  The scale dependence of the evolution of photoproduction cross sections with
the photon-proton centre of mass energy W is studied using low Q^2 < 0.01 GeV^2
e^+p interactions collected by the H1 experiment at HERA. The value of the
largest transverse momentum of a charged particle in the photon fragmentation
region is used to define the hard scale. The slope of the $W$ dependence of the
cross section is observed to increase steeply with increasing transverse
momentum. The result is compared to measurements of the Q^2 evolution of the W
dependence of the virtual photon-proton cross section. Interpretations in terms
of QCD and in terms of Regge phenomenology are discussed.


  The CDF experiment reported a lepton photon missing transverse energy (E_T)
signal 3 sigma in excess of the Standard Model prediction in Tevatron Run I
data. The excess can be explained by the resonant production of a smuon, which
subsequently decays to a muon, a photon and a gravitino. Here, we perform
combined fits of this model to the CDF gamma lepton missing E_T excess, the D0
measurement of the same channel and the CDF photon missing E_T channel.
Although the rates of the latter two analyses are in agreement with the
Standard Model prediction, our model is in good agreement with these data
because their signal to background efficiency is low at the best-fit point.
However, they help to constrain the model away from the best fit point.


  A skier's motion was analyzed by a simple model consist of point mass $m$ and
a single rod connected to a single ski plate. We studied the conditions for the
stable ski turn as functions of the linear velocity and the radius of the turn.
The solutions for the stable ski turn in our model do not require any extra
skier's movement to complete a stable circular turn. The solution may then give
the skier the most comfortable skiing method without any active movement to
control the ski. The generalized force supporting the point mass from the ski
plate was calculated. We obtained the force from the ground (rebound force)
without any geometrical structure of the ski plate. Adding an active movement
to the direction of the ski plate, the conditions for the stable ski turn were
also analyzed. Our result gives some insight for the skier who wants to develop
technique.


  We investigate the asymptotic behavior of several variants of the scan
statistic applied to empirical distributions, which can be applied to detect
the presence of an anomalous interval with any length. Of particular interest
is Studentized scan statistic that is preferable in practice. The main
ingredients in the proof are Kolmogorov's theorem, a Poisson approximation, and
recent technical results by Kabluchko et al (2014).


  We provide a rigorous analysis of the quantum optimal control problem in the
setting of a linear combination $s(t)B+(1-s(t))C$ of two noncommuting
Hamiltonians $B$ and $C$. This includes both quantum annealing (QA) and the
quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA). The target is to minimize
the energy of the final ``problem'' Hamiltonian $C$, for a time-dependent and
bounded control schedule $s(t)\in [0,1]$ and $t\in \mc{I}:= [0,t_f]$. It was
recently shown, in a purely closed system setting, that the optimal solution to
this problem is a ``bang-anneal-bang'' schedule, with the bangs characterized
by $s(t)= 0$ and $s(t)= 1$ in finite subintervals of $\mc{I}$, in particular
$s(0)=0$ and $s(t_f)=1$, in contrast to the standard prescription $s(0)=1$ and
$s(t_f)=0$ of quantum annealing. Here we extend this result to the open system
setting, where the system is described by a density matrix rather than a pure
state. This is the natural setting for experimental realizations of QA and
QAOA. For finite-dimensional environments and without any approximations we
identify sufficient conditions ensuring that either the bang-anneal,
anneal-bang, or bang-anneal-bang schedules are optimal, and recover the
optimality of $s(0)=0$ and $s(t_f)=1$. However, for infinite-dimensional
environments and a system described by an adiabatic Redfield master equation we
do not recover the bang-type optimal solution. In fact we can only identify
conditions under which $s(t_f)=1$, and even this result is not recovered in the
fully Markovian limit. The analysis, which we carry out entirely within the
geometric framework of Pontryagin Maximum Principle, simplifies using the
density matrix formulation compared to the state vector formulation.


  Presence-only data, point locations where a species has been recorded as
being present, are often used in modeling the distribution of a species as a
function of a set of explanatory variables---whether to map species occurrence,
to understand its association with the environment, or to predict its response
to environmental change. Currently, ecologists most commonly analyze
presence-only data by adding randomly chosen "pseudo-absences" to the data such
that it can be analyzed using logistic regression, an approach which has
weaknesses in model specification, in interpretation, and in implementation. To
address these issues, we propose Poisson point process modeling of the
intensity of presences. We also derive a link between the proposed approach and
logistic regression---specifically, we show that as the number of
pseudo-absences increases (in a regular or uniform random arrangement),
logistic regression slope parameters and their standard errors converge to
those of the corresponding Poisson point process model. We discuss the
practical implications of these results. In particular, point process modeling
offers a framework for choice of the number and location of pseudo-absences,
both of which are currently chosen by ad hoc and sometimes ineffective methods
in ecology, a point which we illustrate by example.


  We show that a skew category algebra can be embedded into a twisted tensor
product algebra. We investigate the extension of some concepts of Puig and
Turull from group algebras to category algebras and their behavior with respect
to skew category algebras.


  Experimental studies of synthetic quantum matter are necessarily restricted
to approximate ground states prepared on finite-size quantum simulators. In
general, this limits their reliability for strongly correlated systems, for
instance, in the vicinity of a quantum phase transition (QPT). Here, we propose
a protocol that makes optimal use of a given finite-size simulator by directly
preparing, on its bulk region, a mixed state representing the reduced density
operator of the translation-invariant infinite-sized system of interest. This
protocol is based on coherent evolution with a local deformation of the system
Hamiltonian. For systems of free fermions in one and two spatial dimensions, we
illustrate and explain the underlying physics, which consists of quasi-particle
transport towards the system's boundaries while retaining the bulk "vacuum".
For the example of a non-integrable extended Su-Schrieffer-Heeger model, we
demonstrate that our protocol enables a more accurate study of QPTs. In
addition, we demonstrate the protocol for an interacting spinful Fermi-Hubbard
model with doping for 1D chains and a small two-leg ladder, where the initial
state is a random superposition of energetically low-lying states.


  Narrow-line Seyfert 1 galaxies (NLS1s) is one of the few classes of active
galactic nuclei (AGN) harboring powerful relativistic jets and detected in
$\gamma$ rays. NLS1s are well-known X-ray sources. While in non-jetted sources
the origin of this X-ray emission may be a hot corona surrounding the accretion
disk, in jetted objects, especially beamed ones, the contribution of corona and
relativistic jet is difficult to disentangle without a proper sampling of the
hard X-ray emission. For this reason, we observed with \textit{NuSTAR} the
first four NLS1s detected at high energy $\gamma$ rays. These data, along with
\textit{XMM-Newton} and \textit{Swift/XRT} observations, confirmed that X rays
originate both in the jet and in the accretion disk corona. Time variability in
hard X rays furthermore suggests that, as observed in flat-spectrum radio
quasars, the dissipation region during flares could change its position from
source to source, and it can be located both inside and outside the broad-line
region. We find that jetted NLS1s, and other blazars as well, seem not to
follow the classical fundamental plane of black hole activity, which therefore
should be used as a black hole mass estimator in blazars with extreme care
only. Our results strengthen the idea according to which $\gamma$-NLS1s are
smaller and younger version of flat-spectrum radio quasars, in which both a
Seyfert and a blazar component co-exist.


  Measurements of the electrical response of granular Sn-Ge thin films below
the superconducting transition temperature are reported. The addition of an
external noise to the magnetic field applied to the sample is found to increase
the sample voltage response to a small externally applied ac signal. The gain
coefficient for this signal and the signal-to-noise ratio display clear maxima
at particular noise levels. We interpret these observations as a stochastic
resonance in the percolative Josephson media which occurs close to the
percolation threshold.


  We prove the existence of a large class of asymptotically flat initial data
with non-vanishing mass and angular momentum for which the metric and the
extrinsic curvature have asymptotic expansions at space-like infinity in terms
of powers of a radial coordinate.


  The Quark--Meson--Coupling (QMC) model self-consistently relates the dynamics
of the internal quark structure of a hadron to the relativistic mean fields
arising in nuclear matter. It offers a natural explanation to some open
questions in nuclear theory, including the origin of many-body nuclear forces
and their saturation, the spin-orbit interaction and properties of hadronic
matter at a wide range of densities. The QMC energy density functionals QMC-I
and QMC$\pi$-I have been successfully applied to calculate ground state
observables of finite nuclei in the Hartree-Fock + BCS approximation, as well
as to predict properties of dense nuclear matter and cold non-rotating neutron
stars. Here we report the latest development of the model, QMC$\pi$-II,
extended to include higher order self-interaction of the $\sigma$ meson. A
derivative-free optimization algorithm has been employed to determine a new set
of the model parameters and their statistics, including errors and
correlations. QMC$\pi$-II predictions for a wide range of properties of
even-even nuclei across the nuclear chart, with fewer adjustable parameters,
are comparable with other models. Predictions of ground state binding energies
of even-even isotopes of superheavy elements with Z$>$96 are particularly
encouraging.


  In the framework of cavity QED, we propose a quantum repeater scheme that
uses coherent light and chains of atoms coupled to optical cavities. In
contrast to conventional repeater schemes, we avoid the usage of two-qubit
quantum logical gates by exploiting solely the cavity QED evolution. In our
previous paper [D. Gonta and P. van Loock: Phys. Rev. A 88, 052308 (2013)], we
already proposed a quantum repeater in which the entanglement between two
neighboring repeater nodes was distributed using controlled displacements of
input coherent light, while the produced low-fidelity entangled pairs were
purified using ancillary (four-partite) entangled states. In this paper, the
entanglement distribution is realized using a sequence of controlled phase
shifts and displacements of input coherent light. Compared to previous
coherent-state-based distribution schemes for two-qubit entanglement, the
present scheme relies only upon a simple discrimination of two coherent states
with opposite signs, which can be performed in a quantum mechanically optimal
fashion via a beam splitter and two on-off detectors. The entanglement
purification utilizes a scheme that avoids the usage of ancillary entangled
resources. Our repeater scheme exhibits reasonable fidelities and repeater
rates providing an attractive platform for long-distance quantum communication.


  We show how to derive new instances of the cyclic sieving phenomenon from old
ones via elementary representation theory. Examples are given involving objects
such as words, parking functions, finite fields, and graphs.


