  A theoretical framework is developed to describe the Topological
Langmuir-Cyclotron Wave (TLCW), a recently identified topological surface
excitation in magnetized plasmas. As a topological wave, the TLCW propagates
unidirectionally without scattering in complex boundaries. The TLCW is studied
theoretically as a spectral flow of the Hamiltonian
Pseudo-Differential-Operator (PDO) $\hat{H}$ for waves in an inhomogeneous
plasma. The semi-classical parameter of the Weyl quantization for plasma waves
is identified to be the ratio between electron gyro-radius and the
inhomogeneity scale length of the system. Hermitian eigenmode bundles of the
bulk Hamiltonian symbol H for plasma waves are formally defined. Because
momentum space in classical continuous media is contractible in general, the
topology of the eigenmode bundles over momentum space is trivial. This is in
stark contrast to condensed matters. Nontrivial topology of the eigenmode
bundles in classical continuous media only exists over phase space. A boundary
isomorphism theorem is established to facilitate the calculation of Chern
numbers of eigenmode bundles over non-contractible manifolds in phase space. It
also defines a topological charge of an isolated Weyl point in phase space
without adopting any connection. Using these algebraic topological techniques
and an index theorem formulated by Faure, it is rigorously proven that the
nontrivial topology at the Weyl point of the Langmuir wave-cyclotron wave
resonance generates the TLCW as a spectral flow. It is shown that the TLCW can
be faithfully modeled by a tilted Dirac cone in phase space. An analytical
solution of the entire spectrum of the PDO of a generic tilted phase space
Dirac cone, including its spectral flow, is given. The spectral flow index of a
tilted Dirac cone is one, and its mode structure is a shifted Gaussian
function.


  Polarons are quasi-particles made from electrons interacting with vibrations
in crystal lattices. They derive their name from the strong electron-vibration
polar interaction in ionic systems, that induces associated spectroscopic and
optical signatures of such quasi-particles in these materials. In this paper,
we focus on diamond, a non-polar crystal with inversion symmetry which
nevertheless shows characteristic signatures of polarons, better denoted
"nonpolarons" in this case. The polaronic effects are produced by short-range
crystal fields with only a small influence of long-range quadrupoles. The
many-body spectral function has a characteristic energy dependence, showing a
plateau structure that is similar to but distinct from the satellites observed
in the polar Fr\"{o}hlich case. The temperature-dependent spectral function of
diamond is determined by two methods: the standard Dyson-Migdal approach, which
calculates electron-phonon interactions within the lowest-order expansion of
the self-energy, and the cumulant expansion, which includes higher orders of
electron-phonon interactions. The latter corrects the nonpolaron energies and
broadening, providing a more realistic spectral function, which we examine in
detail for both conduction and valence band edges.


  The efficient delivery of light energy is a prerequisite for non-invasive
imaging and stimulating of target objects embedded deep within a scattering
medium. However, injected waves experience random diffusion by multiple light
scattering, and only a small fraction reaches the target object. Here we
present a method to counteract wave diffusion and to focus multiplescattered
waves to the deeply embedded target. To realize this, we experimentally inject
light to the reflection eigenchannels of a specific flight time where most of
the multiple-scattered waves have interacted with the target object and
maximize the intensity of the returning multiple-scattered waves at the
selected time. For targets that are too deep to be visible by optical imaging,
we demonstrated a more than 10-fold enhancement in light energy delivery in
comparison with ordinary wave diffusion cases. This work will lay a foundation
for enhancing the working depth of imaging, sensing, and light stimulation.


  The chiral phase transition of strong-coupling Abelian gauge theories is
investigated in the brane world. It is assumed that gauge boson propagates in
an extra dimension, i.e. bulk gauge theories. The phase structure is
analytically evaluated by using the low-energy effective theories. We also
numerically solve the ladder Schwinger-Dyson equation for the full fermion
propagator including Kaluza-Klein (KK) excitation modes of the gauge field. It
is found that the chiral phase transition is of the second order, and the
critical value of the coupling constant is obtained. The extra dimension has a
large influence on the chiral phase transition for the Randall-Sundrum (RS)
brane world. It is studied how the number of KK modes affect the chiral phase
transition.


  We introduce the Funding Game, in which $m$ identical resources are to be
allocated among $n$ selfish agents. Each agent requests a number of resources
$x_i$ and reports a valuation $\tilde{v}_i(x_i)$, which verifiably {\em
lower}-bounds $i$'s true value for receiving $x_i$ items. The pairs $(x_i,
\tilde{v}_i(x_i))$ can be thought of as size-value pairs defining a knapsack
problem with capacity $m$. A publicly-known algorithm is used to solve this
knapsack problem, deciding which requests to satisfy in order to maximize the
social welfare.
  We show that a simple mechanism based on the knapsack {\it highest ratio
greedy} algorithm provides a Bayesian Price of Anarchy of 2, and for the
complete information version of the game we give an algorithm that computes a
Nash equilibrium strategy profile in $O(n^2 \log^2 m)$ time. Our primary
algorithmic result shows that an extension of the mechanism to $k$ rounds has a
Price of Anarchy of $1 + \frac{1}{k}$, yielding a graceful tradeoff between
communication complexity and the social welfare.


  This paper studies the fundamental limits of the shared-link coded caching
problem with correlated files, where a server with a library of $N$ files
communicates with $K$ users who can locally cache $M$ files. Given an integer
$r \in [N]$, correlation is modeled as follows: each r-subset of files contains
a unique common block. The tradeoff between the cache size and the average
transmitted load is considered. First, a converse bound under the constraint of
uncoded cache placement (i.e., each user directly stores a subset of the
library bits) is derived. Then, a caching scheme for the case where every user
demands a distinct file (possible for $N \geq K$) is shown to be optimal under
the constraint of uncoded cache placement. This caching scheme is further
proved to be decodable and optimal under the constraint of uncoded cache
placement when (i) $KrM \leq 2N$ or $KrM \geq (K - 1)N $or $r \in \{1,2,N-
1,N\}$ for every demand type (i.e., when the demanded file are not necessarily
distinct), and (ii) when the number of distinct demanded files is no larger
than four. Finally, a two-phase delivery scheme based on interference alignment
is shown to be optimal to within a factor of 2 under the constraint of uncoded
cache placement for every possible demands. As a by-product, the proposed
interference alignment scheme is shown to reduce the (worst-case or average)
load of state-of-the-art schemes for the coded caching problem where the users
can request multiple files.


  We investigate the relation between the four dimensional N=2 SU(2) super
Yang-Mills theory with four fundamental flavors and the quantum mechanics model
with Treibich-Verdier potential described by the Heun equation in the elliptic
form. We study the precise correspondence of quantities in the gauge theory and
the quantum mechanics model. An iterative method is used to obtain the
asymptotic expansion of the spectrum for the Schr\"{o}dinger operator, we are
able to fix the precise relation between the energy spectrum and the instanton
partition function of the gauge theory. We also study asymptotic expansions for
the spectrum which correspond to the strong coupling regions of the
Seiberg-Witten theory.


  We propose a refinement of the Robertson-Schrodinger uncertainty principle
(RSUP) using Wigner distributions. This new principle is stronger than the
RSUP. In particular, and unlike the RSUP, which can be saturated by many phase
space functions, the refined RSUP can be saturated by pure Gaussian Wigner
functions only. Moreover, the new principle is technically as simple as the
standard RSUP. In addition, it makes a direct connection with modern harmonic
analysis, since it involves the Wigner transform and its symplectic Fourier
transform, which is the radar ambiguity function. As a by-product of the
refined RSUP, we derive inequalities involving the entropy and the covariance
matrix of Wigner distributions. These inequalities refine the Shanon and the
Hirschman inequalities for the Wigner distribution of a mixed quantum state
$\rho$. We prove sharp estimates which critically depend on the purity of
$\rho$ and which are saturated in the Gaussian case.


  In this paper we present Very Large Array (VLA) 1.4 GHz (21 cm) observations
of the region between the centres of A3558 and A3562, in the majorcluster
merger complex of the Shapley Concentration. Our final catalogue includes a
total of 174 radio sources above the flux density limit of 0.25 mJy b$^{-1}$.
By cross-correlation with optical and spectroscopic catalogues we found 33
optical counterparts belonging to the Shapley Concentration. We investigated
the effects of cluster merger on the radio emission properties of the galaxy
population by means of the radio source counts and the radio luminosity
functions (RLF). We found that the radio source counts are consistent with the
field source counts.The RLF of elliptical and S0 galaxies in the region
surveyed here, is consistent with the ``universal'' RLF for early--type
galaxies.This result suggests that the deficit in radio galaxies found in
ourprevious works over the whole A3558 chain, is entirely due to the cluster
A3558. A population of faint radio galaxies (logP$_{1.4 GHz}$(W Hz$^{-1}$)
\ltsim 22) is also found.Half of these objects are also blue, suggesting that
starburst is the main mechanism driving the radio emission. Finally, we
detected 14 spiral radio galaxies, whose ratio between radio and optical
emission is similar to those found in galaxies located in rich and dynamically
evolved clusters. Our results are briefly discussed in the light of the age and
stage of the merger in the A3558 cluster complex.


  An unconventional approach is applied to solve the one-dimensional Burgers'
equation. It is based on spline polynomial interpolations and Hopf-Cole
transformation. Taylor expansion is used to approximate the exponential term in
the transformation, then the analytical solution of the simplified equation is
discretized to form a numerical scheme, involving various special functions.
The derived scheme is explicit and adaptable for parallel computing. However,
some types of boundary condition cannot be specified straightforwardly. Three
test cases were employed to examine its accuracy, stability, and parallel
scalability. In the aspect of accuracy, the schemes employed cubic and quintic
spline interpolation performs equally well, managing to reduce the $\ell_{1}$,
$\ell_{2}$ and $\ell_{\infty}$ error norms down to the order of $10^{-4}$. Due
to the transformation, their stability condition $\nu \Delta t/\Delta x^2 >
0.02$ includes the viscosity/diffusion coefficient $\nu$. From the condition,
the schemes can run at a large time step size $\Delta t$ even when grid spacing
$\Delta x$ is small. These characteristics suggest that the method is more
suitable for operational use than for research purposes.


