title: High-dimensional changepoint estimation via sparse projection

abstract:
  Changepoints are a very common feature of Big Data that arrive in the form of
a data stream. In this paper, we study high-dimensional time series in which,
at certain time points, the mean structure changes in a sparse subset of the
coordinates. The challenge is to borrow strength across the coordinates in
order to detect smaller changes than could be observed in any individual
component series. We propose a two-stage procedure called `inspect' for
estimation of the changepoints: first, we argue that a good projection
direction can be obtained as the leading left singular vector of the matrix
that solves a convex optimisation problem derived from the CUSUM transformation
of the time series. We then apply an existing univariate changepoint estimation
algorithm to the projected series. Our theory provides strong guarantees on
both the number of estimated changepoints and the rates of convergence of their
locations, and our numerical studies validate its highly competitive empirical
performance for a wide range of data generating mechanisms. Software
implementing the methodology is available in the R package
`InspectChangepoint'.


title: Inferring the Coronal Density Irregularity from EUV Spectra

abstract:
  Understanding the density structure of the solar corona is important for
modeling both coronal heating and the solar wind. Direct measurements are
difficult because of line-of-sight integration and possible unresolved
structures. We present a new method for quantifying such structure using
density-sensitive EUV line intensities to derive a density irregularity
parameter, a relative measure of the amount of structure along the line of
sight. We also present a simple model to relate the inferred irregularities to
physical quantities, such as the filling factor and density contrast. For quiet
Sun regions and interplume regions of coronal holes, we find a density contrast
of at least a factor of three to ten and corresponding filling factors of about
10-20%. Our results are in rough agreement with other estimates of the density
structures in these regions. The irregularity diagnostic provides a useful
relative measure of unresolved structure in various regions of the corona.


title: The CDE property for minuscule lattices

abstract:
  Reiner, Tenner, and Yong recently introduced the coincidental down-degree
expectations (CDE) property for finite posets and showed that many nice posets
are CDE. In this paper we further explore the CDE property, resolving a number
of conjectures about CDE posets put forth by Reiner-Tenner-Yong. A consequence
of our work is the completion of a case-by-case proof that any minuscule
lattice is CDE. We also explain two major applications of the study of CDE
posets: formulas for certain classes of set-valued tableaux; and homomesy
results for rowmotion and gyration acting on sets of order ideals.


title:
Quantifying Neural Efficiency and Capacity: A Differential Equation
  Interpretation of Polynomial Contrasts

abstract:
  Task based neuroimaging tools for the study of cognitive neuroscience provide
insight into understanding how the brain responds to increasing cognitive
demand. Theoretical models of neural-cognitive relationships have been
developed based on observations of linear and non-linear increases in brain
activity. Neural efficiency and capacity are two parameters of current
theoretical models. These two theoretical parameters describe the rate of
increase of brain activity and the upper limits of the increases, respectively.
The current work demonstrates that a quadratic model of increasing brain
activity in response to the n-back task is a solution to a differential
equation model. This reinterpretation of a standard approach to analyzing a
common cognitive task provides a wealth of new insight. The results include
brain wide measures of neural efficiency and capacity. The quantification of
neural-cognitive relationships provides evidence to support current cognitive
neuroscience theories. In addition, the methods provide a framework for
understanding the neural mechanisms of working memory. This allows estimation
of the effects of experimental manipulations within a conceptual research
framework. The proposed methods were applied to twenty-one healthy young adults
while engaging in four levels of the n-back task. All methods are easily
applicable using standard current software packages for neuroimaging.


title:
An Empirical Comparison of Sampling Quality Metrics: A Case Study for
  Bayesian Nonnegative Matrix Factorization

abstract:
  In this work, we empirically explore the question: how can we assess the
quality of samples from some target distribution? We assume that the samples
are provided by some valid Monte Carlo procedure, so we are guaranteed that the
collection of samples will asymptotically approximate the true distribution.
Most current evaluation approaches focus on two questions: (1) Has the chain
mixed, that is, is it sampling from the distribution? and (2) How independent
are the samples (as MCMC procedures produce correlated samples)? Focusing on
the case of Bayesian nonnegative matrix factorization, we empirically evaluate
standard metrics of sampler quality as well as propose new metrics to capture
aspects that these measures fail to expose. The aspect of sampling that is of
particular interest to us is the ability (or inability) of sampling methods to
move between multiple optima in NMF problems. As a proxy, we propose and study
a number of metrics that might quantify the diversity of a set of NMF
factorizations obtained by a sampler through quantifying the coverage of the
posterior distribution. We compare the performance of a number of standard
sampling methods for NMF in terms of these new metrics.


title:
The total variation flow perturbed by gradient linear multiplicative
  noise

abstract:
  We consider stochastic non-linear diffusion equations with a highly singular
diffusivity term and multiplicative gradient-type noise. We study existence and
uniqueness of non-negative variational solutions in terms of stochastic
variational inequalities. We also show extinction in finite time with
probability one. These kind of equations arise, e.g. in the use for simulation
of image restoring techniques or for modeling turbulence.


title:
The ALMA Redshift 4 Survey (AR4S): I. The massive end of the z=4 main
  sequence of galaxies

abstract:
  We introduce the ALMA Redshift 4 Survey (AR4S), a systematic ALMA survey of
all the known galaxies with stellar mass (M*) larger than 5e10 Msun at 3.5<z<5
in the GOODS--south, UDS and COSMOS CANDELS fields. The sample we have analyzed
in this paper is composed of 96 galaxies observed with ALMA at 890um (180um
rest-frame) with an on-source integration time of 1.3 min per galaxy. We
detected 32% of the sample at more than 3 sigma significance. Using the stacked
ALMA and Herschel photometry, we derived an average dust temperature of 40+/-2
K for the whole sample, and extrapolate the Lir and SFR for all our galaxies
based on their ALMA flux. We then used a forward modeling approach to estimate
their intrinsic sSFR distribution, deconvolved of measurement errors and
selection effects: we find a linear relation between SFR and M*, with a median
sSFR=2.8+/-0.8 Gyr and a dispersion around that relation of 0.28+/-0.13 dex.
This latter value is consistent with that measured at lower redshifts, which is
proof that the main sequence of star-forming galaxies was already in place at
z=4, at least among massive galaxies. These new constraints on the properties
of the main sequence are in good agreement with the latest predictions from
numerical simulations, and suggest that the bulk of star formation in galaxies
is driven by the same mechanism from z=4 to the present day, that is, over at
least 90% of the cosmic history. We also discuss the consequences of our
results on the population of early quiescent galaxies. This paper is part of a
series that will employ these new ALMA observations to explore the star
formation and dust properties of the massive end of the z=4 galaxy population.


title: The weak specification property for geodesic flows on CAT(-1) spaces

abstract:
  We prove that the geodesic flow on a compact locally CAT(-1) space has the
weak specification property, and give various applications. We show that every
H\"older potential on the space of geodesics has a unique equilibrium state. We
establish the equidistribution of weighted periodic orbits and the large
deviations principle for all such measures. The thermodynamic results are
proved for the class of expansive flows with weak specification.


title: Orthogonal product bases of four qubits

abstract:
  An orthogonal product basis (OPB) of a finite-dimensional Hilbert space
$H=H_1\otimes H_2\otimes\cdots\otimes H_n$ is an orthonormal basis of $H$
consisting of product vectors $x_1\otimes x_2\otimes\cdots\otimes x_n$. We show
that the problem of classifying the OPBs of an $n$-qubit system can be reduced
to a purely combinatorial problem. We solve this combinatorial problem in the
case of four qubits and obtain 33 multiparameter families of OPBs. Each OPB of
four qubits is equivalent, under local unitary operations and qubit
permutations, to an OPB belonging to at least one of these families.


title: Continuity of reachable sets of restricted affine control systems

abstract:
  In this paper we give a direct proof that for a restricted affine control
system on a connected manilfold M, the associated reachable sets up to time t
varies continuously with the Haudorff metric.


title:
Forward-backward envelope for the sum of two nonconvex functions:
  Further properties and nonmonotone line-search algorithms

abstract:
  We propose ZeroFPR, a nonmonotone linesearch algorithm for minimizing the sum
of two nonconvex functions, one of which is smooth and the other possibly
nonsmooth. ZeroFPR is the first algorithm that, despite being fit for fully
nonconvex problems and requiring only the black-box oracle of forward-backward
splitting (FBS) --- namely evaluations of the gradient of the smooth term and
of the proximity operator of the nonsmooth one --- achieves superlinear
convergence rates under mild assumptions at the limit point when the linesearch
directions satisfy a Dennis-Mor\'e condition, and we show that this is the case
for quasi-Newton directions. Our approach is based on the forward-backward
envelope (FBE), an exact and strictly continuous penalty function for the
original cost. Extending previous results we show that, despite being nonsmooth
for fully nonconvex problems, the FBE still enjoys favorable first- and
second-order properties which are key for the convergence results of ZeroFPR.
Our theoretical results are backed up by promising numerical simulations. On
large-scale problems, by computing linesearch directions using limited-memory
quasi-Newton updates our algorithm greatly outperforms FBS and its accelerated
variant (AFBS).


title:
Amazon in the White Space: Social Recommendation Aided Distributed
  Spectrum Access

abstract:
  Distributed spectrum access (DSA) is challenging since an individual
secondary user often has limited sensing capabilities only. One key insight is
that channel recommendation among secondary users can help to take advantage of
the inherent correlation structure of spectrum availability in both time and
space, and enable users to obtain more informed spectrum opportunities. With
this insight, we advocate to leverage the wisdom of crowds, and devise social
recommendation aided DSA mechanisms to orient secondary users to make more
intelligent spectrum access decisions, for both strong and weak network
information cases. We start with the strong network information case where
secondary users have the statistical information. To mitigate the difficulty
due to the curse of dimensionality in the stochastic game approach, we take the
one-step Nash approach and cast the social recommendation aided DSA decision
making problem at each time slot as a strategic game. We show that it is a
potential game, and then devise an algorithm to achieve the Nash equilibrium by
exploiting its finite improvement property. For the weak information case where
secondary users do not have the statistical information, we develop a
distributed reinforcement learning mechanism for social recommendation aided
DSA based on the local observations of secondary users only. Appealing to the
maximum-norm contraction mapping, we also derive the conditions under which the
distributed mechanism converges and characterize the equilibrium therein.
Numerical results reveal that the proposed social recommendation aided DSA
mechanisms can achieve superior performance using real social data traces and
its performance loss in the weak network information case is insignificant,
compared with the strong network information case.