  There are various quantum chemical approaches for an ab initio description of
transfer integrals within the framework of Marcus theory in the context of
electron transfer reactions. In our article we aim to calculate transfer
integrals in redox-active single molecule junctions, where we focus on the
coherent tunneling limit with the metal leads taking the position of donor and
acceptor and the molecule acting as a transport mediating bridge. This setup
allows us to derive a conductance, which can be directly compared with recent
results from a non-equilibrium Green's function approach. Compared with purely
molecular systems we face additional challenges due to the metallic nature of
the leads, which rules out some of the common techniques, and due to their
periodicity, which requires {\bf k} space integration. We present three
different methods, all based on density functional theory, for calculating the
transfer integral under these constraints, which we benchmark on molecular test
systems from the relevant literature. We also discuss manybody effects and
apply all three techniques to a junction with a Ruthenium complex in different
oxidation states.


  Quantization has become a popular technique to compress neural networks and
reduce compute cost, but most prior work focuses on studying quantization
without changing the network size. Many real-world applications of neural
networks have compute cost and memory budgets, which can be traded off with
model quality by changing the number of parameters. In this work, we use ResNet
as a case study to systematically investigate the effects of quantization on
inference compute cost-quality tradeoff curves. Our results suggest that for
each bfloat16 ResNet model, there are quantized models with lower cost and
higher accuracy; in other words, the bfloat16 compute cost-quality tradeoff
curve is Pareto-dominated by the 4-bit and 8-bit curves, with models primarily
quantized to 4-bit yielding the best Pareto curve. Furthermore, we achieve
state-of-the-art results on ImageNet for 4-bit ResNet-50 with
quantization-aware training, obtaining a top-1 eval accuracy of 77.09%. We
demonstrate the regularizing effect of quantization by measuring the
generalization gap. The quantization method we used is optimized for
practicality: It requires little tuning and is designed with hardware
capabilities in mind. Our work motivates further research into optimal numeric
formats for quantization, as well as the development of machine learning
accelerators supporting these formats. As part of this work, we contribute a
quantization library written in JAX, which is open-sourced at
https://github.com/google-research/google-research/tree/master/aqt.


  We begin the search for extremely-low mass ($M\leq0.3M_{\odot}$, ELM) white
dwarfs (WDs) in the southern sky based on photometry from the VST ATLAS and
SkyMapper surveys. We use a similar color-selection method as the Hypervelocity
star survey. We switched to an astrometric selection once Gaia Data Release 2
became available. We use the previously known sample of ELM white dwarfs to
demonstrate that these objects occupy a unique parameter space in parallax and
magnitude. We use the SOAR 4.1m telescope to test the Gaia-based selection, and
identify more than two dozen low-mass white dwarfs, including 6 new ELM white
dwarf binaries with periods as short as 2 h. The better efficiency of the
Gaia-based selection enables us to extend the ELM Survey footprint to the
southern sky. We confirm one of our candidates, J0500$-$0930, to become the
brightest ($G=12.6$ mag) and closest ($d=72$ pc) ELM white dwarf binary
currently known. Remarkably, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS)
full-frame imaging data on this system reveals low-level ($<0.1$%) but
significant variability at the orbital period of this system ($P=9.5$ h),
likely from the relativistic beaming effect. TESS data on another system,
J0642$-$5605, reveals ellipsoidal variations due to a tidally distorted ELM WD.
These demonstrate the power of TESS full-frame images in confirming the orbital
periods of relatively bright compact object binaries.


  Let R be a ring and let B be a commutative ring. Let p be a homogeneous
multiplicative polynomial law of degree n from R to B. We show that p is
essentially a determinant, in the sense that p is obtained from a determinant
by left and right composition with ring homomorphisms.


  In this paper we outline an approach to calculus over quasitriangular Hopf
algebras. We study differential operators in the framework of monoidal
categories equipped with a braiding or symmetry. To be more concrete, we choose
as an example the category of modules over quasitriangular Hopf algebra. We
introduce braided differential operators in a pure algebraic manner.This gives
us a possibility to develop calculus in an intrinsic way without enforcing any
type of Leibniz rule. A general notion of quantization in monoidal categories,
proposed in this paper, is a natural isomorphism of the tensor product
bifunctor equipped with some natural coherence conditions. The quantization
"deforms" all algebraic and differential objects in the monoidal category. We
suggest two ways for calculation of quantizations. One of them reduces the
calculation to non-linear cohomologies. THe other describes quantizations in
terms of multiplicative Hochschild cohomologies of the Grothendieck ring of the
given monoidal category. These constructions are illustrated by some examples.


  Two important aspects of the Internet, namely the properties of its topology
and the characteristics of its data traffic, have attracted growing attention
of the physics community. My thesis has considered problems of both aspects.
First I studied the stochastic behavior of TCP, the primary algorithm governing
traffic in the current Internet, in an elementary network scenario consisting
of a standalone infinite-sized buffer and an access link. The effect of the
fast recovery and fast retransmission (FR/FR) algorithms is also considered. I
showed that my model can be extended further to involve the effect of link
propagation delay, characteristic of WAN. I continued my thesis with the
investigation of finite-sized semi-bottleneck buffers, where packets can be
dropped not only at the link, but also at the buffer. I demonstrated that the
behavior of the system depends only on a certain combination of the parameters.
Moreover, an analytic formula was derived that gives the ratio of packet loss
rate at the buffer to the total packet loss rate. This formula makes it
possible to treat buffer-losses as if they were link-losses. Finally, I studied
computer networks from a structural perspective. I demonstrated through fluid
simulations that the distribution of resources, specifically the link
bandwidth, has a serious impact on the global performance of the network. Then
I analyzed the distribution of edge betweenness in a growing scale-free tree
under the condition that a local property, the in-degree of the "younger" node
of an arbitrary edge, is known in order to find an optimum distribution of link
capacity. The derived formula is exact even for finite-sized networks. I also
calculated the conditional expectation of edge betweenness, rescaled for
infinite networks.


  Coherence simplices are generic topological correlation-function defects
supported by a hierarchy of coherence functions. We classify coherence
simplices based on their topology and discuss their structure and dynamics,
together with their relevance to several physical systems.


  Inadequacies in the knowledge of the primary beam response of current
interferometric arrays often form a limitation to the image fidelity. We hope
to overcome these limitations by constructing a frequency-resolved,
full-polarization empirical model for the primary beam of the Westerbork
Synthesis Radio Telescope (WSRT). Holographic observations, sampling angular
scales between about 5 arcmin and 11 degrees, were obtained of a bright compact
source (3C147). These permitted measurement of voltage response patterns for
seven of the fourteen telescopes in the array and allowed calculation of the
mean cross-correlated power beam. Good sampling of the main-lobe, near-in, and
far-side-lobes out to a radius of more than 5 degrees was obtained. A robust
empirical beam model was detemined in all polarization products and at
frequencies between 1322 and 1457 MHz with 1 MHz resolution. Substantial
departures from axi-symmetry are apparent in the main-lobe as well as
systematic differences between the polarization properties. Surprisingly, many
beam properties are modulated at the 5 to 10% level with changing frequency.
These include: (1) the main beam area, (2) the side-lobe to main-lobe power
ratio, and (3) the effective telescope aperture. These semi-sinusoidsal
modulations have a basic period of about 17 MHz, consistent with the natural
'standing wave' period of a 8.75 m focal distance. The deduced frequency
modulations of the beam pattern were verified in an independent long duration
observation using compact continuum sources at very large off-axis distances.
Application of our frequency-resolved beam model should enable higher dynamic
range and improved image fidelity for interferometric observations in complex
fields. (abridged)


  We investigate the visual cross-embodiment imitation setting, in which agents
learn policies from videos of other agents (such as humans) demonstrating the
same task, but with stark differences in their embodiments -- shape, actions,
end-effector dynamics, etc. In this work, we demonstrate that it is possible to
automatically discover and learn vision-based reward functions from
cross-embodiment demonstration videos that are robust to these differences.
Specifically, we present a self-supervised method for Cross-embodiment Inverse
Reinforcement Learning (XIRL) that leverages temporal cycle-consistency
constraints to learn deep visual embeddings that capture task progression from
offline videos of demonstrations across multiple expert agents, each performing
the same task differently due to embodiment differences. Prior to our work,
producing rewards from self-supervised embeddings typically required alignment
with a reference trajectory, which may be difficult to acquire under stark
embodiment differences. We show empirically that if the embeddings are aware of
task progress, simply taking the negative distance between the current state
and goal state in the learned embedding space is useful as a reward for
training policies with reinforcement learning. We find our learned reward
function not only works for embodiments seen during training, but also
generalizes to entirely new embodiments. Additionally, when transferring
real-world human demonstrations to a simulated robot, we find that XIRL is more
sample efficient than current best methods. Qualitative results, code, and
datasets are available at https://x-irl.github.io


  We present the first generative adversarial network (GAN) for natural image
matting. Our novel generator network is trained to predict visually appealing
alphas with the addition of the adversarial loss from the discriminator that is
trained to classify well-composited images. Further, we improve existing
encoder-decoder architectures to better deal with the spatial localization
issues inherited in convolutional neural networks (CNN) by using dilated
convolutions to capture global context information without downscaling feature
maps and losing spatial information. We present state-of-the-art results on the
alphamatting online benchmark for the gradient error and give comparable
results in others. Our method is particularly well suited for fine structures
like hair, which is of great importance in practical matting applications, e.g.
in film/TV production.


  We show that if a link J in the 3-sphere is homotopy ribbon concordant to a
link L then the Alexander polynomial of L divides the Alexander polynomial of
J.


  The Gaussian Free Field (GFF) is a canonical random surface in probability
theory generalizing Brownian motion to higher dimensions. In two dimensions, it
is critical in several senses, and is expected to be the universal scaling
limit of a host of random surface models in statistical physics. It also arises
naturally as the stationary solution to the stochastic heat equation with
additive noise. Focusing on the dynamical aspects of the corresponding
universality class, we study the mixing time, i.e., the rate of convergence to
stationarity, for the canonical prelimiting object, namely the discrete
Gaussian free field (DGFF), evolving along the (heat-bath) Glauber dynamics.
While there have been significant breakthroughs made in the study of cutoff for
Glauber dynamics of random curves, analogous sharp mixing bounds for random
surface evolutions have remained elusive. In this direction, we establish that
on a box of side-length $n$ in $\mathbb Z^2$, when started out of equilibrium,
the Glauber dynamics for the DGFF exhibit cutoff at time $\frac{2}{\pi^2}n^2
\log n$.


