  Harry F. Martz was born June 16, 1942 and grew up in Cumberland, Maryland. He
received a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics (with a minor in physics)
from Frostburg State University in 1964, and earned a Ph.D. in statistics at
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in 1968. He started his
statistics career at Texas Tech University's Department of Industrial
Engineering and Statistics right after graduation. In 1978, he joined the
technical staff at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in Los Alamos, New
Mexico after first working as Full Professor in the Department of Industrial
Engineering at Utah State University in the fall of 1977. He has had a prolific
23-year career with the statistics group at LANL; over the course of his
career, Martz has published over 80 research papers in books and refereed
journals, one book (with co-author Ray Waller), and has four patents associated
with his work at LANL. He is a fellow of the American Statistical Association
and has received numerous awards, including the Technometrics Frank Wilcoxon
Prize for Best Applications Paper (1996), Los Alamos National Laboratory
Achievement Award (1998), R&D 100 Award by R&D Magazine (2003), Council for
Chemical Research Collaboration Success Award (2004), and Los Alamos National
Laboratory's Distinguished Licensing Award (2004). Since retiring as a
Technical Staff member at LANL in 2001, he has worked as a LANL Laboratory
Associate.


  We calculate the lowest order hadronic cross sections for producing colored
heavy quark-antiquark pairs in $L=S=0$ and $L=S=1$ configurations. Such
$Q\Qbar[{}^1S_0^{(8)}]$ and $Q\Qbar[{}^3P_J^{(8)}]$ states hadronize into
$\psi_\Q$ quarkonia at the same order in the NRQCD velocity expansion as
previously considered $Q\Qbar[{}^3S_1^{(8)}]$ pairs. Their contributions to
prompt Psi and Upsilon production at the Tevatron bring the shapes of
theoretical transverse momentum distributions into line with recent CDF
measurements. We find that the best fit values for the linear combinations of
$Q\Qbar[{}^1S_0^{(8)}]$ and $Q\Qbar[{}^3P_J^{(8)}]$ long distance matrix
elements which can be extracted from the data are generally consistent with
NRQCD scaling rules.


  In this article, we completely characterize absolutely norm attaining Hankel
operators and absolutely minimum attaining Toeplitz operators. We also improve
\cite[Theorem 2.1]{RGSSSTOE1}, by characterizing the absolutely norm attaining
Toeplitz operator $T_\varphi$ in terms of the symbol $\varphi \in L^\infty$.


  We report on an effective vector-field theory of the fractional quantum Hall
effect that takes into account projection to Landau levels. The effective
theory refers to neither the composite-boson nor composite-fermion picture, but
properly reproduces the results consistent with them, thus revealing the
universality of the long-wavelength characteristics of the quantum Hall states.
In particular, the dual-field Lagrangian of Lee and Zhang is obtained, and an
argument is given to verify the identification by Goldhaber and Jain of a
composite fermion as a dressed electron. The generalization to double-layer
systems is also remarked on.


  In the chaotic Lorenz system, Chen system and R\"ossler system, their
equilibria are unstable and the number of the equilibria are no more than
three. This paper shows how to construct some simple chaotic systems that can
have any preassigned number of equilibria. First, a chaotic system with no
equilibrium is presented and discussed. Then, a methodology is presented by
adding symmetry to a new chaotic system with only one stable equilibrium, to
show that chaotic systems with any preassigned number of equilibria can be
generated. By adjusting the only parameter in these systems, one can further
control the stability of their equilibria. This result reveals an intrinsic
relationship of the global dynamical behaviors with the number and stability of
the equilibria of a chaotic system.


  We suggest that magnetic fields in the accretion disks of AGN reach into the
coronae above and have a profound effect on the mass flow rate in the corona.
This strongly affects the location where the accretion flow changes from a
geometrically thin disk to a pure vertically extended coronal or
advection-dominated accretion flow (ADAF). We show that this can explain the
different disk truncation radii in elliptical galaxies and low luminosity AGN
with about the same mass flow rate, a discrepancy pointed out by Quataert et
al. (1999). Without disk magnetic activity the disk truncation is expected to
be uniquely related to the mass flow rate (Meyer et al. 2000b). Whether dynamo
action occurs depends on whether the electrical conductivity measured by a
magnetic Reynolds number surpasses a critical value (Gammie and Menou 1998).In
elliptical galaxies the disk is self-gravitating at the radii where the
truncation should occur. It is plausible that instead of a cool disk a ``layer
of clouds'' may form (Shlosman et al. 1990, Gammie 2001) for which no dynamo
action is expected. For low luminosity AGN the magnetic Reynolds number is well
above critical. Simple model calculations show that magnetic fields in the
underlying disks reduce the strength of the coronal flow and shift the
truncation radius significantly inward.


  International academic collaborations cultivate diversity in the research
landscape and facilitate multiperspective methods, as the scope of each
country's science depends on its needs, history, wealth etc. Moreover the
quality of science differ significantly amongst
nations\cite{king2004scientific}, which renders international collaborations a
potential source to understand the dynamics between countries and their
advancements. Analyzing these collaborations can reveal sharing expertise
between two countries in different fields, the most well-known institutions of
a nation, the overall success of collaborative efforts compared to local ones
etc. Such analysis were initially performed using statistical metrics
\cite{melin1996studying}, but network analysis has later proven much more
expressive \cite{wagner2005mapping,gonzalez2008coauthorship}. In this
exploratory analysis, we aim to examine the collaboration patterns between
French and US institutions. Towards this, we capitalize on the Microsoft
Academic Graph MAG \cite{sinha2015overview}, the largest open bibliographic
dataset that contains detailed information for authors, publications and
institutions. We use the coordinates of the world map to tally affiliations to
France or USA. In cases where the coordinates of an affiliation were absent, we
used its Wikipedia url and named entity recognition to identify the country of
its address in the Wikipedia page. We need to stress that institute names have
been volatile (due to University federations created) in the last decade in
France, so this is a best effort trial. The results indicate an intensive and
increasing scientific production in with , with certain institutions such as
Harvard, MIT and CNRS standing out.


  Despite being the most studied nodal line semimetal, a clear understanding of
the transient state relaxation dynamics and the underlying mechanism in ZrSiS
is lacking. Using time and angle resolved photoemission spectroscopy, we study
the ultrafast relaxation dynamics in ZrSiS and reveal a unique relaxation in
the bulk nodal-line state which is well captured by a simple model based on
optical and acoustic phonon cooling. We find linear decay processes for both
optical and acoustic phonon relaxations with acoustic cooling suppressed at
high temperatures. Our results reveal different decay mechanisms for the bulk
and surface states and pave a way to understand the mechanism of conduction in
this material.


  To further reduce the lattice thermal conductivity of thermoelectric
materials, the technique of embedding nano-inclusions into bulk matrix
materials, in addition to point defect scattering via alloying, was widely
applied. Differential Effective Medium (DEM) method was employed to calculate
two-phase heterogeneous systems. However, in most effective medium treatment,
the interface scattering of matrix phonons by embedded nanoparticle was
underestimated by adopting particle's projected area as scattering
cross-section. Herein, modified cross-section calculations, as well as grain
sizes dispersions, are applied in DEM, with the calculations then validated by
comparing with Monte-Carlo simulations and existing experimental data.
Predictions of lattice thermal conductivity reduction on in-situ formed Full
Heusler(FH)/Half Heusler(HH) nano/matrix system are discussed.


  We use the Landau-de Gennes energy to describe a particle immersed into
nematic liquid crystals with a constant applied magnetic field. We derive a
limit energy in a regime where both line and point defects are present, showing
quantitatively that the close-to-minimal energy is asymptotically concentrated
on lines and surfaces nearby or on the particle. We also discuss regularity of
minimizers and optimality conditions for the limit energy.


  We address a discrepancy between different computations of $\eta/s$ (shear
viscosity over entropy density) of hadronic matter. Substantial deviations of
this coefficient are found between transport approaches mainly based on
resonance propagation with finite lifetime and other (semi-analytical)
approaches with energy-dependent cross-sections, where interactions do not
introduce a timescale. We provide an independent extraction of this coefficient
by using the newly-developed SMASH (Simulating Many Accelerated Strongly
interacting Hadrons) transport code, which is an example of a mainly
resonance-based approach. We compare the results from SMASH with numerical
solutions of the Boltzmann equation for simple systems using the Chapman-Enskog
expansion, as well as previous results in the literature. Our conclusion is
that the hadron interaction via resonance formation/decay strongly affects the
transport properties of the system, resulting in significant differences in
$\eta/s$ with respect to other approaches where binary collisions dominate. We
argue that the relaxation time of the system ---which characterizes the shear
viscosity--- is determined by the interplay between the mean-free time and the
lifetime of resonances. We show how an artificial shortening of the resonance
lifetimes, or the addition of a background elastic cross section nicely
interpolate between the two discrepant results.


  The double quantum groups are the Hopf algebras underlying the complex
quantum groups of which the simplest example is the quantum Lorentz group. They
are non- standard quantizations of the double group $G \times G$. We construct
a corresponding quantized universal enveloping algebra (QUE) and prove that the
pairing between a quantum double group and its QUE is nondegenerate. We analyze
the representation theory of these double quantum groups, give a detailed
version of the Iwasawa decomposition proved by Podles and Woronowicz for the
quantum Lorentz group, and show that they are noetherian algebras. Finally we
outline a construction of more general non-standard quantum groups using
quantum double groups and their generalizations.


  A popular challenge on the social media app TikTok is to place the output of
a random number generator in ascending order without arriving at a
contradiction. Most players rely on intuition to construct their sequences and
debate has surfaced in the comments about the optimal strategy to win the game.
To this end, we determine an optimal strategy that offers a 21 percent
improvement in winning odds over the intuitive equal-spacing strategy in the
popular hashtag 20numberchallenge variant.


  RX J0806.3+1527 is suspected to be a double-degenerate white dwarf binary. We
present first results of our NLTE analysis of its optical spectrum. The
VLT/FORS1 data show a composite spectrum consisting of a blue continuum and
superimposed emission lines of the HeII Pickering series and, possibly, the H
Balmer series. Our models are based on hot white dwarf atmospheres and include
illumination effects onto the secondary star. The physical parameters and
chemical abundances derived from the comparison of the observed spectrum with a
grid of model atmospheres provide constraints on the true nature of this
enigmatic binary and on the models proposed so far.


