  The superconducting materials family of doped Bi2Se3 remains intensively
studied in the field of condensed matter physics due to strong experimental
evidence for topologically non-trivial superconductivity in the bulk. However,
at the surface of these materials, even the observation of superconductivity
itself is still controversial. We use scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) down
to 0.4 K to show that on the surface of bulk superconducting SrxBi2Se3, no gap
in the density of states is observed around the Fermi energy as long as clean
metallic probe tips are used. Nevertheless, using scanning electron microscopy
and energy-dispersive X-ray analysis, we find that micron-sized flakes of
SrxBi2Se3 are easily transferred from the sample onto the STM probe tip and
that such flakes consistently show a superconducting gap in the density of
states. We argue that the superconductivity in SrxBi2Se3 crystals does not
extend to the surface when the topological surface state (TSS) is intact, but
in micro-flakes the TSS has been destroyed due to strain and allows the
superconductivity to extend to the surface. To understand this phenomenon, we
propose that the local electric field, always found in electron doped Bi2Se3 in
the presence of the TSS due to an intrinsic upward band bending, works against
superconductivity at the surface.


  We propose a quantum soft-covering problem for a given general quantum
channel and one of its output states, which consists in finding the minimum
rank of an input state needed to approximate the given channel output. We then
prove a one-shot quantum covering lemma in terms of smooth min-entropies by
leveraging decoupling techniques from quantum Shannon theory. This covering
result is shown to be equivalent to a coding theorem for rate distortion under
a posterior (reverse) channel distortion criterion by two of the present
authors. Both one-shot results directly yield corollaries about the i.i.d.
asymptotics, in terms of the coherent information of the channel.
  The power of our quantum covering lemma is demonstrated by two additional
applications: first, we formulate a quantum channel resolvability problem, and
provide one-shot as well as asymptotic upper and lower bounds. Secondly, we
provide new upper bounds on the unrestricted and simultaneous identification
capacities of quantum channels, in particular separating for the first time the
simultaneous identification capacity from the unrestricted one, proving a
long-standing conjecture of the last author.


  Recent improvements in computing allow for the processing and analysis of
very large datasets in a variety of fields. Often the analysis requires the
creation of low-rank approximations to the datasets leading to efficient
storage. This article presents and analyzes a novel approach for creating
nonnegative, structured dictionaries using NMF applied to reordered pixels of
single, natural images. We reorder the pixels based on patches and present our
approach in general. We investigate our approach when using the Singular Value
Decomposition (SVD) and Nonnegative Matrix Factorizations (NMF) as low-rank
approximations. Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Mean Structural
Similarity Index (MSSIM) are used to evaluate the algorithm. We report that
while the SVD provides the best reconstructions, its dictionary of vectors lose
both the sign structure of the original image and details of localized image
content. In contrast, the dictionaries produced using NMF preserves the sign
structure of the original image matrix and offer a nonnegative, parts-based
dictionary.


  In the current era, known as Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ),
encoding large amounts of data in the quantum devices is challenging and the
impact of noise significantly affects the quality of the obtained results. A
viable approach for the execution of quantum classification algorithms is the
introduction of a well-known machine learning paradigm, namely, the ensemble
methods. Indeed, the ensembles combine multiple internal classifiers, which are
characterized by compact sizes due to the smaller data subsets used for
training, to achieve more accurate and robust prediction performance. In this
way, it is possible to reduce the qubits requirements with respect to a single
larger classifier while achieving comparable or improved performance. In this
work, we present an implementation and an extensive empirical evaluation of
ensembles of quantum classifiers for binary classification, with the purpose of
providing insights into their effectiveness, limitations, and potential for
enhancing the performance of basic quantum models. In particular, three
classical ensemble methods and three quantum classifiers have been taken into
account here. Hence, the scheme that has been implemented (in Python) has a
hybrid nature. The results (obtained on real-world datasets) have shown an
accuracy advantage for the ensemble techniques with respect to the single
quantum classifiers, and also an improvement in robustness. In fact, the
ensembles have turned out to be able to mitigate both unsuitable data
normalizations and repeated measurement inaccuracies, making quantum
classifiers more stable.


  A fireball model with time evolution based on transport calculations is used
to examine the dilepton emission rate of an ultra-relativistic heavy-ion
collision. We assume a transition from hadronic matter to a quark-gluon plasma
at a critical temperature T_C between 130-170 MeV. We include thermal
corrections to the hadronic spectra below T_C and use perturbation theory above
T_C. The sensitivity of the spectra with respect to the freeze-out temperature,
the initial fireball temperature and the critical temperature is investigated.


  We present a novel unity of logic, viz., a single sequent calculus that
embodies classical, intuitionistic and linear logics. Concretely, we define
classical linear logic negative (CLL$^-$), a new logic that is classical and
linear yet discards the polarities and the strict De Morgan laws in classical
linear logic (CLL). Then, we define unlinearisation and classicalisation on
sequent calculi such that unlinearisation maps CLL$^-$ (resp. intuitionistic
linear logic (ILL)) to classical logic (CL) (resp. intuitionistic logic (IL)),
and classicalisation maps IL (resp. ILL) to CL (resp. CLL$^-$) modulo
conservative extensions. By these two maps, only a sequent calculus for a
conservative extension of ILL suffices for ILL, IL, CLL$^-$ and CL. This result
achieves a simple, highly systematic unity of logic by discarding the
polarities and the strict De Morgan laws, which (arguably) only CLL has, and
consisting of the uniform classicalisation and unlinearisation, which commute.
Previous methods do not satisfy these points. Our unity also clarifies the
dichotomies between intuitionisity and classicality, and between linearity and
non-linearity of logic, which are symmetric.


  This paper presents a family of algorithms for fast subset filtering within
ordered sets of integers representing composite keys. Applications include
significant acceleration of (ad-hoc) analytic queries against a data warehouse
without any additional indexing. The algorithms work for point, range and set
restrictions on multiple attributes, in any combination, and are inherently
multidimensional. The main idea consists in intelligent combination of
sequential crawling with jumps over large portions of irrelevant keys. The way
to combine them is adaptive to characteristics of the underlying data store.


  We consider iterated function systems on the real line that consist of
continuous, piecewise linear functions. Under a mild separation condition, we
show that the Hausdorff and box dimensions of the attractor are equal to the
minimum of 1 and the exponent which comes from the most natural system of
covers of the attractor.


  This letter presents a complete framework Meeting-Merging-Mission for
multi-robot exploration under communication restriction. Considering
communication is limited in both bandwidth and range in the real world, we
propose a lightweight environment presentation method and an efficient
cooperative exploration strategy. For lower bandwidth, each robot utilizes
specific polytopes to maintains free space and super frontier information (SFI)
as the source for exploration decision-making. To reduce repeated exploration,
we develop a mission-based protocol that drives robots to share collected
information in stable rendezvous. We also design a complete path planning
scheme for both centralized and decentralized cases. To validate that our
framework is practical and generic, we present an extensive benchmark and
deploy our system into multi-UGV and multi-UAV platforms.


  In a transmit preprocessing aided frequency division duplex (FDD) massive
multi-user (MU) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) scheme assisted
orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) system, it is required to
feed back the frequency domain channel transfer function (FDCHTF) of each
subcarrier at the user equipment (UE) to the base station (BS). The amount of
channel state information (CSI) to be fed back to the BS increases linearly
with the number of antennas and subcarriers, which may become excessive. Hence
we propose a novel CSI feedback compression algorithm based on compressive
sensing (CS) by designing a common dictionary (CD) to reduce the CSI feedback
of existing algorithms. Most of the prior work on CSI feedback compression
considered single-UE systems. Explicitly, we propose a common dictionary
learning (CDL) framework for practical frequency-selective channels and design
a CD suitable for both single-UE and multi-UE systems. A set of two methods is
proposed. Specifically, the first one is the CDL-K singular value decomposition
(KSVD) method, which uses the K-SVD algorithm. The second one is the
CDL-orthogonal Procrustes (OP) method, which relies on solving the orthogonal
Procrustes problem. The CD conceived for exploiting the spatial correlation of
channels across all the subcarriers and UEs compresses the CSI at each UE, and
{upon reception} reconstructs it at the BS. Our simulation results show that
the proposed dictionary's estimated channel vectors have lower normalized
mean-squared error (NMSE) than the traditional fixed Discrete Fourier Transform
(DFT) based dictionary. The CSI feedback is reduced by 50%, and the memory
reduction at both the UE and BS starts from 50% and increases with the number
of subcarriers.


  As experimental particle physics becomes more and more precise, it is
becoming increasingly important for Monte Carlo simulations to improve the
precision of their predictions. In terms of the hard matrix element, this means
calculating to a higher order in perturbation theory. To be consistent this
requires both NNLO QCD corrections and NLO EW corrections to be included. There
are also interference effects between these processes that are not simple to
handle consistently. For a broad description of the behaviour of NLO EW
corrections at high energies, the Sudakov logarithmic approach provides a good
approximation, and is much less computationally expensive than the full
calculation. The implementation of EW Sudakov logarithms within the SHERPA
program are outlined here along with some initial results. As well as this, an
overview of the status of full NLO EW computations with SHERPA is presented.


  Analytics over social graphs allows to extract valuable knowledge and
insights for many fields like community detection, fraud detection, and
interest mining. In practice, decentralized social graphs frequently arise,
where the social graph is not available to a single entity and is decentralized
among a large number of users, each holding only a limited local view about the
whole graph. Collecting the local views for analytics of decentralized social
graphs raises critical privacy concerns, as they encode private information
about the social interactions among individuals. In this paper, we design,
implement, and evaluate PrivGED, a new system aimed at privacy-preserving
analytics over decentralized social graphs. PrivGED focuses on the support for
eigendecomposition, one popular and fundamental graph analytics task producing
eigenvalues/eigenvectors over the adjacency matrix of a social graph and
benefits various practical applications. PrivGED is built from a delicate
synergy of insights on graph analytics, lightweight cryptography, and
differential privacy, allowing users to securely contribute their local views
on a decentralized social graph for a cloud-based eigendecomposition analytics
service while gaining strong privacy protection. Extensive experiments over
real-world social graph datasets demonstrate that PrivGED achieves accuracy
comparable to the plaintext domain, with practically affordable performance
superior to prior art.


