  Abductive logic programs offer a formalism to declaratively represent and
reason about problems in a variety of areas: diagnosis, decision making,
hypothetical reasoning, etc. On the other hand, logic program updates allow us
to express knowledge changes, be they internal (or self) and external (or
world) changes. Abductive logic programs and logic program updates thus
naturally coexist in problems that are susceptible to hypothetical reasoning
about change. Taking this as a motivation, in this paper we integrate abductive
logic programs and logic program updates by jointly exploiting tabling features
of logic programming. The integration is based on and benefits from the two
implementation techniques we separately devised previously, viz., tabled
abduction and incremental tabling for query-driven propagation of logic program
updates. A prototype of the integrated system is implemented in XSB Prolog.


  Plasmons, the collective oscillations of interacting electrons, possess
emergent properties that dramatically alter the optical response of metals. We
predict the existence of a new class of plasmons -- chiral Berry plasmons
(CBPs) -- for a wide range of two-dimensional metallic systems including gapped
Dirac materials. As we show, in these materials the interplay between Berry
curvature and electron-electron interactions yields chiral plasmonic modes at
zero magnetic field. The CBP modes are confined to system boundaries, even in
the absence of topological edge states, with chirality manifested in split
energy dispersions for oppositely directed plasmon waves. We unveil a rich CBP
phenomenology and propose setups for realizing them, including in anomalous
Hall metals and optically-pumped 2D Dirac materials. Realization of CBPs will
offer a new paradigm for magnetic field-free, sub-wavelength optical
non-reciprocity, in the mid IR-THz range, with tunable splittings as large as
tens of THz, as well as sensitive all-optical diagnostics of topological bands.


  Spatial patterns arising spontaneously due to internal processes are
ubiquitous in nature, varying from regular patterns of dryland vegetation to
complex structures of bacterial colonies. Many of these patterns can be
explained in the context of a Turing instability, where patterns emerge due to
two locally interacting components that diffuse with different speeds in the
medium. Turing patterns are multistable, such that many different patterns with
different wavelengths are possible for the same set of parameters, but in a
given region typically only one such wavelength is dominant. In the Turing
instability region, random initial conditions will mostly lead to a wavelength
that is similar to that of the leading eigenvector that arises from the linear
stability analysis, but when venturing beyond, little is known about the
pattern that will emerge. Using dryland vegetation as a case study, we use
different models of drylands ecosystems to study the wavelength pattern that is
selected in various scenarios beyond the Turing instability region, focusing
the phenomena of localized states and repeated local disturbances.


  We obtain a fundamental measure density functional for mixtures of parallel
hard cylinders. To this purpose we first generalize to multicomponent mixtures
the fundamental measure functional proposed by Tarazona and Rosenfeld for a
one-component hard disk fluid, through a method alternative to the cavity
formalism of these authors. We show the equivalence of both methods when
applied to two-dimensional fluids. The density functional so obtained reduces
to the exact density functional for one-dimensional mixtures of hard rods when
applied to one-dimensional profiles. In a second step we apply an idea put
forward some time ago by two of us, based again on a dimensional reduction of
the system, and derive a density functional for mixtures of parallel hard
cylinders. We explore some features of this functional by determining the
fluid-fluid demixing spinodals for a binary mixture of cylinders with the same
volume, and by calculating the direct correlation functions.


  A Monte Carlo event generator is presented. An original algorithm is
developed to simulate electron-positron scattering at energies and momentum
transferred much more than the electron mass. The first-order electroweak
radiative corrections are included completely. Higher order corrections are
taken into account by means of electron structure functions.


  We study Nielsen equivalence classes of generating pairs of Kleinian groups
and HNN-extensions. We establish the following facts: - Hyperbolic 2-bridge
knot groups have infinitely many Nielsen classes of generating pairs. - For any
natural number N there is a closed hyperbolic 3-manifold whose fundamental
group has N distinct Nielsen classes of generating pairs. - Two pairs of
elements of a fundamental group of an HNN-extension are Nielsen equivalent iff
they are so for the obvious reasons.


  Influence functions efficiently estimate the effect of removing a single
training data point on a model's learned parameters. While influence estimates
align well with leave-one-out retraining for linear models, recent works have
shown this alignment is often poor in neural networks. In this work, we
investigate the specific factors that cause this discrepancy by decomposing it
into five separate terms. We study the contributions of each term on a variety
of architectures and datasets and how they vary with factors such as network
width and training time. While practical influence function estimates may be a
poor match to leave-one-out retraining for nonlinear networks, we show they are
often a good approximation to a different object we term the proximal Bregman
response function (PBRF). Since the PBRF can still be used to answer many of
the questions motivating influence functions, such as identifying influential
or mislabeled examples, our results suggest that current algorithms for
influence function estimation give more informative results than previous error
analyses would suggest.


  The full-potential linearized augmented plane wave method with the
generalized gradient approximation for the exchange-correlation potential
(FLAPW-GGA) is used to predict the electronic and elastic properties of the
newly discovered superconducting nanolaminate Ti2InC. The band structure,
density of states and Fermi surface features are discussed. The optimized
lattice parameters, independent elastic constants, bulk and shear moduli,
compressibility are evaluated and discussed. The elastic parameters of the
polycrystalline Ti2InC ceramics are estimated numerically for the first time.


  The preheating process in the mixed Higgs-$ R^2 $ model has been investigated
in depth recently, but the analysis of perturbative reheating is still missing.
In this paper, we discuss the effect of perturbative decay during (p)reheating
in this model. It is shown that perturbative decay can play an important role
throughout the whole reheating process. Depending on the model parameters,
perturbative decay can affect different stages of the reheating. We study the
perturbative reheating with and without the presence of early preheating stage,
and calculate the reheating temperature and the duration of the whole
perturbative process. We find that the detail of the early preheating stage may
not affect the final reheating temperature while it can affect the number of
e-folds of reheating.


  We derive simple conditions for the stability or instability of the
synchronized oscillation of a class of networks of coupled phase-oscillators,
which includes many of the systems used in neural modelling.


  Let $(A, B)$ be a nonempty bounded closed convex proximal parallel pair in a
nearly uniformly convex Banach space and $T: A\cup B \rightarrow A\cup B$ be a
continuous and asymptotically relatively nonexpansive map. We prove that there
exists $x \in A\cup B$ such that $\|x - Tx\| = \emph{dist}(A, B)$ whenever
$T(A) \subseteq B$, $T(B) \subseteq A$. Also, we establish that if $T(A)
\subseteq A$ and $T(B) \subseteq B$, then there exist $x \in A$ and $y\in B$
such that $Tx = x$, $Ty = y$ and $\|x - y\| = \emph{dist}(A, B)$. We prove the
aforesaid results when the pair $(A, B)$ has the rectangle property and
property $UC$. In case of $A = B$, we obtain, as a particular case of our
results, the basic fixed point theorem for asymptotically nonexpansive maps by
Goebel and Kirk.


  We investigate finite volume effects in the pattern of chiral symmetry
breaking. To this end we employ a formulation of the Schwinger-Dyson equations
on a torus which reproduces results from the corresponding lattice simulations
of staggered quarks and from the overlap action. Studying the volume dependence
of the quark propagator we find quantitative differences with the infinite
volume result at small momenta and small quark masses. We estimate the minimal
box length L below which chiral perturbation theory cannot be applied to be L
\simeq 1.6 fm. In the infinite volume limit we find a chiral condensate of
|<\bar{q}q>|_{\bar{MS}}^{2 GeV} = (253 \pm 5.0 MeV)^3, an up/down quark mass of
m_{\bar{MS}}^{2 GeV} = 4.1 \pm 0.3 MeV and a pion decay constant which is only
ten percent smaller than the experimental value.


  Similar to vision-and-language navigation (VLN) tasks that focus on bridging
the gap between vision and language for embodied navigation, the new Rendezvous
(RVS) task requires reasoning over allocentric spatial relationships
(independent of the observer's viewpoint) using non-sequential navigation
instructions and maps. However, performance substantially drops in new
environments with no training data. Using opensource descriptions paired with
coordinates (e.g., Wikipedia) provides training data but suffers from limited
spatially-oriented text resulting in low geolocation resolution. We propose a
large-scale augmentation method for generating high-quality synthetic data for
new environments using readily available geospatial data. Our method constructs
a grounded knowledge-graph, capturing entity relationships. Sampled entities
and relations (`shop north of school') generate navigation instructions via (i)
generating numerous templates using context-free grammar (CFG) to embed
specific entities and relations; (ii) feeding the entities and relation into a
large language model (LLM) for instruction generation. A comprehensive
evaluation on RVS, showed that our approach improves the 100-meter accuracy by
45.83% on unseen environments. Furthermore, we demonstrate that models trained
with CFG-based augmentation achieve superior performance compared with those
trained with LLM-based augmentation, both in unseen and seen environments.
These findings suggest that the potential advantages of explicitly structuring
spatial information for text-based geospatial reasoning in previously unknown,
can unlock data-scarce scenarios.


  Complex-valued harmonic functions that are univalent and sense-preserving in
the open unit disk are widely studied. A new methodology is employed to
construct subclasses of univalent harmonic mappings from a given subfamily of
univalent analytic functions. The notion of harmonic Alexander integral
operator is introduced. Also, the radius of convexity for certain families of
harmonic functions is determined.


  The Cluster Value Theorem is known for being a weak version of the classical
Corona Theorem. Given a Banach space $X$, we study the Cluster Value Problem
for the ball algebra $A_u(B_X)$, the Banach algebra of all uniformly continuous
holomorphic functions on the unit ball $B_X$; and also for the Fr\'echet
algebra $H_b(X)$ of holomorphic functions of bounded type on $X$ (more
generally, for $H_b(U)$, the algebra of holomorphic functions of bounded type
on a given balanced open subset $U \subset X$). We show that Cluster Value
Theorems hold for all of these algebras whenever the dual of $X$ has the
bounded approximation property. These results are an important advance in this
problem, since the validity of these theorems was known only for trivial cases
(where the spectrum is formed only by evaluation functionals) and for the
infinite dimensional Hilbert space.
  As a consequence , we obtain weak analytic Nullstellensatz theorems and
several structural results for the spectrum of these algebras.