  Zintl phases are excellent thermoelectric prospects to put the waste heat to
good use. In the quest of the same, using first-principles methods combined
with Boltzmann transport theory, we explored two recent phases NaSrSb and
NaBaSb. We found low lattice thermal conductivity of 1.9 and 1.3 W m$^{-1}$
K$^{-1}$ at 300~K for NaSrSb and NaBaSb, respectively, which are of the same
order as other potential Zintl phases such as Sr$_3$AlSb$_3$ and BaCuSb. We
account for such low values to short phonon lifetimes, small phonon group
velocities, and lattice anharmonicity in the crystal structure. The calculated
electrical transport parameters based on acoustic deformation potential,
ionized impurity, and polar optical phonon scattering mechanisms reveal large
Seebeck coefficients for both materials. Further, we obtain a high figure of
merit of ZT$\sim$2.0 at 900~K for \textit{n}-type NaSrSb. On the other hand,
the figure of merit of \textit{n}-type NaBaSb surpasses the unity. We are
optimistic about our findings and believe our work would set a basis for future
experimental investigations.


  Was the primordial universe magnetized? The answer to this question would
help explain the origin of micro-Gauss strength magnetic fields observed in
galaxies. It is also of fundamental importance in developing a complete theory
of the early universe. While there can be other signatures of cosmological
magnetic fields, a signature in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) would
prove their primordial origin. The B-mode polarization of CMB is particularly
promising in this regard because there are relatively few other sources of
B-modes, and because the vortical modes sourced by the primordial magnetic
field (PMF) survive diffusion damping up to a small fraction of the Silk
length. At present, the Planck temperature and polarization spectra combined
with the B-mode spectrum measured by the South Pole Telescope (SPT) constrain
the PMF strength to be no more than $\sim 1$ nano-Gauss (nG). Because of the
quartic scaling of the CMB anisotropy spectra with the PMF strength, this bound
will not change by much even with the significantly better measurements of the
B-mode spectrum by the Stage III and Stage IV CMB experiments. On the other
hand, tightening the bound well below the $1$ nG threshold would rule out the
purely primordial origin (requiring no dynamo action) of galactic fields.
Considering Faraday rotation, which converts some of the E-modes into B-modes
and scales linearly with the field strength, will help to achieve this goal. As
we demonstrate, the upcoming experiments, such as SPT-3G and the Simons
Observatory, will be sensitive to fields of $\sim 0.5$ nG strength thanks to
the mode-coupling signature induced by Faraday rotation. A future Stage IV
ground based experiment or a Space Probe will be capable of probing fields
below $0.1$ nG, and would detect a scale-invariant PMF of $0.2$ nG strength
without de-lensing or subtracting the galactic rotation measure.


  We continue the study of the space $BV^\alpha(\mathbb{R}^n)$ of functions
with bounded fractional variation in $\mathbb{R}^n$ of order $\alpha\in(0,1)$
introduced in arXiv:1809.08575, by dealing with the asymptotic behaviour of the
fractional operators involved. After some technical improvements of certain
results of our previous work, we prove that the fractional $\alpha$-variation
converges to the standard De Giorgi's variation both pointwise and in the
$\Gamma$-limit sense as $\alpha\to1^-$. We also prove that the fractional
$\beta$-variation converges to the fractional $\alpha$-variation both pointwise
and in the $\Gamma$-limit sense as $\beta\to\alpha^-$ for any given
$\alpha\in(0,1)$.


  Homophily and social influence are two key concepts of social network
analysis. Distinguishing between these phenomena is difficult, and approaches
to disambiguate the two have been primarily limited to longitudinal data
analyses. In this study, we provide sufficient conditions for valid estimation
of social influence through cross-sectional data, leading to a novel
homophily-adjusted social influence model which addresses the backdoor pathway
of latent homophilic features. The oft-used network autocorrelation model (NAM)
is the special case of our proposed model with no latent homophily, suggesting
that the NAM is only valid when all homophilic attributes are observed. We
conducted an extensive simulation study to evaluate the performance of our
proposed homophily-adjusted model, comparing its results with those from the
conventional NAM. Our findings shed light on the nuanced dynamics of social
networks, presenting a valuable tool for researchers seeking to estimate the
effects of social influence while accounting for homophily. Code to implement
our approach is available at https://github.com/hanhtdpham/hanam.


  We theoretically study macroscopic entanglement between a magnetically
trapped Bose-Einstein condensate and a superconducting loop. We treat the
superconducting loop in a quantum superposition of two different flux states
coupling with the magnetic trap to generate macroscopic entanglement. The
scheme also provides a platform to investigate interferometry with an entangled
Bose Einstein condensate and to explore physics at the quantum-classical
interface.


  The radiation force on dust grains may be dynamically important in driving
turbulence and outflows in rapidly star-forming galaxies. Recent studies focus
on the highly optically-thick limit relevant to the densest ultra-luminous
galaxies and super star clusters, where reprocessed infrared photons provide
the dominant source of electromagnetic momentum. However, even among starburst
galaxies, the great majority instead lie in the so-called "single-scattering"
limit, where the system is optically-thick to the incident starlight, but
optically-thin to the re-radiated infrared. In this paper we present a
stability analysis and multidimensional radiation-hydrodynamic simulations
exploring the stability and dynamics of isothermal dusty gas columns in this
regime. We describe our algorithm for full angle-dependent radiation transport
based on the discontinuous Galerkin finite element method. For a range of
near-Eddington fluxes, we show that the medium is unstable, producing
convective-like motions in a turbulent atmosphere with a scale height
significantly inflated compared to the gas pressure scale height and
mass-weighted turbulent energy densities of $\sim 0.01-0.1$ of the midplane
radiation energy density, corresponding to mass-weighted velocity dispersions
of Mach number $\sim 0.5-2$. Extrapolation of our results to optical depths of
$10^3$ implies maximum turbulent Mach numbers of $\sim20$. Comparing our
results to galaxy-averaged observations, and subject to the approximations of
our calculations, we find that radiation pressure does not contribute
significantly to the effective supersonic pressure support in star-forming
disks, which in general are substantially sub-Eddington. We further examine the
time-averaged vertical density profiles in dynamical equilibrium and comment on
implications for radiation-pressure-driven galactic winds.


  In this paper, we characterize the saturation of four universal inequalities
in quantum information theory, including a variant version of strong
subadditivity inequality for von Neumann entropy, the coherent information
inequality, the Holevo quantity and average entropy inequalities. These results
shed new light on quantum information inequalities.


  Recently an influx of studies claim emergent cognitive abilities in large
language models (LLMs). Yet, most rely on anecdotes, overlook contamination of
training sets, or lack systematic Evaluation involving multiple tasks, control
conditions, multiple iterations, and statistical robustness tests. Here we make
two major contributions. First, we propose CogEval, a cognitive
science-inspired protocol for the systematic evaluation of cognitive capacities
in Large Language Models. The CogEval protocol can be followed for the
evaluation of various abilities. Second, here we follow CogEval to
systematically evaluate cognitive maps and planning ability across eight LLMs
(OpenAI GPT-4, GPT-3.5-turbo-175B, davinci-003-175B, Google Bard,
Cohere-xlarge-52.4B, Anthropic Claude-1-52B, LLaMA-13B, and Alpaca-7B). We base
our task prompts on human experiments, which offer both established construct
validity for evaluating planning, and are absent from LLM training sets. We
find that, while LLMs show apparent competence in a few planning tasks with
simpler structures, systematic evaluation reveals striking failure modes in
planning tasks, including hallucinations of invalid trajectories and getting
trapped in loops. These findings do not support the idea of emergent
out-of-the-box planning ability in LLMs. This could be because LLMs do not
understand the latent relational structures underlying planning problems, known
as cognitive maps, and fail at unrolling goal-directed trajectories based on
the underlying structure. Implications for application and future directions
are discussed.


  We present a self-contained proof of Uhlenbeck's decomposition theorem for
$\Omega\in L^p(\mathbb{B}^n,so(m)\otimes\Lambda^1\mathbb{R}^n)$ for $p\in
(1,n)$ with Sobolev type estimates in the case $p \in[n/2,n)$ and
Morrey-Sobolev type estimates in the case $p\in (1,n/2)$. We also prove an
analogous theorem in the case when $\Omega\in L^p( \mathbb{B}^n, TCO_{+}(m)
\otimes \Lambda^1\mathbb{R}^n)$, which corresponds to Uhlenbeck's theorem with
conformal gauge group.


  The total space of the tangent bundle of a K\"ahler manifold admits a
canonical K\"ahler structure. Parallel translation identifies the space
${\Bbb{T}}$ of oriented affine lines in ${\Bbb{R}}^3$ with the tangent bundle
of $S^2$. Thus, the round metric on $S^2$ induces a K\"ahler structure on
${\Bbb{T}}$ which turns out to have a metric of neutral signature. It is shown
that the isometry group of this metric is isomorphic to the isometry group of
the Euclidean metric on ${\Bbb{R}}^3$.
  The geodesics of this metric are either planes or helicoids in ${\Bbb{R}}^3$.
The signature of the metric induced on a surface $\Sigma$ in ${\Bbb{T}}$ is
determined by the degree of twisting of the associated line congruence in
${\Bbb{R}}^3$, and we show that, for $\Sigma$ Lagrangian, the metric is either
Lorentz or totally null. For such surfaces it is proven that the Keller-Maslov
index counts the number of isolated complex points of ${\Bbb{J}}$ inside a
closed curve on $\Sigma$.


  We propose a simple method to measure nonlinear Kerr refractive index in
mid-infrared frequency range that avoids using sophisticated infrared
detectors. Our approach is based on using a near-infrared probe beam which
interacts with a mid-IR beam via wavelength-non-degenerate cross-phase
modulation (XPM). By carefully measuring XPM-induced spectral modifications in
the probe beam and comparing the experimental data with simulation results we
extract the value for the non-degenerate Kerr index. Finally, in order to
obtain the value of degenerate mid-IR Kerr index we use the well-established
two-band formalism of Sheik-Bahae et al., which is shown to become particularly
simple in the limit of low frequencies. The proposed technique is complementary
to the conventional techniques such as z-scan and has the advantage of not
requiring any mid-infrared detectors.