  Let $G$ be a simple $n$-vertex graph with degree sequence $d_1,d_2,...,d_n$
and vertex set $\V(G)$. The degree of $v\in\V(G)$ is denoted by $\D(v)$. The
smallest integer $r$ for which $\V(G)$ has an $r$-partition $$ \V(G)=V_1\cup
V_2\cup...\cup V_r,\quad V_i\cap V_j=\emptyset, \quad,i\neq j $$ such that
$\D(v)\leq n-\abs{V_i}$, $\forall v\in V_i$, $i=1,2,...,r$ is denoted by
$\f(G)$. In this note we prove the inequality $$ \f(G)\geq\frac
n{n-\bar{\bar{d}}}, $$ where
$\bar{\bar{d}}=\sqrt{\dfrac{d_1^2+d_2^2+...+d_n^2}n}$.


  In this paper we characterise the indeterminate case by the eigenvalues of
the Hankel matrices being bounded below by a strictly positive constant. An
explicit lower bound is given in terms of the orthonormal polynomials and we
find expresions for this lower bound in a number of indeterminate moment
problems.


  Transferring quantum states efficiently between distant nodes of an
information processing circuit is of paramount importance for scalable quantum
computing. We report on the first observation of a perfect state transfer
protocol on a lattice, thereby demonstrating the general concept of trans-
porting arbitrary quantum information with high fidelity. Coherent transfer
over 19 sites is realized by utilizing judiciously designed optical structures
consisting of evanescently coupled waveguide ele- ments. We provide unequivocal
evidence that such an approach is applicable in the quantum regime, for both
bosons and fermions, as well as in the classical limit. Our results illustrate
the potential of the perfect state transfer protocol as a promising route
towards integrated quantum computing on a chip.


  We consider gauge-mediated models of supersymmetry (SUSY) breaking with
strongly coupled nonabelian messenger gauge theory. After integrating out the
SUSY-breaking and messenger sectors, we directly see that the effective Kahler
potential transmits the SUSY breaking to the standard model sector.


  We report on measurements of the sound velocity and attenuation in a single
crystal of the candidate quantum- spin-ice material Yb$_2$Ti$_2$O$_7$ as a
function of temperature and magnetic field. The acoustic modes couple to the
spins magneto-elastically and, hence, carry information about the spin
correlations that sheds light on the intricate magnetic phase diagram of
Yb$_2$Ti$_2$O$_7$ and the nature of spin dynamics in the material.
Particularly, we find a pronounced thermal hysteresis in the acoustic data with
a concomitant peak in the specific heat indicating a possible first-order phase
transition at about $0.17$ K. At low temperatures, the acoustic response to
magnetic field saturates hinting at the development of magnetic order.
Furthermore, mean-field calculations suggest that Yb$_2$Ti$_2$O$_7$ undergoes a
first-order phase transition from a cooperative paramagnetic phase to a
ferromagnet below $T\approx 0.17$ K.


  Multiple harmonic-like numbers are studied using the generating function
approach. A closed form is stated for binomial sums involving these numbers and
two additional parameters. Several corollaries and examples are presented which
are immediate consequences of the main result. Finally, combinatorial
identities involving harmonic-like numbers and other prominent sequences like
hyperharmonic numbers and odd harmonic numbers are offered.


  Distributed learning is commonly used for accelerating model training by
harnessing the computational capabilities of multiple-edge devices. However, in
practical applications, the communication delay emerges as a bottleneck due to
the substantial information exchange required between workers and a central
parameter server. SignSGD with majority voting (signSGD-MV) is an effective
distributed learning algorithm that can significantly reduce communication
costs by one-bit quantization. However, due to heterogeneous computational
capabilities, it fails to converge when the mini-batch sizes differ among
workers. To overcome this, we propose a novel signSGD optimizer with
\textit{federated voting} (signSGD-FV). The idea of federated voting is to
exploit learnable weights to perform weighted majority voting. The server
learns the weights assigned to the edge devices in an online fashion based on
their computational capabilities. Subsequently, these weights are employed to
decode the signs of the aggregated local gradients in such a way to minimize
the sign decoding error probability. We provide a unified convergence rate
analysis framework applicable to scenarios where the estimated weights are
known to the parameter server either perfectly or imperfectly. We demonstrate
that the proposed signSGD-FV algorithm has a theoretical convergence guarantee
even when edge devices use heterogeneous mini-batch sizes. Experimental results
show that signSGD-FV outperforms signSGD-MV, exhibiting a faster convergence
rate, especially in heterogeneous mini-batch sizes.


  We study the extension of holomorphic functions of bounded type defined on an
open subset of a Banach space, to larger domains. For this, we first
characterize the envelope of holomorphy of a Riemann domain over a Banach
space, with respect to the algebra of bounded type holomorphic functions, in
terms of the spectrum of the algebra. We then give a simple description of the
envelopes of balanced open sets and relate the concepts of domain of holomorphy
and polynomial convexity. We show that for bounded balanced sets, extensions to
the envelope are always of bounded type, and that this does not necessarily
hold for unbounded sets, answering a question posed by Hirschowitz in 1972. We
also consider extensions to open subsets of the bidual, present some
Banach-Stone type results and show some properties of the spectrum when the
domain is the unit ball of $\ell_p$.


  Let $G$ be a finite group and $A$ be a regular local ring on which $G$ acts.
Under certain assumptions on $A$ and the action, Serre defined a function
$a_G\colon G\rightarrow\mathbb{Z}$ which can be viewed as a higher dimensional
analogue of Artin character, and conjectured that it is associated to a
$\mathbb{Q}_\ell$-rational representation of $G$ for any prime $\ell$
invertible in $A$. We prove this conjecture in the equal characteristic case.


  We revisit the exact shortest unique substring (SUS) finding problem, and
propose its approximate version where mismatches are allowed, due to its
applications in subfields such as computational biology. We design a generic
in-place framework that fits to solve both the exact and approximate
$k$-mismatch SUS finding, using the minimum $2n$ memory words plus $n$ bytes
space, where $n$ is the input string size. By using the in-place framework, we
can find the exact and approximate $k$-mismatch SUS for every string position
using a total of $O(n)$ and $O(n^2)$ time, respectively, regardless of the
value of $k$. Our framework does not involve any compressed or succinct data
structures and thus is practical and easy to implement.


  We prove that in various natural models of a random quotient of a group,
depending on a density parameter, for each hyperbolic group there is some
critical density under which a random quotient is still hyperbolic with high
probability, whereas above this critical value a random quotient is very
probably trivial. We give explicit characterizations of these critical
densities for the various models.


  We compare the recently formulated multifractional spacetimes with field
theories of quantum gravity based on the renormalization group (RG), such as
asymptotic safety and Ho\v{r}ava--Lifshitz gravity. The change of spacetime
dimensionality with the probed scale is realized in both cases by an adaptation
of the measurement tools ("rods") to the scale, but in different ways. In the
multifractional case, by an adaptation of the position-space measure, which can
be encoded into an explicit scale dependence of effective coordinates. In the
case of RG-based theories, by an adaptation of the momenta. The two pictures
are mapped into each other, thus presenting the fractal structure of spacetime
in RG-based theories under an alternative perspective.


  We reconstruct boundary superstring field theory via boundary states. After a
minor modification of the fermionic two-form, all the equations needed for
Batalin-Vilkovisky formulation are simply represented by closed string
oscillators and the proof of gauge invariance is drastically simplified. The
general form of the action of boundary superstring field theory is also
obtained without any assumption and found to take exactly the same form as the
bosonic one. As a special case of this action, we revisit the conjecture that
the action is simply given by the disk partition function when matter and
ghosts are completely decoupled.


  The effect of adding 2 at.% W to a model Ni-Al-Cr superalloy on the
morphological evolution, spatial correlations and temporal evolution of
g'(L12)-precipitates at 1073 K is studied with scanning electron microscopy and
atomic force microscopy. Adding W yields a larger microhardness, earlier onset
of spheroidal-to-cuboidal precipitate morphological transition, larger volume
fraction (from ~20 to 30%), reduction in coarsening kinetics by one third and a
larger number density (Nv) of smaller mean radii (<R>) precipitates. The
kinetics of <R> and interfacial area per unit volume obey t1/3 and t-1/3
relationships, respectively, which is consistent with coarsening driven by
interfacial energy reduction. The Nv power law dependencies deviate, however,
from model predictions indicating that a stationary-state is not achieved.
Quantitative analyses with precipitate size distributions, pair correlation
functions, and edge-to-edge interprecipitate distance distributions gives
insight into 2D microstructural evolution, including the elastically driven
transition from a uniform g'-distribution to one-dimensional <001>-strings to
eventually clustered packs of g'-precipitates in the less densely packed
Ni-Al-Cr alloy.


  Gunby-He-Narayanan showed that the logarithmic gap predictions of Kahn-Kalai
and Talagrand (proved by Park-Pham and Frankston-Kahn-Narayanan-Park) about
thresholds of up-sets do not apply to down-sets. In particular, for the
down-set of triangle-free graphs, they showed that there is a polynomial gap
between the threshold and the factional expectation threshold. In this short
note we give a simpler proof of this result, and extend the polynomial
threshold gap to down-sets of F-free graphs.


  Let f be an obstructed Thurston map with canonical obstruction \Gamma_f. We
prove the following generalization of Pilgrim's conjecture: if the first-return
map F of a periodic component C of the topological surface obtained from the
sphere by pinching the curves of \Gamma_f is a Thurston map then the canonical
obstruction of F is empty. Using this result, we give a complete topological
characterization of canonical Thurston obstructions.


  We study the minimal surfaces between two of the multiple boundaries of 3d
maximally extended rotating eternal black hole. Via AdS/CFT, this corresponds
to investigating the behavior of entanglements of the boundary CFT with
multiple sectors. Non-trivial time evolutions of such entanglements detect the
geometry inside the horizon, and behave differently depending on the choice of
the two boundaries.


