  We describe Human Mesh Recovery (HMR), an end-to-end framework for
reconstructing a full 3D mesh of a human body from a single RGB image. In
contrast to most current methods that compute 2D or 3D joint locations, we
produce a richer and more useful mesh representation that is parameterized by
shape and 3D joint angles. The main objective is to minimize the reprojection
loss of keypoints, which allow our model to be trained using images in-the-wild
that only have ground truth 2D annotations. However, the reprojection loss
alone leaves the model highly under constrained. In this work we address this
problem by introducing an adversary trained to tell whether a human body
parameter is real or not using a large database of 3D human meshes. We show
that HMR can be trained with and without using any paired 2D-to-3D supervision.
We do not rely on intermediate 2D keypoint detections and infer 3D pose and
shape parameters directly from image pixels. Our model runs in real-time given
a bounding box containing the person. We demonstrate our approach on various
images in-the-wild and out-perform previous optimization based methods that
output 3D meshes and show competitive results on tasks such as 3D joint
location estimation and part segmentation.


  We discuss a novel signature of dark matter production at the LHC resulting
from the emission of an additional Higgs boson in the dark sector. The presence
of such a dark Higgs boson is motivated simultaneously by the need to generate
the masses of the particles in the dark sector and the possibility to relax
constraints from the dark matter relic abundance by opening up a new
annihilation channel. If the dark Higgs boson decays into Standard Model states
via a small mixing with the Standard Model Higgs boson, one obtains
characteristic large-radius jets in association with missing transverse
momentum that can be used to efficiently discriminate signal from backgrounds.
We present the sensitivities achievable in LHC searches for dark Higgs bosons
with already collected data and demonstrate that such searches can probe large
regions of parameter space that are inaccessible to conventional mono-jet or
di-jet searches.


  We introduce a notion of usable information contained in the representation
learned by a deep network, and use it to study how optimal representations for
the task emerge during training. We show that the implicit regularization
coming from training with Stochastic Gradient Descent with a high learning-rate
and small batch size plays an important role in learning minimal sufficient
representations for the task. In the process of arriving at a minimal
sufficient representation, we find that the content of the representation
changes dynamically during training. In particular, we find that semantically
meaningful but ultimately irrelevant information is encoded in the early
transient dynamics of training, before being later discarded. In addition, we
evaluate how perturbing the initial part of training impacts the learning
dynamics and the resulting representations. We show these effects on both
perceptual decision-making tasks inspired by neuroscience literature, as well
as on standard image classification tasks.


  Measurements are reported of the proton and deuteron spin structure functions
g1 at beam energies of 29.1, 16.2, and 9.7 GeV and g2 at a beam energy of 29.1
GeV. The integrals of g1 over x have been evaluated at fixed Q**2 = 3
(GeV/c)**2 using the full data set. The Q**2 dependence of the ratio g1/F1 was
studied and found to be small for Q**2 > 1 (GeV/c)**2. Within experimental
precision the g2 data are well-described by the Wandzura-Wilczek twist-2
contribution. Twist-3 matrix elements were extracted and compared to
theoretical predictions. The asymmetry A2 was measured and found to be
significantly smaller than the positivity limit for both proton and deuteron
targets. A2 for the proton is found to be positive and inconsistent with zero.
Measurements of g1 in the resonance region show strong variations with x and
Q**2, consistent with resonant amplitudes extracted from unpolarized data.
These data allow us to study the Q**2 dependence of the first moments of g1
below the scaling region.


  This is a brief review of few relevant topics on tunneling of composite
particles and how the coupling to intrinsic and external degrees of freedom
affects tunneling probabilities. I discuss the phenomena of resonant tunneling,
different barriers seen by subsystems, damping of resonant tunneling by level
bunching and continuum effects due to particle dissociation.


  In this Letter we investigate uniformly rotating, homogeneous and
axisymmetric relativistic fluid bodies with a toroidal shape. The corresponding
field equations are solved by means of a multi-domain spectral method, which
yields highly accurate numerical solutions. For a prescribed, sufficiently
large ratio of inner to outer coordinate radius, the toroids exhibit a
continuous transition to the extreme Kerr black hole. Otherwise, the most
relativistic configuration rotates at the mass-shedding limit. For a given
mass-density, there seems to be no bound to the gravitational mass as one
approaches the black-hole limit and a radius ratio of unity.


  Stars with masses in the range from about 1.3 to 3.5 Mo pass through an
evolutionary stage where they become carbon stars. In this stage, which lasts a
few Myr, these stars are extremely luminous pulsating giants. They are so
luminous in the near-infrared that just a few of them can double the integrated
luminosity of intermediate-age (0.6 to 2 Gyr) Magellanic Cloud clusters at 2.2
microns. Astronomers routinely use such near-infrared observations to minimize
the effects of dust extinction, but it is precisely in this band that carbon
stars can contribute hugely. The actual contribution of carbon stars to the
outer disk light of evolving spiral galaxies has not previously been
morphologically investigated. Here we report new and very deep near-IR images
of the Triangulum spiral galaxy M33=NGC 598, delineating spectacular arcs of
carbon stars in its outer regions. It is these arcs which dominate the
near-infrared m=2 Fourier spectra of M33. We present near-infrared photometry
with the Hale 5-m reflector, and propose that the arcs are the signature of
accretion of low metallicity gas in the outer disk of M33.


  We consider the periodic solutions of a semilinear variable coefficient wave
equation arising from the forced vibrations of a nonhomogeneous string and the
propagation of seismic waves in nonisotropic media. The variable coefficient
characterizes the inhomogeneity of media and its presence usually leads to the
destruction of the compactness of the inverse of linear wave operator with
periodic-Dirichlet boundary conditions on its range. In the pioneering work of
Barbu and Pavel (1997), it gives the existence and regularity of periodic
solution for Lipschitz, nonresonant and monotone nonlinearity under the
assumption $\eta_u>0$ (see Sect. 2 for its definition) on the coefficient
$u(x)$ and leaves the case $\eta_u=0$ as an open problem. In this paper, by
developing the invariant subspace method and using the complete reduction
technique and Leray-Schauder theory, we obtain the existence of periodic
solutions for such a problem when the nonlinear term satisfies the asymptotic
nonresonance conditions. Our result not only does not need any requirements on
the coefficient except for the natural positivity assumption (i.e., $u(x)>0$),
but also does not need the monotonicity assumption on the nonlinearity. In
particular, when the nonlinear term is an odd function and satisfies the global
nonresonance conditions, there is only one (trivial) solution to this problem
on the invariant subspace.


  The energy density of a conformally invariant scalar field around a cosmic
string is estimated by the WKB method. This approach reproduces the precise
value obtained by the other authors using the exact mode-sum method or the
method of mirror images. The approximation is also in good agreement with the
exact result in the three-dimensional case. We also evaluate the energy density
of a conformally invariant scalar field around a global monopole by the same
way and find the known result again.


  In this paper, we propose an efficient and generalizable framework based on
deep convolutional neural network (CNN) for multi-source remote sensing data
joint classification. While recent methods are mostly based on multi-stream
architectures, we use group convolution to construct equivalent network
architectures efficiently within a single-stream network. We further adopt and
improve dynamic grouping convolution (DGConv) to make group convolution
hyperparameters, and thus the overall network architecture, learnable during
network training. The proposed method therefore can theoretically adjust any
modern CNN models to any multi-source remote sensing data set, and can
potentially avoid sub-optimal solutions caused by manually decided architecture
hyperparameters. In the experiments, the proposed method is applied to ResNet
and UNet, and the adjusted networks are verified on three very diverse
benchmark data sets (i.e., Houston2018 data, Berlin data, and MUUFL data).
Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed
single-stream CNNs, and in particular ResNet18-DGConv improves the
state-of-the-art classification overall accuracy (OA) on HS-SAR Berlin data set
from $62.23\%$ to $68.21\%$. In the experiments we have two interesting
findings. First, using DGConv generally reduces test OA variance. Second,
multi-stream is harmful to model performance if imposed to the first few
layers, but becomes beneficial if applied to deeper layers. Altogether, the
findings imply that multi-stream architecture, instead of being a strictly
necessary component in deep learning models for multi-source remote sensing
data, essentially plays the role of model regularizer. Our code is publicly
available at https://github.com/yyyyangyi/Multi-source-RS-DGConv. We hope our
work can inspire novel research in the future.


  We search for ultra-high energy photons by analyzing geometrical properties
of shower fronts of events registered by the Telescope Array surface detector.
By making use of an event-by-event statistical method, we derive upper limits
on the absolute flux of primary photons with energies above 10^19, 10^19.5 and
10^20 eV based on the first three years of data taken.


  An individualized dose rule recommends a dose level within a continuous safe
dose range based on patient level information such as physical conditions,
genetic factors and medication histories. Traditionally, personalized dose
finding process requires repeating clinical visits of the patient and frequent
adjustments of the dosage. Thus the patient is constantly exposed to the risk
of underdosing and overdosing during the process. Statistical methods for
finding an optimal individualized dose rule can lower the costs and risks for
patients. In this article, we propose a kernel assisted learning method for
estimating the optimal individualized dose rule. The proposed methodology can
also be applied to all other continuous decision-making problems. Advantages of
the proposed method include robustness to model misspecification and capability
of providing statistical inference for the estimated parameters. In the
simulation studies, we show that this method is capable of identifying the
optimal individualized dose rule and produces favorable expected outcomes in
the population. Finally, we illustrate our approach using data from a warfarin
dosing study for thrombosis patients.