  The incremental poses computed through odometry can be integrated over time
to calculate the pose of a device with respect to an initial location. The
resulting global pose may be used to formulate a second, consistency based,
loss term in a deep odometry setting. In such cases where multiple losses are
imposed on a network, the uncertainty over each output can be derived to weigh
the different loss terms in a maximum likelihood setting. However, when
imposing a constraint on the integrated transformation, due to how only
odometry is estimated at each iteration of the algorithm, there is no
information about the uncertainty associated with the global pose to weigh the
global loss term. In this paper, we associate uncertainties with the output
poses of a deep odometry network and propagate the uncertainties through each
iteration. Our goal is to use the estimated covariance matrix at each
incremental step to weigh the loss at the corresponding step while weighting
the global loss term using the compounded uncertainty. This formulation
provides an adaptive method to weigh the incremental and integrated loss terms
against each other, noting the increase in uncertainty as new estimates arrive.
We provide quantitative and qualitative analysis of pose estimates and show
that our method surpasses the accuracy of the state-of-the-art Visual Odometry
approaches. Then, uncertainty estimates are evaluated and comparisons against
fixed baselines are provided. Finally, the uncertainty values are used in a
realistic example to show the effectiveness of uncertainty quantification for
localization.


  We use numerical Monte Carlo simulation to study kinetics of deposition of
oriented superdisks, bounded by the Lame curves of the form
$|x|^{2p}+|y|^{2p}=1$, on regular planar substrate. It was recently shown that
the maximum packing density, as well as jamming density $\rho_{J}$, exhibit
discontinuous derivative at $p=0.5$, when the shape changes from convex to
concave form. By careful examination of the late-stage approach to the jamming
limit, we find that the leading term in temporal development is also
nonanalytic at $p=0.5$, and offer heuristic excluded-area arguments for this
behavior.


  A saturated D-optimal design is a {+1,-1} square matrix of given order with
maximal determinant. We search for saturated D-optimal designs of orders 19 and
37, and find that known matrices due to Smith, Cohn, Orrick and Solomon are
optimal. For order 19 we find all inequivalent saturated D-optimal designs with
maximal determinant, 2^30 x 7^2 x 17, and confirm that the three known designs
comprise a complete set. For order 37 we prove that the maximal determinant is
2^39 x 3^36, and find a sample of inequivalent saturated D-optimal designs. Our
method is an extension of that used by Orrick to resolve the previously
smallest unknown order of 15; and by Chadjipantelis, Kounias and Moyssiadis to
resolve orders 17 and 21. The method is a two-step computation which first
searches for candidate Gram matrices and then attempts to decompose them. Using
a similar method, we also find the complete spectrum of determinant values for
{+1,-1} matrices of order 13.


  In this work we focus on a natural class of population protocols whose
dynamics are modelled by the discrete version of Lotka-Volterra equations. In
such protocols, when an agent $a$ of type (species) $i$ interacts with an agent
$b$ of type (species) $j$ with $a$ as the initiator, then $b$'s type becomes
$i$ with probability $P\_{ij}$. In such an interaction, we think of $a$ as the
predator, $b$ as the prey, and the type of the prey is either converted to that
of the predator or stays as is. Such protocols capture the dynamics of some
opinion spreading models and generalize the well-known Rock-Paper-Scissors
discrete dynamics. We consider the pairwise interactions among agents that are
scheduled uniformly at random. We start by considering the convergence time and
show that any Lotka-Volterra-type protocol on an $n$-agent population converges
to some absorbing state in time polynomial in $n$, w.h.p., when any pair of
agents is allowed to interact. By contrast, when the interaction graph is a
star, even the Rock-Paper-Scissors protocol requires exponential time to
converge. We then study threshold effects exhibited by Lotka-Volterra-type
protocols with 3 and more species under interactions between any pair of
agents. We start by presenting a simple 4-type protocol in which the
probability difference of reaching the two possible absorbing states is
strongly amplified by the ratio of the initial populations of the two other
types, which are transient, but "control" convergence. We then prove that the
Rock-Paper-Scissors protocol reaches each of its three possible absorbing
states with almost equal probability, starting from any configuration
satisfying some sub-linear lower bound on the initial size of each species.
That is, Rock-Paper-Scissors is a realization of a "coin-flip consensus" in a
distributed system. Some of our techniques may be of independent value.


  We investigate the effect of spatial dispersion phenomenon on the performance
of graphene-based plasmonic devices at THz. For this purpose, two different
components, namely a phase shifter and a low-pass filter, are taken from the
literature, implemented in different graphene-based host waveguides, and
analyzed as a function of the surrounding media. In the analysis, graphene
conductivity is modeled first using the Kubo formalism and then employing a
full-$k_\rho$ model which accurately takes into account spatial dispersion. Our
study demonstrates that spatial dispersion up-shifts the frequency response of
the devices, limits their maximum tunable range, and degrades their frequency
response. Importantly, the influence of this phenomenon significantly increases
with higher permittivity values of the surrounding media, which is related to
the large impact of spatial dispersion in very slow waves. These results
confirm the necessity of accurately assessing non-local effects in the
development of practical plasmonic THz devices.


  We analyze the self-averaging properties of time-reversed solutions of the
paraxial wave equation with random coefficients, which we take to be Markovian
in the direction of propagation. This allows us to construct an approximate
martingale for the phase space Wigner transform of two wave fields. Using a
priori $L^2$-bounds available in the time-reversal setting, we prove that the
Wigner transform in the high frequency limit converges in probability to its
deterministic limit, which is the solution of a transport equation.


  The introduction and regulation of loudness in broadcasting and streaming
brought clear benefits to the audience, e.g., a level of uniformity across
programs and channels. Yet, speech loudness is frequently reported as being too
low in certain passages, which can hinder the full understanding and enjoyment
of movies and TV programs. This paper proposes expanding the set of
loudness-based measures typically used in the industry. We focus on speech
loudness, and we show that, when clean speech is not available, Deep Neural
Networks (DNNs) can be used to isolate the speech signal and so to accurately
estimate speech loudness, providing a more precise estimate compared to
speech-gated loudness. Moreover, we define critical passages, i.e., passages in
which speech is likely to be hard to understand. Critical passages are defined
based on the local Speech Loudness Deviation (SLD) and the local
Speech-to-Background Loudness Difference (SBLD), as SLD and SBLD significantly
contribute to intelligibility and listening effort. In contrast to other more
comprehensive measures of intelligibility and listening effort, SLD and SBLD
can be straightforwardly measured, are intuitive, and, most importantly, can be
easily controlled by adjusting the speech level in the mix or by enabling
personalization at the user's end. Finally, examples are provided that show how
the detection of critical passages can support the evaluation and control of
the speech signal during and after content production.


  We study axion-dilaton cosmologies derived from the low-energy string
effective action. We present the classical homogeneous
Friedmann-Robertson-Walker solutions and derive the semi-classical perturbation
spectra in the dilaton, axion and moduli fields in the pre-Big Bang scenario.
By constructing the unique S-duality invariant field perturbations for the
axion and dilaton fields we derive S-duality invariant solutions, valid when
the axion field is time-dependent as well as in a dilaton-vacuum cosmology.
Whereas the dilaton and moduli fields have steep blue perturbation spectra
(with spectral index n=4) we find that the axion spectrum depends upon the
expansion rate of the internal dimensions (0.54<n<4) which allows
scale-invariant (n=1) spectra. We note that for n<1 the metric is non-singular
in the conformal frame in which the axion is minimally coupled.


  The fundamental changes in power supply and increasing decentralization
require more active grid operation and an increased integration of ICT at all
power system actors. This trend raises complexity and increasingly leads to
interactions between primary grid operation and ICT as well as different power
system actors. For example, virtual power plants control various assets in the
distribution grid via ICT to jointly market existing flexibilities. Failures of
ICT or targeted attacks can thus have serious effects on security of supply and
system stability. This paper presents a holistic approach to providing methods
specifically for actors in the power system for prevention, detection, and
reaction to ICT attacks and failures. The focus of our measures are solutions
for ICT monitoring, systems for the detection of ICT attacks and intrusions in
the process network, and the provision of actionable guidelines as well as a
practice environment for the response to potential ICT security incidents.


  Mixed action theories with chirally symmetric valence fermions exhibit very
desirable features both at the level of the lattice calculations as well as in
the construction and implementation of the low energy mixed action effective
field theory. In this work we show that when such a mixed action effective
field theory is projected onto the valence sector, both the Lagrangian and the
extrapolation formulae become universal in form through next to leading order,
for all variants of discretization methods used for the sea fermions. Our
conclusion relies on the chiral nature of the valence quarks. The result
implies that for all sea quark methods which are in the same universality class
as QCD, the numerical values of the physical coefficients in the various mixed
action chiral Lagrangians will be the same up to lattice spacing dependent
corrections. This allows us to construct a prescription to determine the mixed
action extrapolation formulae for a large class of hadronic correlation
functions computed in partially quenched chiral perturbation theory at the
one-loop level. For specific examples, we apply this prescription to the
nucleon twist--2 matrix elements and the nucleon--nucleon system. In addition,
we determine the mixed action extrapolation formula for the neutron EDM as this
provides a nice example of a theta-dependent observable; these observables are
exceptions to our prescription.


  We report on recent progress in the acousto-electrical control of
self-assembled quantum dot and quantum post using radio frequency surface
acoustic waves (SAWs). We show that the occupancy state of these optically
active nanostructures can be controlled via the SAW-induced dissociation of
photogenerated excitons and the resulting sequential bipolar carrier injection
which strongly favors the formation of neutral excitons for quantum posts in
contrast to conventional quantum dots. We demonstrate high fidelity preparation
of the neutral biexciton which makes this approach suitable for deterministic
entangled photon pair generation. The SAW driven acoustic charge conveyance is
found to be highly efficient within the wide quantum well surrounding the
quantum posts. Finally we present the direct observation of acoustically
triggered carrier injection into remotely positioned, individual quantum posts
which is required for a low-jitter SAW-triggered single photon source.


  We present two polarization-based protocols for quantum key distribution. The
protocols encode key bits in noiseless subspaces or subsystems, and so can
function over a quantum channel subjected to an arbitrary degree of collective
noise, as occurs, for instance, due to rotation of polarizations in an optical
fiber. These protocols can be implemented using only entangled photon-pair
sources, single-photon rotations, and single-photon detectors. Thus, our
proposals offer practical and realistic alternatives to existing schemes for
quantum key distribution over optical fibers without resorting to
interferometry or two-way quantum communication, thereby circumventing,
respectively, the need for high precision timing and the threat of Trojan horse
attacks.