  Vision language models (VLMs) are an exciting emerging class of language
models (LMs) that have merged classic LM capabilities with those of image
processing systems. However, the ways that these capabilities combine are not
always intuitive and warrant direct investigation. One understudied capability
in VLMs is visual spatial planning -- the ability to comprehend the spatial
arrangements of objects and devise action plans to achieve desired outcomes in
visual scenes. In our study, we introduce VSP, a benchmark that 1) evaluates
the spatial planning capability in these models in general, and 2) breaks down
the visual planning task into finer-grained sub-tasks, including perception and
reasoning, and measure the LMs capabilities in these sub-tasks. Our evaluation
shows that both open-source and private VLMs fail to generate effective plans
for even simple spatial planning tasks. Evaluations on the fine-grained
analytical tasks further reveal fundamental deficiencies in the models' visual
perception and bottlenecks in reasoning abilities, explaining their worse
performance in the general spatial planning tasks. Our work illuminates future
directions for improving VLMs' abilities in spatial planning. Our benchmark is
publicly available at
https://github.com/UCSB-NLP-Chang/Visual-Spatial-Planning.


  In current practice, many image processing tasks are done sequentially (e.g.
denoising, dehazing, followed by semantic segmentation). In this paper, we
propose a novel multi-task neural network architecture designed for combining
sequential image processing tasks. We extend U-Net by additional decoding
pathways for each individual task, and explore deep cascading of outputs and
connectivity from one pathway to another. We demonstrate effectiveness of the
proposed approach on denoising and semantic segmentation, as well as on
progressive coarse-to-fine semantic segmentation, and achieve better
performance than multiple individual or jointly-trained networks, with lower
number of trainable parameters.


  We consider the theory of $N$ free Dirac fermions with a uniformly winding
mass, $m e^{iqx}$, in two spacetime dimensions. This theory (which describes
for instance a superconducting current in an $N$-channel wire) has been
proposed to have a higher-spin gravity with scalar matter as the large-$N$
dual. To order $m^2$, however, thermodynamic quantities in it can be computed
using standard general relativity instead. Here, we consider the question if
the same is true for the entanglement entropy (EE). By comparing results
obtained on two sides of the duality, we find that general relativity indeed
accounts correctly for the EE of an interval to order $m^2$ (and all orders in
$q$).


  In "Li, L. and Yin, X. (2008). Sliced Inverse Regression with
Regularizations. Biometrics, 64(1):124--131" a ridge SIR estimator is
introduced as the solution of a minimization problem and computed thanks to an
alternating least-squares algorithm. This methodology reveals good performance
in practice. In this note, we focus on the theoretical properties of the
estimator. Is it shown that the minimization problem is degenerated in the
sense that only two situations can occur: Either the ridge SIR estimator does
not exist or it is zero.


  Generating novel views from a single image remains a challenging task due to
the complexity of 3D scenes and the limited diversity in the existing
multi-view datasets to train a model on. Recent research combining large-scale
text-to-image (T2I) models with monocular depth estimation (MDE) has shown
promise in handling in-the-wild images. In these methods, an input view is
geometrically warped to novel views with estimated depth maps, then the warped
image is inpainted by T2I models. However, they struggle with noisy depth maps
and loss of semantic details when warping an input view to novel viewpoints. In
this paper, we propose a novel approach for single-shot novel view synthesis, a
semantic-preserving generative warping framework that enables T2I generative
models to learn where to warp and where to generate, through augmenting
cross-view attention with self-attention. Our approach addresses the
limitations of existing methods by conditioning the generative model on source
view images and incorporating geometric warping signals. Qualitative and
quantitative evaluations demonstrate that our model outperforms existing
methods in both in-domain and out-of-domain scenarios. Project page is
available at https://GenWarp-NVS.github.io/.


  We take as a starting point the Gelmini -- Roncadelli model enlarged by a
term with explicit lepton number violation in the Higgs potential and add a
neutrino singlet field coupled via a scalar doublet to the usual leptons. This
scenario allows us to take into account all three present indications in favour
of neutrino oscillations provided by the solar, atmospheric and LSND neutrino
oscillation experiments. Furthermore, it suggests a model which reproduces
naturally one of the two 4-neutrino mass spectra favoured by the data. In this
model the solar neutrino problem is solved by large mixing MSW \nu_e\to\nu_\tau
transitions and the atmospheric neutrino problem by transitions of \nu_\mu into
a sterile neutrino.


  A recursion technique of obtaining the asymptotical expansions for the
bound-state energy eigenvalues of the radial Schr\"odinger equation with a
position-dependent mass is presented. As an example of the application we
calculate the energy eigenvalues for the Coulomb potential in the presence of
position-dependent mass and we derive the inequalities regulating the shifts of
the energy levels from their constant-mass positions.


  The Eisenstein-Picard modular surface $M$ is the quotient space of the
complex hyperbolic plane by the modular group $\rm PU(2,1;
\mathbb{Z}[\omega])$. We determine the global topology of $M$ as a 4-orbifold.


  Learning algorithms for natural language processing (NLP) tasks traditionally
rely on manually defined relevant contextual features. On the other hand,
neural network models using an only distributional representation of words have
been successfully applied for several NLP tasks. Such models learn features
automatically and avoid explicit feature engineering. Across several domains,
neural models become a natural choice specifically when limited characteristics
of data are known. However, this flexibility comes at the cost of
interpretability. In this paper, we define three different methods to
investigate ability of bi-directional recurrent neural networks (RNNs) in
capturing contextual features. In particular, we analyze RNNs for sequence
tagging tasks. We perform a comprehensive analysis on general as well as
biomedical domain datasets. Our experiments focus on important contextual words
as features, which can easily be extended to analyze various other feature
types. We also investigate positional effects of context words and show how the
developed methods can be used for error analysis.


  It is postulated that quantum gravity is a sum over causal structures coupled
to matter via scale evolution. Quantized causal structures can be described by
studying simple matrix models where matrices are replaced by an algebra of
quantum mechanical observables. In particular, previous studies constructed
quantum gravity models by quantizing the moduli of Laplace, weight and
defining-function operators on Fefferman-Graham ambient spaces. The algebra of
these operators underlies conformal geometries. We extend those results to
include fermions by taking an osp(1|2) "Dirac square root" of these algebras.
The theory is a simple, Grassmann, two-matrix model. Its quantum action is a
Chern-Simons theory whose differential is a first-quantized, quantum mechanical
BRST operator. The theory is a basic ingredient for building fundamental
theories of physical observables.


  In this paper we study virtual rational Betti numbers of a
nilpotent-by-abelian group $G$, where the abelianization $N/N'$ of its
nilpotent part $N$ satisfies certain tameness property. More precisely, we
prove that if $N/N'$ is $2(c(n-1)-1)$-tame as a $G/N$-module, $c$ the
nilpotency class of $N$, then
$\mathrm{vb}_j(G):=\sup_{M\in\mathcal{A}_G}\dim_\mathbb{Q} H_j(M,\mathbb{Q})$
is finite for all $0\leq j\leq n$, where $\mathcal{A}_G$ is the set of all
finite index subgroups of $G$.


  For a fixed integer $k\ge 3$ and fixed $1/2 < \sigma > 1$ we consider $$
\int_1^T |\zeta(\sigma + it)|^{2k}dt = \sum_{n=1}^\infty d_k^2(n)n^{-2\sigma}T
+ R(k,\sigma;T), $$ where $R(k,\sigma;T) = o(T) (T\to\infty)$ is the error term
in the above asymptotic formula. Hitherto the sharpest bounds for
$R(k,\sigma;T)$ are given for certain ranges of $\sigma$. We also obtain new
mean value results for the zeta-functions of holomorphic cusp forms and the
Rankin-Selberg series.


  The evolution towards Industry 4.0 is driving the need for innovative
solutions in the area of network management, considering the complex, dynamic
and heterogeneous nature of ICT supply chains. To this end, Intent-Based
networking (IBN) which is already proven to evolve how network management is
driven today, can be implemented as a solution to facilitate the management of
large ICT supply chains. In this paper, we first present a comparison of the
main architectural components of typical IBN systems and, then, we study the
key engineering requirements when integrating IBN with ICT supply chain network
systems while considering AI methods. We also propose a general architecture
design that enables intent translation of ICT supply chain specifications into
lower level policies, to finally show an example of how the access control is
performed in a modeled ICT supply chain system.


  A multivariate errors-in-variables (EIV) model with an intercept term, and a
polynomial EIV model are considered. Focus is made on a structural
homoskedastic case, where vectors of covariates are i.i.d. and measurement
errors are i.i.d. as well. The covariates contaminated with errors are normally
distributed and the corresponding classical errors are also assumed normal. In
both models, it is shown that (inconsistent) ordinary least squares estimators
of regression parameters yield an a.s. approximation to the best prediction of
response given the values of observable covariates. Thus, not only in the
linear EIV, but in the polynomial EIV models as well, consistent estimators of
regression parameters are useless in the prediction problem, provided the size
and covariance structure of observation errors for the predicted subject do not
differ from those in the data used for the model fitting.


  We study synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging and motion estimation of
complex scenes consisting of stationary and moving targets. We use the classic
SAR setup with a single antenna emitting signals and receiving the echoes from
the scene. The known motion estimation methods for such setups work only in
simple cases, with one or a few targets in the same motion. We propose to
extend the applicability of these methods to complex scenes, by complementing
them with a data pre-processing step intended to separate the echoes from the
stationary targets and the moving ones. We present two approaches. The first is
an iteration designed to subtract the echoes from the stationary targets one by
one. It estimates the location of each stationary target from a preliminary
image, and then uses it to define a filter that removes its echo from the data.
The second approach is based on the robust principle component analysis (PCA)
method. The key observation is that with appropriate pre-processing and
windowing, the discrete samples of the stationary target echoes form a low rank
matrix, whereas the samples of a few moving target echoes form a high rank
sparse matrix. The robust PCA method is designed to separate the low rank from
the sparse part, and thus can be used for the SAR data separation. We present a
brief analysis of the two methods and explain how they can be combined to
improve the data separation for extended and complex imaging scenes. We also
assess the performance of the methods with extensive numerical simulations.


  We study the quantitative stability of the solutions to Markovian quadratic
reflected BSDEs with bounded terminal data. By virtue of BMO martingale and
change of measure techniques, we obtain stability estimates for the variation
of the solutions with different underlying forward processes. In addition, we
propose a truncated discrete-time numerical scheme for quadratic reflected
BSDEs, and obtain the explicit rate of convergence by applying the quantitative
stability result.


