  We evaluate the exact equilibrium distribution of gas molecules adsorbed on
an active surface with an infinite number of attachment sites. Our result is a
Poisson distribution having mean $X = {\mu P P_s \over P_e}$, with $\mu$ the
mean gas density, $ P_s$ the sticking probability, $P_e$ the evaporation
probability in a time interval $\tau$, and $P$ Smoluchowski's exit probability
in time interval $\tau$ for the surface in question. We then solve for the case
of a finite number of attachment sites using the mean field approximation,
recovering in this case the Langmuir isotherm.


  We consider shape optimization problems subject to elliptic partial
differential equations. In the context of the finite element method, the
geometry to be optimized is represented by the computational mesh, and the
optimization proceeds by repeatedly updating the mesh node positions. It is
well known that such a procedure eventually may lead to a deterioration of mesh
quality, or even an invalidation of the mesh, when interior nodes penetrate
neighboring cells. We examine this phenomenon, which can be traced back to the
ineptness of the discretized objective when considered over the space of mesh
node positions. As a remedy, we propose a restriction in the admissible mesh
deformations, inspired by the Hadamard structure theorem. First and second
order methods are considered in this setting. Numerical results show that mesh
degeneracy can be overcome, avoiding the need for remeshing or other
strategies. FEniCS code for the proposed methods is available on GitHub.


  The merger of close binary systems containing two neutron stars should
produce a burst of gravitational waves, as predicted by the theory of general
relativity. A reliable estimate of the double-neutron-star merger rate in the
Galaxy is crucial in order to predict whether current gravity wave detectors
will be successful in detecting such bursts. Present estimates of this rate are
rather low, because we know of only a few double-neutron-star binaries with
merger times less than the age of the Universe. Here we report the discovery of
a 22-ms pulsar, PSR J0737-3039, which is a member of a highly relativistic
double-neutron-star binary with an orbital period of 2.4 hours. This system
will merge in about 85 Myr, a time much shorter than for any other known
neutron-star binary. Together with the relatively low radio luminosity of PSR
J0737-3039, this timescale implies an order-of-magnitude increase in the
predicted merger rate for double-neutron-star systems in our Galaxy (and in the
rest of the Universe).


  With the advancement of virtual reality (VR) technology, virtual displays
have become integral to how museums, galleries, and other tourist destinations
present their collections to the public. However, the current lack of immersion
in virtual reality displays limits the user's ability to experience and
appreciate its aesthetics. This paper presents a case study of a creative
approach taken by a tourist attraction venue in developing a physical network
system that allows visitors to enhance VR's aesthetic aspects based on
environmental parameters gathered by external sensors. Our system was
collaboratively developed through interviews and sessions with twelve
stakeholder groups interested in art and exhibitions. This paper demonstrates
how our technological advancements in interaction, immersion, and visual
attractiveness surpass those of earlier virtual display generations. Through
multimodal interaction, we aim to encourage innovation on the Web and create
more visually appealing and engaging virtual displays. It is hoped that the
greater online art community will gain fresh insight into how people interact
with virtual worlds as a result of this work.


  Boij-S\"oderberg theory gives a combinatorial description of the set of Betti
tables belonging to finite length modules over the polynomial ring $S = k[x_1,
\ldots, x_n]$. We posit that a similar combinatorial description can be given
for analogous numerical invariants of graded differential $S$-modules, which
are natural generalizations of chain complexes. We prove several results that
lend evidence in support of this conjecture, including a categorical pairing
between the derived categories of graded differential $S$-modules and coherent
sheaves on $\mathbb{P}^{n-1}$ and a proof of the conjecture in the case where
$S = k[t]$.


  Let $G$ be a complex reductive group. The spherical Hecke category of $G$ can
be presented as the category of $G_{\mathcal O}$-equivariant constructible
sheaves on the affine Grassmannian $\mathrm{Gr}_G$. This category admits a
convolution product, extending the convolution product in the Satake category.
In this paper, we upgrade the mentioned convolution product to an $\mathbb
E_3$-monoidal structure in $\infty$-categories. The construction is intrinsic,
in the sense that it is not performed by pullback from the spectral side of the
Derived Satake Theorem by Bezrukavnikov and Finkelberg. We use classical
properties of the Beilinson-Drinfeld Grassmannian, Lurie's characterization of
$\mathbb E_k$-algebras via the topological Ran space, Gaitsgory and
Rozenblyum's formalism of correspondences and the homotopy theory of stratified
spaces.


  The NASA Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is observing tens of
millions of stars with time spans ranging from $\sim$ 27 days to about 1 year
of continuous observations. This vast amount of data contains a wealth of
information for variability, exoplanet, and stellar astrophysics studies but
requires a number of processing steps before it can be fully utilized. In order
to efficiently process all the TESS data and make it available to the wider
scientific community, the TESS Data for Asteroseismology working group, as part
of the TESS Asteroseismic Science Consortium, has created an automated
open-source processing pipeline to produce light curves corrected for
systematics from the short- and long-cadence raw photometry data and to
classify these according to stellar variability type. We will process all stars
down to a TESS magnitude of 15. This paper is the next in a series detailing
how the pipeline works. Here, we present our methodology for the automatic
variability classification of TESS photometry using an ensemble of supervised
learners that are combined into a metaclassifier. We successfully validate our
method using a carefully constructed labelled sample of Kepler Q9 light curves
with a 27.4 days time span mimicking single-sector TESS observations, on which
we obtain an overall accuracy of 94.9%. We demonstrate that our methodology can
successfully classify stars outside of our labeled sample by applying it to all
$\sim$ 167,000 stars observed in Q9 of the Kepler space mission.


  In this paper, we show that for $\alpha\in(1/2,5/4)$, there exists a force
$f$ and two distinct Leray-Hopf flows $u_1,u_2$ solving the forced fractional
Navier-Stokes equation starting from rest. This shows that the J.L. Lions
exponent is sharp in the class of Leray-Hopf solutions for the forced
fractional Navier-Stokes equation.


  Recently, the facilities of radioactive ion beam (RIB) combined with advanced
detector systems provide us unique opportunity to probe the exotic properties
of the nuclei with unusual neutron-to-proton ratio. In this article, a study of
characterization of different types of ultra-fast timing detectors: a special
type of gas detector (multi-strip multi-gap resistive plate chamber, MMRPC)
($\sigma$ $<$100 ps), scintillators array ( viz., $LaBr_3:Ce$) (timing
resolution ($\sigma<$250 ps) are being presented. A brief discussion on usage
of these different types of ultra-fast timing detector systems at radioactive
ion beam facilities is also included.


  Assuming the monopole dominance, that has been proved in the lattice
gluodynamics, to hold in the continuum limit, we develop an effective scalar
field theory for QCD at large distances to describe confinement. The approach
is based on a gauge (or projection) independent formulation of the monopole
dominance and manifestly Lorentz invariant.


  We apply a simple statistical mechanics cluster approximation for studying
clustering in the Kern and Frenkel model of Janus fluids. The approach is
motivated by recent Monte Carlo simulations work on the same model revealing
that the vapor coexisting with the liquid phase contains clusters of different
sizes and shapes whose equilibrium concentrations in general depend on the
interaction range as well as on thermodynamic parameters. The approximation
hinges on a separation between the intra- and inter-cluster contribution to
thermodynamics, where only the former is explicitly computed by Monte Carlo
simulations. Two levels of a simple liquid theory approximation are exploited
for the description of the latter. In the first we use the ideal-gas
expressions and obtain a qualitative agreement with extensive Monte Carlo bulk
simulations. This can be improved to a semi-quantitative agreement, by using a
hard-sphere description for the cluster-cluster correlations.


  We find that Ag-interstitial ($Ag_I$) acts as an electron donor and plays an
important role in Ag-excess doped polycrystalline PbTe thermoelectric
materials. When Ag is heavily doped in PbTe, the neutral (Ag-Ag) dimer defect
is formed at the Pb-site and the environment becomes Pb-rich/Te-poor condition.
Then the positively ionized Ag interstitial ($Ag_I^+$) defect becomes the major
defect under Pb-rich condition. Due to the small formation energy and small
diffusion barrier of $Ag_I^+$, Ag can be easily dissolved into the PbTe matrix.
The temperature behavior of the Ag defect formation energy well explains the
$Ag_I^+$ solubility, the electron carrier generation, and the increasing
electrical conductivity in Ag-excess doped polycrystalline PbTe at high
temperature. This abnormal doping behavior by forming interstitial defects is
also found for Au-doped PbTe.


  Scattering or tunneling of an electron at a potential barrier is a
fundamental quantum effect. Electron-electron interactions often affect the
scattering, and understanding of the interaction effect is crucial in detection
of various phenomena of electron transport and their application to electron
quantum optics. We theoretically study the partition and collision of two
interacting hot electrons at a potential barrier in the quantum Hall regime. We
predict their kinetic energy change by their Coulomb interaction during the
scattering delay time inside the barrier. The energy change results in
characteristic deviation of the partition probabilities from the noninteracting
case. The derivation includes nonmonotonic dependence of the probabilities on
the barrier height, which agrees with recent experiments, and reduction of the
fermionic antibunching.


  We present a model for the Global Quantum Efficiency (GQE) of the MicroBooNE
optical units. An optical unit consists of a flat, circular acrylic plate,
coated with tetraphenyl butadiene (TPB), positioned near the photocathode of a
20.2-cm diameter photomultiplier tube. The plate converts the ultra-violet
scintillation photons from liquid argon into visible-spectrum photons to which
the cryogenic phototubes are sensitive. The GQE is the convolution of the
efficiency of the plates that convert the 128 nm scintillation light from
liquid argon to visible light, the efficiency of the shifted light to reach the
photocathode, and the efficiency of the cryogenic photomultiplier tube. We
develop a GEANT4-based model of the optical unit, based on first principles,
and obtain the range of probable values for the expected number of detected
photoelectrons ($N_{\rm PE}$) given the known systematic errors on the
simulation parameters. We compare results from four measurements of the $N_{\rm
PE}$ determined using alpha-particle sources placed at two distances from a
TPB-coated plate in a liquid argon cryostat test stand. We also directly
measured the radial dependence of the quantum efficiency, and find that this
has the same shape as predicted by our model. Our model results in a GQE of
$0.0055\pm0.0009$ for the MicroBooNE optical units. While the information shown
here is MicroBooNE specific, the approach to the model and the collection of
simulation parameters will be widely applicable to many liquid-argon-based
light collection systems.