  Network slicing is the means of logically isolating network capabilities from
a one size fits all to a set of different slices where each slice is
responsible for specific network requirements. In the same light, the
micro-operator concept is targeted at local deployment of 5G for vertical
specific services. When a network slice instance (NSI) is created across the
access and core networks, it is important to understand how the communication
service from the created slice instance will be distributed to different
tenants and their end-users. In this vein, we propose a network slice
communication service distribution technique for local 5G micro-operator
deployment scenarios. This is achieved by expanding or leveraging the
communication service management function (CSMF) defined by 3GPP into a
multi-tenant manager and a communication services orchestrator. We further
describe how the communication service orchestrator will address all the
possible multitenant-slice situations that can exist during the distribution of
a network slice instance to multiple tenants. The generic technique introduced
in this paper will proffer a researchable solution for not only network slice
communication service distribution across different micro-operator tenants but
pave the way to support future use cases especially when the allocated slice is
responsible for multiple tenants or when a tenant requests multiple NSIs


  We explore the decays of $B\to V_1V_2$ ($V_{1,2}= (\rho, \omega,K^*, \phi)$
and $B= (B^0, B^+,B_s)$) with transverse polarizations. We explicitly evaluate
the eigenstates of T-odd scalar operators involving spins for the first time,
which offer physical insight among the T violating observables. Based on the
helicity suppression of tree operators for transverse polarizations in the
standard model (SM), we deduce that $\Delta \phi _p= \Delta \phi_\parallel -
\Delta \phi_\perp=0$ with $\Delta\phi_{\perp,\parallel}$ the weak phases of the
transverse amplitudes. In contrast, the experiments show that $\Delta \phi _p
(B^0 \to K^{*0} \omega)= -0.84\pm 0.54$, which could be a signal of new
physics. There is also a discrepancy between our result in the SM and the
experimental data for the transverse polarized branching ratio in $B^0 \to
K^{*0} \omega$. In addition, by counting the helicity flips, we argue that
$\sin(\phi_\parallel - \phi_\perp ) \approx 0$, which meets well with most of
the experiments except for the ones with $B^0\to K^{*0}\omega$, where
$\phi_{\parallel,\perp}$ are the strong phases in the transverse amplitudes.


  We present a detailed analysis of the X-ray emission from the middle-aged
supernova remnant W51C and star-forming region W51B with Suzaku. The soft X-ray
emission from W51C is well represented by an optically thin thermal plasma in
the non-equilibrium ionization state with a temperature of $\sim$0.7 keV. The
elemental abundance of Mg is significantly higher than the solar value. We find
no significant feature of an over-ionized plasma in W51C. The hard X-ray
emission is spatially coincident with the molecular clouds associated with
W51B, overlapping with W51C. The spectrum is represented by an optically thin
thermal plasma with a temperature of $\sim$5 keV or a powerlaw model with a
photon index of $\sim$2.2. The emission probably has diffuse nature since its
luminosity of 1$\times10^{34}$ erg s$^{-1}$ in the 0.5-10 keV band cannot be
explained by the emission from point sources in this region. We discuss the
possibility that the hard X-ray emission comes from stellar winds of OB stars
in W51B or accelerated particles in W51C.


  A discrete-time version of the replicator equation for two-strategy games is
studied. The stationary properties differ from that of continuous time for
sufficiently large values of the parameters, where periodic and chaotic
behavior replace the usual fixed-point population solutions. We observe the
familiar period-doubling and chaotic-band-splitting attractor cascades of
unimodal maps but in some cases more elaborate variations appear due to
bimodality. Also unphysical stationary solutions have unusual physical
implications, such as uncertainty of final population caused by sensitivity to
initial conditions and fractality of attractor preimage manifolds.


  Virtual memory (VM) is critical to the usability and programmability of
hardware accelerators. Unfortunately, implementing accelerator VM efficiently
is challenging because the area and power constraints make it difficult to
employ the large multi-level TLBs used in general-purpose CPUs. Recent research
proposals advocate a number of restrictions on virtual-to-physical address
mappings in order to reduce the TLB size or increase its reach. However, such
restrictions are unattractive because they forgo many of the original benefits
of traditional VM, such as demand paging and copy-on-write.
  We propose SPARTA, a divide and conquer approach to address translation.
SPARTA splits the address translation into accelerator-side and memory-side
parts. The accelerator-side translation hardware consists of a tiny TLB
covering only the accelerator's cache hierarchy (if any), while the translation
for main memory accesses is performed by shared memory-side TLBs. Performing
the translation for memory accesses on the memory side allows SPARTA to overlap
data fetch with translation, and avoids the replication of TLB entries for data
shared among accelerators. To further improve the performance and efficiency of
the memory-side translation, SPARTA logically partitions the memory space,
delegating translation to small and efficient per-partition translation
hardware. Our evaluation on index-traversal accelerators shows that SPARTA
virtually eliminates translation overhead, reducing it by over 30x on average
(up to 47x) and improving performance by 57%. At the same time, SPARTA requires
minimal accelerator-side translation hardware, reduces the total number of TLB
entries in the system, gracefully scales with memory size, and preserves all
key VM functionalities.


  Warped braneworld models has the potential to provide a plausible resolution
to the gauge hierarchy problem but at the cost of introduction of an additional
field, namely the inter-brane separation or, the radion field. Providing an
appropriate stabilization scheme for the radion field has long been sought for.
In this work, we discuss dynamical stabilization of the radion field in the
context of early universe cosmology. We show that by allowing the branes to be
\emph{non-flat} and \emph{dynamical} a radion potential is naturally generated
which can trigger the inflationary phase of the early universe. Interestingly,
the kinetic term of the radion during the inflationary epoch exhibits a
phantom-like behavior and the dynamical evolution of the radion field to its
stable value marks the exit from the phantom phase as well as the inflationary
era simultaneously. We show that the amalgamation and synergy of the radion
potential along with its kinetic term can not only trigger the inflationary
scenario but also provide a successful exit from the same while maintaining
concordance with current observation.


  We present 11 candidate late-type companions to nearby stars identified with
data from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) and the Two Micron
All-Sky Survey (2MASS). Eight of the candidates are likely to be companions
based on their common proper motions with the primaries. The remaining three
objects are rejected as companions, one of which is a free-floating T7 dwarf.
Spectral types are available for five of the companions, which consist of M2V,
M8.5V, L5, T8, and T8. Based on their photometry, the unclassified companions
are probably two mid-M dwarfs and one late-M/early-L dwarf. One of the T8
companions, WISE J142320.84+011638.0, has already been reported by Pinfield and
coworkers. The other T8 companion, ULAS J095047.28+011734.3, was discovered by
Burningham and coworkers through the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope Infrared
Deep Sky Survey, but its companionship has not been previously recognized in
the literature. The L5 companion, 2MASS J17430860+8526594, is a new member of a
class of L dwarfs that exhibit unusually blue near-IR colors. Among the
possible mechanisms that have been previously proposed for the peculiar colors
of these L dwarfs, low metallicity does not appear to be a viable explanation
for 2MASS J17430860+8526594 since our spectrum of the primary suggests that its
metallicity is not significantly subsolar.


  The prospects for using the present-day data on metallicity of globular
clusters (GCs) of the Galaxy to put constraints on the distance to the Galactic
center, $R_0$, are considered. We have found that the GCs of the metal-rich and
metal-poor subsystems separately form a bar-like structure in metallicity maps
whose parameters are very close to those for the Galactic bar. The results
indicate the existence of a bar component within both the metal-rich and
metal-poor subsystems of GCs. The bar GCs could have formed within the already
existing Galactic bar or could have later been locked in resonance with the
bar. We conclude that substantial constraints on the $R_0$ value can be
obtained only with non-axisymmetric models for the space distribution of GC
metallicities with the allowance for the subdivision of GCs into subsystems. We
found evidence for a bar extinction component that causes the observational
incompleteness of GCs in the far side of the Galactic bar and in the
"post-central" region. This selection effect should be taken into account when
determining $R_0$ from the spatial distribution of GCs.


  Boundary integral methods for the solution of boundary value PDEs are an
alternative to `interior' methods, such as finite difference and finite element
methods. They are attractive on domains with corners, particularly when the
solution has singularities at these corners. In these cases, interior methods
can become excessively expensive, as they require a finely discretised 2D mesh
in the vicinity of corners, whilst boundary integral methods typically require
a mesh discretised in only one dimension, that of arc length.
  Consider the Dirichlet problem. Traditional boundary integral methods applied
to problems with corner singularities involve a (real) boundary integral
equation with a kernel containing a logarithmic singularity. This is both
tedious to code and computationally inefficient. The CBIEM is different in that
it involves a complex boundary integral equation with a smooth kernel. The
boundary integral equation is approximated using a collocation technique, and
the interior solution is then approximated using a discretisation of Cauchy's
integral formula, combined with singularity subtraction.
  A high order quadrature rule is required for the solution of the integral
equation. Typical corner singularities are of square root type, and a
`geometrically graded h-p' composite quadrature rule is used. This yields
efficient, high order solution of the integral equation, and thence the
Dirichlet problem.
  Implementation and experimental results in \textsc{matlab} code are
presented.


  We study oriented closed manifolds M^n possessing the following Universal
Realisation of Cycles (URC) Property: For each topological space X and each
integral homology class z of it, there exist a finite-sheeted covering \hM^n of
M^n and a continuous mapping f of \hM^n to X such that f takes the fundamental
class [\hM^n] to kz for a non-zero integer k. We find wide class of examples of
such manifolds M^n among so-called small covers of simple polytopes. In
particular, we find 4-dimensional hyperbolic manifolds possessing the URC
property. As a consequence, we prove that for each 4-dimensional oriented
closed manifold N^4, there exists a mapping of non-zero degree of a hyperbolic
manifold M^4 to N^4. This was conjectured by Kotschick and Loeh.


  A \textit{$k$-transversal} to family of sets in $\mathbb{R}^d$ is a
$k$-dimensional affine subspace that intersects each set of the family. In 1957
Hadwiger provided a necessary and sufficient condition for a family of pairwise
disjoint, planar convex sets to have a $1$-transversal. After a series of three
papers among the authors Goodman, Pollack, and Wenger from 1988 to 1990,
Hadwiger's Theorem was extended to necessary and sufficient conditions for
$(d-1)$-transversals to finite families of convex sets in $\mathbb{R}^d$ with
no disjointness condition on the family of sets. We prove an analogue of the
Goodman-Pollack-Wenger theorem in the complex setting.


  For $p \in [0,1]$ let $\mathcal D(p)$ be the mass problem of infinite bit
sequences~$y$ (i.e., $\{0,1\}$-valued functions) such that for each computable
bit sequence $x$, the bit sequence $ x \leftrightarrow y$ has asymptotic lower
density at most $p$ (where $x \leftrightarrow y$ has a $1$ in position $n$ iff
$x(n) = y(n)$).
  We show that all members of this family of mass problems parameterized by a
real $p$ with $0 < p<1/2 $ have the same complexity in the sense of Muchnik
reducibility. We prove this by showing Muchnik equivalence of the problems
$\mathcal D(p)$ with the mass problem $\mathrm{IOE}(2^ { 2^ n})$.
  As a dual of the problem $\mathcal D(p)$, define $\mathcal B(p)$, for $0 \le
p < 1/2$, to be the set of bit sequences $y$ such that $\underline \rho (x
\leftrightarrow y) > p$ for each computable set~$x$. We prove that the Medvedev
(and hence Muchnik) complexity of the mass problems $\mathcal B(p)$ is the same
for all $p \in (0, 1/2)$, by showing that they are Medvedev equivalent to the
mass problem of functions bounded by $2^{2^ n}$ that are almost everywhere
different from each computable function.
  Together with Joseph Miller, we obtain a proper hierarchy of the mass
problems of type $\mathrm{IOE}$: We study cardinal characteristics in the sense
of set theory that are analogous to the highness properties above.