  We study spin- and mass-imbalanced mixtures of spin-$\tfrac{1}{2}$ fermions
interacting via an attractive contact potential in one spatial dimension.
Specifically, we address the influence of unequal particle masses on the pair
formation by means of the complex Langevin method. By computing the
pair-correlation function and the associated pair-momentum distribution we find
that inhomogeneous pairing is present for all studied spin polarizations and
mass imbalances. To further characterize the pairing behavior, we analyze the
density-density correlations in momentum space, the so-called shot noise, which
is experimentally accessible through time-of-flight imaging. At finite spin
polarization, the latter is known to show distinct maxima at momentum
configurations associated with the Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov (FFLO)
instability. Besides those maxima, we find that additional features emerge in
the noise correlations when mass imbalance is increased, revealing the
stability of FFLO-type correlations against mass imbalance and furnishing an
experimentally accessible signature to probe this type of pairing.


  We propose a new strategy for narrow band, active array imaging of localized
scat- terers when only the intensities are recorded and measured at the array.
We consider a homogeneous medium so that wave propagation is fully coherent. We
show that imaging with intensity-only measurements can be carried out using the
time reversal operator of the imaging system, which can be obtained from
intensity measurements using an appropriate illumination strategy and the
polarization identity. Once the time reversal operator has been obtained, we
show that the images can be formed using its singular value decomposition
(SVD). We use two SVD-based methods to image the scatterers. The proposed
approach is simple and efficient. It does not need prior information about the
sought image, and guarantees exact recovery in the noise-free case.
Furthermore, it is robust with respect to additive noise. Detailed numerical
simulations illustrate the performance of the proposed imaging strategy when
only the intensities are captured.


  We explore charged-Higgs CP-violating effects in an intriguing two-Higgs
doublet model which accords special status to the top quark. In this model the
heaviness of the top quark originates naturally from the much larger VEV of the
second Higgs doublet compared to that of the first. The phenomenology of this
model is quite distinct from that of the usual formulations of the two-Higgs
doublet model. In particular, the model can easily account for the observed CP
violation in the kaon sector even if the CKM matrix is real. The associated
non-standard CP phase can be monitored through measurements of the
time-dependent CP asymmetry in B to psi K_S in experiments at the upcoming
B-factories.


  We measure higher partial wave Feshbach resonances in an ultracold mixture of
fermionic $^6$Li and bosonic $^{133}$Cs by magnetic field dependent atom-loss
spectroscopy. For the $p$-wave Feshbach resonances we observe triplet
structures corresponding to different projections of the pair rotation angular
momentum onto the external magnetic field axis.
  We attribute the splittings to the spin-spin and spin-rotation couplings by
modelling the observation using a full coupled-channel calculation. Comparison
with an oversimplified model, estimating the spin-rotation coupling by
describing the weakly bound close-channel molecular state with the perturbative
multipole expansion, reveals the significant contribution of the molecular
wavefunction at short internuclear distances. Our findings highlight the
potential of Feshbach resonances in providing precise information on short- and
intermediate-range molecular couplings and wavefunctions. The observed $d$-wave
Feshbach resonances allow us to refine the LiCs singlet and triplet
ground-state molecular potential curves at large internuclear separations.


  We give a geometric proof that one may compute a particular generalized
Mahler integral using equidistribution of preperiodic points of a dynamical
system on the sphere. The dynamical system is associated to the multiplication
by 2 map on an elliptic curve over a number field K with Weierstrass equation
y^2 = P(x) (a Lattes dynamical system).


  Hall conductance $\sigma_{xy}$ as the Chern numbers of the Berry connection
in the magnetic Brillouin zone is calculated for a realistic multi band
tight-band model of graphene with non-orthogonal basis. It is confirmed that
the envelope of $\sigma_{xy}$ coincides with a semi-classical result when
magnetic field is sufficiently small.
  The Hall resistivity $\rho_{xy}$ from the weak-field Boltzmann theory also
explains the overall behaviour of the $\sigma_{xy}$ if the Fermi surface is
composed of a single energy band. The plateaux of $\sigma_{xy}$ are explained
from semi-classical quantization and necessary modification is proposed for the
Dirac fermion regimes.


  This paper is devoted to the homogenization of the heat conduction equation,
with a homogeneous Dirichlet boundary condition, having a periodically
oscillating thermal conductivity and a vanishing volumetric heat capacity. A
homogenization result is established by using the evolution settings of
multiscale and very weak multiscale convergence. In particular, we investigate
how the relation between the volumetric heat capacity and the microscopic
structure effects the homogenized problem and its associated local problem. It
turns out that the properties of the microscopic geometry of the problem give
rise to certain special effects in the homogenization result.


  This paper investigates limiting spectral distribution of a high-dimensional
Kendall's rank correlation matrix. The underlying population is allowed to have
general dependence structure. The result no longer follows the generalized
Mar\u{c}enko-Pastur law, which is brand new. It's the first result on rank
correlation matrices with dependence. As applications, we study the Kendall's
rank correlation matrix for multivariate normal distributions with a general
covariance matrix. From these results, we further gain insights on Kendall's
rank correlation matrix and its connections with the sample
covariance/correlation matrix.


  We consider Bayesian optimization in settings where observations can be
adversarially biased, for example by an uncontrolled hidden confounder. Our
first contribution is a reduction of the confounded setting to the dueling
bandit model. Then we propose a novel approach for dueling bandits based on
information-directed sampling (IDS). Thereby, we obtain the first efficient
kernelized algorithm for dueling bandits that comes with cumulative regret
guarantees. Our analysis further generalizes a previously proposed
semi-parametric linear bandit model to non-linear reward functions, and
uncovers interesting links to doubly-robust estimation.


  This paper investigates the coordinated trajectory tracking problem of
multiple vertical takeooff and landing (VTOL) unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).
The case of unidirectional information flow is considered and the objective is
to drive all the follower VTOL UAVs to accurately track the trajectory of the
leader. Firstly, a novel distributed estimator is developed for each VTOL UAV
to obtain the leader's desired information asymptotically. With the outputs of
the estimators, the solution to the coordinated trajectory tracking problem of
multiple VTOL UAVs is transformed to individually solving the tracking problem
of each VTOL UAV. Due to the under-actuated nature of the VTOL UAV, a
hierarchical framework is introduced for each VTOL UAV such that a command
force and an applied torque are exploited in sequence, then the position
tracking to the estimated desired position and the attitude tracking to the
command attitude are achieved. Moreover, an auxiliary system with proper
parameters is implemented to guarantee the singularity-free command attitude
extraction and to obviate the use of the unavailable desired information. The
stability analysis and simulations effectively validate the achievement of the
coordinated trajectory tracking of multiple VTOL UAVs with the proposed control
approach.


  In this note we present some of the most basic aspects of the fractional
Laplacean with a self-contained and purely didactic intent, and with a somewhat
different slant from the several excellent existing references. Given the
interest that nonlocal operators have generated since the 2007 extension paper
of Caffarelli and Silvestre, we feel it is appropriate offering to young
researchers a quick additional guide to the subject which, we hope, will nicely
complement the existing ones.


  We propose a model based on extreme value statistics (EVS) and combine it
with different models for single asperity contact, including adhesive and
elasto-plastic contacts, to derive a relation between the applied load and the
friction force on a rough interface. We find that when the summit distribution
is Gumbel, and the contact model is Hertzian we have the closest conformity
with Amontons law. The range over which Gumbel distribution mimics Amontons law
is wider than the Greenwood-Williamson Model. However exact conformity with
Amonton's law does not seem for any of the well-known EVS distributions. On the
other hand plastic deformations in contact area reduce the relative change of
pressure slightly with Gumbel distribution. Elastic-plastic contact mixes with
Gumbel distribution for summits. it shows the best conformity with Amonton`s
law. Other extreme value statistics are also studied, and results presented. We
combine Gumbel distribution with GW-Mc Cool model which is an improved case of
GW model, it takes into account a bandwidth for wavelengths of {\alpha}.
Comparison of this model with original GW-Mc Cool model and other simplified
versions of BGT reveals that Gumbel distribution has a better conformity with
Amonton`s law for all values of {\alpha}. When adhesive contact model is used,
the main observation is that for zero or even negative applied load, there is
some friction. Asperities with height even less than the separation of two
surfaces are in contact. For a small value of adhesion parameter, a better
conformity with Amontons law is observed. Relative pressure increases for
stronger adhesion which means that adhesion controlled friction dominated by
load controlled friction. We also observe that adhesion increases on a surface
with a lower value of roughness.


  This paper is about creating digital musical instruments where a predictive
neural network model is integrated into the interactive system. Rather than
predicting symbolic music (e.g., MIDI notes), we suggest that predicting future
control data from the user and precise temporal information can lead to new and
interesting interactive possibilities. We propose that a mixture density
recurrent neural network (MDRNN) is an appropriate model for this task. The
predictions can be used to fill-in control data when the user stops performing,
or as a kind of filter on the user's own input. We present an interactive MDRNN
prediction server that allows rapid prototyping of new NIMEs featuring
predictive musical interaction by recording datasets, training MDRNN models,
and experimenting with interaction modes. We illustrate our system with several
example NIMEs applying this idea. Our evaluation shows that real-time
predictive interaction is viable even on single-board computers and that small
models are appropriate for small datasets.


  Balogh, Liu, Sharifzadeh and Treglown [Journal of the European Mathematical
Society, 2018] recently gave a sharp count on the number of maximal sum-free
subsets of $\{1, \dots, n\}$, thereby answering a question of Cameron and
Erd\H{o}s. In contrast, not as much is know about the analogous problem for
finite abelian groups. In this paper we give the first sharp results in this
direction, determining asymptotically the number of maximal sum-free sets in
both the binary and ternary spaces $\mathbb Z^k_2$ and $\mathbb Z^k_3$. We also
make progress on a conjecture of Balogh, Liu, Sharifzadeh and Treglown
concerning a general lower bound on the number of maximal sum-free sets in
abelian groups of a fixed order. Indeed, we verify the conjecture for all
finite abelian groups with a cyclic component of size at least 3084. Other
related results and open problems are also presented.