title: Uncalibrated 3D Room Reconstruction from Sound

abstract:
  This paper presents a method to reconstruct the 3D structure of generic
convex rooms from sound signals. Differently from most of the previous
approaches, the method is fully uncalibrated in the sense that no knowledge
about the microphones and sources position is needed. Moreover, we demonstrate
that it is possible to bypass the well known echo labeling problem, allowing to
reconstruct the room shape in a reasonable computation time without the need of
additional hypotheses on the echoes order of arrival. Finally, the method is
intrinsically robust to outliers and missing data in the echoes detection,
allowing to work also in low SNR conditions. The proposed pipeline formalises
the problem in different steps such as time of arrival estimation, microphones
and sources localization and walls estimation. After providing a solution to
these different problems we present a global optimization approach that links
together all the problems in a single optimization function. The accuracy and
robustness of the method is assessed on a wide set of simulated setups and in a
challenging real scenario. Moreover we make freely available for a challenging
dataset for 3D room reconstruction with accurate ground truth in a real
scenario.


title:
MOSI: Multimodal Corpus of Sentiment Intensity and Subjectivity Analysis
  in Online Opinion Videos

abstract:
  People are sharing their opinions, stories and reviews through online video
sharing websites every day. Studying sentiment and subjectivity in these
opinion videos is experiencing a growing attention from academia and industry.
While sentiment analysis has been successful for text, it is an understudied
research question for videos and multimedia content. The biggest setbacks for
studies in this direction are lack of a proper dataset, methodology, baselines
and statistical analysis of how information from different modality sources
relate to each other. This paper introduces to the scientific community the
first opinion-level annotated corpus of sentiment and subjectivity analysis in
online videos called Multimodal Opinion-level Sentiment Intensity dataset
(MOSI). The dataset is rigorously annotated with labels for subjectivity,
sentiment intensity, per-frame and per-opinion annotated visual features, and
per-milliseconds annotated audio features. Furthermore, we present baselines
for future studies in this direction as well as a new multimodal fusion
approach that jointly models spoken words and visual gestures.


title:
Goldstone origin of black hole hair from supertranslations and
  criticality

abstract:
  Degrees of freedom that carry black hole entropy and hair can be described in
the language of Goldstone phenomenon. They represent the pseudo-Goldstone
bosons of certain supertranslations, called A-transformations, that are
spontaneously broken by the black hole metric. This breaking gives rise to a
tower of Goldstone bosons created by the spontaneously-broken generators that
can be labeled by spherical harmonics. Classically, the number of charges is
infinite, they have vanishing VEVs and the corresponding Goldstone modes are
gapless. The resulting hair and entropy are infinite, but unresolvable. In
quantum theory the two things happen. The number of legitimate Goldstone modes
restricted by requirement of weak-coupling, becomes finite and scales as black
hole area in Planck units. The Goldstones generate a tiny gap, controlled by
their gravitational coupling. The gap turns out to be equal to the inverse of
black hole half-life, $t_{BH}$. Correspondingly, in quantum theory the charges
are neither conserved nor vanish, but non-conservation time is set by $t_{BH}$.
This picture nicely matches with the idea of a black hole as of critical system
composed of many soft gravitons. The A-Goldstones of geometric picture
represent the near-gapless Bogoliubov-Goldstone modes of critical soft-graviton
system.


title: Inverse problems for semilinear wave equations on Lorentzian manifolds

abstract:
  We consider inverse problems in space-time $(M, g)$, a $4$-dimensional
Lorentzian manifold. For semilinear wave equations $\square_g u + H(x, u) = f$,
where $\square_g$ denotes the usual Laplace-Beltrami operator, we prove that
the source-to-solution map $L: f \rightarrow u|_V$, where $V$ is a neighborhood
of a time-like geodesic $\mu$, determines the topological, differentiable
structure and the conformal class of the metric of the space-time in the
maximal set where waves can propagate from $\mu$ and return back. Moreover, on
a given space-time $(M, g)$, the source-to-solution map determines some
coefficients of the Taylor expansion of $H$ in $u$.


title:
Necessary N-representability Constraints from Time-reversal Symmetry for
  Periodic Systems

abstract:
  The variational calculation of the two-electron reduced density matrix
(2-RDM) is extended to periodic molecular systems. If the 2-RDM theory is
extended to the periodic case without consideration of time-reversal symmetry,
however, it can yields energies that are significantly lower than the correct
energies. We derive and implement linear constraints that enforce time-reversal
symmetry on the 2-RDM without destroying its computationally favorable
block-diagonal structure from translational invariance. Time-reversal symmetry
is distinct from space-group or spin (SU(2)) symmetries which can be expressed
by unitary transformations. The time-reversal symmetry constraints are
demonstrated through calculations of the metallic hydrogen chain and the
one-dimensional lithium hydride crystal.


title: Blocker size via matching minors

abstract:
  Finding the maximum number of maximal independent sets in an $n$-vertex graph
$G$, $i(G)$, from a restricted class is an extensively studied problem. Let
$kK_2$ denote the matching of size $k$, that is a graph with $2k$ vertices and
$k$ disjoint edges. A graph with an induced copy of $kK_2$ contains at least
$2^k$ maximal independent sets. The other direction was established in a series
of papers finally yielding $i(G) \le (n/k)^{2k}$ for a graph $G$ without an
induced $(k+1)K_2$. Alekseev proved that $i(G)$ is at most the number of
induced matchings of $G$.
  This work generalises the aforementioned results to clutters. The right
substructures in this setting are minors rather than induced subgraphs. Maximal
independent sets of a clutter $\mathcal{H}$ are in one-to-one correspondence to
the sets of its blocker, $b(\mathcal{H})$, hence $i(\mathcal{H}) =
|b(\mathcal{H})|$. We show that
  \[
  |b(\mathcal{H})| \le
  \sum_{m=0}^{k \cdot f(r)}{|\mathcal{H}| \choose m} {r \choose 2}^m
  \] for a $(k+1)K_2$-minor-free clutter $\mathcal{H}$ where $f(r) =
(2r-3)2^{r-2}$ and $r$ is the maximum size of a set in $\mathcal{H}$. A key
step in the proofs is, similarly to Alekseev's result, showing that
$i(\mathcal{H})$ is bounded by the number of a substructure called
semi-matching, and then proving a dependence between the number of
semi-matchings and the number of minor matchings. Note that similarly to
graphs, a clutter containing a $kK_2$ minor has at least $2^k$ maximal
independent sets.
  From a computational perspective, a polynomial number of independent sets is
particularly interesting. Our results lead to polynomial algorithms for
restricted instances of many problems including Set Cover and k-SAT.


title:
Character tables of Sylow $p$-subgroups of the Steinberg triality groups
  ${^3}D_4(q^3)$

abstract:
  We determine the character tables of Sylow $p$-subgroups $U$ of the Steinberg
triality groups ${^3}D_4(q^3)$, where $q$ is a power of an odd prime $p$.


title: Triangle-free planar graphs with the smallest independence number

abstract:
  Steinberg and Tovey proved that every n-vertex planar triangle-free graph has
an independent set of size at least (n+1)/3, and described an infinite class of
tight examples. We show that all n-vertex planar triangle-free graphs except
for this one infinite class have independent sets of size at least (n+2)/3.


title: Detection and Tracking of Liquids with Fully Convolutional Networks

abstract:
  Recent advances in AI and robotics have claimed many incredible results with
deep learning, yet no work to date has applied deep learning to the problem of
liquid perception and reasoning. In this paper, we apply fully-convolutional
deep neural networks to the tasks of detecting and tracking liquids. We
evaluate three models: a single-frame network, multi-frame network, and a LSTM
recurrent network. Our results show that the best liquid detection results are
achieved when aggregating data over multiple frames, in contrast to standard
image segmentation. They also show that the LSTM network outperforms the other
two in both tasks. This suggests that LSTM-based neural networks have the
potential to be a key component for enabling robots to handle liquids using
robust, closed-loop controllers.


title:
Accurate Non-adiabatic Quantum Dynamics from Pseudospectral Sampling of
  Time-dependent Gaussian Basis Sets

abstract:
  Quantum molecular dynamics requires an accurate representation of the
molecular potential energy surface from a minimal number of electronic
structure calculations, particularly for nonadiabatic dynamics where excited
states are required. In this paper, we employ pseudospectral sampling of
time-dependent Gaussian basis functions for the simulation of non-adiabatic
dynamics. Unlike other methods, the pseudospectral Gaussian molecular dynamics
tests the Schr\"{o}dinger equation with $N$ Dirac delta functions located at
the centers of the Gaussian functions reducing the scaling of potential energy
evaluations from $\mathcal{O}(N^2)$ to $\mathcal{O}(N)$. By projecting the
Gaussian basis onto discrete points in space, the method is capable of
efficiently and quantitatively describing nonadiabatic population transfer and
intra-surface quantum coherence. We investigate three model systems; the
photodissociation of three coupled Morse oscillators, the bound state dynamics
of two coupled Morse oscillators, and a two-dimensional model for collinear
triatomic vibrational dynamics. In all cases, the pseudospectral Gaussian
method is in quantitative agreement with numerically exact calculations. The
results are promising for nonadiabatic molecular dynamics in molecular systems
where strongly correlated ground or excited states require expensive electronic
structure calculations.


title: CosmicFish Implementation Notes V1.0

abstract:
  CosmicFish is a publicly available library to perform Fisher matrix forecast
for several cosmological observations. With the present implementation notes we
provide a guide to the physical and technical details of the library. We
reproduce here the details and all the relevant equations, as they appear in
the code. We submit these notes to the arXiv to grant full and permanent access
to this material which provides a useful guidance to forecasting and the use of
CosmicFish code. We will update this set of notes when relevant modifications
to the CosmicFish code will be released. The present version is based on
CosmicFish Jun16.


