  Secondary discharges, which consist of the breakdown of a gap near a GEM foil
upon a primary discharge across that GEM, are studied in this work.
  Their main characteristics are the occurrence a few $10\,\mu \textrm{s}$
after the primary, the relatively sharp onset at moderate electric fields
across the gap, the absence of increased fields in the system, and their
occurrence under both field directions.
  They can be mitigated using series resistors in the high-voltage connection
to the GEM electrode facing towards an anode. The electric field at which the
onset of secondary discharges occurs indeed increases with increasing
resistance. Discharge propagation form GEM to GEM in a multi-GEM system affects
the occurrence probability of secondary discharges in the gaps between
neighbouring GEMs.
  Furthermore, evidence of charges flowing through the gap after the primary
discharge are reported. Such currents may or may not lead to a secondary
discharge. A characteristic charge, of the order of
$10^{10}\,\textrm{electrons}$, has been measured as the threshold for a primary
discharge to be followed by a secondary discharge, and this number slightly
depends on the gas composition. A mechanism involving the heating of the
cathode surface as trigger for secondary discharges is proposed.


  In a recent letter, Barbosa et al [PRL 90, 227901(2003)] claim that secure
communication is possible with bright coherent pulses, by using quantum noise
to hide the data from an eavesdropper. We show here that the secrecy in the
scheme of Barbosa et al is unrelated to quantum noise, but rather derives from
the secret key that sender and receiver share beforehand.


  The properties characterizing Sturmian words are considered for words on
multiliteral alphabets. We summarize various generalizations of Sturmian words
to multiliteral alphabets and enlarge the list of known relationships among
these generalizations. We also collect many examples of infinite words to
illustrate differences in the generalized definitions of Sturmian words.


  We consider gravity mediated supersymmetry (SUSY) breaking in 5D spacetime
with two 4D branes B1 and B2 separated in the extra dimension. Using an
off-shell 5D supergravity (SUGRA) formalism, we argue that the SUSY breaking
scales could be non-universal even at the fundamental scale in a brane world
setting, since SUSY breaking effects could be effectively localized. As an
application, we suggest a model in which the two light chiral MSSM generations
reside on B1, while the third generation is located on B2, and the Higgs
multiplets as well as gravity and gauge multiplets reside in the bulk. For SUSY
breaking of the order of 10--20 TeV caused by a hidden sector localized at B1,
the scalars belonging to the first two generations can become sufficiently
heavy to overcome the SUSY flavor problem. SUSY breaking on B2 from a different
localized hidden sector gives rise to the third generation soft scalar masses
of the order of 1 TeV. Gaugino masses are also of the order of 1 TeV if the
size of the extra dimension is $\sim 10^{-16}$ ${\rm GeV}^{-1}$. As in 4D
effective supersymmetric theory, an adjustment of TeV scale parameters is
needed to realize the 100 GeV electroweak symmetry breaking scale.


  In this paper, we consider distributed optimization problems over a
multi-agent network, where each agent can only partially evaluate the objective
function, and it is allowed to exchange messages with its immediate neighbors.
Differently from all existing works on distributed optimization, our focus is
given to optimizing a class of non-convex problems, and under the challenging
setting where each agent can only access the zeroth-order information (i.e.,
the functional values) of its local functions. For different types of network
topologies such as undirected connected networks or star networks, we develop
efficient distributed algorithms and rigorously analyze their convergence and
rate of convergence (to the set of stationary solutions). Numerical results are
provided to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed algorithms.


  Recent developments in the field of anisotropic flow in nuclear collision are
reviewed. The results from the top AGS energy to the top RHIC energy are
discussed with emphasis on techniques, interpretation, and uncertainties in the
measurements.


  In this paper we apply the exact solution of the sine-Gordon model to
describe thermodynamic properties of the soliton liquid in the incommensurate
phase of the double-layer quantum Hall systems. In this way we include thermal
fluctuations and extend to finite temperatures the results obtained by C.B.
Hanna, A.H. MacDonald and S.M. Girvin [Phys. Rev. B {\bf 63}, 125305 (2001)].
In addition we calculate the specific heat of the system.
  While the results obtained for the sine-Gordon model are available in a
temperature interval $(0,T_c)$, where $T_c=8\pi \rho_s$, $\rho_s$ the
pseudospin stiffness, they can be applied in the bilayer system up to
temperatures $3T_{\rm BKT}$, where $T_{\rm BKT}=\pi\rho_s/2$ is the vortex
mediated Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless transition temperature. Above this
temperature the operators $\cos\beta \phi$ and $\cos(2\pi \vartheta/\beta)$ are
both relevant and the system is in a phase with coexisting order parameters.
$\vartheta$ is the dual field of $\phi$ and $\beta$ is the sine-Gordon coupling
constant. We provide numerical estimates for thermodynamic quantities for the
range of parameters relevant for GaAs.


  We examine homogeneous metrics on spheres and determine which ones have
positive sectional curvature. The answer is subtle and surprisingly difficult
to prove. In some cases we also determine their pinching constants. This
completes the classification of all homogeneous metrics with positive curvature
(apart from one special Aloff Wallach space where the set of homogeneous
metrics is too large).


  We report deep Sub-Millimeter Array observations of 26 pre-main-sequence
(PMS) stars with evolved inner disks. These observations measure the mass of
the outer disk (r ~20-100 AU) across every stage of the dissipation of the
inner disk (r < 10 AU) as determined by the IR spectral energy distributions
(SEDs). We find that only targets with high mid-IR excesses are detected and
have disk masses in the 1-5 M_Jup range, while most of our objects remain
undetected to sensitivity levels of M_DISK ~0.2-1.5 M_Jup. To put these results
in a more general context, we collected publicly available data to construct
the optical to millimeter wavelength SEDs of over 120 additional PMS stars. We
find that the near-IR and mid-IR emission remain optically thick in objects
whose disk masses span 2 orders of magnitude (~0.5-50 M_Jup). Taken together,
these results imply that, in general, inner disks start to dissipate only after
the outer disk has been significantly depleted of mass. This provides strong
support for photoevaporation being one of the dominant processes driving disk
evolution.


  One important effect of price shocks in the United States has been increased
political attention paid to the structure and performance of oil and natural
gas markets, along with some governmental support for energy conservation. This
paper describes how price changes helped lead the emergence of a political
agenda accompanied by several interventions, as revealed through Granger
causality tests on change in the legislative agenda.


  Estimating treatment effects is one of the most challenging and important
tasks of data analysts. In many applications, like online marketing and
personalized medicine, treatment needs to be allocated to the individuals where
it yields a high positive treatment effect. Uplift models help select the right
individuals for treatment and maximize the overall treatment effect (uplift). A
major challenge in uplift modeling concerns model evaluation. Previous
literature suggests methods like the Qini curve and the transformed outcome
mean squared error. However, these metrics suffer from variance: their
evaluations are strongly affected by random noise in the data, which renders
their signals, to a certain degree, arbitrary. We theoretically analyze the
variance of uplift evaluation metrics and derive possible methods of variance
reduction, which are based on statistical adjustment of the outcome. We derive
simple conditions under which the variance reduction methods improve the uplift
evaluation metrics and empirically demonstrate their benefits on simulated and
real-world data. Our paper provides strong evidence in favor of applying the
suggested variance reduction procedures by default when evaluating uplift
models on RCT data.


  The paper investigates random fields in the ball. It studies three types of
such fields: restrictions of scalar random fields in the ball to the sphere,
spin, and vector random fields. The review of the existing results and new
spectral theory for each of these classes of random fields are given. Examples
of applications to classical and new models of these three types are presented.
In particular, the Mat\'{e}rn model is used for illustrative examples. The
derived spectral representations can be utilised to further study theoretical
properties of such fields and to simulate their realisations. The obtained
results can also find various applications for modelling and investigating ball
data in cosmology, geosciences and embryology.


  There are two established ways to introduce geometric control in the category
of free modules---the bounded control and the continuous control at infinity.
Both types of control can be generalized to arbitrary modules over a noetherian
ring and applied to study algebraic $K$-theory of infinite groups. This was
accomplished for bounded control in part I of the present paper and the
subsequent work of G.~Carlsson and the first author, in the context of spaces
of finite asymptotic dimension. This part II develops the theory of filtered
modules over a proper metric space with a good compactification. It is
applicable in particular to CAT(0) groups which do not necessarily have finite
asymptotic dimension.


  We investigated the critical dynamical scalarization and descalarization of
black holes within the framework of the Einstein-Maxwell-scalar theory
featuring higher-order coupling functions. Both the critical scalarization and
descalarization displayed first-order phase transitions. When examining the
nonlinear dynamics near the threshold, we always observed critical solutions
that are linearly unstable static scalarized black holes. The critical
dynamical scalarization and descalarization share certain similarities with the
type I critical gravitational collapse. However, their initial configurations,
critical solutions, and final outcomes differ significantly. To provide further
insights into the dynamical results, we conducted a comparative analysis
involving static solutions and perturbative analysis.


  The quantum mechanical brachistochrone system with PT-symmetric Hamiltonian
is Naimark dilated and reinterpreted as subsystem of a Hermitian system in a
higher-dimensional Hilbert space. This opens a way to a direct experimental
implementation of the recently hypothesized PT-symmetric ultra-fast
brachistochrone regime of [C. M. Bender et al, Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 98},
040403 (2007)] in an entangled two-spin system.


  We present Hubble Space Telescope imaging of two ultra diffuse galaxies
(UDGs) with measured stellar velocity dispersions in the Coma cluster. The
galaxies, Dragonfly 44 and DFX1, have effective radii of 4.7 kpc and 3.5 kpc
and velocity dispersions of $47^{+8}_{-6}$ km/s and $30^{+7}_{-7}$ km/s,
respectively. Both galaxies are associated with a striking number of compact
objects, tentatively identified as globular clusters: $N_{\rm gc}=74\pm 18$ for
Dragonfly 44 and $N_{\rm gc}=62\pm 17$ for DFX1. The number of globular
clusters is far higher than expected from the luminosities of the galaxies but
is consistent with expectations from the empirical relation between dynamical
mass and globular cluster count defined by other galaxies. Combining our data
for these two objects with previous HST observations of Coma UDGs we find that
UDGs have a factor of $6.9^{+1.0}_{-2.4}$ more globular clusters than other
galaxies of the same luminosity, in contrast to a recent study of a similar
sample by Amorisco et al. (2017), but consistent with earlier results for
individual galaxies. The Harris et al. (2017) relation between globular cluster
count and dark matter halo mass implies a median halo mass of $M_{\rm halo}\sim
1.5\times 10^{11}\,{\rm M}_{\odot}$ for the sixteen Coma UDGs that have been
observed with HST so far, with the largest and brightest having $M_{\rm
halo}\sim 5\times 10^{11}\,{\rm M}_{\odot}$.


