spacetime, which is neither static nor spherically symmetric (at least not in
the usual sense), is rather non-trivial.


  Echo state networks (ESNs) have been recently proved to be universal
approximants for input/output systems with respect to various $L ^p$-type
criteria. When $1\leq p< \infty$, only $p$-integrability hypotheses need to be
imposed, while in the case $p=\infty$ a uniform boundedness hypotheses on the
inputs is required. This note shows that, in the last case, a universal family
of ESNs can be constructed that contains exclusively elements that have the
echo state and the fading memory properties. This conclusion could not be drawn
with the results and methods available so far in the literature.


  Thin structures, such as wire-frame sculptures, fences, cables, power lines,
and tree branches, are common in the real world. It is extremely challenging to
acquire their 3D digital models using traditional image-based or depth-based
reconstruction methods because thin structures often lack distinct point
features and have severe self-occlusion. We propose the first approach that
simultaneously estimates camera motion and reconstructs the geometry of complex
3D thin structures in high quality from a color video captured by a handheld
camera. Specifically, we present a new curve-based approach to estimate
accurate camera poses by establishing correspondences between featureless thin
objects in the foreground in consecutive video frames, without requiring visual
texture in the background scene to lock on. Enabled by this effective
curve-based camera pose estimation strategy, we develop an iterative
optimization method with tailored measures on geometry, topology as well as
self-occlusion handling for reconstructing 3D thin structures. Extensive
validations on a variety of thin structures show that our method achieves
accurate camera pose estimation and faithful reconstruction of 3D thin
structures with complex shape and topology at a level that has not been
attained by other existing reconstruction methods.


  We propose a novel algorithm for the task of supervised discriminative
distance learning by nonlinearly embedding vectors into a low dimensional
Euclidean space. We work in the challenging setting where supervision is with
constraints on similar and dissimilar pairs while training. The proposed method
is derived by an approximate kernelization of a linear Mahalanobis-like
distance metric learning algorithm and can also be seen as a kernel neural
network. The number of model parameters and test time evaluation complexity of
the proposed method are O(dD) where D is the dimensionality of the input
features and d is the dimension of the projection space - this is in contrast
to the usual kernelization methods as, unlike them, the complexity does not
scale linearly with the number of training examples. We propose a stochastic
gradient based learning algorithm which makes the method scalable (w.r.t. the
number of training examples), while being nonlinear. We train the method with
up to half a million training pairs of 4096 dimensional CNN features. We give
empirical comparisons with relevant baselines on seven challenging datasets for
the task of low dimensional semantic category based image retrieval.


  In 2012, we applied a three-dimensional formulation to kinematic measurements
of the Galactic thick disk and derived a surprisingly low dark matter density
at the solar position. This result was challenged by Bovy & Tremaine (2012,
ApJ, 756, 89), who claimed that the observational data are consistent with the
expected dark matter density if a one-dimensional approach is adopted. We
analyze the assumption at the bases of their formulation and their claim that
this returns a lower limit for the local dark matter density, which is accurate
within 20%. We find that the validity of their formulation depends on the
underlying mass distribution. We therefore analyze the predictions that their
hypothesis casts on the radial gradient of the azimuthal velocity dV/dR and
compare it with observational data as a testbed for the validity of their
formulation. We find that their hypothesis requires too steep a profile of
dV(Z)/dR, which is inconsistent with the observational data both in the Milky
Way and in external galaxies. As a consequence, their results are biased and
largely overestimate the mass density. Dynamical simulations also show that,
contrary to their claims, low values of dV/dR are compatible with a Milky Way
like potential with radially constant circular velocity. We nevertheless
confirm that, according to their criticism, our assumption dV/dR=0 is only an
approximation. If this hypothesis is released, and the available information
about dV/dR in the thick disk is used, the resulting local dark matter density
increases by a tiny amount, from 0+-1 to 2+-3 mM_sun pc^(-3), with an upper
limit of ~3.5 mM_sun pc^(-3). Hence, this approximation has negligible
influence on our results. Our analysis shows that their criticism is not a
viable explanation for the inferred lack of dark matter at the solar position
detected by us. More studies are required to understand these unexpected
results.


  The selection of hyper-parameters is critical in Deep Learning. Because of
the long training time of complex models and the availability of compute
resources in the cloud, "one-shot" optimization schemes - where the sets of
hyper-parameters are selected in advance (e.g. on a grid or in a random manner)
and the training is executed in parallel - are commonly used. It is known that
grid search is sub-optimal, especially when only a few critical parameters
matter, and suggest to use random search instead. Yet, random search can be
"unlucky" and produce sets of values that leave some part of the domain
unexplored. Quasi-random methods, such as Low Discrepancy Sequences (LDS) avoid
these issues. We show that such methods have theoretical properties that make
them appealing for performing hyperparameter search, and demonstrate that, when
applied to the selection of hyperparameters of complex Deep Learning models
(such as state-of-the-art LSTM language models and image classification
models), they yield suitable hyperparameters values with much fewer runs than
random search. We propose a particularly simple LDS method which can be used as
a drop-in replacement for grid or random search in any Deep Learning pipeline,
both as a fully one-shot hyperparameter search or as an initializer in
iterative batch optimization.