title: Founded Semantics and Constraint Semantics of Logic Rules

abstract:
  Logic rules and inference are fundamental in computer science and have been
studied extensively. However, prior semantics of logic languages can have
subtle implications and can disagree significantly, on even very simple
programs, including in attempting to solve the well-known Russell's paradox.
These semantics are often non-intuitive and hard-to-understand when
unrestricted negation is used in recursion.
  This paper describes a simple new semantics for logic rules, founded
semantics, and its straightforward extension to another simple new semantics,
constraint semantics, that unify the core of different prior semantics. The new
semantics support unrestricted negation, as well as unrestricted existential
and universal quantifications. They are uniquely expressive and intuitive by
allowing assumptions about the predicates, rules, and reasoning to be specified
explicitly, as simple and precise binary choices. They are completely
declarative and relate cleanly to prior semantics. In addition, founded
semantics can be computed in linear time in the size of the ground program.


title:
Transport and noise properties of a normal metal-superconductor-normal
  metal junction with mixed singlet and chiral triplet pairings

abstract:
  We study transport and zero frequency shot noise properties of a normal
metal-superconductor-normal metal (NSN) junction, with the superconductor
having mixed singlet and chiral triplet pairings. We show that in the subgapped
regime when the chiral triplet pairing amplitude dominates over that of the
singlet, a resonance phenomena emerges out at zero energy where all the quantum
mechanical scattering probabilities acquire a value of 0.25. At the resonance,
crossed Andreev reflection mediating through such junction, acquires a zero
energy peak. This reflects as a zero energy peak in the conductance as well
depending on the doping concentration. We also investigate shot noise for this
system and show that shot noise cross-correlation is negative in the subgapped
regime when the triplet pairing dominates over the singlet one. The latter is
in sharp contrast to the positive shot noise obtained when the singlet pairing
is the dominating one.


title:
Dynamic Programming for One-Sided Partially Observable Pursuit-Evasion
  Games

abstract:
  Pursuit-evasion scenarios appear widely in robotics, security domains, and
many other real-world situations. We focus on two-player pursuit-evasion games
with concurrent moves, infinite horizon, and discounted rewards. We assume that
the players have a partial observability, however, the evader is given an
advantage of knowing the current position of the units of the pursuer. This
setting is particularly interesting for security domains where a robust
strategy, designed to maximize the utility in the worst-case scenario, is often
desirable. We provide, to the best of our knowledge, the first algorithm that
provably converges to the value of a partially observable pursuit-evasion game
with infinite horizon. Our algorithm extends well-known value iteration
algorithm by exploiting that (1) the value functions of our game depend only on
position of the pursuer and the belief he has about the current position of the
evader, and (2) that these functions are piecewise linear and convex in the
belief space.


title:
Universal short-time dynamics: boundary functional renormalization group
  for a temperature quench

abstract:
  We present a method to calculate short-time non-equilibrium universal
exponents within the functional renormalization-group scheme. As an example, we
consider the classical critical dynamics of the relaxational model A after a
quench of the temperature of the system and calculate the initial slip exponent
which characterizes the non-equilibrium universal short-time behaviour of both
the order parameter and correlation functions. The value of this exponent is
found to be consistent with the result of a perturbative dimensional expansion
and of Monte Carlo simulations in three spatial dimensions.


title:
Information Gain in Cosmology: From the Discovery of Expansion to Future
  Surveys

abstract:
  Facing the advent of the next generation cosmological surveys we present a
method to forecast knowledge gain on cosmological models. We propose this as a
well defined and general tool to quantify the performance of different
experiments in relation to different theoretical models. In particular, the
assessment of experimental performance will benefit enormously from the fact
that this method is invariant under re-parametrization of the model. We apply
this to future surveys and compare expected knowledge advancements to the most
relevant experiments performed over the history of modern cosmology. When
considering the standard cosmological model, we show that it will rapidly reach
knowledge saturation in the near future and forthcoming improvements will not
match the past ones. On the contrary, we find that new observations have the
potential for unprecedented knowledge jumps when extensions of the standard
scenario are considered.


title:
A Data-Driven Approach for Semantic Role Labeling from Induced Grammar
  Structures in Language

abstract:
  Semantic roles play an important role in extracting knowledge from text.
Current unsupervised approaches utilize features from grammar structures, to
induce semantic roles. The dependence on these grammars, however, makes it
difficult to adapt to noisy and new languages. In this paper we develop a
data-driven approach to identifying semantic roles, the approach is entirely
unsupervised up to the point where rules need to be learned to identify the
position the semantic role occurs. Specifically we develop a modified-ADIOS
algorithm based on ADIOS Solan et al. (2005) to learn grammar structures, and
use these grammar structures to learn the rules for identifying the semantic
roles based on the context in which the grammar structures appeared. The
results obtained are comparable with the current state-of-art models that are
inherently dependent on human annotated data.


title: Manickam-Mikl\'os-Singhi Conjectures on Partial Geometries

abstract:
  In this paper we give a proof of the Manickam-Mikl\'os-Singhi (MMS)
conjecture for some partial geometries. Specifically, we give a condition on
partial geometries which implies that the MMS conjecture holds. Further,
several specific partial geometries that are counter-examples to the conjecture
are described.


title:
Observation of interspecies ion separation in
  inertial-confinement-fusion implosions

abstract:
  We report direct experimental evidence of interspecies ion separation in
direct-drive, inertial-confinement-fusion experiments on the OMEGA laser
facility. These experiments, which used plastic capsules with D$_2$/Ar gas fill
(1% Ar by atom), were designed specifically to reveal interspecies ion
separation by exploiting the predicted, strong ion thermo-diffusion between ion
species of large mass and charge difference. Via detailed analyses of imaging
x-ray-spectroscopy data, we extract Ar-atom-fraction radial profiles at
different times, and observe both enhancement and depletion compared to the
initial 1%-Ar gas fill. The experimental results are interpreted with
radiation-hydrodynamic simulations that include recently implemented,
first-principles models of interspecies ion diffusion. The experimentally
inferred Ar-atom-fraction profiles agree reasonably, but not exactly, with
calculated profiles associated with the incoming and rebounding first shock.


title:
Mott transition and anomalous resistive state in the pyrochlore
  molybdates

abstract:
  The rare-earth based pyrochlore molybdates involve orbitally degenerate
electrons Hund's coupled to local moments. The large Hund's coupling promotes
ferromagnetism, the superexchange between the local moments prefers
antiferromagnetism, and Hubbard repulsion tries to open a Mott gap. The phase
competition is tuned by the rare-earth ionic radius, decreasing which leads to
change from a ferromagnetic metal to a spin disordered highly resistive ground
state, and ultimately an 'Anderson-Mott' insulator. We attempt a quantitative
theory of the molybdates by studying their minimal model on a pyrochlore
geometry, using a static auxiliary field based Monte Carlo. We establish a
thermal phase diagram that closely corresponds to the experiments, predict the
hitherto unexplored orbital correlations, quantify and explain the origin of
the anomalous resistivity, and present dynamical properties across the
metal-insulator transition.


title:
Enhancing diamond color center fluorescence via optimized plasmonic
  nanorod configuration

abstract:
  A novel numerical methodology has been developed, which makes possible to
optimize arbitrary emitting dipole and plasmonic nano-resonator configuration
with an arbitrary objective function. By selecting quantum efficiency as the
objective function that has to be maximized at preselected Purcell factor
criteria, optimization of plasmonic nanorod based configurations has been
realized to enhance fluorescence of NV and SiV color centers in diamond. Gold
and silver nanorod based configurations have been optimized to enhance
excitation and emission separately, as well as both processes simultaneously,
and the underlying nanophotonical phenomena have been inspected comparatively.
It has been shown that considerable excitation enhancement is achieved by
silver nanorods, while nanorods made of both metals are appropriate to enhance
emission. More significant improvement can be achieved via silver nanorods at
both wavelengths of both color centers. It has been proven that theoretical
limits originating from metal dielectric properties can be approached by
simultaneous optimization, which results in configurations determined by
preferences corresponding to the emission. Larger emission enhancement is
achieved via both metals in case of SiV center compared to the NV center. Gold
and silver nanorod based configurations making possible to improve SiV centers
quantum efficiency by factors of 1.18 and 5.25 are proposed, which have
potential applications in quantum information processing.


title: An analytical framework to nowcast well-being using mobile phone data

abstract:
  An intriguing open question is whether measurements made on Big Data
recording human activities can yield us high-fidelity proxies of socio-economic
development and well-being. Can we monitor and predict the socio-economic
development of a territory just by observing the behavior of its inhabitants
through the lens of Big Data? In this paper, we design a data-driven analytical
framework that uses mobility measures and social measures extracted from mobile
phone data to estimate indicators for socio-economic development and
well-being. We discover that the diversity of mobility, defined in terms of
entropy of the individual users' trajectories, exhibits (i) significant
correlation with two different socio-economic indicators and (ii) the highest
importance in predictive models built to predict the socio-economic indicators.
Our analytical framework opens an interesting perspective to study human
behavior through the lens of Big Data by means of new statistical indicators
that quantify and possibly "nowcast" the well-being and the socio-economic
development of a territory.


title:
NoSOCS in SDSS. V. Red Disc and Blue Bulge Galaxies Across Different
  Environments

abstract:
  We investigated the typical environment and physical properties of "red
discs" and "blue bulges", comparing those to the "normal" objects in the blue
cloud and red sequence. Our sample is composed of cluster members and field
galaxies at $z \le 0.1$, so that we can assess the impact of the local and
global environment. We find that disc galaxies display a strong dependence on
environment, becoming redder for higher densities. This effect is more
pronounced for objects within the virial radius, being also strong related to
the stellar mass. We find that local and global environment affect galaxy
properties, but the most effective parameter is stellar mass. We find evidence
for a scenario where "blue discs" are transformed into "red discs" as they grow
in mass and move to the inner parts of clusters. From the metallicity
differences of red and blue discs, and the analysis of their star formation
histories, we suggest the quenching process is slow. We estimate a quenching
time scale of $\sim $ 2$-$3 Gyr. We also find from the sSFR$-$M$_*$ plane that
"red discs" gradually change as they move into clusters. The "blue bulges" have
many similar properties than "blue discs", but some of the former show strong
signs of asymmetry. The high asymmetry "blue bulges" display enhanced recent
star formation compared to their regular counterparts. That indicates some of
these systems may have increased their star formation due to mergers.
Nonetheless, there may not be a single evolutionary path for these blue
early-type objects.