  We use high-resolution near-infrared spectroscopy from Keck Observatory to
measure the stellar velocity dispersions of 19 super star clusters (SSCs) in
the nuclear starburst of M82. The clusters have ages on the order of 10 Myr,
which is many times longer than the crossing times implied by their velocity
dispersions and radii. We therefore apply the Virial Theorem to derive the
kinematic mass for 15 of the SSCs. The SSCs have masses of 2 x 10^5 to 4 x 10^6
solar masses, with a total population mass of 1.4 x 10^7 solar masses.
Comparison of the loci of the young M82 SSCs and old Milky Way globular
clusters in a plot of radius versus velocity dispersion suggests that the SSCs
are a population of potential globular clusters. We present the mass function
for the SSCs, and find a power law fit with an index of gamma = -1.91 +/- 0.06.
This result is nearly identical to the mass function of young SSCs in the
Antennae galaxies.


  Dark matter detectors will soon be sensitive to Solar neutrinos via two
distinct channels: coherent neutrino-nucleus scattering and neutrino electron
elastic scattering. We establish an analysis method for extracting Solar model
properties and neutrino properties from these measurements, including the
possible effects of sterile neutrinos which have been hinted at by some reactor
experiments and cosmological measurements. Even including sterile neutrinos,
through the coherent scattering channel a 1 ton-year exposure with a
low-threshold Germanium detector could improve on the current measurement of
the normalization of the $^8$B Solar neutrino flux down to 3% or less.
Combining with the elastic scattering data will provide constraints on both the
high and low energy survival probability, and will improve on the uncertainty
on the active-to-sterile mixing angle by a factor of two. This sensitivity to
active-to-sterile transitions is competitive and complementary to forthcoming
dedicated short baseline sterile neutrino searches with nuclear decays.


  We study a complex non-newtonian fluid that models the flow of nematic liquid
crystals. The fluid is described by a system that couples a forced
Navier-Stokes system with a parabolic-type system. We prove the existence of
global weak solutions in dimensions two and three. We show the existence of a
Lyapunov functional for the smooth solutions of the coupled system and use the
cancellations that allow its existence to prove higher global regularity, in
dimension two. We also show the weak-strong uniqueness in dimension two.


  For any closed oriented 3-manifold $M$ with positive simplicial volume and
any closed oriented 3-manifold $N$, we prove that there exists a finite cover
$M'$ of $M$ that admits a degree-1 map $f:M'\to M$, i.e. M virtually
1-dominates N. This result generalizes previous virtual domination results with
closed hyperbolic domain to more general domains.


  We present the general Hardy-like quantum pigeonhole paradoxes for
\textit{n}-particle states, and find that each of such paradoxes can be simply
associated to an un-colorable solution of a specific vertex-coloring problem
induced from the projected-coloring graph (a kind of unconventional graph).
Besides, as a special kind of Hardy's paradox, several kinds of Hardy-like
quantum pigeonhole paradoxes can even give rise to higher success probability
in demonstrating the conflict between quantum mechanics and local or
noncontextual realism than the previous Hardy's paradoxes. Moreover, not only
multi-qubit states, but high-dimensional states can exhibit the paradoxes. In
contrast to only one type of contradiction presented in the original quantum
pigeonhole paradox, two kinds of three-qubit projected-coloring graph states as
the minimal illustration are discussed in our work, and an optical experiment
to verify such stronger paradox is performed. This quantum paradox provides
innovative thoughts and methods in exploring new types of stronger multi-party
quantum nonlocality and may have potential applications in multi-party
untrusted communications and device-independent random number generation.


  The Legendre transform (LET) is a product of a general duality principle: any
smooth curve is, on the one hand, a locus of pairs, which satisfy the given
equation and, on the other hand, an envelope of a family of its tangent lines.
An application of the LET to a strictly convex and smooth function leads to the
Legendre identity (LEID). For strictly convex and three times differentiable
function the LET leads to the Legendre invariant (LEINV). Although the LET has
been known for more then 200 years both the LEID and the LEINV are critical in
modern optimization theory and methods. The purpose of the paper (survey) is to
show the role of the LEID and the LEINV play in both constrained and
unconstrained optimization.


  We've been able to show recently that Permutable Chebyshev polynomials (T
polynomials) defined over the field of real numbers can be used to create a
Diffie-Hellman-like key exchange algorithm and certificates. The cryptosystem
was theoretically proven to withstand attacks using quantum computers. We
additionally prove that attacks based on the inverse of the cosine
representation of T polynomials fail.


  Limited-view artefacts are commonly present in optoacoustic tomography
images, mainly due to practical geometrical and physical constraints imposed by
the imaging systems as well as limited light penetration into large optically
opaque samples. Herein, a new approach termed dynamic particle-enhanced
optoacoustic tomography (DPOT) is proposed for improving image contrast and
visibility of optoacoustic images under limited-view scenarios. The method is
based on the non- linear combination of a temporal sequence of tomographic
reconstructions representing sparsely distributed moving particles. We
demonstrate experimental performance by dynamically imaging the flow of
suspended microspheres in three dimensions, which shows promise for DPOT
applicability in angiographic imaging in living organisms.


  One revisits the standard saddle-point method based on conjugate duality for
solving convex minimization problems. Our aim is to reduce or remove
unnecessary topological restrictions on the constraint set. Dual equalities and
characterizations of the minimizers are obtained with weak or without
constraint qualifications. The main idea is to work with intrinsic topologies
which reflect some geometry of the objective function. The abstract results of
this article are applied in other papers to the Monge-Kantorovich optimal
transport problem and the minimization of entropy functionals.


  Randomized experiments are a powerful methodology for data-driven evaluation
of decisions or interventions. Yet, their validity may be undermined by network
interference. This occurs when the treatment of one unit impacts not only its
outcome but also that of connected units, biasing traditional treatment effect
estimations. Our study introduces a new framework to accommodate complex and
unknown network interference, moving beyond specialized models in the existing
literature. Our framework, termed causal message-passing, is grounded in
high-dimensional approximate message passing methodology. It is tailored for
multi-period experiments and is particularly effective in settings with many
units and prevalent network interference. The framework models causal effects
as a dynamic process where a treated unit's impact propagates through the
network via neighboring units until equilibrium is reached. This approach
allows us to approximate the dynamics of potential outcomes over time, enabling
the extraction of valuable information before treatment effects reach
equilibrium. Utilizing causal message-passing, we introduce a practical
algorithm to estimate the total treatment effect, defined as the impact
observed when all units are treated compared to the scenario where no unit
receives treatment. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach across
five numerical scenarios, each characterized by a distinct interference
structure.


  It is widely believed that the long-range antiferromagnetic order in the
RBa2Cu3O6+x compounds (R=Y and rare earths except of Ce, Pr, Tb) is totally
suppressed for the oxygen index x>0.4 (AFM insulator-metal transition). We
present the results of the copper NQR/NMR studies of aged RBa2Cu3O6+x (R=Tm,Y)
samples showing that a magnetic order can still be present at oxygen contents x
up to at least 0.7 and at temperatures as high as 77K.


  We present the design of an all-reflective, bi-folded Schmidt telescope aimed
at surveys of extended astronomical objects with extremely-low surface
brightness. The design leads to a high image quality without any diffracting
spider, along with a large aperture and field of view, with a small central
obstruction which barely alters the PSF. As an example, we present the design
of a high-quality, 36 cm diameter, fast ( f /2.5) telescope working in the
visible with a large field of view (1.6{\deg}x 2.6{\deg}). The telescope can
operate with a curved detector (or with a flat detector with a field flattener)
and a set of filters. The entrance mirror is anamorphic and replaces the
classical Schmidt entrance corrector plate. We show that this anamorphic
primary mirror can be manufactured through stress polishing, avoiding high
spatial frequency errors, and tested with a simple interferometer scheme. This
prototype is intended to serve as a fast-track scientific and technological
pathfinder for the future space-based MESSIER mission.


  Three-dimensional topological insulators are classified into "strong" (STI)
and "weak" (WTI) according to the nature of their surface states. While the
surface states of the STI are topologically protected from localization, this
does not hold for the WTI. In this work we show that the surface states of the
WTI are actually protected from any random perturbation that does not break
time-reversal symmetry, and does not close the bulk energy gap. Consequently,
the conductivity of metallic surfaces in the clean system remains finite even
in the presence of strong disorder of this type. In the weak disorder limit the
surfaces are found to be perfect metals, and strong surface disorder only acts
to push the metallic surfaces inwards. We find that the WTI differs from the
STI primarily in its anisotropy, and that the anisotropy is not a sign of its
weakness but rather of its richness.


  Similarities between nuclear structure study with many-body theory approach
and nucleon structure calculations with lattice QCD are pointed out. We will
give an example of how to obtain the connected sea partons from a combination
of the experimental data, a global fit of parton distribution functions and a
lattice calculation. We also present a complete calculation of the quark and
glue decomposition of the proton momentum and angular momentum in the quenched
approximation. It is found that the quark orbital angular momentum constitutes
about 50% of the proton spin.


  We introduce a novel correlation, $n_s$ - $\Delta N$, connecting CMB
parameters to the required total e-folds for eternal inflation. This
correlation provides a robust tool for evaluating eternal (string) inflation
models using CMB data and explores the impact of quantum fluctuations on
non-attractor phases. By generalizing eternal inflation criteria, our
parameterization simplifies rigorous testing of predictions and reveals a link
between refined de Sitter conjecture parameters and the eternal nature of the
cosmic landscape. This points to a general tendency towards eternal behavior in
low-energy effective field theories within the landscape, opening the
possibility for our cosmic stage to potentially embrace a 'multiverse'
scenario.


  We discuss obbservations and numerical simulations which show that radiative
shocks in jet-cloud collisions can trigger the collapse of intergalactic clouds
and subsequent star formation in low luminosity, 'FR-I' type, radio galaxies.


  Recent work has demonstrated that embeddings of tree-like graphs in
hyperbolic space surpass their Euclidean counterparts in performance by a large
margin. Inspired by these results and scale-free structure in the word
co-occurrence graph, we present an algorithm for learning word embeddings in
hyperbolic space from free text. An objective function based on the hyperbolic
distance is derived and included in the skip-gram negative-sampling
architecture of word2vec. The hyperbolic word embeddings are then evaluated on
word similarity and analogy benchmarks. The results demonstrate the potential
of hyperbolic word embeddings, particularly in low dimensions, though without
clear superiority over their Euclidean counterparts. We further discuss
subtleties in the formulation of the analogy task in curved spaces.


