cssi/SciSciGPT-SciSciNet huggingface dataset:
Modeling Task Effects on Meaning Representation in the Brain via Zero-Shot MEG Prediction

How meaning is represented in the brain is still one of the big open questions in neuroscience. Does a word (e.g., bird) always have the same representation, or does the task under which the word is processed alter its representation (answering "can you eat it?" versus "can it fly?")? The brain activity of subjects who read the same word while performing different semantic tasks has been shown to differ across tasks. However, it is still not understood how the task itself contributes to this difference. In the current work, we study Magnetoencephalography (MEG) brain recordings of participants tasked with answering questions about concrete nouns. We investigate the effect of the task (i.e. the question being asked) on the processing of the concrete noun by predicting the millisecond-resolution MEG recordings as a function of both the semantics of the noun and the task. Using this approach, we test several hypotheses about the task-stimulus interactions by comparing the zero-shot predictions made by these hypotheses for novel tasks and nouns not seen during training. We find that incorporating the task semantics significantly improves the prediction of MEG recordings, across participants. The improvement occurs 475-550ms after the participants first see the word, which corresponds to what is considered to be the ending time of semantic processing for a word. These results suggest that only the end of semantic processing of a word is task-dependent, and pose a challenge for future research to formulate new hypotheses for earlier task effects as a function of the task and stimuli.
Identification of the Microlens in Event MACHO-LMC-20

We report on the identification of the lens responsible for microlensing event MACHO-LMC-20. As part of a Spitzer IRAC program conducting mid-infrared follow-up of the MACHO Large Magellanic Cloud microlensing fields, we discovered a significant flux excess at the position of the source star for this event. These data, in combination with high-resolution near-infrared Magellan PANIC data, have allowed us to classify the lens as an early M dwarf in the thick disk of the Milky Way, at a distance of ~2 kpc. This is only the second microlens to have been identified, the first also being a M dwarf star in the disk. Together, these two events are still consistent with the expected frequency of nearby stars in the Milky Way thin and thick disks acting as lenses.
Capacitor-within-Capacitor

Capacitors are typically connected together in one of two configurations: either in series, or in parallel. Here we study a capacitor-within-capacitor configuration. Simulations and experiments indicate that the overall capacitance of the structured cell may be made larger than an ordinary two-plate counterpart by at least 50%. Simulations also indicate that the cell’s capacitance may be controlled by the gate voltage. Overall, this concept is deemed suitable for microfluidic sensing and possibly for energy storage elements.
Reconstruction of support of a measure from its moments

In this paper, we address the problem of reconstruction of support of a positive finite Borel measure from its moments. More precisely, given a finite subset of the moments of a measure, we develop a semidefinite program for approximating the support of measure using level sets of polynomials. To solve this problem, a sequence of convex relaxations is provided, whose optimal solution is shown to converge to the support of measure of interest. Moreover, the provided approach is modified to improve the results for uniform measures. Numerical examples are presented to illustrate the performance of the proposed approach.
AdaShare: Learning What To Share For Efficient Deep Multi-Task Learning

Multi-task learning is an open and challenging problem in computer vision. The typical way of conducting multi-task learning with deep neural networks is either through handcrafted schemes that share all initial layers and branch out at an adhoc point, or through separate task-specific networks with an additional feature sharing/fusion mechanism. Unlike existing methods, we propose an adaptive sharing approach, called AdaShare, that decides what to share across which tasks to achieve the best recognition accuracy, while taking resource efficiency into account. Specifically, our main idea is to learn the sharing pattern through a task-specific policy that selectively chooses which layers to execute for a given task in the multi-task network. We efficiently optimize the task-specific policy jointly with the network weights, using standard back-propagation. Experiments on several challenging and diverse benchmark datasets with a variable number of tasks well demonstrate the efficacy of our approach over state-of-the-art methods. Project page: this https URL.
Singular solutions, repeated roots and completeness for higher-spin chains

