  The discovery of ice deposits in the permanently shadowed craters of the
lunar North and South Pole Moon presents an important opportunity for In-Situ
Resource Utilization. These ice deposits maybe the source for sustaining a
lunar base or for enabling an interplanetary refueling station. These ice
deposits also preserve a unique record of the geology and environment of their
hosts, both in terms of impact history and the supply of volatile compounds,
and so are of immense scientific interest. To date, these ice deposits have
been studied indirectly and by remote active radar, but they need to be
analyzed in-situ by robotic systems that can study the depths of the deposits,
their purity and composition. However, these shadowed craters never see
sunlight and are one of the coldest places in the solar system. NASA JPL
proposed use of solar reflectors mounted on crater rims to project sunlight
into the crater depths for use by ground robots. The solar reflectors would
heat the crater base and vehicles positioned at the base sufficiently to
survive the cold-temperatures. Our approach analyzes part of the logistics of
the approach, with teams of robots climbing up and down to the crater to access
the ice deposits. The mission will require robots to climb down extreme
environments and carry large structures, including instruments and
communication devices.


  We investigate use of transverse beam polarization in probing anomalous
coupling of a Higgs boson to a pair of vector bosons, at the International
Linear Collider (ILC). We consider the most general form of VVH (V = W/Z)
vertex consistent with Lorentz invariance and investigate its effects on the
process e+ e- --> f bar{f} H, f being a light fermion. Constructing observables
with definite CP and naive time reversal (tilde T) transformation properties,
we find that transverse beam polarization helps us to improve on the
sensitivity of one part of the anomalous ZZH coupling that is odd under CP.
Even more importantly it provides the possibility of discriminating from each
other, two terms in the general ZZH vertex, both of which are even under CP and
tilde T. Use of transverse beam polarization when combined with information
from unpolarized and linearly polarized beams therefore, allows one to have
completely independent probes of all the different parts of a general ZZH
vertex.


  Machine learning is yielding unprecedented interest in research and industry,
due to recent success in many applied contexts such as image classification and
object recognition. However, the deployment of these systems requires huge
computing capabilities, thus making them unsuitable for embedded systems. To
deal with this limitation, many researchers are investigating brain-inspired
computing, which would be a perfect alternative to the conventional Von Neumann
architecture based computers (CPU/GPU) that meet the requirements for computing
performance, but not for energy-efficiency. Therefore, neuromorphic hardware
circuits that are adaptable for both parallel and distributed computations need
to be designed. In this paper, we focus on Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) with
a comprehensive study of information coding methods and hardware exploration.
In this context, we propose a framework for neuromorphic hardware design space
exploration, which allows to define a suitable architecture based on
application-specific constraints and starting from a wide variety of possible
architectural choices. For this framework, we have developed a behavioral level
simulator for neuromorphic hardware architectural exploration named NAXT.
Moreover, we propose modified versions of the standard Rate Coding technique to
make trade-offs with the Time Coding paradigm, which is characterized by the
low number of spikes propagating in the network. Thus, we are able to reduce
the number of spikes while keeping the same neuron's model, which results in an
SNN with fewer events to process. By doing so, we seek to reduce the amount of
power consumed by the hardware. Furthermore, we present three neuromorphic
hardware architectures in order to quantitatively study the implementation of
SNNs. These architectures are derived from a novel funnel-like Design Space
Exploration framework for neuromorphic hardware.


  In the field of neutrino astronomy, large volumes of optically transparent
matter like glacial ice, lake water, or deep ocean water are used as detector
media. Elementary particle interactions are studied using in situ detectors
recording time distributions and fluxes of the faint photon fields of Cherenkov
radiation generated by ultra-relativistic charged particles, typically muons or
electrons.
  The Photonics software package was developed to determine photon flux and
time distributions throughout a volume containing a light source through Monte
Carlo simulation. Photons are propagated and time distributions are recorded
throughout a cellular grid constituting the simulation volume, and Mie
scattering and absorption are realised using wavelength and position dependent
parameterisations. The photon tracking results are stored in binary tables for
transparent access through ANSI-C and C++ interfaces. For higher-level physics
applications, like simulation or reconstruction of particle events, it is then
possible to quickly acquire the light yield and time distributions for a
pre-specified set of light source and detector properties and geometries
without real-time photon propagation.
  In this paper the Photonics light propagation routines and methodology are
presented and applied to the IceCube and Antares neutrino telescopes. The way
in which inhomogeneities of the Antarctic glacial ice distort the signatures of
elementary particle interactions, and how Photonics can be used to account for
these effects, is described.


  The concept of ergodicity---the convergence of the temporal averages of
observables to their ensemble averages---is the cornerstone of thermodynamics.
The transition from a predictable, integrable behavior to ergodicity is one of
the most difficult physical phenomena to treat; the celebrated KAM theorem is
the prime example. This Letter is founded on the observation that for many
classical and quantum observables, the sum of the ensemble variance of the
temporal average and the ensemble average of temporal variance remains constant
across the integrability-ergodicity transition.
  We show that this property induces a particular geometry of quantum
observables---Frobenius (also known as Hilbert-Schmidt) one---that naturally
encodes all the phenomena associated with the emergence of ergodicity: the
Eigenstate Thermalization effect, the decrease in the inverse participation
ratio, and the disappearance of the integrals of motion. As an application, we
use this geometry to solve a known problem of optimization of the set of
conserved quantities---regardless of whether it comes from symmetries or from
finite-size effects---to be incorporated in an extended thermodynamical theory
of integrable, near-integrable, or mesoscopic systems.


  It is now well known that the performance of a linear code $C$ under
iterative decoding on a binary erasure channel (and other channels) is
determined by the size of the smallest stopping set in the Tanner graph for
$C$. Several recent papers refer to this parameter as the \emph{stopping
distance} $s$ of $C$. This is somewhat of a misnomer since the size of the
smallest stopping set in the Tanner graph for $C$ depends on the corresponding
choice of a parity-check matrix. It is easy to see that $s \le d$, where $d$ is
the minimum Hamming distance of $C$, and we show that it is always possible to
choose a parity-check matrix for $C$ (with sufficiently many dependent rows)
such that $s = d$. We thus introduce a new parameter, termed the \emph{stopping
redundancy} of $C$, defined as the minimum number of rows in a parity-check
matrix $H$ for $C$ such that the corresponding stopping distance $s(H)$ attains
its largest possible value, namely $s(H) = d$.
  We then derive general bounds on the stopping redundancy of linear codes. We
also examine several simple ways of constructing codes from other codes, and
study the effect of these constructions on the stopping redundancy.
Specifically, for the family of binary Reed-Muller codes (of all orders), we
prove that their stopping redundancy is at most a constant times their
conventional redundancy. We show that the stopping redundancies of the binary
and ternary extended Golay codes are at most 35 and 22, respectively. Finally,
we provide upper and lower bounds on the stopping redundancy of MDS codes.


  We present UV/optical/NIR observations and modeling of supernova (SN)
2024ggi, a type II supernova (SN II) located in NGC 3621 at 7.2 Mpc. Early-time
("flash") spectroscopy of SN 2024ggi within +0.8 days of discovery shows
emission lines of H I, He I, C III, and N III with a narrow core and broad,
symmetric wings (i.e., IIn-like) arising from the photoionized,
optically-thick, unshocked circumstellar material (CSM) that surrounded the
progenitor star at shock breakout. By the next spectral epoch at +1.5 days, SN
2024ggi showed a rise in ionization as emission lines of He II, C IV, N IV/V
and O V became visible. This phenomenon is temporally consistent with a
blueward shift in the UV/optical colors, both likely the result of shock
breakout in an extended, dense CSM. The IIn-like features in SN 2024ggi persist
on a timescale of $t_{\rm IIn} = 3.8 \pm 1.6$ days at which time a reduction in
CSM density allows the detection of Doppler broadened features from the fastest
SN material. SN 2024ggi has peak UV/optical absolute magnitudes of $M_{\rm w2}
= -18.7$ mag and $M_{\rm g} = -18.1$ mag that are consistent with the known
population of CSM-interacting SNe II. Comparison of SN 2024ggi with a grid of
radiation hydrodynamics and non-local thermodynamic equilibrium (nLTE)
radiative-transfer simulations suggests a progenitor mass-loss rate of $\dot{M}
= 10^{-2}$M$_{\odot}$ yr$^{-1}$ ($v_w$ = 50 km/s), confined to a distance of $r
< 5\times 10^{14}$ cm. Assuming a wind velocity of $v_w$ = 50 km/s, the
progenitor star underwent an enhanced mass-loss episode in the last ~3 years
before explosion.


  This study investigates the localization of spinor fields in braneworld
models in six or higher dimensions. We study the relationship between fermions
in spacetimes of $2n+2$ and $2n$ dimensions. In conformally flat
extra-dimensional spacetime, fermions cannot be localized through minimal
coupling with gravity. To achieve the localization of spinor fields, we
introduce a tensor coupling term given by $\bar{\Psi}
\Gamma^{M}\Gamma^{N}\Gamma^{P}\cdots T_{MNP\cdots} \Psi$, which ensures $SO(n,
1)$ symmetry. For a tensor $T_{MNP\cdots}$ of odd order, the left and right
chiralities of high-dimensional spinors are decoupled. We find that a special
form of tensor coupling $\bar{\Psi}\Gamma^{M} \partial_M {F(\phi, R,
R^{\mu\nu}R_{\mu\nu},\cdots)} \Psi$ may facilitate the localization of the
spinor field when $F(\phi) = \phi^n$.


  In this paper, we consider a generalized model of $2\times 2$ Keller-Segel
system with nonlinear chemical gradient and small cell diffusion. The existence
of the traveling pulses for such equations is established by the methods of
geometric singular perturbation (GSP in short) and trapping regions from
dynamical systems theory. By the technique of GSP, we show that the necessary
condition for the existence of traveling pulses is that their limiting profiles
with vanishing diffusion can only consist of the slow flows on the critical
manifold of the corresponding algebraic-differential system. We also consider
the linear instability of these pulses by the spectral analysis of the
linearized operators.