  The light-quark correlator in the axial-vector channel is used, in
conjunction with finite energy QCD sum rules at finite temperature, in order to
(a) establish a relation between chiral-symmetry restoration and deconfinement,
and (b) determine the temperature behavior of the $a_1(1260)$ width and
coupling. Results indicate that deconfinement takes place at a slightly lower
temperature than chiral-symmetry restoration, although this difference is not
significant given the accuracy of the method. The behaviour of the $a_1(1260)$
parameters is consistent with quark-gluon deconfinement, as the width grows and
the coupling decreases with increasing temperature.


  We study solutions to a one-phase singular perturbation problem that arises
in combustion theory and that formally approximates the classical one-phase
free boundary problem. We introduce a natural density condition on the
transition layers themselves that guarantees that the key nondegeneracy growth
property of solutions is satisfied and preserved in the limit. We then apply
our result to the problem of classifying global stable solutions of the
underlying semilinear problem and we show that those have flat level sets in
dimensions $n\leq 4$, provided the density condition is fulfilled. The notion
of stability that we use is the one with respect to inner domain deformations
and in the process, we derive succinct new formulas for the first and second
inner variations of general functionals of the form $I(v) = \int |\nabla v|^2 +
\mathcal{F}(v)$ that hold in a Riemannian manifold setting.


  In 2013, scholars laid out a framework for a sustainable, ethical future of
crowd work, recommending career ladders so that crowd work can lead to career
advancement and more economic mobility. Five years later, we consider this
vision in the context of Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT). To understand how
workers currently view their experiences on AMT, and how they publicly present
and share these experiences in their professional lives, we conducted a survey
study with workers on AMT (n=98). The survey we administered included a
combination of multiple choice, binary, and open-ended (short paragraph) items
gauging Turkers' perceptions of their experiences on AMT within the context of
their broader work experience and career goals. This work extends existing
understandings of who crowd workers are and why they crowd work by seeking to
better understand how crowd work factors into Turkers' professional profiles,
and how we can subsequently better support crowd workers in their career
advancement. Our survey results can inform the design of better tools to
empower crowd workers in their professional development both inside and outside
of AMT.


  We show that complementary state-specific reconstruction of logical (bulk)
operators is equivalent to the existence of a quantum minimal surface
prescription for physical (boundary) entropies. This significantly generalizes
both sides of an equivalence previously shown by Harlow; in particular, we do
not require the entanglement wedge to be the same for all states in the code
space. In developing this theorem, we construct an emergent bulk geometry for
general quantum codes, defining "areas" associated to arbitrary logical
subsystems, and argue that this definition is "functionally unique." We also
formalize a definition of bulk reconstruction that we call "state-specific
product unitary" reconstruction. This definition captures the quantum error
correction (QEC) properties present in holographic codes and has potential
independent interest as a very broad generalization of QEC; it includes most
traditional versions of QEC as special cases. Our results extend to approximate
codes, and even to the "non-isometric codes" that seem to describe the interior
of a black hole at late times.


  In this paper we investigate a class of domains $\Omega^{n+1}_k =\{(z,w)\in
\mathbb{C}^n\times \mathbb{C}: |z|^k < |w| < 1\}$ for $k \in \mathbb{Z}^+$
which generalizes the Hartogs triangle. we first obtain the new explicit
formulas for the Bergman kernel function on these domains and further give a
range of $p$ values for which the $L^p$ boundedness of the Bergman projection
holds. This range of $p$ is shown to be sharp.


  In the present paper we study generation of the synchrotron emission by means
of the feedback of Cherenkov drift waves on the particle distribution via the
diffusion process. It is shown that despite the efficient synchrotron losses
the excited Cherenkov drift instability leads to the quasi-linear diffusion
(QLD), effect of which is balanced by dissipation factors and as a result the
pitch angles are prevented from damping, maintaining the corresponding
synchrotron emission. The model is analyzed for a wide range of physical
parameters and it is shown that the mechanism of QLD guarantees the generation
of electromagnetic radiation from soft $X$-rays up to soft $\gamma$-rays,
strongly correlated with Cherenkov drift emission ranging from IR up to UV
energy domains.


  We revisit faithfully balanced modules. These are faithful modules having the
double centralizer property. For finite-dimensional algebras our main tool is
the category ${\rm cogen}^1(M)$ of modules with a copresentation by summands of
finite sums of $M$ on which ${\rm Hom}(-,M)$ is exact. For a faithfully
balanced module $M$ the functor ${\rm Hom}(-,M)$ is a duality on these
categories - for cotilting modules this is the Brenner-Butler theorem. We also
study new classes of faithfully balanced modules combining cogenerators and
cotilting modules. Then we turn to relative homological algebra in the sense of
Auslander-Solberg and define a relative version of faithfully balancedness
which we call $1$-$\mathbf{F}$-faithful. We find relative versions of the best
known classes of faithfully balanced modules (including (co)generators
,(co)tilting and cluster tilting modules). Here we characterize the
corresponding modules over the endomorphism ring of the faithfully balanced
module - this is what we call a \emph{correspondence}. Two highlights are the
relative (higher) Auslander correspondence and the relative cotilting
correspondence - the second is a generalization of a relative cotilting
correspondence of Auslander-Solberg to an involution (as the usual cotilting
correspondence is).


  Within a dense environment ($\rho \approx 10^{14}\,$atoms/cm$^3$) at
ultracold temperatures ($T < 1\,\mu{}\text{K}$), a single atom excited to a
Rydberg state acts as a reaction center for surrounding neutral atoms. At these
temperatures almost all neutral atoms within the Rydberg orbit are bound to the
Rydberg core and interact with the Rydberg atom. We have studied the reaction
rate and products for $nS$ $^{87}$Rb Rydberg states and we mainly observe a
state change of the Rydberg electron to a high orbital angular momentum $l$,
with the released energy being converted into kinetic energy of the Rydberg
atom. Unexpectedly, the measurements show a threshold behavior at $n\approx
100$ for the inelastic collision time leading to increased lifetimes of the
Rydberg state independent of the densities investigated. Even at very high
densities ($\rho\approx4.8\times 10^{14}\,\text{cm}^{-3}$), the lifetime of a
Rydberg atom exceeds $10\,\mu\text{s}$ at $n > 140$ compared to
$1\,\mu\text{s}$ at $n=90$. In addition, a second observed reaction mechanism,
namely Rb$_2^+$ molecule formation, was studied. Both reaction products are
equally probable for $n=40$ but the fraction of Rb$_2^+$ created drops to below
10$\,$% for $n\ge90$.


  Recently, we have reported on low friction CrN/TiN coatings deposited using a
hybrid sputtering technique. These multilayers exhibit friction coefficients
$\mu$ below 0.1 when tested in atmosphere with a relative humidity
$\approx25%$, but $\mu$ ranges between 0.6-0.8 upon decreasing the humidity
below 5%. Here we use first principle calculations to study O and H adatom
energetics on TiN and CrN (001) surfaces. The diffusional barrier of H on
TiN(001) is about half of the value on CrN(001) surface, while both elements
are stronger bonded on CrN. Based on these results we propose a mechanism for a
water-based self-assembled nanobearing.


  We present our analysis of new and archived observations of two candidate
magnetic cataclysmic variables, namely 1RXS J174320.1-042953 and YY Sex. 1RXS
J174320.1-042953 was observed in two distinctive high and low states where a
phase shift was seen, which could be due to the changes in the shape, size, and
(or) location of the accretion region. We find that its orbital X-ray
modulations only persist in the soft (0.3-2.0 keV) energy band, which could be
attributed to the photoelectric absorption in the accretion flow. The X-ray
spectra exhibit a multi-temperature post-shock region where the hard X-rays are
absorbed through a thick absorber with an equivalent hydrogen column of
$\sim$7.5 $\times$ 10$^{23}$ cm$^{-2}$, which partially covers $\sim$56 per
cent of the emission. No soft X-ray excess was found to be present; however, a
soft X-ray emission with a blackbody temperature of $\sim$97 eV describes the
spectra. Extensive TESS observations of YY Sex allow us to refine its orbital
period to 1.5746 $\pm$ 0.0011 h. We did not find any signature of previously
reported spin or beat periods in this system. Furthermore, our new polarimetric
observations show clear circular polarization modulated on the orbital period
only. Finally, both systems show strong Balmer and He II 4686 A$^\circ$
emission lines in the optical spectra, further indicative of their magnetic
nature.


  In this paper we study point transformed electromagnetic invisibility cloaks
in transformation media that are obtained by transformation from general
anisotropic media. We assume that there are several cloaks located in different
points in space. Our results apply in particular to the first order
invisibility cloaks introduced by Pendry et al. and to the high order
invisibility cloaks introduced by Hendi et al. and by Cai et al.. We identify
the appropriate {\it cloaking boundary conditions} that the solutions of
Maxwell equations have to satisfy at the outside, $\partial K_+$, and at the
inside, $\partial K_-$, of the boundary of the cloaked object $K$. Namely, that
the tangential components of the electric and the magnetic fields have to
vanish at $\partial K_+$ -what is always true- and that the normal components
of the curl of the electric and the magnetic fields have to vanish at $\partial
K_-$. These results are proven requiring that energy be conserved. In the case
of one spherical cloak with a spherically stratified $K$ and a radial current
at $\partial K$ we verify by an explicit calculation that our {\it cloaking
boundary conditions} are satisfied and that cloaking of active devices holds
even if the current is at the boundary of the cloaked object. As we prove our
results for media that are obtained by transformation from general anisotropic
media, our results apply to the cloaking of objects with active and passive
devices contained in general anisotropic media, in particular to objects with
active and passive devices contained inside general crystals.


  CoSeO$_4$ has a structure consisting of edge-sharing chains of Co$^{2+}$
octahedra which are held together by SeO$_4^{2-}$ tetrahedra via shared oxygen
atoms at the edges of the octahedra. DC magnetization measurements indicate a
transition to an ordered state below 30 K. Powder neutron diffraction
refinements suggest an ordered state with two unique antiferrromagnetic chains
within the unit cell. Isothermal magnetization measurements indicate a
temperature-dependent field-induced magnetic transition below the ordering
temperature. From neutron diffraction, we find this corresponds to a
realignment of spins from the canted configuration towards the c-axis. The
dielectric constant shows a change in slope at the magnetic ordering
temperature as well as a quadratic dependence on the external magnetic field.