  Temporal action proposals are a common module in action detection pipelines
today. Most current methods for training action proposal modules rely on fully
supervised approaches that require large amounts of annotated temporal action
intervals in long video sequences. The large cost and effort in annotation that
this entails motivate us to study the problem of training proposal modules with
less supervision. In this work, we propose a semi-supervised learning algorithm
specifically designed for training temporal action proposal networks. When only
a small number of labels are available, our semi-supervised method generates
significantly better proposals than the fully-supervised counterpart and other
strong semi-supervised baselines. We validate our method on two challenging
action detection video datasets, ActivityNet v1.3 and THUMOS14. We show that
our semi-supervised approach consistently matches or outperforms the fully
supervised state-of-the-art approaches.


  In a recent letter [Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 75}, 2360 (1996)] we briefly
discussed the existence and nature of ferroelectric order in positionally
disordered dipolar materials. Here we report further results and give a
complete description of our work. Simulations of randomly frozen and
dynamically disordered dipolar soft spheres are used to study ferroelectric
ordering in non-crystalline systems. We also give a physical interpretation of
the simulation results in terms of short- and long-range interactions. Cases
where the dipole moment has 1, 2, and 3 components (Ising, XY and XYZ models,
respectively) are considered. It is found that the Ising model displays
ferroelectric phases in frozen amorphous systems, while the XY and XYZ models
form dipolar glass phases at low temperatures. In the dynamically disordered
model the equations of motion are decoupled such that particle translation is
completely independent of the dipolar forces. These systems spontaneously
develop long-range ferroelectric order at nonzero temperature despite the
absence of any fined-tuned short-range spatial correlations favoring dipolar
order. Furthermore, since this is a nonequilibrium model we find that the
paraelectric to ferroelectric transition depends on the particle mass. For the
XY and XYZ models, the critical temperatures extrapolate to zero as the mass of
the particle becomes infinite, whereas, for the Ising model the critical
temperature is almost independent of mass and coincides with the ferroelectric
transition found for the randomly frozen system at the same density. Thus in
the infinite mass limit the results of the frozen amorphous systems are
recovered.


  CMOS-based computing systems that employ the von Neumann architecture are
relatively limited when it comes to parallel data storage and processing. In
contrast, the human brain is a living computational signal processing unit that
operates with extreme parallelism and energy efficiency. Although numerous
neuromorphic electronic devices have emerged in the last decade, most of them
are rigid or contain materials that are toxic to biological systems. In this
work, we report on biocompatible bilayer graphene-based artificial synaptic
transistors (BLAST) capable of mimicking synaptic behavior. The BLAST devices
leverage a dry ion-selective membrane, enabling long-term potentiation, with
~50 aJ/m^2 switching energy efficiency, at least an order of magnitude lower
than previous reports on two-dimensional material-based artificial synapses.
The devices show unique metaplasticity, a useful feature for generalizable deep
neural networks, and we demonstrate that metaplastic BLASTs outperform ideal
linear synapses in classic image classification tasks. With switching energy
well below the 1 fJ energy estimated per biological synapse, the proposed
devices are powerful candidates for bio-interfaced online learning, bridging
the gap between artificial and biological neural networks.


  We derive the Casimir-Polder force and Casimir torque expressions for an
anisotropic molecule close to a conducting plane with a tensorial conductivity.
We apply our general expressions to the case of a carbon dioxide CO$_2$
molecule close to a plane with pure Hall conductivity and to graphene. We show
that the equilibrium position of this linear molecule is with its main axis
perpendicular to the surface. We hence conjecture a possible way to exploit the
Casimir torque to mechanically improve the performance of CO$_2$ separation
membranes useful for an efficient atmospheric CO$_2$ reduction.


  Recently, Bojikian and Kratsch [2023] have presented a novel approach to
tackle connectivity problems parameterized by clique-width
($\operatorname{cw}$), based on counting small representations of partial
solutions (modulo two). Using this technique, they were able to get a tight
bound for the Steiner Tree problem, answering an open question posed by
Hegerfeld and Kratsch [ESA, 2023]. We use the same technique to solve the
Connected Odd Cycle Transversal problem in time
$\mathcal{O}^*(12^{\operatorname{cw}})$. We define a new representation of
partial solutions by separating the connectivity requirement from the
2-colorability requirement of this problem. Moreover, we prove that our result
is tight by providing SETH-based lower bound excluding algorithms with running
time $\mathcal{O}^*((12-\epsilon)^{\operatorname{lcw}})$ even when
parameterized by linear clique-width. This answers the second question posed by
Hegerfeld and Kratsch in the same paper.


  Action classification has made great progress, but segmenting and recognizing
actions from long untrimmed videos remains a challenging problem. Most
state-of-the-art methods focus on designing temporal convolution-based models,
but the inflexibility of temporal convolutions and the difficulties in modeling
long-term temporal dependencies restrict the potential of these models.
Transformer-based models with adaptable and sequence modeling capabilities have
recently been used in various tasks. However, the lack of inductive bias and
the inefficiency of handling long video sequences limit the application of
Transformer in action segmentation. In this paper, we design a pure
Transformer-based model without temporal convolutions by incorporating temporal
sampling, called Temporal U-Transformer (TUT). The U-Transformer architecture
reduces complexity while introducing an inductive bias that adjacent frames are
more likely to belong to the same class, but the introduction of coarse
resolutions results in the misclassification of boundaries. We observe that the
similarity distribution between a boundary frame and its neighboring frames
depends on whether the boundary frame is the start or end of an action segment.
Therefore, we further propose a boundary-aware loss based on the distribution
of similarity scores between frames from attention modules to enhance the
ability to recognize boundaries. Extensive experiments show the effectiveness
of our model.


  Deep learning (DL) techniques have shown unprecedented success when applied
to images, waveforms, and text. Generally, when the sample size ($N$) is much
bigger than the number of features ($d$), DL often outperforms other machine
learning (ML) techniques, often through the use of Convolutional Neural
Networks (CNNs). However, in many bioinformatics fields (including
metagenomics), we encounter the opposite situation where $d$ is significantly
greater than $N$. In these situations, applying DL techniques would lead to
severe overfitting.
  Here we aim to improve classification of various diseases with metagenomic
data through the use of CNNs. For this we proposed to represent metagenomic
data as images. The proposed Met2Img approach relies on taxonomic and t-SNE
embeddings to transform abundance data into "synthetic images".
  We applied our approach to twelve benchmark data sets including more than
1400 metagenomic samples. Our results show significant improvements over the
state-of-the-art algorithms (Random Forest (RF), Support Vector Machine (SVM)).
We observe that the integration of phylogenetic information alongside abundance
data improves classification. The proposed approach is not only important in
classification setting but also allows to visualize complex metagenomic data.
The Met2Img is implemented in Python.


  Neutron diffraction on the double perovskite Sr2YRuO6 with a
quasi-face-centered cubic (FCC) lattice of Ru moments reveals planar magnetic
correlations that condense into a partial long-range ordered state with coupled
alternate antiferromagnetic (AFM) YRuO4 square layers coexisting with
short-range correlations below T{N1}=32 K. A second transition to a fully
ordered AFM state below T{N2}=24 K is observed. These observations are ascribed
to the cancellation of the magnetic coupling between consecutive AFM square
layers in FCC antiferromagnets, notably the simplest three-dimensional
frustrated magnet model system. Inhomogeneous superconductivity in
Sr2YRu_{1-x}Cu_{x}O6, reported in earlier works, may be nucleated in
magnetically disordered YRu_{1-x}Cu_{x}O4 layers with strong spin fluctuations.


  The polariton-polariton interaction strength is an important parameter for
all kinds of applications using the nonlinear properties of polaritons, such as
optical switching and single-photon blockade devices. In this paper, we review
and compare the results of a series of experiments on polariton-polariton
interactions in GaAs/Al$_x$Ga$_{-1x}$As microcavity polariton structures, and
present new theoretical analysis of these experiments. We show that not just
the energy shift of the spectral lines, but also the results of measurements
sensitive to the polariton scattering rate are important for the calibration of
the interaction parameter at low excitation density. We find that when
adjustments are made to correct for new understanding of the experiments, the
value of the interaction parameter at low density is lower than previous
reported, but still significantly higher than theoretically predicted.


  The goal of this paper is to construct a Frobenius splitting on $G/U$ via the
Poisson geometry of $(G/U,\pi_{G/U})$, where $G$ is a semi-simple algebraic
group of classical type defined over an algebraically closed field of
characteristic $p > 3$, $U$ is the uniradical of a Borel subgroup of $G$ and
$\pi_{G/U}$ is the standard Poisson structure on $G/U$. We first study the
Poisson geometry of $(G/U,\pi_{G/U})$. Then, we develop a general theory for
Frobenius splittings on $\mathbb{T}$-Poisson varieties, where $\mathbb{T}$ is
an algebraic torus. In particular, we prove that compatibly split subvarieties
of Frobenius splittings constructed in this way must be $\mathbb{T}$-Poisson
sub-varieties. Lastly, we apply our general theory to construct a Frobenius
splitting on $G/U$.


  RGBT tracking has attracted increasing attention since RGB and thermal
infrared data have strong complementary advantages, which could make trackers
all-day and all-weather work. However, how to effectively represent RGBT data
for visual tracking remains unstudied well. Existing works usually focus on
extracting modality-shared or modality-specific information, but the potentials
of these two cues are not well explored and exploited in RGBT tracking. In this
paper, we propose a novel multi-adapter network to jointly perform
modality-shared, modality-specific and instance-aware target representation
learning for RGBT tracking. To this end, we design three kinds of adapters
within an end-to-end deep learning framework. In specific, we use the modified
VGG-M as the generality adapter to extract the modality-shared target
representations.To extract the modality-specific features while reducing the
computational complexity, we design a modality adapter, which adds a small
block to the generality adapter in each layer and each modality in a parallel
manner. Such a design could learn multilevel modality-specific representations
with a modest number of parameters as the vast majority of parameters are
shared with the generality adapter. We also design instance adapter to capture
the appearance properties and temporal variations of a certain target.
Moreover, to enhance the shared and specific features, we employ the loss of
multiple kernel maximum mean discrepancy to measure the distribution divergence
of different modal features and integrate it into each layer for more robust
representation learning. Extensive experiments on two RGBT tracking benchmark
datasets demonstrate the outstanding performance of the proposed tracker
against the state-of-the-art methods.


  The classifying space for the framed Haefliger structures of codimension $q$
and class $C^r$ is $(2q-1)$-connected, for $1\le r\le\infty$. The corollaries
deal with the existence of foliations, with the homology and the perfectness of
the diffeomorphism groups, with the existence of foliated products, and of
foliated bundles.