title:
Outflows Driven by Quasars in High-Redshift Galaxies with Radiation
  Hydrodynamics

abstract:
  The quasar mode of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) in the high-redshift Universe
is routinely observed in gas-rich galaxies together with large-scale AGN-driven
winds. It is crucial to understand how photons emitted by the central AGN
source couple to the ambient interstellar-medium to trigger large-scale
outflows. By means of radiation-hydrodynamical simulations of idealised
galactic discs, we study the coupling of photons with the multiphase galactic
gas, and how it varies with gas cloud sizes, and the radiation bands included
in the simulations, which are ultraviolet (UV), optical, and infrared (IR). We
show how a quasar with a luminosity of $10^{46}$ erg/s can drive large-scale
winds with velocities of $10^2-10^3$ km/s and mass outflow rates around $10^3$
M$_\odot$/yr for times of order a few million years. Infrared radiation is
necessary to efficiently transfer momentum to the gas via multi-scattering on
dust in dense clouds. However, IR multi-scattering, despite being extremely
important at early times, quickly declines as the central gas cloud expands and
breaks up, allowing the radiation to escape through low gas density channels.
The typical number of multi-scattering events for an IR photon is only about a
quarter of the mean optical depth from the center of the cloud. Our models
account for the observed outflow rates of $\sim$500-1000 M$_\odot$/yr and high
velocities of $\sim 10^3$ km/s, favouring winds that are energy-driven via
extremely fast nuclear outflows, interpreted here as being
IR-radiatively-driven winds.


title:
Decoherence in Sub-Systems of an Isolated System and the Disappearance
  of Quantum Multiverse

abstract:
  This study was started to know mysterious classicality of nuclei.
  Using three particles model without external environments, it is found that
decisions of respective state of three particles by decoherence are not
simultaneous. Furthermore, in this model, wave function of total three body
system collapses spontaneously without any external environments. Therefore we
may able to insist that a wavefunction of our universe has already collapsed
spontaneously without any external observer, because of the same mechanism with
this model.


title:
Failure mechanisms of single-crystal silicon electrodes in lithium-ion
  batteries

abstract:
  Long-term durability is a major obstacle limiting the widespread use of
lithium ion batteries (LIBs) in heavy-duty applications and others demanding
extended lifetime. As one of the root causes of degradation and failure of
battery performance, the electrode failure mechanisms are still unknown. Here,
we reveal the fundamental fracture mechanisms of single-crystal silicon
electrodes over extended lithiation/delithiation cycles, using electrochemical
testing, microstructure characterization, fracture mechanics, and finite
element analysis. Anisotropic lithium invasion causes crack initiation
perpendicular to the electrode surface, followed by growth through the
electrode thickness. The low fracture energy of the lithiated/unlithiated
silicon interface provides a weak microstructural path for crack deflection,
accounting for the crack patterns and delamination observed after repeated
cycling. Based on this physical understanding, we demonstrate how electrolyte
additives can heal electrode cracks and provide strategies to enhance the
fracture resistance in future LIBs from surface chemical, electrochemical, and
material science perspectives.


title:
Effects of Scan Length and Shrinkage on Reliability of Resting-State
  Functional Connectivity in the Human Connectome Project

abstract:
  In this paper, we use data from the Human Connectome Project (N=461) to
investigate the effect of scan length on reliability of resting-state
functional connectivity (rsFC) estimates produced from resting-state functional
magnetic resonance imaging (rsfMRI). Additionally, we study the benefits of
empirical Bayes shrinkage, in which subject-level estimates borrow strength
from the population average by trading a small increase in bias for a greater
reduction in variance. For each subject, we compute raw and shrinkage estimates
of rsFC between 300 regions identified through independent components analysis
(ICA) based on rsfMRI scans varying from 3 to 30 minutes in length. The time
course for each region is determined using dual regression, and rsFC is
estimated as the Pearson correlation between each pair of time courses.
Shrinkage estimates for each subject are computed as a weighted average between
the raw subject-level estimate and the population average estimate, where the
weight is determined for each connection by the relationship of within-subject
variance to between-subject variance. We find that shrinkage estimates exhibit
greater reliability than raw estimates for most connections, with 30-40%
improvement using scans less than 10 minutes in length and 10-20% improvement
using scans of 20-30 minutes. We also observe significant spatial variability
in reliability of both raw and shrinkage estimates, with connections within the
default mode and motor networks exhibiting the greatest reliability and
between-network connections exhibiting the poorest reliability. We conclude
that the scan length required for reliable estimation of rsFC depends on the
specific connections of interest, and shrinkage can be used to increase
reliability of rsFC, even when produced from long, high-quality rsfMRI scans.


title:
Remnants of black holes from rainbow gravity in terms of a new VSL
  theory

abstract:
  In this paper the gravity's rainbow function is derived in terms of a varying
speed of light (VSL) theory. We calculate the modified temperature, entropy and
heat capacity of the Schwarzschild, Kerr, AdS black holes, as well as spinning
black rings. Our results demonstrate that in rainbow gravity the behaviors of
various black holes have remarkably essential difference from those of standard
black holes near the Planck scale.


title: QBism, Quantum Nonlocality, and the Objective Paradox

abstract:
  The Quantum-Bayesian interpretation of quantum theory claims to eliminate the
question of quantum nonlocality. This claim is not justified, because the
question of non-locality does not arise due to any interpretation of quantum
theory, but due to objective experimental facts. We define the notion
"objective paradox" and explain, comparing QBism and the Copenhagen
interpretation, how avoidance of any paradox results into poor explanatory
power of an interpretation, if there actually exists an objective paradox.


title: A twisted inclusion between tensor products of operator spaces

abstract:
  Given operator spaces $V$ and $W$, let $\widetilde{W}$ denote the opposite
operator space structure on the same underlying Banach space. Although the
identity map $W\to \widetilde{W}$ is in general not completely bounded, we show
that the identity map on $V\otimes W$ extends to a contractive linear map
$V\widehat{\otimes} W \to V\otimes_{\min} \widetilde{W}$, where
$\widehat{\otimes}$ and $\otimes_{\rm min}$ denote the projective and injective
tensor products of operator spaces. In future work, this will be applied to
construct antisymmetric $2$-cocycles on certain Fourier algebras.


title: The environmental dependence of HI in galaxies in the EAGLE simulations

abstract:
  We use the EAGLE suite of cosmological hydrodynamical simulations to study
how the HI content of present-day galaxies depends on their environment. We
show that EAGLE reproduces observed HI mass-environment trends very well, while
semi-analytic models typically overpredict the average HI masses in dense
environments. The environmental processes act primarily as an on/off switch for
the HI content of satellites with stellar mass Mstar>10^9 Msun. At a fixed
Mstar, the fraction of HI-depleted satellites increases with increasing host
halo mass M200 in response to stronger environmental effects, while at a fixed
M200 it decreases with increasing satellite Mstar as the gas is confined by
deeper gravitational potentials. HI-depleted satellites reside mostly, but not
exclusively, within the virial radius r200 of their host halo. We investigate
the origin of these trends by focussing on three environmental mechanisms: ram
pressure stripping by the intra-group medium, tidal stripping by the host halo,
and satellite-satellite encounters. By tracking back in time the evolution of
the HI-depleted satellites, we find that the most common cause of HI removal is
satellite encounters. The timescale for HI removal is typically less than 0.5
Gyr. Tidal stripping occurs in halos of M200<10^{14} Msun within half r200,
while the other processes act also in more massive halos, generally within
r200. Conversely, we find that ram pressure stripping is the most common
mechanism that disturbs the HI morphology of galaxies at redshift z=0. This
implies that HI removal due to satellite-satellite interactions occurs on
shorter timescales than the other processes.


title:
Instability of Supersonic Cold Streams Feeding Galaxies I: Linear
  Kelvin-Helmholtz Instability with Body Modes

abstract:
  Massive galaxies at high redshift are predicted to be fed from the cosmic web
by narrow, dense, cold streams. These streams penetrate supersonically through
the hot medium encompassed by a stable shock near the virial radius of the
dark-matter halo. Our long-term goal is to explore the heating and dissipation
rate of the streams and their fragmentation and possible breakup, in order to
understand how galaxies are fed, and how this affects their star-formation rate
and morphology. We present here the first step, where we analyze the linear
Kelvin-Helmholtz instability (KHI) of a cold, dense slab or cylinder flowing
through a hot, dilute medium in the transonic regime. The current analysis is
limited to the adiabatic case with no gravity and assuming equal pressure in
the stream and the medium. By analytically solving the linear dispersion
relation, we find a transition from a dominance of the familiar rapidly growing
surface modes in the subsonic regime to more slowly growing body modes in the
supersonic regime. The system is parameterized by three parameters: the density
contrast between the stream and the medium, the Mach number of stream velocity
with respect to the medium, and the stream width with respect to the halo
virial radius. We find that a realistic choice for these parameters places the
streams near the mode transition, with the KHI exponential-growth time in the
range 0.01-10 virial crossing times for a perturbation wavelength comparable to
the stream width. We confirm our analytic predictions with idealized
hydrodynamical simulations. Our linear-KHI estimates thus indicate that KHI may
in principle be effective in the evolution of streams by the time they reach
the galaxy. More definite conclusions await the extension of the analysis to
the nonlinear regime and the inclusion of cooling, thermal conduction, the halo
potential well, self-gravity and magnetic fields.


title: Echo Technique to Distinguish Flavors of Astrophysical Neutrinos

abstract:
  The flavor composition of high-energy astrophysical neutrinos is a rich
observable. However, present analyses cannot effectively distinguish particle
showers induced by $\nu_e$ versus $\nu_\tau$. We show that this can be
accomplished by measuring the intensities of the delayed, collective light
emission from muon decays and neutron captures, which are, on average, greater
for $\nu_\tau$ than for $\nu_e$. This new technique would significantly improve
tests of the nature of astrophysical sources and of neutrino properties. We
discuss the promising prospects for implementing it in IceCube and other
detectors.


