  The microscopic phasespace approach URQMD is used to investigate the stopping
power and particle production in heavy systems at SPS and RHIC energies. This
framework bridges with one model consistently the entire available range of
energies from below SIS to CERN, even for the heaviest system Pb+Pb. URQMD is a
hadronic transport model based on the propagation of hadrons on classical
trajectories in the framework of Lorentz-invariant dynamics. It includes
secondary interactions e.g. annihilation of produced mesons leading to the
formation of resonances and the excitation of strings. The collision term
contains 50 different baryon species (including nucleon, delta and hyperon
resonances with masses up to 2 GeV) and 25 different meson species (including
strange meson resonances), which are supplemented by their corresponding
antiparticle and all isospin-projected states. Within this approach we find no
gap in the baryon rapidity distribution even at RHIC. For CERN (SPS) energies
URQMD shows a pile up of baryons and a supression of multi-nucleon clusters
(e.g. He) at midrapidity.


  The interaction of compact objects with an infinitely extended mirror plane
due to quantum fluctuations of a scalar or electromagnetic field that scatters
off the objects is studied. The mirror plane is assumed to obey either
Dirichlet or Neumann boundary conditions or to be perfectly reflecting. Using
the method of images, we generalize a recently developed approach for compact
objects in unbounded space [1,2] to show that the Casimir interaction between
the objects and the mirror plane can be accurately obtained over a wide range
of separations in terms of charge and current fluctuations of the objects and
their images. Our general result for the interaction depends only on the
scattering matrices of the compact objects. It applies to scalar fields with
arbitrary boundary conditions and to the electromagnetic field coupled to
dielectric objects. For the experimentally important electromagnetic Casimir
interaction between a perfectly conducting sphere and a plane mirror we present
the first results that apply at all separations. We obtain both an asymptotic
large distance expansion and the two lowest order correction terms to the
proximity force approximation. The asymptotic Casimir-Polder potential for an
atom and a mirror is generalized to describe the interaction between a
dielectric sphere and a mirror, involving higher order multipole
polarizabilities that are important at sub-asymptotic distances.


  A search for hidden photon cold dark matter (HP CDM) using a new technique
with a dish antenna is reported. From the result of the measurement, we found
no evidence for the existence of HP CDM and set an upper limit on the photon-HP
mixing parameter $\chi$ of $\sim 6\times 10^{-12}$ for the hidden photon mass
$m_\gamma = 3.1 \pm 1.2$ eV.


  SUSY_FLAVOUR 2.0 is a FORTRAN code calculating over 30 low-energy flavour-
and CP-related observables in the R-parity conserving MSSM. The code admits for
the most general flavour structure of the SUSY breaking terms and complex
flavour-diagonal couplings. It includes the numerically important resummation
of chirally enhanced effects and it is fast enough for scanning over a large
SUSY-parameter space. The program can be obtained from
http://www.fuw.edu.pl/susy_flavor.


  Dark matter in the sub-GeV mass range is a theoretically motivated but
largely unexplored paradigm. Such light masses are out of reach for
conventional nuclear recoil direct detection experiments, but may be detected
through the small ionization signals caused by dark matter-electron scattering.
Semiconductors are well-studied and are particularly promising target materials
because their ${\cal O}(1~\rm{eV})$ band gaps allow for ionization signals from
dark matter as light as a few hundred keV. Current direct detection
technologies are being adapted for dark matter-electron scattering. In this
paper, we provide the theoretical calculations for dark matter-electron
scattering rate in semiconductors, overcoming several complications that stem
from the many-body nature of the problem. We use density functional theory to
numerically calculate the rates for dark matter-electron scattering in silicon
and germanium, and estimate the sensitivity for upcoming experiments such as
DAMIC and SuperCDMS. We find that the reach for these upcoming experiments has
the potential to be orders of magnitude beyond current direct detection
constraints and that sub-GeV dark matter has a sizable modulation signal. We
also give the first direct detection limits on sub-GeV dark matter from its
scattering off electrons in a semiconductor target (silicon) based on published
results from DAMIC. We make available publicly our code, QEdark, with which we
calculate our results. Our results can be used by experimental collaborations
to calculate their own sensitivities based on their specific setup. The
searches we propose will probe vast new regions of unexplored dark matter model
and parameter space.


  In this note, we derive the characteristic function expansion for logarithm
of the underlying asset price in corrected Heston model as proposed by Fouque
and Lorig.


  A new technique is used to derive the extinction and age of populations in
the interacting galaxies NGC5194 & NGC5195 from high S/N multicolor photometric
data. A new evolutionary scenario of the interaction is proposed.


  Light-harvesting complexes in natural photosynthetic systems, such as those
in purple bacteria, consist of photo-reactive chromophores embedded in densely
packed "antenna" systems organized in well-defined nanostructures. In the case
of purple bacteria, the chromophore antennas are composed of natural
J-aggregates such as bacteriochlorophylls and carotenoids. Inspired by the
molecular composition of such biological systems, we create a library of
organic materials composed of densely packed J-aggregates in a polymeric
matrix, in which the matrix mimics a protein scaffold. This library of organic
materials shows polaritonic properties which can be tuned from the visible to
the infrared by choice of the model molecule. Inspired by the molecular
architecture of the light-harvesting complexes of \textit{Rhodospirillum
molischianum} bacteria, we study the light-matter interactions of
J-aggregate-based nanorings with similar dimensions to the analogous natural
nanoscale architectures. Electromagnetic simulations show that these nanorings
of J-aggregates can act as resonators, with subwavelength confinement of light
while concentrating the electric field in specific regions. These results open
the door to bio-inspired building blocks for all-organic metamaterials while
offering a new perspective on light-matter interactions at the nanoscale in
densely packed organic matter in biological organisms including photosynthetic
organelles.


  In this technical report, we extensively investigate the accuracy of outputs
from well-known generative artificial intelligence (AI) applications in
response to prompts describing common fluid motion phenomena familiar to the
fluid mechanics community. We examine a range of applications, including
Midjourney, Dall-E, Runway ML, Microsoft Designer, Gemini, Meta AI, and
Leonardo AI, introduced by prominent companies such as Google, OpenAI, Meta,
and Microsoft. Our text prompts for generating images or videos include
examples such as "Von Karman vortex street", "flow past an airfoil",
"Kelvin-Helmholtz instability", "shock waves on a sharp-nosed supersonic body",
etc. We compare the images generated by these applications with real images
from laboratory experiments and numerical software. Our findings indicate that
these generative AI models are not adequately trained in fluid dynamics
imagery, leading to potentially misleading outputs. Beyond text-to-image/video
generation, we further explore the transition from image/video to text
generation using these AI tools, aiming to investigate the accuracy of their
descriptions of fluid motion phenomena. This report serves as a cautionary note
for educators in academic institutions, highlighting the potential for these
tools to mislead students. It also aims to inform researchers at these renowned
companies, encouraging them to address this issue. We conjecture that a primary
reason for this shortcoming is the limited access to copyright-protected fluid
motion images from scientific journals.


  Understanding the dynamics of an environment, such as the movement of humans
and vehicles, is crucial for agents to achieve long-term autonomy in urban
environments. This requires the development of methods to capture the
multi-modal and probabilistic nature of motion patterns. We present Kernel
Trajectory Maps (KTM) to capture the trajectories of movement in an
environment. KTMs leverage the expressiveness of kernels from non-parametric
modelling by projecting input trajectories onto a set of representative
trajectories, to condition on a sequence of observed waypoint coordinates, and
predict a multi-modal distribution over possible future trajectories. The
output is a mixture of continuous stochastic processes, where each realisation
is a continuous functional trajectory, which can be queried at arbitrarily fine
time steps.


  We show that the simplest local search heuristics for two natural Euclidean
clustering problems are PLS-complete. First, we show that the Hartigan--Wong
method for $k$-Means clustering is PLS-complete, even when $k = 2$. Second, we
show the same result for the Flip heuristic for Max Cut, even when the edge
weights are given by the (squared) Euclidean distances between the points in
some set $\mathcal{X} \subseteq \mathbb{R}^d$; a problem which is equivalent to
Min Sum 2-Clustering.


  We suggest different simple schemes to efficiently load and evaporate a
''dimple'' crossed dipolar trap. The collisional processes between atoms which
are trapped in a reservoir load in a non adiabatic way the dimple. The
reservoir trap can be provided either by a dark SPOT Magneto Optical Trap, the
(aberrated) laser beam itself or by a quadrupolar or quadratic magnetic trap.
Optimal parameters for the dimple are derived from thermodynamical equations
and from loading time, including possible inelastic and Majorana losses. We
suggest to load at relatively high temperature a tight optical trap. Simple
evaporative cooling equations, taking into account gravity, the possible
occurrence of hydrodynamical regime, Feshbach resonance processes and three
body recombination events are given. To have an efficient evaporation the
elastic collisional rate (in s$^{-1}$) is found to be on the order of the
trapping frequency and lower than one hundred times the temperature in
micro-Kelvin. Bose Einstein condensates with more than $10^7$ atoms should be
obtained in much less than one second starting from an usual MOT setup.


  The extension of pascalian like matrices depending on a variable from any
field of zero characteristics are shown at work for the first time. Their
properties appear to be one source factory of identities and resulting foreseen
applications


  For a non-constant elliptic surface over $\mathbb{P}^1$ defined over
$\mathbb{Q}$, it is a result of Silverman that the Mordell--Weil rank of the
fibres is at least the rank of the group of sections, up to finitely many
fibres. If the elliptic surface is non-isotrivial one expects that this bound
is an equality for infinitely many fibres, although no example is known
unconditionally. Under the Bunyakovsky conjecture, such an example has been
constructed by Neumann and Setzer. In this note we show that the Legendre
elliptic surface has the desired property, conditional on the existence of
infinitely many Mersenne primes.


  In this work, we studied the Power Law and the Logarithmic Entropy Corrected
versions of the Ricci Dark Energy (RDE) model in a spatially non-flat universe
and in the framework of Ho\v{r}ava-Lifshitz cosmology. For the two cases
containing non-interacting and interacting RDE and Dark Matter (DM), we
obtained the exact differential equation that determines the evolutionary form
of the RDE energy density parameter. Moreover, we obtained the expressions of
the deceleration parameter $q$ and, using a parametrization of the equation of
state (EoS) parameter $\omega_D$ as $\omega_D\left(z\right)=\omega_0+\omega_1
z$, we derived the expressions of both $\omega_0$ and $\omega_1$. We
interestingly found that the expression of $\omega_0$ is the same for both
non-interacting and interacting case. The expression of $\omega_1$ for the
interacting case has strong dependence from the interacting parameter $b^2$.
The parameters derived in this work are done in small redshift approximation
and for low redshift expansion of the EoS parameter.