  The All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN) provides long baseline
(${\sim}4$ yrs) light curves for sources brighter than V$\lesssim17$ mag across
the whole sky. As part of our effort to characterize the variability of all the
stellar sources visible in ASAS-SN, we have produced ${\sim}30.1$ million
V-band light curves for sources in the southern hemisphere using the APASS DR9
catalog as our input source list. We have systematically searched these sources
for variability using a pipeline based on random forest classifiers. We have
identified ${\sim} 220,000$ variables, including ${\sim} 88,300$ new
discoveries. In particular, we have discovered ${\sim}48,000$ red pulsating
variables, ${\sim}23,000$ eclipsing binaries, ${\sim}2,200$ $\delta$-Scuti
variables and ${\sim}10,200$ rotational variables. The light curves and
characteristics of the variables are all available through the ASAS-SN variable
stars database (https://asas-sn.osu.edu/variables). The pre-computed ASAS-SN
V-band light curves for all the ${\sim}30.1$ million sources are available
through the ASAS-SN photometry database (https://asas-sn.osu.edu/photometry).
This effort will be extended to provide ASAS-SN light curves for sources in the
northern hemisphere and for V$\lesssim17$ mag sources across the whole sky that
are not included in APASS DR9.


  We analyze the dynamics of a network of electrically coupled, modified
FitzHugh-Nagumo (FHN) oscillators. The network building-block architecture is a
bidimensional squared array shaped as a torus, with unidirectional nearest
neighbor coupling in both directions. Linear approximation about the origin of
a single torus, reveals that the array is able to oscillate via a Hopf
bifurcation, controlled by the interneuronal coupling constants. Group
theoretic analysis of the dynamics of one torus leads to discrete rotating
waves moving diagonally in the squared array under the influence of the direct
product group
$\mathbb{Z}_N\times\mathbb{Z}_N\times\mathbb{Z}_2\times\mathbb{S}^1.$ Then, we
studied the existence multifrequency patterns of oscillations, in networks
formed by two coupled tori. We showed that when acting on the traveling waves,
this group leaves them unchanged, while when it acts on the in-phase
oscillations, they are shifted in time by $\phi.$ We therefore proved the
possibility of a pattern of oscillations in which one torus produces traveling
waves of constant phase shift, while the second torus shows synchronous
in-phase oscillations, at $N-$ times the frequency shown by the traveling
waves.


  The paper deals with a non--minimally coupled scalar field in the background
of homogeneous but anisotropic Kantowski--Sachs space--time model. The form of
the coupling function of the scalar field with gravity and the potential
function of the scalar field are not assumed phenomenologically, rather they
are evaluated by imposing Noether symmetry to the Lagrangian of the present
physical system. The physical system gets considerable mathematical
simplification by a suitable transformation of the augmented variables $(a, b,
\phi)\rightarrow (u, v, w)$ and by the use of the conserved quantities due to
the geometrical symmetry. Finally, cosmological solutions are evaluated and
analyzed from the point of view of the present evolution of the Universe.


  In the present paper a robustness stress-test of the CHSH experiments for
Einstein locality and causality is designed and employed. Random A and B from
dice and coins, but based on a local model, run "parallel" to a real
experiment. We found a local causal model with a nonzero probability to violate
the CHSH inequality for some relevant quartets $\mathcal{Q}$ of settings in the
series of trials.


  The photoluminescence (PL) and PL excitation (PLE) spectra of CdTe/ZnTe
asymmetric double quantum well (QW) structures are studied on a series of
samples containing two CdTe layers with nominal thicknesses of 2 and 4
monolayers (ML) in the ZnTe matrix. The samples differ in the thickness of the
ZnTe spacer between CdTe QWs which is 45, 65 and 75 ML. It has been found that
at above-barrier excitation the PL from a shallow QW at sufficiently weak
excitation intensities is determined by recombination of hot excitons. It is
shown that under these conditions, when PL is excited by lasers with different
wavelengths, the ratio of the PL intensities from shallow and deep QWs
decreases exponentially with an increase of the initial kinetic energy of hot
excitons. It is found that energy relaxation of hot excitons with LO phonon
emission determine the shape of the PLE spectrum of shallow QW in the range of
exciton kinetic energies up to more than 20 LO phonons above ZnTe bandgap. We
have shown that the results obtained are well described by the model of charge
and energy transfer between QWs.


  Developing practical quantum technologies will require the exquisite
manipulation of fragile systems in a robust and repeatable way. As quantum
technologies move towards real world applications, from biological sensing to
communication in space, increasing experimental complexity introduces
constraints that can be alleviated by the introduction of new technologies.
Robotics has shown tremendous progress in realising increasingly smart,
autonomous and highly dexterous machines. Here, we demonstrate that a robotic
arm equipped with a magnet can sensitise an NV centre quantum magnetometer in
challenging conditions unachievable with standard techniques. We generate
vector magnetic field with $1^\circ$ angular and 0.1 mT amplitude accuracy and
determine the orientation of a single stochastically-aligned spin-based sensor
in a constrained physical environment. Our work opens up the prospect of
integrating robotics across many quantum degrees of freedom in constrained
settings, allowing for increased prototyping speed, control, and robustness in
quantum technology applications.


  We analyse the near infrared colour magnitude diagram of a field including
the giant molecular cloud G0.253+0.016 (a.k.a. The Brick) observed at high
spatial resolution, with HAWK-I at the VLT. The distribution of red clump stars
in a line of sight crossing the cloud, compared with that in a direction just
beside it, and not crossing it, allow us to measure the distance of the cloud
from the Sun to be 7.20, with a statistical uncertainty of +/-0.16 and a
systematic error of +/-0.20 kpc. This is significantly closer than what is
generally assumed, i.e., that the cloud belongs to the near side of the central
molecular zone, at 60 pc from the Galactic center. This assumption was based on
dynamical models of the central molecular zone, observationally constrained
uniquely by the radial velocity of this and other clouds. Determining the true
position of the Brick cloud is relevant because this is the densest cloud of
the Galaxy not showing any ongoing star formation. This puts the cloud off by 1
order of magnitude from the Kennicutt-Schmidt relation between the density of
the dense gas and the star formation rate. Several explanations have been
proposed for this absence of star formation, most of them based on the
dynamical evolution of this and other clouds, within the Galactic center
region. Our result emphasizes the need to include constraints coming from
stellar observations in the interpretation of our Galaxy central molecular
zone.


  Gene expression is significantly stochastic making modeling of genetic
networks challenging. We present an approximation that allows the calculation
of not only the mean and variance but also the distribution of protein numbers.
We assume that proteins decay substantially slower than their mRNA and confirm
that many genes satisfy this relation using high-throughput data from budding
yeast. For a two-stage model of gene expression, with transcription and
translation as first-order reactions, we calculate the protein distribution for
all times greater than several mRNA lifetimes and thus qualitatively predict
the distribution of times for protein levels to first cross an arbitrary
threshold. If in addition the promoter fluctuates between inactive and active
states, we can find the steady-state protein distribution, which can be bimodal
if promoter fluctuations are slow. We show that our assumptions imply that
protein synthesis occurs in geometrically distributed bursts and allows mRNA to
be eliminated from a master equation description. In general, we find that
protein distributions are asymmetric and may be poorly characterized by their
mean and variance. Through maximum likelihood methods, our expressions should
therefore allow more quantitative comparisons with experimental data. More
generally, we introduce a technique to derive a simpler, effective dynamics for
a stochastic system by eliminating a fast variable.


  Potential Future Exposure (PFE) is a standard risk metric for managing
business unit counterparty credit risk but there is debate on how it should be
calculated. The debate has been whether to use one of many historical
("physical") measures (one per calibration setup), or one of many risk-neutral
measures (one per numeraire). However, we argue that limits should be based on
the bank's own risk appetite provided that this is consistent with regulatory
backtesting and that whichever measure is used it should behave (in a sense
made precise) like a historical measure. Backtesting is only required by
regulators for banks with IMM approval but we expect that similar methods are
part of limit maintenance generally. We provide three methods for computing the
bank price of risk from readily available business unit data, i.e. business
unit budgets (rate of return) and limits (e.g. exposure percentiles). Hence we
define and propose a Risk Appetite Measure, A, for PFE and suggest that this is
uniquely consistent with the bank's Risk Appetite Framework as required by
sound governance.


  Breast cancer is the second most common malignancy among women and has become
a major public health problem in current society. Traditional breast cancer
identification requires experienced pathologists to carefully read the breast
slice, which is laborious and suffers from inter-observer variations.
Consequently, an automatic classification framework for breast cancer
identification is worthwhile to develop. Recent years witnessed the development
of deep learning technique. Increasing number of medical applications start to
use deep learning to improve diagnosis accuracy. In this paper, we proposed a
novel training strategy, namely reversed active learning (RAL), to train
network to automatically classify breast cancer images. Our RAL is applied to
the training set of a simple convolutional neural network (CNN) to remove
mislabeled images. We evaluate the CNN trained with RAL on publicly available
ICIAR 2018 Breast Cancer Dataset (IBCD). The experimental results show that our
RAL increases the slice-based accuracy of CNN from 93.75% to 96.25%.


  We consider how the geometry and topology of a compact $n$-dimensional
Riemannian orbifold with boundary relates to its Steklov spectrum. In two
dimensions, motivated by work of A. Girouard, L. Parnovski, I. Polterovich and
D. Sher in the manifold setting, we compute the precise asymptotics of the
Steklov spectrum in terms of only boundary data. As a consequence, we prove
that the Steklov spectrum detects the presence and number of orbifold
singularities on the boundary of an orbisurface and it detects the number each
of smooth and singular boundary components. Moreover, we find that the Steklov
spectrum also determines the lengths of the boundary components modulo an
equivalence relation, and we show by examples that this result is the best
possible. We construct various examples of Steklov isospectral Riemannian
orbifolds which demonstrate that these two-dimensional results do not extend to
higher dimensions. In addition, we give two-dimensional examples which show
that the Steklov spectrum does \emph{not} detect the presence of interior
singularities nor does it determine the orbifold Euler characteristic. In fact,
a flat disk is Steklov isospectral to a cone.
  In another direction, we obtain upper bounds on the Steklov eigenvalues of a
Riemannian orbifold in terms of the isoperimetric ratio and a conformal
invariant. We generalize results of B. Colbois, A. El Soufi and A. Girouard,
and the fourth author to the orbifold setting; in the process, we gain a
sharpness result on these bounds that was not evident in the manifold setting.
In dimension two, our eigenvalue bounds are solely in terms of the orbifold
Euler characteristic and the number each of smooth and singular boundary
components.