  A Hamiltonian embedding is an embedding of a graph $G$ such that the boundary
of each face is a Hamiltonian cycle of $G$. It is shown that the hypercube
graph $Q_n$ admits such an embedding on an orientable surface when $n$ is a
power of 2. Basic necessary conditions on Hamiltonian embeddings for $Q_n$ and
conjectures are made about other values of $n$.


  A goal of Interactive Machine Learning (IML) is to enable people without
specialized training to teach agents how to perform tasks. Many of the existing
machine learning algorithms that learn from human instructions are evaluated
using simulated feedback and focus on how quickly the agent learns. While this
is valuable information, it ignores important aspects of the human-agent
interaction such as frustration. In this paper, we present the Newtonian Action
Advice agent, a new method of incorporating human verbal action advice with
Reinforcement Learning (RL) in a way that improves the human-agent interaction.
In addition to simulations, we validated the Newtonian Action Advice algorithm
by conducting a human-subject experiment. The results show that Newtonian
Action Advice can perform better than Policy Shaping, a state-of-the-art IML
algorithm, both in terms of RL metrics like cumulative reward and human factors
metrics like frustration.


  Major drawback of studying diffusion in multi-component systems is the lack
of suitable techniques to estimate the diffusion parameters. In this study, a
generalized treatment to determine the intrinsic diffusion coefficients in
multi-component systems is developed utilizing the concept of pseudo-binary
approach. This is explained with the help of experimentally developed diffusion
profiles in the Cu(Sn, Ga) and Cu(Sn, Si) solid solutions.


  Recently, alpha matting has received a lot of attention because of its
usefulness in mobile applications such as selfies. Therefore, there has been a
demand for a lightweight alpha matting model due to the limited computational
resources of commercial portable devices. To this end, we suggest a
distillation-based channel pruning method for the alpha matting networks. In
the pruning step, we remove channels of a student network having fewer impacts
on mimicking the knowledge of a teacher network. Then, the pruned lightweight
student network is trained by the same distillation loss. A lightweight alpha
matting model from the proposed method outperforms existing lightweight
methods. To show superiority of our algorithm, we provide various quantitative
and qualitative experiments with in-depth analyses. Furthermore, we demonstrate
the versatility of the proposed distillation-based channel pruning method by
applying it to semantic segmentation.


  Topological condensed matter systems from class A and class AII of the
classification table have received classical electromagnetic and mechanical
analogs and protected wave-guiding with such systems has been demonstrated
experimentally. Here we introduce a map which generates classical analogs for
all entries of the classification table, using only passive elements. Physical
mechanical models are provided for all strong topological phases in dimension
2, as well as for three classes in dimension 3. This includes topological
super-conducting phases, which have never been attempted with classical
systems.


  Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are the most violent explosions in the Universe and
can be used to explore the properties of high-redshift universe. It is believed
that the long GRBs are associated with the deaths of massive stars. So it is
possible to use GRBs to investigate the star formation rate (SFR). In this
paper, we use Lynden-Bell's $c^-$ method to study the luminosity function and
rate of \emph{Swift} long GRBs without any assumptions. We find that the
luminosity of GRBs evolves with redshift as $L(z)\propto g(z)=(1+z)^k$ with
$k=2.43_{-0.38}^{+0.41}$. After correcting the redshift evolution through
$L_0(z)=L(z)/g(z)$, the luminosity function can be expressed as
$\psi(L_0)\propto L_0^{-0.14\pm0.02}$ for dim GRBs and $\psi(L_0)\propto
L_0^{-0.70\pm0.03}$ for bright GRBs, with the break point
$L_{0}^{b}=1.43\times10^{51}~{\rm erg~s^{-1}}$. We also find that the formation
rate of GRBs is almost constant at $z<1.0$ for the first time, which is
remarkably different from the SFR. At $z>1.0$, the formation rate of GRB is
consistent with the SFR. Our results are dramatically different from previous
studies. Some possible reasons for this low-redshift excess are discussed. We
also test the robustness of our results with Monte Carlo simulations. The
distributions of mock data (i.e., luminosity-redshift distribution, luminosity
function, cumulative distribution and $\log N-\log S$ distribution) are in good
agreement with the observations. Besides, we also find that there are
remarkable difference between the mock data and the observations if long GRB
are unbiased tracers of SFR at $z<1.0$.


  The superposition approximation and the Born-Green-Yvon (BGY) equation allows
calculation of pair distributions in thermal equilibrium from pair potentials.
A 2-d variant can be used to derive adatom pair distributions from arbitrary
analytical pair potentials. As practical example substrate mediated elastic
interactions, fitted previously to first principles (FP) calculations, are used
to derive adatom pair distributions of OPd(100). The evaluation method utilizes
the particle-hole symmetry of the pair interaction lattice gas Hamiltonian. The
nonlinear BGY-type integral equation is solved numerically up to half coverage
using power series expansion of coverage. The resulting adatom pair- and
three-body distributions are used to analyze the short-range order of adatoms.
A Monte Carlo (MC) simulation was performed in parallel to compare the current
model with established methods. MC derived pair distributions fit well to those
found with the analytical model, except in the high coverage region. The
Fourier transformed pair correlations are compared with experimental LEED spot
data and provide additional insight. Due to significant attraction the model
predicts formation of 3rd and 4th nearest neighbors (n.n.) at small 3rd n.n.
chains. A long range order of adatoms like a p(2x2) lattice is not found with
the current model but a glassy structure is proposed as also indicated by the
equilibrium Monte Carlo configurations. The glassy structure is assumed to
contain fluctuations explaining broad p(2x2) LEED spots in the 0.25 monolayer
region. The assumptions and limitations of the model towards higher coverages
are discussed and open questions are formulated.


  Dimensionality reduction techniques play an essential role in data analytics,
signal processing and machine learning. Dimensionality reduction is usually
performed in a preprocessing stage that is separate from subsequent data
analysis, such as clustering or classification. Finding reduced-dimension
representations that are well-suited for the intended task is more appealing.
This paper proposes a joint factor analysis and latent clustering framework,
which aims at learning cluster-aware low-dimensional representations of matrix
and tensor data. The proposed approach leverages matrix and tensor
factorization models that produce essentially unique latent representations of
the data to unravel latent cluster structure -- which is otherwise obscured
because of the freedom to apply an oblique transformation in latent space. At
the same time, latent cluster structure is used as prior information to enhance
the performance of factorization. Specific contributions include several
custom-built problem formulations, corresponding algorithms, and discussion of
associated convergence properties. Besides extensive simulations, real-world
datasets such as Reuters document data and MNIST image data are also employed
to showcase the effectiveness of the proposed approaches.


  Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is the interdisciplinary subfield of
computational linguistics that develops methodologies and technologies that
enables the recognition and translation of spoken language into text by
computers. It incorporates knowledge and research in linguistics, computer
science, and electrical engineering fields. Sentiment analysis is contextual
mining of text which identifies and extracts subjective information in the
source material and helping a business to understand the social sentiment of
their brand, product or service while monitoring online conversations.
According to the speech structure, three models are used in speech recognition
to do the match: Acoustic Model, Phonetic Dictionary and Language Model. Any
speech recognition program is evaluated using two factors: Accuracy (percentage
error in converting spoken words to digital data) and Speed (the extent to
which the program can keep up with a human speaker). For the purpose of
converting speech to text (STT), we will be studying the following open source
toolkits: CMU Sphinx and Kaldi. The toolkits use Mel-Frequency Cepstral
Coefficients (MFCC) and I-vector for feature extraction. CMU Sphinx has been
used with pre-trained Hidden Markov Models (HMM) and Gaussian Mixture Models
(GMM), while Kaldi is used with pre-trained Neural Networks (NNET) as acoustic
models. The n-gram language models contain the phonemes or pdf-ids for
generating the most probable hypothesis (transcription) in the form of a
lattice. The speech dataset is stored in the form of .raw or .wav file and is
transcribed in .txt file. The system then tries to identify opinions within the
text, and extract the following attributes: Polarity (if the speaker expresses
a positive or negative opinion) and Keywords (the thing that is being talked
about).


  The Dicke model famously exhibits a phase transition to a superradiant phase
with a macroscopic population of photons and is realized in multiple settings
in open quantum systems. In this work, we study a variant of the Dicke model
where the cavity mode is lossy due to the coupling to a Markovian environment
while the atomic mode is coupled to a colored bath. We analytically investigate
this model by inspecting its low-frequency behavior via the Schwinger-Keldysh
field theory and carefully examine the nature of the corresponding superradiant
phase transition. Integrating out the fast modes, we can identify a simple
effective theory allowing us to derive analytical expressions for various
critical exponents, including those, such as the dynamical critical exponent,
that have not been previously considered. We find excellent agreement with
previous numerical results when the non-Markovian bath is at zero temperature;
however, contrary to these studies, our low-frequency approach reveals that the
same exponents govern the critical behavior when the colored bath is at finite
temperature unless the chemical potential is zero. Furthermore, we show that
the superradiant phase transition is classical in nature, while it is genuinely
non-equilibrium. We derive a fractional Langevin equation and conjecture the
associated fractional Fokker-Planck equation that capture the system's
long-time memory as well as its non-equilibrium behavior. Finally, we consider
finite-size effects at the phase transition and identify the finite-size
scaling exponents, unlocking a rich behavior in both statics and dynamics of
the photonic and atomic observables.


  When individuals engage in spoken discourse, various phenomena can be
observed that differ from those that are apparent in text-based conversation.
While written communication commonly uses a question mark to denote a query, in
spoken discourse, queries are frequently indicated by a rising intonation at
the end of a sentence. However, numerous speech recognition engines do not
append a question mark to recognized queries, presenting a challenge when
creating a spoken dialogue system. Specifically, the absence of a question mark
at the end of a sentence can impede the generation of appropriate responses to
queries in spoken dialogue systems. Hence, we investigate the impact of
question marks on dialogue systems, with the results showing that they have a
significant impact. Moreover, we analyze specific examples in an effort to
determine which types of utterances have the impact on dialogue systems.


  We conjecture that in one-dimensional spatially extended systems the
propagation velocity of correlations coincides with a zero of the convective
Lyapunov spectrum. This conjecture is successfully tested in three different
contexts: (i) a Hamiltonian system (a Fermi-Pasta-Ulam chain of oscillators);
(ii) a general model for spatio-temporal chaos (the complex Ginzburg-Landau
equation); (iii) experimental data taken from a CO_2 laser with delayed
feedback. In the last case, the convective Lyapunov exponent is determined
directly from the experimental data.