  We prove the necessary and the sufficient condition on the f(R) function
leading to the equivalence of general relativity and the f(R) theory in the
sense that for a spacetime with specific Ricci scalar, GR and the f(R) theory
will necessarily have the same solutions. We show how this condition and its
consequences allow to get such functions and give the possibility to fixe
conditions on the parameters of any class of f(R) functions so that GR and this
class of theories will have exactly the same solutions. The well-known model
R+{\alpha}\b{eta}^{1-p}R^{p} for dark energy is presented as an illustration,
as well as the FLRW metric where it's shown that there exists only one class of
f(R) theories which has exactly the same GR scale factor.


  We use the relativistic mean field (RMF) theory to systematically study the
change of deformation of even-even nuclei in the proton-rich Xe region. We
investigate the appearance of triaxial deformation in 25 nuclei in the region
covering Z=50-58 and N=64-72 by performing constrained, triaxially symmetric
RMF calculations of their energy surfaces. We include pairing correlations
using the BCS formalism. We find that the Sn isotopes are spherical and the Te
isotopes are very gamma unstable with shallow minima around gamma = 60 degrees.
Adding more protons, the Xe, Ba and Ce isotopes have prolate deformations with
their sizes increasing with proton number. The neutron number dependence is
found to be small. We compare the calculated results with the available
experimented data on the binding energy and the radii.


  We study the thermodynamics and phase structure of asymptotically flat
non-dilatonic as well as dilatonic black branes in a cavity in arbitrary
dimensions ($D$). We consider the canonical ensemble and so the charge inside
the cavity and the temperature at the wall are fixed. We analyze the stability
of the black brane equilibrium states and derive the phase structures. For the
zero charge case we find an analog of Hawking-Page phase transition for these
black branes in arbitrary dimensions. When the charge is non-zero, we find that
below a critical value of the charge, the phase diagram has a line of
first-order phase transition in a certain range of temperatures which ends up
at a second order phase transition point (critical point) as the charge attains
the critical value. We calculate the critical exponents at that critical point.
Although our discussion is mainly concerned with the non-dilatonic branes, we
show how it easily carries over to the dilatonic branes as well.


  Homoclinic snaking refers to the sinusoidal snaking continuation curve of
homoclinic orbits near a heteroclinic cycle connecting an equilibrium E and a
periodic orbit P. Along this curve the homoclinic orbit performs more and more
windings about the periodic orbit. Typically this behaviour appears in
reversible Hamiltonian systems. Here we discuss this phenomenon in systems
without any particular structure. We give a rigorous analytical verification of
homoclinic snaking under certain assumptions on the behaviour of the stable and
unstable manifolds of E and P. We show how the snaking behaviour depends on the
signs of the Floquet multipliers of P. Further we present a nonsnaking
scenario. Finally we show numerically that these assumptions are fulfilled in a
model equation.


  Recently, machine learning has been used to substitute parts of conventional
computational fluid dynamics, e.g. the cell-face reconstruction in
finite-volume solvers or the curvature computation in the Volume-of-Fluid (VOF)
method. The latter showed improvements in terms of accuracy for coarsely
resolved interfaces, however at the expense of convergence and symmetry. In
this work, a combined approach is proposed, adressing the aforementioned
shortcomings. We focus on interface reconstruction (IR) in the level-set
method, i.e. the computation of the volume fraction and apertures. The combined
model consists of a classification neural network, that chooses between the
conventional (linear) IR and the neural network IR depending on the local
interface resolution. The proposed approach improves accuracy for coarsely
resolved interfaces and recovers the conventional IR for high resolutions,
yielding first order overall convergence. Symmetry is preserved by mirroring
and rotating the input level-set grid and subsequently averaging the
predictions. The combined model is implemented into a CFD solver and
demonstrated for two-phase flows. Furthermore, we provide details of floating
point symmetric implementation and computational efficiency.


  The introduction of explicit notions of rejection, or disbelief, into logics
for knowledge representation can be justified in a number of ways. Motivations
range from the need for versions of negation weaker than classical negation, to
the explicit recording of classic belief contraction operations in the area of
belief change, and the additional levels of expressivity obtained from an
extended version of belief change which includes disbelief contraction. In this
paper we present four logics of disbelief which address some or all of these
intuitions. Soundness and completeness results are supplied and the logics are
compared with respect to applicability and utility.


  In a mean-field description of superfluidity, particle number and gauge angle
are treated as quasi-classical conjugated variables. This level of description
was recently used to describe nuclear reactions around the Coulomb barrier.
Important effects of the relative gauge angle between two identical superfluid
nuclei (symmetric collisions) on transfer probabilities and fusion barrier have
been uncovered. A theory making contact with experiments should at least
average over different initial relative gauge-angles. In the present work, we
propose a new approach to obtain the multiple pair transfer probabilities
between superfluid systems. This method, called Phase-Space combinatorial (PSC)
technique, relies both on phase-space averaging and combinatorial arguments to
infer the full pair transfer probability distribution at the cost of multiple
mean-field calculations only. After benchmarking this approach in a schematic
model, we apply it to the collision $^{20}$O+$^{20}$O at various energies below
the Coulomb barrier. The predictions for one pair transfer are similar to
results obtained with an approximated projection method whereas significant
differences are found for two pairs transfer. Finally, we investigated the
applicability of the PSC method to the contact between non-identical superfluid
systems. [...] The applicability of the PSC method to asymmetric nuclear
collisions is investigated for the $^{14}$O+$^{20}$O collision and it turns out
that unrealistically small single- and multiple-pair transfer probabilities are
obtained. [...] We conclude that the best ground for probing gauge-angle
effects in nuclear reaction and/or for applying the proposed PSC approach on
pair transfer is the collisions of identical open-shell spherical nuclei.


  We have analyzed new CO($J$ = 1-0) data in the region of a reflection nebula
NGC 2023 with a particular focus on the detailed kinematical properties of the
molecular gas. The results show that there are two velocity components which
indicate signatures of dynamical interaction revealed at a high resolution of
19$''$ (= 0.04 pc). Based on the results we propose a hypothesis that two
clouds collided with each other and triggered the formation of the B1.5 star HD
37903 in addition to 20 lower mass stars in two small clusters with a size of 2
pc. Although the previous study favored a scheme of triggering by the HII
region (e.g., Mookerjea et al. 2009), the present results show that the effect
of the HII region is limited only to the surface of the molecular cloud, and
does not contribute to the gas compression and star formation. The present
results lend support for the dominant role of cloud-cloud collision in forming
high mass stars in addition to $\sim$20 lower mass stars, which are also likely
formed by the collision. The present case suggests all the high mass stars in
the Orion region are formed by cloud-cloud collision.


  We reevaluate the necessity of $W_R$ gauge bosons being kinematically
accessible to test the Left-Right Symmetric Model (LRSM) at hadron colliders.
In the limit that $W_R$ are too heavy, resonant production of sub-TeV Majorana
neutrinos $N$ can still proceed at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) via the
process $pp\rightarrow W_R^{\pm *}\rightarrow N \ell^\pm \to \ell^\pm \ell^\pm
+nj $ if mediated by a far off-shell $W_R$. Traditional searches strategies are
insensitive to this regime as they rely on momenta of final states scaling with
TeV-scale $M_{W_R}$. For such situations, the process is actually kinematically
and topologically identical to the direct production (DP) process
$pp\rightarrow W_{\rm SM}^{\pm *} \rightarrow N \ell^\pm \rightarrow \ell^\pm
\ell^\pm +nj$. In this context, we reinterpret $\sqrt{s}=8$ TeV LHC constraints
on DP rates for the minimal LRSM. For $m_N = 200-500$ GeV and right-left
coupling ratio $\kappa_R = g_R/g_L$, we find $(M_{W_R} / \kappa_R) > {1.1-1.8}$
TeV at 95\% CLs. Expected sensitivities to DP at 14 (100) TeV are also recast:
with $\mathcal{L}=1~(10)~\text{ab}^{-1}$, one can probe $(M_{W_R} / \kappa_R) <
{7.9-8.9~(14-40)}$ TeV for $m_N = {100 - 700~(1200)}$ GeV. Findings in terms of
gauge invariant dimension-six operators with heavy $N$ are also reported.


  With the vigorous development of computer vision, oriented object detection
has gradually been featured. In this paper, a novel differentiable angle coder
named phase-shifting coder (PSC) is proposed to accurately predict the
orientation of objects, along with a dual-frequency version (PSCD). By mapping
the rotational periodicity of different cycles into the phase of different
frequencies, we provide a unified framework for various periodic fuzzy problems
caused by rotational symmetry in oriented object detection. Upon such a
framework, common problems in oriented object detection such as boundary
discontinuity and square-like problems are elegantly solved in a unified form.
Visual analysis and experiments on three datasets prove the effectiveness and
the potentiality of our approach. When facing scenarios requiring high-quality
bounding boxes, the proposed methods are expected to give a competitive
performance. The codes are publicly available at
https://github.com/open-mmlab/mmrotate.


  I review some of the recent developments in the theoretical description of
weak inclusive decays of heavy mesons. The topics cover the value of $|V_{cb}|$
as extracted from semileptonic inclusive decays and a short discussion of the
theoretical errors. I also present the results of a recent calculation of
next--to--leading order corrections to nonleptonic inclusive B decays which
allows an improved prediction of the semileptonic branching ratio of B mesons.


  The distribution of GRB durations is bimodal, but there is little additional
evidence to support the division of GRBs into short and long classes. Based on
simple hardness ratios, several studies have shown a tendency for longer GRBs
to have softer energy spectra. Using a database of standard model fits to BATSE
GRBs, we compare the distributions of spectral parameters for short and long
bursts. Our preliminary results show that the average spectral break energy
differs discontinuously between short and long burst classes, but within each
class shows only a weak dependence on burst duration.


  The complex linear Goldstino superfield was proposed in arXiv:1102.3042 for
the cases of global and local four-dimensional N=1 supersymmetry. Here we make
use of this superfield to construct a supergravity action which is invariant
under spontaneously broken local N=1 supersymmetry and has a positive
cosmological constant for certain values of the parameters.