  We initiate the study of expansions of monoids in the class of two-sided
restriction monoids and show that generalizations of the Birget-Rhodes prefix
group expansion, despite the absence of involution, have rich structure close
to that of respective relatively free inverse monoids.
  For a monoid $M$, we define ${\mathcal{FR}}_R(M)$ to be the freest two-sided
restriction monoid generated by a bijective copy, $M'$, of the underlying set
of $M$, such that the inclusion map $\iota\colon M\to {\mathcal{FR}}_R(M)$ is
determined by a set of relations, $R$, so that $\iota$ is a premorphism which
is weaker than a homomorphism. Our main result states that
${\mathcal{FR}}_R(M)$ can be constructed, by means of a partial action product
construction, from $M$ and the idempotent semilattice of ${\mathcal{FI}}_R(M)$,
the free $M'$-generated inverse monoid subject to relations $R$. In particular,
the semilattice of projections of ${\mathcal{FR}}_R(M)$ is isomorphic to the
idempotent semilattice of ${\mathcal{FI}}_R(M)$. The result by Fountain, Gomes
and Gould on the structure of the free two-sided restriction monoid is
recovered as a special case of our result.
  We show that important properties of ${\mathcal{FR}}_R(M)$ are well agreed
with suitable properties of $M$, such as being cancellative or embeddable into
a group. We observe that if $M$ is an inverse monoid, then
${\mathcal{FI}}_s(M)$, the free inverse monoid with respect to strong
premorphisms, is isomorphic to the Lawson-Margolis-Steinberg generalized prefix
expansion $M^{pr}$. This gives a presentation of $M^{pr}$ and leads to a model
for ${\mathcal{FR}}_s(M)$ in terms of the known model for $M^{pr}$.


  This paper investigates the problem of secure lossy source coding in the
presence of an eavesdropper with arbitrary correlated side informations at the
legitimate decoder (referred to as Bob) and the eavesdropper (referred to as
Eve). This scenario consists of an encoder that wishes to compress a source to
satisfy the desired requirements on: (i) the distortion level at Bob and (ii)
the equivocation rate at Eve. It is assumed that the decoders have access to
correlated sources as side information. For instance, this problem can be seen
as a generalization of the well-known Wyner-Ziv problem taking into account the
security requirements. A complete characterization of the
rate-distortion-equivocation region for the case of arbitrary correlated side
informations at the decoders is derived. Several special cases of interest and
an application example to secure lossy source coding of binary sources in the
presence of binary and ternary side informations are also considered. It is
shown that the statistical differences between the side information at the
decoders and the presence of non-zero distortion at the legitimate decoder can
be useful in terms of secrecy. Applications of these results arise in a variety
of distributed sensor network scenarios.


  We consider a massless scalar field in 1+1 dimensions inside a cavity
composed by a fixed plate, which imposes on the field a Robin BC, and an
oscillating one, which imposes on the field a Dirichlet BC. Assuming that the
plate moves for a finite time interval, and considering parametric resonance,
we compute the total number of created particles inside the cavity. We
generalize our results to the case of two parallel plates in 3+1 dimensions.


  We introduce the most general to date version of the permutation-equivariant
quantum K-theory, and express its total descendant potential in terms of
cohomological Gromov-Witten invariants. This is the higher-genus analogue of
adelic characterization from the paper [7] by Givental-Tonita, and is based on
the application of Kawasaki's Riemann-Roch formula to moduli spaces of stable
maps.


  We show that for any bounded function $f:[a,b]\rightarrow{\mathbb R}$ and
$\epsilon>0$ there is a partition $P$ of $[a,b]$ with respect to which the
Riemann sum of $f$ using right endpoints is within $\epsilon$ of the upper
Darboux sum of $f$. This leads to an elementary proof of the theorem of
Gillespie \cite{G} showing that Cauchy's and Riemann's definitions of
integrability coincide.


  When answering a question, people often draw upon their rich world knowledge
in addition to the particular context. While recent works retrieve supporting
facts/evidence from commonsense knowledge bases to supply additional
information to each question, there is still ample opportunity to advance it on
the quality of the evidence. It is crucial since the quality of the evidence is
the key to answering commonsense questions, and even determines the upper bound
on the QA systems performance. In this paper, we propose a recursive erasure
memory network (REM-Net) to cope with the quality improvement of evidence. To
address this, REM-Net is equipped with a module to refine the evidence by
recursively erasing the low-quality evidence that does not explain the question
answering. Besides, instead of retrieving evidence from existing knowledge
bases, REM-Net leverages a pre-trained generative model to generate candidate
evidence customized for the question. We conduct experiments on two commonsense
question answering datasets, WIQA and CosmosQA. The results demonstrate the
performance of REM-Net and show that the refined evidence is explainable.


  The non-population conserving SIR (SIR-NC) model to describe the spread of
infections in a community is proposed and studied. Unlike the standard SIR
model, SIR-NC does not assume population conservation. Although similar in form
to the standard SIR, SIR-NC admits a closed form solution while allowing us to
model mortality, and also provides different, and arguably a more realistic,
interpretation of the model parameters. Numerical comparisons of this SIR-NC
model with the standard, population conserving, SIR model are provided.
Extensions to include imported infections, interacting communities, and models
that include births and deaths are presented and analyzed. Several numerical
examples are also presented to illustrate these models. Two control problems
for the SIR-NC epidemic model are presented. First we consider the continuous
time model predictive control in which the cost function variables correspond
to the levels of lockdown, the level of testing and quarantine, and the number
of infections. We also include a switching cost for moving between lockdown
levels. A discrete time version that is more amenable to computation is then
presented along with numerical illustrations. We then consider a
multi-objective and multi-community control where we can define multiple cost
functions on the different communities and obtain the minimum cost control to
keep the value function corresponding to these control objectives below a
prescribed threshold.


  We prove that certain non-exact magnetic Hamiltonian systems on products of
closed hyperbolic surfaces and with a potential function of large oscillation
admit non-constant contractible periodic solutions of energy below the Ma\~n\'e
critical value. For that we develop a theory of holomorphic curves in
symplectizations of non-compact contact manifolds that arise as the covering
space of a virtually contact structure whose contact form is bounded with all
derivatives up to order three.


  Air shower simulations are essential for interpreting data from cosmic ray
experiments. At highest energies though, a microscopic treatment of a whole
shower is not possible any more, since it would require a huge amount of
CPU-time. We review hybrid approaches of air shower simulation which try to
overcome this problem without giving rise to artificial fluctuations as
generated by the thinning algorithm.


  We consider the problem of falsifying safety requirements of Cyber-Physical
Systems expressed in signal temporal logic (STL). This problem can be turned
into an optimization problem via STL robustness functions. In this paper, our
focus is in falsifying systems with multiple requirements. We propose to solve
such conjunctive requirements using online generative adversarial networks
(GANs) as test generators. Our main contribution is an algorithm which
falsifies a conjunctive requirement $\varphi_1 \land \cdots \land \varphi_n$ by
using a GAN for each requirement $\varphi_i$ separately. Using ideas from
multi-armed bandit algorithms, our algorithm only trains a single GAN at every
step, which saves resources. Our experiments indicate that, in addition to
saving resources, this multi-armed bandit algorithm can falsify requirements
with fewer number of executions on the system under test when compared to (i)
an algorithm training a single GAN for the complete conjunctive requirement and
(ii) an algorithm always training $n$ GANs at each step.


  Many active funds hold concentrated portfolios. Flow-driven trading in these
securities causes price pressure, which pushes up the funds' existing positions
resulting in realized returns. We decompose fund returns into a price pressure
(self-inflated) and a fundamental component and show that when allocating
capital across funds, investors are unable to identify whether realized returns
are self-inflated or fundamental. Because investors chase self-inflated fund
returns at a high frequency, even short-lived impact meaningfully affects fund
flows at longer time scales. The combination of price impact and return chasing
causes an endogenous feedback loop and a reallocation of wealth to early fund
investors, which unravels once the price pressure reverts. We find that flows
chasing self-inflated returns predict bubbles in ETFs and their subsequent
crashes, and lead to a daily wealth reallocation of 500 Million from ETFs
alone. We provide a simple regulatory reporting measure -- fund illiquidity --
which captures a fund's potential for self-inflated returns.


  Levy walk at the finite velocity is considered. To analyze the spatial and
temporal characteristics of this process, the method of moments has been used.
The asymptotic distributions of the moments (at $t\to\infty$) have been
obtained for $N$ dimensional case where the free path of particles demonstrates
the power-law distribution $p_{\xi}(x)=\alpha x_0^\alpha x^{-\alpha-1}$,
$x\to\infty$, $0<\alpha<2$. The three regimes of distribution have been
distinguished: ballistic, diffusion and asymptotic. Introduction of the finite
velocity requires considering of two problems: propagation with distribution at
the finite mathematical expectation of the free path ($1<\alpha<2$) and
propagation with distribution at the infinite mathematical expectation of the
free path of the particle ($0<\alpha<1$). In the case $1<\alpha<2$, the
asymptotic distribution is described by the Levy stable law and the effect of
the finite velocity is reduced to a decrease of diffusivity. At $0<\alpha<1$,
the situation is quite different. Here, the asymptotic distribution exhibits a
$U$- or $W$-shape and is described as the ballistic regime of distribution. The
obtained moments allow to reconstruct the distribution densities of particles
in one-dimensional and three-dimensional cases.


  An analysis of the direct correlation functions $c_{ij} (r)$ of binary
additive hard-sphere mixtures of diameters $\sigma_s$ and $\sigma_b$ (where the
subscripts $s$ and $b$ refer to the "small" and "big" spheres, respectively),
as obtained with the rational-function approximation method and the WM scheme
introduced in previous work [S.\ Pieprzyk \emph{et al.}, Phys.\ Rev.\ E {\bf
101}, 012117 (2020)], is performed. The results indicate that the functions
$c_{ss}(r<\sigma_s)$ and $c_{bb}(r<\sigma_b)$ in both approaches are monotonic
and can be well represented by a low-order polynomial, while the function
$c_{sb}(r<\frac{1}{2}(\sigma_b+\sigma_s))$ is not monotonic and exhibits a well
defined minimum near $r=\frac{1}{2}(\sigma_b-\sigma_s)$, whose properties are
studied in detail. Additionally, we show that the second derivative
$c_{sb}''(r)$ presents a jump discontinuity at
$r=\frac{1}{2}(\sigma_b-\sigma_s)$ whose magnitude satisfies the same
relationship with the contact values of the radial distribution function as in
the Percus-Yevick theory.


  We give conditions under which near-critical stochastic processes on the
half-line have infinitely many or finitely many cutpoints, generalizing
existing results on nearest-neighbour random walks to adapted processes with
bounded increments satisfying appropriate conditional increment moments
conditions. We apply one of these results to deduce that a class of transient
zero-drift Markov chains in $\mathbb{R}^d$, $d \geq 2$, possess infinitely many
separating annuli, generalizing previous results on spatially homogeneous
random walks.