title:
A High Stellar Velocity Dispersion and ~100 Globular Clusters for the
  Ultra Diffuse Galaxy Dragonfly 44

abstract:
  Recently a population of large, very low surface brightness, spheroidal
galaxies was identified in the Coma cluster. The apparent survival of these
Ultra Diffuse Galaxies (UDGs) in a rich cluster suggests that they have very
high masses. Here we present the stellar kinematics of Dragonfly 44, one of the
largest Coma UDGs, using a 33.5 hr integration with DEIMOS on the Keck II
telescope. We find a velocity dispersion of 47 km/s, which implies a dynamical
mass of M_dyn=0.7x10^10 M_sun within its deprojected half-light radius of
r_1/2=4.6 kpc. The mass-to-light ratio is M/L=48 M_sun/L_sun, and the dark
matter fraction is 98 percent within the half-light radius. The high mass of
Dragonfly 44 is accompanied by a large globular cluster population. From deep
Gemini imaging taken in 0.4" seeing we infer that Dragonfly 44 has 94 globular
clusters, similar to the counts for other galaxies in this mass range. Our
results add to other recent evidence that many UDGs are "failed" galaxies, with
the sizes, dark matter content, and globular cluster systems of much more
luminous objects. We estimate the total dark halo mass of Dragonfly 44 by
comparing the amount of dark matter within r=4.6 kpc to enclosed mass profiles
of NFW halos. The enclosed mass suggests a total mass of ~10^12 M_sun, similar
to the mass of the Milky Way. The existence of nearly-dark objects with this
mass is unexpected, as galaxy formation is thought to be maximally-efficient in
this regime.


title:
The equivalence principle and QFT: Can a particle detector tell if we
  live inside a hollow shell?

abstract:
  We show that a particle detector can distinguish the interior of a hollow
shell from flat space for switching times much shorter than the light-crossing
time of the shell, even though the local metrics are indistinguishable. This
shows that a particle detector can read out information about the non-local
structure of spacetime even when switched on for scales much shorter than the
characteristic scale of the non-locality.


title:
Precise limits on cosmological variability of the fine-structure
  constant with zinc and chromium quasar absorption lines

abstract:
  The strongest transitions of Zn and CrII are the most sensitive to relative
variations in the fine-structure constant ($\Delta\alpha/\alpha$) among the
transitions commonly observed in quasar absorption spectra. They also lie
within just 40\AA\ of each other (rest frame), so they are resistant to the
main systematic error affecting most previous measurements of
$\Delta\alpha/\alpha$: long-range distortions of the wavelength calibration.
While Zn and CrII absorption is normally very weak in quasar spectra, we
obtained high signal-to-noise, high-resolution echelle spectra from the Keck
and Very Large Telescopes of 9 rare systems where it is strong enough to
constrain $\Delta\alpha/\alpha$ from these species alone. These provide 12
independent measurements (3 quasars were observed with both telescopes) at
redshifts 1.0--2.4, 11 of which pass stringent reliability criteria. These 11
are all consistent with $\Delta\alpha/\alpha=0$ within their individual
uncertainties of 3.5--13 parts per million (ppm), with a weighted mean
$\Delta\alpha/\alpha = 1.2\pm1.7_{\rm stat}\pm0.9_{\rm sys}$ ppm (1$\sigma$
statistical and systematic uncertainties), indicating no significant
cosmological variations in $\alpha$. This is the first statistical sample of
absorbers that is resistant to long-range calibration distortions (at the $<$1
ppm level), with a precision comparable to previous large samples of $\sim$150
(distortion-affected) absorbers. Our systematic error budget is instead
dominated by much shorter-range distortions repeated across echelle orders of
individual spectra.

categories: astro-ph.CO gr-qc hep-ph hep-th physics.atom-ph


title:
A New Statistical Model for Population III Supernova Rates:
  Discriminating Between $\Lambda$CDM and WDM Cosmologies

abstract:
  With new observational facilities becoming available soon, discovering and
characterising supernovae from the first stars will open up alternative
observational windows to the end of the cosmic dark ages. Based on a
semi-analytical merger tree model of early star formation we constrain
Population III supernova rates. We find that our method reproduces the
Population III supernova rates of large-scale cosmological simulations very
well. Our computationally efficient model allows us to survey a large parameter
space and to explore a wide range of different scenarios for Population III
star formation. Our calculations show that observations of the first supernovae
can be used to differentiate between cold and warm dark matter models and to
constrain the corresponding particle mass of the latter. Our predictions can
also be used to optimize survey strategies with the goal to maximize supernova
detection rates.


title:
Warps and waves in the stellar discs of the Auriga cosmological
  simulations

abstract:
  Recent studies have revealed an oscillating asymmetry in the vertical
structure of the Milky Way's disc. Here we analyze 16 high-resolution, fully
cosmological simulations of the evolution of individual Milky Way-sized
galaxies, carried out with the MHD code AREPO. At redshift zero, about $70\%$
of our galactic discs show strong vertical patterns, with amplitudes that can
exceed 2 kpc. Half of these are typical `integral sign' warps. The rest are
oscillations similar to those observed in the Milky Way. Such structures are
thus expected to be common. The associated mean vertical motions can be as
large as 30~km/s. Cold disc gas typically follows the vertical patterns seen in
the stars. These perturbations have a variety of causes: close encounters with
satellites, distant flybys of massive objects, accretion of misaligned cold gas
from halo infall or from mergers. Tidally induced vertical patterns can be
identified in both young and old stellar populations, whereas those originating
from cold gas accretion are seen mainly in the younger populations. Galaxies
with regular or at most weakly perturbed discs are usually, but not always,
free from recent interactions with massive companions, although we have one
case where an equilibrium compact disc reforms after a merger.


title: Interacting Giant Gravitons from Spin Matrix Theory

abstract:
  Using the non-abelian DBI action we find an effective matrix model that
describes the dynamics of weakly interacting giant gravitons wrapped on
three-spheres in the AdS part of AdS_5 x S^5 at high energies with two angular
momenta on the S^5. In parallel we consider the limit of \CN=4 super Yang-Mills
theory near a certain unitarity bound where it reduces to the quantum
mechanical theory called SU(2) Spin Matrix Theory. We show that the exact same
matrix model that describes the giant gravitons on the string theory side also
provides the effective description in the strong coupling and large energy
limit of the Spin Matrix Theory. Thus, we are able to match non-supersymmetric
dynamics of D-branes on AdS_5 x S^5 to a finite-N regime in \CN=4 super
Yang-Mills theory near a unitarity bound.


title:
Gravitational self-force on eccentric equatorial orbits around a Kerr
  black hole

abstract:
  This paper presents the first calculation of the gravitational self-force on
a small compact object on an eccentric equatorial orbit around a Kerr black
hole to first order in the mass-ratio. That is the pointwise correction to the
object's equations of motion (both conservative and dissipative) due to its own
gravitational field treated as a linear perturbation to the background Kerr
spacetime generated by the much larger spinning black hole. The calculation
builds on recent advances on constructing the local metric and self-force from
solutions of the Teukolsky equation, which led to the calculation of the
Detweiler-Barack-Sago redshift invariant on eccentric equatorial orbits around
a Kerr black hole in a previous paper.
  After deriving the necessary expression to obtain the self-force from the
Weyl scalar $\psi_4$, we perform several consistency checks of the method and
numerical implementation, including a check of the balance law relating orbital
average of the self-force to average flux of energy and angular momentum out of
the system. Particular attention is paid to the pointwise convergence
properties of the sum over frequency modes in our method, identifying a
systematic inherent loss of precision that any frequency domain calculation of
the self-force on eccentric orbits must overcome.


title: New Detectors to Explore the Lifetime Frontier

abstract:
  Long-lived particles (LLPs) are a common feature in many beyond the Standard
Model theories, including supersymmetry, and are generically produced in exotic
Higgs decays. Unfortunately, no existing or proposed search strategy will be
able to observe the decay of non-hadronic electrically neutral LLPs with masses
above $\sim$ GeV and lifetimes near the limit set by Big Bang Nucleosynthesis
(BBN), $c \tau \lesssim 10^7 - 10^8$~m. We propose the MATHUSLA surface
detector concept (MAssive Timing Hodoscope for Ultra Stable neutraL pArticles),
which can be implemented with existing technology and in time for the high
luminosity LHC upgrade to find such ultra-long-lived particles (ULLPs), whether
produced in exotic Higgs decays or more general production modes. We also
advocate for a dedicated LLP detector at a future 100 TeV collider, where a
modestly sized underground design can discover ULLPs with lifetimes at the BBN
limit produced in sub-percent level exotic Higgs decays.


title:
GAMA/H-ATLAS: A meta-analysis of SFR indicators - comprehensive measures
  of the SFR-M* relation and Cosmic Star Formation History at z < 0.4

abstract:
  We present a meta-analysis of star-formation rate (SFR) indicators in the
GAMA survey, producing 12 different SFR metrics and determining the SFR-M*
relation for each. We compare and contrast published methods to extract the SFR
from each indicator, using a well-defined local sample of
morphologically-selected spiral galaxies, which excludes sources which
potentially have large recent changes to their SFR. The different methods are
found to yield SFR-M* relations with inconsistent slopes and normalisations,
suggesting differences between calibration methods. The recovered SFR-M*
relations also have a large range in scatter which, as SFRs of the targets may
be considered constant over the different timescales, suggests differences in
the accuracy by which methods correct for attenuation in individual targets. We
then recalibrate all SFR indicators to provide new, robust and consistent
luminosity-to-SFR calibrations, finding that the most consistent slopes and
normalisations of the SFR-M* relations are obtained when recalibrated using the
radiation transfer method of Popescu et al. These new calibrations can be used
to directly compare SFRs across different observations, epochs and galaxy
populations. We then apply our calibrations to the GAMA II equatorial dataset
and explore the evolution of star-formation in the local Universe. We determine
the evolution of the normalisation to the SFR-M* relation from 0 < z < 0.35 -
finding consistent trends with previous estimates at 0.3 < z < 1.2. We then
provide the definitive z < 0.35 Cosmic Star Formation History, SFR-M* relation
and its evolution over the last 3 billion years.


title:
Universal power-law decay of electron-electron interactions due to
  nonlinear screening in a Josephson junction array

abstract:
  Josephson junctions are the most prominent nondissipative and at the same
time nonlinear elements in superconducting circuits allowing Cooper pairs to
tunnel coherently between two superconductors separated by a tunneling barrier.
Due to this, physical systems involving Josephson junctions show highly complex
behavior and interesting novel phenomena. Here, we consider an infinite
one-dimensional chain of superconducting islands where neighboring islands are
coupled by capacitances. We study the effect of Josephson junctions shunting
each island to a common ground superconductor. We treat the system in the
regime where the Josephson energy exceeds the capacitive coupling between the
islands. For the case of two offset charges on two distinct islands, we
calculate the interaction energy of these charges mediated by quantum phase
slips due to the Josephson nonlinearities. We treat the phase slips in an
instanton approximation and map the problem onto a classical partition function
of interacting particles. Using the Mayer cluster expansion, we find that the
interaction potential of the offset charges decays with an universal
inverse-square power law behavior.