  Photoproduction off protons of the $p\pi^0\eta$ three-body final state was
studied with the Crystal Barrel/TAPS detector at the electron stretcher
accelerator ELSA at Bonn for incident energies from the $\pi^0\eta$ production
threshold up to 2.5\,GeV. Differential cross sections and the total cross
section are presented. The use of linearly polarized photons gives access to
the polarization observables $\Sigma$, $I^{s}$ and $I^{c}$, the latter two
characterize beam asymmetries in case of three-body final states.
$\Delta(1232)\eta$, $N(1535){1/2^-}\pi$, and $p a_0(980)$ are the dominant
isobars contributing to the reaction. The partial wave analysis confirms the
existence of some nucleon and $\Delta$ resonances for which so far only fair
evidence was reported. A large number of decay modes of known nucleon and
$\Delta$ resonances is presented. It is shown that detailed investigations of
decay branching ratios may provide a key to unravelling the structure of
nucleon and $\Delta$ resonances.


  We analyze in the context of Leavitt path algebras some graph operations
introduced in the context of symbolic dynamics by Williams, Parry and Sullivan,
and Franks. We show that these operations induce Morita equivalence of the
corresponding Leavitt path algebras. As a consequence we obtain our two main
results: the first gives sufficient conditions for which the Leavitt path
algebras in a certain class are Morita equivalent, while the second gives
sufficient conditions which yield isomorphisms. We discuss a possible approach
to establishing whether or not these conditions are also in fact necessary. In
the final section we present many additional operations on graphs which
preserve Morita equivalence (resp., isomorphism) of the corresponding Leavitt
path algebras.


  Attitude control of fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is a difficult
control problem in part due to uncertain nonlinear dynamics, actuator
constraints, and coupled longitudinal and lateral motions. Current
state-of-the-art autopilots are based on linear control and are thus limited in
their effectiveness and performance. Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) is a
machine learning method to automatically discover optimal control laws through
interaction with the controlled system, which can handle complex nonlinear
dynamics. We show in this paper that DRL can successfully learn to perform
attitude control of a fixed-wing UAV operating directly on the original
nonlinear dynamics, requiring as little as three minutes of flight data. We
initially train our model in a simulation environment and then deploy the
learned controller on the UAV in flight tests, demonstrating comparable
performance to the state-of-the-art ArduPlane proportional-integral-derivative
(PID) attitude controller with no further online learning required. Learning
with significant actuation delay and diversified simulated dynamics were found
to be crucial for successful transfer to control of the real UAV. In addition
to a qualitative comparison with the ArduPlane autopilot, we present a
quantitative assessment based on linear analysis to better understand the
learning controller's behavior.


  In the frame work of relativistic mean field (RMF) theory, we calculate the
density distribution of protons and neutrons for $^{40,42, 44,48}Ca$ with NL3
and G2 parameter sets. The microscopic proton-nucleus optical potential for
$p+^{40,42,44,48}Ca$ system is evaluated from Dirac NN-scattering amplitude and
the density of the target nucleus using Relativistic-Love-Franey and
McNeil-Ray-Wallace parametrizations. Then we estimate the scattering
observables, such as elastic differential scattering cross-section, analyzing
power and the spin observables with relativistic impulse approximation. We
compare the results with the experimental data for some selective cases and
found that the use of density as well as the scattering matrix parametrization
is crucial for the theoretical prediction.


  This work proposes a new avenue in the search for CP-violating odd-electric
and even-magnetic nuclear moments. A promising candidate to find such moments
in the ground state is the quadrupole-deformed and octupole-correlated nucleus
227-actinium. In this nucleus, the 27.4-keV $E1$~transition that connects the
$3/2^+$ parity-doublet partner and the $3/2^-$ ground state is perfectly suited
to apply the sensitive technique of recoil-free selfabsorption, commonly known
as M\"ossbauer spectroscopy. In this experimental approach, the lifetime of the
$3/2^+$ upper parity-doublet partner allows an estimate of the lower limit of
$\Delta E = 2\cdot \Gamma_{\gamma}$= $23.7(1) \times 10^{-9}$ eV for the
achievable energy resolution to be made. This resolution must be exceeded by
the interaction of a CP-violating moment and the corresponding multipole moment
of the field distribution in the lattice. This work presents the first ideas
for patterns caused by CP-violating moments on the expected quadrupole
splitting and nuclear Zeeman effect.


  We propose and analyze the terahertz (THz) bolometric vector detectors based
on the graphene-channel field-effect transistors (GC-FET) with the black-P gate
barrier layer or with the composite b-BN/black-P/b-BN gate layer. The phase
difference between the signal received by the FET source and drain
substantially affects the plasmonic resonances. This results in a resonant
variation of the detector response on the incoming THz signal phase shift and
the THz radiation angle of incidence.


  We investigate how hypothetical particles - sterile neutrinos - can be
produced in the interior of exploding supernovae via the resonant conversion of
$\bar\nu_\mu$ and $\bar \nu_\tau$. The novelty of our treatment lies in the
proper account of the resulting lepton number diffusion. We compute the yield
of sterile neutrinos and find that even after taking into account back
reaction, sterile neutrinos can carry out a sizeable fraction of the total
energy of the explosion comparable to that of active neutrinos. The production
is, however, exponentially sensitive to the temperature in the inner supernovae
regions, making robust predictions of challenging. In order to understand
whether this production affects supernova evolution and can therefore be
constrained, detailed simulations including the effects of sterile neutrinos
are needed.


  The upper critical magnetic field H_{c2} in thin-film FSF trilayer spin-valve
cores is studied experimentally and theoretically in geometries perpendicular
and parallel to the heterostructure surface. The series of samples with
variable thicknesses of the bottom and of the top Cu_{41}Ni_{59} F-layers are
prepared in a single run, utilizing a wedge deposition technique. The critical
field H_{c2} is measured in the temperature range $0.4-8$ K and for magnetic
fields up to 9 Tesla. A transition from oscillatory to reentrant behavior of
the superconducting transition temperature versus F-layers thickness, induced
by an external magnetic field, has been observed for the first time. In order
to properly interpret the experimental data, we develop a quasiclassical
theory, enabling one to evaluate the temperature dependence of the critical
field and the superconducting transition temperature for an arbitrary set of
the system parameters. A fairly good agreement between our experimental data
and theoretical predictions is demonstrated for all samples, using a single set
of fit parameters. This confirms adequacy of the
Fulde-Ferrell-Larkin-Ovchinnikov (FFLO) physics in determining the unusual
superconducting properties of the studied Cu_{41}Ni_{59}/Nb/Cu_{41}Ni_{59}
spin-valve core trilayers.


  We present explicit formulas - that are also computer code - for 101
real-life quantitative trading alphas. Their average holding period
approximately ranges 0.6-6.4 days. The average pair-wise correlation of these
alphas is low, 15.9%. The returns are strongly correlated with volatility, but
have no significant dependence on turnover, directly confirming an earlier
result based on a more indirect empirical analysis. We further find empirically
that turnover has poor explanatory power for alpha correlations.


  We determine the surface density of matter in the disc of the Galaxy at the
solar position using K giant stars. The local space density and luminosity
function of the giants is determined using parallaxes from the Hipparcos
satellite; for more distant giants, observed in a cone at the South Galactic
Pole, distances are determined using intermediate band DDO photometry (which
has been calibrated to the Hipparcos absolute magnitudes). From this sample, we
determine the gravitational potential vertically of the local Galactic disc, by
comparing the number of giant stars observed in the cone with the number
expected for various models of the matter distribution in the disc. We derive
an estimate of the dynamical disc mass surface density of 56 +/- 6 solar masses
/pc^2, which may be compared to an estimate of 53 solar masses/pc^2 in visible
matter. For all gravitating matter (disc + dark halo) we find the total density
within 1.1 kpc of the disc midplane to be 74 +/- 6 solar masses/pc^2. As has
been found by a number of studies, including our own, we find no compelling
evidence for significant amounts of dark matter in the disc.


  We consider the Maximum-weight Matching (MWM) problem in the streaming
sliding window model of computation. In this model, the input consists of a
sequence of weighted edges on a given vertex set $V$ of size $n$. The objective
is to maintain an approximation of a maximum-weight matching in the graph
spanned by the $L$ most recent edges, for some integer $L$, using as little
space as possible. Prior to our work, the state-of-the-art results were a
$(3.5+\varepsilon)$-approximation algorithm for MWM by Biabani et al.
[ISAAC'21] and a $(3+\varepsilon)$-approximation for (unweighted) Maximum
Matching (MM) by Crouch et al. [ESA'13]. Both algorithms use space
$\tilde{O}(n)$.
  We give the following results:
  1. We give a $(2+\varepsilon)$-approximation algorithm for MWM with space
$\tilde{O}(\sqrt{nL})$. Under the reasonable assumption that the graphs spanned
by the edges in each sliding window are simple, our algorithm uses space
$\tilde{O}(n \sqrt{n})$.
  2. In the $\tilde{O}(n)$ space regime, we give a
$(3+\varepsilon)$-approximation algorithm for MWM, thereby closing the gap
between the best-known approximation ratio for MWM and MM.
  Similar to Biabani et al.'s MWM algorithm, both our algorithms execute
multiple instances of the $(2+\varepsilon)$-approximation $\tilde{O}(n)$-space
streaming algorithm for MWM by Paz and Schwartzman [SODA'17] on different
portions of the stream. Our improvements are obtained by selecting these
substreams differently. Furthermore, our $(2+\varepsilon)$-approximation
algorithm runs the Paz-Schwartzman algorithm in reverse direction over some
parts of the stream, and in forward direction over other parts, which allows
for an improved approximation guarantee at the cost of increased space
requirements.


  In the folklore of linear logic, a common intuition is that the structure of
finiteness spaces, introduced by Ehrhard, semantically reflects the strong
normalization property of cut-elimination. We make this intuition formal in the
context of the non-deterministic {\lambda}-calculus by introducing a finiteness
structure on resource terms, which is such that a {\lambda}-term is strongly
normalizing iff the support of its Taylor expansion is finitary. An application
of our result is the existence of a normal form for the Taylor expansion of any
strongly normalizable non-deterministic {\lambda}-term.


  For solutions $X=(X_t)_{t\in[0,T]}$ of L\'evy-driven Marcus stochastic
differential equations we study the Wong--Zakai type time discrete
approximations $\bar X=(\bar X_{kh})_{0\leq k\leq T/h}$, $h>0$, and establish
the first order convergence $|E f(X_T)-E f(X^h_T)|\leq C h$ for $f\in C_b^4$.