  Quantum networks will be able to service consumers with long-distance
entanglement by use of quantum repeaters that generate Bell pairs (or links)
with their neighbors, iid with probability $p$ and perform Bell State
Measurements (BSMs) on the links that succeed iid with probability $q$. While
global link state knowledge is required to maximize the rate of entanglement
generation between any two consumers, it increases the protocol latency due to
the classical communication requirements and requires long quantum memory
coherence times. We propose two entanglement routing protocols that require
only local link state knowledge to relax the quantum memory coherence time
requirements and reduce the protocol latency. These protocols utilize
multi-path routing protocol and time multiplexed repeaters. The time
multiplexed repeaters first generate links for $k$-time steps before performing
BSMs on any pairs of links. Our two protocols differ in the decision rule used
for performing BSMs at the repeater: the first being a static path based
routing protocol and second a dynamic distance based routing protocol. The
performance of these protocols depends on the quantum network topology and the
consumers' location. We observe that the average entanglement rate and the
latency increase with the time multiplexing block length, $k$, irrespective of
the protocol. When a step function memory decoherence model is introduced such
that qubits are held in the quantum memory for an exponentially distributed
time with mean $\mu$, an optimal $k$ ($k_\text{opt}$) value appears, such that
for increasing $k$ beyond $k_{\rm opt}$ hurts the entanglement rate. $k_{\rm
opt}$ decreases with $p$ and increases with $\mu$. $k_{\rm opt}$ appears due to
the tradeoff between benefits from time multiplexing and the increased
likelihood of previously established Bell pairs decohering due to finite memory
coherence times.


  Optical flow estimation remains challenging due to untextured areas, motion
boundaries, occlusions, and more. Thus, the estimated flow is not equally
reliable across the image. To that end, post-hoc confidence measures have been
introduced to assess the per-pixel reliability of the flow. We overcome the
artificial separation of optical flow and confidence estimation by introducing
a method that jointly predicts optical flow and its underlying uncertainty.
Starting from common energy-based formulations, we rely on the corresponding
posterior distribution of the flow given the images. We derive a variational
inference scheme based on mean field, which incorporates best practices from
energy minimization. An uncertainty measure is obtained along the flow at every
pixel as the (marginal) entropy of the variational distribution. We demonstrate
the flexibility of our probabilistic approach by applying it to two different
energies and on two benchmarks. We not only obtain flow results that are
competitive with the underlying energy minimization approach, but also a
reliable uncertainty measure that significantly outperforms existing post-hoc
approaches.


  Given the implications for the origin of Li enhancement in red giants we have
reviewed Li-rich classification of KIC~9821622, the only bonafide RGB giant
with He inert-core till date, reported as a Li-rich giant by reanalyzing the
high-resolution spectra. We have obtained $A(Li)_{LTE} = 1.42 \pm 0.05$ dex.
After correcting for non-LTE it is $A(Li)_{NLTE} = 1.57 \pm 0.05 $ dex which is
significantly less than the reported A(Li) = $1.80 \pm 0.2$~dex. We found the
sub-ordinate line at 6103 \AA\ is too weak or absent to measure Li abundance.
The derived abundance is normal for red giants undergoing dilution during the
1st dredge-up. Since all the known Kepler field Li-rich giants belong to the
red clump region, this clarification removes the anomaly and strengthens the
evidence that the Li enhancement in low mass giants may be associated only with
the He-core burning phase. The Li excess origin, probably, lies during He-flash
at the RGB tip, an immediate preceding phase to red clump.


  The rational choice theory is based on this idea that people rationally
pursue goals for increasing their personal interests. In most conditions, the
behavior of an actor is not independent of the person and others' behavior.
Here, we present a new concept of rational choice as a hyper-rational choice
which in this concept, the actor thinks about profit or loss of other actors in
addition to his personal profit or loss and then will choose an action which is
desirable to him. We implement the hyper-rational choice to generalize and
expand the game theory. Results of this study will help to model the behavior
of people considering environmental conditions, the kind of behavior
interactive, valuation system of itself and others and system of beliefs and
internal values of societies. Hyper-rationality helps us understand how human
decision makers behave in interactive decisions.


  Newtonian spherically symmetric transonic accretion has been studied by
including the mass of the accreting matter, while considering the growth of the
accretor itself to be negligibly small. A novel iterative method has been
introduced to accomplish that task. It has been demonstrated that the inclusion
of the mass of the fluid changes the critical properties of the flow as well as
the topological phase portraits of the stationary integral solution.


  We show that counts of squarefree integers up to $X$ in short intervals of
size $H$ tend to a Gaussian distribution as long as $H\rightarrow\infty$ and $H
= X^{o(1)}$. This answers a question posed by R.R. Hall in 1989. More generally
we prove a variant of Donsker's theorem, showing that these counts scale to a
fractional Brownian motion with Hurst parameter $1/4$. In fact we are able to
prove these results hold in general for collections of $B$-free integers as
long as the sieving set $B$ satisfies a very mild regularity property, for
Hurst parameter varying with the set $B$.


  This article deals with inductive systems of Toeplitz algebras over arbitrary
directed sets. For such a system the family of its connecting injective
$*$-homomorphisms is defined by a set of natural numbers satisfying a
factorization property. The motivation for the study of those inductive systems
comes from our previous work on the inductive sequences of Toeplitz algebras
defined by sequences of numbers and the limit automorphisms for the inductive
limits of such sequences. We show that there exists an isomorphism in the
category of unital $C^*$-algebras and unital $*$-homomorphisms between the
inductive limit of an inductive system of Toeplitz algebras over a directed set
defined by a set of natural numbers and a reduced semigroup $C^*$-algebra for a
semigroup in the group of all rational numbers. The inductive systems of
Toeplitz algebras over arbitrary partially ordered sets defined by sets of
natural numbers are also studied.


  We study infinite intersections of open subschemes and the corresponding
intersection of Hilbert schemes. If $\{U_i\}$ is the collection of open
subschemes of a variety $X$ containing a fixed point $P$, then we show that the
Hilbert functor of flat and finite families on the spectrum of the local ring
of $P$ is given by the intersection of ${\Cal H}_i$, where ${\Cal H}_i$ is the
Hilbert functor of flat and finite families on $U_i$. In particular we show
that the Hilbert functor of flat and finite families on the spectrum of the
local ring of $P$ is representable by a scheme.


  A partial wave analysis of pbar-p -> eta-eta-pizero data from the Crystal
Barrel experiment is made in terms of s-channel resonances. The decay channels
a_0(980)-eta, f_0(1770)-pi and f_0(2105)-pi provide evidence for two I = 1
J^{PC} = 0^{-+} resonances. The first has mass M =2360 +- 25 MeV and width
Gamma = 300^{+100}_{-50} MeV, and the second M =2070 \pm 35 MeV, Gamma =
310^{+100}_{-50} MeV. There is also evidence for a J^{PC} = 2^{-+} state with M
= 2005 +- 15 MeV and Gamma = 200 +- 40 MeV, decaying strongly to a_0(980)-pi.


  In this paper we examine to what extent the radio continuum can be used as an
extinction free probe of star formation in dwarf galaxies. To that aim we
observe $40$ nearby dwarf galaxies with the Very Large Array at 6 cm ($4$-$8$
GHz) in C-configuration. We obtained images with $3$-$8^{\prime\prime}$
resolution and noise levels of $3$-$15{\rm \,\mu Jy\,beam^{-1}}$. We detected
emission associated with $22$ of the $40$ dwarf galaxies, $8$ of which are new
detections. The general picture is that of an interstellar medium largely
devoid of radio continuum emission, interspersed by isolated pockets of
emission associated with star formation. We find an average thermal fraction of
$\sim 50$-$70$% and an average magnetic field strength of $\sim 5$-$8\,{\rm \mu
G}$, only slightly lower than that found in larger, spiral galaxies. At 100 pc
scales, we find surprisingly high values for the average magnetic field
strength of up to 50$\,{\rm \mu G}$. We find that dwarf galaxies follow the
theoretical predictions of the radio continuum-star formation rate relation
within regions of significant radio continuum emission but that the non-thermal
radio continuum is suppressed relative to the star formation rate when
considering the entire optical disk. We examine the far-infrared-star formation
rate relation for our sample and find that the far-infrared is suppressed
compared to the expected star formation rate. We discuss explanations for these
observed relations and the impact of our findings on the radio
continuum-far-infrared relation. We conclude that radio continuum emission at
centimetre wavelengths has the promise of being a largely extinction-free star
formation rate indicator. We find that star formation rates of gas rich, low
mass galaxies can be estimated with an uncertainty of $\pm 0.2$ dex between the
values of $2 \times 10^{-4}$ and $0.1 {\rm M_\odot\,yr^{-1}}$.


  QSO near-zones are an important probe of the the ionization state of the IGM
at z ~ 6-7, at the end of reionization. We present here high-resolution
cosmological 3D radiative transfer simulations of QSO environments for a wide
range of host halo masses, 10$^{10-12.5}$ M_sun. Our simulated near-zones
reproduce both the overall decrease of observed near-zone sizes at 6 < z < 7
and their scatter. The observable near-zone properties in our simulations
depend only very weakly on the mass of the host halo. The size of the H II
region expanding into the IGM is generally limited by (super-)Lyman Limit
systems loosely associated with (low-mass) dark matter haloes. This leads to a
strong dependence of near-zone size on direction and drives the large observed
scatter. In the simulation centred on our most massive host halo, many
sightlines show strong red damping wings even for initial volume averaged
neutral hydrogen fractions as low as ~ 10$^{-3}$. For QSO lifetimes long enough
to allow growth of the central supermassive black hole while optically bright,
we can reproduce the observed near-zone of ULAS J1120+0641 only with an IGM
that is initially neutral. Our results suggest that larger samples of z > 7
QSOs will provide important constraints on the evolution of the neutral
hydrogen fraction and thus on how late reionization ends.


  We present radio and optical observations of the peculiar radio galaxy
J1835+620, a member of a new sample of large angular size radio galaxies
selected from the NRAO VLA Sky Survey. Its optical counterpart is in a group of
at least three galaxies and shows strong, narrow emission lines which allow us
to measure its redshift as z=0.518. The derived cosmological distance places
J1835+620 among the giant radio galaxies. The outstanding aspect of J1835+620
at radio wavelengths is the existence of two symmetric bright components within
a typical Fanaroff-Riley type II structure. We interpret the source as the
result of two distinct phases of core activity. Radio maps and radio
polarization properties are consistent with a dense new ejection evolving
through an older underlying jet. We suggest that interaction with nearby
galaxies could be the reason for restarting the activity in J1835+620.