  Recently, there has been significant progress in computing scattering
amplitudes in the high-energy limit using rapidity evolution equations. We
describe the state-of-the-art and demonstrate the interplay between
exponentiation of high-energy logarithms and that of infrared singularities.
The focus in this talk is the imaginary part of 2 to 2 partonic amplitudes,
which can be determined by solving the BFKL equation. We demonstrate that the
wavefunction is infrared finite, and that its evolution closes in the soft
approximation. Within this approximation we derive a closed-form solution for
the amplitude in dimensional regularization, which fixes the soft anomalous
dimension to all orders at NLL accuracy. We then turn to finite contributions
of the amplitude and show that the remaining hard contributions can be
determined algorithmically, by iteratively solving the BFKL equation in exactly
two dimensions within the class of single-valued harmonic polylogarithms. To
conclude we present numerical results and analyse large-order behaviour of the
amplitude.


  Simeis 147 (S147, G180.0-01.7, "Spaghetti nebula") is a supernova remnant
(SNR) extensively studied across the entire electromagnetic spectrum, from
radio to giga-electronvolt $\gamma$-rays, except in X-rays. Here, we report the
first detection of significant X-ray emission from the entire SNR using data of
the extended ROentgen Survey Imaging Telescope Array (eROSITA) onboard the
Russian-German Spektrum Roentgen Gamma (SRG). The object is located at the
Galactic anticenter, and its 3 deg size classifies it among the largest SNRs
ever detected in X-rays. By employing $\sim$15 years of Fermi-LAT data, our
study confirms the association of the remnant with a spatially coincident
diffuse giga-electronvolt excess, namely 4FGL J0540.3+2756e or FGES
J0537.6+2751. The X-ray emission is purely thermal, exhibiting strong O, Ne,
and Mg lines; whereas it lacks heavier-Z elements. The emission is mainly
confined to the 0.5-1.0 keV band; no significant emission is detected above 2.0
keV. Both a collisional plasma model in equilibrium and a model of
nonequilibrium collisional plasma can fit the total spectrum. While the
equilibrium model -- though statistically disfavored -- cannot be excluded by
X-ray fitting, only the absorption column of the nonequilibrium model is
consistent with expectations derived from optical extinction data. Adopting an
expansion in a homogeneous medium of typical interstellar medium (ISM) density,
the general SNR properties are broadly consistent with an expansion model that
yields an estimated age of $\sim0.66-2\times10^{5}$ yr, that is a rather old
age. The preference for an X-ray-emitting plasma in nonequilibrium, however,
adds to the observational evidence that favors a substantially younger age. In
a companion paper, we explore an SNR-in-cavity scenario, resulting in a much
younger age that alleviates some of the inconsistencies of the old-age
scenario.


  Modern biomedical datasets are increasingly high dimensional and exhibit
complex correlation structures. Generalized Linear Mixed Models (GLMMs) have
long been employed to account for such dependencies. However, proper
specification of the fixed and random effects in GLMMs is increasingly
difficult in high dimensions, and computational complexity grows with
increasing dimension of the random effects. We present a novel reformulation of
the GLMM using a factor model decomposition of the random effects, enabling
scalable computation of GLMMs in high dimensions by reducing the latent space
from a large number of random effects to a smaller set of latent factors. We
also extend our prior work to estimate model parameters using a modified Monte
Carlo Expectation Conditional Minimization algorithm, allowing us to perform
variable selection on both the fixed and random effects simultaneously. We show
through simulation that through this factor model decomposition, our method can
fit high dimensional penalized GLMMs faster than comparable methods and more
easily scale to larger dimensions not previously seen in existing approaches.


  Newly emerging magnetic flux can show a complicated linked or interwoven
topology of the magnetic field. The complexity of this linkage or knottedness
of magnetic flux is related to the free energy stored in the magnetic field.
Magnetic reconnection provides a process to release this energy on the time
scale of the dynamics. At the same time it approximately conserves the total
magnetic helicity. Therefore the conservation of total magnetic helicity is a
crucial constraint for the relaxation of complex magnetic fields. However, the
total magnetic helicity is only the first, most elementary, quantity of an
infinite series of topological invariants of the magnetic field. All these
invariants are strictly conserved in ideal magnetohydrodynamics. As an example
a preliminary set of these invariants is derived. The relevance of these higher
order invariants for the final state of relaxation under magnetic reconnection
and their implications for the release of magnetic energy are discussed.


  This paper studies nonparametric identification and counterfactual bounds for
heterogeneous firms that can be ranked in terms of productivity. Our approach
works when quantities and prices are latent, rendering standard approaches
inapplicable. Instead, we require observation of profits or other
optimizing-values such as costs or revenues, and either prices or price proxies
of flexibly chosen variables. We extend classical duality results for
price-taking firms to a setup with discrete heterogeneity, endogeneity, and
limited variation in possibly latent prices. Finally, we show that convergence
results for nonparametric estimators may be directly converted to convergence
results for production sets.


  This paper is concerned with the application of a spacetime structure to a
three-dimensional quantum system. There are three components. First, the main
part of this paper presents the constraint conditions which build the relation
of a spacetime structure and a form invariance solution to the covariant Dirac
equation. The second is to devise a spacetime cage for fermions with chosen
constraints. The third part discusses the feasibility of the cage with an
experiment.


  Anatomical segmentation of organs in ultrasound images is essential to many
clinical applications, particularly for diagnosis and monitoring. Existing deep
neural networks require a large amount of labeled data for training in order to
achieve clinically acceptable performance. Yet, in ultrasound, due to
characteristic properties such as speckle and clutter, it is challenging to
obtain accurate segmentation boundaries, and precise pixel-wise labeling of
images is highly dependent on the expertise of physicians. In contrast, CT
scans have higher resolution and improved contrast, easing organ
identification. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for learning to
optimize task-based ultra-sound image representations. Given annotated CT
segmentation maps as a simulation medium, we model acoustic propagation through
tissue via ray-casting to generate ultrasound training data. Our ultrasound
simulator is fully differentiable and learns to optimize the parameters for
generating physics-based ultrasound images guided by the downstream
segmentation task. In addition, we train an image adaptation network between
real and simulated images to achieve simultaneous image synthesis and automatic
segmentation on US images in an end-to-end training setting. The proposed
method is evaluated on aorta and vessel segmentation tasks and shows promising
quantitative results. Furthermore, we also conduct qualitative results of
optimized image representations on other organs.


  The dynamical scaling properties of selfavoiding polymerized membranes with
internal dimension D embedded into d dimensions are studied including
hydrodynamical interactions. It is shown that the theory is renormalizable to
all orders in perturbation theory and that the dynamical scaling exponent z is
given by z=d. The crossover to the region, where the membrane is crumpled
swollen but the hydrodynamic interaction irrelevant is discussed. The results
apply as well to polymers (D=1) as to membranes (D=2).


  Let $p$ and $q$ be anisotropic quadratic forms of dimension $\geq 2$ over a
field $F$. In a recent article, we formulated a conjecture describing the
general constraints which the dimensions of $p$ and $q$ impose on the isotropy
index of $q$ after scalar extension to the function field of $p$. This can be
viewed as a generalization of Hoffmann's Separation Theorem which
simultaneously incorporates and refines some well-known classical results on
the Witt kernels of function fields of quadrics. Using algebro-geometric
methods, it was shown that large parts of this conjecture hold in the case
where the characteristic of $F$ is not 2. In the present article, we prove
similar (in fact, slightly stronger) results in the case where $F$ has
characteristic $2$ and $q$ is a so-called quasilinear form. In contrast to the
situation where $\mathrm{char}(F) \neq 2$, the methods used to treat this case
are purely algebraic.


  We introduce an operational approach to the use of pulsating sources, located
at spatial infinity, for defining a relativistic positioning and navigation
system, based on the use of four-dimensional bases of null four-vectors, in
flat spacetime. As a prototypical case, we show how pulsars can be used to
define such a positioning system. The reception of the pulses for a set of
different sources whose positions in the sky and periods are assumed to be
known allows the determination of the user's coordinates and spacetime
trajectory, in the reference frame where the sources are at rest. We describe
our approach in flat Minkowski spacetime, and discuss the validity of this and
other approximations we have considered.


  Conversational retrieval refers to an information retrieval system that
operates in an iterative and interactive manner, requiring the retrieval of
various external resources, such as persona, knowledge, and even response, to
effectively engage with the user and successfully complete the dialogue.
However, most previous work trained independent retrievers for each specific
resource, resulting in sub-optimal performance and low efficiency. Thus, we
propose a multi-task framework function as a universal retriever for three
dominant retrieval tasks during the conversation: persona selection, knowledge
selection, and response selection. To this end, we design a dual-encoder
architecture consisting of a context-adaptive dialogue encoder and a candidate
encoder, aiming to attention to the relevant context from the long dialogue and
retrieve suitable candidates by simply a dot product. Furthermore, we introduce
two loss constraints to capture the subtle relationship between dialogue
context and different candidates by regarding historically selected candidates
as hard negatives. Extensive experiments and analysis establish
state-of-the-art retrieval quality both within and outside its training domain,
revealing the promising potential and generalization capability of our model to
serve as a universal retriever for different candidate selection tasks
simultaneously.


  We investigate the behavior of hydrated sulfonated polysulfones over a range
of ion contents through differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), Fourier
transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), and molecular dynamics (MD)
simulations. Experimental evidence shows that at comparable ion contents, the
spacing between the ionic groups along the polymer backbone can significantly
impact the amount of melting water present in the polymer. When we only
consider water molecules that can hydrogen bond to four neighboring water
molecules as the melting water, the MD simulation results are found to agree
with the experimental data. The states of water measured by DSC can therefore
be described as "aggregated" (or bulk-like) for the melting component, and
"isolated" for the nonmelting part. Using this physical picture, a polymer with
more aggregated ions has a higher content of melting water, while a polymer at
the same ion content but with more dispersed ions has a lower content of
melting water. Therefore, ions should be well dispersed to minimize the amount
of bulk-like water in ionic polymer membranes.