  In this paper, we study asynchronous federated learning (FL) in a wireless
distributed learning network (WDLN). To allow each edge device to use its local
data more efficiently via asynchronous FL, transmission scheduling in the WDLN
for asynchronous FL should be carefully determined considering system
uncertainties, such as time-varying channel and stochastic data arrivals, and
the scarce radio resources in the WDLN. To address this, we propose a metric,
called an effectivity score, which represents the amount of learning from
asynchronous FL. We then formulate an Asynchronous Learning-aware transmission
Scheduling (ALS) problem to maximize the effectivity score and develop three
ALS algorithms, called ALSA-PI, BALSA, and BALSA-PO, to solve it. If the
statistical information about the uncertainties is known, the problem can be
optimally and efficiently solved by ALSA-PI. Even if not, it can be still
optimally solved by BALSA that learns the uncertainties based on a Bayesian
approach using the state information reported from devices. BALSA-PO
suboptimally solves the problem, but it addresses a more restrictive WDLN in
practice, where the AP can observe a limited state information compared with
the information used in BALSA. We show via simulations that the models trained
by our ALS algorithms achieve performances close to that by an ideal benchmark
and outperform those by other state-of-the-art baseline scheduling algorithms
in terms of model accuracy, training loss, learning speed, and robustness of
learning. These results demonstrate that the adaptive scheduling strategy in
our ALS algorithms is effective to asynchronous FL.


  We study two conjectural identities involving roots of unity and determinants
of Hermitian matrices which have been recently proved by using the famous
eigenvector-eigenvalue identity for normal matrices. In this note, we extend
these identities to a general form by considering the class of circulant
matrices suggested by Petrov. Furthermore, we give another proof to Sun's
identities independent of the eigenvector-eigenvalue identity, where our
strategy is built upon the similarity of an unnecessarily normal matrix to a
particular one with integer eigenvalues, derived from the Fourier transform
vectors suggested by Petrov.


  In his 2006 paper, Jin proves that Kalantari's bounds on polynomial zeros,
indexed by $m \leq 2$ and called $L_m$ and $U_m$ respectively, become sharp as
$m\rightarrow\infty$. That is, given a degree $n$ polynomial $p(z)$ not
vanishing at the origin and an error tolerance $\epsilon > 0$, Jin proves that
there exists an $m$ such that $\frac{L_m}{\rho_{min}} > 1-\epsilon$, where
$\rho_{min} := \min_{\rho:p(\rho) = 0} \left|\rho\right|$. In this paper we
derive a formula that yields such an $m$, thereby constructively proving Jin's
theorem. In fact, we prove the stronger theorem that this convergence is
uniform in a sense, its rate depending only on $n$ and a few other parameters.
We also give experimental results that suggest an optimal m of (asymptotically)
$O\left(\frac{1}{\epsilon^d}\right)$ for some $d \ll 2$. A proof of these
results would show that Jin's method runs in
$O\left(\frac{n}{\epsilon^d}\right)$ time, making it efficient for isolating
polynomial zeros of high degree.


  Consistency regularization and pseudo labeling-based semi-supervised methods
perform co-training using the pseudo labels from multi-view inputs. However,
such co-training models tend to converge early to a consensus, degenerating to
the self-training ones, and produce low-confidence pseudo labels from the
perturbed inputs during training. To address these issues, we propose an
Uncertainty-guided Collaborative Mean-Teacher (UCMT) for semi-supervised
semantic segmentation with the high-confidence pseudo labels. Concretely, UCMT
consists of two main components: 1) collaborative mean-teacher (CMT) for
encouraging model disagreement and performing co-training between the
sub-networks, and 2) uncertainty-guided region mix (UMIX) for manipulating the
input images according to the uncertainty maps of CMT and facilitating CMT to
produce high-confidence pseudo labels. Combining the strengths of UMIX with
CMT, UCMT can retain model disagreement and enhance the quality of pseudo
labels for the co-training segmentation. Extensive experiments on four public
medical image datasets including 2D and 3D modalities demonstrate the
superiority of UCMT over the state-of-the-art. Code is available at:
https://github.com/Senyh/UCMT.


  In this paper, a novel technique named random subspace two-dimensional LDA
(RS-2DLDA) is developed for face recognition. This approach offers a number of
improvements over the random subspace two-dimensional PCA (RS2DPCA) framework
introduced by Nguyen et al. [5]. Firstly, the eigenvectors from 2DLDA have more
discriminative power than those from 2DPCA, resulting in higher accuracy for
the RS-2DLDA method over RS-2DPCA. Various distance metrics are evaluated, and
a weighting scheme is developed to further boost accuracy. A series of
experiments on the MORPH-II and ORL datasets are conducted to demonstrate the
effectiveness of this approach.


  We study Hawking radiation of charged fermions from accelerating and rotation
black holes with electric and magnetic charges. We calculate the tunneling
probabilities of incoming and outgoing fermionic particles and find the Hawking
temperature of these black holes. We also provide an explicit expression of the
classical action for the massive and massless particles in the background of
these black holes.


  Electron bunch compressors formed of achromat arcs have a natural advantage
over the more commonly used chicane compressors in that linearisation of the
longitudinal phase space is of the correct sign to compensate for the curvature
imprinted by rf acceleration. Here we extend the utility of arc compressors to
enable variation of the longitudinal compaction within a fixed footprint. We
also show that this variability can be achieved independently order-by-order in
momentum deviation. The technique we employ consists of additional dipoles,
leading to the advantageous property that variability can be achieved without
incurring significant penalty in terms of chromatic degradation. We show this
by comparison to an alternative system where additional quadrupoles are
utilised to enable variation of momentum compaction. Each of these alternative
approaches are being considered in the context of an upgrade of the MAX IV
linac, Sweden, to enable a soft X-ray free-electron laser (FEL) in addition to
its existing functions.


  Neural ranking models (NRMs) have attracted considerable attention in
information retrieval. Unfortunately, NRMs may inherit the adversarial
vulnerabilities of general neural networks, which might be leveraged by
black-hat search engine optimization practitioners. Recently, adversarial
attacks against NRMs have been explored in the paired attack setting,
generating an adversarial perturbation to a target document for a specific
query. In this paper, we focus on a more general type of perturbation and
introduce the topic-oriented adversarial ranking attack task against NRMs,
which aims to find an imperceptible perturbation that can promote a target
document in ranking for a group of queries with the same topic. We define both
static and dynamic settings for the task and focus on decision-based black-box
attacks. We propose a novel framework to improve topic-oriented attack
performance based on a surrogate ranking model. The attack problem is
formalized as a Markov decision process (MDP) and addressed using reinforcement
learning. Specifically, a topic-oriented reward function guides the policy to
find a successful adversarial example that can be promoted in rankings to as
many queries as possible in a group. Experimental results demonstrate that the
proposed framework can significantly outperform existing attack strategies, and
we conclude by re-iterating that there exist potential risks for applying NRMs
in the real world.


  Arguments for special emergent vacua which generate fermion and weak boson
masses are outlined. Limitations and consequences of the concept are discussed.
If confirmed the Australian dipole would give strong support to such a picture.
Preliminary support from recent DZero and CDF data is discussed and predictions
for LHC are presented.


  Versatile Video Coding (VVC) is the next generation video coding standard
expected by the end of 2020. Compared to its predecessor, VVC introduces new
coding tools to make compression more efficient at the expense of higher
computational complexity. This rises a need to design an efficient and
optimised implementation especially for embedded platforms with limited memory
and logic resources. One of the newly introduced tools in VVC is the Multiple
Transform Selection (MTS). This latter involves three Discrete Cosine Transform
(DCT)/Discrete Sine Transform (DST) types with larger and rectangular transform
blocks. In this paper, an efficient hardware implementation of all DCT/DST
transform types and sizes is proposed. The proposed design uses 32 multipliers
in a pipelined architecture which targets an ASIC platform. It consists in a
multi-standard architecture that supports the transform block of recent MPEG
standards including AVC, HEVC and VVC. The architecture is optimized and
removes unnecessary complexities found in other proposed architec-tures by
using regular multipliers instead of multiple constant multi-pliers. The
synthesized results show that the proposed method which sustain a constant
throughput of two pixels/cycle and constant la-tency for all block sizes can
reach an operational frequency of 600 Mhz enabling to decode in real-time 4K
videos at 48 fps.


  We identify 69 X-ray sources discovered by the Galactic Bulge Survey (GBS)
that are coincident with, or very close to bright stars in the Tycho-2 catalog.
Additionally, two other GBS sources are resolved binary companions to Tycho-2
stars where both components are separately detected in X-rays. Most of these
are likely to be real matches, but we identify nine objects with large and
significant X-ray to optical offsets as either detections of resolved binary
companions or chance alignments. We collate known spectral types for these
objects, and also examine 2MASS colors, variability information from the
All-Sky Automated Survey (ASAS), and X-ray hardness ratios for the brightest
objects. Nearly a third of the stars are found to be optically variable,
divided roughly evenly between irregular variations and periodic modulations.
All fall among the softest objects identified by the GBS. The sample forms a
very mixed selection, ranging in spectral class from O9 to M3. In some cases
the X-ray emission appears consistent with normal coronal emission from
late-type stars, or wind emission from early-types, but the sample also
includes one known Algol, one W UMa system, two Be stars, and several X-ray
bright objects likely to be coronally active stars or binaries. Surprisingly, a
substantial fraction of the spectroscopically classified, non-coincidental
sample (12 out of 38 objects) have late B or A type counterparts. Many of these
exhibit redder near-IR colors than expected for their spectral type and/or
variability, and it is likely that the X-rays originate from a late-type
companion star in most or all of these objects.


  The fundamental collective degree of freedom of fractional quantum Hall
states is identified as a unimodular two-dimensional spatial metric that
characterizes the local shape of the correlations of the incompressible fluid.
Its quantum fluctuations are controlled by a topologically-quantized
"guiding-center spin". Charge fluctuations are proportional to its Gaussian
curvature.