  We study electronic transport in graphene/ferromagnetic insulator hybrid
devices. The system comprises an armchair graphene nanoribbon with a
lens-shaped EuO ferromagnetic insulator layer deposited on top of it. When the
device supports a large number of propagating modes, the proximity exchange
interaction of electrons with the magnetic ions of the ferromagnetic insulator
results in electrons being spatially localised at different spots depending on
their spin. We found the spin-dependent electron focusing is robust under
moderate edge disorder. A spin-polarised electric current can be generated by
placing a third contact in the proper place. This opens the possibility to use
these effects for fabricating tunable sources of polarized electrons.


  Dipolar interactions support the formation of inter-site soliton molecules in
a stack of quasi-1D traps. We show that the stability and properties of
individual solitons, and soliton molecules in such a geometry crucially depend
on the interplay between contact and dipolar interactions. In particular, two
different quasi-1D soliton regimes are possible: a 1D soliton characterized by
purely repulsive DDI and a 3D soliton for which a sufficiently large dipole
moment renders the DDI attractive. Furthermore, we find that contrary to the
case of dimers of polar molecules, the soliton dimers exhibit a nontrivial
behavior of the elementary excitations that stems from the competition between
on-site and inter-site DDI. Finally, we prove the existence of soliton trimers
in a regime where molecular trimers do not occur. We demonstrate that the
soliton molecules that we report are well feasible under realistic experimental
conditions.


  Plus constructions are at the nexus of relative bimodules, indexed
enrichments, modules over functors and graphical calculus. We define several of
these in different settings. The first takes a category to a monoidal category
and the second is an endofunctor for monoidal categories. There are localized
and unital versions of these constructions. These serve three main purposes.
The first is to define a notion that generalizes modules over algebras to
monoidal functors and modules. This is realized via indexed enrichment. The
second is to provide a theory of twists, and the third is to classify relative
bimodules over a given groupoid. In this guise they classify bi-module monoids
with respect to a plethysm products over a the homomorphisms of a category
thought of as a bi-module of the underlying groupoid. The presented plus
constructions generalize the plus construction for Feynman categories and
explain the appearance of the plethysm monoid definition for operads, properads
and props. To this end we introduce a new notion of unique factorization
category (UFC) and show that the plus construction of a hereditary UFC is a
Feynman category. Just as finite sets are the fundamental indexing Feynman
category cospans are the fundamental indexing category hereditary UFC. We give
a local presentation of these constructions as well as a global description of
the morphisms and a graphical version using decorated groupoid colored graphs.
We furthermore consider an enriched setting. The global presentation utilizes
pasting diagram from 2-categories or equivalently double categories, which is
of independent interest. The graphical description is a consequence of the
local definition. In the special case of a UFC there is also a formalism with
groupoid colored graphs. In both cases levels appear when one adds units, which
clarifies their role in this type of construction.


  In this article we study the internal controllability of 1D linear hyperbolic
balance laws when the number of controls is equal to the number of state
variables. The controls are supported in space in an arbitrary open subset. Our
main result is a complete characterization of the minimal control time for the
exact controllability property.


  We consider a quantum system with a finite number of distinguishable quantum
states, which may be partitioned freely by a number of quantum particles,
assumed to be maximally entangled. We show that if we partition the system into
a number of qudits, then the Hilbert space dimension is maximized when each
quantum particle is allowed to represent a qudit of order $e$. We demonstrate
that the dimensionality of an entangled system, constrained by the total number
quantum states, partitioned so as to maximize the number of qutrits will always
exceed the dimensionality of other qudit partitioning. We then show that if we
relax the requirement of partitioning the system into qudits, but instead let
the particles exist in any given state, that the Hilbert space dimension is
greatly increased.


  The spatial $z$-correlators of meson operators in $N_f=2+1+1$ lattice QCD
with optimal domain-wall quarks at the physical point are studied for seven
temperatures in the range of 190-1540 MeV. The meson operators include a
complete set of Dirac bilinears (scalar, pseudoscalar, vector, axial vector,
tensor vector, and axial-tensor vector), and each for six flavor combinations
($\bar u d$, $\bar u s$, $\bar s s$, $\bar u c$, $\bar s c$, and $\bar c c$).
In Ref. \cite{Chiu:2023hnm}, we focused on the meson correlators of $u$ and $d$
quarks, and discussed their implications for the effective restoration of
$SU(2)_L \times SU(2)_R$ and $U(1)_A$ chiral symmetries, as well as the
emergence of approximate $SU(2)_{CS}$ chiral spin symmetry. In this work, we
extend our study to meson correlators of six flavor contents, and first observe
the hierarchical restoration of chiral symmetries in QCD, from $SU(2)_L \times
SU(2)_R \times U(1)_A $ to $SU(3)_L \times SU(3)_R \times U(1)_A $, and to
$SU(4)_L \times SU(4)_R \times U(1)_A $, as the temperature is increased from
190 MeV to 1540 MeV. Moreover, we compare the temperature windows for the
emergence of the approximate $SU(2)_{CS}$ symmetry in light and heavy vector
mesons, and find that the temperature windows are dominated by the $(\bar u c,
\bar s c, \bar c c)$ sectors.


  Semantic segmentation with dense pixel-wise annotation has achieved excellent
performance thanks to deep learning. However, the generalization of semantic
segmentation in the wild remains challenging. In this paper, we address the
problem of unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) in semantic segmentation.
Motivated by the fact that source and target domain have invariant semantic
structures, we propose to exploit such invariance across domains by leveraging
co-occurring patterns between pairwise pixels in the output of structured
semantic segmentation. This is different from most existing approaches that
attempt to adapt domains based on individual pixel-wise information in image,
feature, or output level. Specifically, we perform domain adaptation on the
affinity relationship between adjacent pixels termed affinity space of source
and target domain. To this end, we develop two affinity space adaptation
strategies: affinity space cleaning and adversarial affinity space alignment.
Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior
performance against some state-of-the-art methods on several challenging
benchmarks for semantic segmentation across domains. The code is available at
https://github.com/idealwei/ASANet.


  Computer vision-based deep learning object detection algorithms have been
developed sufficiently powerful to support the ability to recognize various
objects. Although there are currently general datasets for object detection,
there is still a lack of large-scale, open-source dataset for the construction
industry, which limits the developments of object detection algorithms as they
tend to be data-hungry. Therefore, this paper develops a new large-scale image
dataset specifically collected and annotated for the construction site, called
Site Object Detection dAtaset (SODA), which contains 15 kinds of object classes
categorized by workers, materials, machines, and layout. Firstly, more than
20,000 images were collected from multiple construction sites in different site
conditions, weather conditions, and construction phases, which covered
different angles and perspectives. After careful screening and processing,
19,846 images including 286,201 objects were then obtained and annotated with
labels in accordance with predefined categories. Statistical analysis shows
that the developed dataset is advantageous in terms of diversity and volume.
Further evaluation with two widely-adopted object detection algorithms based on
deep learning (YOLO v3/ YOLO v4) also illustrates the feasibility of the
dataset for typical construction scenarios, achieving a maximum mAP of 81.47%.
In this manner, this research contributes a large-scale image dataset for the
development of deep learning-based object detection methods in the construction
industry and sets up a performance benchmark for further evaluation of
corresponding algorithms in this area.


  This work focuses on a specific classification problem, where the information
about a sample is not readily available, but has to be acquired for a cost, and
there is a per-sample budget. Inspired by real-world use-cases, we analyze
average and hard variations of a directly specified budget. We postulate the
problem in its explicit formulation and then convert it into an equivalent MDP,
that can be solved with deep reinforcement learning. Also, we evaluate a
real-world inspired setting with sparse training dataset with missing features.
The presented method performs robustly well in all settings across several
distinct datasets, outperforming other prior-art algorithms. The method is
flexible, as showcased with all mentioned modifications and can be improved
with any domain independent advancement in RL.


  It was shown by Abe, Buhl and Dong that the vertex algebra $V_L^+$ and its
irreducible weak modules satisfy the $C_2$-cofiniteness condition when $L$ is a
positive definite even lattice. In this paper, we extend their results by
showing that the vertex algebra $V_L^+$ and its irreducible weak modules are
$C_2$-cofinite when $L$ is a negative definite even lattice and when $L$ is a
non-degenerate even lattice that is neither negative definite nor positive
definite.


  We have investigated the magnetoresistance (MR) and Hall resistivity
properties of the single crystals of tantalum sulfide, Ta3S2, which was
recently predicted to be a new type II Weyl semimetal. Large MR (up to ~8000%
at 2 K and 16 T), field-induced metal-insulator-like transition and nonlinear
Hall resistivity are observed at low temperatures. The large MR shows a strong
dependence on the field orientation, leading to a giant anisotropic
magnetoresistance (AMR) effect. For the field applied along the b-axis (B//b),
MR exhibits quadratic field dependence at low fields and tends towards
saturation at high fields; while for B//a, MR presents quadratic field
dependence at low fields and becomes linear at high fields without any trend
towards saturation. The analysis of the Hall resistivity data indicates the
coexistence of a large number of electrons with low mobility and a small number
of holes with high mobility. Shubnikov-de Haas (SdH) oscillation analysis
reveals three fundamental frequencies originated from the three-dimensional
(3D) Fermi surface (FS) pockets. We find that the semi-classical multiband
model is sufficient to account for the experimentally observed MR in Ta3S2.


  We report a search for $B^{0}$ decays into invisible final states using a
data sample of $657 \times 10^{6}$ $B\bar{B}$ pairs collected at the
$\Upsilon(4S)$ resonance with the Belle detector at the KEKB $e^{+}e^{-}$
collider. The signal is identified by fully reconstructing a hadronic decay of
the accompanying $B$ meson and requiring no other particles in the event. No
significant signal is observed, and we obtain an upper limit of $1.3 \times
10^{-4}$ at the 90% confidence level for the branching fraction of invisible
$B^{0}$ decay.


  Disentanglement is a problem in which multiple conversations occur in the
same channel simultaneously, and the listener should decide which utterance is
part of the conversation he will respond to. We propose a new model, named
Dialogue BERT (DialBERT), which integrates local and global semantics in a
single stream of messages to disentangle the conversations that mixed together.
We employ BERT to capture the matching information in each utterance pair at
the utterance-level, and use a BiLSTM to aggregate and incorporate the
context-level information. With only a 3% increase in parameters, a 12%
improvement has been attained in comparison to BERT, based on the F1-Score. The
model achieves a state-of-the-art result on the a new dataset proposed by IBM
and surpasses previous work by a substantial margin.