  Oxygen molecule adsorptions on a Pu (100) surface have been studied in
detail, using the generalized gradient approximation to density functional
theory. Dissociative adsorption with a layer by layer alternate spin
arrangement of the plutonium layer is found to be energetically more favorable
compared to molecular adsorption. Hor2 approach on a bridge site without spin
polarization was found to the highest chemisorbed site with energy of 8.787 eV
among all the cases studied. The second highest chemisorption energy of 8.236
eV, is the spin-polarized Hor2 or Ver approach at center site. Inclusion of
spin polarization affects the chemisorption processes significantly,
non-spin-polarized chemisorption energies being typically higher than the
spin-polarized energies. We also find that the 5f electrons to be more
localized in spin-polarized cases compared to the non-spin-polarized
counterparts. The ionic part of O-Pu bonding plays a significant role, while
the Pu 5f-O 2p hybridization was found to be rather week. Also, adsorptions of
oxygen push the top of 5f band deeper away from the Fermi level, indicating
further bonding by the 5f orbitals might be less probable. Except for the
interstitial sites, the work functions increase due to adsorptions of oxygen.


  Aiming at high precision beam position measurement of micron or sub-micron
for Shanghai Soft X-ray free electron laser (SXFEL) facility which is being
built in site of the Shanghai Synchrotron Radiation Facility (SSRF), Shanghai
Institute of Applied Physics has developed a high Q cavity beam position
monitor (CBPM) that the resonant frequency is 4.7 GHz and relevant BPM
electronics include dedicated RF front-end and home-made digital BPM (DBPM)
also has been done. The cavity design, cold test, system architecture and the
beam test with three adjacent pickups has been performed in Shanghai Deep
ultraviolet free electron laser(SDUV-FEL) facility are included. The beam
experiment results show that the physical design of our CBPM is consistent with
the expectations basically and the beam position resolution can fulfill the
resolution requirements for the SXFEL project if we optimize the beam
conditions.


  We apply the infinite mass effective theory, when a heavy quark mass tends to
infinity, and Chiral perturbation theory at the quark level, based on the
extended Nambu -- Jona -- Lasinio model with linear realization of chiral
$U(3)\times U(3)$ symmetry, to calculate the form factors of the
$D^{\,+}_{\,s}\to\phi~\mu^+~\nu_{\,\mu}$ decay up to the first order in current
$s$ -- quark mass. The theoretical results are compared with experimental data
and found to be in good agreement.


  Scalable video coding (SVC) is extended from its predecessor advanced video
coding (AVC) because of its flexible transmission to all type of gadgets.
However, SVC is more flexible and scalable than AVC, but it is more complex in
determining the computations than AVC. The traditional full search method in
the standard H.264 SVC consumes more encoding time for computation. This
complexity in computation need to be reduced and many fast mode decision (FMD)
algorithms were developed, but many fail to balance in all the three measures
such as peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), encoding time and bit rate. In this
paper, the proposed optimal mode selection algorithm based on the orientation
of pixels achieves better time saving, good PSNR and coding efficiency. The
proposed algorithm is compared with the standard H.264 JSVM reference software
and found to be 57.44% time saving, 0.43 dB increments in PSNR and 0.23%
compression in bit rate.


  The test particle Monte-Carlo models for neutral particles are often used in
the tokamak edge modelling codes. The drawback of this approach is that the
self-consistent solution suffers from random error introduced by the
statistical method. A particular case where the onset of nonphysical solutions
can be clearly identified is violation of the global particle balance due to
non-converged residuals. There are techniques which can reduce the residuals -
such as internal iterations in the code B2-EIRENE - but they may pose severe
restrictions on the time-step and slow down the computations. Numerical
diagnostics described in the paper can be used to unambiguously identify when
the too large error in the global particle balance is due to finite-volume
residuals, and their reduction is absolutely necessary. Algorithms which reduce
the error while allowing large time-step are also discussed.


  Polarization properties of strange baryons produced in pp reactions, p + p ->
p + Lambda^0 + K^+ and p + p -> p + Sigma^0 + K^$, near thresholds of the final
states (p Lambda^0 K^+) and (p Sigma^0 K^+) are analysed relative to
polarizations of colliding protons. The cross sections for pp reactions are
calculated within the effective Lagrangian approach accounting for strong pp
rescattering in the initial state of colliding protons with a dominant
contribution of the one-pion exchange and strong final-state interaction of
daughter hadrons (Eur. Phys. J. A 9, 425 (2000)).


  Hand pointing detection has multiple applications in many fields such as
virtual reality and control devices in smart homes. In this paper, we proposed
a novel approach to detect pointing vector in 2D space of a room. After
background subtraction, face and forehead is detected. In the second step,
forehead skin H-S plane histograms in HSV space is calculated. By using these
histogram templates of users skin, and back projection method, skin areas are
detected. The contours of hand are extracted using Freeman chain code
algorithm. Next step is finding fingertips. Points in hand contour which are
candidates for the fingertip can be found in convex defects of convex hull and
contour. We introduced a novel method for finding the fingertip based on the
special points on the contour and their relationships. Our approach detects
hand-pointing vectors in live video from a common webcam with 94%TP and 85%TN.


  We present a coordinate ascent method for a class of semidefinite programming
problems that arise in non-convex quadratic integer optimization. These
semidefinite programs are characterized by a small total number of active
constraints and by low-rank constraint matrices. We exploit this special
structure by solving the dual problem, using a barrier method in combination
with a coordinate-wise exact line search. The main ingredient of our algorithm
is the computationally cheap update at each iteration and an easy computation
of the exact step size. Compared to interior point methods, our approach is
much faster in obtaining strong dual bounds. Moreover, no explicit separation
and reoptimization is necessary even if the set of primal constraints is large,
since in our dual approach this is covered by implicitly considering all primal
constraints when selecting the next coordinate.


  Let L/K be a separable field extension of degree 6. An 1867 theorem of P.
Joubert asserts that if char(K) is different from 2 then L is generated over K
by an element whose minimal polynomial is of the form t^6 + a t^4 + b t^2 + ct
+ d for some a, b, c, d in K. We show that this theorem fails in characteristic
2.


  We explore the effect of hadronization by partonic coalescence on a "conical"
signal at the partonic level. We show that, by transferring partons from a
lower to a higher $p_T$, coalescence makes the conical signal stronger and
hence less susceptible to thermal smearing, provided the signal is integrated
over a large momentum bin and effects such as non-collinearity and a finite
Wigner function width are taken into account. We explore the role of this
effect in baryon/meson scaling and calculate the effect of resonances decays on
such a conical signal.


  We study the persistence P(t) of the magnetization of a d' dimensional
manifold (i.e., the probability that the manifold magnetization does not flip
up to time t, starting from a random initial condition) in a d-dimensional spin
system at its critical point. We show analytically that there are three
distinct late time decay forms for P(t) : exponential, stretched exponential
and power law, depending on a single parameter \zeta=(D-2+\eta)/z where D=d-d'
and \eta, z are standard critical exponents. In particular, our theory predicts
that the persistence of a line magnetization decays as a power law in the d=2
Ising model at its critical point. For the d=3 critical Ising model, the
persistence of the plane magnetization decays as a power law, while that of a
line magnetization decays as a stretched exponential. Numerical results are
consistent with these analytical predictions.


  We rigorously establish that, in disordered three-dimensional (3D) isotropic
solids, the stress autocorrelation function presents anisotropic terms that
decay as $1/r^3$ at long-range, with $r$ the distance, as soon as either
pressure or shear stress fluctuations are normal. By normal, we mean that the
fluctuations of stress, as averaged over spherical domains, decay as the
inverse domain volume. Since this property is required for macroscopic stress
to be self-averaging, it is expected to hold generically in all glasses and we
thus conclude that the presence of $1/r^3$ stress correlation tails is the rule
in these systems. Our proof follows from the observation that, in an infinite
medium, when both material isotropy and mechanical balance hold, (i) the stress
autocorrelation matrix is completely fixed by just two radial functions: the
pressure autocorrelation and the trace of the autocorrelation of stress
deviators; furthermore, these two functions (ii) fix the decay of the
fluctuations of sphere-averaged pressure and deviatoric stresses for windows of
increasing volume. Our conclusion is reached because, due to the precise
analytic relation (i) fixed by isotropy and mechanical balance, the constraints
arising via (ii) from the normality of stress fluctuations demand the spatially
anisotropic stress correlation terms to decay as $1/r^3$ at long-range. For the
sake of generality, we also examine situations when stress fluctuations are not
normal.


  In this paper we study the first cohomologies for the following three
examples of vertex operator algebras: (i) the simple affine VOA associated to a
simple Lie algebra with positive integral level; (ii) the Virasoro VOA
corresponding to minimal models; (iii) the lattice VOA associated to a positive
definite even lattice. We prove that in all these cases, the first cohomology
$H^1(V, W)$ are given by the zero-mode derivations when $W$ is any $V$-module
with an $\N$-grading (not necessarily by the operator $L(0)$). This agrees with
the conjecture made by Yi-Zhi Huang and the author in 2018. For negative energy
representations of Virasoro VOA, the same conclusion holds when $W$ is
$L(0)$-graded with lowest weight greater or equal to $-3$. Relationship between
the first cohomology of the VOA and that of the associated Zhu's algebra is
also discussed.


  We present a detailed, broadband X-ray spectral analysis of the ULX pulsar
NGC 7793 P13, a known super-Eddington source, utilizing data from the
$XMM$-$Newton$, $NuSTAR$ and $Chandra$ observatories. The broadband
$XMM$-$Newton+NuSTAR$ spectrum of P13 is qualitatively similar to the rest of
the ULX sample with broadband coverage, suggesting that additional ULXs in the
known population may host neutron star accretors. Through time-averaged,
phase-resolved and multi-epoch studies, we find that two non-pulsed thermal
blackbody components with temperatures $\sim$0.5 and $\sim$1.5 keV are required
to fit the data below 10 keV, in addition to a third continuum component which
extends to higher energies and is associated with the pulsed emission from the
accretion column. The characteristic radii of the thermal components appear to
be similar, and are too large to be associated with the neutron star itself, so
the need for two components likely indicates the accretion flow outside the
magnetosphere is complex. We suggest a scenario in which the thick inner disc
expected for super-Eddington accretion begins to form, but is terminated by the
neutron star's magnetic field soon after its onset, implying a limit of $B
\lesssim 6 \times 10^{12}$ G for the dipolar component of the central neutron
star's magnetic field. Evidence of similar termination of the disc in other
sources may offer a further means of identifying additional neutron star ULXs.
Finally, we examine the spectrum exhibited by P13 during one of its unusual
'off' states. These data require both a hard powerlaw component, suggesting
residual accretion onto the neutron star, and emission from a thermal plasma,
which we argue is likely associated with the P13 system.