  This is part I of a study on cardinals that are characterizable by Scott
sentences. Building on [3], [6] and [1] we study which cardinals are
characterizable by a Scott sentence $\phi$, in the sense that $\phi$
characterizes $\kappa$, if $\phi$ has a model of size $\kappa$, but no models
of size $\kappa^+$. We show that the set of cardinals that are characterized by
a Scott sentence is closed under successors, countable unions and countable
products (cf. theorems 2.3, 3.4, and corollary 3.6). We also prove that if
$\aleph_\alpha$ is characterized by a Scott sentence, at least one of
$\aleph_alpha$ and $\aleph_alpha^+$ is homogeneously characterizable (cf.
definition 1.3 and theorem 2.9). Based on Shelah's [8], we give counterexamples
that characterizable cardinals are not closed under predecessors, or
cofinalities.


  Motivated by recent progress in the generation of optical spatiotemporal
vortex pulses (STVPs), there is a theoretical discussion about the transverse
orbital angular momentum (OAM) carried by such pulses. Two recent works [K. Y.
Bliokh, Phys. Rev. Lett. 126, 243601 (2021)] and [S. W. Hancock et al., Phys.
Rev. Lett. 127, 193901 (2021)] claimed the OAM values which differ by a factor
of 2 for circular STVPs. Here we resolve this controversy by showing that the
result by Hancock et al. is correct for the total OAM, while the result by
Bliokh describes the suitably defined intrinsic part of the OAM. The other,
extrinsic part of the OAM originates from the fact that plane waves of the same
amplitude but different frequencies in the pulse spectrum contain different
densities of photons, which induces a transverse vortex-dependent shift of the
photon centroid even in a STVP with symmetric energy-density distribution. We
describe similar peculiarities of acoustic and quantum-relativistic
(Klein-Gordon and arbitrary-spin) STVPs. In all cases, only the intrinsic OAM
keeps a universal form independent of the details of the problem and similar to
the OAM of monochromatic vortex beams.


  Learning the kernel parameters for Gaussian processes is often the
computational bottleneck in applications such as online learning, Bayesian
optimization, or active learning. Amortizing parameter inference over different
datasets is a promising approach to dramatically speed up training time.
However, existing methods restrict the amortized inference procedure to a fixed
kernel structure. The amortization network must be redesigned manually and
trained again in case a different kernel is employed, which leads to a large
overhead in design time and training time. We propose amortizing kernel
parameter inference over a complete kernel-structure-family rather than a fixed
kernel structure. We do that via defining an amortization network over pairs of
datasets and kernel structures. This enables fast kernel inference for each
element in the kernel family without retraining the amortization network. As a
by-product, our amortization network is able to do fast ensembling over kernel
structures. In our experiments, we show drastically reduced inference time
combined with competitive test performance for a large set of kernels and
datasets.


  We consider a random graph G(n,p) whose vertex set V has been randomly
embedded in the unit square and whose edges are given weight equal to the
geometric distance between their end vertices. Then each pair {u,v} of vertices
have a distance in the weighted graph, and a Euclidean distance. The stretch
factor of the embedded graph is defined as the maximum ratio of these two
distances, over all u,v in V. We give upper and lower bounds on the stretch
factor (holding asymptotically almost surely), and show that for p not too
close to 0 or 1, these bounds are best possible in a certain sense. Our results
imply that the stretch factor is bounded with probability tending to 1 if and
only if n(1-p) tends to 0, answering a question of O'Rourke.


  The first order phase transitions between a two-dimensional (2d) gas and the
2d solid of the first monolayer have been studied for the noble gases Ar, Kr
and Xe on a NaCl(100) surface in quasi-equilibrium with the three-dimensional
gas phase. Using linear temperature ramps, we show that the widths of the
hysteresis loops of these transitions as a function of the heating rate, r,
scales with a power law r^alpha with alpha between 0.4 and 0.5 depending on the
system. The hysteresis loops for different heating rates are similar. The
island area of the condensed layer was found to grow initially with a t^4 time
dependence. These results are in agreement with theory, which predicts alpha =
0.5 and hysteresis loop similarity.


  In this paper, we show the flux of Hawking radiation in a
Pleba\'nski-Demia\'nski black hole from the point of view of gauge and
gravitational anomalies. We will use the consistent anomaly method to guarantee
that our results are valid in the de Sitter space. This is because we are
including the cosmological constant into our parameters and the covariant
anomaly method gives a wrong value for the Hawking temperature. We also show
that these calculations are a general result. In order to verify the
consistence of our results, we can reproduce earlier known results as certain
limiting cases.


  The celebrated Rauch-Taylor/Bardos-Lebeau-Rauch geometric control condition
is central in the study of the observability of the wave equation linking this
property to high-frequency propagation along geodesics that are therays of
geometric optics. This connection is best understood through the propagation
properties of microlocal defect measures that appear as solutions to the wave
equation concentrate. For a sufficiently smooth metric this propagation occurs
along the bicharacteristic flow. If one considers a merely
$\mathscr{C}^1$-metric this bicharacteristic flow may however not exist. The
Hamiltonian vector field is only continuous; bicharacteristics do exist (as
integral curves of this continuous vector field) but uniqueness is lost. Here,
on a compact manifold without boundary, we consider this low regularity
setting, revisit the geometric control condition, and address the question of
support propagation for a measure solution to an ODE with continuous
coefficients. This leads to a sufficient condition for the observability and
equivalently the exact controllability of the wave equation. Moreover, we
investigate the stabililty of the observability property and the sensitivity of
the control process under a perturbation of the metric of regularity as low as
Lipschitz.


  The progress in high performance computing we are witnessing today offers the
possibility of accurate electron density calculations of systems in realistic
physico-chemical conditions. In this paper, we present a strategy aimed at
performing a first-principle computation of the low energy part of the X-ray
Absorption Spectroscopy (XAS) spectrum based on the density functional theory
calculation of the electronic potential. To test its effectiveness we apply the
method to the computation of the X-ray Absorption Near Edge Structure part of
the XAS spectrum in the paradigmatic, but simple case of Cu2+ in water. In
order to keep into account the effect of the metal site structure fluctuations
in determining the experimental signal, the theoretical spectrum is evaluated
as the average over the computed spectra of a statistically significant number
of simulated metal site configurations. The comparison of experimental data
with theoretical calculations suggests that Cu2+ lives preferentially in a
square-pyramidal geometry. The remarkable success of this approach in the
interpretation of XAS data makes us optimistic about the possibility of
extending the computational strategy we have outlined to the more interesting
case of molecules of biological relevance bound to transition metal ions.


  Controlling electrons at the level of elementary charge $e$ has been
demonstrated experimentally already in the 1980's. Ever since, producing an
electrical current $ef$, or its integer multiple, at a drive frequency $f$ has
been in a focus of research for metrological purposes. In this review we first
discuss the generic physical phenomena and technical constraints that influence
charge transport. We then present the broad variety of proposed realizations.
Some of them have already proven experimentally to nearly fulfill the demanding
needs, in terms of transfer errors and transfer rate, of quantum metrology of
electrical quantities, whereas some others are currently "just" wild ideas,
still often potentially competitive if technical constraints can be lifted. We
also discuss the important issues of read-out of single-electron events and
potential error correction schemes based on them. Finally, we give an account
of the status of single-electron current sources in the bigger framework of
electric quantum standards and of the future international SI system of units,
and briefly discuss the applications and uses of single-electron devices
outside the metrological context.


  We propose a simplification of the Optimized Effective Potential (OEP)
applied to the Self Interaction Correction (SIC) scheme of Density Functional
Theory (DFT). The new scheme fulfills several key formal properties and turns
out to be both simple and accurate. We show examples of applications on model
molecules in terms of observables known to be especially sensitive to details
of the SIC-OEP approach.


  We present calculations of the chemical freeze-out temperature (T_ch) based
on particle yields from STAR and ALICE measured at collision energies ranging
from sqrt{s_{NN}} = 11.5 GeV to 5.02 TeV. Employing the Grand Canonical
Ensemble approach using the Thermal-FIST Hadron Resonance Gas model package, we
show evidence for a flavour-dependent chemical freeze-out in the crossover
region of the QCD phase diagram. At a vanishing baryochemical potential, we
calculate light and strange flavour freeze-out temperatures T_L = 150.2 +- 2.6
MeV and T_S = 165.1 +- 2.7 MeV, respectively.


  We study heavy-light meson resonances with quantum numbers J^P=0^+ and
J^P=1^+ in terms of the non-linear chiral SU(3) Lagrangian. At leading order a
parameter-free prediction is obtained for the scattering of Goldstone bosons
off heavy-light pseudo-scalar and vector mesons once we insist on approximate
crossing symmetry of the unitarized scattering amplitude. The recently
announced narrow open charm states observed by the BABAR and CLEO
collaborations are reproduced. We suggest the existence of states that form an
anti-triplet and a sextet representation of the SU(3) group. In particular, so
far unobserved narrow isospin-singlet states with negative strangeness
(I,S)=(0,-1) are predicted at 2361 MeV J^P=0^+ and 2501 MeV (J^P=1^+).
Similarly, open bottom states are found at 5719 MeV (J^P=0^+) and 5622 MeV
(J^P=1^+). Additional narrow states of mass 5580 MeV (J^P=0^+) and 5650 MeV
(J^P=1^+) with widths of about 50 MeV are obtained in the (I,S)=(1,1) sector.
For the anti-triplet states our results differ most significantly from
predictions that are based on a linear realization of the chiral SU(3) symmetry
in the open bottom sector. Strongly bound 0^+-and 1^+-states with (I,S)=(0,1)
at 5507 MeV and 5553 MeV are predicted.


  Modular Reinforcement Learning (RL) decentralizes the control of multi-joint
robots by learning policies for each actuator. Previous work on modular RL has
proven its ability to control morphologically different agents with a shared
actuator policy. However, with the increase in the Degree of Freedom (DoF) of
robots, training a morphology-generalizable modular controller becomes
exponentially difficult. Motivated by the way the human central nervous system
controls numerous muscles, we propose a Synergy-Oriented LeARning (SOLAR)
framework that exploits the redundant nature of DoF in robot control. Actuators
are grouped into synergies by an unsupervised learning method, and a synergy
action is learned to control multiple actuators in synchrony. In this way, we
achieve a low-rank control at the synergy level. We extensively evaluate our
method on a variety of robot morphologies, and the results show its superior
efficiency and generalizability, especially on robots with a large DoF like
Humanoids++ and UNIMALs.