  In a recent note (arXiv:1209.2423) Renner claims that the criticisms of
Hirota and Yuen on the security foundation of quantum key distribution arose
from a logical mistake. In this paper it is shown that Renner misrepresents the
claims of Yuen and also Hirota while adopting one main theorem of Yuen in lieu
of his own previous error. This leads to his incoherent position which ignores
quantitative security criterion levels that undermine the current security
claims, a main point of the Yuen and Hirota criticisms. This security criterion
issue has never been properly addressed in the literature and is here fully
discussed, as are several common misconceptions on QKD security. Other
foundational issues are touched upon to bring out further the present
precarious state of quantum key distribution security proofs.


  Learning distributed representations of documents has pushed the
state-of-the-art in several natural language processing tasks and was
successfully applied to the field of recommender systems recently. In this
paper, we propose a novel content-based recommender system based on learned
representations and a generative model of user interest. Our method works as
follows: First, we learn representations on a corpus of text documents. Then,
we capture a user's interest as a generative model in the space of the document
representations. In particular, we model the distribution of interest for each
user as a Gaussian mixture model (GMM). Recommendations can be obtained
directly by sampling from a user's generative model. Using Latent semantic
analysis (LSA) as comparison, we compute and explore document representations
on the Delicious bookmarks dataset, a standard benchmark for recommender
systems. We then perform density estimation in both spaces and show that
learned representations outperform LSA in terms of predictive performance.


  A central problem in the study of resource theories is to find functions that
are nonincreasing under resource conversions - termed monotones - in order to
quantify resourcefulness. Various constructions of monotones appear in many
different concrete resource theories. How general are these constructions? What
are the necessary conditions on a resource theory for a given construction to
be applicable? To answer these questions, we introduce a broad scheme for
constructing monotones. It involves finding an order-preserving map from the
preorder of resources of interest to a distinct preorder for which nontrivial
monotones are previously known or can be more easily constructed; these
monotones are then pulled back through the map. In one of the two main classes
we study, the preorder of resources is mapped to a preorder of sets of
resources, where the order relation is set inclusion, such that monotones can
be defined via maximizing or minimizing the value of a function within these
sets. In the other class, the preorder of resources is mapped to a preorder of
tuples of resources, and one pulls back monotones that measure the amount of
distinguishability of the different elements of the tuple (hence its
information content). Monotones based on contractions arise naturally in the
latter class, and, more surprisingly, so do weight and robustness measures. In
addition to capturing many standard monotone constructions, our scheme also
suggests significant generalizations of these. In order to properly capture the
breadth of applicability of our results, we present them within a novel
abstract framework for resource theories in which the notion of composition is
independent of the types of the resources involved (i.e., whether they are
states, channels, combs, etc.).


  The aim of this paper is to develop bootstrap arguments to establish maximal,
oscillation, variational and jump inequalities for the discrete averaging Radon
operators on $\ell^p(\mathbb Z^d)$.


  This article deals with rotating magnetohydrodynamic flows of a thin
stratified layer of astrophysical plasma in a gravitational field with a
free-surface in a vertical external magnetic field. Magnetohydrodynamic
equations are obtained in the two-layer shallow water approximation in an
external magnetic field when plasma is divided into two layers of different
densities. In the beta-plane approximation a system of shallow water equations
for rotating stratified plasma in an external magnetic field is obtained. For
stationary initial conditions in the form of vertical or horizontal magnetic
field a linear theory has been developed and solutions have been found in the
form of magneto-Rossby waves with modifications to them describing the effects
of stratification. A qualitative analysis of the dispersion curves shows the
presence of three-wave nonlinear interactions of magneto-Rossby waves for each
of the stationary solutions. The appearance of parametric instabilities is
shown and their increments are found.


  We derive a holographic prediction of the deconfinement temperature $T_c$ at
vanishing chemical potential within a simplest AdS/QCD model with dynamical
dilaton. Our analysis leads to a linear relation between $T_c^4$ and the gluon
condensate. After normalizing this relation to the lattice data for $SU(3)$
pure gauge theory, the standard phenomenological value of gluon condensate from
QCD sum rules leads to the prediction $T_c=156$ MeV which is in a perfect
agreement with the modern lattice results and freeze-out temperature measured
by the ALICE Collaboration.


  The University of Rochester infrared detector group is working together with
Teledyne Imaging Sensors to develop HgCdTe 15 $\mu m$ cutoff wavelength
detector arrays for future space missions. To reach the 15 $\mu m$ cutoff goal,
we took an intermediate step by developing four $\sim$13 $\mu m$ cutoff
wavelength arrays to identify any unforeseen effects related to increasing the
cutoff wavelength from the extensively characterized 10 $\mu m$ cutoff
wavelength detector arrays developed for the NEOCam mission. The
characterization of the $\sim$13 $\mu m$ cutoff wavelength HgCdTe arrays at the
University of Rochester allowed us to determine the key dark current mechanisms
that limit the performance of these HgCdTe detector arrays at different
temperatures and bias when the cutoff wavelength is increased. We present
initial dark current and well depth measurements of a 15 $\mu m$ cutoff array
which shows dark current values two orders of magnitude smaller at large
reverse bias than would be expected from our previous best structures.


  Advances in mobile and wearable technologies have enabled the potential to
passively monitor a person's mental, behavioral, and affective health. These
approaches typically rely on longitudinal collection of self-reported outcomes,
e.g., depression, stress, and anxiety, to train machine learning (ML) models.
However, the need to continuously self-report adds a significant burden on the
participants, often resulting in attrition, missing labels, or insincere
responses. In this work, we introduce the Scale Scores Simulation using Mental
Models (SeSaMe) framework to alleviate participants' burden in digital mental
health studies. By leveraging pre-trained large language models (LLMs), SeSaMe
enables the simulation of participants' responses on psychological scales. In
SeSaMe, researchers can prompt LLMs with information on participants' internal
behavioral dispositions, enabling LLMs to construct mental models of
participants to simulate their responses on psychological scales. We
demonstrate an application of SeSaMe, where we use GPT-4 to simulate responses
on one scale using responses from another as behavioral information. We also
evaluate the alignment between human and SeSaMe-simulated responses to
psychological scales. Then, we present experiments to inspect the utility of
SeSaMe-simulated responses as ground truth in training ML models by replicating
established depression and anxiety screening tasks from a previous study. Our
results indicate SeSaMe to be a promising approach, but its alignment may vary
across scales and specific prediction objectives. We also observed that model
performance with simulated data was on par with using the real data for
training in most evaluation scenarios. We conclude by discussing the potential
implications of SeSaMe in addressing some challenges researchers face with
ground-truth collection in passive sensing studies.


  Payment protocols developed to realize off-chain transactions in Payment
channel network (PCN) assumes the underlying routing algorithm transfers the
payment via a single path. However, a path may not have sufficient capacity to
route a transaction. It is inevitable to split the payment across multiple
paths. If we run independent instances of the protocol on each path, the
execution may fail in some of the paths, leading to partial transfer of funds.
A payer has to reattempt the entire process for the residual amount. We propose
a secure and privacy-preserving payment protocol, CryptoMaze. Instead of
independent paths, the funds are transferred from sender to receiver across
several payment channels responsible for routing, in a breadth-first fashion.
Payments are resolved faster at reduced setup cost, compared to existing
state-of-the-art. Correlation among the partial payments is captured,
guaranteeing atomicity. Further, two party ECDSA signature is used for
establishing scriptless locks among parties involved in the payment. It reduces
space overhead by leveraging on core Bitcoin scripts. We provide a formal model
in the Universal Composability framework and state the privacy goals achieved
by CryptoMaze. We compare the performance of our protocol with the existing
single path based payment protocol, Multi-hop HTLC, applied iteratively on one
path at a time on several instances. It is observed that CryptoMaze requires
less communication overhead and low execution time, demonstrating efficiency
and scalability.


  We have investigated quantum phase transition employing the quantum
renormalization group (QRG) method while in most previous literature barely
entanglement (concurrence) has been demonstrated. However, it is now well known
that entanglement is not the only signature of quantum correlations and a
variety of computable measures have been developed to characterize quantum
correlations in the composite systems. As an illustration, two cases are
elaborated: one dimensional anisotropic (i) XXZ model and (ii) XY model, with
various measures of quantum correlations, including quantum discord (QD),
geometric discord (GD), measure-induced disturbance (MID), measure-induced
nonlocality (MIN) and violation of Bell inequalities (eg. CHSH inequality). We
have proved that all these correlation measures can effectively detect the
quantum critical points associated with quantum phase transitions (QPT) after
several iterations of the renormalization in both cases. Nonetheless, it is
shown that some of their dynamical behaviors are not totally similar with
entanglement and even when concurrence vanishes there still exists some kind of
quantum correlations which is not captured by entanglement. Intriguingly, CHSH
inequality can never be violated in the whole iteration procedure, which
indicates block-block entanglement can not revealed by the CHSH inequality.
Moreover, the nonanalytic and scaling behaviors of Bell violation have also
been discussed in detail. As a byproduct, we verify that measure-induced
disturbance is exactly equal to the quantum discord measured by \sigma_z for
general X-structured states.


  To each finite subset of $\mathbb{Z}^2$ (a diagram), one can associate a
subvariety of a complex Grassmannian (a diagram variety), and a representation
of a symmetric group (a Specht module). Liu has conjectured that the cohomology
class of a diagram variety is represented by the Frobenius characteristic of
the corresponding Specht module. We give a counterexample to this conjecture.
  However, we show that for the diagram variety of a permutation diagram, Liu's
conjectured cohomology class $\sigma$ is at least an upper bound on the actual
class $\tau$, in the sense that $\sigma - \tau$ is a nonnegative linear
combination of Schubert classes. To do this, we exhibit the appropriate diagram
variety as a component in a degeneration of one of Knutson's interval positroid
varieties (up to Grassmann duality). A priori, the cohomology classes of these
interval positroid varieties are represented by affine Stanley symmetric
functions. We give a different formula for these classes as ordinary Stanley
symmetric functions, one with the advantage of being Schur-positive and
compatible with inclusions between Grassmannians.