  The periodic events occurring in Eta Carinae have been widely monitored
during the last three 5.5-year cycles. The last one recently occurred in
January 2009 and more exhaustive observations have been made at different
wavelength ranges. If these events are produced when the binary components
approach periastron, the timing and sampling of the photometric features can
provide more information about the geometry and physics of the system. Thus, we
continued with our ground-based optical photometric campaign started in 2003 to
record the behaviour of the 2009.0 event in detail. This time the observation
program included a new telescope to obtain information from other photometric
bands. The daily monitoring consists of the acquisition of CCD images through
standard UBVRI filters and a narrow Halpha passband. The subsequent
differential photometry includes the central region of the object and the whole
Homunculus nebula. The results of our relative UBVRIHalpha photometry,
performed from November 2008 up to the end of March 2009, are presented in this
work, which comprises the totality of the event. The initial rising branch, the
maximum, the dip to the minimum and the recovering rising phase strongly
resemble a kind of eclipse. All these features happened on time - according to
that predicted - although there are some photometric differences in comparison
with the previous event. We made a new determination of 2022.8 days for the
period value using the present and previous "eclipse-like" event data. These
results strongly support the binarity hypothesis for Eta Car. In this paper,
the complete dataset with the photometry of the 2009.0 event is provided to
make it readily available for further analysis.


  A quantitative version of the Oppenheim conjecture for inhomogeneous
quadratic forms is proved. We also give an application to eigenvalue spacing on
flat 2-tori with Aharonov-Bohm flux.


  The elastic property of membranes self-assembled from AB diblock and ABA
triblock copolymers, as coarse-grained model of lipids and the bolalipids, are
studied using the self-consistent field theory (SCFT). Specifically, solutions
of the SCFT equations, corresponding to membranes in different geometries
(planar, cylindrical, spherical, and pore) have been obtained for a model
system composed of amphiphilic AB diblock copolymers and ABA triblock
copolymers dissolved in A homopolymers. The free energy of the membranes with
different geometries is then used to extract the bending modulus, Gaussian
modulus, and line tension of the membranes. The results reveal that the bending
modulus of the triblock membrane is greater than that of the diblock membrane.
Furthermore, the Gaussian modulus and line tension of the triblock membrane
indicate that the triblock membranes have higher pore formation energy than
that of the diblock membranes. The equilibrium bridging and looping fractions
of the triblock copolymers are also obtained. Implications of the theoretical
results on the elastic properties of biologically equivalent lipid bilayers and
the bolalipid membranes are discussed.


  We derive out naturally some important distributions such as high order
normal distributions and high order exponent distributions and the Gamma
distribution from a geometrical way. Further, we obtain the exact mean-values
of integral form functionals in the balls of continuous functions space with
$p-$norm, and show the complete concentration of measure phenomenon which means
that a functional takes its average on a ball with probability 1, from which we
have nonlinear exchange formula of expectation.


  In this paper, we present compelling evidence for the parity asymmetry (a
discrete symmetry that is separate from isotropy) in the Cosmic Microwave
Background (CMB) map, measured through two-point temperature correlations. This
parity asymmetric CMB challenges our understanding of the quantum physics of
the early Universe rather than LCDM ($\Lambda$ Cold-Dark-Matter). We commence
by conducting a comprehensive analysis of the Planck CMB, focusing on the
distribution of power in low-multipoles and temperature anticorrelations at
parity conjugate points in position space. We find tension with the near
scale-invariant power-law power spectrum of Standard Inflation (SI), with
p-values of the order $\mathcal{O}\left( 10^{-4}-10^{-3} \right)$.
Alternatively, we explore the framework of direct-sum inflation (DSI), where a
quantum fluctuation arises as a direct-sum of two components evolving forward
and backward in time at parity conjugate points in physical space. We found
that DSI is consistent with data on parity asymmetry, the absence of power at
$\theta>60^{\circ}$, and power suppression at low-even-multipoles, which are
major data anomalies in the SI. Furthermore, we discover that the parameters
characterizing the hemispherical power asymmetry anomaly become statistically
insignificant when the large SI quadrupole amplitude is reduced to align with
the data. DSI explains this low quadrupole with a p-value of $3.5\%$, 39 times
higher than SI. Combining statistics from parameters measuring parity and
low-$\ell$ angular power spectrum, we find that DSI is 50-650 times more
probable than SI. In summary, our investigation suggests that CMB temperature
fluctuations exhibit homogeneity and isotropy but parity-asymmetric consistent
with predictions of DSI. This observation provides tantalizing evidence for the
quantum mechanical nature of gravity.


  Let $d_{\alpha, \beta}(n)=\sum\limits_{\substack{n=kl \alpha l<k\leq\beta
l}}1$ be the number of ways of factoring n into two almost equal integers. For
rational numbers $0<\alpha <\beta $, we consider the following Zeta function
$\zeta_{\alpha,\beta}(s)=\sum\limits_{n=1}^{\infty}\frac{d_{\alpha,
\beta}(n)}{n^{s}}$ for $\Re s>1.$ It has an analytic continuation to $\Re
s>1/3.$ We get an asymptotic formula for the mean square of
$\zeta_{\alpha,\beta}(s)$ in the strip $1/2<\Re s<1$. As an application, we
improve an result on the distribution of primitive Pythagorean triangles.


  Wearable devices like smart glasses have gained popularity across various
applications. However, their limited computational capabilities pose challenges
for tasks that require extensive processing, such as image and video
processing, leading to drained device batteries. To address this, offloading
such tasks to nearby powerful remote devices, such as mobile devices or remote
servers, has emerged as a promising solution. This paper focuses on analyzing
task-offloading scenarios for a healthcare monitoring application performed on
smart wearable glasses, aiming to identify the optimal conditions for
offloading. The study evaluates performance metrics including task completion
time, computing capabilities, and energy consumption under realistic
conditions. A specific use case is explored within an indoor area like an
airport, where security agents wearing smart glasses to detect elevated body
temperature in individuals, potentially indicating COVID-19. The findings
highlight the potential benefits of task offloading for wearable devices in
healthcare settings, demonstrating its practicality and relevance.


  An approximate holographic dual of QCD is constructed and shown to reproduce
the empirical linear trajectories of universal slope on which the square masses
of radially and orbitally excited hadrons join. Conformal symmetry breaking and
other IR effects are described exclusively by deformations of the anti-de
Sitter background metric. The predictions for the light hadron spectrum include
new relations between ground state masses and trajectory slopes and are in good
overall agreement with experimental data.


  This article has been withdrawn by arXiv administrators because the submitter
did not have the legal authority to grant the license applied to the work.


  Sequential Recommender Systems (SRSs) are a popular type of recommender
system that learns from a user's history to predict the next item they are
likely to interact with. However, user interactions can be affected by noise
stemming from account sharing, inconsistent preferences, or accidental clicks.
To address this issue, we (i) propose a new evaluation protocol that takes
multiple future items into account and (ii) introduce a novel relevance-aware
loss function to train a SRS with multiple future items to make it more robust
to noise. Our relevance-aware models obtain an improvement of ~1.2% of NDCG@10
and 0.88% in the traditional evaluation protocol, while in the new evaluation
protocol, the improvement is ~1.63% of NDCG@10 and ~1.5% of HR w.r.t the best
performing models.


  The surface of a topological insulator is a closed two dimensional manifold.
The surface states are described by the Dirac Hamiltonian in curved two
dimensional spaces. For a slab-like sample with a magnetic field perpendicular
to its top and bottom surfaces, there are chiral states delocalized on the four
side faces. These "chiral sheets" carry both charge and spin currents. In
strong magnetic fields the quantized charge Hall effect ($\s_{xy}=(2n+1)e^2/h$)
will coexist with spin Hall effect.


  The $\beta$ and $\gamma$ phases of methylammonium chloride CH$_3$NH$_3$Cl and
methylammonium bromide CH$_3$NH$_3$Br are identified to be ferroelectric $via$
pyroelectric current and dielectric constant measurements. The magnetic
susceptibility also exhibits pronounced discontinuities at the Curie
temperatures. We attribute the origin of spontaneous polarization to the
emergence of two groups of proton orbital magnetic moments from the
uncorrelated motion of the CH$_3$ and NH$_3$ groups in the $\beta$ and $\gamma$
phases. The two inequivalent frameworks of intermolecular orbital resonances
interact with each other to distort the lattice in a non-centrosymmetric
fashion. Our findings indicate that the structural instabilities in molecular
frameworks are magnetic in origin as well as provide a new pathway toward
uncovering new organic ferroelectrics.


  We have produced ultracold heteronuclear KRb molecules by the process of
photoassociation in a two-species magneto-optical trap. Following decay of the
photoassociated KRb*, the molecules are detected using two-photon ionization
and time-of-flight mass spectroscopy of KRb$^+$. A portion of the metastable
triplet molecules thus formed are magnetically trapped. Photoassociative
spectra down to 91 cm$^{-1}$ below the K(4$s$) + Rb (5$p_{1/2}$) asymptote have
been obtained. We have made assignments to all eight of the attractive Hund's
case (c) KRb* potential curves in this spectral region.


  We revisit the study of the maximally singular point in the Coulomb branch of
4d N=2 SU(N) gauge theory with N_f=2n flavors for N_f<2N. When n >= 2, we find
that the low-energy physics is described by two non-trivial superconformal
field theories coupled to a magnetic SU(2) gauge group which is infrared free.
(In the special case n=2, one of these theories is a theory of free
hypermultiplets.) This observation removes a possible counter example to a
conjectured a-theorem.


  In this paper, we extend the result of Kitaev and Korotkin to the case where
a monodromy-preserving deformation has an irregular singularity. For the
monodromy-preserving deformation, we obtain the $\tau$-function whose
deformation parameters are the positions of regular singularities and the
parameter $t$ of an irregular singularity. Furthermore, the $\tau$-function is
expressed by the hyperelliptic $\Theta$ function moving the argument $\z$ and
the period $\B,$ where $t$ and the positions of regular singularities move $z$
and $\B,$ respectively.