  Lobe structures due to the application of resonant magnetic perturbations
(RMPs) have been observed using wide-angle imaging of light from He1+ ions in
the vicinity of the lower X-point in MAST. The data presented are from lower
single-null discharges where RMPs of toroidal mode number, n, of 4 and 6 were
applied. It has been found that, above a threshold value, the lobe structures
extend radially, linearly with the coil current, both in L-mode and H-mode. It
is observed that after the application of the RMP, as the toroidal rotation in
the confined plasma decreases, the lobes extend radially, suggesting the plasma
is less effectively screening the RMP field. Comparing the imaging data with
results from vacuum modelling shows that this technique can accurately predict
the number and poloidal location of the lobes, but over-estimates their radial
extent. More accurate estimates of the extent of the lobes can be made by
accounting for plasma screening of the RMP field. Qualitative agreement between
simulation and experiment is found if it is assumed that the RMP penetrates 2%
in normalised radius from the last closed flux surface.


  This paper introduces a new and ubiquitous framework for establishing
achievability results in \emph{network information theory} (NIT) problems. The
framework uses random binning arguments and is based on a duality between
channel and source coding problems. {Further,} the framework uses pmf
approximation arguments instead of counting and typicality. This allows for
proving coordination and \emph{strong} secrecy problems where certain
statistical conditions on the distribution of random variables need to be
satisfied. These statistical conditions include independence between messages
and eavesdropper's observations in secrecy problems and closeness to a certain
distribution (usually, i.i.d. distribution) in coordination problems. One
important feature of the framework is to enable one {to} add an eavesdropper
and obtain a result on the secrecy rates "for free."
  We make a case for generality of the framework by studying examples in the
variety of settings containing channel coding, lossy source coding, joint
source-channel coding, coordination, strong secrecy, feedback and relaying. In
particular, by investigating the framework for the lossy source coding problem
over broadcast channel, it is shown that the new framework provides a simple
alternative scheme to \emph{hybrid} coding scheme. Also, new results on secrecy
rate region (under strong secrecy criterion) of wiretap broadcast channel and
wiretap relay channel are derived. In a set of accompanied papers, we have
shown the usefulness of the framework to establish achievability results for
coordination problems including interactive channel simulation, coordination
via relay and channel simulation via another channel.


  The relevant quasipotential near an equilibrium point is determined by a new
linear matrix equation, with less unknowns than an existing (possibly
nonlinear) one. This also assures the asymptotic fulfillment of the
Fokker-Planck equation, even globally due to the second term in the noise
strength. An auxiliary result for the exit problem is derived as well.


  Tor is among most well-known dark net in the world. It has noble uses,
including as a platform for free speech and information dissemination under the
guise of true anonymity, but may be culturally better known as a conduit for
criminal activity and as a platform to market illicit goods and data. Past
studies on the content of Tor support this notion, but were carried out by
targeting popular domains likely to contain illicit content. A survey of past
studies may thus not yield a complete evaluation of the content and use of Tor.
This work addresses this gap by presenting a broad evaluation of the content of
the English Tor ecosystem. We perform a comprehensive crawl of the Tor dark web
and, through topic and network analysis, characterize the types of information
and services hosted across a broad swath of Tor domains and their hyperlink
relational structure. We recover nine domain types defined by the information
or service they host and, among other findings, unveil how some types of
domains intentionally silo themselves from the rest of Tor. We also present
measurements that (regrettably) suggest how marketplaces of illegal drugs and
services do emerge as the dominant type of Tor domain. Our study is the product
of crawling over 1 million pages from 20,000 Tor seed addresses, yielding a
collection of over 150,000 Tor pages. We make a dataset of the intend to make
the domain structure publicly available as a dataset at
https://github.com/wsu-wacs/TorEnglishContent.


  Quantum mechanics imposes a fundamental bound on the minimum time required
for the quantum systems to evolve between two states of interest. This bound
introduces a limit on the speed of the dynamical evolution of the systems,
known as the quantum speed limit. We show that black holes can drastically
affect the speed limit of a two-level fermionic quantum system subjected to an
open quantum dynamics. As we demonstrate, the quantum speed limit can enhance
at the vicinity of a black hole's event horizon in the Schwarzschild spacetime.


  Recognition of ancient Tamil characters has always been a challenge for
epigraphers. This is primarily because the language has evolved over the
several centuries and the character set over this time has both expanded and
diversified. This proposed work focuses on improving optical character
recognition techniques for ancient Tamil script which was in use between the
7th and 12th centuries. While comprehensively curating a functional data set
for ancient Tamil characters is an arduous task, in this work, a data set has
been curated using cropped images of characters found on certain temple
inscriptions, specific to this time as a case study. After using Otsu
thresholding method for binarization of the image a two dimensional convolution
neural network is defined and used to train, classify and, recognize the
ancient Tamil characters. To implement the optical character recognition
techniques, the neural network is linked to the Tesseract using the pytesseract
library of Python. As an added feature, the work also incorporates Google's
text to speech voice engine to produce an audio output of the digitized text.
Various samples for both modern and ancient Tamil were collected and passed
through the system. It is found that for Tamil inscriptions studied over the
considered time period, a combined efficiency of 77.7 percent can be achieved.


  Turbulence is a key process in many astrophysical systems. In this work we
explore the statistics of thermal and kinetic energy of isothermal, supersonic,
turbulent gas. We develop analytic formulas for the PDF of thermal and kinetic
energies and their joint PDF. We compare these analytical models with a suite
of simulations with a fixed resolution of $1024^3$ cells across 4 different
Mach numbers (1, 2, 4, 8) and three different driving patterns (compressive,
mixed, solenoidal). We discover an interesting jump discontinuity in the
thermal energy PDF, which carries onto the joint PDF.


  The inflation of Type I error rates is thought to be one of the causes of the
replication crisis. Questionable research practices such as p-hacking are
thought to inflate Type I error rates above their nominal level, leading to
unexpectedly high levels of false positives in the literature and,
consequently, unexpectedly low replication rates. In this article, I offer an
alternative view. I argue that questionable and other research practices do not
usually inflate relevant Type I error rates. I begin with an introduction to
Type I error rates that distinguishes them from theoretical errors. I then
illustrate my argument with respect to model misspecification, multiple
testing, selective inference, forking paths, exploratory analyses, p-hacking,
optional stopping, double dipping, and HARKing. In each case, I demonstrate
that relevant Type I error rates are not usually inflated above their nominal
level, and in the rare cases that they are, the inflation is easily identified
and resolved. I conclude that the replication crisis may be explained, at least
in part, by researchers' misinterpretation of statistical errors and their
underestimation of theoretical errors.


  This paper introduces a matrix analog of the Bessel processes, taking values
in the closed set $E$ of real square matrices with nonnegative determinant.
They are related to the well-known Wishart processes in a simple way: the
latter are obtained from the former via the map $x\mapsto x^\top x$. The main
focus is on existence and uniqueness via the theory of Dirichlet forms. This
leads us to develop new results of potential theoretic nature concerning the
space of real square matrices. Specifically, the function $w(x)=|\det
x|^\alpha$ is a weight function in the Muckenhoupt $A_p$ class for
$-1<\alpha\le 0$ ($p=1$) and $-1<\alpha<p-1$ ($p>1$). The set of matrices of
co-rank at least two has zero capacity with respect to the measure $m(dx)=|\det
x|^\alpha dx$ if $\alpha>-1$, and if $\alpha\ge 1$ this even holds for the set
of all singular matrices. As a consequence we obtain density results for
Sobolev spaces over (the interior of) $E$ with Neumann boundary conditions. The
highly non-convex, non-Lipschitz structure of the state space is dealt with
using a combination of geometric and algebraic methods.


  The software MAVKA is described, which was elaborated for statistically
optimal determination of the characteristics of the extrema of 1000+ variable
stars of different types, mainly eclipsing and pulsating. The approximations
are phenomenological, but not physical. As often, the discovery of a new
variable star is made on time series of a single-filter (single-channel) data,
and there is no possibility to determine parameters needed for physical
modelling (e.g. temperature, radial velocities, mass ratio of binaries).
Besides classical polynomial approximation "AP" (we limited the degree of the
polynomial from 2 to 9), there are realized symmetrical approximations
(symmetrical polynomials "SP", "wall-supported" horizontal line "WSL" and
parabola "WSP", restricted polynomials of non-integer order based on
approximations of the functions proposed by Andronov (2012) and Mikulasek
(2015) and generally asymmetric functions (asymptotic parabola "AP", parabolic
spline "PS", generalized hyperbolic secant function "SECH" and
"log-normal-like" "BSK"). This software is a successor of the "Observation
Obscurer" with some features for the variable star research, including a block
for "running parabola" "RP" scalegram and approximation. Whereas the RP is
oriented on approximation of the complete data set. MAVKA is pointed to parts
of the light curve close to extrema (including total eclipses and transits of
stars and exoplanets). The functions for wider intervals, covering the eclipse
totally, were discussed in 2017Ap.....60...57A . Global and local
approximations are reviewed in 2020kdbd.book..191A . The software is available
at http://uavso.org.ua/mavka and https://katerynaandrych.wixsite.com/mavka. We
have analyzed the data from own observations, as well as from monitoring
obtained at ground-based and space (currently, mainly, TESS) observatories. It
may be used for signals of any nature.