  The fractional Laplacian in R^d has multiple equivalent characterizations.
Moreover, in bounded domains, boundary conditions must be incorporated in these
characterizations in mathematically distinct ways, and there is currently no
consensus in the literature as to which definition of the fractional Laplacian
in bounded domains is most appropriate for a given application. The Riesz (or
integral) definition, for example, admits a nonlocal boundary condition, where
the value of a function u(x) must be prescribed on the entire exterior of the
domain in order to compute its fractional Laplacian. In contrast, the spectral
definition requires only the standard local boundary condition. These
differences, among others, lead us to ask the question: "What is the fractional
Laplacian?" We compare several commonly used definitions of the fractional
Laplacian (the Riesz, spectral, directional, and horizon-based nonlocal
definitions), and we use a joint theoretical and computational approach to
examining their different characteristics by studying solutions of related
fractional Poisson equations formulated on bounded domains.
  In this work, we provide new numerical methods as well as a self-contained
discussion of state-of-the-art methods for discretizing the fractional
Laplacian, and we present new results on the differences in features,
regularity, and boundary behaviors of solutions to equations posed with these
different definitions. We present stochastic interpretations and demonstrate
the equivalence between some recent formulations. Through our efforts, we aim
to further engage the research community in open problems and assist
practitioners in identifying the most appropriate definition and computational
approach to use for their mathematical models in addressing anomalous transport
in diverse applications.


  Using Evans function techniques, we develop a stability index for weak and
strong detonation waves analogous to that developed for shock waves in
[GZ,BSZ], yielding useful necessary conditions for stability. Here, we carry
out the analysis in the context of the Majda model, a simplified model for
reacting flow; the method is extended to the full Navier-Stokes equations of
reacting flow in [Ly,LyZ]. The resulting stability condition is satisfied for
all nondegenerate, i.e., spatially exponentially decaying, weak and strong
detonations of the Majda model in agreement with numerical experiments of [CMR]
and analytical results of [Sz,LY] for a related model of Majda and Rosales. We
discuss also the role in the ZND limit of degenerate, subalgebraically decaying
weak detonation and (for a modified, ``bump-type'' ignition function)
deflagration profiles, as discussed in [GS.1-2] for the full equations.


  A model of dark matter and dark energy based on the concept of gravitational
polarization is investigated. We propose an action in standard general
relativity for describing, at some effective or phenomenological level, the
dynamics of a dipolar medium, i.e. one endowed with a dipole moment vector, and
polarizable in a gravitational field. Using first-order cosmological
perturbations, we show that the dipolar fluid is undistinguishable from
standard dark energy (a cosmological constant Lambda) plus standard dark matter
(a pressureless perfect fluid), and therefore benefits from the successes of
the Lambda-CDM (Lambda-cold dark matter) scenario at cosmological scales.
Invoking an argument of "weak clusterisation" of the mass distribution of
dipole moments, we find that the dipolar dark matter reproduces the
phenomenology of the modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND) at galactic scales. The
dipolar medium action naturally contains a cosmological constant, and we show
that if the model is to come from some fundamental underlying physics, the
cosmological constant Lambda should be of the order of a0^2/c^4, where a0
denotes the MOND constant acceleration scale, in good agreement with
observations.


  Nonlinear PDE's having {\bf given} conditional symmetries are constructed.
They are obtained starting from the invariants of the "conditional symmetry"
generator and imposing the extra condition given by the characteristic of the
symmetry. Several of examples starting from the Boussinesq and including
non-autonomous Korteweg-De Vries like equations are given to showcase the
methodology introduced.


  Diffusion models that can generate high-quality data from randomly sampled
Gaussian noises have become the mainstream generative method in both academia
and industry. Are randomly sampled Gaussian noises equally good for diffusion
models? While a large body of works tried to understand and improve diffusion
models, previous works overlooked the possibility to select or optimize the
sampled noise the possibility of selecting or optimizing sampled noises for
improving diffusion models. In this paper, we mainly made three contributions.
First, we report that not all noises are created equally for diffusion models.
We are the first to hypothesize and empirically observe that the generation
quality of diffusion models significantly depend on the noise inversion
stability. This naturally provides us a noise selection method according to the
inversion stability. Second, we further propose a novel noise optimization
method that actively enhances the inversion stability of arbitrary given
noises. Our method is the first one that works on noise space to generally
improve generated results without fine-tuning diffusion models. Third, our
extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed noise selection and noise
optimization methods both significantly improve representative diffusion
models, such as SDXL and SDXL-turbo, in terms of human preference and other
objective evaluation metrics. For example, the human preference winning rates
of noise selection and noise optimization over the baselines can be up to 57%
and 72.5%, respectively, on DrawBench.


  We examine the question of which characteristic functions yield
Weyl-Heisenberg frames for various values of the parameters. We also give
numerous applications of frames of characteristic functions to the general case
(g,a,b).


  We discuss a special function (polyexponential) that extends the natural
exponential function and also the exponential integral. The basic properties of
the polyexponential are listed and some applications are given. In particular,
it is shown that certain Mellin integrals can be evaluated in terms of
polyexponentials. The polyexponential is related to the exponential
polynomials, the Riemann zeta function, the Dirichlet eta function and the
Lerch Transcendent.


  This paper presents a work on extending the adverbial entries of LGLex: a NLP
oriented syntactic resource for French. Adverbs were extracted from the
Lexicon-Grammar tables of both simple adverbs ending in -ment '-ly' (Molinier
and Levrier, 2000) and compound adverbs (Gross, 1986; 1990). This work relies
on the exploitation of fine-grained linguistic information provided in existing
resources. Various features are encoded in both LG tables and they haven't been
exploited yet. They describe the relations of deleting, permuting, intensifying
and paraphrasing that associate, on the one hand, the simple and compound
adverbs and, on the other hand, different types of compound adverbs. The
resulting syntactic resource is manually evaluated and freely available under
the LGPL-LR license.


  Experiments in several intramolecular singlet fission materials have
indicated that the triplet-triplet spin biexciton has a much longer lifetime
than believed until recently, opening up loss mechanisms that can annihilate
the biexciton prior to its dissociation to free triplets. We have performed
many-body calculations of excited state wavefunctions of hypothetical
phenylene-linked anthracene molecules to better understand linker-dependent
behavior of dimers of larger acenes being investigated as potential singlet
fission candidates. The calculations reveal unanticipated features that we show
carry over to the real covalently-linked pentacene dimers. Dissociation of the
correlated triplet-triplet spin biexciton and free triplet generation may be
difficult in acene dimers where the formation of the triplet-triplet spin
biexciton is truly ultrafast. Conversely, relatively slower biexciton formation
may indicate smaller spin biexciton binding energy and greater yield of free
triplets. Currently available experimental results appear to support this
conclusion. Whether or not the two distinct behaviors are consequences of
distinct mechanisms of triplet-triplet generation from the optical singlet is
an interesting theoretical question.


  We propose to utilize symmetry-protected zero modes of a photonic lattice to
realize a single-mode, fixed-frequency, and spatially tunable laser. These
properties are the consequence of the underlying non-Hermitian particle-hole
symmetry, with which the energy spectrum satisfies
$\varepsilon_m=-\varepsilon_n^*$. Unlike in the Hermitian case, the symmetric
phase of particle-hole symmetry is no longer restricted to $\varepsilon=0$ but
extends along the imaginary-$\varepsilon$ axis, which is set by the
single-cavity frequency and symmetry-protected against position and coupling
disorder of the photonic lattice. By selectively pumping different cavities in
the photonic lattice, we control the spontaneous symmetry restoration process,
which provides a convenient method to tune the spatial profile of the laser
without changing its frequency.


  We show how to compute the probability of any given local configuration in a
random tiling of the plane with dominos. That is, we explicitly compute the
measures of cylinder sets for the measure of maximal entropy $\mu$ on the space
of tilings of the plane with dominos.
  We construct a measure $\nu$ on the set of lozenge tilings of the plane, show
that its entropy is the topological entropy, and compute explicitly the
$\nu$-measures of cylinder sets.
  As applications of these results, we prove that the translation action is
strongly mixing for $\mu$ and $\nu$, and compute the rate of convergence to
mixing (the correlation between distant events). For the measure $\nu$ we
compute the variance of the height function.


  We investigate the problem of backscattering off a time-dependent impurity in
a one-dimensional electron gas. By combining the Schwinger-Keldysh method with
an adiabatic approximation in order to deal with the corresponding out of
equilibrium Dirac equation, we compute the total energy density (TED) of the
system. We show how the free fermion TED is distorted by the backscattering
amplitude and the geometry of the impurity.


  We present an analysis of an extended Rayleigh-Plesset (RP) equation for a
three dimensional cell of microorganisms such as bacteria or viruses in some
liquid, where the cell membrane in bacteria or the envelope (capsid) in viruses
possess elastic properties. To account for rapid changes in the shape
configuration of such microorganisms, the bubble membrane/envelope must be
rigid to resist large pressures while being flexible to adapt to growth or
decay. Such properties are embedded in the RP equation by including a pressure
bending term that is proportional to the square of the curvature of the elastic
wall. Analytical solutions to this extended equation are obtained in terms of
elliptic functions.


  The Noether-Bessel-Hagen theorem can be considered a natural extension of
Noether Theorem to search for symmetries. Here, we develop the approach for
dynamical systems introducing the basic foundations of the method.
Specifically, we establish the Noether-Bessel-Hagen analysis of mechanical
systems where external forces are present. In the second part of the paper, the
approach is adopted to select symmetries for a given systems. In particular, we
focus on the case of harmonic oscillator as a testbed for the theory, and on a
cosmological system derived from scalar-tensor gravity with unknown
scalar-field potential $V (\varphi)$. We show that the shape of potential is
selected by the presence of symmetries. The approach results particularly
useful as soon as the Lagrangian of a given system is not immediately
identifiable or it is not a Lagrangian system.


  If $Y$ is a closed orientable graph manifold, we show that $Y$ admits a
coorientable taut foliation if and only if $Y$ is not an L-space. Combined with
previous work of Boyer and Clay, this implies that $Y$ is an L-space if and
only if $\pi_1(Y)$ is not left-orderable.


  We prove that Fano complete intersections in projective spaces satisfy
Conjecture $\mathcal O$ proposed by Galkin-Golyshev-Iritani.