  Physical properties of anisotropic compressible quantum Hall states and their
implications to integer quantum Hall effect are studied based on a mean field
theory on the von Neumann lattice. It is found that the Hall gas has unusual
thermodynamic properties such as negative pressure and negative compressibility
and unusual transport properties. Transport properties and density profile of
Hall gas states at half fillings agree with those of anisotropic states
discovered experimentally in higher Landau levels. Hall gas formed in the bulk
does not spread but shrinks, owing to negative pressure, and a strip of Hall
gas gives abnormal electric transport at finite temperature. Conductances at
finite temperature and finite injected current agree with recent experiments on
collapse and breakdown phenomena of the integer quantum Hall effect. As a
byproduct, existence of new quantum Hall regime, dissipative quantum Hall
regime, in which Hall resistance is quantized exactly even in the system of
small longitudinal resistance is derived.


  We study unconventional decays of the top-quark and the top-squark in the
framework of SUSY models with broken R-parity. The model under study is the
MSSM with an additional bilinear term that breaks R-parity. In this model the
top-squark behaves similar to a third generation leptoquark. We demonstrate
that existing Tevatron data on the top give rise to restrictions on the SUSY
parameter space. In particular, we focus on scenarios where the tau-neutrino
mass is smaller than 1 eV. We give an exclusion plot derived from the
leptoquark searches at Tevatron.


  High-energy gamma ray emission has been detected recently from supernovae
remnants (SNRs) and their surroundings. The existence of molecular clouds near
some of the SNRs suggests that the gamma rays originate predominantly from p-p
interactions with cosmic rays accelerated at a closeby SNR shock wave. Here we
investigate the acceleration of cosmic rays and the gamma ray production in the
cloud self-consistently by taking into account the interactions of the
streaming instability and the background turbulence both at the shock front and
in the ensuing propagation to the clouds. We focus on the later evolution of
SNRs, when the conventional treatment of the streaming instability is valid but
the magnetic field is enhanced due to either Bell's current instability and/or
due to the dynamo generation of magnetic field in the precursor region. We
calculate the time dependence of the maximum energy of the accelerated
particles. This result is then used to determine the diffusive flux of the
runaway particles escaping the shock region, from which we obtain the gamma
spectrum consistent with observations. Finally, we check the self-consistency
of our results by comparing the required level of diffusion with the level of
the streaming instability attainable in the presence of turbulence damping. The
energy range of cosmic rays subject to the streaming instability is able to
produce the observed energy spectrum of gamma rays.


  We studied the transient behavior of the spin current generated by the
longitudinal spin Seebeck effect (LSSE) in a set of platinum-coated yttrium
iron garnet (YIG) films of different thicknesses. The LSSE was induced by means
of pulsed microwave heating of the Pt layer and the spin currents were measured
electrically using the inverse spin Hall effect in the same layer. We
demonstrate that the time evolution of the LSSE is determined by the evolution
of the thermal gradient triggering the flux of thermal magnons in the vicinity
of the YIG/Pt interface. These magnons move ballistically within the YIG film
with a constant group velocity, while their number decays exponentially within
an effective propagation length. The ballistic flight of the magnons with
energies above 20K is a result of their almost linear dispersion law, similar
to that of acoustic phonons. By fitting the time-dependent LSSE signal for
different film thicknesses varying by almost an order of magnitude, we found
that the effective propagation length is practically independent of the YIG
film thickness. We consider this fact as strong support of a ballistic
transport scenario - the ballistic propagation of quasi-acoustic magnons in
room temperature YIG.


  Fintech companies have been facing challenges from fraudulent behavior for a
long time. Fraud rate in Chinese P2P financial market could go as high as 10%.
It is crucial to collect sufficient information of the user as input to the
anti-fraud process. Data collection framework for Fintech companies are
different fro m conventional internet firms. With individual-based crawling
request , we need to deal with new challenges negligible elsewhere . In this
paper , we give an outline of how we collect data from the web to facilitate
our anti-fraud process. We also overview the challenges and solutions to our
problems. Our team at HC Financial Service Group is one of the few companies
that are capable of developing full-fledged crawlers on our own.


  The integrated spectro-photometric properties of star clusters are subject to
large cluster-to-cluster variations. They are distributed in non trivial ways
around the average properties predicted by standard population synthesis
models. This results from the stochastic mass distribution of the finite
(small) number of luminous stars in each cluster, stars which may be either
particularly blue or particularly red. The color distributions are broad and
usually far from Gaussian, especially for young and intermediate age clusters,
as found in interacting galaxies. When photometric measurements of clusters are
used to estimate ages and masses in conjunction with standard models, biases
are to be expected. We present a Bayesian approach that explicitly accounts for
stochasticity when estimating ages and masses of star clusters that cannot be
resolved into stars. Based on Monte-Carlo simulations, we are starting to
explore the probability distributions of star cluster properties obtained given
a set of multi-wavelength photometric data.


  Understanding the behavior of molecules interacting with superfluid helium
represents a formidable challenge and, in general, requires approaches relying
on large-scale numerical simulations. Here we demonstrate that experimental
data collected over the last 20 years provide evidence that molecules immersed
in superfluid helium form recently-predicted angulon quasiparticles [Phys. Rev.
Lett. 114, 203001 (2015)]. Most importantly, casting the many-body problem in
terms of angulons amounts to a drastic simplification and yields effective
molecular moments of inertia as straightforward analytic solutions of a simple
microscopic Hamiltonian. The outcome of the angulon theory is in good agreement
with experiment for a broad range of molecular impurities, from heavy to
medium-mass to light species. These results pave the way to understanding
molecular rotation in liquid and crystalline phases in terms of the angulon
quasiparticle.


  Consider a multiuser system where an arbitrary number of users communicate
with a distributed receive array over independent Rayleigh fading paths. The
receive array performs minimum mean squared error (MMSE) or zero forcing (ZF)
combining and perfect channel state information is assumed at the receiver.
This scenario is well-known and exact analysis is possible when the receive
antennas are located in a single array. However, when the antennas are
distributed, the individual links all have different average signal to noise
ratio (SNRs) and this is a much more challenging problem. In this paper, we
provide approximate distributions for the output SNR of a ZF receiver and the
output signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) of an MMSE receiver. In
addition, simple high SNR approximations are provided for the symbol error rate
(SER) of both receivers assuming M-PSK or M-QAM modulations. These high SNR
results provide array gain and diversity gain information as well as a
remarkably simple functional link between performance and the link powers.


  We present the results of the long-term optical monitoring campaign of active
galactic nuclei (AGN) coordinated by the Special Astrophysical Observatory of
the Russian Academy of Science. This campaign has produced a remarkable set of
optical spectra, since we have monitored for several decades different types of
broad-line (type 1) AGN, from a Seyfert 1, double-peaked line, radio loud and
radio quiet AGN, to a supermassive binary black hole candidate. Our analysis of
the properties of the broad line region (BLR) of these objects is based on the
variability of the broad emission lines. We hereby give a comparative review of
the variability properties of the broad emission lines and the BLR of seven
different type 1 AGNs, emphasizing some important results, such as the
variability rate, the BLR geometry, and the presence of the intrinsic Baldwin
effect. We are discussing the difference and similarity in the continuum and
emission line variability, focusing on what is the impact of our results to the
supermassive black hole mass determination from the BLR properties.


  As wireless has disrupted communications, wireless will also disrupt the
delivery of energy. Future wireless networks will be equipped with (radiative)
wireless power transfer (WPT) capability and exploit radio waves to carry both
energy and information through a unified wireless information and power
transfer (WIPT). Such networks will make the best use of the RF spectrum and
radiation as well as the network infrastructure for the dual purpose of
communicating and energizing. Consequently those networks will enable trillions
of future low-power devices to sense, compute, connect, and energize anywhere,
anytime, and on the move. In this paper, we review the foundations of such
future system. We first give an overview of the fundamental theoretical
building blocks of WPT and WIPT. Then we discuss some state-of-the-art
experimental setups and prototypes of both WPT and WIPT and contrast
theoretical and experimental results. We draw a special attention to how the
integration of RF, signal and system designs in WPT and WIPT leads to new
theoretical and experimental design challenges for both microwave and
communication engineers and highlight some promising solutions. Topics and
experimental testbeds discussed include closed-loop WPT and WIPT architectures
with beamforming, waveform, channel acquisition, and single/multi-antenna
energy harvester, centralized and distributed WPT, reconfigurable metasurfaces
and intelligent surfaces for WPT, transmitter and receiver architecture for
WIPT, modulation, rate-energy trade-off. Moreover, we highlight important
theoretical and experimental research directions to be addressed for WPT and
WIPT to become a foundational technology of future wireless networks.


  Relativistic band theoretical calculations reveal that intrinsic spin Hall
conductivity in hole-doped archetypical semiconductors Ge, GaAs and AlAs is
large $[\sim 100 (\hbar/e)(\Omega cm)^{-1}]$, showing the possibility of spin
Hall effect beyond the four band Luttinger Hamiltonian. The calculated
orbital-angular-momentum (orbital) Hall conductivity is one order of magnitude
smaller, indicating no cancellation between the spin and orbital Hall effects
in bulk semiconductors. Furthermore, it is found that the spin Hall effect can
be strongly manipulated by strains, and that the $ac$ spin Hall conductivity in
the semiconductors is large in pure as well as doped semiconductors.


  One notion of non-locality in quantum theory is the fact that information may
be encoded in a composite system in such a way that it is not accessible
through local measurements, even with the assistance of classical
communication. Thus, contrary to the classical case, there exists information
in quantum many body systems which cannot be accessed locally. We show however
that, remarkably, two-dimensional subspaces do not have this property: any
physically allowed measurement on information encoded in any two-dimensional
subspace, regardless of entanglement or multi-partite structure, may be
performed locally. Further, this requires only local measurement and
feed-forward of classical information, readily achievable in many experimental
platforms. As an application to quantum secret sharing we suggest a twist on a
well known quantum information splitting protocol, which ensures that no
receiving party ever has access to the full state sent, but parties must work
together to perform measurements on the state. These results may have practical
applications to the measurement of encoded qubits in e.g. quantum secret
sharing, quantum error correction, and reveal a fundamental property unique to
two-dimensional subspaces.