  A microscopic approach to the proton-neutron nuclear response is formulated
in the finite-temperature relativistic nuclear field theory framework. The
approach is based on the meson-nucleon Lagrangian of quantum hadrodynamics and
advances the relativistic field theory for spin-isospin response beyond the
finite-temperature random phase approximation. The dynamical contribution to
the in-medium proton-neutron interaction amplitude is described in a
parameter-free way by the coupling between the single nucleons and
strongly-correlated particle-hole excitations (phonons) within the newly
developed finite-temperature formalism. In this framework we investigate
temperature dependence of the Gamow-Teller and spin dipole resonances in the
closed-shell nuclei $^{48}$Ca, $^{78}$Ni, and $^{132}$Sn. Broader impacts of
their temperature dependence are illustrated for the associated beta decay
rates and lifetimes of $^{78}$Ni and $^{132}$Sn in hot astrophysical
environments. We found a remarkable sensitivity of the beta decay rates to the
enhanced low-energy spin-isospin strength at finite temperature, in particular,
to the contribution of the first-forbidden transitions.


  This research summarizes work done by myself (Nucl.Phys.{\bf A641}
(1998)461), or in collaboration with R. M. Davidson (Phys.Lett.{\bf
B348}(1995)163) and H. Weigel and L. Gamberg (Nucl.Phys.{\bf B560}(1999)xx). I
will discuss several topics related with the computation of structure functions
in the quark model in general and its perturbative evolution. In particular, I
address this topic in the Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model of hadrons, where the
nucleon is constructed as a soliton. I show that the handling of the
regularization procedure is crucial in order to obtain exact scaling in the
Bjorken limit and fulfillment of sum rules. I also include some problems
concerning the general validity of quark model calculations.


  We investigate by Lattice Boltzmann methods the effect of inertia on the
deformation and break-up of a two-dimensional fluid droplet surrounded by fluid
of equal viscosity (in a confined geometry) whose shear rate is increased very
slowly. We give evidence that in two dimensions inertia is {\em necessary} for
break-up, so that at zero Reynolds number the droplet deforms indefinitely
without breaking. We identify two different routes to breakup via two-lobed and
three-lobed structures respectively, and give evidence for a sharp transition
between these routes as parameters are varied.


  The magnetic properties of the high temperature alpha form of the CaCr2O4
compound have been investigated for the first time by magnetic susceptibility,
specific heat and powder neutron diffraction. The system undergoes a unique
magnetic phase transition at 43K to a long range order incommensurate helical
phase with magnetic propagation vector k=(0,0.3317(2),0). The magnetic model
proposed from neutron diffraction data shows that the plane of rotation of the
spins is perpendicular to the wave-vector, and that the magnetic modulation is
consistent with two modes belonging to distinct irreducible representations of
the group. The magnetic point group 2221' is not compatible with
ferroelectricity unlike the CuCrO2 delafossite [Kimura et al., Phys. Rev. B, 78
140401 (2008)] but predicts the existence of quadratic magnetoelectric effects,
discussed based on a Landau analysis.


  Originally introduced as the difference between two possible forms of quantum
mutual information, quantum discord has posteriorly been shown to admit a
formulation according to which it measures a distance between the state under
scrutiny and the closest projectively measured (non-discordant) state.
Recently, it has been shown that quantum discord results in higher values when
projective measurements are substituted by weak measurements. This sounds
paradoxical since weaker measurements should imply weaker disturbance and,
thus, a smaller distance. In this work we solve this puzzle by presenting a
quantifier and an underlying interpretation for what we call weak quantum
discord. As a by-product, we introduce the notion of symmetrical weak quantum
discord.


  Among the many important geometric properties of quantum state space are:
transitivity of the group of symmetries of the cone of unnormalized states on
its interior (homogeneity), identification of this cone with its dual cone of
effects via an inner product (self-duality), and transitivity of the group of
symmetries of the normalized state space on the pure normalized states (pure
transitivity). Koecher and Vinberg showed that homogeneity and self-duality
characterize Jordan-algebraic state spaces: real, complex and quaternionic
quantum theory, spin factors, 3-dimensional octonionic quantum state space and
direct sums of these irreducible spaces. We show that self-duality follows from
homogeneity and pure transitivity. These properties have a more direct physical
and information-processing significance than self-duality. We show for instance
(extending results of Barnum, Gaebeler, and Wilce) that homogeneity is closely
related to the ability to steer quantum states. Our alternative to the
Koecher-Vinberg theorem characterizes nearly the same set of state spaces:
direct sums of isomorphic Jordan-algebraic ones, which may be viewed as
composites of a classical system with an irreducible Jordan-algebraic one.
There are various physically and informationally natural additional postulates
that are known to single out complex quantum theory from among these
Jordan-algebraic possibilities. We give various such reconstructions based on
the additional property of local tomography.


  The nature of polyamorphism and amorphous-to-amorphous transition is
investigated by means of an exactly solvable model with quenched disorder, the
spherical s+p multi-spin interaction model. The analysis is carried out in the
framework of Replica Symmetry Breaking theory and leads to the identification
of low temperature glass phases of different kinds. Besides the usual
`one-step' solution, known to reproduce all basic properties of structural
glasses, also a physically consistent `two-step' solution arises. More
complicated phases are found as well, as temperature is further decreased,
expressing a complex variety of metastable states structures for amorphous
systems.