  Superconducting vortex loops have so far avoided experimental detection
despite being the focus of much theoretical work. We here propose a method of
creating controllable vortex loops in the superconducting condensate arising in
a normal metal through the proximity effect. We demonstrate both analytically
and numerically that superconducting vortex loops emerge when the junction is
pierced by a current-carrying insulated wire and give an analytical expression
for their radii. The vortex loops can readily be tuned big enough to hit the
sample surface, making them directly observable through scanning tunneling
microscopy.


  Matrix completion is a class of machine learning methods that concerns the
prediction of missing entries in a partially observed matrix. This paper
studies matrix completion for mixed data, i.e., data involving mixed types of
variables (e.g., continuous, binary, ordinal). We formulate it as a low-rank
matrix estimation problem under a general family of non-linear factor models
and then propose entrywise consistent estimators for estimating the low-rank
matrix. Tight probabilistic error bounds are derived for the proposed
estimators. The proposed methods are evaluated by simulation studies and
real-data applications for collaborative filtering and large-scale educational
assessment.


  An integrated clinical environment (ICE) enables the connection and
coordination of the internet of medical things around the care of patients in
hospitals. However, ransomware attacks and their spread on hospital
infrastructures, including ICE, are rising. Often the adversaries are targeting
multiple hospitals with the same ransomware attacks. These attacks are detected
by using machine learning algorithms. But the challenge is devising the
anti-ransomware learning mechanisms and services under the following
conditions: (1) provide immunity to other hospitals if one of them got the
attack, (2) hospitals are usually distributed over geographical locations, and
(3) direct data sharing is avoided due to privacy concerns. In this regard,
this paper presents a federated distributed integrated clinical environment,
aka. FedDICE. FedDICE integrates federated learning (FL), which is
privacy-preserving learning, to SDN-oriented security architecture to enable
collaborative learning, detection, and mitigation of ransomware attacks. We
demonstrate the importance of FedDICE in a collaborative environment with up to
four hospitals and four popular ransomware families, namely WannaCry, Petya,
BadRabbit, and PowerGhost. Our results find that in both IID and non-IID data
setups, FedDICE achieves the centralized baseline performance that needs direct
data sharing for detection. However, as a trade-off to data privacy, FedDICE
observes overhead in the anti-ransomware model training, e.g., 28x for the
logistic regression model. Besides, FedDICE utilizes SDN's dynamic network
programmability feature to remove the infected devices in ICE.


  We demonstrate multiferroic behavior in trimerized Mott insulators through
interplay between spins and electric dipole moments resulting from electronic
charge fluctuations in frustrated units. The model consists of stacked
triangular layers of trimers with small intertrimer exchange interactions $J'$
and $J"$. Ferroelectric states coexist with ferro- or antiferromagnetic
orderings depending on the value of the magnetic field $H$ and the sign of the
interlayer exchange $J"$. The electric polarization undergoes abrupt changes as
a function of $H$.


  ALICE has unique capabilities among the LHC experiments for particle
identification (PID) at mid-rapidity ($|\eta| < 0.9$) over a wide range of
transverse momentum ($p_{\rm T}$). In this proceeding recent measurements of
$p_{\rm T}$ spectra for $\pi$, K, ${\rm K}^0_s$, p, and $\Lambda$ in p-Pb
collisions are presented and compared to results from Pb-Pb and pp. In
particular the implications for the question of the existence of radial flow in
small systems is discussed.


  We present new anti-de Sitter black hole solutions of gauged N=8, SO(8)
supergravity, which is the massless sector of the AdS_4\times S^7 vacuum of
M-theory. By focusing on the U(1)^4 Cartan subgroup, we find non-extremal 1, 2,
3 and 4 charge solutions. In the extremal limit, they may preserve up to 1/2,
1/4, 1/8 and 1/8 of the supersymmetry, respectively. In the limit of vanishing
SO(8) coupling constant, the solutions reduce to the familiar black holes of
the M_4\times T^7 vacuum, but have very different interpretation since there
are no winding states on S^7 and no U-duality. In contrast to the T^7
compactification, moreover, we find no static multi-center solutions. Also in
contrast, the S^7 fields appear "already dualized" so that the 4 charges may be
all electric or all magnetic rather than 2 electric and 2 magnetic. Curiously,
however, the magnetic solutions preserve no supersymmetries. We conjecture that
a subset of the extreme electric black holes preserving 1/2 the supersymmetry
may be identified with the S^7 Kaluza-Klein spectrum, with the non-abelian
SO(8) quantum numbers provided by the fermionic zero modes.


  Cognitive biases distort the process of rational decision-making, including
architectural decision-making. So far, no method has been empirically proven to
reduce the impact of cognitive biases on architectural decision-making. We
conducted an experiment in which 44 master's degree graduate students took
part. Divided into 12 teams, they created two designs - before and after a
debiasing workshop. We recorded this process and analysed how the participants
discussed their decisions. In most cases (10 out of 12 groups), the teams'
reasoning improved after the workshop. Thus, we show that debiasing
architectural decision-making is an attainable goal and provide a simple
debiasing treatment that could easily be used when training software
practitioners.


  Individual participant data (IPD) meta-analyses of randomised trials are
considered a reliable way to assess participant-level treatment effect
modifiers but may not make the best use of the available data. Traditionally,
effect modifiers are explored one covariate at a time, which gives rise to the
possibility that evidence of treatment-covariate interaction may be due to
confounding from a different, related covariate. We aimed to evaluate current
practice when estimating treatment-covariate interactions in IPD meta-analysis,
specifically focusing on involvement of additional covariates in the models. We
reviewed 100 IPD meta-analyses of randomised trials, published between 2015 and
2020, that assessed at least one treatment-covariate interaction. We identified
four approaches to handling additional covariates: (1) Single interaction model
(unadjusted): No additional covariates included (57/100 studies); (2) Single
interaction model (adjusted): Adjustment for the main effect of at least one
additional covariate (35/100); (3) Multiple interactions model: Adjustment for
at least one two-way interaction between treatment and an additional covariate
(3/100); and (4) Three-way interaction model: Three-way interaction formed
between treatment, the additional covariate and the potential effect modifier
(5/100). IPD is not being utilised to its fullest extent. In an exemplar
dataset, we demonstrate how these approaches can lead to different conclusions.
Researchers should adjust for additional covariates when estimating
interactions in IPD meta-analysis providing they adjust their main effects,
which is already widely recommended. Further, they should consider whether more
complex approaches could provide better information on who might benefit most
from treatments, improving patient choice and treatment policy and practice.


  An effective intra- and inter-ladder charge-spin hamiltonian for the
quarter-filled ladder compound $\alpha'$-NaV$_2$O$_5$ has been derived by using
the standard canonical transformation method. In the derivation, it is clear
that a finite inter-site Coulomb repulsion is needed to get a meaningful result
otherwise the perturbation becomes ill-defined. Various limiting cases
depending on the values of the model parameters have been analyzed in detail
and the effective exchange couplings are estimated. We find that the effective
intra-ladder exchange may become ferromagnetic for the case of zig-zag charge
ordering in a purely electronic model.
  We estimate the magnitude of the effective inter-rung Coulomb repulsion in a
ladder and find it to be about one-order of magnitude too small in order to
stabilize charge-ordering.


  Arrival directions of cosmic rays with the energy E>4.10^19 eV are analyzed
on the basis of the Yakutsk and AGASA extensive air shower arrays. It is
supposed that the clusters can be formed as a result of fragmentation of
superheavy nuclei. The consequences of this supposition compare with
experimental data. Part of clusters with E>2.10^19 eV correlate with the
nearest pulsars. The new effect is found - clusters intensify a feature of
cosmic rays distribution.


  We use new experiments and a theoretical analysis of the results to show that
the isotopic fractionation associated with laser-heating aerodynamic levitation
experiments is consistent with the velocity of flowing gas as the primary
control on the fractionation. The new Fe and Mg isotope data are well explained
where the gas is treated as a low-viscosity fluid that flows around the molten
spheres with high Reynolds numbers and minimal drag. A relationship between the
ratio of headwind velocity to thermal velocity and saturation is obtained on
the basis of this analysis. The recognition that it is the ratio of flow
velocity to thermal velocity that controls fractionation allows for
extrapolation to other environments in which molten rock encounters gas with
appreciable headwinds. In this way, in some circumstances, the degree of
isotope fractionation attending evaporation is as much a velocimeter as it is a
barometer.


  It is shown that a method for constructing exact multi-solitonic solutions of
the coupled BPS equations in the duality-based generalization of the hermitean
matrix model, which was put forward in a recent paper, is not correct.


  For a long time, the point cloud completion task has been regarded as a pure
generation task. After obtaining the global shape code through the encoder, a
complete point cloud is generated using the shape priorly learnt by the
networks. However, such models are undesirably biased towards prior average
objects and inherently limited to fit geometry details. In this paper, we
propose a Graph-Guided Deformation Network, which respectively regards the
input data and intermediate generation as controlling and supporting points,
and models the optimization guided by a graph convolutional network(GCN) for
the point cloud completion task. Our key insight is to simulate the least
square Laplacian deformation process via mesh deformation methods, which brings
adaptivity for modeling variation in geometry details. By this means, we also
reduce the gap between the completion task and the mesh deformation algorithms.
As far as we know, we are the first to refine the point cloud completion task
by mimicing traditional graphics algorithms with GCN-guided deformation. We
have conducted extensive experiments on both the simulated indoor dataset
ShapeNet, outdoor dataset KITTI, and our self-collected autonomous driving
dataset Pandar40. The results show that our method outperforms the existing
state-of-the-art algorithms in the 3D point cloud completion task.