title: Approximating local observables on projected entangled pair states

abstract:
  Tensor network states are for good reasons believed to capture ground states
of gapped local Hamiltonians arising in the condensed matter context, states
which are in turn expected to satisfy an entanglement area law. However, the
computational hardness of contracting projected entangled pair states in two
and higher dimensional systems is often seen as a significant obstacle when
devising higher-dimensional variants of the density-matrix renormalisation
group method. In this work, we show that for those projected entangled pair
states that are expected to provide good approximations of such ground states
of local Hamiltonians, one can compute local expectation values in
quasi-polynomial time. We therefore provide a complexity-theoretic
justification of why state-of-the-art numerical tools work so well in practice.
We comment on how the transfer operators of such projected entangled pair
states have a gap and discuss notions of local topological quantum order. We
finally turn to the computation of local expectation values on quantum
computers, providing a meaningful application for a small-scale quantum
computer.


title: Landscape of atomic nuclear shapes

abstract:
  We exhibit a wide variety of the nuclear shape phases over the nuclear chart
along with a shell model scheme. Various nuclear shapes are demonstrated within
the framework of proton-neutron spin-orbital interactions; ferro-deformed,
sub-ferro-deformed, and spherical shapes. The spherical shape is classified
into the three magic-number categories in view of a large shell gap mechanism;
double-magic nuclei I, double magic nuclei II, and double magic nuclei III. We
discuss nuclear shape coexistence in the space Z = 76 to 84 as providing a new
way to understanding the dynamical shape phases.


title:
Water Masers in the Andromeda Galaxy: I. A Survey for Water Masers,
  Ammonia, and Hydrogen Recombination Lines

abstract:
  We report the results of a Green Bank Telescope survey for water masers,
ammonia (1,1) and (2,2), and the H66-alpha recombination line toward 506
luminous compact 24 micron-emitting regions in the Andromeda Galaxy (M31). We
include the 206 sources observed in the Darling (2011) water maser survey for
completeness. The survey was sensitive enough to detect any maser useful for
~10 microarcsecond/yr astrometry. No new water masers, ammonia lines, or
H66-alpha recombination lines were detected individually or in spectral stacks
reaching rms noise levels of ~3 mJy and ~0.2 mJy, respectively, in 3.1-3.3 km/s
channels. The lack of detections in individual spectra and in the spectral
stacks is consistent with Galactic extrapolations. Contrary to previous
assertions, there do not seem to be additional bright water masers to be found
in M31. The strong variability of water masers may enable new maser detections
in the future, but variability may also limit the astrometric utility of known
(or future) masers since flaring masers must also fade.


title: Water Masers in the Andromeda Galaxy: II. Where Do Masers Arise?

abstract:
  We present a comparative multi-wavelength analysis of water maser-emitting
regions and non-maser-emitting luminous 24 micron star-forming regions in the
Andromeda Galaxy (M31) to identify the sites most likely to produce luminous
water masers useful for astrometry and proper motion studies. Included in the
analysis are Spitzer 24 micron photometry, Herschel 70 and 160 micron
photometry, H$\alpha$ emission, dust temperature, and star formation rate. We
find significant differences between the maser-emitting and non-maser-emitting
regions: water maser-emitting regions tend to be more IR-luminous and show
higher star formation rates. The five water masers in M31 are consistent with
being analogs of water masers in Galactic star-forming regions and represent
the high-luminosity tail of a larger (and as yet undetected) population. Most
regions likely to produce water masers bright enough for proper motion
measurements using current facilities have already been surveyed, but we
suggest three ways to detect additional water masers in M31: (1) Re-observe the
most luminous mid- or far-IR sources with higher sensitivity than was used in
the Green Bank Telescope survey; (2) Observe early-stage star-forming regions
selected by mm continuum that have not already been selected by their 24 micron
emission, and (3) Re-observe the most luminous mid- or far-IR sources, and rely
on maser variability for new detections.


title:
Limits to coherent scattering and photon coalescence from solid-state
  quantum emitters

abstract:
  The desire to produce high-quality single photons for applications in quantum
information science has lead to renewed interest in exploring solid-state
emitters in the weak excitation regime. Under these conditions it is expected
that photons are coherently scattered, and so benefit from a substantial
suppression of detrimental interactions between the source and its surrounding
environment. Nevertheless, we demonstrate here that this reasoning is
incomplete, as phonon interactions continue to play a crucial role in
determining solid-state emission characteristics even for very weak excitation.
We find that the sideband resulting from non-Markovian relaxation of the phonon
environment is excitation strength independent. It thus leads to an intrinsic
limit to the fraction of coherently scattered light and to the visibility of
two-photon coalescence at weak driving, both of which are absent for atomic
systems or within simpler Markovian treatments.


title: 4d N=2 SCFT from Complete Intersection Singularity

abstract:
  Detailed studies of four dimensional N=2 superconformal field theories (SCFT)
defined by isolated complete intersection singularities are performed: we
compute the Coulomb branch spectrum, Seiberg-Witten solutions and central
charges. Most of our theories have exactly marginal deformations and we
identify the weakly coupled gauge theory descriptions for many of them, which
involve (affine) D and E shaped quiver gauge theories and theories formed from
Argyres-Douglas matters. These investigations provide strong evidence for the
singularity approach in classifying 4d N=2 SCFTs.


title: Quasars as a tracer of large-scale structures in the distant universe

abstract:
  We study the dependence of the number density and properties of quasars on
the background galaxy density using the currently largest spectroscopic
datasets of quasars and galaxies. We construct a galaxy number density field
smoothed over the variable smoothing scale of between approximately 10 and
$20\,h^{-1}$Mpc over the redshift range of $0.46<z<0.59$ using the Sloan
Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Data Release 12 (DR12) Constant MASS (CMASS)
galaxies. The quasar sample is prepared from the SDSS I/II DR7. We examine the
correlation of incidence of quasars with the large-scale background density and
dependence of quasar properties such as bolometric luminosity, black hole mass,
and Eddington ratio on the large-scale density. We find a monotonic correlation
between the quasar number density and large-scale galaxy number density, which
is fitted well with a power law relation, $n_Q\propto\rho_G^{0.618}$. We detect
weak dependences of quasar properties on the large-scale density such as a
positive correlation between black hole mass and density, and a negative
correlation between luminosity and density. We discuss the possibility of using
quasars as a tracer of large-scale structures at high redshifts, which may be
useful for studies of growth of structures in the high redshift universe.


title: Noise and dissipation in rigid body motion

abstract:
  Using the rigid body as an example, we illustrate some features of stochastic
geometric mechanics. These features include: i) a geometric variational
motivation for the noise structure involving Lie-Poisson brackets and momentum
maps, ii) stochastic coadjoint motion with double bracket dissipation, iii) the
Lie-Poisson Fokker-Planck description and its stationary solutions, iv) random
dynamical systems, random attractors and SRB measures connected to statistical
physics.


title: Antineutrino monitoring of spent nuclear fuel

abstract:
  Military and civilian applications of nuclear energy have left a significant
amount of spent nuclear fuel over the past 70 years. Currently, in many
countries world wide, the use of nuclear energy is on the rise. Therefore, the
management of highly radioactive nuclear waste is a pressing issue. In this
letter, we explore antineutrino detectors as a tool for monitoring and
safeguarding nuclear waste material. We compute the flux and spectrum of
antineutrinos emitted by spent nuclear fuel elements as a function of time, and
we illustrate the usefulness of antineutrino detectors in several benchmark
scenarios. In particular, we demonstrate how a measurement of the antineutrino
flux can help to re-verify the contents of a dry storage cask in case the
monitoring chain by conventional means gets disrupted. We then comment on the
usefulness of antineutrino detectors at long-term storage facilities such as
Yucca mountain. Finally, we put forward antineutrino detection as a tool in
locating underground "hot spots" in contaminated areas such as the Hanford site
in Washington state.


title:
Substructured formulations of nonlinear structure problems - influence
  of the interface condition

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


title: Benchmarking Python Tools for Automatic Differentiation

abstract:
  In this paper we compare several Python tools for automatic differentiation.
In order to assess the difference in performance and precision, the problem of
finding the optimal geometrical structure of the cluster with identical atoms
is used as follows. First, we compare performance of calculating gradients for
the objective function. We showed that the PyADOL-C and PyCppAD tools have much
better performance for big clusters than the other ones. Second, we assess
precision of these two tools by calculating the difference between the obtained
at the optimal configuration gradient norms. We conclude that PyCppAD has the
best performance among others, while having almost the same precision as the
second- best performing tool - PyADOL-C.


title: Fermion masses through four-fermion condensates

abstract:
  Fermion masses can be generated through four-fermion condensates when
symmetries prevent fermion bilinear condensates from forming. This less
explored mechanism of fermion mass generation is responsible for making four
reduced staggered lattice fermions massive at strong couplings in a lattice
model with a local four-fermion coupling. The model has a massless fermion
phase at weak couplings and a massive fermion phase at strong couplings. In
particular there is no spontaneous symmetry breaking of any lattice symmetries
in both these phases. Recently it was discovered that in three space-time
dimensions there is a direct second order phase transition between the two
phases. Here we study the same model in four space-time dimensions and find
results consistent with the existence of a narrow intermediate phase with
fermion bilinear condensates, that separates the two asymptotic phases by
continuous phase transitions.


title:
Electron-positron pair production in external electric fields varying
  both in space and time

abstract:
  The Schwinger mechanism of electron-positron pair production in the presence
of strong external electric fields is analyzed numerically for the case of one-
and two-dimensional field configurations where the external field depends both
on time and one spatial coordinate. In order to provide this analysis, a new
efficient numerical approach is developed. The number of particles created is
obtained numerically and also compared with the analytical results for several
exactly solvable one-dimensional backgrounds. For the case of two-dimensional
field configurations the effects of the spatial finiteness are examined, which
confirms their importance and helps us to attest our approach further. The
corresponding calculations are also performed for several more interesting and
nontrivial combinations of temporal and spatial inhomogeneities. Finally, we
discuss the case of a spatially periodic external field when the approach is
particularly productive. The method employed is described in detail.