  -The favored Big Bang concept is that the original symmetry was skewed, the
universe now being all matter, all antimatter having annihilated.
  -The mechanism of matter/antimatter annihilation is analyzed. A total
annihilation of original antimatter could not have occurred; the skewing is
unnecessary; and the universe must contain equally both forms of matter.
  -Current detection of cosmic matter/antimatter annihilations is Gamma Ray
Bursts [GRB's]. However, the conviction that the universe is now all matter
with no antimatter has left that possibility rejected and uninvestigated and
left standing the massive supernovae core collapse hypothesis for GRB's.
  -It has recently been reported that the rate of GRB's increases with red
shift z for z = 0 to 4 as (1 + z)^1.5. The indication is that the rate
increases significantly with time into the past at least back to z = 4 [and
probably back to the Big Bang].
  -That finding is inconsistent with the massive supernovae core collapse
hypothesis for GRB's and supports GRB's being cosmic matter/antimatter
annihilations.


  The scattering of Dirac fermions in the background fields of topological
solitons of the $(2+1)$-dimensional nonlinear $O(3)$ $\sigma$-model is studied
using both analytical and numerical methods. General formulae describing
fermion scattering are obtained and the symmetry properties of the partial
scattering amplitudes and elements of the $S$-matrix are determined. Within the
framework of the Born approximation, the scattering amplitudes, differential
cross-sections, and total cross-sections of fermion-soliton scattering are
obtained in analytical forms, and their symmetry properties and asymptotic
behavior are investigated. The dependences of the first several partial
elements of the $S$-matrix on the momentum of the fermion are obtained using
numerical methods, and some properties of these dependences are ascertained and
discussed.


  Motivated by recent experiments, we analyse the stability of a
three-dimensional Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) loaded in a periodically
driven one-dimensional optical lattice. Such periodically driven systems do not
have a thermodynamic ground state, but may have a long-lived steady state which
is an eigenstate of a "Floquet Hamiltonian". We explore collisional
instabilities of the Floquet ground state which transfer energy into the
transverse modes. We calculate decay rates, finding that the lifetime scales as
the inverse square of the scattering length and inverse of the peak three-
dimensional density. These rates can be controlled by adding additional
transverse potentials.


  Multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA) is a widely used tool to support
decisions in which a set of alternatives should be ranked or classified based
on multiple criteria. Recent studies in MCDA have shown the relevance of
considering not only current evaluations of each criterion but also past data.
Past-data-based approaches carry new challenges, especially in time-varying
environments. This study deals with this challenge via essential tools of
signal processing, such as tensorial representations and adaptive prediction.
More specifically, we structure the criteria' past data as a tensor and, by
applying adaptive prediction, we compose signals with these prediction values
of the criteria. Besides, we transform the prediction in the time domain into a
most favorable decision making domain, called the feature domain. We present a
novel extension of the MCDA method PROMETHEE II, aimed at addressing the tensor
in the feature domain to obtain a ranking of alternatives. Numerical
experiments were performed using real-world time series, and our approach is
compared with other existing strategies. The results highlight the relevance
and efficiency of our proposal, especially for nonstationary time series.


  The flow of contracting systems contracts 1-dimensional parallelotopes, i.e.,
line segments, at an exponential rate. One reason for the usefulness of
contracting systems is that many interconnections of contracting sub-systems
yield an overall contracting system.
  A generalization of contracting systems is $k$-contracting systems, where
$k\in\{1,\dots,n\}$. The flow of such systems contracts the volume of
$k$-dimensional parallelotopes at an exponential rate, and in particular they
reduce to contracting systems when $k=1$. It was shown by Muldowney and Li that
time-invariant $2$-contracting systems have a well-ordered asymptotic
behaviour: all bounded trajectories converge to the set of equilibria.
  Here, we derive a sufficient condition guaranteeing that the system obtained
from the series interconnection of two sub-systems is $k$-contracting. This is
based on a new formula for the $k$th multiplicative and additive compounds of a
block-diagonal matrix, which may be of independent interest. As an application,
we find conditions guaranteeing that $2$-contracting systems with an
exponentially decaying input retain the well-ordered behaviour of
time-invariant 2-contracting systems.


  Gaussian Process (GP) formulation of continuoustime trajectory offers a fast
solution to the motion planning problem via probabilistic inference on factor
graph. However, often the solution converges to in-feasible local minima and
the planned trajectory is not collision-free. We propose a message passing
algorithm that is more sensitive to obstacles with fast convergence time. We
leverage the utility of min-sum message passing algorithm that performs local
computations at each node to solve the inference problem on factor graph. We
first introduce the notion of compound factor node to transform the factor
graph to a linearly structured graph. We next develop an algorithm denoted as
Min-sum Message Passing algorithm for Motion Planning (MS2MP) that combines
numerical optimization with message passing to find collision-free
trajectories. MS2MP performs numerical optimization to solve non-linear least
square minimization problem at each compound factor node and then exploits the
linear structure of factor graph to compute the maximum a posteriori (MAP)
estimation of complete graph by passing messages among graph nodes. The
decentralized optimization approach of each compound node increases sensitivity
towards avoiding obstacles for harder planning problems. We evaluate our
algorithm by performing extensive experiments for exemplary motion planning
tasks for a robot manipulator. Our evaluation reveals that MS2MP improves
existing work in convergence time and success rate.


  Measures in the context of Category Theory lead to various relations, even
differential relations, of categories that are independent of the mathematical
structure forming objects of a category. Such relations, which are independent
of mathematical structure that we may represent a physical body or a system of
reference with, are, precisely, demanded to be the Laws of Physics by the
General Principle of Relativity. This framework leads to a theory for the
physical entirety.


  A recently proposed step-by-step procedure, to merge the low-energy physics
of the $\pi$-bonds electrons of graphene, and quantum field theory on curved
spacetimes, is recalled. The last step there is the proposal of an experiment
to test a Hawking-Unruh effect, emerging from the model, that manifests itself
as an exact (within the model) prediction for the electronic local density of
states, in the ideal case of the graphene membrane shaped as a Beltrami
pseudosphere. A discussion about one particular attempt to experimentally test
the model on molecular graphene is presented, and it is taken as an excuse to
solve some basic issues that will help future experiments. In particular, it is
stated that the effect should be visible on generic surfaces of constant
negative Gaussian curvature, that are infinite in number.


  Feature extraction from persistence diagrams, as a tool to enrich machine
learning techniques, has received increasing attention in recent years. In this
paper we explore an adaptive methodology to localize features in persistent
diagrams, which are then used in learning tasks. Specifically, we investigate
three algorithms, CDER, GMM and HDBSCAN, to obtain adaptive template
functions/features. Said features are evaluated in three classification
experiments with persistence diagrams. Namely, manifold, human shapes and
protein classification. The main conclusion of our analysis is that adaptive
template systems, as a feature extraction technique, yield competitive and
often superior results in the studied examples. Moreover, from the adaptive
algorithms here studied, CDER consistently provides the most reliable and
robust adaptive featurization.


  We numerically calculate two-particle correlation functions of CERN-SPS 158
  A GeV Pb+Pb central collisions based on a (3+1)-dimensional relativistic
hydrodynamics with a first order phase transition. We analyze the pair momentum
dependence of pion source sizes extracted from the
  Yano-Koonin-Podgoretski\u{\i} (YKP) parametrization which is expected to give
the source sizes directly. We find that, even in the case of the first order
phase transition, the collective expansion and surface dominant freeze-out of
the fluid naturally lead to the opaque source for which the interpretation of
the temporal source parameter as the emission duration breaks down.


  We prove that algebraic K-theory satisfies `pro-descent' for abstract blow-up
squares of noetherian schemes. As an application we derive Weibel's conjecture
on the vanishing of negative K-groups.


  We investigate the implications of a massive binary system in the centre of
the gamma-ray blazar Mkn~501 and show that the periodical behaviour recently
observed in the TeV and X-ray lightcurves may possibly be related to the
orbital motion of the relativistic jet emerging from the less massive black
hole. For the special relativistic jet properties inferred from emission
models, we derive an intrinsic orbital period of $(6-14)$ yrs and a
centre-of-mass distance of $(2.0-3.5) \times 10^{16}$ cm. If the binary is very
close with a separation of the order of that for which gravitational radiation
becomes dominant, we find a maximum primary mass of $\sim 10^8 M_{\sun}$ and a
corresponding secondary mass in the range of $\sim (4-42)\times 10^6 M_{\sun}$
depending on the intrinsic jet properties. Such values are in line with the
black hole masses expected from merger scenarios.


  In recent years, chaotic attractors have been extensively used in the design
of secure communication systems. One of the preferred ways of transmitting the
information signal is binary chaotic modulation, in which a binary message
modulates a parameter of the chaotic generator. This paper presents a method of
attack based on estimating the short-time period of the ciphertext generated
from the modulated chaotic attractor. By calculating and then filtering the
short-time period of the transmitted signal it is possible to obtain the binary
information signal with great accuracy without any knowledge of the parameters
of the underlying chaotic system. This method is successfully applied to
various secure communication systems proposed in the literature based on
different chaotic attractors.


  Resistivity measurements are widely exploited to uncover electronic
excitations and phase transitions in metallic solids. While single crystals are
preferably studied to explore crystalline anisotropies, these usually cancel
out in polycrystalline materials. Here we show that in polycrystalline
Mn3Zn0.5Ge0.5N with non-collinear antiferromagnetic order, changes in the
diagonal and, rather unexpected, off-diagonal components of the resistivity
tensor occur at low temperatures indicating subtle transitions between magnetic
phases of different symmetry. This is supported by neutron scattering and
explained within a phenomenological model which suggests that the phase
transitions in magnetic field are associated with field induced topological
orbital momenta. The fact that we observe transitions between spin phases in a
polycrystal, where effects of crystalline anisotropy are cancelled suggests
that they are only controlled by exchange interactions. The observation of an
off-diagonal resistivity extends the possibilities for realising
antiferromagnetic spintronics with polycrystalline materials.


  Recently, two attacks were presented against Proof-of-Stake (PoS) Ethereum:
one where short-range reorganizations of the underlying consensus chain are
used to increase individual validators' profits and delay consensus decisions,
and one where adversarial network delay is leveraged to stall consensus
decisions indefinitely. We provide refined variants of these attacks,
considerably relaxing the requirements on adversarial stake and network timing,
and thus rendering the attacks more severe. Combining techniques from both
refined attacks, we obtain a third attack which allows an adversary with
vanishingly small fraction of stake and no control over network message
propagation (assuming instead probabilistic message propagation) to cause even
long-range consensus chain reorganizations. Honest-but-rational or
ideologically motivated validators could use this attack to increase their
profits or stall the protocol, threatening incentive alignment and security of
PoS Ethereum. The attack can also lead to destabilization of consensus from
congestion in vote processing.