  Recent high-resolution, near-infrared images of protoplanetary disks have
shown that these disks often present spiral features. Spiral arms are among the
structures predicted decades ago by numerical simulations of disk-planet
interaction and thus it is tempting to suspect that planetary perturbers are
responsible for the observed signatures. However, such interpretation is not
free of problems. The spirals are found to have large pitch angles, and in at
least one case (HD 100546) the spiral feature appears effectively unpolarized,
which implies thermal emission of the order of 1000K (465$\pm$40K at closer
inspection). We have recently shown in two-dimensional models that shock
dissipation in the supersonic wake of high-mass planets can lead to significant
heating if the disk is sufficiently adiabatic. In this paper we extend this
analysis to three dimensions in thermodynamically evolving disks. We use the
Pencil Code in spherical coordinates for our models, with a prescription for
thermal cooling based on the optical depth of the local vertical gas column. We
use a 5$M_J$ planet, and show that shocks in the region around the planet where
the Lindblad resonances occur heat the gas to substantially higher temperatures
than the ambient disk gas at that radius. The gas is accelerated vertically
away from the midplane by the shocks to form shock bores, and the gas falling
back toward the midplane breaks up into a turbulent surf near the Lindblad
resonances. This turbulence, although localized, has high $\alpha$ values,
reaching 0.05 in the inner Lindblad resonance, and 0.1 in the outer one. We
also find evidence that the disk regions heated up by the planetary shocks
eventually becomes superadiabatic, generating convection far from the planet's
orbit.


  The decay of an excited is shown to slow down in the presence of a photo
detector. This is similar to the behavior of an atom in a mistuned cavity, and
under the conditions of the quantum Zeno effect. No external perturbing field
is applied to measure the survival probability of the unstable state.


  We obtain new semiclassical estimates for pseudodifferential operators with
low regular symbols. Such symbols appear naturally in a Cauchy Problem related
to recent weak solutions to the unstable Muskat problem constructed via convex
integration in [CCF16]. In particular, our new estimates reveal the tight
relation between the speed of opening of the mixing zone and the regularity of
the interphase.


  In recent years, data science has evolved significantly. Data analysis and
mining processes become routines in all sectors of the economy where datasets
are available. Vast data repositories have been collected, curated, stored, and
used for extracting knowledge. And this is becoming commonplace. Subsequently,
we extract a large amount of knowledge, either directly from the data or
through experts in the given domain. The challenge now is how to exploit all
this large amount of knowledge that is previously known for efficient
decision-making processes. Until recently, much of the knowledge gained through
a number of years of research is stored in static knowledge bases or
ontologies, while more diverse and dynamic knowledge acquired from data mining
studies is not centrally and consistently managed. In this research, we propose
a novel model called ontology-based knowledge map to represent and store the
results (knowledge) of data mining in crop farming to build, maintain, and
enrich the process of knowledge discovery. The proposed model consists of six
main sets: concepts, attributes, relations, transformations, instances, and
states. This model is dynamic and facilitates the access, updates, and
exploitation of the knowledge at any time. This paper also proposes an
architecture for handling this knowledge-based model. The system architecture
includes knowledge modelling, extraction, assessment, publishing, and
exploitation. This system has been implemented and used in agriculture for crop
management and monitoring. It is proven to be very effective and promising for
its extension to other domains.


  Sentence encoders map sentences to real valued vectors for use in downstream
applications. To peek into these representations - e.g., to increase
interpretability of their results - probing tasks have been designed which
query them for linguistic knowledge. However, designing probing tasks for
lesser-resourced languages is tricky, because these often lack large-scale
annotated data or (high-quality) dependency parsers as a prerequisite of
probing task design in English. To investigate how to probe sentence embeddings
in such cases, we investigate sensitivity of probing task results to structural
design choices, conducting the first such large scale study. We show that
design choices like size of the annotated probing dataset and type of
classifier used for evaluation do (sometimes substantially) influence probing
outcomes. We then probe embeddings in a multilingual setup with design choices
that lie in a 'stable region', as we identify for English, and find that
results on English do not transfer to other languages. Fairer and more
comprehensive sentence-level probing evaluation should thus be carried out on
multiple languages in the future.


  The analysis of the density and brightness of big planets satellites, main
asteroid belt objects, Kuiper belt objects and centaurs has been carried out as
well as the analysis of suspected unseen satellites of the stars. According to
the date on the first of January 2006 the catalogue of planetary objects has
been compiled.


  Data from the Muon g-2 experiment and measurements of the fine structure
constant suggest that the anomalous magnetic moments of the muon and electron
are at odds with standard model expectations. We survey the ability of
axion-like-particles, two-Higgs-doublet models and leptoquarks to explain the
discrepancies. We find that accounting for other constraints, all scenarios
except the Type-I, Type-II and Type-Y two-Higgs-doublet models fit the data
well.


  In order to make a further confirmation about the assignments of the excited
bottom and bottom strange mesons $B_{1}(5721)$, $B_{2}^{*}(5747)$,
$B_{s1}(5830)$, $B_{s2}^{*}(5840)$ and meanwhile identify the possible
assignments of $B_{J}(5840)$, $B_{J}(5970)$, we study the strong decays of
these states with the $^{3}P_{0}$ decay model. Our analysis support
$B_{1}(5721)$ and $B_{2}^{*}(5747)$ to be the $1P_{1}'$ and $1^{3}P_{2}$
assignments and the $B_{s1}(5830)$, $B_{s2}^{*}(5840)$ to be the strange
partner of $B_{1}(5721)$ and $B_{2}^{*}(5747)$. Besides, we tentatively
identify the recently observed $B_{J}(5840)$, $B_{J}(5970)$ as the $2^{3}S_{1}$
and $1^{3}D_{3}$ states, respectively. It is noticed that this conclusion needs
further confirmation by measuring the decay channel to $B\pi$ of $B_{J}(5840)$
and $B_{J}(5970)$ in experiments.


  Widely adopted motion forecasting datasets substitute the observed sensory
inputs with higher-level abstractions such as 3D boxes and polylines. These
sparse shapes are inferred through annotating the original scenes with
perception systems' predictions. Such intermediate representations tie the
quality of the motion forecasting models to the performance of computer vision
models. Moreover, the human-designed explicit interfaces between perception and
motion forecasting typically pass only a subset of the semantic information
present in the original sensory input. To study the effect of these modular
approaches, design new paradigms that mitigate these limitations, and
accelerate the development of end-to-end motion forecasting models, we augment
the Waymo Open Motion Dataset (WOMD) with large-scale, high-quality, diverse
LiDAR data for the motion forecasting task.
  The new augmented dataset WOMD-LiDAR consists of over 100,000 scenes that
each spans 20 seconds, consisting of well-synchronized and calibrated high
quality LiDAR point clouds captured across a range of urban and suburban
geographies (https://waymo.com/open/data/motion/). Compared to Waymo Open
Dataset (WOD), WOMD-LiDAR dataset contains 100x more scenes. Furthermore, we
integrate the LiDAR data into the motion forecasting model training and provide
a strong baseline. Experiments show that the LiDAR data brings improvement in
the motion forecasting task. We hope that WOMD-LiDAR will provide new
opportunities for boosting end-to-end motion forecasting models.


  The introduction of strongly-interacting mirror fermions with masses between
the weak scale and 1 TeV could offer a viable alternative to the Higgs
mechanism. The framework provided solves the hierarchy problem naturally and
predicts a rich phenomenology for present and future experiments.


  Background: Mendelian randomization (MR) has been widely applied to causal
inference in medical research. It uses genetic variants as instrumental
variables (IVs) to investigate putative causal relationship between an exposure
and an outcome. Traditional MR methods have dominantly focussed on a two-sample
setting in which IV-exposure association study and IV-outcome association study
are independent. However, it is not uncommon that participants from the two
studies fully overlap (one-sample) or partly overlap (overlapping-sample).
Methods: We proposed a method that is applicable to all the three sample
settings. In essence, we converted a two- or overlapping- sample problem to a
one-sample problem where data of some or all of the individuals were
incomplete. Assume that all individuals were drawn from the same population and
unmeasured data were missing at random. Then the unobserved data were treated
au pair with the model parameters as unknown quantities, and thus, could be
imputed iteratively conditioning on the observed data and estimated parameters
using Markov chain Monte Carlo. We generalised our model to allow for
pleiotropy and multiple exposures and assessed its performance by a number of
simulations using four metrics: mean, standard deviation, coverage and power.
Results: Higher sample overlapping rate and stronger instruments led to
estimates with higher precision and power. Pleiotropy had a notably negative
impact on the estimates. Nevertheless, overall the coverages were high and our
model performed well in all the sample settings. Conclusions: Our model offers
the flexibility of being applicable to any of the sample settings, which is an
important addition to the MR literature which has restricted to one- or two-
sample scenarios. Given the nature of Bayesian inference, it can be easily
extended to more complex MR analysis in medical research.


  For a subspace arrangement over a finite field we study the evaluation code
defined on the arrangement's set of points. The length of this code is given by
the subspace arrangement's characteristic polynomial. For coordinate subspace
arrangements, the dimension is bounded below by the face vector of the
corresponding simplicial complex. The minimum distance is determined for
coordinate subspace arrangements where the simplicial complex is a skeleton.


  We shall use the Euler-Maruyama (EM) scheme with decreasing step size
$\Lambda=(\eta_n)_{n\in \mathbb{N}}$ to approximate the steady state for
piecewise $\alpha$-stable Ornstein-Uhlenbeck processes arising in queue
networks. These processes do not have an explicit dissipation. We prove the EM
scheme converges to the steady state with a rate $\eta^{1/\alpha}_n$ in
Wasserstein-1 distance. In addition, we utilize the Sinkhorn--Knopp algorithm
to compute the Wasserstein-1 distance and conduct the simulations for several
examples.


  In this paper, we consider $k$-free numbers over Beatty sequences. New
results are given.


  During the formation of a star, material is ejected along powerful jets that
impact the ambient material. This outflow phenomenon plays an important role in
the regulation of star formation. Understanding the associated shocks and their
energetic effects is therefore essential to the study of star formation. We
present comparisons of shock models with observations of H$_2$ and SiO emission
in the bipolar outflow BHR71, and predict water emission, under the basic
assumption that the emission regions of the considered species coincide, at the
resolution of currently available observations. New SiO observations from APEX
are presented, and combined with \textit{Spitzer} and ground-based observations
of H$_2$ to constrain shock models. The shock regions associated with targeted
positions in the molecular outflow are studied by means of a 1D code that
generates models of the propagation of stationary shock waves, and
approximations to non-stationary ones. The SiO emission in the inner part of
the outflow is concentrated near the apex of the corresponding bow-shock that
is also seen in the pure rotational transitions of H$_2$. Simultaneous
modelling is possible for H$_2$ and SiO and leads to constraints on the silicon
pre-shock distribution on the grain mantles and/or cores. The best-fitting
models are found to be of the non-stationary type, but the degeneracy of the
solutions is still large. Pre-shock densities of 10$^4$ and 10$^5$ cm$^{-3}$
are investigated, and the associated best-model candidates have rather low
velocity (respectively, 20-30 and 10-15 km s$^{-1}$) and are not older than
1000 years. We provide emission predictions for water, focusing on the
brightest transitions, to be observed with the PACS and HIFI instruments of the
\textit{Herschel} Telescope.