  In this paper, we present a large scale unlabeled person re-identification
(Re-ID) dataset "LUPerson" and make the first attempt of performing
unsupervised pre-training for improving the generalization ability of the
learned person Re-ID feature representation. This is to address the problem
that all existing person Re-ID datasets are all of limited scale due to the
costly effort required for data annotation. Previous research tries to leverage
models pre-trained on ImageNet to mitigate the shortage of person Re-ID data
but suffers from the large domain gap between ImageNet and person Re-ID data.
LUPerson is an unlabeled dataset of 4M images of over 200K identities, which is
30X larger than the largest existing Re-ID dataset. It also covers a much
diverse range of capturing environments (eg, camera settings, scenes, etc.).
Based on this dataset, we systematically study the key factors for learning
Re-ID features from two perspectives: data augmentation and contrastive loss.
Unsupervised pre-training performed on this large-scale dataset effectively
leads to a generic Re-ID feature that can benefit all existing person Re-ID
methods. Using our pre-trained model in some basic frameworks, our methods
achieve state-of-the-art results without bells and whistles on four widely used
Re-ID datasets: CUHK03, Market1501, DukeMTMC, and MSMT17. Our results also show
that the performance improvement is more significant on small-scale target
datasets or under few-shot setting.


  We introduce a family of ZX-calculi which axiomatise the stabiliser fragment
of quantum theory in odd prime dimensions. These calculi recover many of the
nice features of the qubit ZX-calculus which were lost in previous proposals
for higher-dimensional systems. We then prove that these calculi are complete,
i.e. provide a set of rewrite rules which can be used to prove any equality of
stabiliser quantum operations. Adding a discard construction, we obtain a
calculus complete for mixed state stabiliser quantum mechanics in odd prime
dimensions, and this furthermore gives a complete axiomatisation for the
related diagrammatic language for affine co-isotropic relations.


  Procedures to recover explicitly discrete and continuous skew-selfadjoint
Dirac systems on semi-axis from rational Weyl matrix functions are considered.
Their stability is shown. Some new facts on asymptotics of pseudo-exponential
potentials (i.e., of explicit solutions of inverse problems) are proved as
well. GBDT version of Backlund-Darboux transformation, methods from system
theory and results on algebraic Riccati equations are used for this purpose.


  The purpose of this paper is to establish a Lagrangian potential theory,
analogous to the classical pluripotential theory, and to define and study a
Lagrangian differential operator of Monge-Ampere type. This development is new
even in ${\bf C}^n$. However, it applies quite generally -- perhaps most
importantly to symplectic manifolds equipped with a Gromov metric.
  The Lagrange Monge-Ampere operator is an explicit polynomial on ${\rm
Sym}^2(TX)$ whose principle branch defines the space of Lag-harmonics.
Interestingly the operator depends only on the Laplacian and the SKEW-Hermitian
part of the Hessian. The Dirichlet problem for this operator is solved in both
the homogeneous and inhomogeneous cases. The homogeneous case is also solved
for each of the other branches.
  This paper also introduces and systematically studies the notions of
Lagrangian plurisubharmonic and harmonic functions, and Lagrangian convexity.
An analogue of the Levi Problem is proved. In ${\bf C}^n$ there is another
concept, Lag-plurihamonics, which relate in several ways to the harmonics on
any domain. Parallels of this Lagrangian potential theory with standard
(complex) pluripotential theory are constantly emphasized.


  ALICE is the experiment dedicated to the study of the quark gluon plasma in
heavy-ion collisions at the CERN LHC. Improvements of ALICE sub-detectors are
envisaged for the upgrade plans of year 2017. The Muon Forward Tracker (MFT) is
a proposal in view of this upgrade, motivated both by the possibility to
overcome the intrinsic limitations of the Muon Spectrometer, and by the
possibility to perform new measurements of general interest for the whole ALICE
physics. The measurement of the offset of single muons and dimuons will permit
to disentangle open charm ($c\tau \sim 150 \mu$m) and beauty ($c\tau \sim 500
\mu$m) production. The MFT, thanks to its tracking capabilities, will allow to
improve the mass resolution of the resonances for a better separation between
$\rho/\omega$ and $\phi$, $J/\psi$ and $\psi'$, and $-$ to a lesser extent $-$
$\Upsilon$ family resonances. In addition, it will help to reject a large
fraction of muons coming from pion and kaon decays, improving the signal over
background ratio. In order to evaluate the feasibility of this upgrade, a setup
composed by five silicon planes was simulated within the AliRoot framework. In
this report, we present preliminary results on the MFT performances in a
low-multiplicity environment.


  We two had year-long research leaves in Japan, working together fulltime with
several Japanese plus Tony De Groot back in Livermore and Harald Posch in
Vienna. We summarize a few of the high spots from that very productive year (
1989-1990 ), followed by an additional fifteen years' work in Livermore, with
extensive travel. Next came our retirement in Nevada in 2005, which has turned
out to be a long-term working vacation. Carol narrates this part of our history
together.


  We show that the p_T spectra measured in pp collisions at the LHC exhibit
geometrical scaling introduced earlier in the context of deep inelastic
scattering. We also argue that the onset of geometrical scaling can be seen in
nucleus-nucleus collisions at lower RHIC energies.