  The main objective of this work is to develop a unified framework that can be
used as a lens to quantitatively assess and augment a wide range of
coarse-grained models of turbulence, viz. large eddy simulations (LES), hybrid
Reynolds-averaged/LES methods and wall-modeled (WM)LES. Taking a turbulent
channel flow as an example, optimality is assessed in the wall-resolved limit,
the hybrid RANS/LES limit and the WMLES limit, via projections at different
resolutions suitable for these approaches. These optimal a priori estimates are
shown to have similar characteristics to existing a posteriori solutions
reported in the literature. Consistent accuracy metrics are developed for
scale-resolving methods using the optimal solution as a reference, and
evaluations are performed. We further characterize the slip velocity in WMLES
in terms of the near-wall under-resolution and develop a universal scaling
relationship. Insights from the a-priori tests are used to augment existing
slip-based wall models. Various a posteriori tests reveal superior performance
over the dynamic slip wall model. Guidance for the development of improved
slip-wall models is provided, including a target for the dynamic procedure.


  We construct several series of explicit presentations of infinite hyperbolic
groups enjoying Kazhdan's property (T). Some of them are significantly shorter
than the previously known shortest examples. Moreover, we show that some of
those hyperbolic Kazhdan groups possess finite simple quotient groups of
arbitrarily large rank; they constitute the first known specimens combining
those properties. All the hyperbolic groups we consider are non-positively
curved k-fold generalized triangle groups, i.e. groups that possess a
simplicial action on a CAT(0) triangle complex, which is sharply transitive on
the set of triangles, and such that edge-stabilizers are cyclic of order k.


  I examine potential mechanisms behind two stylized facts of initial public
offerings (IPOs) returns. By analyzing investor emotions expressed on
StockTwits and Twitter, I find that emotions conveyed through these social
media platforms can help explain the mispricing of IPO stocks. The abundance of
information and opinions shared on social media can generate hype around
certain stocks, leading to investors' irrational buying and selling decisions.
This can result in an overvaluation of the stock in the short term but often
leads to a correction in the long term as the stock's performance fails to meet
the inflated expectations. In particular, I find that IPOs with high levels of
pre-IPO enthusiasm tend to have a significantly higher first-day return of
29.73%, compared to IPOs with lower levels of pre-IPO investor enthusiasm,
which have an average first-day return of 17.59%. However, this initial
enthusiasm may be misplaced, as IPOs with high pre-IPO investor enthusiasm
demonstrate a much lower average long-run industry-adjusted return of -8.22%,
compared to IPOs with lower pre-IPO investor enthusiasm, which have an average
long-run industry-adjusted return of -0.14%. Diving deeper into the qualitative
aspects of investor discourse, I find that messages rich in financial language
or that bolster prevailing information drive my results. Additionally, a trend
towards caution emerges among users who frequently engage with IPOs, perhaps a
byproduct of lessons from past endeavors. Intriguingly, firms that enjoy high
levels of pre-IPO optimism consistently garner post-launch enthusiasm, a trend
at odds with their long-term under-performance.


  The effect of pairing on small and large amplitude dynamics is discussed.
Pairing correlation is treated in a fully microscopic transport theory using a
simplified BCS version of the Time-Dependent Hartree-Fock Bogolyubov (TDHFB)
theory. The approach is applied to study the Giant Dipole and Giant Quadrupole
Resonance in spherical and/or deformed magnesium isotopes showing very good
agreement with QRPA theory. The present framework also provides a consistent
approach to describe nuclear reactions around the Coulomb barrier. As an
illustration, the influence of pairing correlations on multi-nucleon transfer
is studied for reactions at sub-barrier energy.


  We review how the AdS/CFT correspondence is motivated within string theory,
and discuss how it is generalized to gauge/gravity duality. In particular, we
highlight the relation to quantum information theory by pointing out that the
Fisher information metric of a Gaussian probability distribution corresponds to
an Anti-de Sitter space. As an application example of gauge/gravity duality, we
present a holographic Kondo model. The Kondo model in condensed matter physics
describes a spin impurity interacting with a free electron gas: At low
energies, the impurity is screened and there is a logarithmic rise of the
resistivity. In quantum field theory, this amounts to a negative beta function
for the impurity coupling and the theory flows to a non-trivial IR fixed point.
For constructing a gravity dual, we consider a large $N$ version of this model
in which the ambient electrons are strongly coupled even before the interaction
with the impurity is switched on. We present the brane construction which
motivates a gravity dual Kondo model and use this model to calculate the
impurity entanglement entropy and the resistivity, which has a power-law
behaviour. We also study quantum quenches, and discuss the relation to the
Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model.


  In the big data era, deep learning and intelligent data mining technique
solutions have been applied by researchers in various areas. Forecast and
analysis of stock market data have represented an essential role in today's
economy, and a significant challenge to the specialist since the market's
tendencies are immensely complex, chaotic and are developed within a highly
dynamic environment. There are numerous researches from multiple areas
intending to take on that challenge, and Machine Learning approaches have been
the focus of many of them. There are multiple models of Machine Learning
algorithms been able to obtain competent outcomes doing that class of
foresight. This paper proposes the implementation of a generative adversarial
network (GAN), which is composed by a bi-directional Long short-term memory
(LSTM) and convolutional neural network(CNN) referred as Bi-LSTM-CNN to
generate synthetic data that agree with existing real financial data so the
features of stocks with positive or negative trends can be retained to predict
future trends of a stock. The novelty of this proposed solution that distinct
from previous solutions is that this paper introduced the concept of a hybrid
system (Bi-LSTM-CNN) rather than a sole LSTM model. It was collected data from
multiple stock markets such as TSX, SHCOMP, KOSPI 200 and the S&P 500,
proposing an adaptative-hybrid system for trends prediction on stock market
prices, and carried a comprehensive evaluation on several commonly utilized
machine learning prototypes, and it is concluded that the proposed solution
approach outperforms preceding models. Additionally, during the research stage
from preceding works, gaps were found between investors and researchers who
dedicated to the technical domain.


  Quaternion space has brought several benefits over the traditional Euclidean
space: Quaternions (i) consist of a real and three imaginary components,
encouraging richer representations; (ii) utilize Hamilton product which better
encodes the inter-latent interactions across multiple Quaternion components;
and (iii) result in a model with smaller degrees of freedom and less prone to
overfitting. Unfortunately, most of the current recommender systems rely on
real-valued representations in Euclidean space to model either user's long-term
or short-term interests. In this paper, we fully utilize Quaternion space to
model both user's long-term and short-term preferences. We first propose a
QUaternion-based self-Attentive Long term user Encoding (QUALE) to study the
user's long-term intents. Then, we propose a QUaternion-based self-Attentive
Short term user Encoding (QUASE) to learn the user's short-term interests. To
enhance our models' capability, we propose to fuse QUALE and QUASE into one
model, namely QUALSE, by using a Quaternion-based gating mechanism. We further
develop Quaternion-based Adversarial learning along with the Bayesian
Personalized Ranking (QABPR) to improve our model's robustness. Extensive
experiments on six real-world datasets show that our fused QUALSE model
outperformed 11 state-of-the-art baselines, improving 8.43% at HIT@1 and 10.27%
at NDCG@1 on average compared with the best baseline.


  We study the phase synchronization and cluster formation in coupled maps on
different networks. We identify two different mechanisms of cluster formation;
(a) {\it Self-organized} phase synchronization which leads to clusters with
dominant intra-cluster couplings and (b) {\it driven} phase synchronization
which leads to clusters with dominant inter-cluster couplings. In the novel
driven synchronization the nodes of one cluster are driven by those of the
others. We also discuss the dynamical origin of these two mechanisms for small
networks with two and three nodes.


  In this paper, we will give a thorough study of the notion of Property $(T)$
for $C^*$-algebras (as introduced by M.B. Bekka in \cite{Bek-T}) as well as a
slight stronger version of it, called "strong property $(T)$" (which is also an
analogue of the corresponding concept in the case of discrete groups and type
$\rm II_1$-factors). More precisely, we will give some interesting equivalent
formulations as well as some permanence properties for both property $(T)$ and
strong property $(T)$. We will also relate them to certain $(T)$-type
properties of the unitary group of the underlying $C^*$-algebra.


  The classical nucleation theory (CNT) concept of a nucleus as a fragment of
the bulk new phase fails for nanosized nuclei. An extension of CNT taking into
account the properties of the transition region between coexisting bulk phases
is proposed. For this purpose, the finite-thickness layer method which is an
alternative to Gibbs one is used; the transition region is considered as a
separate (surface) phase. An equation for the nucleation work is derived which
is basic for the multivariable theory of nucleation. Equations of equilibrium
following from it are employed for considering the dependences of surface
tension on radius and temperature for droplets; Kelvin formula for the
equilibrium vapor pressure is extended to small radii. It is shown that the
ratio of the isothermal nucleation rate to that of CNT can achieve several
orders of magnitude due to the curvature effect (the dependence of surface
tension on curvature). The analysis of different dependences of the Tolman
length on radius, d(R), suggests that (i) the curvature effect is determined by
the value of d(0) which is positive and relates to the limiting (spinodal)
vapor supersaturation and (ii) the function d(R) decreases with increasing
radius; at the same time, this effect is weakly sensitive to the form of the
function d(R) and its asymptotic value. The second differential of the work is
obtained as a quadratic form with contributions from both the bulk and surface
phases. It is used for calculating the fluctuations of surface layer parameters
such as the surface tension and the specific surface area as well as the
fluctuations of nucleus parameters.


  The electronic and optical properties of the cleavage InAs(110) surface are
studied using a semi-empirical tight-binding method which employs an extended
atomic-like basis set. We describe and discuss the electronic character of the
surface electronic states and we compare with other theoretical approaches, and
with experimental observations. We calculate the surface electronic band
structure and the Reflectance Anisotropy Spectrum, which are described and
discussed in terms of the surface electronic states and the atomic structure.