  In this article, we consider the representation of $m$-gonal forms over
$\mathbb N_0$. We show that any $m$-gonal forms over $\mathbb N_0$ of rank $\ge
5$ is almost regular and ponder the sufficiently large integers which are
indeed represented over $\mathbb N_0$ among the integers which are locally
represented. And as its consequential result, we prove a finiteness theorem for
universal (original polygonal number version's) $m$-gonal forms over $\mathbb
N_0$.


  Interest in online rating data has increased in recent years in which ordinal
ratings of products or local businesses are provided by users of a website,
such as Yelp or Amazon. One source of heterogeneity in ratings is that users
apply different standards when supplying their ratings; even if two users
benefit from a product the same amount, they may translate their benefit into
ratings in different ways. In this article we propose an ordinal data model,
which we refer to as a multi-rubric model, which treats the criteria used to
convert a latent utility into a rating as user-specific random effects, with
the distribution of these random effects being modeled nonparametrically. We
demonstrate that this approach is capable of accounting for this type of
variability in addition to usual sources of heterogeneity due to item quality,
user biases, interactions between items and users, and the spatial structure of
the users and items. We apply the model developed here to publicly available
data from the website Yelp and demonstrate that it produces interpretable
clusterings of users according to their rating behavior, in addition to
providing better predictions of ratings and better summaries of overall item
quality.


  We propose a simple grand unified theory (GUT) scenario in which
supersymmetry (SUSY) is spontaneously broken in visible sector. Our model is
based on the GUT model that has been proposed to solve almost all problems in
conventional GUT scenarios. In the previous work, the problems can be solved by
a natural assumption in a supersymmetric vacuum. In this paper, we consider an
extension of the model (i.e. omitting one singlet field) and break SUSY
spontaneously without new sector. Our model does not have hidden sector and
predicts high-scale SUSY where sfermion masses are of order 100-1000 TeV and
flavor violating processes are suppressed. In this scenario, we can see an
explicit signature of GUT in sfermion mass spectrum since the sfermion mass
spectrum respects SU(5) matter unification. In addition, we find a superheavy
long lived charged lepton as a proof of our scenario, and it may be seen in the
LHC.


  Vortex beam carrying orbital angular momentum (OAM) is disturbed by oceanic
turbulence (OT) when propagating in underwater wireless optical communication
(UWOC) system. Adaptive optics (AO) is used to compensate for distortion and
improve the performance of the UWOC system. In this work, we propose a
diffractive deep neural network (DDNN) based AO scheme to compensate for the
distortion caused by OT, where the DDNN is trained to obtain the mapping
between the distortion intensity distribution of the vortex beam and its
corresponding phase screen representating OT. The intensity pattern of the
distorted vortex beam obtained in the experiment is input to the DDNN model,
and the predicted phase screen can be used to compensate the distortion in real
time. The experiment results show that the proposed scheme can extract quickly
the characteristics of the intensity pattern of the distorted vortex beam, and
output accurately the predicted phase screen. The mode purity of the
compensated vortex beam is significantly improved, even with a strong OT. Our
scheme may provide a new avenue for AO techniques, and is expected to promote
the communication quality of UWOC system.


  We study the probability of close encounters between stars from a nuclear
cluster and a massive black hole. The gravitational field of the system is
dominated by the black hole in its sphere of influence. It is further modified
by the cluster mean field (a spherical term) and a gaseous disc/torus (an
axially symmetric term) causing a secular evolution of stellar orbits via Kozai
oscillations. Intermittent phases of large eccentricity increase the chance
that stars become damaged inside the tidal radius of the central hole. Such
events can produce debris and lead to recurring episodes of enhanced accretion
activity. We introduce an effective loss cone and associate it with tidal
disruptions during the high-eccentricity phases of the Kozai cycle. By
numerical integration of the trajectories forming the boundary of the loss cone
we determine its shape and volume. We also include the effect of relativistic
advance of pericentre. The potential of the disc has the efffect of enlarging
the loss cone and, therefore, the predicted number of tidally disrupted stars
should grow by factor of ~10^2. On the other hand, the effect of the cluster
mean potential together with the relativistic pericentre advance act against
the eccentricity oscillations. In the end we expect the tidal disruption events
to be approximately ten times more frequent in comparison with the model in
which the three effects -- the cluster mean field, the relativistic pericentre
advance, and the Kozai mechanism -- are all ignored. The competition of
different influences suppresses the predicted star disruption rate as the black
hole mass increases. Hence, the process under consideration is more important
for intermediate-mass black holes, M_bh~10^4M_s.


  This research proposes a new database and method to detect the reduction of
alertness conditions due to alcohol, drug consumption and sleepiness
deprivation from Near-Infra-Red (NIR) periocular eye images. The study focuses
on determining the effect of external factors on the Central Nervous System
(CNS). The goal is to analyse how this impacts iris and pupil movement
behaviours and if it is possible to classify these changes with a standard iris
NIR capture device. This paper proposes a modified MobileNetV2 to classify iris
NIR images taken from subjects under alcohol/drugs/sleepiness influences. The
results show that the MobileNetV2-based classifier can detect the Unfit
alertness condition from iris samples captured after alcohol and drug
consumption robustly with a detection accuracy of 91.3% and 99.1%,
respectively. The sleepiness condition is the most challenging with 72.4%. For
two-class grouped images belonging to the Fit/Unfit classes, the model obtained
an accuracy of 94.0% and 84.0%, respectively, using a smaller number of
parameters than the standard Deep learning Network algorithm. This work is a
step forward in biometric applications for developing an automatic system to
classify "Fitness for Duty" and prevent accidents due to alcohol/drug
consumption and sleepiness.


  Electroweak baryogenesis is an attractive mechanism to generate the baryon
asymmetry of the Universe via a strong first order electroweak phase
transition. We compare the phase transition patterns suggested by the vacuum
structure at the critical temperatures, at which local minima are degenerate,
with those obtained from computing the probability for nucleation via tunneling
through the barrier separating local minima. Heuristically, nucleation becomes
difficult if the barrier between the local minima is too high, or if the
distance (in field space) between the minima is too large. As an example of a
model exhibiting such behavior, we study the Next-to-Minimal Supersymmetric
Standard Model, whose scalar sector contains two SU(2) doublets and one gauge
singlet. We find that the calculation of the nucleation probabilities prefers
different regions of parameter space for a strong first order electroweak phase
transition than the calculation based solely on the critical temperatures. Our
results demonstrate that analyzing only the vacuum structure via the critical
temperatures can provide a misleading picture of the phase transition patterns,
and, in turn, of the parameter space suitable for electroweak baryogenesis.


  This paper develops a Carleman type estimate for immersed surface in
Euclidean space at infinity. With this estimate, we obtain an unique
continuation property for harmonic functions on immersed surfaces vanishing at
infinity, which leads to rigidity results in geometry.


  [Abridged] We develop a simple star formation model whose goal is to
interpret the emerging body of observational data on star-forming galaxies at
z>~6. The efficiency and duty cycle of the star formation activity within dark
matter halos are determined by fitting the luminosity functions of Lya emitter
and Lyman-break galaxies at redshifts z~5-6. Using our model parameters we
predict the likely abundance of star forming galaxies at earlier epochs and
compare these to the emerging data in the redshift interval 7<z<10. We find
that the abundance of luminous Lyman-break galaxies in the 500 Myr between z~6
and 10 can be naturally explained by the hierarchical assembly of dark matter
haloes; there is only marginal evidence for strong physical evolution. In
contrast, the first estimates of the abundance of less luminous star forming
galaxies at z=9-10 are higher than predicted and, if verified by further data,
may suggest a top-heavy stellar mass function at these early epochs. Although
these abundances remain uncertain because of the difficulty of spectroscopic
confirmation and cosmic variance, even a modest improvement in survey
capability with present or upcoming facilities should yield great progress. In
this context, we use our model to consider those observational techniques that
hold the most promise and make predictions for specific surveys that are, or
will soon be, underway. We conclude that narrowband Lya emitter surveys should
be efficient on searches at z~7-8; however, such conventional surveys are
unlikely to detect sufficient galaxies at z~10 to provide useful constraints.
For this reason, gravitational lensing offers the best prospect for probing the
z~10 universe prior to JWST.


  Let R be a commutative Noetherian local ring with residue field k. Let X be a
resolving subcategory of finitely generated R-modules. This paper mainly
studies when X contains k or consists of totally reflexive modules. It is
proved that X does so if X is closed under cosyzygies. A conjecture of Dao and
Takahashi is also shown to hold in several cases.


  The signature of a spanning tree $T$ of the $n$-cube $Q_n$ is the $n$-tuple
$\mathrm{sig}(T)=(a_1,a_2,\dots,a_n)$ such that $a_i$ is the number of edges of
$T$ in the $i$th direction. We characterise the $n$-tuples that can occur as
the signature of a spanning tree, and classify a signature $\mathcal{S}$ as
reducible or irreducible according to whether or not there is a proper nonempty
subset $R$ of $[n]$ such that restricting $\mathcal{S}$ to the indices in $R$
gives a signature of $Q_{|R|}$. If so, we say moreover that $\mathcal{S}$ and
$T$ reduce over $R$.
  We show that reducibility places strict structural constraints on $T$. In
particular, if $T$ reduces over a set of size $r$ then $T$ decomposes as a sum
of $2^r$ spanning trees of $Q_{n-r}$, together with a spanning tree of a
contraction of $Q_n$ with underlying simple graph $Q_r$. Moreover, this
decomposition is realised by an isomorphism of edge slide graphs, where the
edge slide graph of $Q_n$ is the graph $\mathcal{E}(Q_n)$ on the spanning trees
of $Q_n$, with an edge between two trees if and only if they are related by an
edge slide. An edge slide is an operation on spanning trees of the $n$-cube
given by ``sliding'' an edge of a spanning tree across a $2$-dimensional face
of the cube to get a second spanning tree.
  The signature of a spanning tree is invariant under edge slides, so the
subgraph $\mathcal{E}(\mathcal{S})$ of $\mathcal{E}(Q_n)$ induced by the trees
with signature $\mathcal{S}$ is a union of one or more connected components of
$\mathcal{E}(Q_n)$. Reducible signatures may be further divided into strictly
reducible and quasi-irreducible signatures, and as an application of our
results we show that $\mathcal{E}(\mathcal{S})$ is disconnected if
$\mathcal{S}$ is strictly reducible. We conjecture that the converse is also
true.