  Operating system kernels are the security keystone of most computer systems,
as they provide the core protection mechanisms. Kernels are in particular
responsible for their own security, i.e. they must prevent untrusted user tasks
from reaching their level of privilege. We demonstrate that proving such
absence of privilege escalation is a pre-requisite for any definitive security
proof of the kernel. While prior OS kernel formal verifications were performed
either on source code or crafted kernels, with manual or semi-automated methods
requiring significant human efforts in annotations or proofs, we show that it
is possible to compute such kernel security proofs using fully-automated
methods and starting from the executable code of an existing microkernel with
no modification, thus formally verifying absence of privilege escalation with
high confidence for a low cost. We applied our method on two embedded
microkernels, including the industrial kernel AnonymOS: with only 58 lines of
annotation and less than 10 minutes of computation, our method finds a
vulnerability in a first (buggy) version of AnonymOS and verifies absence of
privilege escalation in a second (secure) version.


  Aims: To investigate the relationship between surges and magnetic
reconnection during the emergence of small-scale active regions. In particular,
to examine how the large-scale geometry of the magnetic field, shaped by
different phases of reconnection, guides the flowing of surges. Methods: We
present three flux emergence models. The first model, and the simplest,
consists of a region emerging into a horizontal ambient field that is initially
parallel to the top of the emerging region. The second model is the same as the
first but with an extra smaller emerging region which perturbs the main region.
This is added to create a more complex magnetic topology and to test how this
complicates the development of surges compared to the first model. The last
model has a non-uniform ambient magnetic field to model the effects of
emergence near a sunspot field and impose asymmetry on the system through the
ambient magnetic field. At each stage, we trace the magnetic topology to
identify the locations of reconnection. This allows for field lines to be
plotted from different topological regions, highlighting how their geometry
affects the development of surges. Results: In the first model, we identify
distinct phases of reconnection. Each phase is associated with a particular
geometry for the magnetic field and this determines the paths of the surges.
The second model follows a similar pattern to the first but with a more complex
magnetic topology and extra eruptions. The third model highlights how an
asymmetric ambient field can result in preferred locations for reconnection,
subsequently guiding the direction of surges.


  Compliance control is an increasingly employed technique used in the robotic
field. It is known that various mechanical properties can be reproduced
depending on the design of the stiffness matrix, but the design theory that
takes advantage of this high degree of design freedom has not been elucidated.
This paper, therefore, discusses the non-diagonal elements of the stiffness
matrix. We proposed a design method according to the conditions required for
achieving stable motion. Additionally, we analyzed the displacement induced by
the non-diagonal elements in response to an external force and found that to
obtain stable contact with a symmetric matrix, the matrix should be positive
definite, i.e., all eigenvalues must be positive, however its parameter design
is complicated. In this study, we focused on the use of asymmetric matrices in
compliance control and showed that the design of eigenvalues can be simplified
by using a triangular matrix. This approach expands the range of the stiffness
design and enhances the ability of the compliance control to induce motion. We
conducted experiments using the stiffness matrix and confirmed that assembly
could be achieved without complicated trajectory planning.


  Let $V$ be a finite-dimensional vector space over a field $\mathbb{F}$,
equipped with a symmetric or alternating non-degenerate bilinear form $b$. When
the characteristic of $\mathbb{F}$ is not $2$, we characterize the
endomorphisms $u$ of $V$ that split into $u=a_1+a_2$ for some pair $(a_1,a_2)$
of $b$-selfadjoint (respectively, $b$-skew-selfadjoint) endomorphisms of $V$
such that $(a_1)^2=(a_2)^2=0$. In the characteristic $2$ case, we obtain a
similar classification for the endomorphisms of $V$ that split into the sum of
two square-zero $b$-alternating endomorphisms of $V$ when $b$ is alternating
(an endomorphism $v$ is called $b$-alternating whenever $b(x,v(x))=0$ for all
$x \in V$).
  Finally, if the field $\mathbb{F}$ is equipped with a non-identity
involution, we characterize the pairs $(h,u)$ in which $h$ is a Hermitian form
on a finite-dimensional space over $\mathbb{F}$, and $u$ is the sum of two
square-zero $h$-selfadjoint endomorphisms.


  Using the Feynman-Dyson diagram technique, we study nonlinear
polariton-polariton scattering in a two-dimensional micropillar-based optical
superlattice with hexagonal symmetry. We demonstrate that both the emerging
polariton chirality and the loop Feynman diagrams up to infinite order should
be strictly accounted for in the evaluation of the self-energy of the system.
Further, we explicitly show that in such a design the time of polariton
scattering towards the Dirac points can be drastically decreased which can be
used, for instance, in engineering novel classes of polariton lasers with
substantially reduced thresholds.


  The OFDM waveform exhibits high fluctuation in the signal envelope which
causes distortion in the nonlinear power amplifier of the transmitter.
Peak-to-Average Power Ratio (PAPR) and Cubic Metric (CM) are the common metrics
to quantify the phenomenon. A promising approach for PAPR or CM reduction is
Sign Selection which is based on altering the signs of the data symbols. In
this paper, the Method of Conditional Expectations (CE Method) is proposed to
obtain a competing suboptimal solution to the Sign Selection problem. For PAPR
reduction, a surrogate metric is introduced which allows for an efficient
application of the CE Method. For CM reduction, the tractability of the
definition of CM is exploited to this end. The algorithm is analyzed to obtain
an upper bound on the worst-case reduced metric value. A noticeable
characteristic is the persistent reduction capability for a wide range of
subcarrier numbers. In particular, simulations show a reduction of the
so-called "effective PAPR" to about 6.5 dB from 10.5 dB and 11.7 dB
respectively for 64 to 1024 subcarriers. A similar steady reduction of 3 dB is
observed for CM. In addition, the CE Method leads to a pruned version of Sign
Selection which halves the rate loss.