  The motivation for extending secret sharing schemes to cases when either the
set of players is infinite or the domain from which the secret and/or the
shares are drawn is infinite or both, is similar to the case when switching to
abstract probability spaces from classical combinatorial probability. It might
shed new light on old problems, could connect seemingly unrelated problems, and
unify diverse phenomena.
  Definitions equivalent in the finitary case could be very much different when
switching to infinity, signifying their difference. The standard requirement
that qualified subsets should be able to determine the secret has different
interpretations in spite of the fact that, by assumption, all participants have
infinite computing power. The requirement that unqualified subsets should have
no, or limited information on the secret suggests that we also need some
probability distribution. In the infinite case events with zero probability are
not necessarily impossible, and we should decide whether bad events with zero
probability are allowed or not.
  In this paper, rather than giving precise definitions, we enlist an abundance
of hopefully interesting infinite secret sharing schemes. These schemes touch
quite diverse areas of mathematics such as projective geometry, stochastic
processes and Hilbert spaces. Nevertheless our main tools are from probability
theory. The examples discussed here serve as foundation and illustration to the
more theory oriented companion paper.


  Whether the $Y(4260)$ can couple to open charm channels has been a crucial
issue for understanding its nature. The available experimental data suggest
that the cross section line shapes of exclusive processes in $e^+e^-$
annihilations have nontrivial structures around the mass region of the
$Y(4260)$. As part of a series of studies of the $Y(4260)$ as mainly a
$\bar{D}D_1(2420)+c.c.$ molecular state, we show that the partial widths of the
$Y(4260)$ to the two-body open charm channels of $e^+e^-\to D^*\bar{D}^*$ and
$D_s^*\bar{D}_s^*$ are much smaller than that to $\bar{D}D^*\pi+c.c.$. The line
shapes measured by the Belle Collaboration for these two channels can be well
described by the vector charmonium states $\psi(4040)$, $\psi(4160)$ and
$\psi(4415)$ together with the $Y(4260)$. It turns out that the interference of
the $Y(4260)$ with the other charmonia produces a dip around 4.22~GeV in the
$e^+e^-\to D^*\bar{D}^*$ cross section line shape. The data also show an
evidence for the strong coupling of the $Y(4260)$ to the $D\bar D_1(2420)$, in
line with the expectation in the hadronic molecular scenario for the $Y(4260)$.


  In the fast-growing smart devices, Android is the most popular OS, and due to
its attractive features, mobility, ease of use, these devices hold sensitive
information such as personal data, browsing history, shopping history,
financial details, etc. Therefore, any security gap in these devices means that
the information stored or accessing the smart devices are at high risk of being
breached by the malware. These malware are continuously growing and are also
used for military espionage, disrupting the industry, power grids, etc. To
detect these malware, traditional signature matching techniques are widely
used. However, such strategies are not capable to detect the advanced Android
malicious apps because malware developer uses several obfuscation techniques.
Hence, researchers are continuously addressing the security issues in the
Android based smart devices. Therefore, in this paper using Drebin benchmark
malware dataset we experimentally demonstrate how to improve the detection
accuracy by analyzing the apps after grouping the collected data based on the
permissions and achieved 97.15% overall average accuracy. Our results
outperform the accuracy obtained without grouping data (79.27%, 2017), Arp, et
al. (94%, 2014), Annamalai et al. (84.29%, 2016), Bahman Rashidi et al. (82%,
2017)) and Ali Feizollah, et al. (95.5%, 2017). The analysis also shows that
among the groups, Microphone group detection accuracy is least while Calendar
group apps are detected with the highest accuracy, and with the highest
accuracy, and for the best performance, one shall take 80-100 features.


  The results of searches for $B^{0}_{(s)} \rightarrow J/{\psi} p \overline{p}$
and $B^{+} \to J/{\psi} p \overline{p} {\pi}^{+}$ decays are reported. The
analysis is based on a data sample, corresponding to an integrated luminosity
of 1.0 fb$^{-1}$ of $pp$ collisions, collected with the LHCb detector. An
excess with 2.8$\,\sigma$ significance is seen for the decay $B^{0}_{s} \to
J/{\psi} p \overline{p}$ and an upper limit on the branching fraction is set at
the 90 % confidence level: ${\cal B}(B^{0}_{s} \to J/{\psi} p \overline{p}) <
4.8 \times 10^{-6}$, which is the first such limit. No significant signals are
seen for $B^{0} \to J/{\psi} p \overline{p}$ and $B^{+} \to J/{\psi} p
\overline{p} {\pi}^{+}$ decays, for which the corresponding limits are set:
${\cal{B}}(B^{0} \to J/{\psi} p \overline{p}) < 5.2 \times 10^{-7}$, which
significantly improves the existing limit; and ${\cal{B}}(B^{+} \to J/{\psi} p
\overline{p} {\pi}^{+}) < 5.0 \times 10^{-7}$, which is the first limit on this
branching fraction.


  We revisit the Casimir effect for two concentric spherical shells in de
Sitter background with a new geometric configuration, namely Euclidean
signature between and Lorentzian signature outside the spheres with different
cosmological constants, for a massless scalar field satisfying Dirichlet
boundary conditions on the spheres. It is shown that an extra constant pressure
emerges due to this signature changing configuration. Some interesting aspects
of this extra term are then discussed.


  Fenchel-Young losses are a family of convex loss functions, encompassing the
squared, logistic and sparsemax losses, among others. Each Fenchel-Young loss
is implicitly associated with a link function, for mapping model outputs to
predictions. For instance, the logistic loss is associated with the soft argmax
link function. Can we build new loss functions associated with the same link
function as Fenchel-Young losses? In this paper, we introduce Fitzpatrick
losses, a new family of convex loss functions based on the Fitzpatrick
function. A well-known theoretical tool in maximal monotone operator theory,
the Fitzpatrick function naturally leads to a refined Fenchel-Young inequality,
making Fitzpatrick losses tighter than Fenchel-Young losses, while maintaining
the same link function for prediction. As an example, we introduce the
Fitzpatrick logistic loss and the Fitzpatrick sparsemax loss, counterparts of
the logistic and the sparsemax losses. This yields two new tighter losses
associated with the soft argmax and the sparse argmax, two of the most
ubiquitous output layers used in machine learning. We study in details the
properties of Fitzpatrick losses and in particular, we show that they can be
seen as Fenchel-Young losses using a modified, target-dependent generating
function. We demonstrate the effectiveness of Fitzpatrick losses for label
proportion estimation.


  Recently Jamrozy et al. (2009) identified 4C 02.27 (J0935+0204) as the first
possible example of a double-double radio source which is optically identified
with a quasar (i.e. not a galaxy), at the redshift of z=0.649. The overall
projected angular size of the radio source reaches about 1.5', with a prominent
"core" component in the centre. The two opposite pairs of radio lobes might
indicate two periods of episodic activity. We report on our short exploratory
1.6-GHz Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) observations of the innermost
radio structure of the quasar, conducted with the electronic European VLBI
Network (e-EVN) on 2009 September 30. These revealed a milliarcsecond-scale
compact source which is the base of the approaching one of the two symmetric
relativistic jets currently supplying the hot spots in the inner pair of the
arcsecond-scale radio lobes in 4C 02.27.


  The visual quality of point clouds has been greatly emphasized since the
ever-increasing 3D vision applications are expected to provide cost-effective
and high-quality experiences for users. Looking back on the development of
point cloud quality assessment (PCQA) methods, the visual quality is usually
evaluated by utilizing single-modal information, i.e., either extracted from
the 2D projections or 3D point cloud. The 2D projections contain rich texture
and semantic information but are highly dependent on viewpoints, while the 3D
point clouds are more sensitive to geometry distortions and invariant to
viewpoints. Therefore, to leverage the advantages of both point cloud and
projected image modalities, we propose a novel no-reference point cloud quality
assessment (NR-PCQA) metric in a multi-modal fashion. In specific, we split the
point clouds into sub-models to represent local geometry distortions such as
point shift and down-sampling. Then we render the point clouds into 2D image
projections for texture feature extraction. To achieve the goals, the
sub-models and projected images are encoded with point-based and image-based
neural networks. Finally, symmetric cross-modal attention is employed to fuse
multi-modal quality-aware information. Experimental results show that our
approach outperforms all compared state-of-the-art methods and is far ahead of
previous NR-PCQA methods, which highlights the effectiveness of the proposed
method. The code is available at https://github.com/zzc-1998/MM-PCQA.


  We elaborate on the recent proposal that intersection numbers of certain
cohomology classes on the moduli space of genus-zero Riemann surfaces with
punctures compute tree-level scattering amplitudes in quantum field theories.
The relevant cohomology classes are twisted by representations of the
fundamental group that describes how punctures braid around each other on the
Riemann surface, which can be used to link it to the space of kinematic
invariants. Intersection numbers of said cohomology classes, whose
representatives we call twisted forms, can be shown to fully localize on the
boundaries of the moduli space, which are in one-to-one map with Feynman
diagrams. We prove that when twisted forms are logarithmic, their intersection
numbers have a simple expansion in terms of trivalent Feynman diagrams allowing
only for massless propagators on the internal and external lines. For physical
applications one also needs to study non-logarithmic forms as they are
responsible for propagation of massive states. We utilize the natural fibre
bundle structure of the moduli space, which allows for a direct access to the
boundaries, to introduce recursion relations for intersection numbers that
"integrate out" puncture-by-puncture. The resulting recursion involves only
linear algebra of certain matrices describing braiding properties of the moduli
space and evaluating one-dimensional residues, thus paving a way for explicit
analytic computations of scattering amplitudes. Together with the previous
reformulation of the tree-level S-matrix of string theory in terms of twisted
forms, the results of this work complete a unified geometric framework for
studying scattering amplitudes from genus-zero Riemann surfaces. We show that a
web of dualities between different homology and cohomology groups allows for
deriving a host of identities among various types of amplitudes computed from
the moduli space.


  What is the time complexity of matrix multiplication of sparse integer
matrices with $m_{in}$ nonzeros in the input and $m_{out}$ nonzeros in the
output? This paper provides improved upper bounds for this question for almost
any choice of $m_{in}$ vs. $m_{out}$, and provides evidence that these new
bounds might be optimal up to further progress on fast matrix multiplication.
  Our main contribution is a new algorithm that reduces sparse matrix
multiplication to dense (but smaller) rectangular matrix multiplication. Our
running time thus depends on the optimal exponent $\omega(a,b,c)$ of
multiplying dense $n^a\times n^b$ by $n^b\times n^c$ matrices. We discover that
when $m_{out}=\Theta(m_{in}^r)$ the time complexity of sparse matrix
multiplication is $O(m_{in}^{\sigma+\epsilon})$, for all $\epsilon > 0$, where
$\sigma$ is the solution to the equation
$\omega(\sigma-1,2-\sigma,1+r-\sigma)=\sigma$. No matter what
$\omega(\cdot,\cdot,\cdot)$ turns out to be, and for all $r\in(0,2)$, the new
bound beats the state of the art, and we provide evidence that it is optimal
based on the complexity of the all-edge triangle problem.
  In particular, in terms of the input plus output size $m = m_{in} + m_{out}$
our algorithm runs in time $O(m^{1.3459})$. Even for Boolean matrices, this
improves over the previous
$m^{\frac{2\omega}{\omega+1}+\epsilon}=O(m^{1.4071})$ bound [Amossen, Pagh;
2009], which was a natural barrier since it coincides with the longstanding
bound of all-edge triangle in sparse graphs [Alon, Yuster, Zwick; 1994]. We
find it interesting that matrix multiplication can be solved faster than
triangle detection in this natural setting. In fact, we establish an
equivalence to a special case of the all-edge triangle problem.