  We analyse the transverse momentum ($p_{\rm T}$)-spectra as a function of
charged-particle multiplicity at midrapidity ($|y| < 0.5$) for various
identified particles such as $\pi^{\pm}$, $K^{\pm}$, $K_S^0$, $p+\overline{p}$,
$\phi$, $K^{*0} + \overline {K^{*0}}$, and $\Lambda$ + $\bar{\Lambda}$ in
proton-proton collisions at $\sqrt{s}$ = 7 TeV using Boltzmann-Gibbs Blast Wave
(BGBW) model and thermodynamically consistent Tsallis distribution function. We
obtain the multiplicity dependent kinetic freeze-out temperature ($T_{\rm
kin}$) and radial flow ($\beta$) of various particles after fitting the $p_{\rm
T}$-distribution with BGBW model. Here, $T_{\rm kin}$ exhibits mild dependence
on multiplicity class while $\beta$ shows almost independent behaviour. The
information regarding Tsallis temperature and the non-extensivity parameter
($q$) are drawn by fitting the $p_{\rm T}$-spectra with Tsallis distribution
function. The extracted parameters of these particles are studied as a function
of charged particle multiplicity density ($dN_{ch}/d\eta$). In addition to
this, we also study these parameters as a function of particle mass to observe
any possible mass ordering. All the identified hadrons show a mass ordering in
temperature, non-extensive parameter and also a strong dependence on
multiplicity classes, except the lighter particles. It is observed that as the
particle multiplicity increases, the $q$-parameter approaches to
Boltzmann-Gibbs value, hence a conclusion can be drawn that system tends to
thermal equilibrium. The observations are consistent with a differential
freeze-out scenario of the produced particles.


  Weak value (WV) is a quantum mechanical measurement protocol, proposed by
Aharonov, Albert, and Vaidman. It consists of a weak measurement, which is
weighed in, conditional on the outcome of a later, strong measurement. Here we
define another two-step measurement protocol, null weak value (NVW), and point
out its advantages as compared to WV. We present two alternative derivations of
NWVs and compare them to the corresponding derivations of WVs.


  The microscopic physics behind low lattice thermal conductivity of single
crystal rocksalt lead telluride (PbTe) is investigated. Mode-dependent phonon
(normal and umklapp) scattering rates and their impact on thermal conductivity
were quantified by the first-principles-based anharmonic lattice dynamics
calculations that accurately reproduce thermal conductivity in a wide
temperature range. The low thermal conductivity of PbTe is attributed to the
scattering of longitudinal acoustic phonons by transverse optical phonons with
large anharmonicity, and small group velocity of the soft transverse acoustic
phonons. This results in enhancing the relative contribution of optical
phonons, which are usually minor heat carrier in bulk materials.


  This preprint has been reviewed and recommended by Peer Community In Ecology
(https://dx.doi.org/10.24072/pci.ecology.100001). In a recent article,
Bicca-Marques and Calegaro-Marques [2016] discussed the putative assumptions
related to an interpretation we provided regarding an observed positive
relationship between weekly averaged parasite richness of a group of mandrills
(Mandrillus sphinx) and their daily path lengths (DPL), published earlier in
the same journal (Brockmeyer et al., 2015). In our article, we proposed, inter
alia, that "the daily travels of mandrills could be seen as a way to escape
contaminated habitats on a local scale". In their article, Bicca-Marques and
Calegaro-Marques [2016] proposed an alternative mechanism that they considered
to be more parsimonious. In their view, increased DPL also increases exposure
to novel parasites from the environment. In other words, while we proposed that
elevated DPL may be a consequence of elevated parasite richness, they viewed it
as a cause. We are happy to see that our study attracted so much interest that
it evoked a public comment. We are also grateful to Bicca-Marques and
Calegaro-Marques [2016] for pointing out an obvious alternative scenario that
we failed to discuss and for laying out several key factors and assumptions
that should be addressed by future studies examining the links between parasite
risk and group ranging. We use this opportunity to advance this discourse by
responding to some of the criticisms raised in their discussion of our article.
In this reply, we briefly contextualize the main object of criticism. We then
discuss the putative parsimony of the two competing scenarios.


  Non-Abelian quantum holonomies, i.e., unitary state changes solely induced by
geometric properties of a quantum system, have been much under focus in the
physics community as generalizations of the Abelian Berry phase. Apart from
being a general phenomenon displayed in various subfields of quantum physics,
the use of holonomies has lately been suggested as a robust technique to obtain
quantum gates; the building blocks of quantum computers. Non-Abelian holonomies
are usually associated with cyclic changes of quantum systems, but here we
consider a generalization to noncyclic evolutions. We argue that this open-path
holonomy can be used to construct quantum gates. We also show that a structure
of partially defined holonomies emerges from the open-path holonomy. This
structure has no counterpart in the Abelian setting. We illustrate the general
ideas using an example that may be accessible to tests in various physical
systems.


  Accurate evaluation of liver viability during its procurement is a
challenging issue and has traditionally been addressed by taking invasive
biopsy on liver. Recently, people have started to investigate on the
non-invasive evaluation of liver viability during its procurement using the
liver surface thermal images. However, existing works include the background
noise in the thermal images and do not consider the cross-subject heterogeneity
of livers, thus the viability evaluation accuracy can be affected. In this
paper, we propose to use the irregular thermal data of the pure liver region,
and the cross-subject liver evaluation information (i.e., the available
viability label information in cross-subject livers), for the real-time
evaluation of a new liver's viability. To achieve this objective, we extract
features of irregular thermal data based on tools from graph signal processing
(GSP), and propose an online domain adaptation (DA) and classification
framework using the GSP features of cross-subject livers. A multiconvex block
coordinate descent based algorithm is designed to jointly learn the
domain-invariant features during online DA and learn the classifier. Our
proposed framework is applied to the liver procurement data, and classifies the
liver viability accurately.


  In this paper we update the existing schemes for computation of
atom-interferometric signal in single-atom interferometers to interferometry
with dense Bose-condensed atomic samples. Using the theory developed we explain
the fringe contrast degradation observed, for longer duration of
interferometric cycle, in the Michelson interferometer on a chip recently
realized at JILA (Ying-Ju Wang, Dana Z. Anderson, Victor M. Bright, Eric A.
Cornell, Quentin Diot, Tetsuo Kishimoto, Mara Prentiss, R. A. Saravanan,
Stephen R. Segal, Saijun Wu, Phys. Rev. Lett. 94, 090405 (2005)). We further
suggest several recipes for suppression of the interaction-related contrast
degradation.


  We present strong numerical evidence for the band Kondo effect in the doped
2D Hubbard model by showing the systematic change of the density of states,
imaginary part of the self-energy, effective magnetic moment and quasiparticle
residue upon decreasing the temperature. Quadratically vanishing (in frequency)
scattering rates near the Fermi energy and a linearly vanishing (in
temperature) effective magnetic moment at low temperatures strongly support the
screening of magnetic moments from singly occupied electrons by doped holes in
the 2D Hubbard model.


  Automated evaluation is crucial for streamlining text summarization
benchmarking and model development, given the costly and time-consuming nature
of human evaluation. Traditional methods like ROUGE do not correlate well with
human judgment, while recently proposed LLM-based metrics provide only
summary-level assessment using Likert-scale scores. This limits deeper model
analysis, e.g., we can only assign one hallucination score at the summary
level, while at the sentence level, we can count sentences containing
hallucinations. To remedy those limitations, we propose FineSurE, a
fine-grained evaluator specifically tailored for the summarization task using
large language models (LLMs). It also employs completeness and conciseness
criteria, in addition to faithfulness, enabling multi-dimensional assessment.
We compare various open-source and proprietary LLMs as backbones for FineSurE.
In addition, we conduct extensive benchmarking of FineSurE against SOTA methods
including NLI-, QA-, and LLM-based methods, showing improved performance
especially on the completeness and conciseness dimensions. The code is
available at https://github.com/DISL-Lab/FineSurE-ACL24.


  We compute the accretion efficiency of small solids, with radii 1 cm $\le$ Rs
$\le$ 10 m, on planets embedded in gaseous disks. Planets have masses 3 $\le$
Mp $\le$ 20 Earth masses (Me) and orbit within 10 AU of a solar-mass star. Disk
thermodynamics is modeled via three-dimensional radiation-hydrodynamic
calculations that typically resolve the planetary envelopes. Both icy and rocky
solids are considered, explicitly modeling their thermodynamic evolution. The
maximum efficiencies of 1 $\le$ Rs $\le$ 100 cm particles are generally
$\lesssim$ 10%, whereas 10 m solids tend to accrete efficiently or be
segregated beyond the planet's orbit. A simplified approach is applied to
compute the accretion efficiency of small cores, with masses Mp $\le$ 1 Me and
without envelopes, for which efficiencies are approximately proportional to
Mp^(2/3). The mass flux of solids, estimated from unperturbed drag-induced
drift velocities, provides typical accretion rates dMp/dt $\lesssim$ 1e-5
Mearth/yr. In representative disk models with an initial gas-to-dust mass ratio
of 70-100 and total mass of 0.05-0.06 Msun, solids' accretion falls below 1e-6
Mearth/yr after 1-1.5 million years (Myr). The derived accretion rates, as
functions of time and planet mass, are applied to formation calculations that
compute dust opacity self-consistently with the delivery of solids to the
envelope. Assuming dust-to-solid coagulation times of approximately 0.3 Myr and
disk lifetimes of approximately 3.5 Myr, heavy-element inventories in the range
3-7 Me require that approximately 90-150 Me of solids cross the planet's orbit.
The formation calculations encompass a variety of outcomes, from planets a few
times the Earth mass, predominantly composed of heavy elements, to giant
planets. The peak luminosities during the epoch of solids' accretion range from
$\approx$ 1e-7 to $\approx$ 1e-6 times the solar luminosity.