  Using quasipotential approach, we have studied exclusive semileptonic decays
of heavy mesons with the account of relativistic effects. Due to more complete
relativistic description of the $s$ quark more precise expressions for
semileptonic form factors are obtained. Various differential distributions in
exclusive semileptonic decays of heavy mesons are calculated. It is argued that
consistent account of relativistic effects and HQET motivated choice of the
parameters of quark-antiquark potential allow to get reliable value for the
ratio $A_2(0)/A_1(0)$ in the $D\to K^*l\nu_l$ decay as well as the
ratio~$\Gamma(D\to K^*l\nu_l)/\Gamma(D\to Kl\nu_l)$. All calculated branching
ratios are in accord with available experimental data.


  Many meta-learning methods are proposed for few-shot detection. However,
previous most methods have two main problems, poor detection APs, and strong
bias because of imbalance and insufficient datasets. Previous works mainly
alleviate these issues by additional datasets, multi-relation attention
mechanisms and sub-modules. However, they require more cost. In this work, for
meta-learning, we find that the main challenges focus on related or irrelevant
semantic features between categories. Therefore, based on semantic features, we
propose a Top-C classification loss (i.e., TCL-C) for classification task and a
category-based grouping mechanism for category-based meta-features obtained by
the meta-model. The TCL-C exploits the true-label prediction and the most
likely C-1 false classification predictions to improve detection performance on
few-shot classes. According to similar appearance (i.e., visual appearance,
shape, and limbs etc.) and environment in which objects often appear, the
category-based grouping mechanism splits categories into disjoint groups to
make similar semantic features more compact between categories within a group
and obtain more significant difference between groups, alleviating the strong
bias problem and further improving detection APs. The whole training consists
of the base model and the fine-tuning phases. According to grouping mechanism,
we group the meta-features vectors obtained by meta-model, so that the
distribution difference between groups is obvious, and the one within each
group is less. Extensive experiments on Pascal VOC dataset demonstrate that
ours which combines the TCL-C with category-based grouping significantly
outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods for few-shot detection. Compared
with previous competitive baseline, ours improves detection APs by almost 4%
for few-shot detection.


  There is a constrained-WZNW--Toda theory for any simple Lie algebra equipped
with an integral gradation. It is explained how the different approaches to
these dynamical systems are related by gauge transformations. Combining Gauss
decompositions in relevent gauges, we unify formulae already derived, and
explictly determine the holomorphic expansion of the conformally reduced WZNW
solutions - whose restriction gives the solutions of the Toda equations. The
same takes place also for semi-integral gradations. Most of our conclusions are
also applicable to the affine Toda theories.


  In response to a comment on one of our manuscript, this work studies the
posterior channel and noise distributions conditioned on the NACKs and ACKs of
all previous transmissions in HARQ system with statistical approaches. Our main
result is that, unless the coherence interval (time or frequency) is large as
in block-fading assumption, the posterior distribution of the channel and noise
either remains almost identical to the prior distribution, or it mostly follows
the same class of distribution as the prior one. In the latter case, the
difference between the posterior and prior distribution can be modeled as some
parameter mismatch, which has little impact on certain type of applications.


  In order to derive a large set of Hamiltonian dynamical systems, but with
only first order Lagrangian, we resort to the formulation in terms of
Lagrange-Souriau 2-form formalism. A wide class of systems derived in different
phenomenological contexts are covered. The non-commutativity of the particle
position coordinates are a natural consequence. Some explicit examples are
considered.


  We study finite-dimensional product Hilbert spaces, coupled spin systems,
entanglement and energy level crossing. The Hamilton operators are based on the
Pauli group. We show that swapping the interacting term can lead from
unentangled eigenstates to entangled eigenstates and from an energy spectrum
with energy level crossing to avoided energy level crossing.


  We investigate the holographic correspondence between (p+1)-dimensional
($0\le p\le 4$) SYM theories with 16 supercharges and superstring theories on
the near-horizon limit of Dp-brane backgrounds. Following an approach based on
the tunneling picture, we study Euclidean superstring semi-classically along
null geodesics which connect two points on the boundary of the spacetime. We
extend the analysis of hep-th/0308024 and study the fermionic sector of the
superstring. For $p\ne 3$, we do not have world-sheet supersymmetry, and the
energies of bosonic and fermionic fluctuations do not match. By interpreting
the superstring amplitudes as correlators of gauge theory operators with large
R-charge J, we obtain gauge theory two-point functions including those of
fermionic operators. Our approach yields results consistent with the previous
supergravity analysis for the D0-branes, including the subleading part in J.
Our prediction from holography is that the two-point functions for the
supergravity modes are power-law behaved, even for the non-conformal ($p\ne 3$)
SYM theories.