  Orbital eccentricity is one of the most robust discriminators for
distinguishing between dynamical and isolated formation scenarios of binary
black hole mergers using gravitational-wave observatories such as LIGO and
Virgo. Using state-of-the-art cluster models, we show how selection effects
impact the detectable distribution of eccentric mergers from clusters. We show
that the observation (or lack thereof) of eccentric binary black hole mergers
can significantly constrain the fraction of detectable systems that originate
from dynamical environments, such as dense star clusters. After roughly 150
observations, observing no eccentric binary signals would indicate that
clusters cannot make up the majority of the merging binary black hole
population in the local universe (95% credibility). However, if dense star
clusters dominate the rate of eccentric mergers and a single system is
confirmed to be measurably eccentric in the first and second gravitational-wave
transient catalogs, clusters must account for at least 14% of detectable binary
black hole mergers. The constraints on the fraction of detectable systems from
dense star clusters become significantly tighter as the number of eccentric
observations grows and will be constrained to within 0.5 dex once 10 eccentric
binary black holes are observed.


  We argue that the amazing progress of first-principles materials physics
necessitates a revision of the Standard Approach to electrodynamics of media.
We hence subject this Standard Approach to a thorough critique, which shows
both its inherent conceptual problems and its practical inapplicability to
modern ab initio calculations. We then go on to show that the common practice
in ab initio materials physics has overcome these difficulties by taking a
different, microscopic approach to electrodynamics of media, only superficially
resembling the Standard Approach whose validity is restricted to the
macroscopic domain. As this paradigm shift went largely unnoticed outside and
partly even within the ab initio community, the present article aims at a
systematic development and paradigmatic discussion of this new, microscopic
first-principles approach to electrodynamics of media, for which we propose the
name "Functional Approach".


  We report experimental observations of a novel magnetoresistance (MR)
behavior of two-dimensional electron systems in perpendicular magnetic field in
the ballistic regime, for k_BT\tau/\hbar>1. The MR grows with field and
exhibits a maximum at fields B>1/\mu, where \mu is the electron mobility. As
temperature increases the magnitude of the maximum grows and its position moves
to higher fields. This effect is universal: it is observed in various Si- and
GaAs- based two-dimensional electron systems. We compared our data with recent
theory based on the Kohn anomaly modification in magnetic field, and found
qualitative similarities and discrepancies.


  Three photon decay rate of $J/\psi$ is studied using two $N_f=2$ twisted mass
gauge ensembles with lattice spacings $a\simeq 0.085$ fm (I) and $0.067$
fm(II). Using a new method, only the correlation functions directly related to
the physical decay width are computed with all polarizations of the initial and
final states summed over. Our results for such rare decay on the two ensembles
are: $\mathcal{B}_{I,II}(J/\psi\rightarrow 3\gamma)=(1.614 \pm 0.016 \pm
0.261)\times 10^{-5},(1.809 \pm 0.051 \pm 0.295)\times 10^{-5}$ where the first
errors are statistical and the second are estimates from systematics. We also
propose a method to analyze the Dalitz plot of the corresponding process based
on the lattice data which can provide direct information for the experiments.


  We focus on $\Theta$-rich and almost $\Theta$-rich words over a finite
alphabet $\mathcal{A}$, where $\Theta$ is an involutive antimorphism over
$\mathcal{A}^*$. We show that any recurrent almost $\Theta$-rich word $\uu$ is
an image of a recurrent $\Theta'$-rich word under a suitable morphism, where
$\Theta'$ is again an involutive antimorphism. Moreover, if the word $\uu$ is
uniformly recurrent, we show that $\Theta'$ can be set to the reversal mapping.
We also treat one special case of almost $\Theta$-rich words. We show that
every $\Theta$-standard words with seed is an image of an Arnoux-Rauzy word.


  Spin excitations in atomic-scale nanostructures have been investigated with
inelastic scanning tunneling spectroscopy, sometimes with conflicting results.
In this work we present a theoretical viewpoint on a recent experimental
controversy regarding the spin excitations of Co adatoms on Pt(111). While one
group [Balashov et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. \textbf{102}, 257203 (2009)] claims to
have detected them, another group reported their observation only after the
hydrogenation of the Co adatom [Dubout et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. \textbf{114},
106807 (2015)]. Utilizing time-dependent density functional theory in
combination with many-body perturbation theory we demonstrate that, although
inelastic spin excitations are possible for Cr, Mn, Fe, and Co adatoms, their
efficiency differs. While the excitation signature is less pronounced for Mn
and Co adatoms, it is larger for Cr and Fe adatoms. We find that the tunneling
matrix elements related to the nature and symmetry of the relevant electronic
states are more favorable for triggering the spin excitations in Fe than in Co.
An enhancement of the tunneling and of the inelastic spectra is possible by
attaching hydrogen to the adatom at the appropriate position.


  Nonrelativistic electrostatic unmagnetized shocks are frequently observed in
laboratory plasmas and they are likely to exist in astrophysical plasmas. Their
maximum speed, expressed in units of the ion acoustic speed far upstream of the
shock, depends only on the electron-to-ion temperature ratio if binary
collisions are absent. The formation and evolution of such shocks is examined
here for a wide range of shock speeds with particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations.
The initial temperatures of the electrons and the 400 times heavier ions are
equal. Shocks form on electron time scales at Mach numbers between 1.7 and 2.2.
Shocks with Mach numbers up to 2.5 form after tens of inverse ion plasma
frequencies. The density of the shock-reflected ion beam increases and the
number of ions crossing the shock thus decreases with an increasing Mach
number, causing a slower expansion of the downstream region in its rest frame.
The interval occupied by this ion beam is on a positive potential relative to
the far upstream. This potential pre-heats the electrons ahead of the shock
even in the absence of beam instabilities and decouples the electron
temperature in the foreshock ahead of the shock from the one in the far
upstream plasma. The effective Mach number of the shock is reduced by this
electron heating. This effect can potentially stabilize nonrelativistic
electrostatic shocks moving as fast as supernova remnant (SNR) shocks.


  Based on the general form of the master equation for open quantum systems the
tunneling is considered. Using the path integral technique a simple closed form
expression for the tunneling rate through a parabolic barrier is obtained. The
tunneling in the open quantum systems strongly depends on the coupling with
environment. We found the cases when the dissipation prohibits tunneling
through the barrier but decreases the crossing of the barrier for the energies
above the barrier. As a particular application, the case of decay from the
metastable state is considered.


  Individual personalities significantly influence our perceptions, decisions,
and social interactions, which is particularly crucial for gaining insights
into human behavior patterns in online social network analysis. Many
psychological studies have observed that personalities are strongly reflected
in their social behaviors and social environments. In light of these problems,
this paper proposes a sociological analysis framework for one's personality in
an environment-based view instead of individual-level data mining.
Specifically, to comprehensively understand an individual's behavior from
low-quality records, we leverage the powerful associative ability of LLMs by
designing an effective prompt. In this way, LLMs can integrate various
scattered information with their external knowledge to generate higher-quality
profiles, which can significantly improve the personality analysis performance.
To explore the interactive mechanism behind the users and their online
environments, we design an effective hypergraph neural network where the
hypergraph nodes are users and the hyperedges in the hypergraph are social
environments. We offer a useful dataset with user profile data, personality
traits, and several detected environments from the real-world social platform.
To the best of our knowledge, this is the first network-based dataset
containing both hypergraph structure and social information, which could push
forward future research in this area further. By employing the framework on
this dataset, we can effectively capture the nuances of individual
personalities and their online behaviors, leading to a deeper understanding of
human interactions in the digital world.


  The aim of the paper is to derive spectral estimates into several classes of
magnetic systems. They include three-dimensional regions with Dirichlet
boundary as well as a particle in $\mathbb{R}^3$ confined by a local change of
the magnetic field. We establish two-dimensional Berezin-Li-Yau and
Lieb-Thirring-type bounds in the presence of magnetic fields and, using them,
get three-dimensional estimates for the eigenvalue moments of the corresponding
magnetic Laplacians.


  One way of expressing the self-duality $A\cong \Hom(A,\mathbb{C})$ of Abelian
groups is that their character tables are self-transpose (in a suitable
ordering). Noncommutative groups fail to satisfy this property. In this paper
we extend the duality to some noncommutative groups considering when the
character table of a finite group is close to being the transpose of the
character table for some other group. We find that groups dual to each other
have dual normal subgroup lattices. We show that our concept of duality cannot
work for non-nilpotent groups and we describe $p$-group examples.


  By cyclic adiabatic change of two control parameters of an optical trap one
can induce a circulating current of condensed bosons. The amount of particles
that are transported per period depends on the "radius" of the cycle, and this
dependence can be utilized in order to probe the interatomic interactions. For
strong repulsive interaction the current can be regarded as arising from a
sequence of Landau-Zener crossings. For weaker interaction one observes either
gradual or coherent mega crossings, while for attractive interaction the
particles are glued together and behave like a classical ball. For the analysis
we use the Kubo approach to quantum pumping with the associated Dirac monopoles
picture of parameter space.


  This document is one of a series of whitepapers from the USQCD collaboration.
Here, we discuss opportunities for Lattice Quantum Chromodynamics (LQCD) in the
research frontier in fundamental symmetries and signals for new physics. LQCD,
in synergy with effective field theories and nuclear many-body studies,
provides theoretical support to ongoing and planned experimental programs in
searches for electric dipole moments of the nucleon, nuclei and atoms, decay of
the proton, $n$-$\overline{n}$ oscillations, neutrinoless double-$\beta$ decay
of a nucleus, conversion of muon to electron, precision measurements of weak
decays of the nucleon and of nuclei, precision isotope-shift spectroscopy, as
well as direct dark matter detection experiments using nuclear targets. This
whitepaper details the objectives of the LQCD program in the area of
Fundamental Symmetries within the USQCD collaboration, identifies priorities
that can be addressed within the next five years, and elaborates on the areas
that will likely demand a high degree of innovation in both numerical and
analytical frontiers of the LQCD research.