  This paper discusses a vision based health monitoring system which would be
very easy in use and deployment. Elder and sick people who are not able to talk
or walk they are dependent on other human beings for their daily needs and need
continuous monitoring. The developed system provides facility to the sick or
elder person to describe his or her need to their caretaker in lingual
description by showing particular hand gesture with the developed system. This
system uses fingertip detection technique for gesture extraction and artificial
neural network for gesture classification and recognition. The system is able
to work in different light conditions and can be connected to different devices
to announce users need on a distant location.


  We describe Dr.Fill, a program that solves American-style crossword puzzles.
From a technical perspective, Dr.Fill works by converting crosswords to
weighted CSPs, and then using a variety of novel techniques to find a solution.
These techniques include generally applicable heuristics for variable and value
selection, a variant of limited discrepancy search, and postprocessing and
partitioning ideas. Branch and bound is not used, as it was incompatible with
postprocessing and was determined experimentally to be of little practical
value. Dr.Fillls performance on crosswords from the American Crossword Puzzle
Tournament suggests that it ranks among the top fifty or so crossword solvers
in the world.


  In this paper we consider minimizers of the Mumford-Shah functional with
Dirichlet boundary conditions. We study blow-ups at the boundary and prove an
epsilon-regularity theorem.


  Nonlocality without entanglement and its subsequent generalizations offer
deep information-theoretic insights and subsequently find several useful
applications. Concept of genuinely nonlocal set of product states emerges as a
natural multipartite generalization of this phenomenon. Existence of such sets
eventually motivates the problem concerning their entanglement-assisted
discrimination. Here, we construct examples of genuinely nonlocal product
states for arbitrary number of parties. Strength of genuine nonlocality of
these sets can be considered minimal as their perfect discrimination is
possible with entangled resources residing in Hilbert spaces having the
smallest possible dimensions. Our constructions lead to fully separable
measurements that are impossible to implement even if all but one party come
together. Furthermore, they also provide the opportunity to compare different
multipartite states that otherwise are incomparable under single copy local
manipulation.


  Pre-trained graph models (PGMs) aim to capture transferable inherent
structural properties and apply them to different downstream tasks. Similar to
pre-trained language models, PGMs also inherit biases from human society,
resulting in discriminatory behavior in downstream applications. The debiasing
process of existing fair methods is generally coupled with parameter
optimization of GNNs. However, different downstream tasks may be associated
with different sensitive attributes in reality, directly employing existing
methods to improve the fairness of PGMs is inflexible and inefficient.
Moreover, most of them lack a theoretical guarantee, i.e., provable lower
bounds on the fairness of model predictions, which directly provides assurance
in a practical scenario. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel
adapter-tuning framework that endows pre-trained graph models with provable
fairness (called GraphPAR). GraphPAR freezes the parameters of PGMs and trains
a parameter-efficient adapter to flexibly improve the fairness of PGMs in
downstream tasks. Specifically, we design a sensitive semantic augmenter on
node representations, to extend the node representations with different
sensitive attribute semantics for each node. The extended representations will
be used to further train an adapter, to prevent the propagation of sensitive
attribute semantics from PGMs to task predictions. Furthermore, with GraphPAR,
we quantify whether the fairness of each node is provable, i.e., predictions
are always fair within a certain range of sensitive attribute semantics.
Experimental evaluations on real-world datasets demonstrate that GraphPAR
achieves state-of-the-art prediction performance and fairness on node
classification task. Furthermore, based on our GraphPAR, around 90\% nodes have
provable fairness.


  The treatment proposed by Sacchi quant-ph/0009104 does not represent correct
solution, since the necessary conditions on CP maps are not guaranteed.


  In this note I show that nonlocal generalization of the standard model (SM)
with nonlocal scale $\Lambda_{nl} \approx 3$ TeV can explain recent CDF result
on the W-mass measurement


  We discuss dispersion representations for the triangle diagram
$F(p_1^2,p_2^2,q^2)$, the single dispersion representation in $q^2$ and the
double dispersion representation in $p_1^2$ and $p_2^2$, with special emphasis
on the appearance of the anomalous singularities and the anomalous cuts in
these representations. For the double dispersion representation in $p_1^2$ and
$p_2^2$, the appearance of the anomalous cut in the region $q^2>0$ is
demonstrated, and a new derivation of the anomalous double spectral density is
given. We point out that the double spectral representation is particularly
suitable for applications in the region of $p_1^2$ and/or $p_2^2$ above the
two-particle thresholds. The dispersion representations for the triangle
diagram in the nonrelativistic limit are studied and compared with the triangle
diagram of the nonrelativistic field theory.


  We present internal velocity dispersions and precise radial velocities for
200 globular clusters (GCs) in M31 that are derived using new high-resolution
spectra from MMT/Hectochelle. Of these, 163 also have King model structural
parameters that allow us to estimate their mass-to-light ratios. This is, by
far, the largest such dataset available for any galaxy, including the Milky
Way. These data strongly confirm earlier suggestions that the optical and
near-infrared mass-to-light ratios of M31 GCs decline with increasing
metallicity. This behavior is the opposite of that predicted by stellar
population models for a standard initial mass function. We show that this
phenomenon does not appear to be caused by standard dynamical evolution. A
shallower mass function for metal-rich GCs (with dN/dM ~ M^-0.8 to M^-1.3 below
one solar mass) can explain the bulk of extant observations. We also observe a
consistent, monotonic correlation between mass-to-light ratio and cluster mass.
This correlation, in contrast to the correlation with metallicity, is
well-explained by the accepted model of dynamical evolution of GCs through mass
segregation and the preferential loss of low-mass stars, and these data are
among the best available to constrain this process.


  We study the long time behavior of positive solutions of the Cauchy problem
for nonlinear reaction-diffusion equations in $\mathbb{R}^N$ with bistable,
ignition or monostable nonlinearities that exhibit threshold behavior. For
$L^2$ initial data that are radial and non-increasing as a function of the
distance to the origin, we characterize the ignition behavior in terms of the
long time behavior of the energy associated with the solution. We then use this
characterization to establish existence of a sharp threshold for monotone
families of initial data in the considered class under various assumptions on
the nonlinearities and spatial dimension. We also prove that for more general
initial data that are sufficiently localized the solutions that exhibit
ignition behavior propagate in all directions with the asymptotic speed equal
to that of the unique one-dimensional variational traveling wave.


  We investigated the archival ground-based VLBI images of the extragalactic
radio sources included in both the {\it Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe
(WMAP)} and the {\it Planck} catalogues, and selected 49 bright and compact
sources as potential targets for space Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI)
observations at mm wavelengths. These sources have a flat radio continuum
spectrum between 33 and 94~GHz. They are identified as core-dominated active
galactic nuclei (AGN), located at declinations above $-40\degr$, and have never
been observed with ground-based VLBI at 86~GHz. The radio properties of the 49
new sources are presented. We compare this new sample with similar samples of
compact AGN available from earlier studies. The new candidates, together with
the existing bright compact AGN sample identified from 86-GHz ground-based VLBI
imaging surveys, form a catalogue of more than 160 AGN. These could be primary
targets for mm-VLBI observations on the ground, as well as for future
mm-wavelength space VLBI missions such as the project with two satellites
currently under study in China.


  We argue a new classification scheme of long gamma-ray bursts (LGRBs) using
the morphology of the cumulative light curve of the prompt emission. We
parametrize the morphology by the absolute deviation from their constant
luminosity ($ADCL$) and derive the value for 36 LGRBs which have spectropic
redshifts, spectral parameters determined by the Band model, 1-second peak
fluxes, fluences, and 64-msec resolution light curves whose peak counts are 10
times larger than background fluctuations. Then we devide the sample according
to the value of ADCL into two groups ($ADCL < 0.17$ and $ADCL > 0.17$) and, for
each group, derive the spectral peak energy $E_{\rm p}$ - peak luminosity
$L_{\rm p}$ correlation and the Fundamental Plane of LGRBs, which is a
correlation between the spectral peak energy $E_{\rm p}$, the luminosity time
$T_{\rm L}$ ($\equiv E_{\rm iso}/L_{\rm p}$ where $E_{\rm iso}$ is isotropic
energy) and the peak luminosity $L_{\rm p}$. We find that both of the
correlations for both groups are statistically more significant compared with
ones derived from all samples. The Fundamental Planes with small and large ADCL
are given by $L_{\rm p}=10^{52.53\pm 0.01}(E_{\rm p}/10^{2.71}{\rm
keV})^{1.84\pm 0.03} (T_{\rm L}/10^{0.86}{\rm sec})^{0.29\pm0.08}$ with
$\chi^2_{\nu}=10.93/14$ and $L_{\rm p}=10^{52.98\pm0.08}(E_{\rm
p}/10^{2.71}{\rm keV})^{1.82\pm 0.09} (T_{\rm L}/10^{0.86}{\rm sec})^{0.85\pm
0.27}$ with $\chi^2_{\nu}=7.58/8$, respectively. This fact implies the
existence of subclasses of LGRBs characterized by the value of $ADCL$. Also
there is a hint for the existence of the intermediate-$ADCL$ class which
deviates from both fundamental planes. Both relations are so tight that our
result provides a new accurate distance measurement scheme up to the high
redshift universe.


  Couplings between a closed string RR field and open strings are calculated in
a system of coincident branes and antibranes of type II theory. The result can
be written cleanly using the curvature of the superconnection.


  Reconstructing an object's geometry and appearance from multiple images, also
known as inverse rendering, is a fundamental problem in computer graphics and
vision. Inverse rendering is inherently ill-posed because the captured image is
an intricate function of unknown lighting conditions, material properties and
scene geometry. Recent progress in representing scene properties as
coordinate-based neural networks have facilitated neural inverse rendering
resulting in impressive geometry reconstruction and novel-view synthesis. Our
key insight is that polarization is a useful cue for neural inverse rendering
as polarization strongly depends on surface normals and is distinct for diffuse
and specular reflectance. With the advent of commodity, on-chip, polarization
sensors, capturing polarization has become practical. Thus, we propose PANDORA,
a polarimetric inverse rendering approach based on implicit neural
representations. From multi-view polarization images of an object, PANDORA
jointly extracts the object's 3D geometry, separates the outgoing radiance into
diffuse and specular and estimates the illumination incident on the object. We
show that PANDORA outperforms state-of-the-art radiance decomposition
techniques. PANDORA outputs clean surface reconstructions free from texture
artefacts, models strong specularities accurately and estimates illumination
under practical unstructured scenarios.