title: Multiple Hypothesis Colorization

abstract:
  In this work we focus on the problem of colorization for image compression.
Since color information occupies a large proportion of the total storage size
of an image, a method that can predict accurate color from its grayscale
version can produce dramatic reduction in image file size. But colorization for
compression poses several challenges. First, while colorization for artistic
purposes simply involves predicting plausible chroma, colorization for
compression requires generating output colors that are as close as possible to
the ground truth. Second, many objects in the real world exhibit multiple
possible colors. Thus, to disambiguate the colorization problem some additional
information must be stored to reproduce the true colors with good accuracy. To
account for the multimodal color distribution of objects we propose a deep
tree-structured network that generates multiple color hypotheses for every
pixel from a grayscale picture (as opposed to a single color produced by most
prior colorization approaches). We show how to leverage the multimodal output
of our model to reproduce with high fidelity the true colors of an image by
storing very little additional information. In the experiments we show that our
proposed method outperforms traditional JPEG color coding by a large margin,
producing colors that are nearly indistinguishable from the ground truth at the
storage cost of just a few hundred bytes for high-resolution pictures!


title: The Optics of Refractive Substructure

abstract:
  Newly recognized effects of refractive scattering in the ionized interstellar
medium have broad implications for very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) at
extreme angular resolutions. Building upon work by Blandford & Narayan (1985),
we present a simplified, geometrical optics framework, which enables rapid,
semi-analytic estimates of refractive scattering effects. We show that these
estimates exactly reproduce previous results based on a more rigorous
statistical formulation. We then derive new expressions for the
scattering-induced fluctuations of VLBI observables such as closure phase, and
we demonstrate how to calculate the fluctuations for arbitrary quantities of
interest using a Monte Carlo technique.


title:
Content Retrieval At the Edge: A Social-aware and Named Data Cooperative
  Framework

abstract:
  Recent years with the popularity of mobile devices have witnessed an
explosive growth of mobile multimedia contents which dominate more than 50\% of
mobile data traffic. This significant growth poses a severe challenge for
future cellular networks. As a promising approach to overcome the challenge, we
advocate Content Retrieval At the Edge, a content-centric cooperative service
paradigm via device-to-device (D2D) communications to reduce cellular traffic
volume in mobile networks. By leveraging the Named Data Networking (NDN)
principle, we propose sNDN, a social-aware named data framework to achieve
efficient cooperative content retrieval. Specifically, sNDN introduces
Friendship Circle by grouping a user with her close friends of both high
mobility similarity and high content similarity. We construct NDN routing
tables conditioned on Friendship Circle encounter frequency to navigate a
content request and a content reply packet between Friendship Circles, and
leverage social properties in Friendship Circle to search for the final target
as inner-Friendship Circle routing. The evaluation results demonstrate that
sNDN can save cellular capacity greatly and outperform other content retrieval
schemes significantly.


title: The Puzzle of Empty Bottle in Quantum Theory

abstract:
  We discuss an extremely simple effect of 'shadowing' where the very existence
of the measuring apparatus deforms the evolution of quantum states even if the
measurement is never preformed. In spite of strange intuitive aspects, it might
be related to some recent doubts about the completeness of quantum theories.


title: Existence of the optimum for Shallow Lake type models

abstract:
  We consider the optimal control problem associated with a general version of
the well known shallow lake model, and we prove the existence of an optimum in
the class $L_{loc}^{1}\left(0,+\infty\right)$. Any direct proof seems to be
missing in the literature. Dealing with admissible controls that can be
unbounded (even locally) is necessary in order to represent properly the
concrete optimization problem; on the other hand, the non-compactness of the
control space together with the infinite horizon setting prevents from having
good \emph{a priori} estimates - and this makes the existence problem
considerably harder. We present an original method which is in a way opposite
to the classical control theoretic approach used to solve finite horizon Mayer
or Bolza problems. Synthetically, our method is based on the following scheme:
i) two uniform localization lemmas providing, given $T\geq1$ and a maximizing
sequence of controls, another sequence of controls which is bounded in
$L^{\infty}\left(\left[0,T\right]\right)$ and still maximizing. ii) A special
diagonal procedure dealing with sequences which are not extracted one from the
other. iii) A 'standard' diagonal procedure. The optimum results to be locally
bounded by construction.
  Keywords: Optimal control, infinite horizon, non compact control space,
uniform localization, convex-concave dynamics, logarithmic utility.


title: Parafermions in the tau-2 model II

abstract:
  Many years ago Baxter introduced an inhomogeneous two-dimensional classical
spin model, now called the $\tau_2(t)$ model with free boundary conditions, and
he specialized the resulting quantum spin-chain Hamiltonian in a special limit
to a simple clock Hamiltonian. Recently, Fendley showed that this clock
Hamiltonian can be expressed in terms of free "parafermions." Baxter followed
this up by showing that this construction generalizes to the more general
$\tau_2(t)$ model, provided some conjectures hold. In this paper, we will
compare the different notations and approaches enabling us to express the
Hamiltonians in terms of projection operators as introduced by Fendley. By
examining the properties of the raising operators, we are then able to prove
the last unproven conjecture in Baxter's paper left in our previous paper. Thus
the eigenvectors can all be written in terms of these raising operators.


title:
Calibration artefacts in radio interferometry. III. Phase-only
  calibration and primary beam correction

abstract:
  This is the third installment in a series of papers in which we investigate
calibration artefacts. Calibration artefacts (also known as ghosts or spurious
sources) are created when we calibrate with an incomplete model. In the first
two papers of this series we developed a mathematical framework which enabled
us to study the ghosting mechanism itself. An interesting concomitant of the
second paper was that ghosts appear in symmetrical pairs. This could possibly
account for spurious symmetrization. Spurious symmetrization refers to the
appearance of a spurious source (the anti-ghost) symmetrically opposite an
unmodelled source around a modelled source. The analysis in the first two
papers indicates that the anti-ghost is usually very faint, in particular when
a large number of antennas are used. This suggests that spurious symmetrization
will mainly occur at an almost undetectable flux level. In this paper, we show
that phase-only calibration produces an anti-ghost that is $N$-times (where $N$
denotes the number of antennas in the array) as bright as the one produced by
phase and amplitude calibration and that this already bright ghost can be
further amplified by the primary beam correction.


title: Path-dependent SDEs in Hilbert spaces

abstract:
  We study path-dependent SDEs in Hilbert spaces. By using methods based on
contractions in Banach spaces, we prove existence and uniqueness of mild
solutions, continuity of mild solutions with respect to perturbations of all
the data of the system, G\^ateaux differentiability of generic order n of mild
solutions with respect to the starting point, continuity of the G\^ateaux
derivatives with respect to all the data. The analysis is performed for generic
spaces of paths that do not necessarily coincide with the space of continuous
functions.


title:
Classification of finite dimensional uniserial representations of
  conformal Galilei algebras

abstract:
  With the aid of the $6j$-symbol, we classify all uniserial modules of
$\mathfrak{sl}(2)\ltimes \mathfrak{h}_{n}$, where $\mathfrak{h}_{n}$ is the
Heisenberg Lie algebra of dimension $2n+1$.


title: Predicting Novel Tick Vectors of Zoonotic Disease

abstract:
  With the resurgence of tick-borne diseases such as Lyme disease and the
emergence of new pathogens such as Powassan virus, understanding what
distinguishes vector from non-vector species, and predicting undiscovered tick
vectors is an important step towards mitigating human disease risk. We apply
generalized boosted regression to interrogate over 90 features for over 240
species of Ixodes ticks. Our model predicted vector status with ~97% accuracy
and implicated 14 tick species whose intrinsic trait profiles confer high
probabilities (~80%) that they are capable of transmitting infections from
animal hosts to humans. Distinguishing characteristics of zoonotic tick vectors
include several anatomical structures that facilitate efficient host seeking
and blood-feeding from a wide variety of host species. Boosted regression
analysis produced both actionable predictions to guide ongoing surveillance as
well as testable hypotheses about the biological underpinnings of vectorial
capacity across tick species.


title: A Quintuple Star System Containing Two Eclipsing Binaries

abstract:
  We present a quintuple star system that contains two eclipsing binaries. The
unusual architecture includes two stellar images separated by 11" on the sky:
EPIC 212651213 and EPIC 212651234. The more easterly image (212651213) actually
hosts both eclipsing binaries which are resolved within that image at 0.09",
while the westerly image (212651234) appears to be single in adaptive optics
(AO), speckle imaging, and radial velocity (RV) studies. The 'A' binary is
circular with a 5.1-day period, while the 'B' binary is eccentric with a
13.1-day period. The gamma velocities of the A and B binaries are different by
~10 km/s. That, coupled with their resolved projected separation of 0.09",
indicates that the orbital period and separation of the 'C' binary (consisting
of A orbiting B) are ~65 years and ~25 AU, respectively, under the simplifying
assumption of a circular orbit. Motion within the C orbit should be discernible
via future RV, AO, and speckle imaging studies within a couple of years. The C
system (i.e., 212651213) has a radial velocity and proper motion that differ
from that of 212651234 by only ~1.4 km/s and ~3 mas/yr. This set of similar
space velocities in 3 dimensions strongly implies that these two objects are
also physically bound, making this at least a quintuple star system.


title: Applications of Thin Orbits

abstract:
  This text is based on a series of three expository lectures on a variety of
topics related to "thin orbits," as delivered at Durham University's Easter
School on "Dynamics and Analytic Number Theory" in April 2014. The first
lecture reviews closed geodesics on the modular surface and the reduction
theory of binary quadratic forms before discussing Duke's equidistribution
theorem (for indefinite classes). The second lecture exposits three quite
different but (it turns out) not unrelated problems, due to
Einsiedler-Lindenstrauss-Michel-Venkatesh, McMullen, and Zaremba. The third
lecture reformulates these in terms of the aforementioned thin orbits, and
shows how all three would follow from a single "Local-Global" Conjecture of
Bourgain and the author. We also describe some partial progress on the
conjecture, which has lead to some results on the original problems.


title:
Functional It\=o calculus in Hilbert spaces and application to
  path-dependent Kolmogorov equations

abstract:
  Recently, functional It\=o calculus has been introduced and developed in
finite dimension for functionals of continuous semimartingales. With different
techniques, we develop a functional It\=o calculus for functionals of Hilbert
spacevalued diffusions. In this context, we first prove a path-dependent
It\=o's formula, then we show applications to classical solutions of
path-dependent Kolmogorov equations in Hilbert spaces and derive a Clark-Ocone
type formula. Finally, we explicitly verify that all the theory developed can
be applied to a class of diffusions driven by SDEs with a path-dependent drift
(suitably regular) and constant diffusion coefficient.