  We prove a necessary condition that has every extremal sequence for the
Bellman function of the dyadic maximal operator.This implies the weak-Lp
uniqueness for such a sequence.


  We consider the so called combined energy of a deformation between two
concentric annuli and minimize it, provided that it keep order of the
boundaries. It is an extension of the corresponding result of Euclidean energy.
It is intrigue that, the minimizers are certain radial mappings and they exists
if and only if the annulus on the image domain is not too thin, provided that
the original annulus is fixed. This in turn implies a Nitsche type phenomenon.
Next we consider the combined distortion and obtain certain related results
which are dual to the results for combined energy, which also involve some
Nitche type phenomenon.
  {The main part of the paper is concerned with the total combined energy, a
certain integral operator, defined as a convex linear combination of the
combined energy and combined distortion, of diffeomorphisms between two
concentric annuli $\A(1,r)$ and $\B(1,R)$. First we construct radial minimizers
of total combined energy, then we prove that those radial minimizers are
absolute minimizers on the class of all mappings between the annuli under
certain constraint. This extends the main result obtained by Iwaniec and
Onninen in \cite{arma}.}


  In-plane resistivity measurements as a function of temperature, magnetic
field and its orientation with respect to the crystallographic $ab-$plane were
used to study the upper critical field, $H_{c2}$, of two overdoped compositions
of the iron-based superconductor Ba(Fe$_{1-x}$Ni$_x$)$_2$As$_2$, $x=$0.054 and
$x$=0.072. Measurements were performed using precise alignment (with accuracy
less than 0.1$^o$) of magnetic field with respect to the Fe-As-plane. The
dependence of the $H_{c2}$ on angle $\theta$ between the field and the
$ab$-plane was measured in isothermal conditions in a broad temperature range.
We found that the shape of $H_{c2}(\theta)$, clearly deviates from
Ginzburg-Landau functional form.


  We consider the problem of clustering a set of high-dimensional data points
into sets of low-dimensional linear subspaces. The number of subspaces, their
dimensions, and their orientations are unknown. We propose a simple and
low-complexity clustering algorithm based on thresholding the correlations
between the data points followed by spectral clustering. A probabilistic
performance analysis shows that this algorithm succeeds even when the subspaces
intersect, and when the dimensions of the subspaces scale (up to a log-factor)
linearly in the ambient dimension. Moreover, we prove that the algorithm also
succeeds for data points that are subject to erasures with the number of
erasures scaling (up to a log-factor) linearly in the ambient dimension.
Finally, we propose a simple scheme that provably detects outliers.


  Experimental plots of the fraction of detected electrons removed from the
zero-loss peak, versus the fraction of incident electrons scattered outside of
the objective aperture, can serve as a robust fingerprint of object-contrast in
an energy filtered transmission electron microscope (EFTEM). Examples of this,
along with the first in a series of models for interpreting the resulting
patterns, were presented at the August 2010 meeting of the Microscope Society
of America meeting in Portland, Oregon, and published in {\em Microscopy and
MicroAnalysis} {\bf 16}, Supplement 2, pages 1534-1535 by Cambridge University
Press.


  Excitonic semiconductors have been a subject of research for photovoltaic
applications for many decades. Among them, the organic polymers and small
molecules based solar cells have now exceeded 19% power conversion efficiency
(PCE). While organic photovoltaics (OPVs) are approaching maturity, the advent
of strongly excitonic inorganic semiconductors such as two-dimensional
transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs) has renewed interest in excitonic
solar cells due to their high-optical constants, stable inorganic structure and
sub-nm film thicknesses. While several reports have been published on TMDC
based PVs, achieving power conversion efficiencies higher than 6% under one-sun
AM1.5G illumination has remained challenging. Here, we perform a full optical
and electronic analysis of design, structure and performance of monolayer TMDC
based, single-junction excitonic PVs. Our computational model with optimized
properties predicts a PCE of 9.22% in a superlattice device structure. Our
analysis suggests that, while the PCE for 2D excitonic solar cells may be
limited to < 10%, a specific power > 100 W g-1 may be achieved with our
proposed designs, making them attractive in aerospace, distributed remote
sensing, and wearable electronics.


  We generalise various non-triviality conditions for group actions to Fell
bundles over discrete groups and prove several implications between them. We
also study sufficient criteria for the reduced section C*-algebra C_r(B) of a
Fell bundle (B_g) to be strongly purely infinite. If the unit fibre A=B_e
contains an essential ideal that is separable or of Type I, then the Fell
bundle is aperiodic if and only if it is topologically free. If, in addition,
G=Z or G=Z/p for a square-free number p, then these equivalent conditions are
satisfied if and only if A detects ideals in C_r(B), if and only if A^+ \ {0}
supports C_r(B) in the Cuntz sense. For G as above and arbitrary A, C_r(B) is
simple if and only if the Fell bundle B is minimal and pointwise outer. In
general, B is aperiodic if and only if each of its non-trivial fibres has a
non-trivial Connes spectrum. If G is finite or if A contains an essential ideal
that is of Type I or simple, then aperiodicity is equivalent to pointwise pure
outerness.


  It is well-known that the commutant algebra of the
$U_q(\mathfrak{sl}_2)$-action on the $n$-fold tensor product of its fundamental
module is isomorphic to the Temperley-Lieb algebra TL$_n(\nu)$ with fugacity
parameter $\nu = -q - q^{-1}$ (at least in the generic case, i.e., when $q$ is
not a root of unity, or $n$ is small enough). Furthermore, the simple
$U_q(\mathfrak{sl}_2)$-modules appearing in the direct-sum decomposition of the
$n$-fold tensor product module are in one-to-one correspondence with those of
the Temperley-Lieb algebra. This double-commutant property is referred to as
quantum Schur-Weyl duality.
  In this article, we investigate such a duality in great detail. We prove that
the commutant of the $U_q(\mathfrak{sl}_2)$-action on any generic type-one
tensor product module is isomorphic to a diagram algebra that we call the
valenced Temperley-Lieb algebra TL$_\varsigma(\nu)$. This corresponds to
representations with higher spin, which results in the need of valences (or
colors) in the Temperley-Lieb diagrams. We establish detailed direct-sum
decompositions exhibiting this duality and find explicit bases amenable to
concrete calculations, important in applications. We also include a
double-commutant type property for homomorphisms between different
$U_q(\mathfrak{sl}_2)$-modules, realized by valenced diagrams. The diagram
calculus is reminiscent to Kauffman's recoupling theory and the graphical
methods developed among others by Penrose and Frenkel \& Khovanov. The results
also contain the standard quantum Schur-Weyl duality as a special case, and
when specialized to $q \rightarrow 1$, imply the classical Frobenius-Schur-Weyl
duality for the Lie algebra $\mathfrak{sl}_2(\mathbb{C})$ and a higher-spin
version thereof.


  Noncollinear magnetism opens exciting possibilities to generate topological
superconductivity. Here, we focus on helical and cycloidal magnetic textures in
magnet-superconductor hybrid structures in a background magnetic field. We
demonstrate that this system can enter a topological phase which can be
understood as a set of parallel topological wires. We explore and confirm this
idea in depth with three different approaches: a continuum model, a
tight-binding model based on the magnetic unit cell, and exact diagonalization
on a finite two-dimensional lattice. The key signature of this topological
state is the presence of Majorana bound states at certain disclination defects
in the magnetic texture. Based on the $C_2$ symmetry imposed by the helical or
cycloidal texture, we employ the theory of topological crystalline
superconductors with rotation invariants to obtain the Majorana parity at
disclinations. Furthermore, we consider a 90-degree helimagnet domain wall,
which is formed by a string of alternating disclinations. We discuss how the
resulting chain of disclination bound states hybridizes into two chiral modes
with different velocities. We suggest that hybrid systems of chiral magnets and
superconductors are capable of hosting Majorana modes in various spatial
configurations with potentially far less nano-engineering than in, e.g.,
semiconductor wires.


  We study the systematic numerical approximation of a class of Allen-Cahn type
problems modeling the motion of phase interfaces. The common feature of these
models is an underlying gradient flow structure which gives rise to a decay of
an associated energy functional along solution trajectories. We first study the
discretization in space by a conforming Galerkin approximation of a variational
principle which characterizes smooth solutions of the problem. Well-posedness
of the resulting semi-discretization is established and the energy decay along
discrete solution trajectories is proven. A problem adapted implicit
time-stepping scheme is then proposed and we establish its well-posed and decay
of the free energy for the fully discrete scheme. Some details about the
numerical realization by finite elements are discussed, in particular the
iterative solution of the nonlinear problems arising in every time-step. The
theoretical results are illustrated by numerical tests which also provide
further evidence for asymptotic expansions of the interface velocities derived
by Alber et al.


  We show, through analytical theory and rigorous numerical calculations, that
optical binding can organize a collection of particles into stable
one-dimensional lattice. This lattice, as well as other optically-bound
structures, are shown to exhibit spatially localized vibrational eigenmodes.
The origin of localization here is distinct from the usual mechanisms such as
disorder, defect, or nonlinearity, but is a consequence of the long-ranged
nature of optical binding. For an array of particles trapped by an interference
pattern, the stable configuration is often dictated by the external light
source, but our calculation revealed that inter-particle optical binding forces
can have a profound influence on the dynamics.


  The inner structure of the attractor appearing when the
Varley-Gradwell-Hassell population model bifurcates from regular to chaotic
behaviour is studied. By algebraic and geometric arguments the coexistence of a
continuum of neutrally stable limit cycles with different periods in the
attractor is explained.


  Airborne electromagnetic surveys may consist of hundreds of thousands of
soundings. In most cases, this makes 3D inversions unfeasible even when the
subsurface is characterized by a high level of heterogeneity. Instead,
approaches based on 1D forwards are routinely used because of their
computational efficiency. However, it is relatively easy to fit 3D responses
with 1D forward modelling and retrieve apparently well-resolved conductivity
models. However, those detailed features may simply be caused by fitting the
modelling error connected to the approximate forward. In addition, it is, in
practice, difficult to identify this kind of artifacts as the modeling error is
correlated. The present study demonstrates how to assess the modelling error
introduced by the 1D approximation and how to include this additional piece of
information into a probabilistic inversion. Not surprisingly, it turns out that
this simple modification provides not only much better reconstructions of the
targets but, maybe, more importantly, guarantees a correct estimation of the
corresponding reliability.