  We analyze the non-gaussian density perturbations generated in
ekpyrotic/cyclic models based on heterotic M-theory. In this picture, two
scalar fields produce nearly scale-invariant entropic perturbations during an
ekpyrotic phase that are converted into curvature modes {\it after the
ekpyrotic phase is complete} and just before the big bang. Both intrinsic
non-linearity in the entropy perturbation and the conversion process contribute
to non-gaussianity. The range of the non-gaussianity parameter $f_{NL}$ depends
on how gradual the conversion process is and the steepness of the scalar field
potential during the ekpyrotic phase. Although a wider range is possible, in
principle, natural values of the ekpyrotic parameters combined with a gradual
conversion process lead to values of $-60 \lesssim f_{NL} \lesssim +80$,
typically much greater than slow-roll inflation but within the current
observational bounds.


  Color centers in diamond are versatile solid state atomic-like systems
suitable for quantum technological applications. In particular, the negatively
charged silicon vacancy center (SiV) can exhibit a narrow photoluminescence
(PL) line and lifetime-limited linewidth in bulk diamonds at cryogenic
temperature. We present a low-temperature study of chemical vapour deposition
(CVD)-grown diamond nano-pyramids containing SiV centers. The PL spectra
feature a bulk-like zero-phonon line with ensembles of SiV centers, with a
linewidth below 10 GHz which demonstrates very low crystal strain for such a
nano-object.


  We argue that there is a relationship between stochastic quantization and
AdS/CFT, and we present an explicit calculation to support our claim. In
particular, we show that a conformally coupled scalar with phi4 interaction on
AdS4 is related, via stochastic quantization as well as via AdS/CFT, to a
massless scalar with phi6 interaction in 3d. We show that our results have an
underlying geometric origin, which might help to elucidate further the proposed
relationship between stochastic quantization and holography.


  3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has shown a powerful capability for novel view
synthesis due to its detailed expressive ability and highly efficient rendering
speed. Unfortunately, creating relightable 3D assets with 3DGS is still
problematic, particularly for reflective objects, as its discontinuous
representation raises difficulties in constraining geometries. Inspired by
previous works, the signed distance field (SDF) can serve as an effective way
for geometry regularization. However, a direct incorporation between Gaussians
and SDF significantly slows training. To this end, we propose GS-ROR for
reflective objects relighting with 3DGS aided by SDF priors. At the core of our
method is the mutual supervision of the depth and normal between deferred
Gaussians and SDF, which avoids the expensive volume rendering of SDF. Thanks
to this mutual supervision, the learned deferred Gaussians are well-constrained
with a minimal time cost. As the Gaussians are rendered in a deferred shading
mode, while the alpha-blended Gaussians are smooth, individual Gaussians may
still be outliers, yielding floater artifacts. Therefore, we further introduce
an SDF-aware pruning strategy to remove Gaussian outliers, which are located
distant from the surface defined by SDF, avoiding the floater issue.
Consequently, our method outperforms the existing Gaussian-based inverse
rendering methods in terms of relighting quality. Our method also exhibits
competitive relighting quality compared to NeRF-based methods with at most 25%
of training time and allows rendering at 200+ frames per second on an RTX4090.


  Optimally selecting a subset of targets from a larger catalog is a common
problem in astronomy and cosmology. A specific example is the selection of
targets from an imaging survey for multi-object spectrographic follow-up. We
present a new heuristic algorithm, HYBRID, for this purpose and undertake
detailed studies of its performance. HYBRID combines elements of the simulated
annealing, MCMC and particle-swarm methods and is particularly successful in
cases where the survey landscape has multiple curvature or clustering scales.
HYBRID consistently outperforms the other methods, especially in
high-dimensionality spaces with many extrema. This means many fewer simulations
must be run to reach a given performance confidence level and implies very
significant advantages in solving complex or computationally expensive
optimisation problems.


  We demonstrate field and current controlled magnetodynamics in nanocontact
spin-torque nano-oscillators (STNOs) based on orthogonal magnetic tunnel
junctions (MTJs). We systematically analyze the microwave properties (frequency
$f$, linewidth $\Delta f$, power $P$, and frequency tunability $df/dI$) with
their physical origins---perpendicular magnetic anisotropy (PMA), damping-like
and field-like spin transfer torque (STT), and voltage-controlled magnetic
anisotropy (VCMA). These devices present several advantageous characteristics:
high emission frequencies ($f> 20$ GHz), high frequency tunability
($df/dI=0.25$~GHz/mA), and zero-field operation ($f\sim 4$ GHz). Furthermore, a
detailed investigation of $f(H, I)$ reveals that $df/dI$ is mostly governed by
the large VCMA (287~fJ/(V$\cdot$m)), while STT plays a negligible role.


  We discuss recent developments in lattice QCD for the bulk thermodynamics of
the transition. We review the current status of the equation of state, the
possible implications of a magnetic field and the fluctuations of conserved
charges, like the net electric charge or baryon number. We also show
predictions for higher cumulants, which will be experimentally available in
near future.


  The in-ice or in-water Cherenkov neutrino telescope such as IceCube has
already proved its power in measuring the Glashow resonance by searching for
the bump around $E^{}_{\rm \nu} = 6.3~{\rm PeV}$ arising from the $W$-boson
production. In the next few decades, there are many proposals that observe
cosmic tau neutrinos with extensive air showers, also known as tau neutrino
telescopes. As has been recognized, the air shower telescope is in principle
sensitive to the Glashow resonance via the channel $W \to \tau \nu^{}_{\tau}$
followed by the tau decay in the air. However, with a thorough numerical
analysis we have identified several limitations for those telescopes on hunting
the resonance. If ultrahigh-energy neutrinos are dominantly produced from the
meson decay, it will be statistically difficult for a rather advanced proposal,
such as TAMBO with a geometric area around $500~{\rm km^2}$, to discriminate
the Glashow resonance induced by $\overline{\nu}^{}_{e}$ from the intrinsic
$\nu^{}_{\tau}/\overline{\nu}^{}_{\tau}$ background. The discovery significance
is only around $1\sigma$ considering the flux parameters measured by IceCube as
the input. Nevertheless, the significance will be improved to $90\%$ if PeV
neutrinos mainly originate from the neutron decay, which is, however, thought
to be only a subdominant neutrino source. The presence of new physics can also
increase the significance. Compared to the in-ice or in-water telescope, the
challenge for the Glashow resonance search is ascribed to several factors: (i)
a suppressed branching ratio of $11\%$ for the decay $W \to \tau
\nu^{}_{\tau}$; (ii) the smearing effect and the reduced acceptance because the
daughter neutrino takes away $\langle y \rangle \sim 75\%$ of the energy from
the $W$ decay; (iii) a large attenuation effect for Earth-skimming neutrinos
with the resonance.


  In the present work, we perform time-series analysis on the latitude bins of
the solar full disk (SFD) images of Nobeyama Radioheliograph (NoRH) at 17 GHz.
The flux modulation method traces the passage of radio features over the solar
disc and the autocorrelation analysis of the time-series data of SFD images
(one per day) for the period 1999-2001 gives the rotation period as a function
of latitude extending from 60 degree S to 60 degree N. The results show that
the solar corona rotates less differentially than the photosphere and
chromosphere, i.e., it has smaller gradient in the rotation rate.


  Motivated by the desire to image exosolar planets, recent work by us and
others has shown that high-contrast imaging can be achieved using specially
shaped pupil masks. To date, the masks we have designed have been symmetric
with respect to a cartesian coordinate system but were not rotationally
invariant, thus requiring that one take multiple images at different angles of
rotation about the central point in order to obtain high-contrast in all
directions. In this paper, we present a new class of masks that have rotational
symmetry and provide high-contrast in all directions with just one image. These
masks provide the required 10^{-10} level of contrast to within 4 lambda/D, and
in some cases 3 lambda/D, of the central point, which is deemed necessary for
exosolar planet finding/imaging. They are also well-suited for use on
ground-based telescopes, and perhaps NGST too, since they can accommodate
central obstructions and associated support spiders.


  It is shown that some of the physical properties of inert gas (IG)
condensates (polarizability, compressibility, metallization under pressure,
equation of state) may be well described taking into account the first excited
state of atoms only. The Herzfeld criterion of metallization well corresponds
to the Mott transition criterion and to the percolation threshold. For metallic
xenon concentration of the molecular type excitations corresponds to the Bose
condensation temperature $T_C\sim 4000K$. The BCS formula gives $T_c\sim
5000K$. If phonons are changed by fluctuations of interatomic interaction
energy. A simple relations between the parameters of atoms at metallization has
been found.


  The Nilsson et al. (2006) Lyman-alpha nebula has often been cited as the most
plausible example of a Lyman-alpha nebula powered by gravitational cooling. In
this paper, we bring together new data from the Hubble Space Telescope and the
Herschel Space Observatory as well as comparisons to recent theoretical
simulations in order to revisit the questions of the local environment and most
likely power source for the Lyman-alpha nebula. In contrast to previous
results, we find that this Lyman-alpha nebula is associated with 6 nearby
galaxies and an obscured AGN that is offset by $\sim$4"$\approx$30 kpc from the
Lyman-alpha peak. The local region is overdense relative to the field, by a
factor of $\sim$10, and at low surface brightness levels the Lyman-alpha
emission appears to encircle the position of the obscured AGN, highly
suggestive of a physical association. At the same time, we confirm that there
is no compact continuum source located within $\sim$2-3"$\approx$15-23 kpc of
the Lyman-alpha peak. Since the latest cold accretion simulations predict that
the brightest Lyman-alpha emission will be coincident with a central growing
galaxy, we conclude that this is actually a strong argument against, rather
than for, the idea that the nebula is gravitationally-powered. While we may be
seeing gas within cosmic filaments, this gas is primarily being lit up, not by
gravitational energy, but due to illumination from a nearby buried AGN.