  The statics and dynamics of a surface separating two phases of a relativistic
quantum field theory at or near the critical temperature typically make use of
a free energy as a functional of an order parameter. This free energy
functional also affords an economical description of states away from
equilibrium. The similarities and differences between using a scalar field as
the order parameter versus the energy density are examined, and a peculiarity
is noted. We also point out several conceptual errors in the literature dealing
with the dynamical prefactor in the nucleation rate.


  Rigid-body impact sound synthesis methods often omit the ground sound. In
this paper we analyze an idealized ground-sound model based on an elastodynamic
halfspace, and use it to identify scenarios wherein ground sound is
perceptually relevant versus when it is masked by the impacting object's modal
sound or transient acceleration noise. Our analytical model gives a smooth,
closed-form expression for ground surface acceleration, which we can then use
in the Rayleigh integral or in an "acoustic shader" for a finite-difference
time-domain wave simulation. We find that when modal sound is inaudible, ground
sound is audible in scenarios where a dense object impacts a soft ground and
scenarios where the impact point has a low elevation angle to the listening
point.


  Active learning (AL) aims to reduce labeling costs by querying the examples
most beneficial for model learning. While the effectiveness of AL for
fine-tuning transformer-based pre-trained language models (PLMs) has been
demonstrated, it is less clear to what extent the AL gains obtained with one
model transfer to others. We consider the problem of transferability of
actively acquired datasets in text classification and investigate whether AL
gains persist when a dataset built using AL coupled with a specific PLM is used
to train a different PLM. We link the AL dataset transferability to the
similarity of instances queried by the different PLMs and show that AL methods
with similar acquisition sequences produce highly transferable datasets
regardless of the models used. Additionally, we show that the similarity of
acquisition sequences is influenced more by the choice of the AL method than
the choice of the model.


  The "gauged'' Peccei-Quinn (PQ) mechanism of Fukuda, Ibe, Suzuki and Yanagida
is implemented in the flavorful axion model of Carone and Merchand. This model
of flavor is similar to other successful ones based on the double tetrahedral
group, but the flavor symmetry includes a global U(1) factor that leads to the
presence of a flavorful axion. Here we gauge that U(1) symmetry and introduce a
heavy sector that includes (1) the fermions necessary to cancel anomalies and
(2) a second scalar flavon field that spontaneously breaks the U(1) symmetry.
The full theory has an accidental U(1)$\times$U(1)$'$ global symmetry,
anomalous with respect to QCD; U(1)$_\text{PQ}$ emerges as a linear
combination. The gauged flavor symmetry restricts the possible PQ
symmetry-breaking higher-dimension operators so that sufficient axion quality
is preserved. We provide a model of the quark sector, as a proof of principle,
and then a model which incorporates the standard model charged leptons as well.
In both cases, the charge assignments that lead to acceptable axion quality
also lead to a multiplicity of some of the heavy sector states; we check that
the Landau pole for hypercharge remains above the cut off of the effective
theory. We consider relevant phenomenological constraints on these models
including those on the predicted axion couplings.


  We give a combinatorial proof for a multivariable formula of the generating
series of type D Young walls. Based on this we give a motivic refinement of a
formula for the generating series of Euler characteristics of Hilbert schemes
of points on the orbifold surface of type D.


  The zonostrophic instability that leads to the emergence of zonal jets in
barotropic beta-plane turbulence was analyzed through a geometric decomposition
of the eddy stress tensor. The stress tensor is visualized by an eddy variance
ellipse whose characteristics are related to eddy properties. The tilt of the
ellipse principal axis is the tilt of the eddies with respect to the shear, the
eccentricity of the ellipse is related to the eddy anisotropy, while its size
is related to the eddy kinetic energy. Changes of these characteristics are
directly related to the vorticity fluxes forcing the mean flow. The statistical
state dynamics of the turbulent flow closed at second order was employed as it
provides an analytic expression for both the zonostrophic instability and the
stress tensor. For the linear phase of the instability, the stress tensor was
analytically calculated at the stability boundary. For the non--linear
equilibration of the instability the tensor was calculated in the limit of
small supercriticality in which the amplitude of the jet velocity follows
Ginzburg--Landau dynamics. It is found that dependent on the characteristics of
the forcing, the jet is accelerated either because it primarily anisotropizes
the eddies so as to produce upgradient fluxes or because it changes the eddy
tilt. The instability equilibrates as these changes are partially reversed by
the non--linear terms. Parameterizations of the ellipse characteristics are
also discussed.


  We exhibit a strong connection between cover times of graphs, Gaussian
processes, and Talagrand's theory of majorizing measures. In particular, we
show that the cover time of any graph $G$ is equivalent, up to universal
constants, to the square of the expected maximum of the Gaussian free field on
$G$, scaled by the number of edges in $G$. This allows us to resolve a number
of open questions. We give a deterministic polynomial-time algorithm that
computes the cover time to within an O(1) factor for any graph, answering a
question of Aldous and Fill (1994). We also positively resolve the blanket time
conjectures of Winkler and Zuckerman (1996), showing that for any graph, the
blanket and cover times are within an O(1) factor. The best previous
approximation factor for both these problems was $O((\log \log n)^2)$ for
$n$-vertex graphs, due to Kahn, Kim, Lovasz, and Vu (2000).


  We compare Monte Carlo results for the interface tension and interface energy
of the 3-dimensional Ising model with Pad\'e and inhomogeneous differential
approximants of the low temperature series that was recently extended by Arisue
to $17^{\rm th}$ order in $u=\exp(-4\beta)$. The series is expected to suffer
from the roughening singularity at $u\approx 0.196$. The comparison with the
Monte Carlo data shows that the Pad\'e and inhomogeneous differential
approximants fail to improve the truncated series result of the interface
tension and the interface energy in the region around the roughening
transition. The Monte Carlo data show that the specific heat displays a peak in
the smooth phase. Neither the truncated series nor the Pad\'e approximants find
this peak. We also compare Monte Carlo data for the energy of the ASOS model
with the corresponding low temperature series that we extended to order
$u^{12}$.


  We present results of a study of the galactic open cluster population based
on the all-sky catalogue ASCC-2.5 (I/280A) compiled from Tycho-2, Hipparcos and
other catalogues. The sample of optical clusters from ASCC-2.5 is complete up
to about 850 pc from the Sun. The symmetry plane of the clusters' distribution
is determined to be at $Z_0=-22\pm4$ pc, and the scale height of open clusters
is only $56\pm3$ pc. The total surface density and volume density in the
symmetry plane are $\Sigma=$ 114 kpc$^{-2}$ and $D(Z_0)=1015$ kpc$^{-3}$,
respectively. We find the total number of open clusters in the Galactic disk to
be of order of 10$^5$ at present. Fluctuations in the spatial and velocity
distributions are attributed to the existence of four open cluster complexes
(OCCs) of different ages containing up to a few tens of clusters. Members in an
OCC show the same kinematic behaviour, and a narrow age spread. We find, that
the youngest cluster complex, OCC~1 ($\log t<7.9$), with 19 deg inclination to
the Galactic plane, is apparently a signature of Gould's Belt. The most
abundant OCC~2 complex has moderate age ($\log t\approx8.45$). The clusters of
the Perseus-Auriga group, having the same age as OCC~2, but different
kinematics are seen in breaks between Perseus-Auriga clouds. The oldest ($\log
t\approx8.85$) and sparsest group was identified due to a large motion in the
Galactic anticentre direction. Formation rate and lifetime of open clusters are
found to be $0.23\pm0.03$ kpc$^{-2}$Myr$^{-1}$ and 322$\pm$31 Myr,
respectively. This implies a total number of cluster generations in the history
of the Galaxy between 30 to 40. We estimate that less than about 10% of the
total Galactic stellar disk population has ever passed an open cluster
membership.


  Self-organization of nanoparticles is a major issue to synthesize mesoscopic
structures. Among the possible mechanisms leading to self-organization, the
oriented attachment is efficient yet not completely understood. We investigate
here the oriented attachment process of ZnO nanocrystals preformed in the gas
phase. During the deposition in high vacuum, about 60% of the particles, which
are uncapped, form larger crystals through oriented attachment. In the present
conditions of deposition, no selective direction for the oriented attachment is
noticed. To probe the driving force of the oriented attachment, and more
specifically the possible influence of the dipolar interaction between
particles, we have deposited the same nanocrystals in the presence of a
constant electric field. The expected effect was to enhance the fraction of
domains resulting from the oriented attachment due to the increased interaction
of the particle dipoles with the electric field. The multiscale analytical and
statistical analysis (TEM coupled to XRD) shows no significant influence of the
electric field on the organization of the particles. We therefore conclude that
the dipolar interaction between nanocrystals is not the prominent driving force
in the process. Consequently, we argue, in accordance with recent theoretical
and experimental investigations, that the surface reduction, possibly driven by
Coulombic interaction, may be the major mechanism for the oriented attachment
process.


  Within a pQCD inspired kinetic parton cascade we simulate the space time
evolution of gluons which are produced initially in a heavy ion collision at
RHIC energy. The inelastic gluonic interactions $gg \leftrightarrow ggg$ do
play an important role: For various initial conditions it is found that
thermalization and the close to ideal fluid dynamical behaviour sets in at very
early times. Special emphasis is put on color glass condensate initial
conditions and the `bottom up thermalization' scenario. Off-equilibrium $3\to
2$ processes make up the very beginning of the evolution leading to an initial
decrease in gluon number and a temporary avalanche of the gluon momentum
distribution to higher transversal momenta.


  During the past earthquakes, different low ductile failure modes are observed
in the gravity design structures and thus, the most of existing damage indices
may fail to assess the damage of gravity design structures accurately in
referring to the two main performance levels: immediate occupancy and ultimate
limit state. Therefore, this study investigates the energy dissipated by the
brittle structures and the possible damage indices based on energy for the
damage assessment of gravity design frames. In the framework of an Energy-Based
Seismic Design Approach, we need the assessment of the Demand and on the
Capacity, both expressed in Energy. A methodology for the assessment of the
seismic energy demands imposed on structures is already proposed, but not such
methodology that makes consensus is proposed for the calculation of the Energy
dissipation Capacity avoiding the Hysteretic models. The estimation of the
energy expended by the building during an earthquake excitation is a tricky
issue. For this purpose, this study considers the wavelet based energy
estimation and compares it with different approaches for measuring the damages
of a structure: the dominant inelastic period of a building and the more
classical measure, the inter-story drift. IDA analysis are performed in energy,
drift and inelastic period. Furthermore, the damage assessment results based on
the expended energy for three gravity design buildings are compared and
discussed relatively to the results expressed in inelastic period and drift.
Finally, this study concludes that no significant effects of number of
inelastic cycles to the damage assessment results for low ductile structures.
However, this study also highlights the effects of number of inelastic cycles
to the damage for medium and high ductile structures.