  In recent years the femtoscopy technique has been used by the ALICE
Collaboration in small colliding systems at the LHC to investigate the
strong-interaction of hadron pairs in the low-energy regime. The extension of
this technique to the study of many-body correlations aims to deliver in the
next years the first experimental measurements of the genuine many-hadron
interactions, provided that the contributions due to the lower order terms are
properly accounted for. In this paper we present a method that allows to
determine the residual lower order contributions to the three-body correlation
functions, based on the cumulant decomposition approach and on kinematic
transformations. A procedure to simulate genuine three-body correlations in
three-baryon correlation functions is also developed. A qualitative study of
the produced correlation signal is performed by varying the strength of the
adopted three-body interaction model and comparisons with the expectations for
the lower order contributions to the correlation function are shown. The method
can be also applied to evaluate the combinatorial background in the two-body
correlation functions, providing an improved statistical accuracy with respect
to the standard techniques. The example of the contribution by the pK$^+$K$^-$
channel to the recently measured p$\phi$ correlation is discussed.


  Recent observations suggest that Type IIn supernovae (SNe IIn) may exhibit
late-time (>100 days) infrared (IR) emission from warm dust more than other
types of core-collapse SNe. Mid-IR observations, which span the peak of the
thermal spectral energy distribution, provide useful constraints on the
properties of the dust and, ultimately, the circumstellar environment,
explosion mechanism, and progenitor system. Due to the low SN IIn rate (<10% of
all core-collapse SNe), few IR observations exist for this subclass. The
handful of isolated studies, however, show late-time IR emission from warm dust
that, in some cases, extends for five or six years post-discovery. While
previous Spitzer/IRAC surveys have searched for dust in SNe, none have targeted
the Type IIn subclass. This article presents results from a warm Spitzer/IRAC
survey of the positions of all 68 known SNe IIn within a distance of 250 Mpc
between 1999 and 2008 that have remained unobserved by Spitzer more than 100
days post-discovery. The detection of late-time emission from ten targets
(~15%) nearly doubles the database of existing mid-IR observations of SNe IIn.
Although optical spectra show evidence for new dust formation in some cases,
the data show that in most cases the likely origin of the mid-IR emission is
pre-existing dust, which is continuously heated by optical emission generated
by ongoing circumstellar interaction between the forward shock and
circumstellar medium. Furthermore, an emerging trend suggests that these SNe
decline at ~1000--2000 days post-discovery once the forward shock overruns the
dust shell. The mass-loss rates associated with these dust shells are
consistent with luminous blue variable (LBV) progenitors.


  The method of constructing of extended phase space for singular theories
which permits the consideration of covariant gauges without the introducing of
a ghost fields, is proposed. The extension of the phase space is carried out by
the identification of the initial theory with an equivalent theory with higher
derivatives and applying to it the Ostrogradsky method of Hamiltonian
description .


  Cooperation between actors in design and construction activities in
architecture is an essential stake nowadays. In professional practices the
actors involved in construction projects use numerous tools. The project is
unique but the "views" that actors manipulate are various and sometimes
fundamentally different. Their common characteristic is that they partially
represent the cooperation context through a specific point of view.
"Bat'iViews" suggests to the actors a multi-view interface of the context and
enables to navigate through the different views. This proposition is based on a
model-driven approach. We distinguish between "context modelling" and modelling
of concepts represented in each "businessview". A model integrative
infrastructure allows us to develop the prototype and to manage user
interaction through the definition of models' transformations.


  Rheology of a dilute cohesive granular gas is theoretically and numerically
studied. The flow curve between the shear viscosity and the shear rate is
derived from the inelastic Boltzmann equation for particles having square-well
potentials in a simple shear flow. It is found that (i) the stable uniformly
sheared state only exists above a critical shear rate and (ii) the viscosity in
the uniformly sheared flow is almost identical to that for uniformly sheared
flow of hard core granular particles. Below the critical shear rate, clusters
grow with time, in which the viscosity can be approximated by that for the
hard-core fluids if we replace the diameter of the particle by the mean
diameter of clusters.


  Based on optical medium analogy, we establish a formalism to describe the
interaction between an electromagnetic (EM) system with gravitational waves
(GWs) background. After a full discussion on the classical treatment of the
EM-GW interaction and finding the EM field mode-functions in the presence of
the magneto-dielectric media caused by GWs, the governing quantum interaction
Hamiltonian is obtained. Investigation of the optical quadrature variance as
well as the visibility of a laser field interacting with the multi-mode
squeezed primordial gravitational waves imply that the inflationary primordial
gravitational waves (PGWs) act as a decoherence mechanism that destroy EM
coherency after a characteristic time scale, $\tau_{c}$, which depends on the
inflationary parameters $(\beta,\beta_s,r)$, or equivalently, the fractional
energy density of PGWs, $\Omega_{gw,0}$. The decoherency mechanism overcomes
the coherent effects, such as revivals of optical squeezing, thus leaving their
confirmation out of reach. Influenced by the continuum of the squeezed PGWs,
the laser field suffers a line-width broadening by $\gamma=
\tau_{\text{c}}^{-1}$. The most peculiar property of the EM spectrum is the
apparition of side bands at $\omega\sim \omega_0\pm 1.39 \tau_c^{-1}$Hz,
stemming from the squeezed nature of PGWs. The laser phase noise induced by the
squeezed PGWs grows with time squarely, $\Delta\phi=(t/\tau_c)^2$, that can
most possibly be sensed within a finite flight time.


  In this survey we present some recent applications of proof mining to the
fixed point theory of (asymptotically) nonexpansive mappings and to the
metastability (in the sense of Terence Tao) of ergodic averages in uniformly
convex Banach spaces.


  We perform a comprehensive study of the emission of massive scalar fields by
a higher-dimensional, simply rotating black hole both in the bulk and on the
brane. We derive approximate, analytic results as well as exact numerical ones
for the absorption probability, and demonstrate that the two sets agree very
well in the low and intermediate-energy regime for scalar fields with mass
m_\Phi < 1 TeV in the bulk and m_\Phi < 0.5 TeV on the brane. The numerical
values of the absorption probability are then used to derive the Hawking
radiation power emission spectra in terms of the number of extra dimensions,
angular-momentum of the black hole and mass of the emitted field. We compute
the total emissivities in the bulk and on the brane, and demonstrate that,
although the brane channel remains the dominant one, the bulk-over-brane energy
ratio is considerably increased (up to 33%) when the mass of the emitted field
is taken into account.


  The Berry phase of a bipartite system described by a Heisenberg XXZ model
driven by a one-site magnetic field is investigated. The effect of the
Dzyaloshinski-Moriya (DM) anisotropic interaction on the Berry phase is
discussed. It is found that the DM interaction affects the Berry phase
monotonously, and can also cause sudden change of the Berry phase for some weak
magnetic field cases.


  In this paper we propose methodology for inference of binary-valued adjacency
matrices from various measures of the strength of association between pairs of
network nodes, or more generally pairs of variables. This strength of
association can be quantified by sample covariance and correlation matrices,
and more generally by test-statistics and hypothesis test p-values from
arbitrary distributions. Community detection methods such as block modelling
typically require binary-valued adjacency matrices as a starting point. Hence,
a main motivation for the methodology we propose is to obtain binary-valued
adjacency matrices from such pairwise measures of strength of association
between variables. The proposed methodology is applicable to large
high-dimensional data-sets and is based on computationally efficient
algorithms. We illustrate its utility in a range of contexts and data-sets.


  We calculate the Newtonian potential in the two-brane Randall-Sundrum model,
emphasizing the effect of the finite distance between the two branes. The
result obtained is quite natural: When the distance in the potential is small
compared to the brane separation the two-brane model is indistinguishable from
the one-brane model, whereas when the distance is large the bulk dimension
behaves like an ordinary compact dimension, with an exponentially decreasing
correction to the four-dimensional potential. The contribution from the radion
is also included, and is found to give only a multiplicative factor of order 1
in the correction.


  We study the properties of singly-quantized linear vortices in the supersolid
phase of a dipolar Bose-Einstein condensate at zero temperature modeling
$^{164}$Dy atoms. The system is extended in the $x-y$ plane and confined by a
harmonic trap in the the polarization direction $z$. Our study is based on a
generalized Gross-Pitaevskii equation. We characterize the ground state of the
system in terms of spatial order and superfluid fraction and compare the
properties of a single vortex and of a vortex dipole in the superfluid phase
(SFP) and in the supersolid phase (SSP). At variance with a vortex in the SFP,
which is free to move in the superfluid, a vortex in the SSP is localized at
the interstitial sites and does not move freely. We have computed the energy
barrier for motion from an equilibrium site to another. The fact that the
vortex is submitted to a periodic potential has a dramatic effect on the
dynamics of a vortex dipole made of two counter rotating parallel vortices;
instead of rigidly translating as in the SFP, the vortex and anti-vortex
approach each other by a series of jumps from one site to another until they
annihilate in a very short time and their energy is transferred to bulk
excitations.


  We introduce a nonlinear operator to model diffusion on a complex undirected
network under crowded conditions. We show that the asymptotic distribution of
diffusing agents is a nonlinear function of the nodes' degree and saturates to
a constant value for sufficiently large connectivities, at variance with
standard diffusion in the absence of excluded-volume effects. Building on this
observation, we define and solve an inverse problem, aimed at reconstructing
the a priori unknown connectivity distribution. The method gathers all the
necessary information by repeating a limited number of independent measurements
of the asymptotic density at a single node that can be chosen randomly. The
technique is successfully tested against both synthetic and real data, and
shown to estimate with great accuracy also the total number of nodes.


  We present a lattice QCD calculation of the glue spin $S_G$ in the nucleon
for the first time. It was recently shown that the first moment of the glue
helicity distribution could be obtained through the cross-product of the the
electric field $\vec{E}$ and the physical gauge field $\vec{A}_{phys}$ with the
non-Abelian Coulomb gauge condition, i.e. $\int d^3 x\, \,\vec{E}(x) \times
\vec{A}_{phys}(x)$ in the infinite momentum frame. We use the gauge field
tensor from the overlap Dirac operator to check the frame dependence and
calculate glue spin with several momenta. The calculation is carried out with
valence overlap fermion on 2+1 flavor DWF gauge configurations on the $24^3
\times 64$ lattice with $a^{-1}=1.77$ GeV with the light sea quark mass
corresponding to a pion mass of 330 MeV.