  Following recent interest by the community, the scaling of the minimal
singular value of a Vandermonde matrix with nodes forming clusters on the
length scale of Rayleigh distance on the complex unit circle is studied. Using
approximation theoretic properties of exponential sums, we show that the decay
is only single exponential in the size of the largest cluster, and the bound
holds for arbitrary small minimal separation distance. We also obtain a
generalization of well-known bounds on the smallest eigenvalue of the
generalized prolate matrix in the multi-cluster geometry. Finally, the results
are extended to the entire spectrum.


  The pion structure in Minkowski space is described in terms of an analytic
model of the Bethe-Salpeter amplitude combined with Euclidean Lattice QCD
results for the running quark mass. In the present work, a pion model
previously proposed, which allows for a Nakanishi integral representation, is
studied in order to verify the sensitivity of the pion electromagnetic form
factor to small variations of the quark self-energy. In addition, we extend the
previous work, providing the Nakanishi integral representation for the
invariants associated with a decomposition of the pion Bethe-Salpeter
amplitude.


  Zeta Ori A is a hot star claimed to host a weak magnetic field, but no clear
magnetic detection was obtained so far. In addition, it was recently shown to
be a binary system composed of a O9.5I supergiant and a B1IV star. We aim at
verifying the presence of a magnetic field in zeta Ori A, identifying to which
of the two binary components it belongs (or whether both stars are magnetic),
and characterizing the field.Very high signal-to-noise spectropolarimetric data
were obtained with Narval at the Bernard Lyot Telescope (TBL) in France.
Archival HEROS, FEROS and UVES spectroscopic data were also used. The data were
first disentangled to separate the two components. We then analyzed them with
the Least-Squares Deconvolution (LSD) technique to extract the magnetic
information. We confirm that zeta Ori A is magnetic. We find that the
supergiant component zeta Ori Aa is the magnetic component: Zeeman signatures
are observed and rotational modulation of the longitudinal magnetic field is
clearly detected with a period of 6.829 d. This is the only magnetic O
supergiant known as of today. With an oblique dipole field model of the Stokes
V profiles, we show that the polar field strength is ~ 140 G. Because the
magnetic field is weak and the stellar wind is strong, zeta Ori Aa does not
host a centrifugally supported magnetosphere. It may host a dynamical
magnetosphere. Its companion zeta Ori Ab does not show any magnetic signature,
with an upper limit on the undetected field of $\sim$ 300 G.


  We study dynamics of a D3-brane propagating in the vicinity of k coincident
NS5 branes. We show that when $g_s$ is small, there exists a regime in which
dynamics of the D-brane is governed by Dirac-Born-Infeld action while higher
order derivative in the expansion can not be neglected. This leads to a
restriction on how fast scalar field may roll. We analyze the motion of a
rolling scalar field in this regime, and extend the analysis to cosmological
systems obtained by coupling this type of field theory to four dimensinal
gravity. It also leads to some FRW cosmologies, some of which are related to
those obtained with tachyon matter.


  We calculate the deconfining temperature of SO(N) gauge theories in 2+1
dimensions, and determine the order of the phase transition as a function of N,
for various values of N in the range [4,16]. We do so by extrapolating our
lattice results to the infinite volume limit, and then to the continuum limit,
for each value of N. We then extrapolate to the N=infinity limit and observe
that the SO(N) and SU(N) deconfining temperatures agree in that limit. We find
that the the deconfining temperatures of all the SO(N) gauge theories appear to
follow a single smooth function of N, despite the lack of a non-trivial centre
for odd N. We also compare the deconfining temperatures of SO(6) with SU(4),
and of SO(4) with SU(2)xSU(2), motivated by the fact that these pairs of gauge
theories share the same Lie algebras.


  We propose policy gradient algorithms which learn risk-sensitive policies in
a reinforcement learning (RL) framework. Our proposed algorithms maximize the
distortion risk measure (DRM) of the cumulative reward in an episodic Markov
decision process in on-policy and off-policy RL settings, respectively. We
derive a variant of the policy gradient theorem that caters to the DRM
objective, and integrate it with a likelihood ratio-based gradient estimation
scheme. We derive non-asymptotic bounds that establish the convergence of our
proposed algorithms to an approximate stationary point of the DRM objective.


  Recently there has been much progress in the development of stochastic models
for state reduction in quantum mechanics. In such models, the collapse of the
wave function is a physical process, governed by a nonlinear stochastic
differential equation that generalizes the Schr\"odinger equation. The present
paper considers energy-based stochastic extensions of the Schr\"odinger
equation. Most of the work carried out hitherto in this area has been concerned
with models where the process driving the stochastic dynamics of the quantum
state is Brownian motion. Here, the Brownian framework is broadened to a wider
class of models where the noise process is of the L\'evy type, admitting
stationary and independent increments. The properties of such models are
different from those of Brownian reduction models. In particular, for L\'evy
models the decoherence rate depends on the overall scale of the energy. Thus,
in L\'evy reduction models, a macroscopic quantum system will spontaneously
collapse to an eigenstate even if the energy level gaps are small.


  Angular-momentum or parity-dependent nonlocal optical potentials for
nucleon-${}^{16}\mathrm{O}$ scattering able to fit differential cross section
data over the whole angular regime are developed and applied to the description
of deuteron-${}^{16}\mathrm{O}$ scattering in the framework of three-body
Faddeev-type equations for transition operators. Differential cross sections
and deuteron analyzing powers for elastic scattering and
${}^{16}\mathrm{O}(d,p){}^{17}\mathrm{O}$ transfer reactions are calculated
using a number of local and nonlocal optical potentials and compared with
experimental data. Angular-momentum or parity-dependence of the optical
potential turns out to be quite irrelevant in the considered three-body
reactions while nonlocality is essential for a successful description of the
differential cross section data, especially in transfer reactions.