  We present a simple architecture for deterministic quantum circuits operating
on single photon qubits. Few resources are necessary to implement two
elementary gates and can be recycled for computing with large numbers of
qubits. The deterministic realization of some key multi-qubit gates, such as
the Fredkin and Toffoli gate, is greatly simplified in this approach.


  Density functional study of strain effects on the electronic band structure
and transport prop- erties of the graphene nanoribbons (GNR) is presented. We
apply a uniaxial strain in the x (nearest-neighbor) and y (second
nearest-neighbor) directions, related to the deformation of zigzag and armchair
edge GNRs (AGNR and ZGNR), respectively. We calculate the quantum conduc- tance
and band structures of the GNR using the Wannier function in a strain range
from -8% to +8% (minus and plus signs show compression and tensile strain). As
strain increases, depending on the AGNR family type, the electrical
conductivity changes from an insulator to a conductor. This is accompanied by a
variation in the electron and hole effective masses. The compression x
direction strain in ZGNR shifts some bands to below the Fermi level (Ef ) and
the quantum conductance does not change, but the tensile x direction strain
causes an increase in the quantum conductance to 10e2/h near the Ef . For
transverse direction, it is very sensitive to strain and the tensile y
direction strain causes an increase in the conductance while the compressive y
direction strain decreases the conductance at first but increases later.


  Quasi-Newton methods employ an update rule that gradually improves the
Hessian approximation using the already available gradient evaluations. We
propose higher-order secant updates which generalize this idea to higher-order
derivatives, approximating for example third derivatives (which are tensors)
from given Hessian evaluations. Our generalization is based on the observation
that quasi-Newton updates are least-change updates satisfying the secant
equation, with different methods using different norms to measure the size of
the change. We present a full characterization for least-change updates in
weighted Frobenius norms (satisfying an analogue of the secant equation) for
derivatives of arbitrary order. Moreover, we establish convergence of the
approximations to the true derivative under standard assumptions and explore
the quality of the generated approximations in numerical experiments.


  We prove a surgery formula for the smooth Yamabe invariant $\sigma(M)$ of a
compact manifold $M$. Assume that $N$ is obtained from $M$ by surgery of
codimension at least 3. We prove the existence of a positive number
$\Lambda_n$, depending only on the dimension $n$ of $M$, such that $$ \sigma(N)
\geq \min{\sigma(M),\Lambda_n}. $$


  The Quot scheme of points $\mathrm{Quot}_{d,n}(X)$ on a variety $X$ over a
field $k$ parametrizes quotient sheaves of $\mathcal{O}_X^{\oplus d}$ of
zero-dimensional support and length $n$. It is a rank-$d$ generalization of the
Hilbert scheme of $n$ points. When $X$ is a reduced curve with only the cusp
singularity $\{x^2=y^3\}$ and $d\geq 0$ is fixed, the generating series for the
motives of $\mathrm{Quot}_{d,n}(X)$ in the Grothendieck ring of varieties is
studied via Gr\"obner bases, and shown to be rational. Moreover, the generating
series is computed explicitly when $d\leq 3$. The computational results exhibit
surprising patterns (despite the fact that the category of finite length
coherent modules over a cusp is wild), which not only enable us to conjecture
the exact form of the generating series for all $d$, but also suggest a general
functional equation whose $d=1$ case is the classical functional equation of
the motivic zeta function known for any Gorenstein curve.
  As another side of the story, Quot schemes are related to the Cohen--Lenstra
series. The Cohen--Lenstra series encodes the count of "commuting matrix
points'' (or equivalently, coherent modules of finite length) of a variety over
a finite field, about which Huang formuated a "rationality'' conjecture for
singular curves. We prove a general formula that expresses the Cohen--Lenstra
series in terms of the motives of the (punctual) Quot schemes, which together
with our main rationality theorem, provides positive evidence for Huang's
conjecture for the cusp.


  It is well-known that gravitino propagation in standard supergravities is
free of any causality problems. However, two issues related to gravitino
propagation were recently uncovered in specific supergravities with nonlinear
supersymmetry. One of them concerns potential acausality/superluminality,
whereas the second one arises from the vanishing of the sound speed at specific
points during inflation. The former is famously related to positivity
constraints on specific EFT operators, derived from dispersion relations on the
energy-growing part of scattering amplitudes, and indeed we show that
subluminality constraints for the gravitino are related via the equivalence
theorem to positivity bounds in low-energy goldstino actions. However, the
former are stronger, in the sense that they apply to functions of the scalar
fields not only in the ground state, but for any field values such as those
scanned by time-dependent solutions, unlike bounds derived from $2\to 2$
scattering amplitudes in the vacuum. We also argue that nontrivial causality
constraints arise only in the case where nonlinear supersymmetry in the matter
sector is encoded into superfield constraints which do not seem to arise from
microscopic two-derivative lagrangians, in particular for the orthogonal
constraint used to build minimal models of inflation in supergravity. This
allows us to propose simple alternatives which maintain the minimality of the
spectra and are causal in all points of the theory parameter space. We also
discuss minimal supergravity models of inflation along these lines.


  Given a mean curvature flow of compact, embedded $C^2$ surfaces satisfying
Neumann free boundary condition on a mean convex, smooth support surface in
3-dimensional Euclidean space, we show that it can be extended as long as its
mean curvature and perimeter stay uniformly bounded along the flow.


  We prove that a pointwise fractional Hardy inequality implies a fractional
Hardy inequality, defined via a Gagliardo-type seminorm. The proof consists of
two main parts. The first one is to characterize the pointwise fractional Hardy
inequality in terms of a fractional capacity density condition. The second part
is to show the deep open-endedness or self-improvement property of the
fractional capacity density, which we accomplish in the setting of a complete
geodesic space equipped with a doubling measure. These results are new already
in the standard Euclidean setting.


  The disruption of binary stars by the tidal field of the black hole in the
Galactic Center can produce the hypervelocity stars observed in the halo. We
use numerical models to simulate the full spectrum of observable velocities of
stars ejected into the halo by this binary disruption process. Our model
includes a range of parameters for binaries with 3-4 M_Solar primaries,
consideration of radial orbits of the ejected stars through an approximate mass
distribution for the Galaxy, and the impact of stellar lifetimes. We calculate
the spectrum of ejection velocities and reproduce previous results for the mean
ejection velocity at the Galactic center. The model predicts that the full
population of ejected stars includes both the hypervelocity stars with
velocities large enough to escape from the Galaxy and a comparable number of
ejected, but bound, stars of the same stellar type. The predicted median speeds
of the population of ejected stars as a function of distance in the halo are
consistent with current observations. Combining the model with the data also
shows that interesting constraints on the properties of binaries in the
Galactic Center and on the mass distribution in the Galaxy can be obtained even
with modest samples of ejected stars.


  Bondi-Metzner-Sachs (BMS) symmetries, or equivalently Conformal Carroll
symmetries, are intrinsically associated to null manifolds and in two
dimensions can be obtained as an In{\"o}n{\"u}-Wigner contraction of the
two-dimensional ($2d$) relativistic conformal algebra. Instead of performing
contractions, we demonstrate in this paper how this transmutation of symmetries
can be achieved by infinite boosts or degenerate linear transformations on
coordinates. Taking explicit cues from the worldsheet theory of null strings,
we show boosting the system is equivalent to adding a current-current
deformation term to the Hamiltonian. As the strength of this deformation term
reaches a critical value, the classical symmetry algebra "flows" from two
copies of Virasoro to the BMS algebra. We further explore the situation where
the CFT coordinates are asymmetrically transformed, and degenerate limits lead
to chiral theories.


  In this paper, we present SAPHIR, a multilingual authoring tool producing a
Progressive Web App, usable on computers, tablets, and smartphones, online or
offline. We presented our design process, the architecture of the system, the
model on which it is based, and its main parts: SAPHIR it-self is the main
software proposing activities to children to learn and play; MINE is the
authoring tool used by pedagogical designers and resources translators to
create and translate resources without requiring any programming skills; TAILLE
is dedicated to teachers to whom he provides educational explanations to use
SAPHIR with their learners. The different parts were used with both pedagogical
designers and students.


  We present results of time-domain Brillouin scattering (TDBS) to determine
the local temperature of liquids in contact to an optical transducer. TDBS is
based on an ultrafast pump-probe technique to determine the light scattering
frequency shift caused by the propagation of coherent acoustic waves in a
sample. Since the temperature influences the Brillouin scattering frequency
shift, the TDBS signal probes the local temperature of the liquid. Results for
the extracted Brillouin scattering frequencies recorded at different liquid
temperatures and at different laser powers - i.e. different steady state
background temperatures- are shown to demonstrate the usefulness of TDBS as a
temperature probe. This TDBS experimental scheme is a first step towards the
investigation of ultrathin liquids measured by GHz ultrasonic probing.


  Distant supervision leverages knowledge bases to automatically label
instances, thus allowing us to train relation extractor without human
annotations. However, the generated training data typically contain massive
noise, and may result in poor performances with the vanilla supervised
learning. In this paper, we propose to conduct multi-instance learning with a
novel Cross-relation Cross-bag Selective Attention (C$^2$SA), which leads to
noise-robust training for distant supervised relation extractor. Specifically,
we employ the sentence-level selective attention to reduce the effect of noisy
or mismatched sentences, while the correlation among relations were captured to
improve the quality of attention weights. Moreover, instead of treating all
entity-pairs equally, we try to pay more attention to entity-pairs with a
higher quality. Similarly, we adopt the selective attention mechanism to
achieve this goal. Experiments with two types of relation extractor demonstrate
the superiority of the proposed approach over the state-of-the-art, while
further ablation studies verify our intuitions and demonstrate the
effectiveness of our proposed two techniques.