  Offline optimization is an emerging problem in many experimental engineering
domains including protein, drug or aircraft design, where online
experimentation to collect evaluation data is too expensive or dangerous. To
avoid that, one has to optimize an unknown function given only its offline
evaluation at a fixed set of inputs. A naive solution to this problem is to
learn a surrogate model of the unknown function and optimize this surrogate
instead. However, such a naive optimizer is prone to erroneous overestimation
of the surrogate (possibly due to over-fitting on a biased sample of function
evaluation) on inputs outside the offline dataset. Prior approaches addressing
this challenge have primarily focused on learning robust surrogate models.
However, their search strategies are derived from the surrogate model rather
than the actual offline data. To fill this important gap, we introduce a new
learning-to-search perspective for offline optimization by reformulating it as
an offline reinforcement learning problem. Our proposed policy-guided gradient
search approach explicitly learns the best policy for a given surrogate model
created from the offline data. Our empirical results on multiple benchmarks
demonstrate that the learned optimization policy can be combined with existing
offline surrogates to significantly improve the optimization performance.


  Template-based signal detection most often relies on computing a correlation,
or a dot product, between an incoming data stream and a signal template. While
such a correlation results in an ongoing estimate of the magnitude of the
signal in the data stream, it does not directly indicate the presence or
absence of a signal. Instead, the problem of signal detection is one of
model-selection. Here we explore the use of the Bayesian odds-ratio (OR), which
is the ratio of posterior probabilities of a signal-plus-noise model over a
noise-only model. We demonstrate this method by applying it to simulated
electroencephalographic (EEG) signals based on the P300 response, which is
widely used in both Brain Computer Interface (BCI) and Brain Machine Interface
(BMI) systems. The efficacy of this algorithm is demonstrated by comparing the
receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves of the OR-based (logOR) filter
to the usual correlation method where we find a significant improvement in P300
detection. The logOR filter promises to improve the accuracy and speed of the
detection of evoked brain responses in BCI/BMI applications as well the
detection of template signals in general.


  It has been thought that only light species could behave as radiation and
account for the dark radiation observed recently by Planck, WMAP9, South Pole
and ATACAMA telescopes. In this work we will show that GeV scale WIMPs can
plausibly account for the dark radiation as well. Heavy WIMPs might mimic the
effect of a half neutrino species if some of their fraction were produced
non-thermally after the thermal freeze-out. In addition, we will show how BBN,
CMB and Structure Formation bounds might be circumvented.


  The phi meson production on hyperons, pi Y --> phi Y and anti-kaons bar-K
N--> phi Y is argued to be a new efficient source of phi mesons in a
nucleus-nucleus collision. These reactions are not suppressed according to
Okubo-Zweig-Izuka rule in contrast to the processes with non-strange particles
in the entrance channels, pi B and BB with B=N,Delta. A rough estimate of the
cross sections within a simple hadronic model shows that the cross sections of
pi Y-->phi Y and bar-K N-->phi Y reactions can exceed that of the pi N--> phi N
reaction by factors 50 and 60, respectively. In the hadrochemical model for
nucleus-nucleus collisions at SIS and lower AGS energies we calculate the
evolution of strange particle populations and phi meson production rate due to
the new processes. It is found that the catalytic reactions can be operative if
the maximal temperature in nucleus-nucleus collisions is larger than 130 MeV
and the collision time is larger than 10 fm. A possible influence of the
catalytic reactions on the centrality dependence of the phi yield at AGS
energies and the phi rapidity distributions at SPS energies is discussed.


  The configurational information in sentences of a free word order language
such as Sanskrit is of limited use. Thus, the context of the entire sentence
will be desirable even for basic processing tasks such as word segmentation. We
propose a structured prediction framework that jointly solves the word
segmentation and morphological tagging tasks in Sanskrit. We build an energy
based model where we adopt approaches generally employed in graph based parsing
techniques (McDonald et al., 2005a; Carreras, 2007). Our model outperforms the
state of the art with an F-Score of 96.92 (percentage improvement of 7.06%)
while using less than one-tenth of the task-specific training data. We find
that the use of a graph based ap- proach instead of a traditional lattice-based
sequential labelling approach leads to a percentage gain of 12.6% in F-Score
for the segmentation task.


  Description of electrons as solitons of the polarization field implies that
an ordinary dielectric has a hidden order, associated with the invariance with
respect to adding loops of quantized electric flux. We describe the mechanism
by which the finite polarizability of the medium renders the interaction
between the solitons short-ranged (prior to their coupling to electromagnetism)
and argue that the structure of the solitons allows them to be quantized as
either fermions or bosons. At the quantum level, the theory has, in addition to
the solitonic electric, elementary magnetic excitations, suggesting that small
dielectrics may host quantized magnetic vortices carrying circular polarization
currents.


  We propose a notion of graph convergence that interpolates between the
Benjamini--Schramm convergence of bounded degree graphs and the dense graph
convergence developed by L\'aszl\'o Lov\'asz and his coauthors. We prove that
spectra of graphs, and also some important graph parameters such as numbers of
colorings or matchings, behave well in convergent graph sequences. Special
attention is given to graph sequences of large essential girth, for which
asymptotics of coloring numbers are explicitly calculated. We also treat
numbers of matchings in approximately regular graphs.
  We introduce tentative limit objects that we call graphonings because they
are common generalizations of graphons and graphings. Special forms of these,
called Hausdorff and Euclidean graphonings, involve geometric measure theory.
We construct Euclidean graphonings that provide limits of hypercubes and of
finite projective planes, and, more generally, of a wide class of regular
sequences of large essential girth. For any convergent sequence of large
essential girth, we construct weaker limit objects: an involution invariant
probability measure on the sub-Markov space of consistent measure sequences
(this is unique), or an acyclic reversible sub-Markov kernel on a probability
space (non-unique). We also pose some open problems.


  The robustness of the stability properties of dynamical systems in the
presence of unknown/adversarial perturbations to system parameters is a
desirable property. In this paper, we present methods to efficiently compute
and improve the approximate stability radius of linear time-invariant systems.
We propose two methods to derive closed-form expressions of approximate
stability radius, and use these to re-design the system matrix to increase the
stability radius. Our numerical studies show that the approximations work well
and are able to improve the robustness of the stability of the system.


  This paper explores leveraging large language models for map-free off-road
navigation using generative AI, reducing the need for traditional data
collection and annotation. We propose a method where a robot receives verbal
instructions, converted to text through Whisper, and a large language model
(LLM) model extracts landmarks, preferred terrains, and crucial adverbs
translated into speed settings for constrained navigation. A language-driven
semantic segmentation model generates text-based masks for identifying
landmarks and terrain types in images. By translating 2D image points to the
vehicle's motion plane using camera parameters, an MPC controller can guides
the vehicle towards the desired terrain. This approach enhances adaptation to
diverse environments and facilitates the use of high-level instructions for
navigating complex and challenging terrains.


  We consider the simplest classical integrable model corresponding to a
non-hyperelliptic spectral curve. We show that a certain complicated integral
occurs when computing the average of observables in this model. This integral
does not factorise. Since similar problems should also exist in the quantum
case, we think that a serious question arises of how to deal with these
integrals.


  There is a perceived disconnect between how ad hoc industry solutions and
academic research solutions in cyber security are developed and applied. Is
there a difference in philosophy in how solutions to cyber security problems
are developed by industry and by academia. What could academia and industry do
to bridge this gap and speed up the development and use of effective
cybersecurity solutions? This paper provides an overview of the most critical
gaps and solutions identified by an interdisciplinary expert exchange on the
topic. The discussion was held in the form of the webinar "Bridging the
Bubbles: Connecting Academia and Industry in Cybersecurity Research" in
November 2022 as part of the Rogers Cybersecure Catalyst webinar series.
Panelists included researchers from academia and industry as well as experts
from industry and business development. The key findings and recommendations of
this exchange are supported by the relevant scientific literature on the topic
within this paper. Different approaches and time frames in development and
lifecycle management, challenges in knowledge transfer and communication as
well as heterogeneous metrics for success in projects are examples of the
evaluated subject areas.


  A mathematically correct approach to study theories with infinite-dimensional
groups of symmetries is presented. It is based on quasi-invariant measures on
the groups. In this paper, the properties of the measure on the group of
diffeomorphisms are used to evaluate the functional integrals in the Schwarzian
theory. As an important example of the application of the new technique, we
explicitly evaluate the correlation functions in the Schwarzian theory.


  We describe a massively parallel implementation of the recently developed
discontinuous Galerkin density functional theory (DGDFT) [J. Comput. Phys.
2012, 231, 2140] method, for efficient large-scale Kohn-Sham DFT based
electronic structure calculations. The DGDFT method uses adaptive local basis
(ALB) functions generated on-the-fly during the self-consistent field (SCF)
iteration to represent the solution to the Kohn-Sham equations. The use of the
ALB set provides a systematic way to improve the accuracy of the approximation.
It minimizes the number of degrees of freedom required to represent the
solution to the Kohn-Sham problem for a desired level of accuracy. In
particular, DGDFT can reach the planewave accuracy with far fewer numbers of
degrees of freedom. By using the pole expansion and selected inversion (PEXSI)
technique to compute electron density, energy and atomic forces, we can make
the computational complexity of DGDFT scale at most quadratically with respect
to the number of electrons for both insulating and metallic systems. We show
that DGDFT can achieve 80% parallel efficiency on 128,000 high performance
computing cores when it is used to study the electronic structure of
two-dimensional (2D) phosphorene systems with 3,500-14,000 atoms. This high
parallel efficiency results from a two-level parallelization scheme that we
will describe in detail.