  We investigate split supersymmetry (SUSY) within a supergravity framework,
where local SUSY is broken by the F-term of a hidden sector chiral superfield
X. With reasonably general assumptions, we show that the fermionic component of
X will always have mass within a Tev. Though its coupling to the observable
sector superfields is highly suppressed in Tev scale SUSY, we show that it can
be enhanced by many orders in split SUSY, leading to its likely participation
in accelerator phenomenology.We conclude with a specific example of such a
scenario in a string based supergravity model.


  In this chapter we review the progress in experiments with hybrid systems of
trapped ions and ultracold neutral atoms. We give a theoretical overview over
the atom-ion interactions in the cold regime and give a summary of the most
important experimental results. We conclude with an overview of remaining open
challenges and possible applications in hybrid quantum systems of ions and
neutral atoms.


  Let $\{f_j\}_{j=1}^n$ and $\{g_k\}_{k=1}^m$ be Parseval p-frames for a finite
dimensional Banach space $\mathcal{X}$. Then we show that \begin{align} (1)
\quad\quad\quad\quad \log (nm)\geq S_f (x)+S_g (x)\geq -p \log
\left(\displaystyle\sup_{y \in \mathcal{X}_f\cap \mathcal{X}_g,
\|y\|=1}\left(\max_{1\leq j\leq n, 1\leq k\leq m}|f_j(y)g_k(y)|\right)\right),
\quad \forall x \in \mathcal{X}_f\cap \mathcal{X}_g, \end{align} where
\begin{align*} &\mathcal{X}_f:= \{z\in \mathcal{X}: f_j(z)\neq 0, 1\leq j \leq
n\}, \quad \mathcal{X}_g:= \{w\in \mathcal{X}: g_k(w)\neq 0, 1\leq k \leq
m\},\\ &S_f (x):=
-\sum_{j=1}^{n}\left|f_j\left(\frac{x}{\|x\|}\right)\right|^p\log
\left|f_j\left(\frac{x}{\|x\|}\right)\right|^p, \quad S_g (x):=
-\sum_{k=1}^{m}\left|g_k\left(\frac{x}{\|x\|}\right)\right|^p\log
\left|g_k\left(\frac{x}{\|x\|}\right)\right|^p, \quad \forall x \in
\mathcal{X}_g. \end{align*} We call Inequality (1) as \textbf{Functional
Deutsch Uncertainty Principle}. For Hilbert spaces, we show that Inequality (1)
reduces to the uncertainty principle obtained by Deutsch \textit{[Phys. Rev.
Lett., 1983]}. We also derive a dual of Inequality (1).


  Imaging systems measuring intensity in the far field succumb to Rayleigh's
curse, a resolution limitation dictated by the finite aperture of the optical
system. Many proof-of-principle and some two-dimensional imaging experiments
have shown that, by using spatial mode demultiplexing (SPADE), the field
information collected is maximal, and thus, the resolution increases beyond the
Rayleigh criterion. Hitherto, the SPADE approaches are based on resolving the
lateral splitting of a Gaussian wavefunction. Here, we consider the case in
which the light field originates from a bi-photon source, i.e. spontaneous
parametric down-conversion, and a horizontal separation is introduced in one of
the two photons. We show that a separation induced in the signal photon arm can
be super-resolved using coincidence measurements after projecting both photons
on Hermite-Gauss modes. Remarkably the Fisher information associated with the
measurement is enhanced compared to the ordinary SPADE techniques by
$\sqrt{K}$, where $K$ is the Schmidt number of the two-photon state that
quantifies the amount of spatial entanglement between the two photons.


  We apply a branch-and-bound (B\&B) algorithm to the D-optimality problem
based on a convex mixed-integer nonlinear formulation. We discuss possible
methodologies to accelerate the convergence of the B\&B algorithm, by combining
the use of different upper bounds, variable-bound tightening inequalities, and
local-search procedures. Different methodologies to compute the determinant of
a matrix after a rank-one update are investigated to accelerate the
local-searches. We discuss our findings through numerical experiments with
randomly generated test problem.


  In this article we deal with the Cauchy problem for the quasi-linear scalar
conservation law \[u_t+ {\cal F}(u)_t+u_x=0,\] where ${\cal F}$ is a specific
hysteresis operator, namely the Play operator. Hysteresis models a
rate-independent memory relationship between the input $u$ and its output. Its
presence in the partial differential equation gives a particular non-local
feature to the latter allowing us to capture phenomena that may arise in some
application fields. Riemann problems and the interactions between shock lines
are studied and via the so-called Wave-Front Tracking method a solution to the
Cauchy problem with bounded variation initial data is constructed. The solution
found satisfies an entropy-like condition, making it the unique solution in the
class of entropy admissible ones.


  We present a $(1- \varepsilon)$-approximation algorithms for maximum
cardinality matchings in disk intersection graphs -- all with near linear
running time. We also present estimation algorithm that returns $(1\pm
\varepsilon)$-approximation to the size of such matchings -- this algorithms
run in linear time for unit disks, and $O(n \log n)$ for general disks (as long
as the density is relatively small).


  We consider high-frequency sampled continuous-time autoregressive moving
average (CARMA) models driven by finite-variance zero-mean L\'evy processes. An
L^2-consistent estimator for the increments of the driving L\'evy process
without order selection in advance is proposed if the CARMA model is
invertible. In the second part we analyse the high-frequency behaviour of
approximating Riemann sum processes, which represent a natural way to simulate
continuous-time moving average processes on a discrete grid. We shall compare
their autocovariance structure with the one of sampled CARMA processes, where
the rule of integration plays a crucial role. Moreover, new insight into the
kernel estimation procedure of Brockwell et al. (2012a) is given.


  The continuous modal mu-calculus is a fragment of the modal mu-calculus,
where the application of fixpoint operators is restricted to formulas whose
functional interpretation is Scott-continuous, rather than merely monotone. By
game-theoretic means, we show that this relatively expressive fragment still
allows two important techniques of basic modal logic, which notoriously fail
for the full modal mu-calculus: filtration and canonical models. In particular,
we show that the Filtration Theorem holds for formulas in the language of the
continuous modal mu-calculus. As a consequence we obtain the finite model
property over a wide range of model classes. Moreover, we show that if a basic
modal logic L is canonical and the class of L-frames admits filtration, then
the logic obtained by adding continuous fixpoint operators to L is sound and
complete with respect to the class of L-frames. This generalises recent results
on a strictly weaker fragment of the modal mu-calculus, viz. PDL.


  We study matroid prophet inequalities when distributions are unknown and
accessible only through samples. While single-sample prophet inequalities for
special matroids are known, no constant-factor competitive algorithm with even
a sublinear number of samples was known for general matroids. Adding more to
the stake, the single-sample version of the question for general matroids has
close (two-way) connections with the long-standing matroid secretary
conjecture.
  In this work, we give a $(\frac14 - \varepsilon)$-competitive matroid prophet
inequality with only $O_\varepsilon(\mathrm{poly} \log n)$ samples. Our
algorithm consists of two parts: (i) a novel quantile-based reduction from
matroid prophet inequalities to online contention resolution schemes (OCRSs)
with $O_\varepsilon(\log n)$ samples, and (ii) a $(\frac14 -
\varepsilon)$-selectable matroid OCRS with $O_\varepsilon(\mathrm{poly} \log
n)$ samples which carefully addresses an adaptivity challenge.


  Let Fq be a finite field with q=8 or q at least 16. Let S be a smooth cubic
surface defined over Fq containing at least one rational line. We use a
pigeonhole principle to prove that all the rational points on S are generated
via tangent and secant operations from a single point.


  Results are presented on component masses and system angular momenta for over
a hundred low-temperature contact binaries. It is found that the secondary
components in close binary systems are very similar in mass. Our observational
evidence strongly supports the argument that the evolutionary process goes from
near-contact binaries to A-type contact binaries, without any need of mass loss
from the system. Furthermore, the evolutionary direction of A-type into W-type
systems with a simultaneous mass and angular momentum loss is also discussed.
The opposite direction of evolution seems to be unlikely, since it requires an
increase of the total mass and the angular momentum of the system.


  We report on our time-resolved CCD photometry during the 2005 June
superoutburst of a WZ Sge-type dwarf nova candidate, ASAS 160048-4846.2. The
ordinary superhumps underwent a complex evolution during the superoutburst. The
superhump amplitude experienced a regrowth, and had two peaks. The superhump
period decreased when the superhump amplitude reached to the first maximum,
successively gradually increased until the second maximum of the amplitude, and
finally decreased again. Investigating other SU UMa-type dwarf novae which show
an increase of the superhump period, we found the same trend of the superhump
evolution in superoutbursts of them. We speculate that the superhump regrowth
in the amplitude has a close relation to the increase of the superhump period,
and all of SU UMa-type dwarf novae with a superhump regrowth follow the same
evolution of the ordinary superhumps as that of ASAS 160048-4846.2.


  We consider the problem of constructing a non-singular inflationary universe
in stringy gravity via branch changing, from a previously superexponentially
expanding phase to an FRW-like phase. Our approach is based on the phase space
analysis of the dynamics, and we obtain a no-go theorem which rules out the
efficient scenario of branch changing catalyzed by dilaton potential and
stringy fluid sources. We furthermore consider the effects of string-loop
corrections to the gravitational action in the form recently suggested by
Damour and Polyakov. These corrections also fail to produce the desired branch
change. However, focusing on the possibility that these corrections may
decouple the dilaton, we deduce that they may lead to an inflationary expansion
in the presence of a cosmological constant, which asymptotically approaches
Einstein-deSitter solution.


  What is the nature of the energy spectrum of a black hole ? The algebraic
approach to black hole quantization requires the horizon area eigenvalues to be
equally spaced. As stressed long ago by by Mukhanov, such eigenvalues must be
exponentially degenerate with respect to the area quantum number if one is to
understand black hole entropy as reflecting degeneracy of the observable
states. Here we construct the black hole states by means of a pair of "creation
operators" subject to a particular simple algebra, a slight generalization of
that for the harmonic oscillator. We then prove rigorously that the n-th area
eigenvalue is exactly 2 raised to the n-fold degenerate. Thus black hole
entropy qua logarithm of the number of states for fixed horizon area comes out
proportional to that area.


  We propose a consistent approach to the definition of electric, magnetic, and
toroidal multipole moments. Electric and magnetic fields are split into
potential, vortex, and radiative terms, with the latter ones dropped off in the
quasistatic approximation. The potential part of the electric field, the vortex
parts of the magnetic field and vector potential contain gradients of scalar
functions. Formally introducing magnetic and toroidal analogs of the electric
charge, we apply multipole expansions for those scalars. Closed-form
expressions are derived in an arbitrary order for electric, magnetic, and
toroidal multipoles, which constitute a full system for expansions of the
electromagnetic field.