We investigate the completeness of the solutions of the Bethe equations for the integrable spin-s isotropic (XXX) spin chain with periodic boundary conditions. Solutions containing the exact string is, i(s − 1), ..., −i(s − 1), −is are singular. For s > 1/2, there exist also 'strange' solutions with repeated roots, which nevertheless are physical (i.e., correspond to eigenstates of the Hamiltonian). We derive conditions for the singular solutions and the solutions with repeated roots to be physical. We formulate a conjecture for the number of solutions with pairwise distinct roots in terms of the numbers of singular and strange solutions. Using homotopy continuation, we solve the Bethe equations numerically for s = 1 and s = 3/2 up to eight sites, and find some support for the conjecture. We also present several examples of strange solutions.
A note on warped string compactification

Abstract We give a short review of a large class of warped string geometries, obtained via F-theory compactified on Calabi–Yau fourfolds, that upon reduction to 5 dimensions give consistent supersymmetric realizations of the RS compactification scenario.
Bound states of pseudo-Dirac dark matter

We study the bound-state spectrum in a simple model of pseudo-Dirac dark matter, and examine how the rate of bound-state formation through radiative capture compares to Sommerfeld-enhanced annihilation. We use this model as an example to delineate the new features induced by the presence of a mass splitting between the dark matter and a nearly-degenerate partner, compared to the case where only a single dark-matter-like state is present. We provide a simple analytic prescription for estimating the spectrum of bound states in systems containing a mass splitting, which in turn allows characterization of the resonances due to near-zero-energy bound states, and validate this estimate both for pseudo-Dirac dark matter and for the more complex case of wino dark matter. We demonstrate that for pseudo-Dirac dark matter the capture rate into deeply bound states is, to a good approximation, simply related to the Sommerfeld enhancement factor.
Kinematics and properties of the central molecular zone as probed with [C ii]

Context. The Galactic central molecular zone (CMZ) is a region containing massive and dense molecular clouds, with dynamics driven by a variety of energy sources including a massive black hole. It is thus the nearest template for understanding physical processes in extragalactic nuclei. The CMZ’s neutral interstellar gas has been mapped spectrally in many neutral atomic and molecular gas tracers, but the ionized and CO-dark H 2 regions are less well traced spectroscopically. Aims. We identify features of the UV irradiated neutral gas, photon dominated regions (PDRs) and CO-dark H 2 , and highly ionized gas in the CMZ as traced by the fine structure line of C + at 158 μ m, [C ii], and characterize their properties. Methods. We observed the [C ii] 158 μ m fine structure line with high spectral resolution using Herschel HIFI with two perpendicular on-the-fly strip scans, along l = −0.8 to +0.8 and b = −0.8 to +0.8, both centered on ( l , b ) = (0°, 0°). We analyze the spatial-velocity distribution of the [C ii] data, compare them to those of [C i] and CO, and to dust continuum maps, in order to determine the properties and distribution of the ionized and neutral gas and its dynamics within the CMZ. Results. The longitude- and latitude-velocity maps of [C ii] trace portions of the orbiting open gas streams of dense molecular clouds, the cloud G0.253+0.016, also known as the Brick, the arched filaments, the ionized gas within several pc of Sgr A and Sgr B2, and the warm dust bubble. We use the [C ii] data to determine the physical and dynamical properties of these CMZ features. Conclusions. The bright far-IR 158 μ m C + line, [C ii], when observed with high spatial and spectral resolution, traces a wide range of emission features in the CMZ. The [C ii] emission arises primarily from dense PDRs and highly ionized gas, and is an important tracer of the kinematics and physical conditions of this gas.
Wide-band parametric amplifier readout and resolution of optical microwave kinetic inductance detectors

The energy resolution of a single photon counting microwave kinetic inductance detector can be degraded by noise coming from the primary low temperature amplifier in the detector's readout system. Until recently, quantum limited amplifiers have been incompatible with these detectors due to the dynamic range, power, and bandwidth constraints. However, we show that a kinetic inductance based traveling-wave parametric amplifier can be used for this application and reaches the quantum limit. The total system noise for this readout scheme was equal to ∼2.1 in units of quanta. For incident photons in the 800–1300 nm range, the amplifier increased the average resolving power of the detector from ∼6.7 to 9.3 at which point the resolution becomes limited by noise on the pulse height of the signal. Noise measurements suggest that a resolving power of up to 25 is possible if the redesigned detectors can remove this additional noise source.
Supersymmetric D3/D5 for massive defects on curved space