  We systematically study the indirect interaction between a magnon mode and a
cavity photon mode mediated by travelling photons of a waveguide. From a
general Hamiltonian, we derive the effective coupling strength between two
separated modes, and obtain the theoretical expression of system's
transmission. Accordingly, we design an experimental set-up consisting of a
shield cavity photon mode, microstrip line and a magnon system to test our
theoretical predictions. From measured transmission spectra, indirect
interaction, as well as mode hybridization, between two modes can be observed.
All experimental observations support our theoretical predictions. In this
work, we clarify the mechanism of travelling photon mediated interactions
between two separate modes. Even without spatial mode overlap, two separated
modes can still couple with each other through their correlated dissipations
into a mutual travelling photon bus. This conclusion may help us understand the
recently discovered dissipative coupling effect in cavity magnonics systems.
Additionally, the physics and technique developed in this work may benefit us
in designing new hybrid systems based on the waveguide magnonics.


  The interactions inside the (bisemi)particles are envisaged from two points
of view: The first approach, based on the reducible representations of
algebraic bilinear semigroups, allows to describe explicitly the interactions
between (bisemi)particles by means of gravito-electro-magnetic fields of
interaction while the second approach,based on the consideration of
(bi)connections, leads to Maxwell extended equations involving the
gravitational field.


  On September 12, 2016, at 21:44:07 UT, a -9.2 +\- 0.5 mag fireball appeared
over northeastern Poland. The precise orbit and atmospheric trajectory of the
event is presented, based on the data collected by six video stations of Polish
Fireball Network (PFN). The PF120916 Piecki fireball entered Earth's atmosphere
with the velocity of 16.7 +\- 0.3 km/s and started to shine at height of 81.9
+\- 0.3 km. Clear deceleration started after first three seconds of flight, and
the terminal velocity of the meteor was only 5.0 +\- 0.3 km/s at height of 26.0
+\- 0.2 km. Such a low value of terminal velocity indicates that fragments with
total mass of around 10-15 kg could survive the atmospheric passage and cause
fall of the meteorites. The predicted area of possible meteorite impact is
computed and it is located south of Reszel city at Warmian-Masurian region. The
impact area was extensively searched by experienced groups of meteorite hunters
but without any success.


  Angle Resolved Photoemission Spectroscopy (ARPES) probes the momentum-space
electronic structure of materials, and provides invaluable information about
the high-temperature superconducting cuprates. Likewise, the cuprate
real-space, inhomogeneous electronic structure is elucidated by Scanning
Tunneling Spectroscopy (STS). Recently, STS has exploited quasiparticle
interference (QPI) - wave-like electrons scattering off impurities to produce
periodic interference patterns - to infer properties of the QP in
momentum-space. Surprisingly, some interference peaks in
Bi_{2}Sr_{2}CaCu_{2}O_{8+\delta} (Bi-2212) are absent beyond the
antiferromagnetic (AF) zone boundary, implying the dominance of particular
scattering process. Here, we show that ARPES sees no evidence of quasiparticle
(QP) extinction: QP-like peaks are measured everywhere on the Fermi surface,
evolving smoothly across the AF zone boundary. This apparent contradiction
stems from different natures of single-particle (ARPES) and two-particle (STS)
processes underlying these probes. Using a simple model, we demonstrate
extinction of QPI without implying the loss of QP beyond the AF zone boundary.


  Most state-of-the-art self-supervised speaker verification systems rely on a
contrastive-based objective function to learn speaker representations from
unlabeled speech data. We explore different ways to improve the performance of
these methods by: (1) revisiting how positive and negative pairs are sampled
through a "symmetric" formulation of the contrastive loss; (2) introducing
margins similar to AM-Softmax and AAM-Softmax that have been widely adopted in
the supervised setting. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the symmetric
contrastive loss which provides more supervision for the self-supervised task.
Moreover, we show that Additive Margin and Additive Angular Margin allow
reducing the overall number of false negatives and false positives by improving
speaker separability. Finally, by combining both techniques and training a
larger model we achieve 7.50% EER and 0.5804 minDCF on the VoxCeleb1 test set,
which outperforms other contrastive self supervised methods on speaker
verification.


  The study of many-body quantum dynamics in strongly-correlated systems is
extremely challenging. To date few numerical methods exist which are capable of
simulating the non-equilibrium dynamics of two-dimensional quantum systems, in
part reflecting complexity theoretic obstructions. In this work, we present a
new technique able to overcome this obstacle, by combining continuous unitary
flow techniques with the newly developed method of scrambling transforms. We
overcome the prejudice that approximately diagonalizing the Hamiltonian cannot
lead to reliable predictions for relatively long times. To the contrary, we
show that the method works well in both localized and delocalized phases, and
makes reliable predictions for a number of quantities including
infinite-temperature autocorrelation functions. We complement our findings with
rigorous incremental bounds on the truncation error. This approach shows that
in practice, the exploration of intermediate-scale time evolution may be more
feasible than is commonly assumed, challenging near-term quantum simulators.


  We study the phase diagram of dense quark matter with an emphasis on the role
of the strange quark mass. Our approach is based on two effective field
theories (EFTs). The first is an EFT that describes quark quasi-particles near
the Fermi surface. This EFT is valid at energies small compared to the chemical
potential. The second is an EFT for the Goldstone modes in the paired phase. We
find that in response to a non-zero strange quark mass the CFL phase first
undergoes a transition to a kaon condensed phase, and then to a gapless phase
with a non-zero Goldstone boson current.


  Motivated by the randomized generation of slowly synchronizing automata, we
study automata made of permutation letters and a merging letter of rank $
n\!-\!1 $. We present a constructive randomized procedure to generate
synchronizing automata of that kind with (potentially) large alphabet size
based on recent results on \textit{primitive} sets of matrices. We report
numerical results showing that our algorithm finds automata with much larger
reset threshold than a mere uniform random generation and we present new
families of automata with reset threshold of $ \Omega(n^2/4) $. We finally
report theoretical results on randomized generation of primitive sets of
matrices: a set of permutation matrices with a $ 0 $ entry changed into a $ 1 $
is primitive and has exponent of $ O(n\log n) $ with high probability in case
of uniform random distribution and the same holds for a random set of binary
matrices where each entry is set, independently, equal to $ 1 $ with
probability $ p $ and equal to $ 0 $ with probability $ 1-p $, when $ np-\log
n\rightarrow\infty $ as $ n\rightarrow\infty $.


  In this paper, we study the BSW process of the slowly evaporating charged
black hole. It can be found that the BSW process will also arise near black
hole horizon when the evaporation of charged black hole is very slow. But now
the background black hole does not have to be an extremal black hole, and it
will be approximately an extremal black hole unless it is nearly a huge
stationary black hole.


  We consider stationary hidden Markov models with finite state space and
nonparametric modeling of the emission distributions. It has remained unknown
until very recently that such models are identifiable. In this paper, we
propose a new penalized least-squares esti-mator for the emission distributions
which is statistically optimal and practically tractable. We prove a non
asymptotic oracle inequality for our nonparametric estimator of the emission
distributions. A consequence is that this new estimator is rate minimax
adaptive up to a logarithmic term. Our methodology is based on projections of
the emission distributions onto nested subspaces of increasing complexity. The
popular spectral estimators are unable to achieve the optimal rate but may be
used as initial points in our procedure. Simulations are given that show the
improvement obtained when applying the least-squares minimization consecutively
to the spectral estimation.


  The pattern of anisotropies in the Cosmic Microwave Background depends upon
the masses and lifetimes of the three neutrino species. A neutrino species of
mass greater than 10 eV with lifetime between 10^{13} sec and 10^{17} sec
leaves a very distinct signature (due to the integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect):
the anisotropies at large angles are predicted to be comparable to those on
degree scales. Present data exclude such a possibility and hence this region of
parameter space. For $m_\nu \simeq 30$ eV, $\tau \simeq 10^{13}$ sec, we find
an interesting possibility: the Integrated Sachs Wolfe peak produced by the
decaying neutrino in low-$\Omega$ models mimics the acoustic peak expected in
an $\Omega = 1$ model.


  In this paper, we construct an infinite family of $\frac{q-1}{2}$-ovoids of
the generalized quadrangle $Q(4,q)$, for $q\equiv 1 (\text{mod}\ 4)$ and $q>5$.
Together with the examples given by Bamberg et al. and constructions provided
by Feng et al., this establishes the existence of $\frac{q-1}{2}$-ovoids in
$Q(4,q)$ for each odd prime power $q$.


  Gradient inversion (GI) attacks present a threat to the privacy of clients in
federated learning (FL) by aiming to enable reconstruction of the clients' data
from communicated model updates. A number of such techniques attempts to
accelerate data recovery by first reconstructing labels of the samples used in
local training. However, existing label extraction methods make strong
assumptions that typically do not hold in realistic FL settings. In this paper
we present a novel label recovery scheme, Recovering Labels from Local Updates
(RLU), which provides near-perfect accuracy when attacking untrained (most
vulnerable) models. More significantly, RLU achieves high performance even in
realistic real-world settings where the clients in an FL system run multiple
local epochs, train on heterogeneous data, and deploy various optimizers to
minimize different objective functions. Specifically, RLU estimates labels by
solving a least-square problem that emerges from the analysis of the
correlation between labels of the data points used in a training round and the
resulting update of the output layer. The experimental results on several
datasets, architectures, and data heterogeneity scenarios demonstrate that the
proposed method consistently outperforms existing baselines, and helps improve
quality of the reconstructed images in GI attacks in terms of both PSNR and
LPIPS.