  We prove the following Alon-Boppana type theorem for general (not necessarily
regular) weighted graphs: if $G$ is an $n$-node weighted undirected graph of
average combinatorial degree $d$ (that is, $G$ has $dn/2$ edges) and girth $g>
2d^{1/8}+1$, and if $\lambda_1 \leq \lambda_2 \leq \cdots \lambda_n$ are the
eigenvalues of the (non-normalized) Laplacian of $G$, then \[ \frac
{\lambda_n}{\lambda_2} \geq 1 + \frac 4{\sqrt d} - O \left( \frac 1{d^{\frac
58} }\right) \] (The Alon-Boppana theorem implies that if $G$ is unweighted and
$d$-regular, then $\frac {\lambda_n}{\lambda_2} \geq 1 + \frac 4{\sqrt d} -
O\left( \frac 1 d \right)$ if the diameter is at least $d^{1.5}$.)
  Our result implies a lower bound for spectral sparsifiers. A graph $H$ is a
spectral $\epsilon$-sparsifier of a graph $G$ if \[ L(G) \preceq L(H) \preceq
(1+\epsilon) L(G) \] where $L(G)$ is the Laplacian matrix of $G$ and $L(H)$ is
the Laplacian matrix of $H$. Batson, Spielman and Srivastava proved that for
every $G$ there is an $\epsilon$-sparsifier $H$ of average degree $d$ where
$\epsilon \approx \frac {4\sqrt 2}{\sqrt d}$ and the edges of $H$ are a
(weighted) subset of the edges of $G$. Batson, Spielman and Srivastava also
show that the bound on $\epsilon$ cannot be reduced below $\approx \frac
2{\sqrt d}$ when $G$ is a clique; our Alon-Boppana-type result implies that
$\epsilon$ cannot be reduced below $\approx \frac 4{\sqrt d}$ when $G$ comes
from a family of expanders of super-constant degree and super-constant girth.
  The method of Batson, Spielman and Srivastava proves a more general result,
about sparsifying sums of rank-one matrices, and their method applies to an
"online" setting. We show that for the online matrix setting the $4\sqrt 2 /
\sqrt d$ bound is tight, up to lower order terms.


  SiC is a promising substrate for Si-on-insulator (SOI) wafers for efficient
thermal management owing to its high thermal conductivity and large bandgap.
However, fabricating a Si device layer on a SiC substrate with a high and
uniform thermal-boundary conductance (TBC) at the wafer scale is challenging.
In this study, a 4-inch Si-on-SiC wafer was fabricated using a room-temperature
surface-activated bonding method, and the TBC was measured using the
time-domain thermoreflectance (TDTR) method. The obtained TBC was 109 MW/m2K in
the as-bonded sample, improving to 293 MW/m2K after annealing at 750 oC,
representing a 78% increase compared to previously reported values for a Si-SiC
interface formed by bonding methods. Such enhancement is attributed to the
absence of an oxide layer at the interface. Furthermore, we assessed the actual
spatial distribution of the TBC in the SOI system by combining the TDTR mapping
with a mathematical model to remove the influence of random errors in the
experiment. The spatial distributions before and after annealing were 7% and
17%, respectively. Such variation highlights the need to consider the TBC
distribution when designing thermal management systems.


  We discuss form factors and coupling constants for the $\gamma^* \pi^0
\gamma$, $\rho\pi\pi$ and $\gamma \pi \rho$ interactions generated by a model
field theory that produces finite size $\bar{q}q$ meson modes. The approach
implements dressing of the vertices and propagators consistent with dynamical
chiral symmetry breaking, gauge invariance, quark confinement and perturbative
QCD.


  We show how to realize a quantum interface between optical fields and the
polarized nuclear spins in a singly charged quantum dot, which is strongly
coupled to a high-finesse optical cavity. An effective direct coupling between
cavity and nuclear spins is obtained by adiabatically eliminating the (far
detuned) excitonic and electronic states. The requirements needed to map qubit
and continuous variable states of cavity or traveling-wave fields to the
collective nuclear spin are investigated: For cavity fields, we consider
adiabatic passage processes to transfer the states. It is seen that a
significant improvement in cavity lifetimes beyond present-day technology would
be required for a quantum interface. We then turn to a scheme which couples the
nuclei to the output field of the cavity and can tolerate significantly shorter
cavity lifetimes. We show that the lifetimes reported in the literature and the
recently achieved nuclear polarization of ~90% allow both high-fidelity
read-out and write-in of quantum information between the nuclear spins and the
output field. We discuss the performance of the scheme and provide a convenient
description of the dipolar dynamics of the nuclei for highly polarized spins,
demonstrating that this process does not affect the performance of our
protocol.


  In recent years, recognition of text from natural scene image and video frame
has got increased attention among the researchers due to its various
complexities and challenges. Because of low resolution, blurring effect,
complex background, different fonts, color and variant alignment of text within
images and video frames, etc., text recognition in such scenario is difficult.
Most of the current approaches usually apply a binarization algorithm to
convert them into binary images and next OCR is applied to get the recognition
result. In this paper, we present a novel approach based on color channel
selection for text recognition from scene images and video frames. In the
approach, at first, a color channel is automatically selected and then selected
color channel is considered for text recognition. Our text recognition
framework is based on Hidden Markov Model (HMM) which uses Pyramidal Histogram
of Oriented Gradient features extracted from selected color channel. From each
sliding window of a color channel our color-channel selection approach analyzes
the image properties from the sliding window and then a multi-label Support
Vector Machine (SVM) classifier is applied to select the color channel that
will provide the best recognition results in the sliding window. This color
channel selection for each sliding window has been found to be more fruitful
than considering a single color channel for the whole word image. Five
different features have been analyzed for multi-label SVM based color channel
selection where wavelet transform based feature outperforms others. Our
framework has been tested on different publicly available scene/video text
image datasets. For Devanagari script, we collected our own data dataset. The
performances obtained from experimental results are encouraging and show the
advantage of the proposed method.


  We present AGNfitter, a publicly available open-source algorithm implementing
a fully Bayesian Markov Chain Monte Carlo method to fit the spectral energy
distributions (SEDs) of active galactic nuclei (AGN) from the sub-mm to the UV,
allowing one to robustly disentangle the physical processes responsible for
their emission. AGNfitter makes use of a large library of theoretical,
empirical, and semi-empirical models to characterize both the nuclear and host
galaxy emission simultaneously. The model consists of four physical emission
components: an accretion disk, a torus of AGN heated dust, stellar populations,
and cold dust in star forming regions. AGNfitter determines the posterior
distributions of numerous parameters that govern the physics of AGN with a
fully Bayesian treatment of errors and parameter degeneracies, allowing one to
infer integrated luminosities, dust attenuation parameters, stellar masses, and
star formation rates. We tested AGNfitter's performace on real data by fitting
the SEDs of a sample of 714 X-ray selected AGN from the XMM-COSMOS survey,
spectroscopically classified as Type1 (unobscured) and Type2 (obscured) AGN by
their optical-UV emission lines. We find that two independent model parameters,
namely the reddening of the accretion disk and the column density of the dusty
torus, are good proxies for AGN obscuration, allowing us to develop a strategy
for classifying AGN as Type1 or Type2, based solely on an SED-fitting analysis.
Our classification scheme is in excellent agreement with the spectroscopic
classification, giving a completeness fraction of $\sim 86\%$ and $\sim 70\%$,
and an efficiency of $\sim 80\%$ and $\sim 77\%$, for Type1 and Type2 AGNs,
respectively.


  COVID-19 has resulted in an ongoing pandemic and as of 12 June 2020, has
caused more than 7.4 million cases and over 418,000 deaths. The highly dynamic
and rapidly evolving situation with COVID-19 has made it difficult to access
accurate, on-demand information regarding the disease. Online communities,
forums, and social media provide potential venues to search for relevant
questions and answers, or post questions and seek answers from other members.
However, due to the nature of such sites, there are always a limited number of
relevant questions and responses to search from, and posted questions are
rarely answered immediately. With the advancements in the field of natural
language processing, particularly in the domain of language models, it has
become possible to design chatbots that can automatically answer consumer
questions. However, such models are rarely applied and evaluated in the
healthcare domain, to meet the information needs with accurate and up-to-date
healthcare data. In this paper, we propose to apply a language model for
automatically answering questions related to COVID-19 and qualitatively
evaluate the generated responses. We utilized the GPT-2 language model and
applied transfer learning to retrain it on the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset
(CORD-19) corpus. In order to improve the quality of the generated responses,
we applied 4 different approaches, namely tf-idf, BERT, BioBERT, and USE to
filter and retain relevant sentences in the responses. In the performance
evaluation step, we asked two medical experts to rate the responses. We found
that BERT and BioBERT, on average, outperform both tf-idf and USE in
relevance-based sentence filtering tasks. Additionally, based on the chatbot,
we created a user-friendly interactive web application to be hosted online.


  We show that cotunneling in the 5/2 fractional quantum Hall regime allows us
to test the Moore-Read wave function, proposed for this regime, and to probe
the nature of the fractional charge carriers. We calculate the cotunneling
current for electrons that tunnel between two quantum Hall edge states via a
quantum dot and for quasiparticles with fractional charges e/4 and e/2 that
tunnel via an antidot. While electron cotunneling is strongly suppressed, the
quasiparticle tunneling shows signatures characteristic of the Moore-Read
state. For comparison, we also consider cotunneling between Laughlin states,
and find that electron transport between Moore-Read states and between Laughlin
states at filling factor 1/3 have identical voltage dependences.


  Criticality has been proposed as a mechanism for the emergence of complexity,
life, and computation, as it exhibits a balance between robustness and
adaptability. In classic models of complex systems where structure and dynamics
are considered homogeneous, criticality is restricted to phase transitions,
leading either to robust (ordered) or adaptive (chaotic) phases in most of the
parameter space. Many real-world complex systems, however, are not homogeneous.
Some elements change in time faster than others, with slower elements (usually
the most relevant) providing robustness, and faster ones being adaptive.
Structural patterns of connectivity are also typically heterogeneous,
characterized by few elements with many interactions and most elements with
only a few. Here we take a few traditionally homogeneous dynamical models and
explore their heterogeneous versions, finding evidence that heterogeneity
extends criticality. Thus, parameter fine-tuning is not necessary to reach a
phase transition and obtain the benefits of (homogeneous) criticality. Simply
adding heterogeneity can extend criticality, making the search/evolution of
complex systems faster and more reliable. Our results add theoretical support
for the ubiquitous presence of heterogeneity in physical, social, and
technological systems, as natural selection can exploit heterogeneity to evolve
complexity "for free". In artificial systems and biological design,
heterogeneity may also be used to extend the parameter range that allows for
criticality.