  In this work, we study the conditions under which fluorescent beads can be
used to emulate single fluorescent molecules in the calibration of optical
microscopes. Although beads are widely used due to their brightness and easy
manipulation, there can be notable differences between the point spread
functions (PSFs) they produce and those for single-molecule fluorophores,
caused by their different emission pattern and their size. We study
theoretically these differences for various scenarios, e.g. with or without
polarization channel splitting, to determine the conditions under which the use
of beads as a model for single molecules is valid. We also propose methods to
model the blurring due to the size difference and compensate for it to produce
PSFs that are more similar to those for single molecules.


  Successfully modeling state and analytics-based semantic relationships of
documents enhances representation, importance, relevancy, provenience, and
priority of the document. These attributes are the core elements that form the
machine-based knowledge representation for documents. However, modeling
document relationships that can change over time can be inelegant, limited,
complex or overly burdensome for semantic technologies. In this paper, we
present Direct Qualification (DQ), an approach for modeling any semantically
referenced document, concept, or named graph with results from associated
applied analytics. The proposed approach supplements the traditional
subject-object relationships by providing a third leg to the relationship; the
qualification of how and why the relationship exists. To illustrate, we show a
prototype of an event-based system with a realistic use case for applying DQ to
relevancy analytics of PageRank and Hyperlink-Induced Topic Search (HITS).


  We study semi-analytically the light emission and absorption properties of
arbitrary stratified photonic structures with embedded two-dimensional
magnetoelectric point scattering lattices, as used in recent plasmon-enhanced
LEDs and solar cells. By employing dyadic Green's function for the layered
structure in combination with Ewald lattice summation to deal with the particle
lattice, we develop an efficient method to study the coupling between planar 2D
scattering lattices of plasmonic, or metamaterial point particles, coupled to
layered structures. Using the `array scanning method' we deal with localized
sources. Firstly, we apply our method to light emission enhancement of dipole
emitters in slab waveguides, mediated by plasmonic lattices. We benchmark the
array scanning method against a reciprocity-based approach to find that the
calculated radiative rate enhancement in k-space below the light cone shows
excellent agreement. Secondly, we apply our method to study
absorption-enhancement in thin-film solar cells mediated by periodic Ag
nanoparticle arrays. Lastly, we study the emission distribution in k-space of a
coupled waveguide-lattice system. In particular, we explore the dark mode
excitation on the plasmonic lattice using the so-called Array Scanning Method.
Our method could be useful for simulating a broad range of complex nanophotonic
structures, i.e., metasurfaces, plasmon-enhanced light emitting systems and
photovoltaics.


  We describe a data-driven discovery method that leverages Simpson's paradox
to uncover interesting patterns in behavioral data. Our method systematically
disaggregates data to identify subgroups within a population whose behavior
deviates significantly from the rest of the population. Given an outcome of
interest and a set of covariates, the method follows three steps. First, it
disaggregates data into subgroups, by conditioning on a particular covariate,
so as minimize the variation of the outcome within the subgroups. Next, it
models the outcome as a linear function of another covariate, both in the
subgroups and in the aggregate data. Finally, it compares trends to identify
disaggregations that produce subgroups with different behaviors from the
aggregate. We illustrate the method by applying it to three real-world
behavioral datasets, including Q\&A site Stack Exchange and online learning
platforms Khan Academy and Duolingo.


  Classical evaluations of configurations of intertwined quantum contexts
induce relations, such as true-implies-false, true-implies-true, but also
nonseparability among the input and output terminals. When combined, these
exploitable configurations (aka gadgets) deliver the strongest form of
classical value indefiniteness. However, the choice of the respective
configuration among all such collections, and thus the relation of its
terminals, remains arbitrary and cannot be motivated by some superselection
principle inherent to quantum or classical physics.


  Starting from a previously derived theoretical expression for the electrical
conductivity of the Bechgaard salts,and experimental data on the resistivity of
these materials,it is shown how a valueof the electron hopping energy can be
determined.Values obtained in this way are in agreement with estimates made by
more complicated methods.


  Hecke-Hopf algebras were defined by A. Berenstein and D. Kazhdan. We give an
explicit presentation of an Hecke-Hopf algebra when the parameter $m_{ij},$
associated to any two distinct vertices $i$ and $j$ in the presentation of a
Coxeter group, equals $4,$ $5$ or $6$. As an application, we give a proof of a
conjecture of Berenstein and Kazhdan when the Coxeter group is crystallographic
and non-simply-laced. As another application, we show that another conjecture
of Berenstein and Kazhdan holds when $m_{ij},$ associated to any two distinct
vertices $i$ and $j,$ equals $4$ and that the conjecture does not hold when
some $m_{ij}$ equals $6$ by giving a counterexample to it.


  Control studies in ecological models of networks involving invasive plants
can offer tangible management strategies. Framing control policies to tackle
problems posed by invasive plants on indigenous plant diversity under the
sustainable developmental goals framework is the main motivation of this paper.
Based on the reported experimental and theoretical observations, we propose
minimal ecological models of direct interactions of \textit{Lantana camara}
with other entitites e.g. other indigenous plants (denoted by Control-plant)
and soil microbes. The species' abundance variables represented by the nodes in
the model networks follow generalized Lotka-Volterra dynamics and input signals
are incorporated at appropriate driver nodes to control the \textit{Lantana
camara} outgrowth. Analysis with Lie algebra and controllability criteria
showed that our model systems are controllable with minimum of two control
input signals. Analytical results of our model equations indicated that
successive interventions are required to increase the abundance of
control-plant, the microbes and suppress \textit{Lantana camara}. We observed
from the numerical analysis with LQR algorithm that the number of interventions
to be taken to control the \textit{Lantana camara} outgrowth depends on the
choice of various important parameters such as intervention time, effort and
penalty etc. Further, the increase in nonlinear terms contributed from
self-loops in the network model shows the persistence of \textit{L. camara} and
how it drives the coexistence of the species. We propose that parameters we
have identified in our study needed to be considered and analyzed extensively
for designing sustainable policies to control invasive species in an ecosystem.


  We introduce a practical robotics solution for the task of heterogeneous
bagging, requiring the placement of multiple rigid and deformable objects into
a deformable bag. This is a difficult task as it features complex interactions
between multiple highly deformable objects under limited observability. To
tackle these challenges, we propose a robotic system consisting of two learned
policies: a rearrangement policy that learns to place multiple rigid objects
and fold deformable objects in order to achieve desirable pre-bagging
conditions, and a lifting policy to infer suitable grasp points for bi-manual
bag lifting. We evaluate these learned policies on a real-world three-arm robot
platform that achieves a 70% heterogeneous bagging success rate with novel
objects. To facilitate future research and comparison, we also develop a novel
heterogeneous bagging simulation benchmark that will be made publicly
available.


  For certain situations we give a geometrical background for quasiclassical KP
calculations based on an explicit connection to quantum mechanics and the
collapse of coherent states to coadjoint orbits for classical operators.


  In 2014 A. Degtyarev, I. Itenberg and the author gave a description, up to
fiberwise equivariant deformations, of maximally inflected real trigonal curves
of type~I (over a base $ B $ of an arbitrary genus) in terms of the
combinatorics of sufficiently simple graphs and for $ B=\mathbb{P}^1 $ obtained
a complete classification of such curves. In this paper, the mentioned results
are extended to maximally inflected real trigonal curves of type~II over $
B=\mathbb{P}^1 $. As usual, the results for such curves are extended to real
Jacobian elliptic surfaces with all singular fibers real.


  In [O'Connell and Yor (2002)] a path-transformation G was introduced with the
property that, for X belonging to a certain class of random walks on the
integer lattice, the transformed walk G(X) has the same law as that of the
original walk conditioned never to exit a type-A Weyl chamber. In this paper,
we show that G is closely related to the Robinson-Schensted algorithm, and use
this connection to give a new proof of the above representation theorem. The
new proof is valid for a larger class of random walks and yields additional
information about the joint law of X and G(X). The corresponding results for
the Brownian model are recovered by Donsker's theorem. These are connected with
Hermitian Brownian motion and the Gaussian Unitary Ensemble of random matrix
theory. The connection we make between the path-transformation G and the RS
algorithm also provides a new formula and interpretation for the latter. This
can be used to study properties of the RS algorithm and, moreover, extends
easily to a continuous setting.


  Various diffusion MRI (dMRI) preprocessing pipelines are currently available
to yield more accurate diffusion parameters. Here, we evaluated accuracy and
robustness of the optimized Diffusion parameter EStImation with Gibbs and NoisE
Removal (DESIGNER) pipeline in a large clinical dMRI dataset and using ground
truth phantoms. DESIGNER has been modified to improve denoising and target
Gibbs ringing for partial Fourier acquisitions. We compared the revisited
DESIGNER (Dv2) (including denoising, Gibbs removal, correction for motion, EPI
distortion, and eddy currents) against the original DESIGNER (Dv1) pipeline,
minimal preprocessing (including correction for motion, EPI distortion, and
eddy currents only), and no preprocessing on a large clinical dMRI dataset of
524 control subjects with ages between 25 and 75 years old. We evaluated the
effect of specific processing steps on age correlations in white matter with
DTI and DKI metrics. We also evaluated the added effect of minimal Gaussian
smoothing to deal with noise and to reduce outliers in parameter maps compared
to DESIGNER (Dv2)'s noise removal method. Moreover, DESIGNER (Dv2)'s updated
noise and Gibbs removal methods were assessed using ground truth dMRI phantom
to evaluate accuracy. Results show age correlation in white matter with DTI and
DKI metrics were affected by the preprocessing pipeline, causing systematic
differences in absolute parameter values and loss or gain of statistical
significance. Both in clinical dMRI and ground truth phantoms, DESIGNER (Dv2)
pipeline resulted in the smallest number of outlier voxels and improved
accuracy in DTI and DKI metrics as noise was reduced and Gibbs removal was
improved. Thus, DESIGNER (Dv2) provides more accurate and robust DTI and DKI
parameter maps as compared to no preprocessing or minimal preprocessing.