  For several modern nucleon-nucleon potentials state-of-the-art Faddeev
calculations are carried out for the $nd$ total cross section between 10 and
300 MeV projectile energy and compared to new high precision measurements. The
agreement between theory and data is rather good, with exception at the higher
energies where a 10% discrepancy builds up. In addition the convergence of the
multiple scattering series incorporated in the Faddeev scheme is studied
numerically with the result, that rescattering corrections remain important.
Based on this multiple scattering series the high energy limit of the total
$nd$ cross section is also investigated analytically. In contrast to the naive
expectation that the total $nd$ cross section is the sum of the $np$ and $nn$
total cross sections we find additional effects resulting from the rescattering
processes, which have different signs and different behavior as function of the
energy. A shadowing effect in the high energy limit only occurs for energies
higher than 300 MeV. The expressions in the high energy limit have
qualitatively a similar behavior as the exactly calculated expressions, but can
be expected to be valid quantitatively only at much higher energies.


  This investigation is firstly focused into showing that two metric parameters
represent the same object in graph theory. That is, we prove that the multiset
resolving sets and the ID-colorings of graphs are the same thing. We also
consider some computational and combinatorial problems of the multiset
dimension, or equivalently, the ID-number of graphs. We prove that the decision
problem concerning finding the multiset dimension of graphs is NP-complete. We
consider the multiset dimension of king grids and prove that it is bounded
above by 4. We also give a characterization of the strong product graphs with
one factor being a complete graph, and whose multiset dimension is not
infinite.


  We study the Vladimirov fractional differentiation operator $D^\alpha_N$,
$\alpha >0, N\in \mathbb Z$, on a $p$-adic ball $B_N=\{ x\in \mathbb Q_p:\
|x|_p\le p^N\}$. To its known interpretations via restriction from a similar
operator on $\mathbb Q_p$ and via a certain stochastic process on $B_N$, we add
an interpretation as a pseudo-differential operator in terms of the Pontryagin
duality on the additive group of $B_N$. We investigate the Green function of
$D^\alpha_N$ and a nonlinear equation on $B_N$, an analog the classical porous
medium equation.


  Deformations of cell sheets during morphogenesis are driven by developmental
processes such as cell division and cell shape changes. In morphoelastic shell
theories of development, these processes appear as variations of the intrinsic
geometry of a thin elastic shell. However, morphogenesis often involves large
bending deformations that are outside the formal range of validity of these
shell theories. Here, by asymptotic expansion of three-dimensional
incompressible morphoelasticity in the limit of a thin shell, we derive a shell
theory for large intrinsic bending deformations and emphasise the resulting
geometric material anisotropy and the elastic role of cell constriction. Taking
the invagination of the green alga Volvox as a model developmental event, we
show how results for this theory differ from those for a classical shell theory
that is not formally valid for these large bending deformations and reveal how
these geometric effects stabilise invagination.


  Anomaly detection in networks often boils down to identifying an underlying
graph structure on which the abnormal occurrence rests on. Financial fraud
schemes are one such example, where more or less intricate schemes are employed
in order to elude transaction security protocols. We investigate the problem of
learning graph structure representations using adaptations of dictionary
learning aimed at encoding connectivity patterns. In particular, we adapt
dictionary learning strategies to the specificity of network topologies and
propose new methods that impose Laplacian structure on the dictionaries
themselves. In one adaption we focus on classifying topologies by working
directly on the graph Laplacian and cast the learning problem to accommodate
its 2D structure. We tackle the same problem by learning dictionaries which
consist of vectorized atomic Laplacians, and provide a block coordinate descent
scheme to solve the new dictionary learning formulation. Imposing Laplacian
structure on the dictionaries is also proposed in an adaptation of the Single
Block Orthogonal learning method. Results on synthetic graph datasets
comprising different graph topologies confirm the potential of dictionaries to
directly represent graph structure information.


  Image data has a great potential of helping conventional visual inspections
of civil engineering structures due to the ease of data acquisition and the
advantages in capturing visual information. A variety of techniques have been
proposed to detect damages, such as cracks and spalling on a close-up image of
a single component (columns and road surfaces etc.). However, these techniques
commonly suffer from severe false-positives especially when the image includes
multiple components of different structures. To reduce the false-positives and
extract reliable information about the structures' conditions, detection and
localization of critical structural components are important first steps
preceding the damage assessment. This study aims at recognizing bridge
structural and non-structural components from images of urban scenes. During
the bridge component recognition, every image pixel is classified into one of
the five classes (non-bridge, columns, beams and slabs, other structural, other
nonstructural) by multi-scale convolutional neural networks (multi-scale CNNs).
To reduce false-positives and get consistent labels, the component
classifications are integrated with scene understanding by an additional
classifier with 10 higher-level scene classes (building, greenery, person,
pavement, signs and poles, vehicles, bridges, water, sky, and others). The
bridge component recognition integrated with the scene understanding is
compared with the naive approach without scene classification in terms of
accuracy, false-positives and consistencies to demonstrate the effectiveness of
the integrated approach.


  Learning from the data stored in a database is an important function
increasingly available in relational engines. Methods using lower precision
input data are of special interest given their overall higher efficiency but,
in databases, these methods have a hidden cost: the quantization of the real
value into a smaller number is an expensive step. To address the issue, in this
paper we present MLWeaving, a data structure and hardware acceleration
technique intended to speed up learning of generalized linear models in
databases. ML-Weaving provides a compact, in-memory representation enabling the
retrieval of data at any level of precision. MLWeaving also takes advantage of
the increasing availability of FPGA-based accelerators to provide a highly
efficient implementation of stochastic gradient descent. The solution adopted
in MLWeaving is more efficient than existing designs in terms of space (since
it can process any resolution on the same design) and resources (via the use of
bit-serial multipliers). MLWeaving also enables the runtime tuning of
precision, instead of a fixed precision level during the training. We
illustrate this using a simple, dynamic precision schedule. Experimental
results show MLWeaving achieves up to16 performance improvement over
low-precision CPU implementations of first-order methods.


  We first present an Iwahori-Matsumoto presentation of affine Yokonuma-Hecke
algebras $\widehat{Y}_{r,n}(q)$ to give a new proof of the fact, which was
previously proved by Chlouveraki and S\'echerre, that $\widehat{Y}_{r,n}(q)$ is
a particular case of the pro-$p$-Iwahori-Hecke algebras defined by Vign\'eras,
meanwhile, we give one application. Using the new presentation, we then give a
third presentation of $\widehat{Y}_{r,n}(q),$ from which we immediately get an
unexpected result, that is, the extended affine Hecke algebra of type $A$ is a
subalgebra of the affine Yokonuma-Hecke algebra.


  This paper is concerned with the Laitinen Conjecture. The conjecture predicts
an answer to the Smith question which reads as follows. Is it true that for a
finite group acting smoothly on a sphere with exactly two fixed points, the
tangent spaces at the fixed points have always isomorphic group module
structures defined by differentiation of the action? Using the technique of
induction of group representations, we indicate a new infinite family of finite
Oliver groups for which the Laitinen Conjecture holds.


  On a reasonable class of domains in $\CC^n$, we characterize those
holomorphic functions which continue analytically past the boundary. Then we
give some applications of this result to holomorphic mappings. In addition,
some new results about the Lu Qi-Keng conjecture are treated.


  Depending on its adsorption conformation on the Au(111) surface, a
zwitterionic single-molecule machine works in two different ways under bias
voltage pulses. It is a unidirectional rotor while anchored on the surface. It
is a fast-drivable molecule-vehicle (nanocar) while physisorbed. By tuning the
surface coverage, the conformation of the molecule can be selected to be either
rotor or nanocar. The inelastic tunneling excitation producing the movement is
investigated in the same experimental conditions for both the unidirectional
rotation of the rotor and the directed movement of the nanocar.


  The research on developing CNN-based fully-automated Brain-Tumor-Segmentation
systems has been progressed rapidly. For the systems to be applicable in
practice, a good The research on developing CNN-based fully-automated
Brain-Tumor-Segmentation systems has been progressed rapidly. For the systems
to be applicable in practice, a good processing quality and reliability are the
must. Moreover, for wide applications of such systems, a minimization of
computation complexity is desirable, which can also result in a minimization of
randomness in computation and, consequently, a better performance consistency.
To this end, the CNN in the proposed system has a unique structure with 2
distinguished characters. Firstly, the three paths of its feature extraction
block are designed to extract, from the multi-modality input, comprehensive
feature information of mono-modality, paired-modality and cross-modality data,
respectively. Also, it has a particular three-branch classification block to
identify the pixels of 4 classes. Each branch is trained separately so that the
parameters are updated specifically with the corresponding ground truth data of
a target tumor areas. The convolution layers of the system are custom-designed
with specific purposes, resulting in a very simple config of 61,843 parameters
in total. The proposed system is tested extensively with BraTS2018 and
BraTS2019 datasets. The mean Dice scores, obtained from the ten experiments on
BraTS2018 validation samples, are 0.787+0.003, 0.886+0.002, 0.801+0.007, for
enhancing tumor, whole tumor and tumor core, respectively, and 0.751+0.007,
0.885+0.002, 0.776+0.004 on BraTS2019. The test results demonstrate that the
proposed system is able to perform high-quality segmentation in a consistent
manner. Furthermore, its extremely low computation complexity will facilitate
its implementation/application in various environments.


  We present a proof of the conjecture $\mathcal{NP}$ = $\mathcal{PSPACE}$ by
showing that arbitrary tautologies of Johansson's minimal propositional logic
admit "small" polynomial-size dag-like natural deductions in Prawitz's system
for minimal propositional logic. These "small" deductions arise from standard
"large"\ tree-like inputs by horizontal dag-like compression that is obtained
by merging distinct nodes labeled with identical formulas occurring in
horizontal sections of deductions involved. The underlying "geometric" idea: if
the height, $h\left( \partial \right) $ , and the total number of distinct
formulas, $\phi \left( \partial \right) $ , of a given tree-like deduction
$\partial$ of a minimal tautology $\rho$ are both polynomial in the length of
$\rho$, $\left| \rho \right|$, then the size of the horizontal dag-like
compression is at most $h\left( \partial \right) \times \phi \left( \partial
\right) $, and hence polynomial in $\left| \rho \right|$. The attached proof is
due to the first author, but it was the second author who proposed an initial
idea to attack a weaker conjecture $\mathcal{NP}= \mathcal{\mathit{co}NP}$ by
reductions in diverse natural deduction formalisms for propositional logic.
That idea included interactive use of minimal, intuitionistic and classical
formalisms, so its practical implementation was too involved. The attached
proof of $ \mathcal{NP}=\mathcal{PSPACE}$ runs inside the natural deduction
interpretation of Hudelmaier's cutfree sequent calculus for minimal logic.