  Mazur proved that any element xi of order three in the Shafarevich-Tate group
of an elliptic curve E over a number field k can be made visible in an abelian
surface A in the sense that xi lies in the kernel of the natural homomorphism
between the cohomology groups H^1(k,E) -> H^1(k,A). However, the abelian
surface in Mazur's construction is almost never a jacobian of a genus 2 curve.
In this paper we show that any element of order three in the Shafarevich-Tate
group of an elliptic curve over a number field can be visualized in the
jacobians of a genus 2 curve. Moreover, we describe how to get explicit models
of the genus 2 curves involved.


  The CP violation phase phi_s and charge asymmetries in B^0_s decays have been
measured by the D0 experiment in Run II of the Fermilab Tevatron Collider where
proton anti-proton collisions take place at a center of mass energy of
sqrt{s}=1.96 TeV. The measurements are based on integrated luminosities between
1.0 fb^-1 and 2.8 fb^-1. A 1.8 sigma deviation from the Standard Model is
observed in the measurement of the CP violation phase
phi_s=-0.57^{+0.24}_{-0.30} (stat) ^{+0.07}_{-0.02} (syst) rad in the decay
channel B^0_s -> J/psi phi. A combination with CDF results yields a 2.2 sigma
deviation from the Standard Model.


  Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is becoming an attack target of advanced
persistent threat (APT). Currently, IIoT logs have not been effectively used
for anomaly detection. In this paper, we use blockchain to prevent logs from
being tampered with and propose a pvalue-guided anomaly detection approach.
This approach uses statistical pvalues to combine multiple heterogeneous log
parser algorithms. The weighted edit distance is selected as a score function
to calculate the nonconformity score between a log and a predefined event. The
pvalue is calculated based on the non-conformity scores which indicate how well
a log matches an event. This approach is tested on a large number of real-world
HDFS logs and IIoT logs. The experiment results show that abnormal events could
be effectively recognized by our pvalue-guided approach.


  In black hole physics, the second law of thermodynamics is generally valid
whether the black hole is a static or a non-static one. Considering the
universe as a thermodynamical system the second law of black hole dynamics
extends to the non-negativity of the sum of the entropy of the matter and the
horizon, known as generalized second law of thermodynamics(GSLT). Here, we have
assumed the universe to be bounded by the event-horizon where Bekenstein
entropy-area relation and Hawking-temperature are not applicable. Thus
considering entropy to be an arbitrary function of the area of the
event-horizon, we have tried to find the nature of the entropy-function for the
validity of the GSLT both in quintessence-era and in phantom-era. Finally, some
graphical representation of the entropy-function has been presented.


  In d>4 dimensions, one can argue for the existence of small black rings using
a scaling argument. We apply the same scaling argument to the d=4 case and
demonstrate that it fails to say anything about the existence of d=4 small
black rings, because stringy corrections get out of control. General relativity
theorems say that there does not exist a black hole with toroidal topology for
d=4, but we interpret this as saying that, for d=4 small black rings, stringy
corrections are crucial which invalidate the assumptions those theorems are
based on.


  We present a theoretical investigation of the effect of multiple ionisation
sources in HII regions on the total elemental abundances derived from the
analysis of collisionally excited emission lines. We focus on empirical methods
based on direct temperature measurements that are commonly employed in cases
when the temperature of the nebular gas can be determined from the ratio of
nebular to auroral lines of (e.g.) doubly ionised oxygen. We find that direct
temperature methods that employ a two-temperature zone approach (DT2T methods)
are very robust against the spatial distribution of sources. Errors smaller
than 0.15 dex are estimated for regions where the metallicity is twice solar
and errors below 0.05 dex for solar metallicities and below. The biases
introduced by the spatial distribution of the ionisation sources are thus much
smaller for DT2T methods than for strong line methods, previously investigated
by Ercolano, Bastian & Stasinska. Our findings are in agreement with the recent
study of HII regions in NGC 300 by Bresolin et al.


  In this paper we study a class of stationary states for reaction--diffusion
systems of $k\geq 3$ densities having disjoint supports. For a class of
segregation states governed by a variational principle we prove existence and
provide conditions for uniqueness. Some qualitative properties and the local
regularity both of the densities and of their free boundaries are established
in the more general context of a functional class characterized by differential
inequalities.


  In our current study, we delve into the peak-like structure observed during
the reaction process of $K^+n\to K^{0}p$ at approximately $\sqrt{s}\sim2.5$
GeV. Our focus centers on exploring the potential $S=+1$ resonance
$P^{+*}_0\equiv P^*_0$ as an excited state within the extended vector-meson and
baryon ($VB$) antidecuplet. To achieve this aim, we employ the effective
Lagrangian method in conjunction with the $(u,t)$-channel Regge approach,
operating within the tree-level Born approximation. We thoroughly examine
various spin-parity quantum numbers for the resonance, resulting in a
compelling description of the data, where $M_{P^*_0}\approx2.5$ GeV and
$\Gamma_{P^*_0}\approx100$ MeV. Furthermore, we propose an experimental
technique to amplify the signal-to-noise ratio ($S/N$) for accurately measuring
the resonance. Notably, our findings reveal that background interference
diminishes significantly within the $K^*$ forward-scattering region in the
center-of-mass frame when the $K^*$ is perpendicularly polarized to the
reaction plane. Additionally, we explore the recoil-proton spin asymmetry to
definitively determine the spin and parity of the resonance. This study stands
to serve as a valuable reference for designing experimental setups aimed at
investigating and comprehending exotic phenomena in QCD. Specifically, our
insights will inform future J-PARC experiments, particularly those employing
higher kaon beam energies.


  The impurity effects are studied for the BiS_{2}- layered superconductors
based on a two orbital model with the Bogoliubov-de-Gennes technique. The
superconducting critical temperature (T_{c}) as a function of the mpurity
concentration is calculated. Significant reduction of T_{c} is found for spin
singlet nearest-neighboring paring d-wave state and the spin triplet
next-nearest-neighboring (NNN) paring p-wave state, while no depression of
T_{c} for isotropic s-wave state. The single impurity effects for various
paring states are also explored. The impurity resonance peak in the local
density of states spectrum is found only for the d-wave state. For the spin
triplet NNN paring p-wave state, two in-gap peaks occur in the case of positive
impurity potential; and a single in-gap peak is found for the negative impurity
potential, which shifts towards to lower energy with decreasing the potential
strength. These results can be used to detect the paring symmetry of the
BiS_{2}- based superconductors.


  In previous papers it was shown that the left and right O-module structure of
the jet bundles on the projective line differed. In this paper we show that
similar statements hold for jet bundles on projective space in any dimension.
We also consider some classes associated to jet bundles in the algebraic
K-theory of projective space.


  In this paper, we explore the integration of parameterized quantum pulses
with the contextual subspace method. The advent of parameterized quantum pulses
marks a transition from traditional quantum gates to a more flexible and
efficient approach to quantum computing. Working with pulses allows us to
potentially access areas of the Hilbert space that are inaccessible with a
CNOT-based circuit decomposition. Compared to solving the complete Hamiltonian
via the traditional Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE), the computation of
the contextual correction generally requires fewer qubits and measurements,
thus improving computational efficiency. Plus a Pauli grouping strategy, our
framework, SpacePulse, can minimize the quantum resource cost for the VQE and
enhance the potential for processing larger molecular structures.


  General philosophy of procedure of detecting rare events in the recent
experiments with 48Ca projectile at the Dubna Gas-Filled Recoil
Separator(DGFRS) aimed to the synthesis of superheavy elements (SHE) has been
reviewed. Specific instruments and methods are under consideration. Some
historical sources of the successful experiments for Z=112-118 are considered
too. Special attention is paid to application of method of active correlations
in heavy-ion induced complete fusion nuclear reactions. Example of application
in Z=115 experiment is presented. Brief description of the 243Am + 48Ca ->
291-x115+xn experiment is presented too. Some attention is paid to the role of
chemical experiments in discoveries of SHEs. The DGFRS detection/monitoring
system is presented in full firstly.


  To be secure, cryptographic algorithms crucially rely on the underlying
hardware to avoid inadvertent leakage of secrets through timing side channels.
Unfortunately, such timing channels are ubiquitous in modern hardware, due to
its labyrinthine fast-paths and optimizations. A promising way to avoid timing
vulnerabilities is to devise --- and verify --- conditions under which a
hardware design is free of timing variability, i.e., executes in constant-time.
In this paper, we present Iodine: a clock precise, constant-time approach to
eliminating timing side channels in hardware. Iodine succeeds in verifying
various open source hardware designs in seconds and with little developer
effort. Iodine also discovered two constant-time violations: one in a
floating-point unit and another one in an RSA encryption module.


  The geodesic structure of the Teo wormhole is briefly discussed and some
observables are derived that promise to be of use in detecting a rotating
traversable wormhole indirectly, if it does exist. We also deduce the exact
Lense-Thirring (LT) precession frequency of a test gyroscope moving toward a
rotating traversable Teo wormhole. The precession frequency diverges on the
ergoregion, a behavior intimately related to and governed by the geometry of
the ergoregion, analogous to the situation in a Kerr spacetime. Interestingly,
it turns out that here the LT precession is inversely proportional to the
angular momentum ($a$) of the wormhole along the pole and around it in the
strong gravity regime, a behavior contrasting with its direct variation with
$a$ in the case of other compact objects. In fact, divergence of LT precession
inside the ergoregion can also be avoided if the gyro moves with a non-zero
angular velocity in a certain range. As a result, the spin precession frequency
of the gyro can be made finite throughout its whole path, even very close to
the throat, during its travel to the wormhole. Furthermore, it is evident from
our formulation that this spin precession not only arises due to curvature or
rotation of the spacetime but also due to the non-zero angular velocity of the
spin when it does not move along a geodesic in the strong gravity regime. If in
the future, interstellar travel indeed becomes possible through a wormhole or
at least in its vicinity, our results would prove useful in determining the
behavior of a test gyroscope which is known to serve as a fundamental
navigation device.