  The interval graph for a set of intervals on a line consists of one vertex
for each interval, and an edge for each intersecting pair of intervals. A probe
interval graph is a variant that is motivated by an application to genomics,
where the intervals are partitioned into two sets: probes and non-probes. The
graph has an edge between two vertices if they intersect and at least one of
them is a probe. We give a linear-time algorithm for determining whether a
given graph and partition of vertices into probes and non-probes is a probe
interval graph. If it is, we give a layout of intervals that proves this. We
can also determine whether the layout of the intervals is uniquely constrained
within the same time bound. As part of the algorithm, we solve the
consecutive-ones probe matrix problem in linear time, develop algorithms for
operating on PQ trees, and give results that relate PQ trees for different
submatrices of a consecutive-ones matrix.


  Plasma instabilities can play a fundamental role in quark-gluon plasma
equilibration in the high energy (weak coupling) limit. Early simulations of
the evolution of plasma instabilities in non-abelian gauge theory, performed in
one spatial dimension, found behavior qualitatively similar to traditional QED
plasmas. Later simulations of the fully three-dimensional theory found
different behavior, unlike traditional QED plasmas. To shed light on the origin
of this difference, we study the intermediate case of two spatial dimensions.
Depending on how the "two-dimensional'' theory is formulated, we can obtain
either behavior.


  Observations of the redshifted 21-cm signal emitted by neutral hydrogen
represent a promising probe of large-scale structure in the universe. However,
cosmological 21-cm signal is challenging to observe due to astrophysical
foregrounds which are several orders of magnitude brighter. Traditional linear
foreground removal methods can optimally remove foregrounds for a known
telescope response but are sensitive to telescope systematic errors such as
antenna gain and delay errors, leaving foreground contamination in the
recovered signal. Non-linear methods such as principal component analysis, on
the other hand, have been used successfully for foreground removal, but they
lead to signal loss that is difficult to characterize and requires careful
analysis. In this paper, we present a systematics-robust foreground removal
technique which combines both linear and non-linear methods. We first obtain
signal and foreground estimates using a linear filter. Under the assumption
that the signal estimate is contaminated by foreground residuals induced by
parameterizable systematic effects, we infer the systematics-induced
contamination by cross-correlating the initial signal and foreground estimates.
Correcting for the inferred error, we are able to subtract foreground
contamination from the linearly filtered signal up to the first order in the
amplitude of the telescope systematics. In simulations of an interferometric
21-cm survey, our algorithm removes foreground leakage induced by complex gain
errors by one to two orders of magnitude in the power spectrum. Our technique
thus eases the requirements on telescope characterization for modern and
next-generation 21-cm cosmology experiments.


  We study nonaxisymmetric collision of two black holes (BHs) with a high
velocity $v=|dx^i/dx^0|=0.6$--$0.9c$ at infinity, where $x^{\mu}$ denotes
four-dimensional coordinates. We prepare two boosted BHs for the initial
condition which is different from that computed by a simple moving-puncture
approach. By extrapolation of the numerical results, we find that the impact
parameter has to be smaller that $\approx 2.5GM_0/c^2$ for formation of a BH in
the collision for $v \to c$, where $M_0 c^2$ is the initial total ADM mass
energy of the system. For the critical value of the impact parameter, 20--30%
of mass energy and 60--70% of angular momentum are dissipated by gravitational
radiation for $v=0.6$--$0.9c$.


  If the present dark matter in the Universe annihilates into Standard Model
particles, it must contribute to the gamma ray fluxes detected on the Earth.
Here we briefly review the present constraints for the detection of gamma ray
photons produced in the annihilation of branon dark matter. We show that
observations of dwarf spheroidal galaxies and the galactic center by EGRET,
Fermi-LAT or MAGIC are below the sensitivity limits for branon detection.
However,future experiments such as CTA could be able to detect gamma-ray
photons from annihilating branons of masses above 150 GeV.


  The discovery of argon from underground sources with significantly less 39Ar
than atmospheric argon was an important step in the development of
direct-detection dark matter experiments using argon as the active target. We
report on the design and operation of a low background detector with a single
phase liquid argon target that was built to study the 39Ar content of the
underground argon. Underground argon from the Kinder Morgan CO2 plant in
Cortez, Colorado was determined to have less than 0.65% of the 39Ar activity in
atmospheric argon.


  The bandwidth of a graph G is the minimum of the maximum difference between
adjacent labels when the vertices have distinct integer labels. We provide a
polynomial algorithm to produce an optimal bandwidth labeling for graphs in a
special class of block graphs (graphs in which every block is a clique), namely
those where deleting the vertices of degree one produces a path of cliques. The
result is best possible in various ways. Furthermore, for two classes of graphs
that are ``almost'' caterpillars, the bandwidth problem is NP-complete.


  Recent proposals of deep beamformers using deep neural networks have
attracted significant attention as computational efficient alternatives to
adaptive and compressive beamformers. Moreover, deep beamformers are versatile
in that image post-processing algorithms can be combined with the beamforming.
Unfortunately, in the current technology, a separate beamformer should be
trained and stored for each application, demanding significant scanner
resources. To address this problem, here we propose a {\em switchable} deep
beamformer that can produce various types of output such as DAS, speckle
removal, deconvolution, etc., using a single network with a simple switch. In
particular, the switch is implemented through Adaptive Instance Normalization
(AdaIN) layers, so that various output can be generated by merely changing the
AdaIN code. Experimental results using B-mode focused ultrasound confirm the
flexibility and efficacy of the proposed methods for various applications.


  We study the general framework of quantum channel simulation, that is, the
ability of a quantum channel to simulate another one using different classes of
codes. First, we show that the minimum error of simulation and the one-shot
quantum simulation cost under no-signalling assisted codes are given by
semidefinite programs. Second, we introduce the channel's smooth
max-information, which can be seen as a one-shot generalization of the mutual
information of a quantum channel. We provide an exact operational
interpretation of the channel's smooth max-information as the one-shot quantum
simulation cost under no-signalling assisted codes, which significantly
simplifies the study of channel simulation and provides insights and bounds for
the case under entanglement-assisted codes. Third, we derive the asymptotic
equipartition property of the channel's smooth max-information; i.e., it
converges to the quantum mutual information of the channel in the independent
and identically distributed asymptotic limit. This implies the quantum reverse
Shannon theorem in the presence of no-signalling correlations. Finally, we
explore the simulation cost of various quantum channels.


  The design of an experiment on the spontaneous crystallization of a
laser-cooled, but thermal atomic cloud into a hexagonally structured phase is
discussed. Atomic interaction is mediated by the dipole potential of an optical
lattice formed spontaneously in a multi-mode degenerate cavity from single-mode
longitudinal pumping. The length scale of the structure is given by the
diffractive dephasing between the spontaneous sidebands and the on-axis pump. A
linear stability indicates that the transition can be observed in a cavity of
moderate finesse compatible with having the cavity mirrors outside the vacuum
cell. A new anti-reflected cell has been assembled for this purpose.


  Using a D = 1 supergravity framework I construct a super-Friedmann equation
for an isotropic and homogenous universe including dynamical scalar fields. In
the context of quantum theory this becomes an equation for a wave-function of
the universe of spinorial type, the Wheeler-DeWitt- Dirac equation. It is
argued that a cosmological constant breaks a certain chiral symmetry of this
equation, a symmetry in the Hilbert space of universe states, which could
protect a small cosmological constant from being affected by large quantum
corrections.


  (abridged) This paper is the second part of a work investigating the
properties of dusty tori in AGN by means of multi-component SED fitting. It
focuses on low luminosity, low redshift (z < 0.25) AGN selected among emission
line galaxies as well as X-ray, radio and mid-infrared selected type 2 AGN
samples from the literature. The available multi-band photometry covers the
spectral range from the u-band up to 160 um. The observed SED of each object is
fit to a set of multi-component models comprising a stellar component, a high
optical depth torus and cold emission from a starburst (SB). The contribution
of the various components (stars, torus, SB) is reflected in the position of
the objects on the IRAC colour diagram. The comparison of type 1 (as derived
from Hatziminaoglou et al. 2008) and type 2 AGN properties is broadly
consistent with the Unified Scheme. The estimated ratio between type 2 and type
1 objects is about 2-2.5:1. The AGN accretion-to-infrared luminosity ratio is
an indicator of the obscuration of the AGN since it scales down with the
covering factor. We find evidence supporting the receding torus paradigm, with
the estimated fraction of obscured AGN decreasing with increasing optical
luminosity over four orders of magnitude. The average star formation rates are
of ~ 10, 40 and 115 Mo/yr for the low-z, type 2 and quasar samples,
respectively; but this might simply reflect observational biases, as our
quasars are one to two orders of magnitude more luminous than the type 2 AGN.
For the majority of objects with 70 and/or 160 um detections an SB component
was needed in order to reproduce the data points, implying that the
far-infrared emission in AGN arises mostly from star formation; moreover, the
SB-to-AGN luminosity ratio shows a slight trend with increasing luminosity.


  In this article we derive two simple solutions of nonlinear Fokker - Planck
equation for incompressible fluid and investigate their properties. In the
second version errors in coefficients Imn and Jmn values are corrected.


  We investigate type I multiple orthogonal polynomials on $r$ intervals which
have a common point at the origin and endpoints at the $r$ roots of unity
$\omega^j$, $j=0,1,\ldots,r-1$, with $\omega = \exp(2\pi i/r)$. We use the
weight function $|x|^\beta (1-x^r)^\alpha$, with $\alpha,\beta >-1$ for the
multiple orthogonality relations. We give explicit formulas for the type I
multiple orthogonal polynomials, the coefficients in the recurrence relation,
the differential equation, and we obtain the asymptotic distribution of the
zeros.


  Understanding the effects of atomic structure modification in hematite
photoanodes is essential for the rational design of high-efficiency
functionalizations. Recently it was found that interface modification with
Sn/Sb segregates considerably increases hematite photocatalytic efficiency.
However, the understanding of the different electronic effects of these
modifications at the atomic level is still lacking. This letter describes the
segregation effects of two different dopants-Sn and Sb-on both the solid-solid
(grain-boundaries) and solid-liquid interfaces (surfaces) of hematite. Within
an ab-initio approach, we quantitatively extract the potential barrier
reduction on polycrystalline interfaces due to the dopant, which causes an
increase in the inter-grain electron transport. Concomitantly, the dopants'
segregation on hematite surfaces results in a decrease of the oxygen vacancy
formation energy. Such vacancies lead to the experimentally observed rise of
the flat-band potential. The comprehension of the electronic effects of dopants
on both types of interfaces explains the experimental peak efficiency of
interface-modified hematite with dopant segregates, also enabling the control
and design of interfaces for different higher-efficiency applications.