  Phase diagrams chart material properties with respect to one or more external
or internal parameters such as pressure or magnetisation; as such, they play a
fundamental role in many theoretical and applied fields of science. In this
work, we prove that provided the phase of the Hamiltonian at a finite size
reflects the phase in the thermodynamic limit, approximating the critical
boundary in its phase diagram to constant precision is
$P^{QMA_{EXP}}$-complete. This holds even for translationally-invariant nearest
neighbour couplings, and even if the system's phase diagram is promised to have
a single critical boundary delineating two phases. For the simpler case of a
single parameter, the same problem remains $QMA_{EXP}$-hard. Our results extend
the study of quantum phases to systems with more realistic phase diagrams than
previously studied. Furthermore, our findings place complexity-theoretic
constraints on the effectiveness of (computational or analytic) methods based
on finite size criteria, similar in spirit to the Knabe bound, for the task of
extrapolating the properties (e.g. gapped/gapless) of a system from finite-size
observations to the thermodynamic limit.


  We study the accretion flow from a counter-rotating torus orbiting a central
Kerr black hole (BH). We characterize the flow properties at the turning point
of the accreting matter flow from the orbiting torus, defined by the condition
$u^\phi = 0$ on the flow torodial velocity. The counter-rotating accretion flow
and jet-like flow turning point location along BH rotational axis is given.
Some properties of the counter-rotating flow thickness and counter-rotating
tori energetics are studied.The maximum amount of matter swallowed by the BH
from the counter-rotating tori is determined by the background properties. The
fast spinning BH energetics depends mostly on BH spin rather than on the
properties of the counter-rotating fluids or the tori masses. The turning point
is located in a narrow orbital corona (spherical shell), for photons and matter
flow constituents, surrounding the BH stationary limit (outer ergosurface),
depending on the BH spin-mass ratio and the fluid initial momentum only. The
turning corona for jet-like-flow has larger thickness, it is separated from the
torus flow turning corona and it is closer to the BH stationary limit. Turning
points of matter accreting from torus and from jets are independent explicitly
of the details of the accretion and tori model. The turning corona could be
observable due to an increase of flow luminosity and temperature. The corona is
larger on the BH equatorial plane, where it is the farthest from the central
attractor, and narrower on the BH poles.


  We show that coupling among multiple resonances can be conveniently
introduced and controlled by boundary wave scattering. We demonstrate this
principle in optical microcavities of quasi-circular shape, where the couplings
of multiple modes are determined by the scattering from different harmonic
boundary deformations. We analyze these couplings using a perturbation theory,
which gives an intuitive understanding of the first-order and higher-order
scattering processes. Different scattering paths between two boundary waves can
either enhance or reduce their coupling strength. The effect of controlled
multimode coupling is most pronounced in the direction of output from an open
cavity, which can cause a dramatic change of the external cavity field
distribution.


  During morphogenesis, the shape of a tissue emerges from collective cellular
behaviors, which are in part regulated by mechanical and biochemical
interactions between cells. Quantification of force and stress is therefore
necessary to analyze the mechanisms controlling tissue morphogenesis. Recently,
a mechanical measurement method based on force inference from cell shapes and
connectivity has been developed. It is non-invasive, and can provide space-time
maps of force and stress within an epithelial tissue, up to prefactors. We
previously performed a comparative study of three force-inference methods,
which differ in their approach of treating indefiniteness in an inverse problem
between cell shapes and forces. In the present study, to further validate and
compare the three force inference methods, we tested their robustness by
measuring temporal fluctuation of estimated forces. Quantitative data of
cell-level dynamics in a developing tissue suggests that variation of forces
and stress will remain small within a short period of time ($\sim$minutes).
Here, we showed that cell-junction tensions and global stress inferred by the
Bayesian force inference method varied less with time than those inferred by
the method that estimates only tension. In contrast, the amplitude of temporal
fluctuations of estimated cell pressures differs less between different
methods. Altogether, the present study strengthens the validity and robustness
of the Bayesian force-inference method.


  Motivated by widespread dominance hierarchy, growth of group sizes, and
feedback mechanisms in social species, we are devoted to exploring the scalable
second-order consensus of hierarchical groups. More specifically, a
hierarchical group consists of a collection of agents with double-integrator
dynamics on a directed acyclic graph with additional reverse edges, which
characterize feedback mechanisms across hierarchical layers. As the group size
grows and the reverse edges appear, we investigate whether the absolute
velocity protocol and the relative velocity protocol can preserve the system
consensus property without tuning the control gains. It is rigorously proved
that the absolute velocity protocol is able to achieve completely scalable
second-order consensus but the relative velocity protocol cannot. This result
theoretically reveals how the scalable coordination behavior in hierarchical
groups is determined by local interaction rules. Moreover, we develop a
hierarchical structure in order to achieve scalable second-order consensus for
networks of any size and with any number of reverse edges.


  Epidemiological evidence is based on multiple data sources including clinical
trials, cohort studies, surveys, registries and expert opinions. Merging
information from different sources opens up new possibilities for the
estimation of causal effects. We show how causal effects can be identified and
estimated by combining experiments and observations in real and realistic
scenarios. As a new tool, we present do-search, a recently developed
algorithmic approach that can determine the identifiability of a causal effect.
The approach is based on do-calculus, and it can utilize data with non-trivial
missing data and selection bias mechanisms. When the effect is identifiable,
do-search outputs an identifying formula on which numerical estimation can be
based. When the effect is not identifiable, we can use do-search to recognize
additional data sources and assumptions that would make the effect
identifiable. Throughout the paper, we consider the effect of salt-adding
behavior on blood pressure mediated by the salt intake as an example. The
identifiability of this effect is resolved in various scenarios with different
assumptions on confounding. There are scenarios where the causal effect is
identifiable from a chain of experiments but not from survey data, as well as
scenarios where the opposite is true. As an illustration, we use survey data
from NHANES 2013--2016 and the results from a meta-analysis of randomized
controlled trials and estimate the reduction in average systolic blood pressure
under an intervention where the use of table salt is discontinued.


  By 1930, at a time when the new physics based on relativity and quantum
theory had reached a state of consolidation, problems of a foundational kind
began to abound. Physicists began to speak of a new "crisis" and envisage a
forthcoming "revolution" of a scale similar to the one in the mid-1920s. The
perceived crisis was an issue not only in microphysics but also in cosmology,
where it resulted in ambitious cosmophysical theories that transcended the
ordinary methods of physics. The uncertain cognitive situation was, in some
circles, associated to the uncertain political and moral situation. Did the
problems of foundational physics demand a revolution in thinking that somehow
paralleled the political revolutions of the time? I argue that although such
ideas were indeed discussed in the 1930s, they were more rhetoric than reality.
With the benefit of hindsight one can see that the perceived crisis was only
temporary and not significantly related to social or ideological developments
in the decade.


  Granular flow problems characterized by large deformations are widespread in
various applications, including coastal and geotechnical engineering. The paper
deals with the application of a rigid-perfectly plastic two-phase model
extended by the Drucker-Prager yield criterion to simulate granular media with
a finite volume flow solver (FV). The model refers to the combination of a
Bingham fluid and an Eulerian strain measure to assess the failure region of
granular dam slides. A monolithic volume-of-fluid (VoF) method is used to
distinguish between the air and granular phases, both governed by the
incompressible Navier-Stokes equations. The numerical framework enables
modeling of large displacements and arbitrary shapes for large-scale
applications. The displayed validation and verification focuses on the
rigid-perfectly plastic material model for non-cohesive and cohesive materials
with varying angles of repose. Results indicate a good agreement of the
predicted soil surface and strain results with experimental and numerical data.


  Achieving a proper balance between planning quality, safety and efficiency is
a major challenge for autonomous driving. Optimisation-based motion planners
are capable of producing safe, smooth and comfortable plans, but often at the
cost of runtime efficiency. On the other hand, naively deploying trajectories
produced by efficient-to-run deep imitation learning approaches might risk
compromising safety. In this paper, we present PILOT -- a planning framework
that comprises an imitation neural network followed by an efficient optimiser
that actively rectifies the network's plan, guaranteeing fulfilment of safety
and comfort requirements. The objective of the efficient optimiser is the same
as the objective of an expensive-to-run optimisation-based planning system that
the neural network is trained offline to imitate. This efficient optimiser
provides a key layer of online protection from learning failures or deficiency
in out-of-distribution situations that might compromise safety or comfort.
Using a state-of-the-art, runtime-intensive optimisation-based method as the
expert, we demonstrate in simulated autonomous driving experiments in CARLA
that PILOT achieves a seven-fold reduction in runtime when compared to the
expert it imitates without sacrificing planning quality.


  Ge rich ternary chalcogenide glasses (ChG) exhibit photobleaching (PB) when
illuminated with bandgap light and such an effect is originating from the
combined effect of intrinsic structural changes and photo-oxidation. In a sharp
contradict to these previous observations, in this letter, we demonstrate for
the first time that Ge rich Ge25As10Se65 ChG thin films exhibit photodarkening
(PD) at 20 K and PB at 300 and 420 K for continuous illumination of ~ 3 hours.
Strikingly, the temporal evolution of PD/PB show distinct characteristics at
the temperatures of illumination and provide valuable information on the light
induced structural changes. Further, structure specific far infrared (FIR)
absorption measurements give direct evidence of different structural units
involved in PD/PB at the contrasting temperatures. By comparing the
lightinduced effects in vacuum and air, we conclude that intrinsic structural
changes dominate over photo-oxidation in the observed PB in Ge25As10Se65 ChG
thin films.


  In this work, various versions of the so-called Omega-Lemma are provided,
which ensure differentiability properties of pushforwrds between spaces of
C^r-sections (or compactly supported C^r-sections) in vector bundles over
finite-dimensional base manifolds whose fibres are (possibly
infinite-dimensional) locally convex spaces.
  Applications are given, including the proof of continuity for some natural
module multiplications on spaces of sections and the construction of certain
infinite-dimensional Lie groups of Lie group-valued maps.