  In this thesis we discuss supersymmetric gauge theories, focusing on exact
results achieved using methods of integrability. For the larger portion of the
thesis we study the N=4 super Yang-Mills theory in the planar limit, a
recurring topic being the Konishi anomalous dimension, which is roughly the
analogue for the mass of the proton in quantum chromodynamics. The N=4
supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory is known to be integrable in the planar limit,
which opens up a wealth of techniques one can employ in order to find results
in this limit valid at any value of the coupling. We begin with perturbation
theory where the integrability of the theory first manifests itself. Here we
showcase the first exact result, the so-called slope function, which is the
linear small spin expansion coefficient of the generalized Konishi anomalous
dimension. We then move on to exact results mainly achieved using the novel
quantum spectral curve approach, the method allowing one to find scaling
dimensions of operators at arbitrary values of the coupling. As an example we
find the second coefficient in the small spin expansion after the slope, which
we call the curvature function. This allows us to extract non-trivial
information about the Konishi operator. Methods of integrability are also
applicable to other supersymmetric gauge theories such as ABJM, which in fact
shares many similarities with N=4 super Yang-Mills. We briefly review these
parallel developments in the last chapter of the thesis.


  Positron emission tomography (PET) is an important modality for diagnosing
diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer's disease, capable of revealing the
uptake of radiolabeled molecules that target specific pathological markers of
the diseases. Recently, positronium lifetime imaging (PLI) that adds to
traditional PET the ability to explore properties of the tissue
microenvironment beyond tracer uptake has been demonstrated with time-of-flight
(TOF) PET and the use of non-pure positron emitters. However, achieving
accurate reconstruction of lifetime images from data acquired by systems having
a finite TOF resolution still presents a challenge. This paper focuses on the
two-dimensional PLI, introducing a maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) method
that employs an exponentially modified Gaussian (EMG) probability distribution
that describes the positronium lifetime data produced by TOF PET. We evaluate
the performance of our EMG-based MLE method against \st{traditional} approaches
using exponential likelihood functions and penalized surrogate methods. Results
from computer-simulated data reveal that the proposed EMG-MLE method can yield
quantitatively accurate lifetime images. We also demonstrate that the proposed
MLE formulation can be extended to handle PLI data containing multiple positron
populations.


  Compact and low-loss photonic crystal waveguides are critical in integrated
terahertz (THz) applications. Compared with pure metal or dielectric photonic
crystal waveguides, hybrid (metal-dielectric) integrated waveguides provide a
simple way to further improve the field confinement and the propagation loss.
In this work, we investigate a hybrid waveguide consisting of metallic photonic
crystals and dielectric films in 0.1-1.0 THz. Photonic crystal waveguides based
on metal pillar arrays (MPAs) support two resonance modes including the
fundamental and high-order transverse magnetic (TM) modes and then form one
apparent bandgap in 0.45-0.55 THz. The high-order TM-mode shows higher
confinement than the fundamental mode and are thus sensitive to the dielectric
film on the MPAs. The propagation loss and field confinement can be optimized
by changing the dielectric film thickness and refractive index. The
investigation shows that the lowest loss occurs at 0.68 THz because the
high-order TM-mode THz waves are tightly confined inside the hybrid waveguide.
This work proves that such hybrid waveguides based on metallic photonic
crystals are promising to develop as a compact integrated terahertz device.


  A search for the single production of a vector-like top partner ($T$)
decaying into a $Z$ boson and a top quark is presented, using the full Run 2
dataset corresponding to 139 $\mathrm{fb}^{-1}$ of $pp$ collisions at $\sqrt{s}
= 13$ TeV, collected in 2015-2018 with the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron
Collider. The targeted final state is characterized by the presence of a pair
of electrons or muons with opposite-sign charges which form a $Z$-boson
candidate, as well as by the presence of $b$-tagged jets and forward jets.
Events with exactly two or at least three leptons are categorized into two
independently optimized analysis channels. No significant excess above the
background expectation is observed and the results from the two channels are
statistically combined to set exclusion limits at 95% confidence level on the
masses and couplings of $T$ for different benchmark models and generalized
branching ratio scenarios.


  We prove a parametrized compactness theorem on manifolds of bounded Ricci
curvature, upper bounded diameter and lower bounded injectivity radius.


  We consider spaces of holomorphic functions which are square-integrable
against a Gaussian weight, which appear in the theory of metaplectic
FBI--Bargmann transforms. We identify the operator norm of embeddings between
two such spaces, by relating these embeddings to Fourier integral operators
with complex phase.


  Partial control is a technique used in systems with transient chaos. The aim
of this control method is to avoid the escape of the orbits from a region Q of
the phase space where the transient chaotic dynamics takes place. This
technique is based on finding a special subset of Q called the safe set. The
chaotic orbit can be sustained in the safe set with a minimum amount of
control. In this work we develop a control strategy to gradually lead any
chaotic orbit in Q to the safe set by using the safety function. With the
technique proposed here, the safe set can be converted into a global attractor
of Q.


  Let $F$ be a nonarchimedean local field of characteristic $0$ and residue
field of order not divisible by $2$. We show how to calculate the product of
the covolume of a torsion-free lattice in $PGL(2,F)$ and the formal dimension
of a discrete series representation of $GL(2,F)$. The covolume comes from a
theorem of Ihara, and the formal dimensions are contained in results of Corwin,
Moy, and Sally. By a theorem going back to Atiyah, and by triviality of the
second cohomology group of a free group, the resulting product is the von
Neumann dimension of a discrete series representation considered as a
representation of a free group factor.


  This paper introduces Multilingual LibriSpeech (MLS) dataset, a large
multilingual corpus suitable for speech research. The dataset is derived from
read audiobooks from LibriVox and consists of 8 languages, including about
44.5K hours of English and a total of about 6K hours for other languages.
Additionally, we provide Language Models (LM) and baseline Automatic Speech
Recognition (ASR) models and for all the languages in our dataset. We believe
such a large transcribed dataset will open new avenues in ASR and
Text-To-Speech (TTS) research. The dataset will be made freely available for
anyone at http://www.openslr.org.


  Fine-tuning a Pre-trained Language Model (PLM) on a specific downstream task
has been a well-known paradigm in Natural Language Processing. However, with
the ever-growing size of PLMs, training the entire model on several downstream
tasks becomes very expensive and resource-hungry. Recently, different Parameter
Efficient Tuning (PET) techniques are proposed to improve the efficiency of
fine-tuning PLMs. One popular category of PET methods is the low-rank
adaptation methods which insert learnable truncated SVD modules into the
original model either sequentially or in parallel. However, low-rank
decomposition suffers from limited representation power. In this work, we
address this problem using the Kronecker product instead of the low-rank
representation. We introduce KronA, a Kronecker product-based adapter module
for efficient fine-tuning of Transformer-based PLMs. We apply the proposed
methods for fine-tuning T5 on the GLUE benchmark to show that incorporating the
Kronecker-based modules can outperform state-of-the-art PET methods.


  Water nanoclusters ejected to space from abundant amorphous water-ice-coated
cosmic dust have been proposed to constitute Rydberg baryonic dark matter. This
phenomenological model is now qualitatively supported by several recent
observations: the laboratory-generated ejection of water nanoclusters from
amorphous water-ice; the absence of dark matter in Galaxy NGC 1052-DF2; a
recent study of dark matter in distant galaxies reporting the direct
interaction of dark matter with galactic baryonic matter; the bullet cluster;
and the birefringence of the cosmic microwave background. A link between
Rydberg dark matter and dark energy and its relevance to quintessence are
reviewed. The use of the James Webb Space Telescope to test this model further
is suggested.


  This paper proposes a multilayer graph model for the community detection from
multiple observations. This is a very frequent situation, when different
estimators are applied to infer graph edges from signals at its nodes, or when
different signal measurements are carried out. The multilayer network stacks
the graph observations at the different layers, and it links replica nodes at
adjacent layers. This configuration matches the Cartesian product between the
ground truth graph and a path graph, where the number of nodes corresponds to
the number of the observations. Stemming on the algebraic structure of the
Laplacian of the Cartesian multilayer network, we infer a subset of the
eigenvectors of the true graph and perform community detection. Experimental
results on synthetic graphs prove the accuracy of the method, which outperforms
state-of-the-art approaches in terms of ability of correctly detecting graph
communities. Finally, we show the application of our method to discriminate
different brain networks derived from real EEG data collected during motor
imagery experiments. We conclude that our approach appears promising in
identifying graph communities when multiple observations of the graph are
available and it results promising for EEG-based motor imagery applications.


  We have studied color-octet contributions for $J/\psi$ inclusive production
at B factories, i.e., $e^+e^-\to J/\psi(^3P_J^{[8]},^1S_0^{[8]}) +
X_{\mathrm{non}-c\bar c}$, using the soft gluon factorization (SGF) approach,
in which the $J/\psi$ energy spectrum is expressed in a form of perturbatively
calculable short-distance hard parts convoluted with one-dimensional soft gluon
distributions (SGDs). The series of velocity corrections originated from
kinematic effect can be naturally resummed in this approach. Short-distance
hard parts have been calculated analytically to next-to-leading order in
$\alpha_s$. Renormalization group equations for SGDs have been derived and
solved, which resums Sudakov logarithms originated from soft gluon emissions.
Our final result gives a upper bound for color-octet matrix elements consistent
with that extracted from hadron colliders. This may relieve the well-known
universality problem in the NRQCD factorization.
  As a comparison, we also analytically calculated short-distance hard parts in
the NRQCD factorization, with Sudakov logarithms resummed by using soft
collinear effective theory. The comparison shows that velocity corrections from
kinematic effect, which have been resummed in SGF, are significant for
phenomenological study. Furthermore, it is found that Sudakov logarithms
originated from soft gluon emissions are very important, while it is not the
case for Sudakov logarithms originated from jet function. Therefore, the
partial Sudakov resummation in SGF has already captured the main physics.


  CrAs was firstly observed possessing the bulk superconductivity (Tc~2 K)
under high pressure (0.8 GPa) in the very recent work (Wei Wu, et al. Nature
Communications 5, 5508 (2014)). To explore the correlation between the
structure and the superconductivity, the high-pressure structure evolution of
CrAs was investigated using angle dispersive X-ray diffraction (XRD) method
with small steps of ~0.1 GPa in a diamond anvil cell (DAC) up to 1.8 GPa. In
the pressure range covered by our current experiment, the structure of CrAs
keeps stable. However, the lattice parameters exhibit anomalous compression
behaviors. With the pressure increasing, the lattice parameters a and c both
show a process of first increasing and then decreasing, and the lattice
parameter b goes through a quick contract at 0.35 GPa, which suggests a
pressure-induced isostructural phase transition occurs in CrAs around this
pressure point. Above the phase transition pressure, the axial
compressibilities of CrAs present remarkable anisotropy. The compressibilities
along the a- and c-axis are about an order of magnitude smaller than that along
the b-axis, which is closely related to the different stacking modes in CrAs6
octahedron along different crystallographic axes. A schematic band model was
used for addressing above anomalous compression behavior in CrAs.