  In order to retrieve unlabeled images by textual queries, cross-media
similarity computation is a key ingredient. Although novel methods are
continuously introduced, little has been done to evaluate these methods
together with large-scale query log analysis. Consequently, how far have these
methods brought us in answering real-user queries is unclear. Given baseline
methods that compute cross-media similarity using relatively simple text/image
matching, how much progress have advanced models made is also unclear. This
paper takes a pragmatic approach to answering the two questions. Queries are
automatically categorized according to the proposed query visualness measure,
and later connected to the evaluation of multiple cross-media similarity models
on three test sets. Such a connection reveals that the success of the
state-of-the-art is mainly attributed to their good performance on
visual-oriented queries, while these queries account for only a small part of
real-user queries. To quantify the current progress, we propose a simple
text2image method, representing a novel test query by a set of images selected
from large-scale query log. Consequently, computing cross-media similarity
between the test query and a given image boils down to comparing the visual
similarity between the given image and the selected images. Image retrieval
experiments on the challenging Clickture dataset show that the proposed
text2image compares favorably to recent deep learning based alternatives.


  A general expression of the hard thermal loop gluon propagator is given for a
variety of abelian gauge fixing conditions (Coulomb gauge, axial gauge,
covariant gauge, temporal gauge ...) The current --- current interaction
energy, in particular the Coulomb energy, is shown to be independent of the
gauge fixing condition (not only of the parameter).


  Tropical algebra emerges in many fields of mathematics such as algebraic
geometry, mathematical physics and combinatorial optimization. In part, its
importance is related to the fact that it makes various parameters of
mathematical objects computationally accessible. Tropical polynomials play a
fundamental role in this, especially for the case of algebraic geometry. On the
other hand, many algebraic questions behind tropical polynomials remain open.
In this paper we address four basic questions on tropical polynomials closely
related to their computational properties:
  1. Given a polynomial with a certain support (set of monomials) and a
(finite) set of inputs, when is it possible for the polynomial to vanish on all
these inputs?
  2. A more precise question, given a polynomial with a certain support and a
(finite) set of inputs, how many roots can this polynomial have on this set of
inputs?
  3. Given an integer $k$, for which $s$ there is a set of $s$ inputs such that
any non-zero polynomial with at most $k$ monomials has a non-root among these
inputs?
  4. How many integer roots can have a one variable polynomial given by a
tropical algebraic circuit?
  In the classical algebra well-known results in the direction of these
questions are Combinatorial Nullstellensatz due to N. Alon, J. Schwartz - R.
Zippel Lemma and Universal Testing Set for sparse polynomials respectively. The
classical analog of the last question is known as $\tau$-conjecture due to M.
Shub - S. Smale. In this paper we provide results on these four questions for
tropical polynomials.


  We propose an effective approach for spatio-temporal action localization in
realistic videos. The approach first detects proposals at the frame-level and
scores them with a combination of static and motion CNN features. It then
tracks high-scoring proposals throughout the video using a
tracking-by-detection approach. Our tracker relies simultaneously on
instance-level and class-level detectors. The tracks are scored using a
spatio-temporal motion histogram, a descriptor at the track level, in
combination with the CNN features. Finally, we perform temporal localization of
the action using a sliding-window approach at the track level. We present
experimental results for spatio-temporal localization on the UCF-Sports, J-HMDB
and UCF-101 action localization datasets, where our approach outperforms the
state of the art with a margin of 15%, 7% and 12% respectively in mAP.


  We compute numerical approximations of the period integrals for eleven rigid
double octic Calabi--Yau threefolds and compare them with the periods of
corresponding weight our cusp forms and find, as to be expected,
commensurabilities. These give information on character of the correspondences
of these varieties with the associated Kuga-Sato modular threefolds.


  We report the first measurement of CNO solar neutrinos by Borexino that uses
the Correlated Integrated Directionality (CID) method, exploiting the
sub-dominant Cherenkov light in the liquid scintillator detector. The
directional information of the solar origin of the neutrinos is preserved by
the fast Cherenkov photons from the neutrino scattered electrons, and is used
to discriminate between signal and background. The directional information is
independent from the spectral information on which the previous CNO solar
neutrino measurements by Borexino were based. While the CNO spectral analysis
could only be applied on the Phase-III dataset, the directional analysis can
use the complete Borexino data taking period from 2007 to 2021. The absence of
CNO neutrinos has been rejected with >5{\sigma} credible level using the
Bayesian statistics. The directional CNO measurement is obtained without an
external constraint on the $^{210}$Bi contamination of the liquid scintillator,
which was applied in the spectral analysis approach. The final and the most
precise CNO measurement of Borexino is then obtained by combining the new
CID-based CNO result with an improved spectral fit of the Phase-III dataset.
Including the statistical and the systematic errors, the extracted CNO
interaction rate is $R(\mathrm{CNO})=6.7^{+1.2}_{-0.8} \, \mathrm{cpd/100 \,
tonnes}$. Taking into account the neutrino flavor conversion, the resulting CNO
neutrino flux at Earth is $\Phi_\mathrm{CNO}=6.7 ^{+1.2}_{-0.8} \times 10^8 \,
\mathrm{cm^{-2} s^{-1}}$, in agreement with the high metallicity Standard Solar
Models. The results described in this work reinforce the role of the event
directional information in large-scale liquid scintillator detectors and open
up new avenues for the next-generation liquid scintillator or hybrid neutrino
experiments.


  This paper aims to address few-shot segmentation. While existing
prototype-based methods have achieved considerable success, they suffer from
uncertainty and ambiguity caused by limited labeled examples. In this work, we
propose attentional prototype inference (API), a probabilistic latent variable
framework for few-shot segmentation. We define a global latent variable to
represent the prototype of each object category, which we model as a
probabilistic distribution. The probabilistic modeling of the prototype
enhances the model's generalization ability by handling the inherent
uncertainty caused by limited data and intra-class variations of objects. To
further enhance the model, we introduce a local latent variable to represent
the attention map of each query image, which enables the model to attend to
foreground objects while suppressing the background. The optimization of the
proposed model is formulated as a variational Bayesian inference problem, which
is established by amortized inference networks. We conduct extensive
experiments on four benchmarks, where our proposal obtains at least competitive
and often better performance than state-of-the-art prototype-based methods. We
also provide comprehensive analyses and ablation studies to gain insight into
the effectiveness of our method for few-shot segmentation.


  In this work we study a class of stochastic processes $\{X_t\}_{t\in\N}$,
where $X_t = (\phi \circ T_s^t)(X_0)$ is obtained from the iterations of the
transformation T_s, invariant for an ergodic probability \mu_s on [0,1] and a
continuous by part function $\phi:[0,1] \to \R$. We consider here $T_s:[0,1]\to
[0,1]$ the Manneville-Pomeau transformation. The autocorrelation function of
the resulting process decays hyperbolically (or polynomially) and we obtain
efficient methods to estimate the parameter s from a finite time series. As a
consequence we also estimate the rate of convergence of the autocorrelation
decay of these processes. We compare different estimation methods based on the
periodogram function, on the smoothed periodogram function, on the variance of
the partial sum and on the wavelet theory.


  Using first-principles density functional theory calculations, combined with
a topological analysis, we have investigated the electronic properties of
$Cd_3As_2$ and $Na_3Bi$ Dirac topological semimetals doped with non-magnetic
and magnetic impurities. Our systematic analysis shows that the selective
breaking of the inversion, rotational and time-reversal symmetry, controlled by
specific choices of the impurity doping, induces phase transitions from the
original Dirac semimetal to a variety of topological phases such as,
topological insulator, trivial semimetal, non-magnetic and magnetic Weyl
semimetal, and Chern insulator. The Dirac semimetal phase can exist only if the
rotational symmetry $C_n$ with $n > 2$ is maintained. One particularly
interesting phase emerging in doped $Cd_3As_2$ is a coexisting Dirac-Weyl
phase, which occurs when only inversion symmetry is broken while time-reversal
symmetry and rotational symmetry are both preserved. To further characterize
the low-energy excitations of this phase, we have complemented our density
functional results with a continuum four-band $k\cdot p$ model, which indeed
displays nodal points of both Dirac and Weyl type. The coexisting phase appears
as a transition point between two topologically distinct Dirac phases, but may
also survive in a small region of parameter space controlled by external
strain.


  Quality of Service (QoS) techniques are applied in IP networks to utilize
available network resources in the most efficient manner to minimize delays and
delay variations (jitters) in network traffic having multiple type of services.
Multimedia services may include voice, video and database. Researchers have
done considerable work on queuing disciplines to analyze and improve QoS
performance in wired and wireless IP networks. This paper highlights QoS
analysis in a wired IP network with more realistic enterprise modeling and
presents simulation results of a few statistics not presented and discussed
before. Four different applications are used i.e. FTP, Database, Voice over IP
(VoIP) and Video Conferencing (VC). Two major queuing disciplines are evaluated
i.e. 'Priority Queuing' and 'Weighted Fair Queuing' for packet identification
under Differentiated Services Code Point (DSCP). The simulation results show
that WFQ has an edge over PQ in terms of queuing delays and jitters experienced
by low priority services. For high priority traffic, dependency of 'Traffic
Drop', 'Buffer Usage' and 'Packet Delay Variation' on selected buffer sizes is
simulated and discussed to evaluate QoS deeper. In the end, it is also analyzed
how network's database service with applied Quality of Service may be affected
in terms of throughput (average rate of data received) for internal network
users when the server is also accessed by external user(s) through Virtual
Private Network (VPN).


  This paper presents methods to compare networks where relationships between
pairs of nodes in a given network are defined. We define such network distance
by searching for the optimal method to embed one network into another network,
prove that such distance is a valid metric in the space of networks modulo
permutation isomorphisms, and examine its relationship with other network
metrics. The network distance defined can be approximated via multi-dimensional
scaling, however, the lack of structure in networks results in poor
approximations. To alleviate such problem, we consider methods to define the
interiors of networks. We show that comparing interiors induced from a pair of
networks yields the same result as the actual network distance between the
original networks. Practical implications are explored by showing the ability
to discriminate networks generated by different models.


  This two-part article aims to introduce a quantum analogue to classical
Markov decision processes (MDPs). In Part II, building on the formulation of
q-MDPs presented in Part I, our focus shifts to the development of algorithms
for computing optimal policies and value functions of both open-loop and
closed-loop policies. First, by using the duality between the dynamic
programming and the semi-definite programming formulations of any q-MDP with
open-loop policies, we establish an algorithm that enables us to efficiently
compute optimal open-loop quantum policies and value functions. Then, dynamic
programming and semi-definite programming formulations for closed-loop policies
is established, where duality of these two formulations similarly enables the
efficient computation of optimal closed-loop policies and value functions.
Finally, given that any q-MDP can be approximated by q-MDPs with classical
policies--potentially with higher-dimensional underlying Hilbert spaces than
the original model--and since any classical policy is an element of the set of
closed-loop policies, we conclude that any q-MDP can be approximated by q-MDPs
with closed-loop policies having higher-dimensional Hilbert spaces.