  A general method based on the polynomial deformations of the Lie algebra
sl(2,R) is proposed in order to exhibit the quasi-exactly solvability of
specific Hamiltonians implied by quantum physical models. This method using the
finite-dimensional representations and differential realizations of such
deformations is illustrated on the sextic oscillator as well as on the second
harmonic generation.


  Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are powerful machine learning models that excel
at analyzing structured data represented as graphs, demonstrating remarkable
performance in applications like social network analysis and recommendation
systems. However, classical GNNs face scalability challenges when dealing with
large-scale graphs. This paper proposes frameworks for implementing GNNs on
quantum computers to potentially address the challenges. We devise quantum
algorithms corresponding to the three fundamental types of classical GNNs:
Graph Convolutional Networks, Graph Attention Networks, and Message-Passing
GNNs. A complexity analysis of our quantum implementation of the Simplified
Graph Convolutional (SGC) Network shows potential quantum advantages over its
classical counterpart, with significant improvements in time and space
complexities. Our complexities can have trade-offs between the two: when
optimizing for minimal circuit depth, our quantum SGC achieves logarithmic time
complexity in the input sizes (albeit at the cost of linear space complexity).
When optimizing for minimal qubit usage, the quantum SGC exhibits space
complexity logarithmic in the input sizes, offering an exponential reduction
compared to classical SGCs, while still maintaining better time complexity.
These results suggest our Quantum GNN frameworks could efficiently process
large-scale graphs. This work paves the way for implementing more advanced
Graph Neural Network models on quantum computers, opening new possibilities in
quantum machine learning for analyzing graph-structured data.


  Gowdy spacetimes are generalized to admit two commuting spatial "local"
Killing vectors, and some new varieties of them are presented, which are all
closely related to Thurston's geometries. Explicit spatial compactifications,
as well as the boundary conditions for the metrics are given in a systematic
way. A short comment on an implication to their dynamics toward the initial
singularity is made.


  As deep learning becomes more expensive, both in terms of time and compute,
inefficiencies in machine learning (ML) training prevent practical usage of
state-of-the-art models for most users. The newest model architectures are
simply too large to be fit onto a single processor. To address the issue, many
ML practitioners have turned to model parallelism as a method of distributing
the computational requirements across several devices. Unfortunately, the
sequential nature of neural networks causes very low efficiency and device
utilization in model parallel training jobs. We propose a new form of "shard
parallelism" combining task and model parallelism, then package it into a
framework we name Hydra. Hydra recasts the problem of model parallelism in the
multi-model context to produce a fine-grained parallel workload of independent
model shards, rather than independent models. This new parallel design promises
dramatic speedups relative to the traditional model parallelism paradigm.


  It is shown that color-superconducting quark matter, where quarks of the same
flavor form Cooper pairs with spin one, exhibits an electromagnetic Meissner
effect. This is in contrast to spin-zero color superconductors where Cooper
pairs consist of quarks with different flavors.


  We consider (generalized) Kolakoski sequences on an alphabet with two even
numbers. They can be related to a primitive substitution rule of constant
length ell. Using this connection, we prove that they have pure point dynamical
and pure point diffractive spectrum, where we make use of the strong interplay
between these two concepts. Since these sequences can then be described as
model sets with ell-adic internal space, we add an approach to ``visualize''
such internal spaces.


  We prove $L^p(b\mathcal{D})$-regularity of the Cauchy-Leray integral for
bounded domains $\mathcal{D}\subset\mathbb C^n$ whose boundary satisfies the
minimal regularity condition of class $C^{1,1}$, together with a naturally
occurring notion of convexity.


  Sn0.8Ag0.2Te is a new superconductor with Tc ~ 2.4 K. The superconducting
properties of Sn0.8Ag0.2Te have been investigated by specific heat measurements
under magnetic fields. Bulk nature of superconductivity was confirmed from the
amplitude of the specific heat jump at the superconducting transition, and the
amplitude is consistent with fully-gapped superconductivity. Upper critical
field was estimated from specific heat and electrical resistivity measurements
under magnetic fields. The Hall coefficient was positive, suggesting that the
Ag acts as a p-type dopant in Sn0.8Ag0.2Te.


  This paper describes HyperStream, a large-scale, flexible and robust software
package, written in the Python language, for processing streaming data with
workflow creation capabilities. HyperStream overcomes the limitations of other
computational engines and provides high-level interfaces to execute complex
nesting, fusion, and prediction both in online and offline forms in streaming
environments. HyperStream is a general purpose tool that is well-suited for the
design, development, and deployment of Machine Learning algorithms and
predictive models in a wide space of sequential predictive problems.
  Source code, installation instructions, examples, and documentation can be
found at: https://github.com/IRC-SPHERE/HyperStream.