  Hard X-ray emissions from a Herbig Be star MWC297 were discovered in three
separate observations spanning 5 days in April 1994 with the Advanced Satellite
for Cosmology and Astrophysics (ASCA). An X-ray flare was found at the
beginning of the second observation with a maximum luminosity of 4.9E32 ergs/s,
which is five times larger than that of the quiescent phase (the first
observation). It then declined with an e-folding time of ~5.6E4 sec to the
pre-flare level in the third observation. The X-ray spectra are explained by
absorbed thin-thermal plasma models. The temperature in the quiescent phase of
about 2.7 keV is significantly higher than that of main-sequence OB stars and
similar to low mass young stellar objects (YSOs) and other Herbig Ae/Be stars
observed with ASCA. The temperature increased in the flare phase to about 6.7
keV at the flux maximum, then decreased to 3.2 keV in the decay phase.
  These facts strongly suggest that X-rays from Herbig Ae/Be stars, at least
for MWC297, are attributable to magnetic activity similar to low mass YSOs.
Since no theory predicts surface convection zone in massive stars like MWC297,
our results may require a mechanism other than the conventional stellar dynamo
theory. Possible magnetic activity could be either the stellar interior shear
or the inherited magnetic field from the parent molecular cloud.


  Background: Independent Component Analysis (ICA) is a widespread tool for
exploration and denoising of electroencephalography (EEG) or
magnetoencephalography (MEG) signals. In its most common formulation, ICA
assumes that the signal matrix is a noiseless linear mixture of independent
sources that are assumed non-Gaussian. A limitation is that it enforces to
estimate as many sources as sensors or to rely on a detrimental PCA step.
  Methods: We present the Spectral Matching ICA (SMICA) model. Signals are
modelled as a linear mixing of independent sources corrupted by additive noise,
where sources and the noise are stationary Gaussian time series. Thanks to the
Gaussian assumption, the negative log-likelihood has a simple expression as a
sum of divergences between the empirical spectral covariance matrices of the
signals and those predicted by the model. The model parameters can then be
estimated by the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm.
  Results: Experiments on phantom MEG datasets show that SMICA can recover
dipole locations more precisely than usual ICA algorithms or Maxwell filtering
when the dipole amplitude is low. Experiments on EEG datasets show that SMICA
identifies a source subspace which contains sources that have less pairwise
mutual information, and are better explained by the projection of a single
dipole on the scalp.
  Comparison with existing methods: Noiseless ICA models lead to degenerate
likelihood when there are fewer sources than sensors, while SMICA succeeds
without resorting to prior dimension reduction.
  Conclusions: SMICA is a promising alternative to other noiseless ICA models
based on non-Gaussian assumptions.


  It has recently been suggested that the parity doublet structure seen in the
spectrum of highly excited baryons may be due to effective chiral symmetry
restoration for these states. We review the recent developments in this field.
We demonstrate with a simple quantum-mechanical example that it is a very
natural property of quantum systems that a symmetry breaking effect which is
important for the low-lying spectrum of the system, can become unimportant for
the highly-lying states; the highly lying states reveal a multiplet structure
of nearly degenerate states. Using the well established concepts of
quark-hadron duality, asymptotic freedom in QCD and validity of the operator
product expansion in QCD we show that the spectral densities obtained with the
local currents that are connected to each other via chiral transformations,
very high in the spectrum must coincide. Hence effects of spontaneous breaking
of chiral symmetry in QCD vacuum that are crucially important for the low-lying
spectra, become irrelevant for the highly-lying states. Then to the extent that
identifiable hadronic resonances still exist in the continuum spectrum at high
excitations this implies that the highly excited hadrons must fall into
multiplets associated with the representations of the chiral group. We
demonstrate that this is indeed the case for meson spectra in the large $N_c$
limit. All possible parity-chiral multiplets are classified for baryons and it
is demonstrated that the existing data on highly excited $N$ and $\Delta$
states at masses of 2 GeV and higher is consistent with approximate chiral
symmetry restoration. However new experimental studies are needed to achieve
any definitive conclusions.


  We identify the semigroups consisting of bounded composition operators on the
Hardy spaces $H^p(\U)$ of the upper half-plane. We show that any such semigroup
is strongly continuous on $H^p(\U)$ but not uniformly continuous and we
identify the infinitesimal generator.


  The Cohen-Macaulay property of a graph arising from a poset has been studied
by various authors. In this article, we study the Cohen-Macaulay property of a
graph arising from a family of reflexive and antisymmetric relations on a set.
We use this result to find classes of multipartite graphs which are
Cohen-Macaulay.


  We study the energy spectrum of symmetric double quantum dots in narrow-gap
carbon nanotubes with one and two electrostatically confined electrons in the
presence of spin-orbit and Coulomb interactions. Compared to GaAs quantum dots,
the spectrum exhibits a much richer structure because of the spin-orbit
interaction that couples the electron's isospin to its real spin through two
independent coupling constants. In a single dot, both constants combine to
split the spectrum into two Kramers doublets, while the antisymmetric constant
solely controls the difference in the tunneling rates of the Kramers doublets
between the dots. For the two-electron regime, the detailed structure of the
spin-orbit split energy spectrum is investigated as a function of detuning
between the quantum dots in a 22-dimensional Hilbert space within the framework
of a single-longitudinal-mode model. We find a competing effect of the
tunneling and Coulomb interaction. The former favors a left-right symmetric
two-particle ground state, while in the regime where the Coulomb interaction
dominates over tunneling, a left-right antisymmetric ground state is found. As
a result, ground states on both sides of the $(11)$-$(02)$ degeneracy point may
possess opposite left-right symmetry, and the electron dynamics when tuning the
system from one side of the $(11)$-$(02)$ degeneracy point to the other is
controlled by three selection rules (in spin, isospin, and left-right
symmetry). We discuss implications for the spin-dephasing and Pauli blockade
experiments.


  We discuss the polar in symbol space to hypoelliptic and partially
hypoelliptic operators, assuming a transmission property related to a
rectifiable boundary and using a representation based on two scalar products.


  There are roughly three stages in real industrial recommendation systems,
candidates generation (retrieval), ranking and reranking. Individual-level
diversity and system-level diversity are both important for industrial
recommender systems. The former focus on each single user's experience, while
the latter focus on the difference among users. Graph-based retrieval
strategies are inevitably hijacked by heavy users and popular items, leading to
the convergence of candidates for users and the lack of system-level diversity.
Meanwhile, in the reranking phase, Determinantal Point Process (DPP) is
deployed to increase individual-level diverisity. Heavily relying on the
semantic information of items, DPP suffers from clickbait and inaccurate
attributes. Besides, most studies only focus on one of the two levels of
diversity, and ignore the mutual influence among different stages in real
recommender systems. We argue that individual-level diversity and system-level
diversity should be viewed as an integrated problem, and we provide an
efficient and deployable solution for web-scale recommenders. Generally, we
propose to employ the retrieval graph information in diversity-based reranking,
by which to weaken the hidden similarity of items exposed to users, and
consequently gain more graph explorations to improve the system-level
diveristy. Besides, we argue that users' propensity for diversity changes over
time in content feed recommendation. Therefore, with the explored graph, we
also propose to capture the user's real-time personalized propensity to the
diversity. We implement and deploy the combined system in WeChat App's Top
Stories used by hundreds of millions of users. Offline simulations and online
A/B tests show our solution can effectively improve both user engagement and
system revenue.


  We study the fundamental algorithmic rigidity problems for generic frameworks
periodic with respect to a fixed lattice or a finite-order rotation in the
plane. For fixed-lattice frameworks we give an $O(n^2)$ algorithm for deciding
generic rigidity and an O(n^3) algorithm for computing rigid components. If the
order of rotation is part of the input, we give an O(n^4) algorithm for
deciding rigidity; in the case where the rotation's order is 3, a more
specialized algorithm solves all the fundamental algorithmic rigidity problems
in O(n^2) time.


  The complex investigation of dc transport and magnetic properties of the
epitaxial manganite/iridate heterostructure was carried out by mean of X-ray
(XRD), dc resistance measurements, ferromagnetic resonance (FMR) and polarized
neutron reflectivity (PNR). Epitaxial growth of the heterostructure proceeded
according to the cube-to-cube mechanism with the small lattice turn. The dc
measurement indicates the presence of a conduction channel at the
iridate/manganite interface due to the charge leakage from iridate that makes
it hole doped, while the manganite side becomes electron doped. This is
confirmed by the first principles calculations based on density functional
theory [Sayantika Bhowal, and Sashi Satpathy AIP Conference Proceedings 2005,
020007 (2018)] that show the charge transfer at the interface from the
half-filled spin-orbit entangled Jeff = 1/2 state of the iridate to the empty e
states of manganite. The neutron scattering data show the turn of magnetization
vector of the heterostructure (mainly manganite) on 26 degree closer to the
external field with reducing temperature down to 10K. Additional ferromagnetic
state appearing at T<100K indicate on emergence of ferromagnetism in the thin
(10 nm) paramagnetic SIO film close to the interface. We have measured the dc
voltage aroused on the SIO film caused by spin pumping and the anisotropic
magnetoresistance in the heterostructure.


  Economic engineering is a new field wherein economic systems are modelled in
the same manner as traditional mechanical and electrical engineering systems.
In this paper, we use Newton's theory of motion as the basis for the theory of
demand; thereby establishing a theoretical foundation for economic engineering.
We follow Newton's original development, as set forth in the Principia, to
determine economic analogs to his three laws of motion. The pivotal result is
an operational definition for an economic force, i.e. a want or a desire, in
terms of a price adjustment. With this, we model the price effects of scarcity
and trade friction in analogy with the models for the spring and damping force.
In turn, we define economic benefits and surplus as analogous to the
definitions of mechanical work and energy. These are then used to interpret the
various types of economic equilibrium considered by economists from a
mechanical perspective. The effectiveness of the analogy is illustrated by
applying it to modelling the price and inventory dynamics of various economic
agents -- including consumers, dealers, holders, spot and futures traders --
using linear-time invariant systems theory.


  Axion dark matter (DM) may efficiently convert to photons in the
magnetospheres of neutron stars (NSs), producing nearly monochromatic radio
emission. This process is resonantly triggered when the plasma frequency
induced by the underlying charge distribution approximately matches the axion
mass. We search for evidence of this process using archival Green Bank
Telescope data collected in a survey of the Galactic Center in the C-Band by
the Breakthrough Listen project. While Breakthrough Listen aims to find
signatures of extraterrestrial life in the radio band, we show that their
high-frequency resolution spectral data of the Galactic Center region is ideal
for searching for axion-photon transitions generated by the population of NSs
in the inner pc of the Galaxy. We use data-driven models to capture the
distributions and properties of NSs in the inner Galaxy and compute the
expected radio flux from each NS using state-of-the-art ray tracing
simulations. We find no evidence for axion DM and set leading constraints on
the axion-photon coupling, excluding values down to the level $g_{a \gamma
\gamma} \sim 10^{-11}$ GeV$^{-1}$ for DM axions for masses between 15 and 35
$\mu$eV.