  The chirally-odd twist-3 nucleon distribution e(x) is studied in the large-Nc
limit in the framework of the chiral quark-soliton model at a low normalization
point of about 0.6 GeV. The remarkable result is that in the model e(x)
contains a delta-function-type singularity at x=0. The regular part of e(x) is
found to be sizeable at the low scale of the model and in qualitative agreement
with bag model calculations.


  We study the properties of metrics aimed at the characterization of grid-like
ordering in complex networks. These metrics are based on the global and local
behavior of cycles of order four, which are the minimal structures able to
identify rectangular clustering. The analysis of data from real networks
reveals the ubiquitous presence of a high level of grid-like ordering that is
non-trivially correlated with the local degree properties. These observations
provide new insights on the hierarchical structure of complex networks.


  By means of sequential and cotunneling spectroscopy, we study the tunnel
couplings between metallic leads and individual levels in a carbon nanotube
quantum dot. The levels are ordered in shells consisting of two doublets with
strong- and weak-tunnel couplings, leading to gate-dependent level
renormalization. By comparison to a one- and two-shell model, this is shown to
be a consequence of disorder-induced valley mixing in the nanotube. Moreover, a
parallel magnetic field is shown to reduce this mixing and thus suppress the
effects of tunnel renormalization.


  The spectral branching behavior of the 2x2 operator matrix of the
magneto-hydrodynamic alpha^2-dynamo is analyzed numerically. Some qualitative
aspects of level crossings are briefly discussed with the help of a simple toy
model which is based on a Z_2-graded-pseudo-Hermitian 2x2 matrix. The
considered issues comprise: the underlying SU(1,1) symmetry and the Krein space
structure of the system, exceptional points of branching type and diabolic
points, as well as the algebraic and geometric multiplicity of corresponding
degenerate eigenvalues.


  Any smooth surface in R^3 may be flattened along the z-axis, and the
flattened surface becomes close to a billiard table in R^2 . We show that,
under some hypotheses, the geodesic flow of this surface converges locally
uniformly to the billiard flow. Moreover, if the billiard is dispersive and has
finite horizon, then the geodesic flow of the corresponding surface is Anosov.
We apply this result to the theory of mechanical linkages and their dynamics:
we provide a new example of a simple linkage whose physical behavior is Anosov.
For the first time, the edge lengths of the mechanism are given explicitly.


  We study the semisuper-Efimov effect, which is found for four identical
bosons with a resonant three-body interaction in 2D, in various systems. Based
on solutions of bound-state and renormalization-group equations, we first
demonstrate an emergence of the semisuper-Efimov effect in mass-imbalanced
bosons in 2D. Compared with the Efimov and the super-Efimov effects, the mass
ratio-dependent scaling parameter is unexpectedly found to take on a finite
value even for extremely mass-imbalanced situations, where the mass ratio is 0
or $\infty$. By a renormalization-group analysis, we also show that a weak
two-body interaction sustains the semisuper-Efimov effect. Finally, we liberate
the universality of the semisuper-Efimov effect from 2D by showing that bosons
with linear-dispersion relation support the semisuper-Efimov effect in 1D.


  Manipulating the spin degrees of freedom of electrons affords an excellent
platform for exploring novel quantum states in condensed-matter physics and
material science. Based on first-principles calculations and analysis of
crystal symmetries, we propose a fully spin-polarized composite semimetal
state, which is combined with the one-dimensional nodal lines and
two-dimensional nodal surfaces, in the half-metal material CaFeO$_3$. In the
nodal line-surface states, the Baguenaudier-like nodal lines feature six rings
linked together, which are protected by the three independent symmetry
operations:$\mathcal{PT}$, $\mathcal{M}_{y}$, and
$\mathcal{\widetilde{M}}_{z}$. Near the Fermi level, the spin-polarized nodal
surface states are guaranteed by the joint operation
$\mathcal{T}\mathcal{S}_{2i}$ in the $k_{i(i=x,y,z)}=\pi$ plane. Furthermore,
high-quality CaFeO$_3$ harbors ultra-clean energy dispersion, which is rather
robust against strong triaxial compressional strain and correlation effect. The
realization of the Weyl nodal line-surface half-metal presents great potential
for spintronics applications with high speed and low power consumption.


  Blockchain technology, within its fast widespread and superiority
demonstrated by recent studies, can be also used as an informatic tool for
solving various aviation problems. Aviation electronics (avionics) systems
stand out as the application area of informatics methods in solving aviation
problems or providing different capabilities to aircrafts. Avionics systems are
electronic systems used in air and space vehicles for many purposes such as
surveillance, navigation and communication. In this study, the applicability of
blockchain technology as a new approach in the development of avionics systems
is discussed, and in this regard, a method inspired by the previously
implemented applications in electronic flight systems is proposed to help
evaluate the applicability of this technology in new avionics system designs.
The potential of blockchain for solving the problems especially in basic
services, communication, navigation and flight management systems; the problem
structures for which application of this technology would be a reliable
solution; and the superiority and inferiority of its use in avionic systems are
explained. A guiding paper is proposed for aviation engineers/experts to make a
decision on applying blockchain into avionics systems.


  We investigate the search for heavy Majorana neutrinos stemming from a
composite model scenario at the upcoming LHC Run II at a center of mass energy
of 13 TeV. While previous studies of the composite Majorana neutrino were
focussed on gauge interactions via magnetic type transition coupling between
ordinary and heavy fermions (with mass $m^*$) here we complement the composite
model with contact interactions at the energy scale $\Lambda$ and we find that
the production cross sections are dominated by such contact interactions by
roughly two/three orders of magnitude. This mechanism provides therefore very
interesting rates at the prospected luminosities. We study the same sign
di-lepton and di-jet signature ($pp \to \ell\ell jj$) and perform a fast
detector simulation based on Delphes. We compute 3$\sigma$ and 5$\sigma$
contour plots of the statistical significance in the parameter space
($\Lambda,m^*$). We find that the potentially excluded regions at $\sqrt{s}
=13$ TeV are quite larger than those excluded so far at Run I considering
searches with other signatures.


  This paper describes an approach to the facial action unit (AU) detection. In
this work, we present our submission to the Field Affective Behavior Analysis
(ABAW) 2021 competition. The proposed method uses the pre-trained JAA model as
the feature extractor, and extracts global features, face alignment features
and AU local features on the basis of multi-scale features. We take the AU
local features as the input of the graph convolution to further consider the
correlation between AU, and finally use the fused features to classify AU. The
detected accuracy was evaluated by 0.5*accuracy + 0.5*F1. Our model achieves
0.674 on the challenging Aff-Wild2 database.


  We report on the experimental realization of Pb1-xSnxTe pentagonal nanowires
(NWs) with [110] orientation using molecular beam epitaxy techniques. Using
first-principles calculations, we investigate the structural stability in NWs
of SnTe and PbTe in three different structural phases: cubic, pentagonal with
[001] orientation and pentagonal with [110] orientation. Within a semiclassical
approach, we show that the interplay between ionic and covalent bonds favors
the formation of pentagonal NWs. Additionally, we find that this pentagonal
structure is more likely to occur in tellurides than in selenides. The
disclination and twin boundary cause the electronic states originating from the
NW core region to generate a conducting band connecting the valence and
conduction bands, creating a symmetry-enforced metallic phase. The metallic
core band has opposite slopes in the cases of Sn and Te twin boundary, while
the bands from the shell are insulating. We finally study the electronic and
topological properties of pentagonal NWs unveiling their potential as a new
platform for higher-order topology and fractional charge. These pentagonal NWs
represent a unique case of intrinsic core-shell one-dimensional nanostructures
with distinct structural, electronic and topological properties between the
core and the shell region.


  NASA's New Horizons (NH) Pluto-Kuiper belt (PKB) mission was launched on 19
January 2006 on a Jupiter Gravity Assist (JGA) trajectory toward the Pluto
system for a 14 July 2015 closest approach; Jupiter closest approach occurred
on 28 February 2007. It was competitively selected by NASA for development on
29 November 2001. New Horizons is the first mission to the Pluto system and the
Kuiper belt; and will complete the reconnaissance of the classical planets. The
~400 kg spacecraft carries seven scientific instruments, including imagers,
spectrometers, radio science, a plasma and particles suite, and a dust counter
built by university students. NH will study the Pluto system over a 5-month
period beginning in early 2015. Following Pluto, NH will go on to reconnoiter
one or two 30-50 kilometer diameter Kuiper belt Objects (KBOs), if NASA
approves an extended mission. If successful, NH will represent a watershed
development in the scientific exploration of a new class of bodies in the solar
system - dwarf planets, of worlds with exotic volatiles on their surfaces, of
rapidly (possibly hydrodynamically) escaping atmospheres, and of giant impact
derived satellite systems. It will also provide the first dust density
measurements beyond 18 AU, cratering records that shed light on both the
ancient and present-day KB impactor population down to tens of meters, and a
key comparator to the puzzlingly active, former dwarf planet (now satellite of
Neptune) called Triton, which is as large as Eris and Pluto.


  Although the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) primary mission
observed the northern and southern ecliptic hemispheres, generally avoiding the
ecliptic, and the Kepler space telescope during the K2 mission could only
observe near the ecliptic, many of the K2 fields extend far enough from the
ecliptic plane that sections overlap with TESS fields. Using photometric
observations from both K2 and TESS, combined with archival spectroscopic
observations, we globally modeled four known planetary systems discovered by K2
that were observed in the first year of the primary TESS mission. Specifically,
we provide updated ephemerides and system parameters for K2-114 b, K2-167 b,
K2-237 b, and K2-261 b. These were some of the first K2 planets to be observed
by TESS in the first year and include three Jovian sized planets and a
sub-Neptune with orbital periods less than 12 days. In each case, the updated
ephemeris significantly reduces the uncertainty in prediction of future times
of transit, which is valuable for planning observations with the James Webb
Space Telescope and other future facilities. The TESS extended mission is
expected to observe about half of the K2 fields, providing the opportunity to
perform this type of analysis on a larger number of systems.