title:
Orthogonal basis with a conicoid first mode for shape specification of
  optical surfaces

abstract:
  A rigorous and powerful theoretical framework is proposed to obtain systems
of orthogonal functions (or shape modes) to represent optical surfaces. The
method is general so it can be applied to different initial shapes and
different polynomials. Here we present results for surfaces with circular
apertures when the first basis function (mode) is a conicoid. The system for
aspheres with rotational symmetry is obtained applying an appropriate change of
variables to Legendre polynomials, whereas the system for general freeform case
is obtained applying a similar procedure to spherical harmonics. Numerical
comparisons with standard systems, such as Forbes and Zernike polynomials, are
performed and discussed.


title: Inferring Mobility Measures from GPS Traces with Missing Data

abstract:
  With increasing availability of smartphones with GPS capabilities,
large-scale studies relating individual-level mobility patterns to a wide
variety of patient-centered outcomes, from mood disorders to surgical recovery,
are becoming a reality. Similar past studies have been small in scale and have
provided wearable GPS devices to subjects. These devices typically collect
mobility traces continuously without significant gaps in the data, and
consequently the problem of data missingness has been safely ignored.
Leveraging subjects' own smartphones makes it possible to scale up and extend
the duration of these types of studies, but at the same time introduces a
substantial challenge: to preserve a smartphone's battery, GPS can be active
only for a small portion of the time, frequently less than $10\%$, leading to a
tremendous missing data problem. We introduce a principled statistical
approach, based on weighted resampling of the observed data, to impute the
missing mobility traces, which we then summarize using different mobility
measures. We compare the strengths of our approach to linear interpolation, a
popular approach for dealing with missing data, both analytically and through
simulation of missingness for empirical data. We conclude that our imputation
approach better mirrors human mobility both theoretically and over a sample of
GPS mobility traces from 182 individuals in the Geolife data set, where,
relative to linear interpolation, imputation resulted in a 10-fold reduction in
the error averaged across all mobility features.


title: Recognizing Surgical Activities with Recurrent Neural Networks

abstract:
  We apply recurrent neural networks to the task of recognizing surgical
activities from robot kinematics. Prior work in this area focuses on
recognizing short, low-level activities, or gestures, and has been based on
variants of hidden Markov models and conditional random fields. In contrast, we
work on recognizing both gestures and longer, higher-level activites, or
maneuvers, and we model the mapping from kinematics to gestures/maneuvers with
recurrent neural networks. To our knowledge, we are the first to apply
recurrent neural networks to this task. Using a single model and a single set
of hyperparameters, we match state-of-the-art performance for gesture
recognition and advance state-of-the-art performance for maneuver recognition,
in terms of both accuracy and edit distance. Code is available at
https://github.com/rdipietro/miccai-2016-surgical-activity-rec .


title: Uniform propagation of chaos for Kac's 1D particle system

abstract:
  In this paper we study Kac's 1D particle system, consisting of the velocities
of $N$ particles colliding at constant rate and randomly exchanging energies.
We prove uniform (in time) propagation of chaos in Wasserstein distance with
explicit polynomial rates in $N$, for both the squared (i.e., the energy) and
non-squared particle system. These rates are of order $N^{-1/3}$ (almost, in
the non-squared case), assuming that the initial distribution of the limit
nonlinear equation has finite moments of sufficiently high order ($4+\epsilon$
is enough when using the 2-Wasserstein distance). The proof relies on a
convenient parametrization of the collision recently introduced by Hauray, as
well as on a coupling technique developed by Cortez and Fontbona.


title: Electrodynamics of a Cosmic Dark Fluid

abstract:
  Cosmic Dark Fluid is considered as a non-stationary medium, in which
electromagnetic waves propagate, and magneto-electric field structures emerge
and evolve. A medium - type representation of the Dark Fluid allows us to
involve into analysis the concepts and mathematical formalism elaborated in the
framework of classical covariant electrodynamics of continua, and to
distinguish dark analogs of well-known medium-effects, such as optical
activity, pyro-electricity, piezo-magnetism, electro- and magneto-striction and
dynamo-optical activity. The Dark Fluid is assumed to be formed by a duet of a
Dark Matter (a pseudoscalar axionic constituent) and Dark Energy (a scalar
element); respectively, we distinguish electrodynamic effects induced by these
two constituents of the Dark Fluid. The review contains discussions of ten
models, which describe electrodynamic effects induced by Dark Matter and/or
Dark Energy. The models are accompanied by examples of exact solutions to the
master equations, correspondingly extended; applications are considered for
cosmology and space-times with spherical and pp-wave symmetries. In these
applications we focused the attention on three main electromagnetic phenomena
induced by the Dark Fluid: first, emergence of Longitudinal Magneto-Electric
Clusters; second, generation of anomalous electromagnetic responses; third,
formation of Dark Epochs in the Universe history.


title:
Ultra-high oxidation potential of Ti/Cu-SnO2 anodes fabricated by spray
  pyrolysis for wastewater treatment

abstract:
  High oxidation potential indicates anodes have high oxidation power and high
current efficiency for organics oxidation. In this paper, we prepared
Ti/Cu-SnO2 anodes using spray pyrolysis method. The Ti/Cu-SnO2 anodes have an
ultra-high oxidation potential of about 2.7 V vs NHE, suitable for use in
wastewater treatment. The Ti/Cu-SnO2 anodes exhibit the preferred orientation
along (110) plane at high Cu doped concentration. First-principles calculations
suggest that work function of Cu-SnO2 increases with the Cu doping
concentration. It is obtained that the preferred (110) plane and the high work
function are responsible for the enhanced oxidation potential of Ti/Cu-SnO2
anodes.


title:
Tight Bounds on the Complexity of Semi-Equitable Coloring of Cubic and
  Subcubic Graphs

abstract:
  A $k$-coloring of a graph $G=(V,E)$ is called semi-equitable if there exists
a partition of its vertex set into independent subsets $V_1,\ldots,V_k$ in such
a way that $|V_1| \notin \{\lceil |V|/k\rceil, \lfloor |V|/k \rfloor\}$ and
$||V_i|-|V_j|| \leq 1$ for each $i,j=2,\ldots,k$. The color class $V_1$ is
called non-equitable. In this note we consider the complexity of semi-equitable
$k$-coloring, $k\geq 4$, of the vertices of a cubic or subcubic graph $G$. In
particular, we show that, given a $n$-vertex subcubic graph $G$ and constants
$\epsilon > 0$, $k \geq 4$, it is NP-complete to obtain a semi-equitable
$k$-coloring of $G$ whose non-equitable color class is of size $s$ if $s \geq
n/3+\epsilon n$, and it is polynomially solvable if $s \leq n/3$.


title:
Polarization measurement of dielectronic recombination transitions in
  highly charged krypton ions

abstract:
  We report linear polarization measurements of x rays emitted due to
dielectronic recombination into highly charged krypton ions. The ions in the
He-like through O-like charge states were populated in an electron beam ion
trap with the electron beam energy adjusted to recombination resonances in
order to produce $K\alpha$ x rays. The x rays were detected with a newly
developed Compton polarimeter using a beryllium scattering target and 12
silicon x-ray detector diodes sampling the azimuthal distribution of the
scattered x rays. The extracted degrees of linear polarization of several
dielectronic recombination transitions agree with results of relativistic
distorted--wave calculations. We also demonstrate a high sensitivity of the
polarization to the Breit interaction, which is remarkable for a medium-$Z$
element like krypton. The experimental results can be used for polarization
diagnostics of hot astrophysical and laboratory fusion plasmas.

categories: physics.atom-ph astro-ph.IM physics.ins-det physics.plasm-ph


title: Local chiral potentials and the structure of light nuclei

abstract:
  We present fully local versions of the minimally non-local nucleon-nucleon
potentials constructed in a previous paper [M.\ Piarulli {\it et al.}, Phys.\
Rev.\ C {\bf 91}, 024003 (2015)], and use them in hypersperical-harmonics and
quantum Monte Carlo calculations of ground and excited states of $^3$H, $^3$He,
$^4$He, $^6$He, and $^6$Li nuclei. The long-range part of these local
potentials includes one- and two-pion exchange contributions without and with
$\Delta$-isobars in the intermediate states up to order $Q^3$ ($Q$ denotes
generically the low momentum scale) in the chiral expansion, while the
short-range part consists of contact interactions up to order $Q^4$. The
low-energy constants multiplying these contact interactions are fitted to the
2013 Granada database in two different ranges of laboratory energies, either
0--125 MeV or 0--200 MeV, and to the deuteron binding energy and $nn$ singlet
scattering length. Fits to these data are performed for three models
characterized by long- and short-range cutoffs, $R_{\rm L}$ and $R_{\rm S}$
respectively, ranging from $(R_{\rm L},R_{\rm S})=(1.2,0.8)$ fm down to
$(0.8,0.6)$ fm. The long-range (short-range) cutoff regularizes the one- and
two-pion exchange (contact) part of the potential.


title: Excess of genomic defects in a woolly mammoth on Wrangel island

abstract:
  Woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius) populated Siberia, Beringia, and
North America during the Pleistocene and early Holocene. Recent breakthroughs
in ancient DNA sequencing have allowed for complete genome sequencing for two
specimens of woolly mammoths (Palkopoulou et al. 2015). One mammoth specimen is
from a mainland population ~45,000 years ago when mammoths were plentiful. The
second, a 4300 yr old specimen, is derived from an isolated population on
Wrangel island where mammoths subsisted with small effective population size
more than 43-fold lower than previous populations. These extreme differences in
effective population size offer a rare opportunity to test nearly neutral
models of genome architecture evolution within a single species. Using these
previously published mammoth sequences, we identify deletions, retrogenes, and
non-functionalizing point mutations. In the Wrangel island mammoth, we identify
a greater number of deletions, a larger proportion of deletions affecting gene
sequences, a greater number of candidate retrogenes, and an increased number of
premature stop codons. This accumulation of detrimental mutations is consistent
with genomic meltdown in response to low effective population sizes in the
dwindling mammoth population on Wrangel island. In addition, we observe high
rates of loss of olfactory receptors and urinary proteins, either because these
loci are non-essential or because they were favored by divergent selective
pressures in island environments. Finally, at the locus of FOXQ1 we observe two
independent loss-of-function mutations, which would confer a satin coat
phenotype in this island woolly mammoth.