  We present new absorption-line analysis and new galaxy survey data obtained
for the field around PKS0405-123 at z=0.57. Combining previously known OVI
absorbers with new identifications in the higher S/N UV spectra obtained with
COS, we have established a sample of 7 OVI absorbers and 12 individual
components at z=0.0918-0.495 along the sightline toward PKS0405-123. We
complement the available UV absorption spectra with galaxy survey data that
reach 100% completeness at projected distances rho<200 kpc of the quasar
sightline for galaxies as faint as 0.1L* (0.2L*) out to redshifts of z=0.35
(z=0.5). The high level of completeness achieved at faint magnitudes by our
survey reveals that OVI absorbers are closely associated with gas-rich
environments containing at least one low-mass, emission-line galaxy. An
intriguing exception is a strong OVI system at z=0.183 that does not have a
galaxy found at rho<4 Mpc, and our survey rules out the presence of any
galaxies of L>0.04L* at rho<250 kpc and any galaxies of L>0.3L* at rho<1 Mpc.
We further examine the galactic environments of OVI absorbers and those
"Lya-only" absorbers with HI column density log N(HI)>13.6 and no detectable
OVI absorption features. The Lya-only absorbers serve as a control sample in
seeking the discriminating galactic features that result in the observed OVI
absorbing gas at large galactic radii. We find a clear distinction in the
radial profiles of mean galaxy surface brightness around different absorbers.
Specifically, OVI absorbers are found to reside in regions of higher mean
surface brightness at rho<500 kpc (+5 mag Mpc^-2 relative to the background),
while only a mild increase in galaxy surface brightness is seen at small rho
around Lya-only absorbers (+2 mag Mpc^-2). The additional insights gained from
our deep galaxy survey demonstrates the need to probe to low luminosities to
better understand absorbing systems.


  The quantum measurement problem considered for the model of measuring system
(MS) consist of measured state S (particle), detector D and information
processing device (observer) $O$ interacting with S,D.
  For 'external' observer $O'$ MS evolution obeys to Schrodinger equation (SE)
and $O$ (self)description of MS reconstructed from it in Breuer ansatz. MS
irreversible evolution (state collapse) for $O$ can be obtained if the true
quantum states manifold has the dual structure $L_T=\cal {H} \bigotimes L_V$
where $\cal H$ is Hilbert space and $\cal L_V$ is the set with elements
$V^O=|O_j> < O_j|$ describing random 'pointer' outcomes $O_j$ observed by $O$
in the individual events. Possible experimental tests of this dual states
structure described. The results interpretation in Quantum Information
framework and Relational Quantum Mechanics discussed.


  Multilingual task-oriented dialogue (ToD) facilitates access to services and
information for many (communities of) speakers. Nevertheless, the potential of
this technology is not fully realised, as current datasets for multilingual ToD
- both for modular and end-to-end modelling - suffer from severe limitations.
1) When created from scratch, they are usually small in scale and fail to cover
many possible dialogue flows. 2) Translation-based ToD datasets might lack
naturalness and cultural specificity in the target language. In this work, to
tackle these limitations we propose a novel outline-based annotation process
for multilingual ToD datasets, where domain-specific abstract schemata of
dialogue are mapped into natural language outlines. These in turn guide the
target language annotators in writing a dialogue by providing instructions
about each turn's intents and slots. Through this process we annotate a new
large-scale dataset for training and evaluation of multilingual and
cross-lingual ToD systems. Our Cross-lingual Outline-based Dialogue dataset
(termed COD) enables natural language understanding, dialogue state tracking,
and end-to-end dialogue modelling and evaluation in 4 diverse languages:
Arabic, Indonesian, Russian, and Kiswahili. Qualitative and quantitative
analyses of COD versus an equivalent translation-based dataset demonstrate
improvements in data quality, unlocked by the outline-based approach. Finally,
we benchmark a series of state-of-the-art systems for cross-lingual ToD,
setting reference scores for future work and demonstrating that COD prevents
over-inflated performance, typically met with prior translation-based ToD
datasets.


  Two multicomponent generalizations of the AKNS-type spectral problems
associated with $sl(2,\mathbb{R})$ and $so(3,\mathbb{R})$ are introduced and
the corresponding two hierarchies of generalized multicomponent AKNS-type
soliton equations are presented by the standard procedure, respectively. By
virtue of the trace identity, bi-Hamiltonian structures which lead to a common
recursion operator are established for each of the two resulting soliton
hierarchies. And thus the Liouville integrability is shown for all systems in
each of the two new generalized soliton hierarchies, seperately.


  We show that the Kac-Paljutkin Hopf algebra appears as a quotient of
$C(SU_{-1}(2))$, which means that the corresponding quantum group $G_{KP}$ can
be regarded as a quantum subgroup of $SU_{-1}(2)$. We combine the fact that
corepresentation category of the Kac-Paljutkin Hopf algebra is a
Tambara-Yamagami tensor category associated with the Krein 4-group and the
method of graded twisting of Hopf algebras, to construct the Hopf
*-homomorphism.


  Efficiently harvesting thermodynamic resources requires a precise
understanding of their structure. This becomes explicit through the lens of
information engines -- thermodynamic engines that use information as fuel.
Maximizing the work harvested using available information is a form of
physically-instantiated machine learning that drives information engines to
develop complex predictive memory to store an environment's temporal
correlations. We show that an information engine's complex predictive memory
poses both energetic benefits and risks. While increasing memory facilitates
detection of hidden patterns in an environment, it also opens the possibility
of thermodynamic overfitting, where the engine dissipates additional energy in
testing. To address overfitting, we introduce thermodynamic regularizers that
incur a cost to engine complexity in training due to the physical constraints
on the information engine. We demonstrate that regularized thermodynamic
machine learning generalizes effectively. In particular, the physical
constraints from which regularizers are derived improve the performance of
learned predictive models. This suggests that the laws of physics jointly
create the conditions for emergent complexity and predictive intelligence.


  We analytically investigate the effect of a non-centrosymmetric geometry in
the optical second harmonic (SH) generation from a particle made of a
centrosymmetric material, in the interior of which quadratic optical processes
are suppressed. We consider a cylindrical particle with a cross-section that is
slightly deformed away from a circle and with a radius much smaller than the
wavelength. We calculate the induced linear and nonlinear fields perturbatively
in terms of the deformation parameter and obtain the nonlinear dipolar and
quadrupolar hyperpolarizabilities, whose spectra we evaluate for metallic and
dielectric materials. We show that for very small deformations the dipolar
contribution to the response competes with the quadrupolar term, and may even
be dominant. We explore the spectra of the hyperpolarizability and identify the
contributions to its structure for metallic and dielectric particles. We also
discuss the nature of SH radiation at various frequencies and find that it may
be dominated by the dipolar or the quadrupolar term, or that both may compete
yielding non-symmetric radiation patterns. Our calculation may be employed to
assess, calibrate and test numerical SH calculations.


  There has been a growing interest in ultra-high purity, low-background
NaI(Tl) crystals for dark matter direct searches. Past research indicates that
zone refining is an efficient and scalable way to purify NaI. In particular, K
and Rb -- two elements with radioisotopes that can cause scintillation
backgrounds -- can be efficiently removed by zone refining. However, zone
refining has never been demonstrated for ultra-high purity NaI which became
commercially available recently. In this article, we show that many common
metallic impurities can be efficiently removed via zone refining. A numerical
model for predicting the final impurity distribution was developed and used to
fit the ICP-MS measurement data to determine the segregation coefficient and
the initial concentration. Under this scheme, the segregation coefficient for K
is estimated to be 0.57, indicating that zone refining is still effective in
removing K from ultra-high purity NaI. As zone refining tends to move the
impurities to one end, elements with concentrations too low to be measured
directly in the unprocessed powder can potentially be detected in the end due
to the enrichment. We also present an analysis technique to estimate the
initial concentrations of impurities with partial data, which effectively
enhances the sensitivity of the spectrometer. Using this technique, the initial
concentration of $^{85}$Rb is estimated to be between 5 ppt and 14 ppt at 90%
CL, at least 14 times lower than the detection limit of ICP-MS and 7 times
lower than the current most stringent limit set by the DAMA collaboration by
direct counting of radioactive $^{87}$Rb. These results imply that zone
refining is a key technique in developing next-generation, NaI-based crystal
scintillators for dark matter direct detection.


  In this talk I discuss intersecting brane configurations coming from explicit
metrics with G_2 holonomy. An example of a 7-manifold which representing a R^3
bundle over a self-dual Einstein space is described and the potential appearing
after compactification over the 6-d twistor space is derived.


  The paper proposes to introduce incomplete Srivastava's triple hypergeometric
matrix functions through application of the incomplete Pochhammer matrix
symbols. We also derive certain properties such as matrix differential
equation, integral formula, reduction formula, recursion formula, recurrence
relation and differentiation formula of the incomplete Srivastava's triple
hypergeometric matrix functions.


  The comparison of magnetic moment of neutron and proton enables to outline
qualitatively the structure of nucleon by using a model similar to the one
suggested by Ida and Kobayashi that "baryons consist of a qq pair (or a
diquark) and another quark moving around it with orbital angular momentum L".


  We use the density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) for transfer matrices
to numerically calculate impurity corrections to thermodynamic properties. The
method is applied to two impurity models in the spin-1/2 chain, namely a weak
link in the chain and an external impurity spin. The numerical analysis
confirms the field theory calculations and gives new results for the crossover
behavior.