  We prove that a group has word problem that is a growing context-sensitive
language precisely if its word problem can be solved using a non-deterministic
Cannon's algorithm (the deterministic algorithms being defined by Goodman and
Shapiro). We generalise their results to find many examples of groups not
admitting non-deterministic Cannon's algorithms. This adds to the examples of
Kambites and Otto of groups separating context-sensitive and growing
context-sensitive word problems, and provides a new language-theoretic
separation result.


  Transforming an initial quantum state into a target state through the fastest
possible route---a quantum brachistochrone---is a fundamental challenge for
many technologies based on quantum mechanics. Here, we demonstrate fast
coherent transport of an atomic wave packet over a distance of 15 times its
size---a paradigmatic case of quantum processes where the target state cannot
be reached through a local transformation. Our measurements of the transport
fidelity reveal the existence of a minimum duration---a quantum speed
limit---for the coherent splitting and recombination of matter waves. We obtain
physical insight into this limit by relying on a geometric interpretation of
quantum state dynamics. These results shed light upon a fundamental limit of
quantum state dynamics and are expected to find relevant applications in
quantum sensing and quantum computing.


  Optical resonance is central to a wide range of optical devices and
techniques. In an optical cavity, the round-trip length and mirror reflectivity
can be chosen to optimize the circulating optical power, linewidth, and
free-spectral range (FSR) for a given application. In this paper we show how an
atomic spinwave system, with no physical mirrors, can behave in a manner that
is analogous to an optical cavity. We demonstrate this similarity by
characterising the build-up and decay of the resonance in the time domain, and
measuring the effective optical linewidth and FSR in the frequency domain. Our
spinwave is generated in a 20 cm long Rb gas cell, yet it facilitates an
effective FSR of 83 kHz, which would require a round-trip path of 3.6 km in a
free-space optical cavity. Furthermore, the spinwave coupling is controllable
enabling dynamic tuning of the effective cavity parameters.


  A bilinear inequality of Geba, Greenleaf, Iosevich, Palsson, and Sawyer for
the Fourier transform is shown to be equivalent to a simpler linear inequality,
and the range of exponents is extended. Related mixed-norm inequalities are
discussed.


  The positive semidefinite rank of a nonnegative $(m\times n)$-matrix~$S$ is
the minimum number~$q$ such that there exist positive semidefinite $(q\times
q)$-matrices $A_1,\dots,A_m$, $B_1,\dots,B_n$ such that $S(k,\ell) =
\mbox{tr}(A_k^* B_\ell)$.
  The most important, lower bound technique for nonnegative rank is solely
based on the support of the matrix S, i.e., its zero/non-zero pattern. In this
paper, we characterize the power of lower bounds on positive semidefinite rank
based on solely on the support.


  Millimeter wave (mmWave) has great potential in realizing high data rate
thanks to the large spectral channels. It is considered as a key technology for
the fifth generation wireless networks and is already used in wireless LAN
(e.g., IEEE 802.11ad). Using mmWave for vehicular communications, however, is
often viewed with some skepticism due to a misconception that the Doppler
spread would become too large at these high frequencies. This is not true when
directional beam is employed for communications. In this paper, closed form
expressions relating the channel coherence time and beamwidth are derived.
Unlike prior work that assumed perfect beam pointing, the pointing error due to
the receiver motion is incorporated to show that there exists a non-zero
optimal beamwidth that maximizes the coherence time. To investigate the
mobility effect on the beam alignment which is an important feature in mmWave
systems, a novel concept of beam coherence time is defined. The beam coherence
time, which is an effective measure of beam alignment frequency, is shown to be
much larger than the conventional channel coherence time and thus results in
reduced beam alignment overhead. Using the derived correlation function, the
channel coherence time, and the beam coherence time, an overall performance
metric considering both the channel time-variation and the beam alignment
overhead is derived. Using this metric, it is shown that beam alignment in
every beam coherence time performs better than the beam alignment in every
channel coherence time due to the large overhead for the latter case.


  Vision Transformers (ViTs) have recently achieved competitive performance in
broad vision tasks. Unfortunately, on popular threat models, naturally trained
ViTs are shown to provide no more adversarial robustness than convolutional
neural networks (CNNs). Adversarial training is still required for ViTs to
defend against such adversarial attacks. In this paper, we provide the first
and comprehensive study on the adversarial training recipe of ViTs via
extensive evaluation of various training techniques across benchmark datasets.
We find that pre-training and SGD optimizer are necessary for ViTs' adversarial
training. Further considering ViT as a new type of model architecture, we
investigate its adversarial robustness from the perspective of its unique
architectural components. We find, when randomly masking gradients from some
attention blocks or masking perturbations on some patches during adversarial
training, the adversarial robustness of ViTs can be remarkably improved, which
may potentially open up a line of work to explore the architectural information
inside the newly designed models like ViTs. Our code is available at
https://github.com/mo666666/When-Adversarial-Training-Meets-Vision-Transformers.


  The Galactic black-hole binary GRO J1655$-$40 was observed with Suzaku on
2005 September 22--23, for a net exposure of 35 ks with the X-ray Imaging
Spectrometer (XIS) and 20 ks with the Hard X-ray Detector (HXD). The source was
detected over a broad and continuous energy range of 0.7--300 keV, with an
intensity of $\sim$50 mCrab at 20 keV. At a distance of 3.2 kpc, the 0.7--300
keV luminosity is $ \sim 5.1 \times 10^{36}$ erg s$^{-1}$ ($\sim 0.7$ % of the
Eddington luminosity for a 6 $M_{\odot}$ black hole). The source was in a
typical low/hard state, exhibiting a power-law shaped continuum with a photon
index of $\sim 1.6$. During the observation, the source intensity gradually
decreased by 25% at energies above $\sim 3$ keV, and by 35% below 2 keV. This,
together with the soft X-ray spectra taken with the XIS, suggests the presence
of an independent soft component that can be represented by emission from a
cool ($\sim 0.2$ keV) disk. The hard X-ray spectra obtained with the HXD reveal
a high-energy spectral cutoff, with an e-folding energy of $\sim 200$ keV.
Since the spectral photon index above 10 keV is harder by $\sim 0.4$ than that
observed in the softer energy band, and the e-folding energy is higher than
those of typical reflection humps, the entire 0.7--300 keV spectrum cannot be
reproduced by a single thermal Comptonization model, even considering
reflection effects. Instead, the spectrum (except the soft excess) can be
successfully explained by invoking two thermal-Comptonization components with
different $y$-parameters. In contrast to the high/soft state spectra of this
object in which narrow iron absorption lines are detected with equivalent
widths of 60--100 eV, the present XIS spectra bear no such features beyond an
upper-limit equivalent width of 25 eV.


  We present theoretical and experimental study of resonant Brillouin
scattering of excitonic polaritons in one-dimensional multiple-quantum-well
structure. We obtain general analytical results for the scattering light
spectra, valid for arbitrary quantum well arrangement. Application of our
theory to the specific case of short-period superlattice shows a perfect
quantitative agreement with experimental results for the height, width and
position of the Brillouin scattering peaks and allows us to determine the
energy, radiative and nonradiative decay rates of quantum well excitons. We
reveal the signatures of excitonic polariton formation in the scattering
spectra and show, that the spectral width and height are strongly sensitive to
the number of wells in the sample.


  In the present article we study a special class of surfaces in the
four-dimensional Euclidean space, which are one-parameter systems of meridians
of the standard rotational hypersurface. They are called meridian surfaces. We
show that a meridian surface has a harmonic Gauss map if and only if it is part
of a plane. Further, we give necessary and sufficient conditions for a meridian
surface to have pointwise 1-type Gauss map and find all meridian surfaces with
pointwise 1-type Gauss map.


  We study numerically the inertial migration of a single rigid sphere and an
oblate spheroid in straight square and rectangular ducts. A highly accurate
interface-resolved numerical algorithm is employed to analyse the entire
migration dynamics of the oblate particle and compare it with that of the
sphere. Similarly to the inertial focusing of spheres, the oblate particle
reaches one of the four face-centred equilibrium positions, however they are
vertically aligned with the axis of symmetry in the spanwise direction. In
addition, the lateral trajectories of spheres and oblates collapse into an
equilibrium manifold before ending at the equilibrium positions, with the
equilibrium manifold tangential to lines of constant background shear for both
sphere and oblate particles. The differences between the migration of the
oblate and sphere are also presented, in particular the oblate may focus on the
diagonal symmetry line of the duct cross-section, close to one of the corners,
if its diameter is larger than a certain threshold. Moreover, we show that the
final orientation and rotation of the oblate exhibit a chaotic behaviour for
Reynolds numbers beyond a critical value. Finally, we document that the lateral
motion of the oblate particle is less uniform than that of the spherical
particle due to its evident tumbling motion throughout the migration. In a
square duct, the strong tumbling motion of the oblate in the first stage of the
migration results in a lower lateral velocity and consequently longer focusing
length with respect to that of the spherical particle. The opposite is true in
a rectangular duct where the higher lateral velocity of the oblate in the
second stage of the migration, with negligible tumbling, gives rise to shorter
focusing lengths. These results can help the design of microfluidic systems for
bio-applications.


  Direct load control of a heterogeneous cluster of residential demand
flexibility sources is a high-dimensional control problem with partial
observability. This work proposes a novel approach that uses a convolutional
neural network to extract hidden state-time features to mitigate the curse of
partial observability. More specific, a convolutional neural network is used as
a function approximator to estimate the state-action value function or
Q-function in the supervised learning step of fitted Q-iteration. The approach
is evaluated in a qualitative simulation, comprising a cluster of
thermostatically controlled loads that only share their air temperature, whilst
their envelope temperature remains hidden. The simulation results show that the
presented approach is able to capture the underlying hidden features and
successfully reduce the electricity cost the cluster.