  With the help of a Stueckelberg field we construct a regularized U(1) gauge
invariant action through the introduction of cutoff functions. This action has
the property that it converges formally to the unregularized action of QED when
the ultraviolet cutoff goes to infinity. Integrating out exactly the
Stueckelberg field we obtain a simple effective regularized action, which is
fully gauge invariant and gives rise to the same prediction as QED at the tree
level and to the one loop order.


  We perform a density functional theory study of the effects of oxygen
adsorption on the structural and electronic properties of Gr/Co(0001) and
Gr/Co/Ir(111) interfaces. In both interfaces, the graphene-Co distance
increases with increasing O concentration. The oxygen intercalation effectively
decreases the electronic interaction, preventing the hybridization of graphene
states with Co $d$-orbitals, hence (partly) restoring the typical Dirac cone of
pristine graphene. In the case of graphene/Co 1ML/Ir(111), which presents a
moir\'e pattern, the interplay between the O distribution and the continuous
change of the graphene-Co registry can be used to tune graphene corrugation and
electronic properties. The computed electronic properties are in very good
agreement with previously reported angle resolved photoemission spectroscopy
and photoemission electron microscopy measurements for Gr/Co(0001).


  We report on the demonstration of Doppler-free polarization spectroscopy of
the D2 line of 6Li atoms. Counterintuitively, the presence of an Ar buffer gas,
in a certain pressure range, causes a drastic enhancement of the polarization
rotation signal. The observed dependence of the signal amplitude on the Ar
buffer pressure and the pump laser power is reproduced by calculations based on
simple rate equations. We performed stable laser frequency locking using a
dispersion signal obtained by polarization spectroscopy for laser cooling of
6Li atoms.


  We have selelcted 556 Red Horizontal Branch (RHB) stars along the streams of
the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy (Sgr) from SDSS DR7 spectroscopic data using a
theoretical model. The metallicity and \alpha-elements distributions are
investigated for stars in the Sgr streams and for Galactic stars at the same
locations. We find that the Sgr stars have two peaks in the metallicity
distribution while the Galactic stars have a more prominent metal-poor peak.
Meanwhile, [\alpha/Fe] ratios of the Sgr stars are lower than those of the
Galactic stars. Among the Sgr stars, we find a difference in the metallicity
distribution between the leading and trailing arms of the Sgr tidal tails. The
metallicity and [\alpha/Fe] distribution of the leading arm is similar to that
of the Galaxy. The trailing arm is composed mainly of a metal rich component
and [\alpha/Fe] is obviously lower than that of the Galactic stars. The
metallicity gradient is -(1.8 \pm 0.3)\times10^{-3} dex degree^{-1} in the
first wrap of the trailing arm and -(1.5 \pm 0.4)\times10^{-3} dex degree^{-1}
in the first wrap of the leading arm. No significant gradient exists along the
second wraps of the leading or trailing arms. It seems that the Sgr dwarf
galaxy initially lost the metal poor component in the second wrap (older) arms
due to the tidal force of our Galaxy and then the metal rich component is
disrupted in the first wrap (younger) arms. Finally, we found that the velocity
dispersion of the trailing arm from 88^\circ<\Lambda_\odot<112^\circ is \sigma
= 9.808 \pm 1.0 km s^{-1}, which is consistent with previous work in the
literature.


  In this paper, we investigate the thinning dynamics of evaporating
surfactant-stabilised surface bubbles by considering the role of the
physical-chemistry of solutions used in the liquid bath. We study the impact of
the surfactant concentration below and above the cmc (critical micelle
concentration) and the role of ambient humidity. First, in a humidity-saturated
atmosphere, we show that if the initial thickness depends on the surfactant
concentration and is limited by the surface elasticity, the drainage dynamics
are very well described from the capillary and gravity contributions. These
dynamics are independent of the surfactant concentration. In a second part, our
study reveals that the physical-chemistry impacts the thinning dynamics through
evaporation. We include in the model the additional contribution due to
evaporation, which shows a good description of the experimental data below the
cmc. Above the cmc, although this model is unsatisfactory at short times, the
dynamics at long times is correctly rendered and we establish that the increase
of the surfactant concentration decreases the impact of evaporation. Finally,
the addition of a hygroscopic compound, glycerol, can be also rationalized by
our model. We demonstrate that glycerol decreases the bubble thinning rate at
ambient humidity, thus increasing their stability.


  Privacy Impact Assessments (PIAs) offer a systematic process for assessing
the privacy impacts of a project or system. As a privacy engineering strategy,
PIAs are heralded as one of the main approaches to privacy by design,
supporting the early identification of threats and controls. However, there is
still a shortage of empirical evidence on their uptake and proven effectiveness
in practice. To better understand the current state of literature and research,
this paper provides a comprehensive Scoping Review (ScR) on the topic of PIAs
"in the wild", following the well-established Preferred Reporting Items for
Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines. As a result, this ScR
includes 45 studies, providing an extensive synthesis of the existing body of
knowledge, classifying types of research and publications, appraising the
methodological quality of primary research, and summarising the positive and
negative aspects of PIAs in practice, as reported by studies. This ScR also
identifies significant research gaps (e.g., evidence gaps from contradictory
results and methodological gaps from research design deficiencies), future
research pathways, and implications for researchers, practitioners, and
policymakers developing and evaluating PIA frameworks. As we conclude, there is
still a significant need for more primary research on the topic, both
qualitative and quantitative. A critical appraisal of qualitative studies
(n=28) revealed deficiencies in the methodological quality, and only four
quantitative studies were identified, suggesting that current primary research
remains incipient. Nonetheless, PIAs can be regarded as a prominent sub-area in
the broader field of Empirical Privacy Engineering, warranting further research
toward more evidence-based practices.


  We present a computational investigation on the slow dynamics of a mixture of
large and small soft spheres. By varying the size disparity at a moderate fixed
composition different relaxation scenarios are observed for the small
particles. For small disparity density-density correlators exhibit moderate
stretching. Only small quantitative differences are observed between dynamic
features for large and small particles. On the contrary, large disparity
induces a clear time scale separation between the large and the small
particles. Density-density correlators for the small particles become extremely
stretched, and display logarithmic relaxation by properly tuning the
temperature or the wavevector. Self-correlators decay much faster than
density-density correlators. For very large size disparity, a complete
separation between self- and collective dynamics is observed for the small
particles. Self-correlators decay to zero at temperatures where density-density
correlations are frozen. The dynamic picture obtained by varying the size
disparity resembles features associated to Mode Coupling transition lines of
the types B and A at, respectively, small and very large size disparity. Both
lines might merge, at some intermediate disparity, at a higher-order point, to
which logarithmic relaxation would be associated. This picture resembles
predictions of a recent Mode Coupling Theory for fluids confined in matrixes
with interconnected voids [V. Krakoviack, Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 94}, 065703
(2005)].


  Metals deformed at high strain rates can exhibit failure through formation of
shear bands, a phenomenon often attributed to Hadamard instability and
localization of the strain into an emerging coherent structure. We verify
formation of shear bands for a nonlinear model exhibiting strain softening and
strain rate sensitivity. The effects of strain softening and strain rate
sensitivity are first assessed by linearized analysis, indicating that the
combined effect leads to Turing instability. For the nonlinear model a class of
self-similar solutions is constructed, that depicts a coherent localizing
structure and the formation of a shear band. This solution is associated to a
heteroclinic orbit of a dynamical system. The orbit is constructed numerically
and yields explicit shear localizing solutions.


  In this work, the dynamics of agents below a \textit{threshold line} in some
modified CCM type kinetic wealth exchange models are studied. These agents are
eligible for subsidy as can be seen in any real economy. An interaction is
prohibited if both of the interacting agents' wealth fall below the threshold
line. A walk for such agents can be conceived in the abstract Gain-Loss
Space(GLS) and is macroscopically compared to a lazy walk. The effect of giving
subsidy once to such agents is checked over giving repeated subsidy from the
point of view of the walk in GLS. It is seen that the walk has more positive
drift if the subsidy is given once. The correlations and other interesting
quantities are studied.


  A common understanding of quantum mechanics (QM) among students and practical
users is often plagued by a number of "myths", that is, widely accepted claims
on which there is not really a general consensus among experts in foundations
of QM. These myths include wave-particle duality, time-energy uncertainty
relation, fundamental randomness, the absence of measurement-independent
reality, locality of QM, nonlocality of QM, the existence of well-defined
relativistic QM, the claims that quantum field theory (QFT) solves the problems
of relativistic QM or that QFT is a theory of particles, as well as myths on
black-hole entropy. The fact is that the existence of various theoretical and
interpretational ambiguities underlying these myths does not yet allow us to
accept them as proven facts. I review the main arguments and counterarguments
lying behind these myths and conclude that QM is still a
not-yet-completely-understood theory open to further fundamental research.


  The purpose of the MIPP experiment is to study the inclusive production of
photons, pions, kaons and nucleons in pi, K and p interactions on various
targets using beams from the Main Injector at Fermilab. The function of the
calorimeters is to measure the production of forward-going neutrons and
photons. The electromagnetic calorimeter consist of 10 lead plates interspersed
with proportional chambers. It was followed by the hadron calorimeter with 64
steel plates interspersed with scintillator. The data presented were collected
with a variety of targets and beam momenta from 5 GeV/c to 120 GeV/c. The
energy calibration of both calorimeters with electrons, pions, kaons, and
protons is discussed. The resolution for electrons was found to be
0.27/sqrt(E), and for hadrons the resolution was 0.554/sqrt(E) with a constant
term of 2.6%. The performance of the calorimeters was tested on a neutron
sample.


  Drones are being used in many industries for a variety of applications,
including inspecting bridges, surveying farm land, and delivering cargo.
Automating these kinds of scenarios requires more than following a sequence of
GPS waypoints; they require integrating on-device hardware with real-time
analysis to provide feedback and control to the drone. Currently, implementing
these kinds of advanced scenarios is a complex task, requiring skilled software
engineers programming with drone APIs. We envision an alternate model to enable
drone operators to orchestrate advanced behaviors using a card-based approach.
We describe the design of our card-based programming model, position it
relative to other visual programming metaphors, share results from our paper
prototype user study, and discuss our learnings from its implementation.
Results suggest that a wide range of scenarios can be implemented with moderate
mental effort and learning, balanced by intuitiveness and engagement.