  Factor analysis is often used to assess whether a single univariate latent
variable is sufficient to explain most of the covariance among a set of
indicators for some underlying construct. When evidence suggests that a single
factor is adequate, research often proceeds by using a univariate summary of
the indicators in subsequent research. Implicit in such practices is the
assumption that it is the underlying latent, rather than the indicators, that
is causally efficacious. The assumption that the indicators do not have effects
on anything subsequent, and that they are themselves only affected by
antecedents through the underlying latent is a strong assumption, effectively
imposing a structural interpretation on the latent factor model. In this paper,
we show that this structural assumption has empirically testable implications,
even though the latent variable itself is unobserved. We develop a statistical
test to potentially reject the structural interpretation of a latent factor
model. We apply this test to data concerning associations between the
Satisfaction-with-Life-Scale and subsequent all-cause mortality, which provides
strong evidence against a structural interpretation for a univariate latent
underlying the scale. Discussion is given to the implications of this result
for the development, evaluation, and use of measures and for the use of factor
analysis itself.


  Hospital readmission rate is high for heart failure patients. Early detection
of deterioration will help doctors prevent readmissions, thus reducing health
care cost and providing patients with just-in-time intervention. Wearable
devices (e.g., wristbands and smart watches) provide a convenient technology
for continuous outpatient monitoring. In the paper, we explore the feasibility
of monitoring outpatients using Fitbit Charge HR wristbands and the potential
of machine learning models to predicting clinical deterioration (readmissions
and death) among outpatients discharged from the hospital. We developed and
piloted a data collection system in a clinical study which involved 25 heart
failure patients recently discharged from a hospital. The results from the
clinical study demonstrated the feasibility of continuously monitoring
outpatients using wristbands. We observed high levels of patient compliance in
wearing the wristbands regularly and satisfactory yield, latency and
reliability of data collection from the wristbands to a cloud-based database.
Finally, we explored a set of machine learning models to predict deterioration
based on the Fitbit data. Through 5-fold cross validation, K nearest neighbor
achieved the highest accuracy of 0.8800 for identifying patients at risk of
deterioration using the health data from the beginning of the monitoring.
Machine learning models based on multimodal data (step, sleep and heart rate)
significantly outperformed the traditional clinical approach based on LACE
index. Moreover, our proposed weighted samples one class SVM model can reach
high accuracy (0.9635) for predicting the deterioration happening in the future
using data collected by a sliding window, which indicates the potential for
allowing timely intervention.


  This paper addresses the fundamental characteristics of information exchange
via multihop network coding over two-way relaying in a wireless ad hoc network.
The end-to-end rate regions achieved by time-division multihop (TDMH),
MAC-layer network coding (MLNC) and PHY-layer network coding (PLNC) are first
characterized. It is shown that MLNC does not always achieve better rates than
TDMH, time sharing between TDMH and MLNC is able to achieve a larger rate
region, and PLNC dominates the rate regions achieved by TDMH and MLNC. An
opportunistic scheduling algorithm for MLNC and PLNC is then proposed to
stabilize the two-way relaying system for Poisson arrivals whenever the rate
pair is within the Shannon rate regions of MLNC and PLNC. To understand the
two-way transmission limits of multihop network coding, the sum-rate
optimization with or without certain traffic pattern and the end-to-end
diversity-multiplexing tradeoffs (DMTs) of two-way transmission over multiple
relay nodes are also analyzed.


  The current acceleration of the Universe is one of the most puzzling issues
in theoretical physics nowadays. We are far from giving an answer on this
letter to its true nature. Yet, with the observations we have at hand, we
analyse the different patterns that the gravitational potential can show in the
future. Surprisingly, gravity not only can get weaker in the near future, it
can even become repulsive; or equivalently, the gravitational potential may
become negative. We show this remark by using one of the simplest
phenomenological model we can imagine for dark energy. We have as well reviewed
the statefinder approach of these models. For completeness, we have also showed
the behaviour of the density contrast of dark matter and dark energy for these
simple (yet illustrative models). Our results are displayed at present and how
they evolve in the future.


  We describe a family of quadrilateral meshes based on diamonds, rhombi with
60 and 120 degree angles, and kites with 60, 90, and 120 degree angles, that
can be adapted to a local size function by local subdivision operations. Our
meshes use a number of elements that is within a constant factor of the minimum
possible for any mesh of bounded aspect ratio elements, graded by the same
local size function, and is invariant under Laplacian smoothing. The vertices
of our meshes form the centers of the circles in a pair of dual circle
packings. The same vertex placement algorithm but a different mesh topology
gives a pair of dual well-centered meshes adapted to the given size function.


  We study the dynamics of a classical scalar field that rolls down a linear
potential as it interacts bi-quadratically with a quantum field. We explicitly
solve the dynamical problem by using the classical-quantum correspondence
(CQC). Rolling solutions on the effective potential are shown to compare very
poorly with the full solution. Spatially homogeneous initial conditions
maintain their homogeneity and small inhomogeneities in the initial conditions
do not grow.


  We study the structure and stability of nonlinear impurity modes in the
discrete nonlinear Schr{\"o}dinger equation with a single on-site nonlinear
impurity emphasizing the effects of interplay between discreteness,
nonlinearity and disorder. We show how the interaction of a nonlinear localized
mode (a discrete soliton or discrete breather) with a repulsive impurity
generates a family of stationary states near the impurity site, as well as
examine both theoretical and numerical criteria for the transition between
different localized states via a cascade of bifurcations.


  For the discretization of the convective term in the Navier-Stokes equations
(NSEs), the commonly used convective formulation (CONV) does not preserve the
energy if the divergence constraint is only weakly enforced. In this paper, we
apply the skew-symmetrization technique in [B. Cockburn, G. Kanschat and D.
Sch\"{o}tzau, Math. Comp., 74 (2005), pp. 1067-1095] to conforming finite
element methods, which restores energy conservation for CONV. The crucial idea
is to replace the discrete advective velocity with its a
$H(\operatorname{div})$-conforming divergence-free approximation in CONV. We
prove that the modified convective formulation also conserves linear momentum,
helicity, 2D enstrophy and total vorticity under some appropriate senses. Its a
Picard-type linearization form also conserves them. Under the assumption
$\boldsymbol{u}\in L^{2}(0,T;\boldsymbol{W}^{1,\infty}(\Omega)),$ it can be
shown that the Gronwall constant does not explicitly depend on the Reynolds
number in the error estimates. The long time numerical simulations show that
the linearized and modified convective formulation has a similar performance
with the EMAC formulation and outperforms the usual skew-symmetric formulation
(SKEW).


  Advancements in sensor technology, artificial intelligence (AI), and
augmented reality (AR) have unlocked opportunities across various domains. AR
and large language models like GPT have witnessed substantial progress and are
increasingly being employed in diverse fields. One such promising application
is in operations and maintenance (O&M). O&M tasks often involve complex
procedures and sequences that can be challenging to memorize and execute
correctly, particularly for novices or under high-stress situations. By
marrying the advantages of superimposing virtual objects onto the physical
world, and generating human-like text using GPT, we can revolutionize O&M
operations. This study introduces a system that combines AR, Optical Character
Recognition (OCR), and the GPT language model to optimize user performance
while offering trustworthy interactions and alleviating workload in O&M tasks.
This system provides an interactive virtual environment controlled by the Unity
game engine, facilitating a seamless interaction between virtual and physical
realities. A case study (N=15) is conducted to illustrate the findings and
answer the research questions. The results indicate that users can complete
similarly challenging tasks in less time using our proposed AR and AI system.
Moreover, the collected data also suggests a reduction in cognitive load and an
increase in trust when executing the same operations using the AR and AI
system.


  For parameters that are applicable to the conditions at young supernova
remnants, we present results of 2D3V particle-in-cell simulations of a
non-relativistic plasma shock with a large-scale perpendicular magnetic field
inclined at 45-deg angle to the simulation plane to approximate 3D physics. We
developed an improved clean setup that uses the collision of two plasma slabs
with different density and velocity, leading to the development of two
distinctive shocks and a contact discontinuity. The shock formation is mediated
by Weibel-type filamentation instabilities that generate magnetic turbulence.
Cyclic reformation is observed in both shocks with similar period, for which we
note global variations on account of shock rippling and local variations
arising from turbulent current filaments. The shock rippling occurs on spatial
and temporal scales given by gyro-motions of shock-reflected ions. The drift
motion of electrons and ions is not a gradient drift, but commensurates with E
x B drift. We observe a stable suprathermal tail in the ion spectra, but no
electron acceleration because the amplitude of Buneman modes in the shock foot
is insufficient for trapping relativistic electrons. We see no evidence of
turbulent reconnection. A comparison with other 2D simulation results suggests
that the plasma beta and the ion-to-electron mass ratio are not decisive for
efficient electron acceleration, but pre-acceleration efficacy might be reduced
with respect to the 2D results once three-dimensional effects are fully
accounted for. Other microphysical factors may also be at play to limit the
amplitude of Buneman waves or prevent return of electrons to the foot region.


  This work presents an effective model for strongly interacting matter and the
QCD equation of state (EoS). The model includes both hadron and quark degrees
of freedom and takes into account the transition of chiral symmetry restoration
as well as the deconfinement phase transition. At low temperatures $T$ and
baryonic densities $\rho_B$ a hadron resonance gas is described using a
SU(3)-flavor sigma-omega model and a quark phase is introduced in analogy to
PNJL models for higher $T$ and $\rho_B$. In this way, the correct asymptotic
degrees of freedom are used in a wide range of $T$ and $\rho_B$. Here, results
of this model concerning the chiral and deconfinement phase transitions and
thermodynamic model properties are presented. Large hadron resonance
multiplicities in the transition region emphasize the importance of heavy-mass
resonance states in this region and their impact on the chiral transition
behavior. The resulting phase diagram of QCD matter at small chemical
potentials is in line with latest lattice QCD and thermal model results.


  We study analytically the dynamic response of membrane aerofoils subject to
arbitrary, small-amplitude chord motions and transverse gusts in a
two-dimensional inviscid incompressible flow. The theoretical model assumes
linear deformations of an extensible membrane under constant tension, which are
coupled aeroelastically to external aerodynamic loads using unsteady thin
aerofoil theory. The structural and aerodynamic membrane responses are
investigated for harmonic heave oscillations, an instantaneous change in angle
of attack, sinusoidal transverse gusts, and a sharp-edged gust. The unsteady
lift responses for these scenarios produce aeroelastic extensions to the
Theodorsen, Wagner, Sears, and K\"{u}ssner functions, respectively, for a
membrane aerofoil. These extensions incorporate for the first time membrane
fluid-structure interaction into the expressions for the unsteady lift response
of a flexible aerofoil. Our results suggest that membrane aerofoils with
appropriately tuned pretension could possess substantial aerodynamic benefits
over rigid aerofoils in unsteady flow conditions.