  Collaborative filtering (CF) based recommender systems are typically trained
based on personal interaction data (e.g., clicks and purchases) that could be
naturally represented as ego graphs. However, most existing recommendation
methods collect these ego graphs from all users to compose a global graph to
obtain high-order collaborative information between users and items, and these
centralized CF recommendation methods inevitably lead to a high risk of user
privacy leakage. Although recently proposed federated recommendation systems
can mitigate the privacy problem, they either restrict the on-device local
training to an isolated ego graph or rely on an additional third-party server
to access other ego graphs resulting in a cumbersome pipeline, which is hard to
work in practice. In addition, existing federated recommendation systems
require resource-limited devices to maintain the entire embedding tables
resulting in high communication costs.
  In light of this, we propose a semi-decentralized federated ego graph
learning framework for on-device recommendations, named SemiDFEGL, which
introduces new device-to-device collaborations to improve scalability and
reduce communication costs and innovatively utilizes predicted interacted item
nodes to connect isolated ego graphs to augment local subgraphs such that the
high-order user-item collaborative information could be used in a
privacy-preserving manner. Furthermore, the proposed framework is
model-agnostic, meaning that it could be seamlessly integrated with existing
graph neural network-based recommendation methods and privacy protection
techniques. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed SemiDFEGL, extensive
experiments are conducted on three public datasets, and the results demonstrate
the superiority of the proposed SemiDFEGL compared to other federated
recommendation methods.


  Most back hole and neutron star progenitors are found in triples or higher
multiplicity systems. Here, we present a new triple stellar evolution code,
${\tt TSE}$, which simultaneously takes into account the physics of the stars
and their gravitational interaction. ${\tt TSE}$ is used to simulate the
evolution of massive stellar triples in the galactic field from the
zero-age-main-sequence until they form compact objects. To this end, we
implement initial conditions that incorporate the observed high correlation
between the orbital parameters of early-type stars. We show that the
interaction with a tertiary companion can significantly impact the evolution of
the inner binary. High eccentricities can be induced by the third-body
dynamical effects, leading to a Roche lobe overflow or even to a stellar merger
from initial binary separations $~10^3$ - $10^5\,\rm R_\odot$. In $\sim5\,\%$
of the systems the tertiary companion itself fills its Roche lobe, while $\sim
10\,\%$ of all systems become dynamically unstable. We find that between
$0.3\%$ and $5\%$ of systems form a stable triple with an inner compact object
binary, where the exact fraction depends on metallicity and the natal kick
prescription. The vast majority of these triples are binary black holes with
black hole companions. We find no binary neutron star in any surviving triple,
unless zero natal kicks are assumed. About half of all black hole binaries
formed in our models are in triples, where in the majority the tertiary black
hole is able to perturb their long-term evolution. Our results show that triple
interactions are key to a full understanding of massive star evolution and
compact object binary formation.


  Oligo pools are array-synthesized, user-defined mixtures of single-stranded
oligonucleotides that can be used as a source of synthetic DNA for library
cloning. While currently offering the most affordable source of synthetic DNA,
oligo pools also come with limitations such as a maximum synthesis length
(approximately 350 bases), a higher error rate compared to alternative
synthesis methods, and the presence of truncated molecules in the pool due to
incomplete synthesis. Here, we provide users with a comprehensive protocol that
details how oligo pools can be used in combination with Golden Gate cloning to
create user-defined protein mutant libraries, as well as single guide RNA
libraries for CRISPR applications. Our methods are optimized to work within the
Yeast Toolkit Golden Gate scheme, but are in principle compatible with any
other Golden Gate-based modular cloning toolkit and extendable to other
restriction enzyme-based cloning methods beyond Golden Gate. Our methods yield
high-quality, affordable, in-house variant libraries.


  We show that current localization in polycrystalline varistors occurs on
paths which are, usually, in the universality class of the directed polymer in
a random medium. We also show that in ceramic superconductors, voltage
localizes on a surface which maps to an Ising domain wall. The emergence of
these manifolds is explained and their structure is illustrated using direct
solution of non-linear resistor networks.


  We propose a scheme which encodes information in both the longitudinal and
spatial transverse phases of a continuous-wave optical beam. A split
detector-based interferometric scheme is then introduced to optimally detect
both encoded phase signals. In contrast to present-day optical storage devices,
our phase coding scheme has an information storage capacity which scales with
the power of the read-out optical beam. We analyse the maximum number of
encoding possibilities at the shot noise limit. In addition, we show that using
squeezed light, the shot noise limit can be overcome and the number of encoding
possibilities increased. We discuss a possible application of our phase coding
scheme for increasing the capacities of optical storage devices.


  We study the convergence of stochastic fixed point iterations in the
consistent case (in the sense of Butnariu and Fl{\aa}m (1995)) in several
different settings, under decreasingly restrictive regularity assumptions of
the fixed point mappings. The iterations are Markov chains and, for the
purposes of this study, convergence is understood in very restrictive terms. We
show that sufficient conditions for geometric (linear) convergence in
expectation of stochastic projection algorithms presented in Nedi\'c (2011),
are in fact necessary for geometric (linear) convergence in expectation more
generally of iterated random functions.


  L. Lamata et al. have presented an entanglement classification of four qubits
under stochastic local operation and classical communication (SLOCC) based on
inductive approach [Phys. Rev. A \textbf{75}, 022318 (2007)]. While it works
well for three qubits, we show that some of the families for four qubits have
overlaps and hence this approach is not valid for entanglement classification
of four or more qubits under SLOCC.


  The two body problem in a scalar theory of gravity is investigated. We focus
on the closest theory to General Relativity (GR), namely Nordstr\"om's theory
of gravity (1913). The gravitational field can be exactly solved for any
configuration of point-particles. We then derive the exact equations of motion
of two inspiraling bodies including the exact self-forces terms. We prove that
there is no innermost circular orbit (ICO) in the exact theory whereas we find
(order-dependent) ICOs if post-Newtonian (PN) truncations are used. We
construct a solution of the two body problem in an iterative (non-PN) way,
which can be viewed as a series in powers of $(v/c)^{5}$. Besides this rapid
convergence, each order also provides non-perturbative information. Starting
from a circular Newtonian-like orbit, the first iteration already yields the
4.5 PN radiation reaction. These results not only shed light on some
non-perturbative effects of relativistic gravity, but may also be useful to
test numerical codes.


  In this paper we study a family of nonlinear $\sigma$-models in which the
target space is the super manifold $H^{2|2N}$. These models generalize
Zirnbauer's $H^{2|2}$ nonlinear $\sigma$-model which has a number of special
features for which we find analogs in the general case. For example, by
supersymmetric localization, the partition function of the $H^{2|2}$ model is a
constants independent of the coupling constants. Here we show that for the
$H^{2|2N}$ model, the partition function is a multivariate polynomial of degree
$N-1$, increasing in each variable. We use these facts to provide estimates on
the Fourier and Laplace transforms of the '$t$-field' when these models are
specialized to $\mathbb{Z}^2$. From the bounds, we conclude the $t$-field
exhibits polynomial decay of correlations and has fluctuations which are at
least those of a massless free field.


  We show that the mean-model parameter is always orthogonal to the error
distribution in generalized linear models. Thus, the maximum likelihood
estimator of the mean-model parameter will be asymptotically efficient
regardless of whether the error distribution is known completely, known up to a
finite vector of parameters, or left completely unspecified, in which case the
likelihood is taken to be an appropriate semiparametric likelihood. Moreover,
the maximum likelihood estimator of the mean-model parameter will be
asymptotically independent of the maximum likelihood estimator of the error
distribution. This generalizes some well-known results for the special cases of
normal, gamma and multinomial regression models, and, perhaps more
interestingly, suggests that asymptotically efficient estimation and inferences
can always be obtained if the error distribution is nonparametrically estimated
along with the mean. In contrast, estimation and inferences using misspecified
error distributions or variance functions are generally not efficient.


  This paper proposes the novel task of video generation conditioned on a
SINGLE semantic label map, which provides a good balance between flexibility
and quality in the generation process. Different from typical end-to-end
approaches, which model both scene content and dynamics in a single step, we
propose to decompose this difficult task into two sub-problems. As current
image generation methods do better than video generation in terms of detail, we
synthesize high quality content by only generating the first frame. Then we
animate the scene based on its semantic meaning to obtain the temporally
coherent video, giving us excellent results overall. We employ a cVAE for
predicting optical flow as a beneficial intermediate step to generate a video
sequence conditioned on the initial single frame. A semantic label map is
integrated into the flow prediction module to achieve major improvements in the
image-to-video generation process. Extensive experiments on the Cityscapes
dataset show that our method outperforms all competing methods.


  We investigated the experiences of 15 parents and their tween children (ages
8-12, n=23) during nature explorations using the NatureCollections app, a
mobile application that connects children with nature. Drawing on parent
interviews and in-app audio recordings from a 2-week deployment study, we found
that tweens experiences with the NatureCollections app were influenced by
tensions surrounding how parents and tweens negotiate technology use more
broadly. Despite these tensions, the app succeeded in engaging tweens in
outdoor nature explorations, and parents valued the shared family experiences
around nature. Parents desired the app to support family bonding and inform
them about how their tween used the app. This work shows how applications
intended to support enriching youth experiences are experienced in the context
of screen time tensions between parents and tween during a transitional period
of child development. We offer recommendations for designing digital
experiences to support family needs and reduce screen time tensions.


  Product states are always considered as the states that don't contain quantum
correlation. We discuss here when a quantum channel sends the product states to
themselves. The exact forms of such channels are proposed. It is shown that
such a quantum channel is a local quantum channel, a composition of a local
quantum channel and a flip operation, or such that one of the local states is
fixed. Both finite- and infinite-dimensional systems are considered.


  We examine the dynamic and geometric phases of the electron in quantum
mechanics using Hestenes' spacetime algebra formalism. First the standard
dynamic phase formula is translated into the spacetime algebra. We then define
new formulas for the dynamic and geometric phases that can be used in Hestenes'
formalism.


  A search for the decays $B_c^+ \to J/\psi D^{(*)0} K^+$ and $B_c^+ \to J/\psi
D^{(*)+} K^{*0}$ is performed with data collected at the LHCb experiment
corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 3 fb$^{-1}$. The decays $B_c^+ \to
J/\psi D^0 K^+$ and $B_c^+ \to J/\psi D^{*0} K^+$ are observed for the first
time, while first evidence is reported for the $B_c^+ \to J/\psi D^{*+} K^{*0}$
and $B_c^+ \to J/\psi D^+ K^{*0}$ decays. The branching fractions of these
decays are determined relative to the $B_c^+ \to J/\psi \pi^+$ decay. The
$B_c^+$ mass is measured, using the $J/\psi D^0 K^+$ final state, to be
$6274.28 \pm 1.40 (stat) \pm 0.32 (syst)$ MeV/$c^2$. This is the most precise
single measurement of the $B_c^+$ mass to date.