  We study Maxwell theory, in the presence of charged scalar sources, near the
black hole horizon in a partial wave basis. We derive the gauge field
configuration that solves Maxwell equations in the near-horizon region of a
Schwarzschild black hole when sourced by a charge density of a localised
charged particle. This is the electromagnetic analog of the gravitational
Dray-'t Hooft shockwave near the horizon. We explicitly calculate the S-matrix
associated with this shockwave in the first quantised $1\rightarrow 1$
formalism. We develop a theory for scalar QED near the horizon using which we
compute the electromagnetic eikonal S-matrix from elastic $2\rightarrow 2$
scattering of charged particles exchanging soft photons in the black hole
eikonal limit. The resulting ladder resummation agrees perfectly with the
result from the first quantised formalism, whereas the field-theoretic
formulation allows for a computation of a wider range of amplitudes. As a
demonstration, we explicitly compute sub-leading corrections that arise from
four-vertices.


  We present enumerations of a class of maps on Klein bottle which give rise to
semi-equivelar maps. Semi-equivelar maps are generalizations of equivelar maps.
There are eleven types of semi-equivelar maps on the Klein bottle. These are of
the types $\{3^{6}\}$, $\{4^{4}\}$, $\{6^{3}\}$, $\{3^{3},$ $4^{2}\}$,
$\{3^{2},$ $4,$ $3,$ $4\}$, $\{3,$ $6,$ $3,$ $6\}$, $\{3^{4}, 6\}$, $\{4,$
$8^{2}\}$, $\{3, 12^{2}\}$, $\{4,$ $6,$ $12\}$, $\{3,$ $4,$ $6,$ $4\}$. In this
article, we attempt to classify these maps.


  The LHC runs at 7 and 8 TeV have led to the discovery of the Higgs boson at
125 GeV which will remain as one of the major physics discoveries of our time.
Another very important result was the surprising absence of any signals of new
physics that, if confirmed in the continuation of the LHC experiments, is going
to drastically change our vision of the field. Indeed the theoretical criterium
of naturalness required the presence of new physics at the TeV scale. At
present the indication is that Nature does not too much care about our notion
of naturalness. Still the argument for naturalness is a solid one and one is
facing a puzzling situation. We review the different ideas and proposals that
are being considered in the theory community to cope with the naturalness
problem.


  A rotationally-symmetrical ellipsoidal flow model is proposed for the
relativistic heavy-ion collisions and compared with the 14.6 A GeV/c Si-Al and
10.8 A GeV/c Au-Au collision data. The large stopping in the heavier collision
system and heavier produced particles is accounted for by using the ellipsoidal
flow picture. The central dip in the proton and deuteron rapidity distributions
for Si-Al collision are reproduced.


  Turbulence enhances the wall shear stress in boundary layers, significantly
increasing the drag on streamlined bodies. Other flow features such as
freestream pressure gradients and streamwise boundary layer growth also
strongly influence the skin friction. In this paper, an angular momentum
integral (AMI) equation is introduced to quantify these effects by representing
them as torques that alter the shape of the mean velocity profile. This
approach uniquely isolates the skin friction of a Blasius boundary layer in a
single term that depends only on the Reynolds number, so that other torques are
interpreted as augmentations relative to the laminar case having the same
Reynolds number. The AMI equation for external flows shares this key property
with the so-called FIK relation for internal flows [Fukagata et al. 2002, Phys.
Fluids, \textbf{14}, L73-L76]. Without a geometrically imposed boundary layer
thickness, the length scale in the Reynolds number for the AMI equation may be
chosen freely. After a brief demonstration using Falkner-Skan boundary layers,
the AMI equation is applied as a diagnostic tool on four transitional and
turbulent boundary layer DNS datasets. Regions of negative wall-normal velocity
are shown to play a key role in limiting the peak skin friction during the late
stages of transition, and the relative strengths of terms in the AMI equation
become independent of the transition mechanism a very short distance into the
fully-turbulent regime. The AMI equation establishes an intuitive, extensible
framework for interpreting the impact of turbulence and flow control strategies
on boundary layer skin friction.


  This report provides an overview of recent work that harnesses the Big Data
Revolution and Large Scale Computing to address grand computational challenges
in Multi-Messenger Astrophysics, with a particular emphasis on real-time
discovery campaigns. Acknowledging the transdisciplinary nature of
Multi-Messenger Astrophysics, this document has been prepared by members of the
physics, astronomy, computer science, data science, software and
cyberinfrastructure communities who attended the NSF-, DOE- and NVIDIA-funded
"Deep Learning for Multi-Messenger Astrophysics: Real-time Discovery at Scale"
workshop, hosted at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications,
October 17-19, 2018. Highlights of this report include unanimous agreement that
it is critical to accelerate the development and deployment of novel,
signal-processing algorithms that use the synergy between artificial
intelligence (AI) and high performance computing to maximize the potential for
scientific discovery with Multi-Messenger Astrophysics. We discuss key aspects
to realize this endeavor, namely (i) the design and exploitation of scalable
and computationally efficient AI algorithms for Multi-Messenger Astrophysics;
(ii) cyberinfrastructure requirements to numerically simulate astrophysical
sources, and to process and interpret Multi-Messenger Astrophysics data; (iii)
management of gravitational wave detections and triggers to enable
electromagnetic and astro-particle follow-ups; (iv) a vision to harness future
developments of machine and deep learning and cyberinfrastructure resources to
cope with the scale of discovery in the Big Data Era; (v) and the need to build
a community that brings domain experts together with data scientists on equal
footing to maximize and accelerate discovery in the nascent field of
Multi-Messenger Astrophysics.


  Individual colloidal quantum dots can be optically trapped and manipulated by
a single infrared laser beam operated at low laser powers. If the absorption
spectrum and the emission wavelength of the trapping laser are appropriately
chosen, the trapping laser light can act as a source for two-photon excitation
of the trapped quantum dot. This eliminates the need for an additional
excitation laser in experiments where individual quantum dots are used both as
force transducers and for visualization of the system. To use quantum dots as
handles for quantitative optical force transduction, it is crucial to perform a
precise force calibration. Here, we present an Allan variance analysis of
individual optically trapped quantum dots and show that the optimal measurement
time for experiments involving individual quantum dots is on the order of 0.3
seconds. Due to their small size and strong illumination, quantum dots are
optimal for single molecule assays where, optimally, the presence of the tracer
particle should not dominate the dynamics of the system. As an example, we
investigated the thermal fluctuations of a DNA tether using an individual
colloidal quantum dot as marker, this being the smallest tracer for tethered
particle method reported.


  Magnetic skyrmions can be considered as topologically protected localized
vortex-like spin textures. Due to their stability, their small size, and the
possibility to move them by low electric currents they are promising candidates
for spintronic devices. Without violating topological protection, it is
possible to create skyrmion-antiskyrmion pairs, as long as the total charge
remains unchanged. We derive a skyrmion equation of motion which reveals how
spin-polarized charge currents create skyrmion-antiskyrmion pairs. It allows to
identify general prerequisites for the pair creation process. We corroborate
these general principles by numerical simulations. On a lattice, where
topological protection becomes imperfect, the antiskyrmion partner of the pairs
is annihilated and only the skyrmion survives. This eventually changes the
total skyrmion number and yields a new way of creating and controlling
skyrmions.


  We prove that the conformal group of a closed, simply connected, real
analytic Lorentzian manifold is compact. D'Ambra proved in 1988 that the
isometry group of such a manifold is compact. Our result implies the Lorentzian
Lichnerowicz Conjecture for real analytic Lorentzian manifolds with finite
fundamental group.
  Third version includes corrections and clarifications, particularly in
section 6.


  We show that non-abelian potentials acting on ultracold gases with two
hyperfine levels can give rise to ground states with non-abelian excitations.
We consider a realistic gauge potential for which the Landau levels can be
exactly determined: the non-abelian part of the vector potential makes the
Landau levels non-degenerate. In the presence of strong repulsive interactions,
deformed Laughlin ground states occur in general. However, at the degeneracy
points of the Landau levels, non-abelian quantum Hall states appear: these
ground states, including deformed Moore-Read states (characterized by Ising
anyons as quasi-holes), are studied for both fermionic and bosonic gases.


  The average treatment effect (ATE) is popularly used to assess the treatment
effect. However, the ATE implicitly assumes a homogenous treatment effect even
amongst individuals with different characteristics. In this paper, we mainly
focus on assessing the treatment effect heterogeneity, which has important
implications in designing the optimal individual treatment regimens and in
policy making. The treatment benefit rate (TBR) and treatment harm rate (THR)
have been defined to characterize the magnitude of heterogeneity for binary
outcomes. When the outcomes are continuous, we extend the definitions of the
TBR and THR to compare the difference between potential outcomes with a
pre-specified level c. Unlike the ATE, these rates involve the joint
distribution of the potential outcomes and can not be identified without
further assumptions even in randomized clinical trials. In this article, we
assume the potential outcomes are independent conditional on the observed
covariates and an unmeasured latent variable. Under this assumption, we prove
the identification of the TBR and THR in non-separable (generalized) linear
models for both continuous and binary outcomes. We then propose estimators and
derive their asymptotic distributions. In the simulation studies, we implement
our proposed methods to assess the performance of our estimators and carry out
a sensitive analysis for different underlying distribution for the latent
variable. Finally, we illustrate the proposed methods in two randomized
controlled trials.


  The control of nonlinear processes and possible transitions to chaos in
systems of interacting particles is a fundamental physical problem. We propose
a new nonuniform solid-state plasma system, produced by the optical injection
of current in two-dimensional semiconductor structures, where this control can
be achieved. Due to an injected current, the system symmetry is initially
broken. The subsequent nonequilibrium dynamics is governed by the spatially
varying long-range Coulomb forces and electron-hole collisions. As a result,
inhomogeneities in the charge and velocity distributions should develop
rapidly, and lead to previously unexpected experimental consequences. We
suggest that the system eventually evolves into a behavior similar to chaos.


  Let X be a Gorenstein normal 3-fold satisfying (ELF) with local rings which
are at worst isolated hypersurface (e.g. terminal) singularities. By using the
singular derived category D_{sg}(X) and its idempotent completion, we give
necessary and sufficient categorical conditions for X to be Q-factorial and
complete locally Q-factorial respectively. We then relate this information to
maximal modification algebras(=MMAs), introduced in [IW10], by showing that if
an algebra A is derived equivalent to X as above, then X is Q-factorial if and
only if A is an MMA. Thus all rings derived equivalent to Q-factorial
terminalizations in dimension three are MMAs. As an application, we extend some
of the algebraic results in Burban-Iyama-Keller-Reiten [BIKR] and Dao-Huneke
[DH] using geometric arguments.