  Recent results on mixing, CP violation and rare decays in charm physics from
the LHCb experiment are presented. Study of ''wrong-sign'' $D^{0} \rightarrow
K^+ \pi^-$ decays provides the highest precision measurements to date of the
mixing parameters $x^{\prime 2}$ and $y^{\prime}$, and of CP violation in this
decay mode. Direct and indirect CP violation in the $D^0$ system are probed to
a sensitivity of around $10^{-3}$ using $D^0 \rightarrow K^+K^-$ and $D^0
\rightarrow \pi^+\pi^-$ decays and found to be consistent with zero. Searches
for the rare decays $D^+_{(s)} \rightarrow \pi^+\mu^+\mu^-$, $D^+_{(s)}
\rightarrow \pi^-\mu^+\mu^+$ and $D^0 \rightarrow \mu^+\mu^-$ find no evidence
of signal, but set the best limits on branching fractions to date. Thus,
despite many excellent results in charm physics from LHCb, no evidence for
physics beyond the Standard Model is found.


  Large-scale optimization problems are prevalent in several fields, including
engineering, finance, and logistics. However, most optimization problems cannot
be efficiently encoded onto a physical system because the existing quantum
samplers have too few qubits. Another typical limiting factor is that the
optimization constraints are not compatible with the native cost Hamiltonian.
This work presents a new approach to address these challenges. We introduce the
adversarial quantum autoencoder model (AQAM) that can be used to map
large-scale optimization problems onto existing quantum samplers while
simultaneously optimizing the problem through latent quantum-enhanced Boltzmann
sampling. We demonstrate the AQAM on a neutral atom sampler, and showcase the
model by optimizing 64px by 64px unit cells that represent a broad-angle filter
metasurface applicable to improving the coherence of neutral atom devices.
Using 12-atom simulations, we demonstrate that the AQAM achieves a lower Renyi
divergence and a larger spectral gap when compared to classical Markov Chain
Monte Carlo samplers. Our work paves the way to more efficient mapping of
conventional optimization problems into existing quantum samplers.


  We formulate and for the most part prove a conjecture in the style of
Mazur-Greenberg for the nonvanishing of central values of Rankin-Selberg
$L$-functions attached to elliptic curves in abelian extensions of imaginary
quadratic fields. This in particular generalizes the theorem of Rohrlich on
$L$-functions of elliptic curves in cyclotomic towers to the setting of abelian
extensions of imaginary quadratic fields, corresponding to families of
degree-four $L$-functions given by
$\operatorname{GL}(2)\times\operatorname{GL}(2)$ Rankin-Selberg $L$-functions.
It also generalizes the theorems of Rohrlich, Greenberg, Vatsal, and Cornut for
$L$-functions of elliptic curves in $\operatorname{Z}_p^2$-extensions of
imaginary quadratic fields.


  Magnetic and transport properties of La0.7Ca0.3Mn1-xM'xO3 (M'=Al,Ti) are
studied. The dilution of the Mn lattice results in a weakening of the
ferromagnetism, a deterioration of the metallic conductivity, and a strong
enhancement of the magnetoresistance. Although Tc linearly decreases with x in
the low substitution ranges for both M' series, the scaling behavior Tc(np)
previously observed for La0.7Sr0.3Mn1-xM'xO3 [Phys. Rev. B 73, 184403 (2006)]
is no longer obtained. Extrapolations of the Tc(np) linear curves to Tc=0 give
np values much smaller than 1. These results suggest that, according to a
molecular-field approximation, antiferromagnetic superexchange between Mn ions
is significant in La0.7Ca0.3MnO3, in contrast to what observed in
La0.7Sr0.3MnO3. Additionally, structural data of the Al-substituted samples
suggest that variations of the eg-electron bandwidth W cannot explain the
decrease of Tc in magnetically diluted manganites.


  Nanoscale control of charge doping in two-dimensional (2D) materials permits
the realization of electronic analogs of optical phenomena, relativistic
physics at low energies, and technologically promising nanoelectronics.
Electrostatic gating and chemical doping are the two most common methods to
achieve local control of such doping. However, these approaches suffer from
complicated fabrication processes that introduce contamination, change material
properties irreversibly, and lack flexible pattern control. Here we demonstrate
a clean, simple, and reversible technique that permits writing, reading, and
erasing of doping patterns for 2D materials at the nanometer scale. We
accomplish this by employing a graphene/boron nitride (BN) heterostructure that
is equipped with a bottom gate electrode. By using electron transport and
scanning tunneling microscopy (STM), we demonstrate that spatial control of
charge doping can be realized with the application of either light or STM tip
voltage excitations in conjunction with a gate electric field. Our
straightforward and novel technique provides a new path towards on-demand
graphene pn junctions and ultra-thin memory devices.


  Recent advancements in image understanding have benefited from the extensive
use of web image-text pairs. However, video understanding remains a challenge
despite the availability of substantial web video-text data. This difficulty
primarily arises from the inherent complexity of videos and the inefficient
language supervision in recent web-collected video-text datasets. In this
paper, we introduce Text-Only Pre-Alignment (TOPA), a novel approach to extend
large language models (LLMs) for video understanding, without the need for
pre-training on real video data. Specifically, we first employ an advanced LLM
to automatically generate Textual Videos comprising continuous textual frames,
along with corresponding annotations to simulate real video-text data. Then,
these annotated textual videos are used to pre-align a language-only LLM with
the video modality. To bridge the gap between textual and real videos, we
employ the CLIP model as the feature extractor to align image and text
modalities. During text-only pre-alignment, the continuous textual frames,
encoded as a sequence of CLIP text features, are analogous to continuous CLIP
image features, thus aligning the LLM with real video representation. Extensive
experiments, including zero-shot evaluation and finetuning on various video
understanding tasks, demonstrate that TOPA is an effective and efficient
framework for aligning video content with LLMs. In particular, without training
on any video data, the TOPA-Llama2-13B model achieves a Top-1 accuracy of 51.0%
on the challenging long-form video understanding benchmark, Egoschema. This
performance surpasses previous video-text pre-training approaches and proves
competitive with recent GPT-3.5-based video agents.


  The GBAR experiment aims at measuring the free fall of antihydrogen atoms in
the terrestrial gravitational field. It is located at CERN in the AD area. It
is the first experiment which has been connected to the ELENA low energy
antiproton ring that started commissioning in the summer of 2018. First tests
with antiproton and positron beams were performed in summer and fall of 2018.
The status and plans of the experiment are described in this document.


  We present a NICMOS 1.6 micron imaging isophotal study of 27 early-type
galaxies. Our selected sample is not as biased against dusty galaxies as the
visible WFPC samples observed with HST. Core galaxies have reduced ellipticity
and boxiness near and within their core or break radius. This supports a core
formation mechanism which mixes or scatters stars such as scattering caused by
a binary black hole. We find no correlation between core properties and dust
mass or X-ray luminosity, suggesting that processes determining the current gas
content (e.g., such as minor mergers and cooling flows) are unrelated to
processes occurring during core formation. Core galaxies exist in a variety of
environments ranging from poor groups to large clusters. A combined sample
suggests that galaxy groups may harbor more luminous power law galaxies than
clusters such as Virgo and Fornax.


  We prove that certain means of the quadratical partial sums of the
two-dimensional Vilenkin-Fourier series are uniformly bounded operators from
the Hardy space $H_{p}$ to the space $L_{p}$ for $0<p\leq 1.$ We also prove
that the sequence in the denominator cannot be improved.


  We report measurements of the dissipation in the Superfluid Helium high
REynold number von Karman flow (SHREK) experiment for different forcing
conditions, through a regime of global hysteretic bifurcation. Our
macroscopical measurements indicate no noticeable difference between the
classical fluid and the superfluid regimes, thereby providing evidence of the
same dissipative anomaly and response to asymmetry in fluid and superfluid
regime. %In the latter case, A detailed study of the variations of the
hysteretic cycle with Reynolds number supports the idea that (i) the stability
of the bifurcated states of classical turbulence in this closed flow is partly
governed by the dissipative scales and (ii) the normal and the superfluid
component at these temperatures (1.6K) are locked down to the dissipative
length scale.


  This paper is devoted to the analysis of random motions on the line and in
the space R^d (d > 1) performed at finite velocity and governed by a
non-homogeneous Poisson process with rate \lambda(t). The explicit
distributions p(x,t) of the position of the randomly moving particles are
obtained solving initial-value problems for the Euler- Poisson-Darboux equation
when \lambda(t) = \alpha/t, t > 0. We consider also the case where \lambda(t) =
\lambda coth \lambda t and \lambda(t) = \lambda tanh \lambda t, where some
Riccati differential equations emerge and the explicit distributions are
obtained for d = 1. We also examine planar random motions with random
velocities by projecting random flights in R^d onto the plane. Finally the case
of planar motions with four orthogonal directions is considered and the
corresponding higher-order equations with time-varying coefficients obtained.


  The ring of Witt vectors over a perfect valuation ring of characteristic p,
often denoted A_inf, plays a pivotal role in p-adic Hodge theory; for instance,
Bhatt, Morrow, and Scholze have recently reinterpreted and refined the
crystalline comparison isomorphism by relating it to a certain A_inf-valued
cohomology theory. We address some basic ring-theoretic questions about A_inf
motivated by analogies with two-dimensional regular local rings. For example,
we show that in most cases A_inf, which is manifestly not noetherian, is also
not coherent. On the other hand, it does have the property that vector bundles
over the complement of the closed point in Spec A_inf do extend uniquely over
the puncture; moreover, a similar statement holds in Huber's category of adic
spaces.


  We investigate the stimulated Raman adiabatic passage in two-color
photoassociation for a atom-molecule Bose-Einstein condensate. By applying two
time-varying Guassian laser pulses that fulfill generalized two-photon
resonance condition, we obtain highly efficient atom-molecule conversion. The
efficiency depends on the free-bound detuning and the delay time between the
two pulses. By adjusting the parameters optimally, we achieve 92% conversion
efficiency.


  Motivated by the difficulty to solve numerically the weakly compressible 1D
isentropic Euler equations with classical methods, we develop in this paper a
two scale numerical method on this model. This method is based on two scale
convergence theory developped by N'Guetseng and Allaire, and finite volume
scheme. Furthermore, we do some numerical simulations in order to verify that
the two-scale numerical method is more and more accurate when the Mach number
diminishes.