  The role of anti-kaons in the symmetry energy to be determined in heavy-ion
collisions as for instance in such observables as the $\pi^-/\pi^+$ ratio is
discussed using a simple chiral Lagrangian. It is shown, with some mild
assumptions, that kaons, when present in the system, can affect the EoS
appreciably for both symmetric and asymmetric nuclear matter. For nuclear
matter with small asymmetry with which heavy-ion collisions are studied, it may
be difficult to distinguish a stiff symmetry energy and the supersoft symmetry
energy, even with kaons present. However the effect of kaon is found to be
significant such that $\mu_n-\mu_p \neq 0$ near $x=1/2$, at which the chemical
potential difference is zero without kaon amplitude. We present the argument
that in order to obtain a reliably accurate equation of state (EoS) for
compact-star matter, a much deeper understanding is needed on how the
strangeness degrees of freedom such as kaons, hyperons etc. behave in baryonic
matter in a Fermi liquid (or possibly a non-Fermi liquid) phase with potential
phase changes. It is suggested that such an {\em accurate} treatment could have
an important implication on possibly modified gravity.


  Humans tame the complexity of mathematical reasoning by developing
hierarchies of abstractions. With proper abstractions, solutions to hard
problems can be expressed concisely, thus making them more likely to be found.
In this paper, we propose Learning Mathematical Abstractions (LEMMA): an
algorithm that implements this idea for reinforcement learning agents in
mathematical domains. LEMMA augments Expert Iteration with an abstraction step,
where solutions found so far are revisited and rewritten in terms of new
higher-level actions, which then become available to solve new problems. We
evaluate LEMMA on two mathematical reasoning tasks--equation solving and
fraction simplification--in a step-by-step fashion. In these two domains, LEMMA
improves the ability of an existing agent, both solving more problems and
generalizing more effectively to harder problems than those seen during
training.


  Integrated development environments (IDEs) are prevalent code-writing and
debugging tools. However, they have yet to be widely adopted for launching
machine learning (ML) experiments. This work aims to fill this gap by
introducing JetTrain, an IDE-integrated tool that delegates specific tasks from
an IDE to remote computational resources. A user can write and debug code
locally and then seamlessly run it remotely using on-demand hardware. We argue
that this approach can lower the entry barrier for ML training problems and
increase experiment throughput.


  A model of particle production is developed based on a parallel with a theory
of Bose-Einstein condensation and similarities with other critical phenomena
such as critical opalescence. The role of a power law critical exponent tau and
Levy index alpha are studied. Various features of this model are developed and
compared with other commonly used models of particle production which are shown
to differ by having different values for tau, alpha. While void scaling is a
feature of this model, hierarchical structure is not a general property of it.
The value of the exponent tau=2 is a transition point associated with void and
hierarchical scaling features. An exponent gamma is introduced to describe
enhanced fluctuations near a critical point. Experimentally determined
properties of the void scaling function can be used to determine tau.


  Based on the space-time duality of light, we numerically demonstrate that
temporal dispersion grating couplers can generate from a single pulse an array
of replicas of equal amplitude. The phase-only profile of the temporal grating
is optimized by a genetic algorithm that takes into account the optoelectronic
bandwidth limitations of the setup.


  String geometry theory is one of the candidates of the non-perturbative
formulation of string theory. In this paper, from the string geometry theory,
we derive path-integrals of perturbative superstrings on all the string
backgrounds, $G_{\mu\nu}(x)$ and $B_{\mu\nu}(x)$, by considering fluctuations
around the string background configurations, which are parametrized by the
string backgrounds.


  We investigate the noise properties of a superconducting single electron
transistor (SSET) coupled to an harmonically driven resonator. Using a Langevin
equation approach, we calculate the frequency spectrum of the SSET charge and
calculate its effect on the resonator field. We find that the heights of the
peaks in the frequency spectra depend sensitively on the amplitude of the
resonator oscillation and hence suggest that the heights of these peaks could
act as a sensitive signal for detecting the small changes in the amplitude of
the drive. The previously known results for the effective amplitude-dependent
damping and temperature provided by the SSET for the case of a low frequency
resonator are generalized for all resonator frequencies.


  This work considers the effect of averaging, and more generally
extrapolation, of the iterates of gradient descent in smooth convex
optimization. After running the method, rather than reporting the final
iterate, one can report either a convex combination of the iterates (averaging)
or a generic combination of the iterates (extrapolation). For several common
stepsize sequences, including recently developed accelerated periodically long
stepsize schemes, we show averaging cannot improve gradient descent's
worst-case performance and is, in fact, strictly worse than simply returning
the last iterate. In contrast, we prove a conceptually simple and
computationally cheap extrapolation scheme strictly improves the worst-case
convergence rate: when initialized at the origin, reporting
$(1+1/\sqrt{16N\log(N)})x_N$ rather than $x_N$ improves the best possible
worst-case performance by the same amount as conducting $O(\sqrt{N/\log(N)})$
more gradient steps. Our analysis and characterizations of the best-possible
convergence guarantees are computer-aided, using performance estimation
problems. Numerically, we find similar (small) benefits from such simple
extrapolation for a range of gradient methods.


  A double exchange model with quenched disorder for conduction electrons is
studied by field theoretical methods. By using a path integral formalism and
replica techniques based on it, an ensemble-averaged spin wave dispersion of
the localized spins is derived. It is shown that the spectrum of the spin wave
has gaps at the multiple of the Fermi wavenumber of the conduction electrons in
the presence of disorder, and hence, quenched disorder for electrons adds a
striking effect to the dynamics of the localized spins. In the strong disorder
limit, the present results suggest spin-glass like behavior due to the
frustration of the exchange coupling.


  We have performed deep imaging in the IR J- and K-bands for three sub-samples
of radio sources extracted from the Westerbork Northern Sky Survey, a large
low-frequency radio survey containing Ultra Steep Spectrum (USS), Gigahertz
Peaked Spectrum (GPS) and Flat Spectrum (FS) sources. We present the results of
these IR observations, carried out with the ARcetri Near Infrared CAmera
(ARNICA) at the Nordic Optical Telescope (NOT), providing photometric and
morphologic information on high redshift radio galaxies and quasars. We find
that the radio galaxies contained in our sample do not show the pronounced
radio/IR alignment claimed for 3CR sources. IR photometric measurements of the
gravitational lens system 1600+434 are also presented.


  We discuss the emission of gravitational radiation produced in encounters of
dark matter galactic halos. To this aim we perform a number of numerical
simulations of typical galaxy mergers, computing the associated gravitational
radiation waveforms as well as the energy released in the processes. Our
simulations yield dimensionless gravitational wave amplitudes of the order of
$10^{-13}$ and gravitational wave frequencies of the order of $10^{-16}$ Hz,
when the galaxies are located at a distance of 10 Mpc. These values are of the
same order as those arising in the gravitational radiation originated by strong
variations of the gravitational field in the early Universe, and therefore,
such gravitational waves cannot be directly observed by ground-based detectors.
We discuss the feasibility of an indirect detection by means of the B-mode
polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) induced by such waves.
Our results show that the gravitational waves from encounters of dark matter
galactic halos leave much too small an imprint on the CMB polarization to be
actually observed with ongoing and future missions.


  We derive the effective angular momentum operator to $1/m^2$ and one-loop
order in non-relativistic quantum electrodynamics (NRQED). In both dimensional
and three-momentum-cutoff regularization schemes, we obtain the
non-relativistic expansion for the spin and orbital angular momentum operators
of the electron and photon, respectively. Our result is useful in precision
calculations of the angular momentum properties for non-relativistic QED bound
states, such as atom systems.


  Eccentric gaseous discs are unstable to a parametric instability involving
the resonant interaction between inertial-gravity waves and the eccentric mode
in the disc. We present 3D global hydrodynamical simulations of inviscid
circumbinary discs that form an inner cavity and become eccentric through
interaction with the central binary. The parametric instability grows and
generates turbulence that transports angular momentum with stress parameter
$\alpha \sim 5 \times 10^{-3}$ at distances $\lesssim 7 \;a_{bin} $, where
$a_{bin}$ is the binary semi-major axis. Vertical turbulent diffusion occurs at
a rate corresponding to $\alpha_{diff}\sim 1-2\times 10^{-3}$. We examine the
impact of turbulent diffusion on the vertical settling of pebbles, and on the
rate of pebble accretion by embedded planets. In steady state, dust particles
with Stokes numbers ${\it St} \lesssim 0.1$ form a layer of finite thickness
$H_d \gtrsim 0.1 H$, where $H$ is the gas scale height. Pebble accretion
efficiency is then reduced by a factor $r_{acc}/H_d$, where $r_{acc}$ is the
accretion radius, compared to the rate in a laminar disc. For accreting core
masses with $m_p \lesssim 0.1\; M_\oplus$, pebble accretion for particles with
${\it St} \gtrsim 0.5$ is also reduced because of velocity kicks induced by the
turbulence. These effects combine to make the time needed by a Ceres-mass
object to grow to the pebble isolation mass, when significant gas accretion can
occur, longer than typical disc lifetimes. Hence, the origins of circumbinary
planets orbiting close to their central binary systems, as discovered by the
Kepler mission, are difficult to explain using an in situ model that invokes a
combination of the streaming instability and pebble accretion.


  We investigate the use of non-overlapping domain decomposition (DD) methods
for nonlinear structure problems. The classic techniques would combine a global
Newton solver with a linear DD solver for the tangent systems. We propose a
framework where we can swap Newton and DD, so that we solve independent
nonlinear problems for each substructure and linear condensed interface
problems. The objective is to decrease the number of communications between
subdomains and to improve parallelism. Depending on the interface condition, we
derive several formulations which are not equivalent, contrarily to the linear
case. Primal, dual and mixed variants are described and assessed on a simple
plasticity problem.


  We combine the parametric Barvinok algorithm with a generation algorithm for
a finite list of suitably chosen discrete sub-cases on the enumeration of
complete simple games, i.e. a special subclass of monotone Boolean functions.
Recently, Freixas et al. have proven an enumeration formula for complete simple
games with two types of voters. We will provide a shorter proof and an
enumeration formula for complete simple games with two shift-minimal winning
coalitions.