  Adult hippocampal neurogenesis and hippocampus-dependent cognition in mice
have been found to be adversely affected by hypomagnetic field exposure. The
effect concurred with a reduction of reactive oxygen species in the absence of
the geomagnetic field. A recent theoretic study suggests a mechanistic
interpretation of this phenomenon in the framework of the Radical Pair
Mechanism. According to this model, a flavin-superoxide radical pair, born in
the singlet spin configuration, undergoes magnetic field-dependent spin
dynamics such that the pair's recombination is enhanced as the applied magnetic
field is reduced. This model has two ostensible weaknesses: a) the assumption
of a singlet initial state is irreconcilable with known reaction pathways
generating such radical pairs, and b) the model neglects the swift spin
relaxation of free superoxide, which abolishes any magnetic sensitivity in
geomagnetic/hypomagnetic fields. We here suggest that a model based on a
radical triad and the assumption of a secondary radical scavenging reaction
can, in principle, explain the phenomenon without unnatural assumptions, thus
providing a coherent explanation of hypomagnetic field effects in biology.


  Modern video codecs including the newly developed AOMedia Video 1 (AV1)
utilize hybrid coding techniques to remove spatial and temporal redundancy.
However, efficient exploitation of statistical dependencies measured by a mean
squared error (MSE) does not always produce the best psychovisual result. One
interesting approach is to only encode visually relevant information and use a
different coding method for "perceptually insignificant" regions in the frame,
which can lead to substantial data rate reductions while maintaining visual
quality. In this paper, we introduce a texture analyzer before encoding the
input sequences to identify "perceptually insignificant" regions in the frame
using convolutional neural networks. We designed and developed a new scheme
that integrate the texture analyzer into the codec that can largely reduce the
temporal flickering artifact for codec with hierarchical coding structure. The
proposed method is implemented in AV1 codec by introducing a new coding tool
called texture mode, where texture mode is a special inter mode treated at the
encoder, that if texture mode is selected, no inter prediction is performed for
the identified texture regions. Instead, displacement of the entire region is
modeled by just one set of motion parameters. Therefore, only the model
parameters are transmitted to the decoder for reconstructing the texture
regions. Non-texture regions in the frame are coded conventionally. We show
that for many standard test sets, the proposed method achieved significant data
rate reductions with satisfying visual quality.


  In this paper, we consider the computation of charged moments of the reduced
density matrix of two disjoint intervals in the $1+1$ dimensional free
compactified boson conformal field theory (CFT) by studying the four-point
function of the fluxed twist fields. We obtained the exact scaling function of
this four-point function and discussed its decompactification limit. This
scaling function was used to obtain the charged moments of the partial
transpose which we refer as charged R\'enyi negativity. These charged moments
and the charged moments of the partial transpose are essential for the problem
of symmetry decomposition of the corresponding entanglement measures. We test
our analytic formula against exact numerical computation in the complex
harmonic chain, finding perfect agreements.


  Optical character recognition (OCR) technology has been widely used in
various scenes, as shown in Figure 1. Designing a practical OCR system is still
a meaningful but challenging task. In previous work, considering the efficiency
and accuracy, we proposed a practical ultra lightweight OCR system (PP-OCR),
and an optimized version PP-OCRv2. In order to further improve the performance
of PP-OCRv2, a more robust OCR system PP-OCRv3 is proposed in this paper.
PP-OCRv3 upgrades the text detection model and text recognition model in 9
aspects based on PP-OCRv2. For text detector, we introduce a PAN module with
large receptive field named LK-PAN, a FPN module with residual attention
mechanism named RSE-FPN, and DML distillation strategy. For text recognizer,
the base model is replaced from CRNN to SVTR, and we introduce lightweight text
recognition network SVTR LCNet, guided training of CTC by attention, data
augmentation strategy TextConAug, better pre-trained model by self-supervised
TextRotNet, UDML, and UIM to accelerate the model and improve the effect.
Experiments on real data show that the hmean of PP-OCRv3 is 5% higher than
PP-OCRv2 under comparable inference speed. All the above mentioned models are
open-sourced and the code is available in the GitHub repository PaddleOCR which
is powered by PaddlePaddle.


  The $b$-calculus of Melrose is a tool for studying structures on a smooth
manifold with a first order degeneracy at a given hypersurface. In this
framework, Mendoza defined complex $b$-manifolds. In the spirit of work of
Scott, we extend Mendoza's definition to the case of higher-order degeneracies,
introducing the notion of a complex $b^k$-manifold for $k$ a positive integer.
We then investigate the local and global automorphisms of complex
$b^k$-manifolds. We also propose $b^k$-analogues for some classical spaces of
holomorphic functions.


  In practically all known till now methods of nuclear chronometry there were
usually taken into account the life-times of only fundamental states of
$\alpha$-radioactive nuclei. But in the processes of nuclear synthesis in stars
and under the influence of the constant cosmic radiation on surfaces of planets
the excitations of the $\alpha$-radioactive nuclei are going on. Between them
there are the states with the excited $\alpha$-particles inside the parent
nuclei and so with much smaller life-times. And inside the large masses of
stellar, terrestrial and meteoric substances the transitions between different
internal conditions of radioactive nuclei are accompanied by infinite chains of
the $\gamma$-radiations with the subsequent $\gamma$-absorptions, the further
$\gamma$-radiations etc. For the description of the $\alpha$-decay evolution
with considering of such excited states and multiple $\gamma$-radiations and
$\gamma$-absorptions inside stars and under the influence of the cosmic
radiation on the earth surface we present the quantum-mechanical approach,
which is based on the generalized Krylov-Fock theorem.
  Some simple estimations are also presented. They bring to the conclusion that
the usual (non-corrected) "nuclear clocks" do really indicate not to realistic
values but to the \emph{upper limits} of the durations of the $\alpha$-decay
stellar and planet processes.


  Finite size effects on the calorimetric cooperatity of the folding-unfolding
transition in two-state proteins are considered using the Go lattice models
with and without side chains. We show that for models without side chains a
dimensionless measure of calorimetric cooperativity kappa2 defined as the ratio
of the van't Hoff to calorimetric enthalpy does not depend on the number of
amino acids N. The average value of kappa2 is about 3/4 which is lower than the
experimental value kappa2=1. For models with side chains kappa2 approaches
unity as kappa2 \sim N^mu, where exponent mu=0.17. Above the critical chain
length Nc =135 these models can mimic the truly all-or-non folding-unfolding
transition.


  I study how strategic communication among voters shapes both political
outcomes and parties' advertising strategies in a model of informative campaign
advertising. Two main results are derived. First, echo chambers arise
endogenously. Surprisingly, a small ideological distance between voters is not
sufficient to guarantee that a chamber is created, bias direction plays a
crucial role. Second, when voters' network entails a significant waste of
information, parties tailor their advertising to the opponent's supporters
rather than to their own.


  The paper contains a computer simulation concerning a basic non-Walrasian
equilibrium system, following the Edmond Malinvaud "short side" approach, as
far as the price adjustment is concerned, and the sequential Hicksian "weeks"
structure with regard of the temporal characterization.


  This paper studies a stochastic model that describes the evolution of vehicle
densities in a road network. It is consistent with the class of (deterministic)
kinematic wave models, which describe traffic flows on the basis of
conservation laws that incorporate the macroscopic fundamental diagram (a
functional relationship between vehicle density and flow). Our setup is capable
of handling multiple types of vehicle densities, with general macroscopic
fundamental diagrams, on a network with arbitrary topology.
  Interpreting our system as a spatial population process, we derive, under a
natural scaling, fluid and diffusion limits. More specifically, the vehicle
density process can be approximated with a suitable Gaussian process, which
yield accurate normal approximations to the joint (in the spatial and temporal
sense) vehicle density process. The corresponding means and variances can be
computed efficiently. Along the same lines, we develop an approximation to the
vehicles' travel-time distribution between any given origin and destination
pair. Finally, we present a series of numerical experiments that demonstrate
the accuracy of the approximations and illustrate the usefulness of the
results.


  Total variation (TV) is a powerful regularization method that has been widely
applied in different imaging applications, but is difficult to apply to diffuse
optical tomography (DOT) image reconstruction (inverse problem) due to complex
and unstructured geometries, non-linearity of the data fitting and
regularization terms, and non-differentiability of the regularization term. We
develop several approaches to overcome these difficulties by: i) defining
discrete differential operators for unstructured geometries using both finite
element and graph representations; ii) developing an optimization algorithm
based on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) for the
non-differentiable and non-linear minimization problem; iii) investigating
isotropic and anisotropic variants of TV regularization, and comparing their
finite element- and graph-based implementations. These approaches are evaluated
on experiments on simulated data and real data acquired from a tissue phantom.
Our results show that both FEM and graph-based TV regularization is able to
accurately reconstruct both sparse and non-sparse distributions without the
over-smoothing effect of Tikhonov regularization and the over-sparsifying
effect of L$_1$ regularization. The graph representation was found to
out-perform the FEM method for low-resolution meshes, and the FEM method was
found to be more accurate for high-resolution meshes.


  Computer assisted technologies based on algorithmic software segmentation are
an increasing topic of interest in complex surgical cases. However - due to
functional instability, time consuming software processes, personnel resources
or licensed-based financial costs many segmentation processes are often
outsourced from clinical centers to third parties and the industry. Therefore,
the aim of this trial was to assess the practical feasibility of an easy
available, functional stable and licensed-free segmentation approach to be used
in the clinical practice. In this retrospective, randomized, controlled trail
the accuracy and accordance of the open-source based segmentation algorithm
GrowCut (GC) was assessed through the comparison to the manually generated
ground truth of the same anatomy using 10 CT lower jaw data-sets from the
clinical routine. Assessment parameters were the segmentation time, the volume,
the voxel number, the Dice Score (DSC) and the Hausdorff distance (HD). Overall
segmentation times were about one minute. Mean DSC values of over 85% and HD
below 33.5 voxel could be achieved. Statistical differences between the
assessment parameters were not significant (p<0.05) and correlation
coefficients were close to the value one (r > 0.94). Complete functional stable
and time saving segmentations with high accuracy and high positive correlation
could be performed by the presented interactive open-source based approach. In
the cranio-maxillofacial complex the used method could represent an algorithmic
alternative for image-based segmentation in the clinical practice for e.g.
surgical treatment planning or visualization of postoperative results and
offers several advantages. Systematic comparisons to other segmentation
approaches or with a greater data amount are areas of future works.


  The dynamics of a system quenched into a state with lamellar order and
subject to an uniform shear flow is solved in the large-N limit. The
description is based on the Brazovskii free-energy and the evolution follows a
convection-diffusion equation. Lamellae order preferentially with the normal
along the vorticity direction. Typical lengths grow as $\gamma t^{5/4}$ (with
logarithmic corrections) in the flow direction and logarithmically in the shear
direction. Dynamical scaling holds in the two-dimensional case while it is
violated in D=3.