  By analyzing $e^+e^-$ annihilation data corresponding to an integrated
luminosity of $2.93\,\rm fb^{-1}$ collected at the center-of-mass energy of
3.773\,GeV with the BESIII detector, we report the first observations of the
doubly Cabibbo-suppressed decays $D^+\to K^+\pi^0\pi^0$ and $D^+\to
K^+\pi^0\eta$. The branching fractions of $D^+\to K^+\pi^0\pi^0$ and $D^+\to
K^+\pi^0\eta$ are measured to be $(2.1 \pm 0.4_{\rm stat} \pm 0.1_{\rm
syst})\times 10^{-4}$ and $(2.1 \pm 0.5_{\rm stat} \pm 0.1_{\rm syst})\times
10^{-4}$ with statistical significances of 8.8$\sigma$ and 5.5$\sigma$,
respectively. In addition, we search for the subprocesses $D^+\to
K^{*}(892)^{+}\pi^0$ and $D^+\to K^{*}(892)^{+}\eta$ with $K^{*}(892)^+\to
K^+\pi^0$. The branching fraction of $D^+\to K^{*}(892)^{+}\eta$ is determined
to be $({4.4^{+1.8}_{-1.5}}_{\rm stat}\pm0.2_{\rm syst})\times10^{-4}$, with a
statistical significance of 3.2$\sigma$. No significant signal for $D^+\to
K^{*}(892)^{+}\pi^0$ is found and we set an upper limit on the branching
fraction of this decay at the 90\% confidence level to be $5.4\times10^{-4}$.


  Plasmonic gratings of different periodicities are fabricated on top of
Silicon nanocrystals embedded in Silicon Dioxide. Purcell enhancements of up to
2 were observed, which matches the value from simulations. Plasmonic
enhancements are observed for the first three orders of the plasmonic modes,
with the peak enhancement wavelength varying with the periodicity. Biharmonic
gratings are also fabricated to extract the enhanced emission from the first
order plasmonic mode, resulting in enhancements with quality factors of up to
16.


  Given a non-archimedean real closed field with archimedean value group which
contains the reals, we establish for the category of semialgebraic sets and
functions a full Lebesgue measure and integration theory such that the main
results from the classical setting hold. The construction involves methods from
model theory, o-minimal geometry and valuation theory. We set up the
construction in such a way that it is determined by a section of the valuation.
If the value group is isomorphic to the group of rational numbers the
construction is uniquely determined up to isomorphism. The range of the measure
and integration is obtained in a controled and tame way from the real closed
field we start with. The main example is given by the case of the field of
Puiseux series where the range is the polynomial ring in one variable over this
field.


  A geometric construction for the Poincare formula for relativistic addition
of velocities in one dimension was given by Jerzy Kocik in "Geometric Diagram
for Relativistic Addition of Velocities", American Journal of Physics, volume
80, page 737, 2012. While the proof given there used Cartesian coordinate
geometry, three alternative approaches are given in this article: a
trigonometric one, one via Euclidean geometry, and one using projective
geometry.


  We present the analysis of emission lines in high-resolution optical spectra
of the planet-host star Proxima Centauri (Proxima) classified as a<EMAIL_ADDRESS>We
carry out the detailed analysis of observed spectra to get a better
understanding of the physical conditions of the atmosphere of this star. We
identify the emission lines in a serie series of 147 high-resolution optical
spectra of the star at different levels of activity and compare them with the
synthetic spectra computed over a wide spectral range. Our synthetic spectra
computed with the PHOENIX 2900/5.0/0.0 model atmosphere fits pretty well the
observed optical-to-near-infrared spectral energy distribution. However,
modelling strong atomic lines in the blue spectrum (3900--4200\AA{}) requires
implementing additional opacity. We show that high temperature layers in
Proxima Centauri consist in at least three emitting parts: a) a stellar
chromosphere where numerous emission lines form. We suggest that some emission
cores of strong absorption lines of metals form there; b) flare regions above
the chromosphere, where hydrogen Balmer lines up to high transition levels
(10--2) form; c) a stellar wind component with V${r}$\,=\,$-$30 \kmps{} seen in
some Balmer lines as blue shifted emission lines. We believe that the observed
He line at 4026\AA{} in emission can be formed in that very hot region. We
show, that real structure of the atmosphere of Proxima is rather complicated.
The photosphere of the star is best fit by a normal M5 dwarf spectrum. On the
other hand emission lines form in the chromosphere, flare regions and extended
hot envelope.


  Despite the many use cases for large language models (LLMs) in creating
personalized chatbots, there has been limited research on evaluating the extent
to which the behaviors of personalized LLMs accurately and consistently reflect
specific personality traits. We consider studying the behavior of LLM-based
agents which we refer to as LLM personas and present a case study with GPT-3.5
and GPT-4 to investigate whether LLMs can generate content that aligns with
their assigned personality profiles. To this end, we simulate distinct LLM
personas based on the Big Five personality model, have them complete the
44-item Big Five Inventory (BFI) personality test and a story writing task, and
then assess their essays with automatic and human evaluations. Results show
that LLM personas' self-reported BFI scores are consistent with their
designated personality types, with large effect sizes observed across five
traits. Additionally, LLM personas' writings have emerging representative
linguistic patterns for personality traits when compared with a human writing
corpus. Furthermore, human evaluation shows that humans can perceive some
personality traits with an accuracy of up to 80%. Interestingly, the accuracy
drops significantly when the annotators were informed of AI authorship.


  In order to analyze the instability phenomenon observed along the Northern
High Speed Line of R\'eseau Ferr\'e de France (RFF), soil blocks were taken at
a site near the railway, at four different depths (1.2, 2.2, 3.5 and 4.9 m).
Cyclic triaxial tests were carried out on saturated and unsaturated soil
specimens. The results from tests on initially saturated specimens showed that
the soil taken at 2.2 m depth has the lowest resistance to cyclic loading, in
relation to its highest porosity and lowest clay fraction. This soil was then
studied at unsaturated state with various initial water contents. Unsaturated
soil specimens were first subjected to cyclic loadings to decrease their
volume. These cyclic loadings was stopped when the volume decrease was
approximately equal to the initial pore air volume, or when the pores filled by
air were eliminated and the soil was considered to become saturated.
Afterwards, the back-pressure tubing was saturated with de-aired water and
cycles were applied under undrained condition. Significant effect of initial
water content was evidenced: the lower the initial water content, the higher
the cyclic resistance. This can be explained by the densification of the soil
during the initial cyclic loadings.


  We consider the long-time behaviour of spherically symmetric solutions in the
Einstein-Skyrme model. Using nonlinear perturbation analysis we obtain the
leading order estimation of the tail in the topologically trivial sector (B =
0) of the model. We show that solutions starting from small compactly supported
initial data decay as 1/t^4 at future timelike infinity and as 1/u^2 at future
null infinity. We also verified that long-time behaviour for the tail in
Einstein-Skyrme model is exactly the same as it was obtained for wave maps.


  This study introduces a novel mechanistic modeling and statistical framework
for analyzing motion energy dynamics within psychotherapy sessions. We
transform raw motion energy data into an interpretable narrative of
therapist-patient interactions, thereby revealing unique insights into the
nature of these dynamics. Our methodology is established through three detailed
case studies, each shedding light on the complexities of dyadic interactions. A
key component of our approach is an analysis spanning four years of one
therapist's sessions, allowing us to distinguish between trait-like and
state-like dynamics. This research represents a significant advancement in the
quantitative understanding of motion dynamics in psychotherapy, with the
potential to substantially influence both future research and therapeutic
practice.


  We have developed a model to describe the interactions of neutrinos with
nucleons and nuclei via charged and neutral currents, focusing on the region of
the quasielastic and Delta(1232) peaks. For neutrino nucleon collisions a fully
relativistic formalism is used. The extension to finite nuclei has been done in
the framework of a coupled-channel BUU transport model where we have studied
exclusive channels taking into account in-medium effects and final state
interactions.


  Millimeter-wave (mmWave) band (30 - 300 GHz) is an emerging spectrum range
for wireless communication, short-range radar and sensor applications.
mmWave-optic modulators that could efficiently convert mmWave signals into
optical domain are crucial components for long-haul transmission of mmWave
signals through optical networks. At these ultrahigh frequencies, however, the
modulation performances are highly sensitive to the transmission line loss as
well as the velocity- and impedance-matching conditions, while precise
measurements and modeling of these parameters are often non-trivial. Here we
present a systematic investigation of the mmWave-optic modulation performances
of thin-film lithium niobate modulators through theoretical modeling,
electrical verifications and electro-optic measurements at frequencies up to
325 GHz. Based on our experimentally verified model, we demonstrate thin-film
lithium niobate mmWave-optic modulators with a measured 3-dB electro-optic
bandwidth of 170 GHz and a 6-dB bandwidth of 295 GHz. The device also shows a
low RF half-wave voltage of 7.3 V measured at an ultrahigh modulation frequency
of 250 GHz. This work provides a comprehensive guideline for the design and
characterization of mmWave-optic modulators and paves the way toward future
integrated mmWave photonic systems for beyond-5G communication and radar
applications.


  The Bethe ansatz equation is solved to obtain analytically the leading
finite-size correction of the spectra of the asymmetric XXZ chain and the
accompanying isotropic 6-vertex model near the antiferromagnetic phase boundary
at zero vertical field. The energy gaps scale with size $N$ as $N^{-1/2}$ and
its amplitudes are obtained in terms of level-dependent scaling functions.
Exactly on the phase boundary, the amplitudes are proportional to a sum of
square-root of integers and an anomaly term. By summing over all low-lying
levels, the partition functions are obtained explicitly. Similar analysis is
performed also at the phase boundary of zero horizontal field in which case the
energy gaps scale as $N^{-2}$. The partition functions for this case are found
to be that of a nonrelativistic free fermion system. From symmetry of the
lattice model under $\pi /2$ rotation, several identities between the partition
functions are found. The $N^{-1/2}$ scaling at zero vertical field is
interpreted as a feature arising from viewing the Pokrovsky-Talapov transition
with the space and time coordinates interchanged.


  For a given Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm, we define the distance
between configurations that quantifies the difficulty of transitions. This
distance enables us to investigate MCMC algorithms in a geometrical way, and we
investigate the geometry of the simulated tempering algorithm implemented for
an extremely multimodal system with highly degenerate vacua. We show that the
large scale geometry of the extended configuration space is given by an
asymptotically anti-de Sitter metric, and argue in a simple, geometrical way
that the tempering parameter should be best placed exponentially to acquire
high acceptance rates for transitions in the extra dimension. We also discuss
the geometrical optimization of the tempered Lefschetz thimble method, which is
an algorithm towards solving the numerical sign problem.