  Accurate localization is fundamental for autonomous underwater vehicles
(AUVs) to carry out precise tasks, such as manipulation and construction.
Vision-based solutions using fiducial marker are promising, but extremely
challenging underwater because of harsh lighting condition underwater. This
paper introduces a gradient-based active camera exposure control method to
tackle sharp lighting variations during image acquisition, which can establish
better foundation for subsequent image enhancement procedures. Considering a
typical scenario for underwater operations where visual tags are used, we
proposed several experiments comparing our method with other state-of-the-art
exposure control method including Active Exposure Control (AEC) and
Gradient-based Exposure Control (GEC). Results show a significant improvement
in the accuracy of robot localization. This method is an important component
that can be used in visual-based state estimation pipeline to improve the
overall localization accuracy.


  Graph analysis performs many random reads and writes, thus, these workloads
are typically performed in memory. Traditionally, analyzing large graphs
requires a cluster of machines so the aggregate memory exceeds the graph size.
We demonstrate that a multicore server can process graphs with billions of
vertices and hundreds of billions of edges, utilizing commodity SSDs with
minimal performance loss. We do so by implementing a graph-processing engine on
top of a user-space SSD file system designed for high IOPS and extreme
parallelism. Our semi-external memory graph engine called FlashGraph stores
vertex state in memory and edge lists on SSDs. It hides latency by overlapping
computation with I/O. To save I/O bandwidth, FlashGraph only accesses edge
lists requested by applications from SSDs; to increase I/O throughput and
reduce CPU overhead for I/O, it conservatively merges I/O requests. These
designs maximize performance for applications with different I/O
characteristics. FlashGraph exposes a general and flexible vertex-centric
programming interface that can express a wide variety of graph algorithms and
their optimizations. We demonstrate that FlashGraph in semi-external memory
performs many algorithms with performance up to 80% of its in-memory
implementation and significantly outperforms PowerGraph, a popular distributed
in-memory graph engine.


  Zen Puzzle Garden (ZPG) is a one-player puzzle game. In this paper, we prove
that deciding the solvability of ZPG is NP-complete.


  We revisit the problem of calculating the probability current for
discontinuous states, such that may arise in atom trapping or as a result of
projective measurements. In the first passage time representation, the problem
reduces to evaluation of a localised wave originating from the discontinuity,
whose interference with the initial state determines the transfer of
probability. Depending on the type of discontinuity, the current behaves as
$t^{1/2}$, $t^{3/2}$ or $const(t)$. Our approach generalises earlier work on
this subject.


  Sample assignment plays a prominent part in modern object detection
approaches. However, most existing methods rely on manual design to assign
positive / negative samples, which do not explicitly establish the
relationships between sample assignment and object detection performance. In
this work, we propose a novel dynamic sample assignment scheme based on
hyper-parameter search. We first define the number of positive samples assigned
to each ground truth as the hyper-parameters and employ a surrogate
optimization algorithm to derive the optimal choices. Then, we design a dynamic
sample assignment procedure to dynamically select the optimal number of
positives at each training iteration. Experiments demonstrate that the
resulting HPS-Det brings improved performance over different object detection
baselines. Moreover, We analyze the hyper-parameter reusability when
transferring between different datasets and between different backbones for
object detection, which exhibits the superiority and versatility of our method.


  The game Arc-Kayles is played on an undirected graph with two players taking
turns deleting an edge and its endpoints from the graph. We study a
generalization of this game, Weighted Arc Kayles (WAK for short), played on
graphs with counters on the vertices. The two players alternate choosing an
edge and removing one counter on both endpoints. An edge can no longer be
selected if any of its endpoints has no counter left. The last player to play a
move wins. We give a winning strategy for WAK on trees of depth 2. Moreover, we
show that the Grundy values of WAK and Arc-Kayles are unbounded. We also prove
a periodicity result on the outcome of WAK when the number of counters is fixed
for all the vertices but one. Finally, we show links between this game and a
variation of the non-attacking queens game on a chessboard.


  Denote by $\mathcal{H}_{d,g,r}$ the Hilbert scheme of smooth curves, that is
the union of components whose general point corresponds to a smooth irreducible
and non-degenerate curve of degree $d$ and genus $g$ in $\mathbb P^r$. A
component of $\mathcal{H}_{d,g,r}$ is rigid in moduli if its image under the
natural map $\pi:\mathcal{H}_{d,g,r} \dashrightarrow \mathcal{M}_{g}$ is a one
point set. In this note, we provide a proof of the fact that
$\mathcal{H}_{d,g,r}$ has no components rigid in moduli for $g > 0$ and $r=3$,
from which it follows that the only smooth projective curves embedded in
$\mathbb P^3$ whose only deformations are given by projective transformations
are the twisted cubic curves. In case $r \geq 4$, we also prove the
non-existence of a component of $\mathcal{H}_{d,g,r}$ rigid in moduli in a
certain restricted range of $d$, $g>0$ and $r$. In the course of the proofs, we
establish the irreducibility of $\mathcal{H}_{d,g,3}$ beyond the range which
has been known before.


  This paper studies the mismatch removal problem, which may serve as the
subsequent step of feature matching. Non-rigid deformation makes it difficult
to remove mismatches because no parametric transformation can be found. To
solve this problem, we first propose an algorithm based on the re-weighting and
1-point RANSAC strategy (R1P-RNSC), which is a parametric method under a
reasonable assumption that the non-rigid deformation can be approximately
represented by multiple locally rigid transformations. R1P-RNSC is fast but
suffers from a drawback that the local smoothing information cannot be taken
into account. Then, we propose a non-parametric algorithm based on the
expectation maximization algorithm and dual quaternion (EMDQ) representation to
generate the smooth deformation field. The two algorithms compensate for the
drawbacks of each other. Specifically, EMDQ needs good initial values provided
by R1P-RNSC, and R1P-RNSC needs EMDQ for refinement. Experimental results with
real-world data demonstrate that the combination of the two algorithms has the
best accuracy compared to other state-of-the-art methods, which can handle up
to 85% of outliers in real-time. The ability to generate dense deformation
field from sparse matches with outliers in real-time makes the proposed
algorithms have many potential applications, such as non-rigid registration and
SLAM.


  Let $\mathrm S^3$ be the unit sphere of $\mathbb C^2$ with its standard
Cauchy-Riemann (CR) structure. This paper investigates the CR geometry of
curves in $\mathrm S^3$ which are transversal to the contact distribution,
using the local CR invariants of $\mathrm S^3$. More specifically, the focus is
on the CR geometry of transversal knots. Four global invariants of transversal
knots are considered: the phase anomaly, the CR spin, the Maslov index, and the
CR self-linking number. The interplay between these invariants and the
Bennequin number of a knot are discussed. Next, the simplest CR invariant
variational problem for generic transversal curves is considered and its closed
critical curves are studied.


  The effect of antiferromagnetic interchain coupling in alternating spin
(1,1/2) chains is studied by mean of a spin wave theory and density matrix
renormalization group (DMRG). In particular, two limiting cases are
investigated, the two-leg ladder and its two dimensional (2D) generalization.
Results of the ground state properties like energy, spin gap, magnetizations,
and correlation functions are reported for the whole range of the interchain
coupling $J_{\perp}$. For the 2D case the spin wave results predict a smooth
dimensional crossover from 1D to 2D keeping the ground state always ordered.
For the ladder system, the DMRG results show that any $J_{\perp}>0$ drives the
system to a gapped ground state. Furthermore the behaviour of the correlation
functions closely resemble the uniform spin-1/2 ladder. For $J_{\perp}$ lower
than 0.3, however, the gap behaves quadratically as $\Delta\sim0.6
J^2_{\perp}$. Finally, it is argued that the behaviour of the spin gap for an
arbitrary number of mixed coupled spin chains is analogous to that of the
uniform spin-1/2 chains.


  The recently discovered two-dimensional (2D) layered semiconductor MoSi2N4
has aroused great interest due to its unique 2D material characteristics. In
this Letter, we found that differences in the structural details for MoSi2N4
may lead to differences in the intensity of second harmonic generation (SHG)
and its response to strain. Accordingly, SHG can be used as a simple technique
to identify the structural details of this system. We further calculated the
SHG effects of MoSi2N4 derivatives and investigated their strain-regulation
mechanism, especially including the anomalous SHG responses under strain for
MoSi2P4 and MoGe2P4, differing from other known 2D materials. The studies may
have forward-looking significance for the research of nonlinear optics and
optoelectronics in this novel 2D material system.


  This article is devoted to the long-time dynamics of point-vortex systems
near thermal equilibrium and to the possible emergence of collisional
relaxation. More precisely, we consider a tagged particle coupled to a large
number of background particles that are initially at equilibrium, and we
analyze its resulting slow dynamics. On the one hand, in the spirit of the
Lenard-Balescu relaxation for plasmas, we establish in a generic setting the
outset of the slow thermalization of the tagged particle. On the other hand, we
show that a completely different phenomenology is also possible in some
degenerate regime: the slow dynamics of the tagged particle then remains
conservative and the thermalization no longer holds in a strict sense. We
provide the first detailed description of this degenerate regime and of its
mixing properties. Note that it is particularly delicate to handle due to
statistical closure problems, which manifest themselves as a lack of
self-adjointness of the effective Hamiltonian.


  If $(k,\ell)$ is an exponent pair such that $k+\ell<1$, then we have $$
\int_1^T|\zeta(1/2+it)|^4|\zeta(\sigma+it)|^2dt \ll_\epsilon
T^{1+\epsilon}\quad(\sigma > \min({5\over6},\max(\ell-k, {5k+\ell\over4k+1})),
$$ while if $(k,\ell)$ is an exponent pair such that $3k+\ell<1$, then we have
$$ \int_1^T|\zeta(1/2+it)|^4|\zeta(\sigma+it)|^4dt \ll_\epsilon
T^{1+\epsilon}\quad(\sigma > {11k+\ell+1\over8k+2}). $$


  This year is the centenary of the birth of Ettore Majorana, one of the major
Italian physicists of all times. In this note we briefly sketch a few
biographical details about Ettore Majorana and introduce and discuss the main
points of Majorana's 10th article. In his article Majorana explicitly considers
quantum mechanics as an irreducible statistical theory because the theory is
not able to describe the time evolution of a single particle or atom in a
precise environment at a deterministic level. This lack of determinism at the
level of an elementary physical system motivated him to suggest a formal
analogy between statistical laws observed in physics and in the social
sciences. We hope the occasion of the centenary of the birth of Ettore Majorana
will be useful to remember and to reconsider not only his exceptional
achievements in theoretical physics but also his fresh and original views on
the role of statistical laws in physics and in other disciplines such as the
social sciences.