  We propose a 4-dimensional Kaluza-Klein approach to general relativity in the
(2,2)-splitting of space-time using the double null gauge. The associated
Lagrangian is equivalent to the Einstein-Hilbert Lagrangian, since it yields
the same field equations as the E-H Lagrangian does. It is describable as a
(1+1)-dimensional Yang-Mills type gauge theory coupled to (1+1)-dimensional
matter fields, where the minimal coupling associated with the diffeomorphism
group of the 2-dimensional spacelike fibre space automatically appears. Written
in the first-order formalism, our Lagrangian density directly yields a non-zero
local Hamiltonian density, where the associated time function is the retarded
time. From this Hamiltonian density, we obtain a positive-definite local
gravitational energy density. In the asymptotically flat space-times, the
volume integrals of the proposed local gravitational energy density over
suitable 3-dimensional hypersurfaces correctly reproduce the Bondi and the ADM
surface integral, at null and spatial infinity, respectively, supporting our
proposal. We also obtain the Bondi mass-loss formula as a negative-definite
flux integral of a bilinear in the gravitational currents at null infinity.


  In this paper, we perform theoretical study on the physical properties of
two-dimensional transition metal chalcogenides MX$_{2}$ and M$_{2}$X$_{3}$ (M=
Ni, Pd; X= S, Se, Te). These studied materials are classified in three stable
phases according to their lattice structures: hexagonal MX$_{2}$, orthorhombic
MX$_{2}$ and orthorhombic M$_{2}$X$_{3}$. They have either isotropic or
anisotropic in-plane properties depending on their symmetries. In particular,
the orthorhombic MX$_{2}$ and M$_{2}$X$_{3}$ have low lattice symmetry and
present highly anisotropic properties. The orthorhombic MX$_{2}$ possess giant
negative in-plane Poisson's ratios, different from the other two phases.
Moreover, by joint analysis of band gap, band edge and optical absorption, the
orthorhombic MX$_{2}$ and M$_{2}$X$_{3}$ are found to be highly efficient as
water splitting photocatalysts within the visible and ultraviolet sunlight
regions.


  We investigate several distinct spectral crossovers amongst various
integrable and quantum-chaotic limits of a 1D disordered quantum spin-1/2
model, by tuning the relative amplitudes of various Hamiltonian parameters to
retain or break relevant unitary and antiunitary symmetries. Since we are
specially interested in crossovers involving a Gaussian symplectic ensemble
(GSE) limit, we carry out all our calculations with an odd number of spins that
naturally results in eigenspectra with Kramers degeneracies. The various
crossovers are investigated via detailed studies of both short-range (NNSD) and
long-range (spectral rigidity and number variance) spectral correlations. The
short-range studies show excellent agreement with RMT predictions. One of the
highlights of this study is the systematic investigation of the consequences of
retaining both eigenvalues corresponding to every Kramers doublet, in a
crossover involving the GSE limit, and see how it evolves to a limit where the
KD is naturally lifted. The NNSD plot in the GSE limit exhibits a Dirac delta
peak at zero splitting and a renormalized GSE hump at finite splitting, whose
general analytical form is derived. With an increasing symmetry breaking
magnetic field the NNSD shows an interesting, dynamic two-peaked structure that
finally converges to the standard GUE lineshape. We explain this trend in terms
of a competition between the splittings amongst distinct Kramers doublets and
the Zeeman-like splittings induced by a breaking of time-reversal symmetry. In
the long-range spectral correlation studies, we shed light on the extent of
agreement between our physical spin systems and RMT predictions. Our studies
also show that the long-range correlations may serve to distinguish between the
two Poissonian limits (nonlocalized and localized) in the reentrant crossovers,
which the short-range correlations fail to distinguish.


  In a power distribution network, the network topology information is
essential for an efficient operation of the network. This information of
network connectivity is not accurately available, at the low voltage level, due
to uninformed changes that happen from time to time. In this paper, we propose
a novel data--driven approach to identify the underlying network topology
including the load phase connectivity from time series of energy measurements.
The proposed method involves the application of Principal Component Analysis
(PCA) and its graph-theoretic interpretation to infer the topology from smart
meter energy measurements. The method is demonstrated through simulation on
randomly generated networks and also on IEEE recognized Roy Billinton
distribution test system.


  We determine (multi)graded Betti numbers of path ideals of lines and star
graphs.


  We determine all affinely homogeneous hypersurfaces S^3 in R^4 whose Hessian
is (invariantly) of constant rank 2, including the simply transitive ones.
  We find 34 inequivalent terminal branches yielding each to a nonempty moduli
space of homogeneous models of hypersurfaces S^3 in R^4, sometimes parametrized
by a certain complicated algebraic variety, especially for the 15 (over 34)
families of models which are simply transitive.
  We employ the power series method of equivalence, which captures invariants
at the origin, creates branches, and infinitesimalizes calculations.
  In Lie's original classification spirit, we describe the found homogeneous
models by listing explicit Lie algebras of infinitesimal transformations,
sometimes parametrized by absolute invariants satisfying certain algebraic
equations.


  The wealth of high-energy (E > 50 MeV) and very-high-energy (E > 100 GeV)
data accumulated over the past few years have provided unprecedented
opportunities to probe pulsar emission models. The Fermi Large Area Telescope
(LAT) has now detected over 200 gamma-ray pulsars of vastly different ages,
providing an extensive dataset of spectra and light curves compared to a mere
decade ago. Ground-based Cherenkov telescopes deepened our appreciation of the
mysterious richness of the pulsar mechanism by a surprise detection of pulsed
emission up to 1 TeV from the Crab pulsar. These discoveries position us to
make real progress in pulsar theory. A number of studies have developed new and
enhanced existing dissipative magnetohydrodynamical (MHD) and particle-in-cell
(PIC) codes to solve the global electrodynamics and pursue fundamental
questions about magnetospheric particle injection, acceleration, and radiation.
While MHD models capture the global aspects of pulsar magnetospheres, the
microphysics need to be probed self-consistently by PIC simulations. Some
dissipative MHD models consider the current sheet (CS) as an important site for
high-energy curvature radiation (CR), while early PIC results point to energy
dissipation taking place in the CS, where particles are accelerated by magnetic
reconnection and may possibly emit $\gamma$ rays via synchrotron radiation
(SR). This is in marked contrast to some older local emission models that
studied CR gamma rays produced in gaps nearer to the spinning neutron star. The
universality of these results should become clearer as current computational
restrictions are overcome and boundary conditions are refined. Continued and
combined polarimetric, spectral, and temporal measurements should aid us in
scrutinising these new emission models in our persistent pursuit of a deeper
understanding of the pulsar marvel.


  In generating large quantities of DNA data, high-throughput sequencing
technologies require advanced bioinformatics infrastructures for efficient data
analysis. k-mer counting, the process of quantifying the frequency of
fixed-length k DNA subsequences, is a fundamental step in various
bioinformatics pipelines, including genome assembly and protein prediction. Due
to the growing volume of data, the scaling of the counting process is critical.
In the literature, distributed memory software uses hash tables, which exhibit
poor cache friendliness and consume excessive memory. They often also lack
support for flexible parallelism, which makes integration into existing
bioinformatics pipelines difficult. In this work, we propose HySortK, a highly
efficient sorting-based distributed memory k-mer counter. HySortK reduces the
communication volume through a carefully designed communication scheme and
domain-specific optimization strategies. Furthermore, we introduce an abstract
task layer for flexible hybrid parallelism to address load imbalances in
different scenarios. HySortK achieves a 2-10x speedup compared to the GPU
baseline on 4 and 8 nodes. Compared to state-of-the-art CPU software, HySortK
achieves up to 2x speedup while reducing peak memory usage by 30% on 16 nodes.
Finally, we integrated HySortK into an existing genome assembly pipeline and
achieved up to 1.8x speedup, proving its flexibility and practicality in
real-world scenarios.


  It has been found that at a high luminosity $e^+ e^-$ collider, sizable
$\eta_c+c\bar{c}X$ and $\eta_b+b\bar{b}X$ events can be produced when it works
around the $Z$ peak. In this paper, we calculate the decay widths of $Z \to
\eta_c+c+\bar{c}+X$ and $Z \to \eta_b+b+\bar{b}+X$ up to next-to-leading order
(NLO) accuracy. We find that the NLO corrections are significant in these two
processes. After including the NLO corrections, the decay widths of $Z \to
\eta_c+c+\bar{c}+X$ and $Z \to \eta_b+b+\bar{b}+X$ are enhanced by about $37\%$
and $28\%$ for the case of $\mu_R=2m_c$ and $\mu_R=2m_b$, respectively. The
differential decay widths $d\Gamma/ds_1$ and $d\Gamma/dz$ for these two decay
processes are also analyzed.


  This study investigates why and how inconsistency in the generation of Large
Language Models (LLMs) might induce or exacerbate societal injustice. For
instance, LLMs frequently exhibit contrasting gender stereotypes regarding the
same career depending on varied contexts, highlighting the arguably harmful
unpredictability of LLMs' behavioral patterns. To augment the existing
discrimination assessment with the capability to account for variation in LLM
generation, we formulate the Prejudice-Volatility Framework (PVF) that
precisely defines behavioral metrics for assessing LLMs, which delineate the
probability distribution of LLMs' stereotypes from the perspective of token
prediction probability. Specifically, we employ a data-mining approach to
approximate the possible applied contexts of LLMs and devise statistical
metrics to evaluate the corresponding contextualized societal discrimination
risk. Further, we mathematically dissect the aggregated discrimination risk of
LLMs into prejudice risk, originating from their system bias, and volatility
risk, stemming from their generation inconsistency. While initially intended
for assessing discrimination in LLMs, our proposed PVF facilitates the
comprehensive and flexible measurement of any inductive biases, including
knowledge alongside prejudice, across various modality models.
  We apply PVF to 12 most commonly adopted LLMs and compare their risk levels.
Our findings reveal that: i) prejudice risk is the primary cause of
discrimination risk in LLMs, indicating that inherent biases in these models
lead to stereotypical outputs; ii) most LLMs exhibit significant pro-male
stereotypes across nearly all careers; iii) alignment with Reinforcement
Learning from Human Feedback lowers discrimination by reducing prejudice, but
increases volatility; iv) discrimination risk in LLMs correlates with
socio-economic factors like profession salaries.