  Particle production in the background of an external classical oscillating
field is a key process describing the stage of preheating after inflation. For
sufficiently strong couplings between the inflaton and matter fields, this
process is known to proceed non-perturbatively. Parametric resonance plays
crucial role for bosonic fields in this case, and the evolution of the
occupation numbers for fermions is non-perturbative as well. In the Minkowski
space, parametric resonance for bosons and non-perturbative effects for
fermions would still persist even in the case of weak coupling. In particular,
the energy density of created bosons would grow exponentially with time.
However, the situation is quite different in the expanding universe. We give a
simple demonstration how the conditions of the expanding universe,
specifically, redshift of the field modes, lead to the usual perturbative
expressions for particle production by an oscillating inflaton in the case of
weak couplings. The results that we obtain are relevant and fully applicable to
the Starobinsky model of inflation.


  We study the influence of particle shape on growth processes at the edges of
evaporating drops. Aqueous suspensions of colloidal particles evaporate on
glass slides, and convective flows during evaporation carry particles from drop
center to drop edge, where they accumulate. The resulting particle deposits
grow inhomogeneously from the edge in two-dimensions, and the deposition front,
or growth line, varies spatio-temporally. Measurements of the fluctuations of
the deposition front during evaporation enable us to identify distinct growth
processes that depend strongly on particle shape. Sphere deposition exhibits a
classic Poisson like growth process; deposition of slightly anisotropic
particles, however, belongs to the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) universality
class, and deposition of highly anisotropic ellipsoids appears to belong to a
third universality class, characterized by KPZ fluctuations in the presence of
quenched disorder.


  It is shown that observed peculiarities of the Universe expansion are an
inevitable consequence of the gravitational force properties following from
gauge-invariant gravitation equations considered in detail in an author's paper
in Annalen der Physik, v.17, 28 (2008).


  We study whether the relations between the Weyl anomaly, entanglement entropy
(EE), and thermal entropy of a two-dimensional (2D) conformal field theory
(CFT) extend to 2D boundaries of 3D CFTs, or 2D defects of $D \geq 3$ CFTs. The
Weyl anomaly of a 2D boundary or defect defines two or three central charges,
respectively. One of these, $b$, obeys a c-theorem, as in 2D CFT. For a 2D
defect, we show that another, $d_2$, interpreted as the defect's `conformal
dimension,' must be non-negative by the Averaged Null Energy Condition (ANEC).
We show that the EE of a sphere centered on a planar defect has a logarithmic
contribution from the defect fixed by $b$ and $d_2$. Using this and known
holographic results, we compute $b$ and $d_2$ for 1/2-BPS surface operators in
the maximally supersymmetric (SUSY) 4D and 6D CFTs. The results are consistent
with $b$'s c-theorem. Via free field and holographic examples we show that no
universal `Cardy formula' relates the central charges to thermal entropy.


  Parking functions of length $n$ are well known to be in correspondence with
both labelled trees on $n+1$ vertices and factorizations of the full cycle
$\sigma_n=(0\,1\,\cdots\,n)$ into $n$ transpositions. In fact, these
correspondences can be refined: Kreweras equated the area enumerator of parking
functions with the inversion enumerator of labelled trees, while an elegant
bijection of Stanley maps the area of parking functions to a natural statistic
on factorizations of $\sigma_n$. We extend these relationships in two principal
ways. First, we introduce a bivariate refinement of the inversion enumerator of
trees and show that it matches a similarly refined enumerator for
factorizations. Secondly, we characterize all full cycles $\sigma$ such that
Stanley's function remains a bijection when the canonical cycle $\sigma_n$ is
replaced by $\sigma$. We also exhibit a connection between our refined
inversion enumerator and Haglund's bounce statistic on parking functions.


  The circumgalactic medium (CGM) is a crucial component of galaxy evolution,
but thus far its physical properties are highly unconstrained. As of yet, no
cosmological simulation has reached convergence when it comes to constraining
the cold and dense gas fraction of the CGM. Such components are also
challenging to observe, and require sub-millimeter instruments with a high
sensitivity to extended, diffuse emission, like the proposed Atacama Large
Aperture Sub-millimetre telescope (AtLAST). We present a state-of-the-art
theoretical effort at modeling the [CII], [CI](1-0), [CI](2-1), CO(3-2), and
[OIII] line emissions of galaxies. We use the high-resolution cosmological
zoom-in simulation Ponos, representing a star forming galaxy system at z = 6.5
($M_*=2\times10^9~M_{\odot}$), undergoing a major merger. We adopt different
modeling approaches based on the photoionisation code Cloudy. Our fiducial
model uses radiative transfer post-processing with RamsesRT and Krome to create
realistic FUV radiation fields, which we compare to sub-grid modeling
approaches adopted in the literature. We find significant differences in the
luminosity and in the contribution of different gas phases and galaxy
components between the different modeling approaches. [CII] is the least
model-dependant gas tracer, while [CI](1-0) and CO(3-2) are very
model-sensitive. In all models, we find a significant contribution to the
emission of [CII] (up to $\sim$10%) and [OIII] (up to $\sim$20%) from the CGM.
[CII] and [OIII] trace different regions of the CGM: [CII] arises from an
accreting filament and from tidal tails, while [OIII] traces a puffy halo
surrounding the main disc, probably linked to SN feedback. We discuss our
results in the context of current and future sub-mm observations with ALMA and
AtLAST.


  We present a construction of a new integrable model as an infinite limit of
Calogero models of N particles with spin. It is implemented in the
multicomponent Fock space. Explicit formulas for Dunkl operators, the Yangian
generators in the multicomponent Fock space are presented. The classical limit
of the system is examined.