  Fact-checking is an essential tool to mitigate the spread of misinformation
and disinformation. We introduce the task of fact-checking in dialogue, which
is a relatively unexplored area. We construct DialFact, a testing benchmark
dataset of 22,245 annotated conversational claims, paired with pieces of
evidence from Wikipedia. There are three sub-tasks in DialFact: 1) Verifiable
claim detection task distinguishes whether a response carries verifiable
factual information; 2) Evidence retrieval task retrieves the most relevant
Wikipedia snippets as evidence; 3) Claim verification task predicts a dialogue
response to be supported, refuted, or not enough information. We found that
existing fact-checking models trained on non-dialogue data like FEVER fail to
perform well on our task, and thus, we propose a simple yet data-efficient
solution to effectively improve fact-checking performance in dialogue. We point
out unique challenges in DialFact such as handling the colloquialisms,
coreferences and retrieval ambiguities in the error analysis to shed light on
future research in this direction.


  In this comment we discuss the application of homotopy perturbation method to
a nonlinear differential mass equation that solves the
Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff equation for an isotropic and spherically symmetric
system. We show that one obtains the same results, more easily and
straightforwardly, by means of a textbook power-series method.


  We identify 85 variable galaxies in the GOODS North and South fields using 5
epochs of HST ACS V-band (F606W) images spanning 6 months. The variables are
identified through significant flux changes in the galaxy's nucleus and
represent ~2% of the survey galaxies. With the aim of studying the active
galaxy population in the GOODS fields, we compare the variability-selected
sample with X-ray and mid-IR AGN candidates. Forty-nine percent of the
variables are associated with X-ray sources identified in the 2Ms Chandra
surveys. Twenty-four percent of X-ray sources likely to be AGN are optical
variables and this percentage increases with decreasing hardness ratio of the
X-ray emission. Stacking of the non-X-ray detected variables reveals marginally
significant soft X-ray emission. Forty-eight percent of mid-IR power-law
sources are optical variables, all but one of which are also X-ray detected.
Thus, about half of the optical variables are associated with either X-ray or
mid-IR power-law emission. The slope of the power-law fit through the Spitzer
IRAC bands indicates that two-thirds of the variables have BLAGN-like SEDs.
Among those galaxies spectroscopically identified as AGN, we observe
variability in 74% of broad-line AGNs and 15% of NLAGNs. The variables are
found in galaxies extending to z~3.6. We compare the variable galaxy colors and
magnitudes to the X-ray and mid-IR sample and find that the non-X-ray detected
variable hosts extend to bluer colors and fainter intrinsic magnitudes. The
variable AGN candidates have Eddington ratios similar to those of X-ray
selected AGN.


  We address the information content of European option prices about volatility
in terms of the Fisher information matrix. We assume that observed option
prices are centred on the theoretical price provided by Heston's model
disturbed by additive Gaussian noise. We fit the likelihood function on the
components of the VIX, i.e., near- and next-term put and call options on the
S&P 500 with more than 23 days and less than 37 days to expiration and
non-vanishing bid, and compute their Fisher information matrices from the
Greeks in the Heston model. We find that option prices allow reliable estimates
of volatility with negligible uncertainty as long as volatility is large
enough. Interestingly, if volatility drops below a critical value, inferences
from option prices become impossible because Vega, the derivative of a European
option w.r.t. volatility, nearly vanishes.


  We identify and analyse obstructions to factorisation of integer matrices
into products $N^T N$ or $N^2$ of matrices with rational or integer entries.
The obstructions arise as quadratic forms with integer coefficients and raise
the question of the discrete range of such forms. They are obtained by
considering matrix decompositions over a superalgebra. We further obtain a
formula for the determinant of a square matrix in terms of adjugates of these
matrix decompositions, as well as identifying a $\it co-Latin$ symmetry space.


  The rapid evolution of programming languages and software systems has
necessitated the implementation of multilingual and scalable clone detection
tools. However, it is difficult to achieve the above requirements at the same
time. Most existing tools only focus on one challenge. In this work, we propose
TGMM, a tree and GPU-based tool for multilingual and multi-granularity code
clone detection. By generating parse trees based on user-provided grammar
files, TGMM can extract code blocks at a specified granularity and detect
Type-3 clones efficiently. In order to show the performance of TGMM, we compare
it with seven state-of-the-art tools in terms of recall, precision, and
execution time. TGMM ranks first in execution time and precision, while its
recall is comparable to the others. Moreover, we analyzed the language
extensibility of TGMM across 30 mainstream programming languages. Out of these,
a total of 25 languages were supported, while the remaining five currently lack
the necessary grammar files. Finally, we analyzed the clone characteristics of
nine popular languages at five common granularities, hoping to inspire future
researchers. The source code of TGMM is available at:
https://github.com/TGMM24/TGMM.git.


  Large uncertainties in the determinations of the equation of state of dense
stellar matter allow the intriguing possibility that the bulk quark matter in
beta equilibrium might be the true ground state of the matter at zero pressure.
And quarks will form Cooper pairs very readily since the dominant interaction
between quarks is attractive in some channels. As a result, quark matter will
generically exhibit color superconductivity, with the favored pairing pattern
at intermediately high densities being two-flavor pairing. In the light of
several possible candidates for such self-bound quark stars, including the very
low-mass central compact object in supernova remnant HESS J1731-347 reported
recently, we carry out one field-theoretic model, the Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model,
of investigation on the stability of beta-stable two-flavor color
superconducting (2SC) phase of quark matter, nevertheless find no
physically-allowed parameter space for the existence of 2SC quark stars.


  At intermediate and high redshifts, measurements of galaxy star-formation
rates are usually based on rest-frame ultraviolet (UV) data. A correction for
dust attenuation, A_UV, is needed for these measurements. This correction is
typically inferred from UV spectral slopes (beta) using an equation known as
"Meurer's Relation." In this paper, we study this relation at a redshift of 1.5
using images and photometric measurements in the rest-frame UV (HST) through
mid-infrared (Spitzer). It is shown that massive star-forming galaxies (above
10^10 Msun) have dust corrections that are dependent on their inclination to
the line-of-sight. Edge-on galaxies have higher A_UV and infrared excess
(IRX=L(IR)/L(UV)) than face-on galaxies at a given beta. Interestingly, dust
corrections for low-mass star-forming galaxies do not depend on inclination.
This is likely because more massive galaxies have more disk-like
shapes/kinematics, while low-mass galaxies are more prolate and have more
disturbed kinematics. To account for an inclination-dependent dust correction,
a modified Meurer's Relation is derived: A_UV=4.43+1.99 beta - 1.73 (b/a-0.67),
where b/a is the galaxy axis ratio. This inclination-dependence of A_UV can be
explained by a two-component model of the dust distribution inside galaxies. In
such a model, the dust attenuation of edge-on galaxies has a higher
contribution from a "mixture" component (dust uniformly mixed with stars in the
diffuse interstellar medium), and a lower contribution from a "birth cloud"
component (near-spherical dust shells surrounding young stars in H II regions)
than that of face-on galaxies. The difference is caused by the larger
path-lengths through disks at higher inclinations.


  We investigate the superfluid properties of two-dimensional driven Bose
liquids, such as polariton condensates, using their long-wavelength description
in terms of a compact Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) equation for the phase
dynamics. We account for topological defects (vortices) in the phase field
through a duality mapping between the compact KPZ equation and a theory of
non-linear electrodynamics coupled to charges. Using the dual theory we derive
renormalization group equations that describe vortex unbinding in these media.
When the non-equilibirum drive is turned off, the KPZ non-linearity {\lambda}
vanishes and the RG flow gives the usual Kosterlitz-Thouless (KT) transition.
On the other hand, with non-linearity {\lambda} > 0 vortices always unbind,
even if the same system with {\lambda} = 0 is superfluid. We predict the finite
size scaling behavior of the superfluid stiffness in the crossover governed by
vortex unbinding showing its clear distinction from the scaling associated with
the KT transition.


  The north ecliptic pole (NEP) field is a natural deep field location for many
satellite observations. It has been targeted manytimes since it was surveyed by
the AKARI space telescope with its unique wavelength coverage from the near- to
mid-infrared(mid-IR). Many follow-up observations have been carried out and
made this field one of the most frequently observed areas witha variety of
facilities, accumulating abundant panchromatic data from X-ray to radio
wavelength range. Recently, a deep opticalsurvey with the Hyper Suprime-Cam
(HSC) at the Subaru telescope covered the NEP-Wide (NEPW) field, which enabled
us toidentify faint sources in the near- and mid-IR bands, and to improve the
photometric redshift (photo-z) estimation. In this work,we present newly
identified AKARI sources by the HSC survey, along with multi-band photometry
for 91,861 AKARI sourcesobserved over the NEPW field. We release a new
band-merged catalogue combining various photometric data from GALEXUV to the
submillimetre (sub-mm) bands (e.g., Herschel/SPIRE, JCMT/SCUBA-2). About 20,000
AKARI sources are newlymatched to the HSC data, most of which seem to be faint
galaxies in the near- to mid-infrared AKARI bands. This cataloguemotivates a
variety of current research, and will be increasingly useful as recently
launched (eROSITA/ART-XC) and futurespace missions (such as JWST, Euclid, and
SPHEREx) plan to take deep observations in the NEP field.


  We perform numerical simulations of a two-dimensional bidisperse granular
packing subjected to both a static confining pressure and a sinusoidal dynamic
forcing applied by a wall on one edge of the packing. We measure the response
experienced by a wall on the opposite edge of the packing and obtain the
resonant frequency of the packing as the static or dynamic pressures are
varied. Under increasing static pressure, the resonant frequency increases,
indicating a velocity increase of elastic waves propagating through the
packing. In contrast, when the dynamic amplitude is increased for fixed static
pressure, the resonant frequency decreases, indicating a decrease in the wave
velocity. This occurs both for compressional and for shear dynamic forcing, and
is in agreement with experimental results. We find that the average contact
number $Z_c$ at the resonant frequency decreases with increasing dynamic
amplitude, indicating that the elastic softening of the packing is associated
with a reduced number of grain-grain contacts through which the elastic waves
can travel. We image the excitations created in the packing and show that there
are localized disturbances or soft spots that become more prevalent with
increasing dynamic amplitude. Our results are in agreement with experiments on
glass bead packings and earth materials such as sandstone and granite, and may
be relevant to the decrease in elastic wave velocities that has been observed
to occur near fault zones after strong earthquakes, in surficial sediments
during strong ground motion, and in structures during earthquake excitation.