  The use of renewable energies strengthens decarbonization strategies. To
integrate volatile renewable sources, energy systems require grid expansion,
storage capabilities, or flexible consumption. This study focuses on industries
adjusting production to real-time energy markets, offering flexible consumption
to the grid. Flexible production considers not only traditional goals like
minimizing production time but also minimizing energy costs and emissions,
thereby enhancing the sustainability of businesses. However, existing research
focuses on single goals, neglects the combination of makespan, energy costs and
emissions, or assumes constant or periodic tariffs instead of a dynamic energy
market. We present a novel memetic NSGA-III to minimize makespan, energy cost,
and emissions, integrating real energy market data, and allowing manufacturers
to adapt consumption to current grid conditions. Evaluating it with benchmark
instances from literature and real energy market data, we explore the
trade-offs between objectives, showcasing potential savings in energy costs and
emissions on estimated Pareto fronts.


  We propose a new generative model for layout generation. We generate layouts
in three steps. First, we generate the layout elements as nodes in a layout
graph. Second, we compute constraints between layout elements as edges in the
layout graph. Third, we solve for the final layout using constrained
optimization. For the first two steps, we build on recent transformer
architectures. The layout optimization implements the constraints efficiently.
We show three practical contributions compared to the state of the art: our
work requires no user input, produces higher quality layouts, and enables many
novel capabilities for conditional layout generation.


  Morphogenesis, the establishment and repair of emergent complex anatomy by
groups of cells, is a fascinating and biomedically-relevant problem. One of its
most fascinating aspects is that a developing embryo can reliably recover from
disturbances, such as splitting into twins. While this reliability implies some
type of goal-seeking error minimization over a morphogenic field, there are
many gaps with respect to detailed, constructive models of such a process being
used to implement the collective intelligence of cellular swarms. We describe a
closed-loop negative-feedback system for creating reaction-diffusion (RD)
patterns with high reliability. It uses a cellular automaton to characterize a
morphogen pattern, then compares it to a goal and adjusts accordingly,
providing a framework for modeling anatomical homeostasis and robust generation
of target morphologies. Specifically, we create a RD pattern with N
repetitions, where N is easily changeable. Furthermore, the individual
repetitions of the RD pattern can be easily stretched or shrunk under genetic
control to create, e.g., some morphological features larger than others.
Finally, the cellular automaton uses a computation wave that scans the
morphogen pattern unidirectionally to characterize the features that the
negative feedback then controls. By taking advantage of a prior process
asymmetrically establishing planar polarity (e.g., head vs. tail), our
automaton is greatly simplified. This work contributes to the exciting effort
of understanding design principles of morphological computation, which can be
used to understand evolved developmental mechanisms, manipulate them in
regenerative medicine settings, or embed a degree of synthetic intelligence
into novel bioengineered constructs.


  Given a matroid and a group of its matroid automorphisms, we study the
induced group action on the Chow ring of the matroid. This turns out to always
be a permutation action. Work of Adiprasito, Huh and Katz showed that the Chow
ring satisfies Poincar\'e duality and the Hard Lefschetz theorem. We lift these
to statements about this permutation action, and suggest further conjectures in
this vein.


  We provide a rather complete description of the results obtained so far on
the nonlinear diffusion equation $u_t=\nabla\cdot (u^{m-1}\nabla
(-\Delta)^{-s}u)$, which describes a flow through a porous medium driven by a
nonlocal pressure. We consider constant parameters $m>1$ and $0<s<1$, we assume
that the solutions are non-negative, and the problem is posed in the whole
space. We present a theory of existence of solutions, results on uniqueness,
and relation to other models. As new results of this paper, we prove the
existence of self-similar solutions in the range when $N=1$ and $m>2$, and the
asymptotic behavior of solutions when $N=1$. The cases $m = 1$ and $m = 2$ were
rather well known.


  Scalar hair of black holes in theories with a shift symmetry are constrained
by the no-hair theorem of Hui and Nicolis, assuming spherical symmetry,
time-independence of the scalar field and asymptotic flatness. The most studied
counterexample is a linear coupling of the scalar with the Gauss-Bonnet
invariant. However, in this case the norm of the shift-symmetry current $J^2$
diverges at the horizon casting doubts on whether the solution is physically
sound. We show that this is not an issue since $J^2$ is not a scalar quantity,
since $J^\mu$ is not a diff-invariant current in the presence of Gauss-Bonnet.
The same theory can be written in Horndeski form with a non-analytic function
$G_5 \sim \log X$. In this case the shift-symmetry current is diff-invariant,
but contains powers of $X$ in the denominator, so that its divergence at the
horizon is again immaterial. We confirm that other hairy solutions in the
presence of non-analytic Horndeski functions are pathological, featuring
divergences of physical quantities as soon as one departs from
time-independence and spherical symmetry. We generalise the no-hair theorem to
Beyond Horndeski and DHOST theories, showing that the coupling with
Gauss-Bonnet is necessary to have hair.


  We combine all available information about the spectral shape and morphology
of the radio halo of the Coma cluster with the gamma-ray upper limits obtained
by the Fermi-LAT and with the magnetic field strength derived from Faraday
rotation measures (RM). We explore the possibility that the radio halo is due
to synchrotron emission of secondary electrons generated via p-p collisions in
the intra-cluster-medium (ICM). First we investigate the case of pure secondary
models. We use the observed spatial distribution of the halo's radio brightness
to constrain the amount of cosmic rays (CRs) and their spatial distribution in
the cluster that are required by the model. Under the canonical assumption that
the spectrum of CRs is a power-law in momentum and that the spectrum of
secondaries is stationary, we find that the combination of the steep spectrum
of CRs necessary to explain the spectrum of the halo and their very broad
spatial distribution (and large energy density) result in a gamma-ray emission
in excess of present limits, unless the cluster magnetic field is sufficiently
large. However such a field appears inconsistent with constraints from RM.
Second we investigate more complex models based on secondary particles in which
CR protons and their secondaries are all reaccelerated by MHD turbulence. We
show that under these conditions it is possible to reproduce the radio data and
to predict gamma-rays in agreement with the Fermi-LAT limits without tension
with constraints on the cluster magnetic field. Reacceleration of secondaries
by MHD turbulence also requires a spatial distribution of CRs much flatter than
that of the ICM, if both the turbulent and magnetic field energy densities
scale with that of the ICM. However broader spatial distributions of turbulence
and field and/or the reacceleration of additional primary electrons in the ICM
greatly alleviate this requirement.


  Recent advances in using quantitative ultrasound (QUS) methods have provided
a promising framework to non-invasively and inexpensively monitor or predict
the effectiveness of therapeutic cancer responses. One of the earliest steps in
using QUS methods is contouring a region of interest (ROI) inside the tumour in
ultrasound B-mode images. While manual segmentation is a very time-consuming
and tedious task for human experts, auto-contouring is also an extremely
difficult task for computers due to the poor quality of ultrasound B-mode
images. However, for the purpose of cancer response prediction, a rough
boundary of the tumour as an ROI is only needed. In this research, a
semi-automated tumour localization approach is proposed for ROI estimation in
ultrasound B-mode images acquired from patients with locally advanced breast
cancer (LABC). The proposed approach comprised several modules, including 1)
feature extraction using keypoint descriptors, 2) augmenting the feature
descriptors with the distance of the keypoints to the user-input pixel as the
centre of the tumour, 3) supervised learning using a support vector machine
(SVM) to classify keypoints as "tumour" or "non-tumour", and 4) computation of
an ellipse as an outline of the ROI representing the tumour. Experiments with
33 B-mode images from 10 LABC patients yielded promising results with an
accuracy of 76.7% based on the Dice coefficient performance measure. The
results demonstrated that the proposed method can potentially be used as the
first stage in a computer-assisted cancer response prediction system for
semi-automated contouring of breast tumours.


  We present a numerical analysis of the entropy rate and statistical
complexity related to the spin flip dynamics of the 2D Ising Ferromagnet at
different temperatures T. We follow an information theoretic approach and test
three different entropy estimation algorithms to asses entropy rate and
statistical complexity of binary sequences. The latter are obtained by
monitoring the orientation of a single spin on a square lattice of side-length
L=256 at a given temperature parameter over time. The different entropy
estimation procedures are based on the M-block Shannon entropy (a well
established method that yields results for benchmarking purposes),
non-sequential recursive pair substitution (providing an elaborate and an
approximate estimator) and a convenient data compression algorithm contained in
the zlib-library (providing an approximate estimator only). We propose an
approximate measure of statistical complexity that emphasizes on correlations
within the sequence and which is easy to implement, even by means of black-box
data compression algorithms. Regarding the 2D Ising Ferromagnet simulated using
Metropolis dynamics and for binary sequences of finite length, the proposed
approximate complexity measure is peaked close to the critical temperature. For
the approximate estimators, a finite-size scaling analysis reveals that the
peak approaches the critical temperature as the sequence length increases.
Results obtained using different spin-flip dynamics are briefly discussed. The
suggested complexity measure can be extended to non-binary sequences in a
straightforward manner.


  We describe a system for long-distance distribution of quantum entanglement,
in which coherent light with large average photon number interacts dispersively
with single, far-detuned atoms or semiconductor impurities in optical cavities.
Entanglement is heralded by homodyne detection using a second bright light
pulse for phase reference. The use of bright pulses leads to a high success
probability for the generation of entanglement, at the cost of a lower initial
fidelity. This fidelity may be boosted by entanglement purification techniques,
implemented with the same physical resources. The need for more purification
steps is well compensated for by the increased probability of success when
compared to heralded entanglement schemes using single photons or weak coherent
pulses with realistic detectors. The principle cause of the lower initial
fidelity is fiber loss; however, spontaneous decay and cavity losses during the
dispersive atom/cavity interactions can also impair performance. We show that
these effects may be minimized for emitter-cavity systems in the weak-coupling
regime as long as the resonant Purcell factor is larger than one, the cavity is
over-coupled, and the optical pulses are sufficiently long. We support this
claim with numerical, semiclassical calculations using parameters for three
realistic systems: optically bright donor-bound impurities such as 19-F:ZnSe
with a moderate-Q microcavity, the optically dim 31-P:Si system with a high-Q
microcavity, and trapped ions in large but very high-Q cavities.