  The Harnack and log Harnack inequalities for stochastic differential equation
driven by $G$-Brownian motion with multiplicative noise are derived by means of
coupling by change of mesure. All of the above results extend the existing ones
in the linear expectation setting. Moreover, the gradient estimate generalize
the nonlinear results appeared in [11].


  Federated learning is a promising direction to tackle the privacy issues
related to sharing patients' sensitive data. Often, federated systems in the
medical image analysis domain assume that the participating local clients are
\textit{honest}. Several studies report mechanisms through which a set of
malicious clients can be introduced that can poison the federated setup,
hampering the performance of the global model. To overcome this, robust
aggregation methods have been proposed that defend against those attacks. We
observe that most of the state-of-the-art robust aggregation methods are
heavily dependent on the distance between the parameters or gradients of
malicious clients and benign clients, which makes them prone to local model
poisoning attacks when the parameters or gradients of malicious and benign
clients are close. Leveraging this, we introduce DISBELIEVE, a local model
poisoning attack that creates malicious parameters or gradients such that their
distance to benign clients' parameters or gradients is low respectively but at
the same time their adverse effect on the global model's performance is high.
Experiments on three publicly available medical image datasets demonstrate the
efficacy of the proposed DISBELIEVE attack as it significantly lowers the
performance of the state-of-the-art \textit{robust aggregation} methods for
medical image analysis. Furthermore, compared to state-of-the-art local model
poisoning attacks, DISBELIEVE attack is also effective on natural images where
we observe a severe drop in classification performance of the global model for
multi-class classification on benchmark dataset CIFAR-10.


  We report for the first time exact ground-states deduced for the D=2
dimensional generic periodic Anderson model at finite $U$, the Hamiltonian of
the model not containing direct hopping terms for $f$-electrons $(t^f = 0)$.
The deduced itinerant phase presents non-Fermi liquid properties in the normal
phase, emerges for real hybridization matrix elements, and not requires
anisotropic unit cell. In order to deduce these results, the plaquette operator
procedure has been generalised to a block operator technique which uses blocks
higher than an unit cell and contains $f$-operator contributions acting only on
a single central site of the block.


  We examine trilinear gauge boson couplings (TGCs) in the context of the
$SU(3)_W\otimes U(1)'$ gauge-Higgs unification scenario. The TGCs play
important roles in the probes of the physics beyond the standard model, since
they are highly restricted by the experiments. We discuss mass spectrum of the
neutral gauge boson with brane-localized mass terms carefully and find that the
TGCs and $\rho$ parameter may deviate from standard model predictions. Finally
we put a constraint from these observables and discuss the possible parameter
space.


  The number of binary asteroids in the near-Earth region might be
significantly higher than expected. While Bottke and Melosh (1996) suggested
that about 15% of the NEAs are binaries, as indicated from the frequency of
double craters, and Pravec and Harris (2000) suggested that half of the
fast-rotating NEAs are binaries, our recent study of Aten NEA lightcurves shows
that the fraction of binary NEAs might be even higher than 50%. We found two
asteroids with asynchronous binary characteristics such as two additive periods
and fast rotation of the primary fragment. We also identified three asteroids
with synchronous binary characteristics such as amplitude higher than one
magnitude, U-shaped lightcurve maxima and V-shaped lightcurve minima. These
five binaries were detected out of a sample of eight asteroids observed,
implying a 63% binarity frequency. Confirmation of this high binary population
requires the study of a larger representative sample. However, any mitigation
program that requires the deflection or demise of a potential impactor will
have to factor in the possibility that the target is a binary or multiple
asteroid system.


  We have considered the persistence of unvisited sites of a lattice, i.e., the
probability $S(t)$ that a site remains unvisited till time $t$ in presence of
mutually repulsive random walkers. The dynamics of this system has direct
correspondence to that of the domain walls in a certain system of Ising spins
where the number of domain walls become fixed following a zero termperature
quench. Here we get the result that $S(t) \propto \exp(-\alpha t^{\beta})$
where $\beta$ is close to 0.5 and $\alpha$ a function of the density of the
walkers $\rho$. The number of persistent sites in presence of independent
walkers of density $\rho^\prime$ is known to be $S^\prime (t) = \exp(-2
\sqrt{\frac{2}{\pi}} \rho^\prime t^{1/2})$. We show that a mapping of the
interacting walkers' problem to the independent walkers' problem is possible
with $\rho^\prime = \rho/(1-\rho)$ provided $\rho^\prime, \rho$ are small. We
also discuss some other intricate results obtained in the interacting walkers'
case.


  We aim to estimate the contribution of the radial component of the Lorentz
force to the gas rotation in several types of galaxies. Using typical
parameters for the exponential scale of synchrotron emission and the scale
length of HI gas, under the assumption of equipartition between the energies of
cosmic rays and total magnetic fields, we derive the Lorentz force and compare
it to the gravitational force in the radial component of the momentum equation.
We distinguish the different contributions between the large-scale and the
small-scale turbulent fields by Reynolds averaging. We compare these findings
with a dynamical dynamo model. We find a possible reduction of circular gas
velocity in the very outer parts and an increase inside a radius of four times
the synchrotron scale length. Sufficiently localized radial reversals of the
magnetic field may cause characteristic modulations in the gas rotation curve
with typical amplitudes of 10-20 km/s. It is unlikely that the magnetic field
contributes to the flat rotation in the outer parts of galaxies. If anything,
it will \emph{impede} the gravitationally supported rotation, demanding for an
even higher halo mass to explain the observed rotation profile. We speculate
that this may have consequences for ram pressure stripping and the truncation
of the stellar disc.


  Brownian particles interacting sequentially with distinct temperatures and
driving forces at each stroke have been tackled as a reliable alternative for
the construction of engine setups. However they can behave very inefficiently
depending on the driving used for the worksource and/or when temperatures of
each stage are very different from each other. Inspired by some models for
molecular motors and recent experimental studies, a coupling between driving
and velocities is introduced as an alternative ingredient for enhancing the
system performance. Here, the role of this new ingredient for levering the
engine performance is detailed investigated from stochastic thermodynamics.
Exact expressions for quantities and distinct maximization routes have been
obtained and investigated. The search of an optimal coupling provides a
substantial increase of engine performance (mainly efficiency), even for large
$\Delta T$. A simple and general argument for the optimal coupling can be
estimated, irrespective the driving and other model details.


  VLA observations of large-scale HI and OH absorption in the merging galaxy of
NGC6240 are presented with 1 arcsec resolution. HI absorption is found across
large areas of the extended radio continuum structure with a strong
concentration towards the double-nucleus. The OH absorption is confined to the
nuclear region. The HI and OH observations identify fractions of the gas disks
of the two galaxies and confirm the presence of central gas accumulation
between the nuclei. The data clearly identify the nucleus of the southern
galaxy as the origin of the symmetric superwind outflow and also reveal
blue-shifted components resulting from a nuclear starburst. Various absorption
components are associated with large-scale dynamics of the system including a
foreground dust lane crossing the radio structure in the northwest region.


  We show how the Minkowskian space-time emerges from a topologically
homogeneous causal network, presenting a simple analytical derivation of the
Lorentz transformations, with metric as pure event-counting. The derivation
holds generally for d=1 space dimension, however, it can be extended to d>1 for
special causal networks.


  We present BV and u'g'r'i' CCD photometry of the central region of NGC 2482.
We also present BVu'g' CCD photometry of five clusters that have been poorly
studied in the past: Ruprecht 42, Ruprecht 51, Ruprecht 153, Ruprecht 154; and
AH03 J0748-26.9, which to our knowledge has not been studied before. Using a
global optimization technique that eliminates much of the subjectivity
previously inherent in main sequence fitting studies, we obtain values of the
distances, ages, and metallicities of the clusters, with robust estimates of
the uncertainties of these fundamental parameters. Four of our clusters are
less than ~1.3 kpc beyond the Sun's distance from the Galactic Center and have
essentially solar metallicity. The metallicities of those clusters more distant
from the Galactic Center are consistent with a 0.3 dex step to lower [Fe/H]
found in other studies.


  We elucidate the universal spatio-temporal scaling properties of the
time-dependent correlation functions in a class of two-component
one-dimensional (1D) driven diffusive system that consists of two coupled
asymmetric exclusion process. By using a perturbative renormalization group
framework, we show that the relevant scaling exponents have values same as
those for the 1D Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) equation. We connect these universal
scaling exponents with the symmetries of the model equations. We thus establish
that these models belong to the 1D KPZ universality class.


  Inflation provides a natural mechanism to account for the origin of cosmic
structures. The generation of primordial inhomogeneities during inflation can
be understood via the spontaneous creation of quanta from the vacuum. We show
that when the corresponding {\it stimulated} creation of quanta is considered,
the characteristics of the state of the universe at the onset of inflation are
not diluted by the inflationary expansion and can be imprinted in the spectrum
of primordial inhomogeneities. The non-gaussianities (particularly in the
so-called squeezed configuration) in the cosmic microwave background and galaxy
distribution can then tell us about the state of the universe that existed at
the time when quantum field theory in curved spacetime first emerged as a
plausible effective theory.


  Let $M$ be a complex manifold with boundary $X$, which admits a holomorphic
Lie group $G$-action preserving $X$. We establish a full asymptotic expansion
for the $G$-invariant Bergman kernel under certain assumptions. As an
application, we get $G$-invariant version of Fefferman's result about
regularity of biholomorphic maps on strongly pseudoconvex domains of $\mathbb
C^n$. Moreover, we show that the Guillemin-Sternberg map on a complex manifold
with boundary is Fredholm by developing reduction to boundary technique, which
establish ``quantization commutes with reduction" in this case.


  For any positive natural number $r\in\N^+$ we construct new explicit proper
$r$-harmonic functions on the celebrated $3$-dimensional Thurston geometries
$\Sol$, $\Nil$, $\SL2$, $\H^2\times\rn$ and $\s^2\times\rn$.