  The atomistic resolution recently achieved by ultrafast spectroscopies
demands corresponding theoretical advances. Real-time time-dependent
density-functional theory (RT-TDDFT) with Ehrenfest dynamics offers an optimal
trade-off between accuracy and computational costs to study electronic and
vibrational dynamics of laser-excited materials in the sub-picosecond regime.
However, this approach is unable to account for thermal effects or zero-point
energies which are crucial in the physics involved. Herein, we adopt a
quantum-semiclassical method based on RT-TDDFT+Ehrenfest to simulate
laser-induced electronic and vibrational coherences in condensed matter. With
the example of carbon-conjugated molecules, we show that ensemble-averaging
with initial configurations from a nuclear quantum distribution remedies many
shortcomings of single-trajectory RT-TDDFT+Ehrenfest, damping electronic
coherence and introducing ultrafast non-adiabatic coupling between excited
states. As the number of sampled configurations decreases with size and
rigidity of the compounds, computational costs remain moderate for large
systems for which mean-field approaches shine. The explicit inclusion of a
time-dependent pulse in the simulations makes this method a prime advance for
first-principles studies of coherent nonlinear spectroscopy as an independent
counterpart to experimental results.


  The present paper is a modest attempt to initiate the research program
outlined in this abstract. We propose that general relativity and relativistic
MOND (RelMOND) are analogues of the broken electroweak symmetry. That is,
$SU(2)_R \times U(1)_{YDEM} \rightarrow U(1)_{DEM}$ (DEM stands for dark
electromagnetism), and GR is assumed to arise from the broken $SU(2)_R$
symmetry, and is analogous to the weak force. RelMOND is identified with dark
electromagnetism $U(1)_{DEM}$, which is the remaining unbroken symmetry after
spontaneous symmetry breaking of the darkelectro-grav sector $SU(2)_R \times
U(1)_{YDEM}$. This sector, as well as the electroweak sector, arise from the
breaking of an $E_8 \times E_8$ symmetry, in a recently proposed model of
unification of the standard model with pre-gravitation, this latter being an
$SU(2)_R$ gauge theory. The source charge for the dark electromagnetic force is
square-root of mass, motivated by the experimental fact that the square-roots
of the masses of the electron, up quark, and down quark, are in the ratio
1:2:3, which is a flip of their electric charge ratios 3:2:1 The introduction
of the dark electromagnetic force helps understand the weird mass ratios of the
second and third generation of charged fermions. We also note that in the deep
MOND regime, acceleration is proportional to square-root of mass, which
motivates us to propose the relativistic $U(1)_{DEM}$ gauge symmetry as the
origin of MOND. We explain why the dark electromagnetic force falls inversely
with distance, as in MOND, and not as the inverse square of distance. We
conclude that dark electromagnetism is a good mimicker of cold dark matter, and
the two are essentially indistinguishable in those cosmological situations
where CDM is successful in explaining observations, such as CMB anisotropies,
and gravitational lensing.


  A robust numerical method called the Preconditioned Bi-Conjugate Gradient
(Pre-BiCG)method is proposed for the solution of radiative transfer equation in
spherical geometry.A variant of this method called Stabilized Preconditioned
Bi-Conjugate Gradient (Pre-BiCG-STAB) is also presented. These are iterative
methods based on the construction of a set of bi-orthogonal vectors. The
application of Pre-BiCG method in some benchmark tests show that the method is
quite versatile, and can handle hard problems that may arise in astrophysical
radiative transfer theory.


  We analyze a two-dimensional Kondo lattice model with special emphasis on
non-Hermitian properties of the single-particle spectrum, following a recent
proposal by Kozii and Fu. Our analysis based on the dynamical mean-field theory
elucidates that the single-particle spectral weight shows the exceptional
points (EPs). Correspondingly, the spectral weight exhibits the band touching,
resulting in a structure similar to the "Fermi arc". Furthermore, we find an
intriguing phenomenon arising from the periodicity of the lattice. The EPs
generated by two distinct Dirac points merge and change into a hybrid point
which vanishes as the exchange interaction is increased. Accordingly, the
paramagnetic phase in the low temperature region shows a significant difference
from non-interacting fermions: the imaginary part of the self-energy yields the
"Fermi loop" without any defective points.


  Thin films of MgB2 superconductor were prepared by three different procedures
on sapphire and silicon substrates. Boron thin films, ex-situ annealed in
magnesium vapour, resulted in textured polycrystalline films with crystal
dimensions below about 1000 nm, onset critical temperature Tcon near 39 K and
width of phase transition about 1 K. Both, ex-situ and in-situ annealed
co-deposited boron and magnesium thin films on sapphire and silicon substrates
give smooth nanocrystalline films. DC properties of nanocrystalline MgB2 films
co-deposited on silicon substrate reached Tcon = 33 K and zero resistance Tco =
27 K, the highest values received until now on Si substrates. In addition,
microwave analyses prove the existence of superconducting parts of the film
below 39 K. This result confirms the possibility to synthesise nanocrystalline
superconducting MgB2 thin films on silicon substrate with critical temperature
near 39 K, prepared by vacuum co-deposition of boron and magnesium films.


  The thermal properties of black holes in the presence of quantum fields can
be revealed through solutions of the semi-classical Einstein equation. We
present a brief but self-contained review of the main features of the
semi-classical back reaction problem for a black hole in the microcanonical
ensemble. The solutions, obtained for conformal scalars, massless spinors and
U(1) gauge bosons, are used to calculate the $O(\hbar)$ corrections to the
temperature and thermodynamical entropy of a Schwarzschild black hole. In each
spin case considered, the entropy corrections $\Delta S(r)$, are positive
definite and monotone increasing with increasing distance $r$ from the hole,
and are of the same order as the naive flat space radiation entropy.


  Soft QCD and double parton scattering are of great interest in high energy
physics. They are both actively studied at the LHCb experiment. The measurement
of the central exclusive production of $J/\psi$ and $\psi(2S)$ mesons in $pp$
collisions at $\sqrt{s} = 13 \,{\mathrm{TeV}}$ is presented. The result shows
good agreement with the theoretical predictions. The measurement of the
$J/\psi$ pair production cross-section in $pp$ collisions at $\sqrt{s} = 13
\,{\mathrm{TeV}}$ is reported. The differential cross-sections as functions of
various kinematic variables are compared to the theoretical predictions, and
show significant evidence of double parton scattering contribution.


  We present a class forcing notion $\mathbb M(\eta)$, uniformly definable for
ordinals $\eta$, which forces the ground model to be the $\eta$-th inner mantle
of the extension, in which the sequence of inner mantles has length at least
$\eta$. This answers a conjecture of Fuchs, Hamkins, and Reitz [FHR15] in the
positive. We also show that $\mathbb M(\eta)$ forces the ground model to be the
$\eta$-th iterated HOD of the extension, where the sequence of iterated HODs
has length at least $\eta$. We conclude by showing that the lengths of the
sequences of inner mantles and of iterated HODs can be separated to be any two
ordinals you please.


  In this paper we consider the problem of learning the optimal policy for
uncontrolled restless bandit problems. In an uncontrolled restless bandit
problem, there is a finite set of arms, each of which when pulled yields a
positive reward. There is a player who sequentially selects one of the arms at
each time step. The goal of the player is to maximize its undiscounted reward
over a time horizon T. The reward process of each arm is a finite state Markov
chain, whose transition probabilities are unknown by the player. State
transitions of each arm is independent of the selection of the player. We
propose a learning algorithm with logarithmic regret uniformly over time with
respect to the optimal finite horizon policy. Our results extend the optimal
adaptive learning of MDPs to POMDPs.


  Using periodic points we study a notion of entropy with values in the p-adic
numbers. This is done for actions of countable discrete residually finite
groups $\Gamma$. For suitable $\Gamma = \mathbb{Z}^d$-actions we obtain p-adic
analogues of multivariable Mahler measures. For certain actions of more general
groups the p-adic entropy can be expressed in terms of a p-adic analogue of the
Fuglede-Kadison determinant from the theory of von Neumann algebras. Many basic
questions remain open.


  In this work we focus on two different methods to deal with parametrized
partial differential equations in an efficient and accurate way. Starting from
high fidelity approximations built via the hierarchical model reduction
discretization, we consider two approaches, both based on a projection model
reduction technique. The two methods differ for the algorithm employed during
the construction of the reduced basis. In particular, the former employs the
proper orthogonal decomposition, while the latter relies on a greedy algorithm
according to the certified reduced basis technique. The two approaches are
preliminarily compared on two-dimensional scalar and vector test cases.


  Multilevel Monte Carlo simulations of a BSCCO system are carried out
including both Josephson as well as electromagnetic couplings for a range of
anisotropies. A first order melting transition of the flux lattice is seen on
increasing the temperature and/or the magnetic field. The phase diagram for
BSCCO is obtained for different values of the anisotropy parameter $\gamma$.
The best fit to the experimental results of D. Majer {\it et al.} [Phys. Rev.
Lett. {\bf 75}, 1166 (1995)] is obtained for $\gamma\approx 250$ provided one
assumes a temperature dependence $\lambda^2(0)/\lambda^2(T)=1-t$ of the
penetration depth with $t=T/T_c$. Assuming a dependence
$\lambda^2(0)/\lambda^2(T)=1-t^2$ the best fit is obtained for $ \gamma\approx
450$. For finite anisotropy the data is shown to collapse on a straight line
when plotted in dimensionless units which shows that the melting transition can
be satisfied with a single Lindemann parameter whose value is about 0.3. A
different scaling applies to the $\gamma=\infty$ case. The energy jump is
measured across the transition and for large values of $\gamma$ it is found to
increase with increasing anisotropy and to decrease with increasing magnetic
field. For infinite anisotropy we see a 2D behavior of flux droplets with a
transition taking place at a temperature independent of the magnetic field. We
also show that for smaller values of anisotropy it is reasonable to replace the
electromagnetic coupling with an in-plane interaction represented by a Bessel
function of the second kind ($K_0$), thus justifying our claim in a previous
paper.


  We present a complete theory of the asymptotics of the zeros of OPUC with
Verblunsky coefficients $\alpha_n = \sum_{\ell=1}^L C_\ell b_\ell^n +
O((b\Delta)^n)$ where $\Delta <1$ and $\abs{b_\ell} = b<1$.