  This paper suggests a new approach to questions of rationality of threefolds
based on category theory. Following M. Ballard, D. Favero, L. Katzarkov
(ArXiv:1012.0864) and D. Favero, L. Katzarkov (Noether--Lefschetz Spectra and
Algebraic cycles, in preparation) we enhance constructions from A. Kuznetsov
(arXiv:0904.4330) by introducing Noether--Lefschetz spectra --- an interplay
between Orlov spectra (C. Oliva, Algebraic cycles and Hodge theory on
generalized Reye congruences, Compos. Math. 92, No. 1 (1994) 1--22) and
Hochschild homology. The main goal of this paper is to suggest a series of
interesting examples where above techniques might apply. We start by
constructing a sextic double solid $X$ with 35 nodes and torsion in
$H^3(X,\mathbb Z)$. This is a novelty --- after the classical example of Artin
and Mumford (1972), this is the second example of a Fano threefold with a
torsion in the 3-rd integer homology group. In particular $X$ is non-rational.
We consider other examples as well --- $V_{10}$ with 10 singular points and
double covering of quadric ramified in octic with 20 nodal singular points.
  After analyzing the geometry of their Landau--Ginzburg models we suggest a
general non-rationality picture based on Homological Mirror Symmetry and
category theory.


  In order to assess whether the environment has a significant effect on galaxy
sizes, we compare the mass--size relations of cluster and field galaxies in the
$0.4 < z < 0.8$ redshift range from the ESO Distant Cluster Survey (EDisCS)
using HST images. We analyse two mass-selected samples, one defined using
photometric redshifts ($10.2 \le \log M_\ast/M_{\odot} \le 12.0$), and a
smaller more robust subsample using spectroscopic redshifts ($10.6 \le \log
M_\ast/M_{\odot} \le 11.8$). We find no significant difference in the size
distributions of cluster and field galaxies of a given morphology. Similarly,
we find no significant difference in the size distributions of cluster and
field galaxies of similar rest-frame $B-V$ colours. We rule out average size
differences larger than $10$--$20$\% in both cases. Consistent conclusions are
found with the spectroscopic and photometric samples. These results have
important consequences for the physical process(es) responsible for the size
evolution of galaxies, and in particular the effect of the environment. The
remarkable growth in galaxy size observed from $z\sim2.5$ has been reported to
depend on the environment at higher redshifts ($z>1$), with early-type/passive
galaxies in higher density environments growing earlier. Such dependence
disappears at lower redshifts. Therefore, if the reported difference at
higher-$z$ is real, the growth of field galaxies has caught up with that of
cluster galaxies by $z\sim1$. Any putative mechanism responsible for galaxy
growth has to account for the existence of environmental differences at high
redshift and their absence (or weakening) at lower redshifts.


  Interpreting data with mathematical models is an important aspect of
real-world applied mathematical modeling. Very often we are interested to
understand the extent to which a particular data set informs and constrains
model parameters. This question is closely related to the concept of parameter
identifiability, and in this article we present a series of computational
exercises to introduce tools that can be used to assess parameter
identifiability, estimate parameters and generate model predictions. Taking a
likelihood-based approach, we show that very similar ideas and algorithms can
be used to deal with a range of different mathematical modelling frameworks.
The exercises and results presented in this article are supported by a suite of
open access codes that can be accessed on GitHub.


  In this work, an improved quark model approach to the $\omega$ meson
photo-production with an effective Lagrangian is presented. The {\it t}-channel
{\it natural}-parity exchange is taken into account through the Pomeron
exchange, while the {\it unnatural}-parity exchange is described by the $\pi^0$
exchange. With a very limited number of parameters, the available experimental
data in the low energy regime can be consistently accounted for. We find that
the beam polarization observables show sensitivities to some {\it s}-channel
individual resonances in the $SU(6)\otimes O(3)$ quark model symmetry limit.
Especially, the two resonances $P_{13}(1720)$ and $F_{15}(1680)$, which belong
to the representation $[{\bf 56, ^2 8}, 2, 2, J]$, have dominant contributions
over other excited states. Concerning the essential motivation of searching for
"missing resonances" in meson photo-production, this approach provides a
feasible framework, on which systematic investigations can be done.


  We construct quasiisometries of nilpotent Lie groups. In particular, for any
simply connected nilpotent Lie group N, we construct quasiisometries from N to
itself that is not at finite distance from any map that is a composition of
left translations and automorphisms. We also construct biLipschitz maps of the
Heisenberg groups that send vertical lines to non-vertical curves.


  This review presents flavour related issues in the production and decays of
heavy states at LHC, both from the experimental side and from the theoretical
side. We review top quark physics and discuss flavour aspects of several
extensions of the Standard Model, such as supersymmetry, little Higgs model or
models with extra dimensions. This includes discovery aspects as well as
measurement of several properties of these heavy states. We also present public
available computational tools related to this topic.


  Using the group catalog obtained from zCOSMOS spectroscopic data and the
complementary photometric data from the COSMOS survey, we explore segregation
effects occurring in groups of galaxies at intermediate/high redshifts. We
built two composite groups at intermediate (0.2 <= z <= 0.45) and high (0.45 <
z <= 0.8) redshifts, and we divided the corresponding composite group galaxies
into three samples according to their distance from the group center. We
explored how galaxy stellar masses and colors - working in narrow bins of
stellar masses - vary as a function of the galaxy distance from the group
center. We found that the most massive galaxies in our sample (Log(M_gal/M_sun)
>= 10.6) do not display any strong group-centric dependence of the fractions of
red/blue objects. For galaxies of lower masses (9.8 <= Log(M_gal/M_sun) <=
10.6) there is a radial dependence in the changing mix of red and blue
galaxies. This dependence is most evident in poor groups, whereas richer groups
do not display any obvious trend of the blue fraction. Interestingly, mass
segregation shows the opposite behavior: it is visible only in rich groups,
while poorer groups have a a constant mix of galaxy stellar masses as a
function of radius. We suggest a simple scenario where color- and
mass-segregation originate from different physical processes. While dynamical
friction is the obvious cause for establishing mass segregation, both
starvation and galaxy-galaxy collisions are plausible mechanisms to quench star
formation in groups at a faster rate than in the field. In poorer groups the
environmental effects are caught in action superimposed to secular galaxy
evolution. Their member galaxies display increasing blue fractions when moving
from the group center to more external regions, presumably reflecting the
recent accretion history of these groups.


  Smart contracts are computer programs running on blockchains to automate the
transaction execution between users. The absence of contract specifications
poses a real challenge to the correctness verification of smart contracts.
Program invariants are properties that are always preserved throughout the
execution, which characterize an important aspect of the program behaviors. In
this paper, we propose a novel invariant generation framework, INVCON+, for
Solidity smart contracts. INVCON+ extends the existing invariant detector,
InvCon, to automatically produce verified contract invariants based on both
dynamic inference and static verification. Unlike INVCON+, InvCon only produces
likely invariants, which have a high probability to hold, yet are still not
verified against the contract code. Particularly, INVCON+ is able to infer more
expressive invariants that capture richer semantic relations of contract code.
We evaluate INVCON+ on 361 ERC20 and 10 ERC721 real-world contracts, as well as
common ERC20 vulnerability benchmarks. The experimental results indicate that
INVCON+ efficiently produces high-quality invariant specifications, which can
be used to secure smart contracts from common vulnerabilities.


  Future wireless communication infrastructure will rely on terahertz systems
that can support an increasing demand for large-bandwidth, ultra-fast wireless
data transfer. In order to satisfy this demand, compact, low-power, and low
noise sources of terahertz radiation are being developed. A promising route to
achieving this goal is combining photonic-integrated optical frequency combs
with fast photodiodes for difference frequency generation in the THz. Here, we
demonstrate wireless communications using a 300 GHz carrier wave generated via
photomixing of two optical tones originating from diode lasers that are
injection locked to a dissipative Kerr soliton frequency microcomb. We achieve
transfer rates of 80 Gbps using homodyne detection and 60 Gbps transmitting
simultaneously both data and clock signals in a dual-path wireless link. This
experimental demonstration paves a path towards low-noise and integrated
photonic millimeter-wave transceivers for future wireless communication
systems.


  Quasicrystals,characterized by long-range order without translational
symmetry,have catalyzed transformative advances in various fields,including
optics in terms of field quasicrystals.Here,we present the first demonstration
of photonic quasicrystals formed by spin angular momentum, unveiling novel
spin-orbit coupling effects absent in traditional field quasicrystals.A de
Bruijn tiling like theoretical framework was built elucidating the formation
mechanism of spin quasicrystals for diverse symmetries.Moreover,the
configurations of these spin textures can be manipulated through the
adjustments of the wavefronts,among which phason-like discontinuous dynamics is
observed and quantitatively measured. Unlike optical quasicrystals shaped by
electromagnetic fields,these spin-governed quasicrystals exhibit quasi-periodic
properties of kinematic parameters,extending their potential applications to
other physical systems. These findings hold promise for novel advancements in
optical trapping,quasicrystal fabrication,and optical encryption systems.


  The stellar, gaseous and young stellar disks in the LITTLE THINGS sample of
nearby dIrrs are fitted with functions to search for correlations between the
parameters. We find that the HI radial profiles are generally flatter in the
center and fall faster in the outer regions than the V-band profiles, while
young stars are more centrally concentrated, especially if the HI is more
centrally flat. This pattern suggests that the HI is turning into molecules in
the center and the molecular clouds are forming stars and FUV. A model that
assumes the molecular surface density is proportional to the total gas surface
density to a power of 1.5 or 2, in analogy with the Kennicutt-Schmidt relation,
reproduces the relationship between the ratio of the visible to the HI scale
length and the HI Sersic index. The molecular fraction is estimated as a
function of radius for each galaxy by converting the FUV to a molecular surface
density using conventional calibrations. The average molecular fraction inside
3R_D is 23+/-17%. However, the break in the stellar surface brightness profile
has no unified tracer related to star formation.


  In this work, we propose the Generative Latent Flow (GLF), an algorithm for
generative modeling of the data distribution. GLF uses an Auto-encoder (AE) to
learn latent representations of the data, and a normalizing flow to map the
distribution of the latent variables to that of simple i.i.d noise. In contrast
to some other Auto-encoder based generative models, which use various
regularizers that encourage the encoded latent distribution to match the prior
distribution, our model explicitly constructs a mapping between these two
distributions, leading to better density matching while avoiding over
regularizing the latent variables. We compare our model with several related
techniques, and show that it has many relative advantages including fast
convergence, single stage training and minimal reconstruction trade-off. We
also study the relationship between our model and its stochastic counterpart,
and show that our model can be viewed as a vanishing noise limit of VAEs with
flow prior. Quantitatively, under standardized evaluations, our method achieves
state-of-the-art sample quality among AE based models on commonly used
datasets, and is competitive with GANs' benchmarks.