We construct the holographic dual for $$ \mathcal{N}=4 $$ SYM on S4 and AdS4 coupled to massive $$ \mathcal{N}=2 $$ supersymmetric quenched flavor fields on a codimension-1 defect, which is S3 and AdS3, respectively. The holographic description is in terms of a D3/probe D5 brane system. We set up and reduce the BPS equations for D5-brane embeddings with arbitrary supersymmetric deformations and partly solve them at the non-linear level. The remaining equations are solved explicitly in a small-mass expansion. We compute the contribution of the defect fields to the partition function on S4 and compare to a field theory computation using supersymmetric localization, for which we set up the matrix model. Both computations agree, lending strong support to holographic probe brane constructions using D3/D5 configurations in general.
Partially ordered sets in Macaulay2

We introduce the package Posets for Macaulay2. This package provides a data structure and the necessary methods for working with partially ordered sets, also called posets. In particular, the package implements methods to enumerate many commonly studied classes of posets, perform operations on posets, and calculate various invariants associated to posets. Introduction. A partial order is a binary relation over a set P that is antisymmetric, reflexive, and transitive. A set P together with a partial order is called a poset, or partially ordered set. Posets are combinatorial structures that are used in modern mathematical research, particularly in algebra. We introduce the package Posets forMacaulay2 via three distinct posets or related ideals which arise naturally in combinatorial algebra. We first describe two posets that are generated from algebraic objects. The intersection semilattice associated to a hyperplane arrangement can be used to compute the number of unbounded and bounded real regions cut out by a hyperplane arrangement, as well as the dimensions of the homologies of the complex complement of a hyperplane arrangement. Given a monomial ideal, the lcm-lattice of its minimal generators gives information on the structure of the free resolution of the original ideal. Specifically, two monomial ideals with isomorphic lcm-lattices have the “same” (up to relabeling) minimal free resolution, and the lcm-lattice can be used to compute, among other things, the multigraded Betti numbers βi,b(R/M) = dimk Tori,b(R/M, k) of the monomial ideal. In contrast to the first two examples (associating a poset to an algebraic object), we then describe an ideal that is generated from a poset. In particular, the Hibi ideal of a finite poset is a squarefree monomial ideal which has many nice algebraic properties that can be described in terms of combinatorial properties of the poset. In particular, the resolution and Betti numbers, the multiplicity, the projective dimension, and the Alexander dual are all nicely described in terms of data about the poset itself. Intersection (semi)lattices. A hyperplane arrangement A is a finite collection of affine hyperplanes in some vector space V . The dimension of a hyperplane arrangement is defined by dim(A) = dim(V ), and the rank of a hyperplane arrangement rank(A) is the dimension of the span in V of the set of normals to the hyperplanes in A. The intersection semilattice L(A) of A is the set of the nonempty intersections of subsets of hyperplanes ⋂ H∈A H for H ∈ A ⊆ A, ordered by reverse inclusion. We include the empty intersection corresponding to A = ∅, which is the minimal element in the intersection meet semilattice 0 ∈ L(A). If the intersection of all hyperplanes in A is nonempty, ⋂
Fluid heterogeneity detection based on the asymptotic distribution of the time-averaged mean squared displacement in single particle tracking experiments

A tracer particle is called anomalously diffusive if its mean squared displacement grows approximately as σ 2 t α as a function of time t for some constant σ 2, where the diffusion exponent satisfies α ≠ 1. In this article, we use recent results on the asymptotic distribution of the time-averaged mean squared displacement [20] to construct statistical tests for detecting physical heterogeneity in viscoelastic fluid samples starting from one or multiple observed anomalously diffusive paths. The methods are asymptotically valid for the range 0 < α < 3/2 and involve a mathematical characterization of time-averaged mean squared displacement bias and the effect of correlated disturbance errors. The assumptions on particle motion cover a broad family of fractional Gaussian processes, including fractional Brownian motion and many fractional instances of the generalized Langevin equation framework. We apply the proposed methods in experimental data from treated P. aeruginosa biofilms generated by the collaboration of the Hill and Schoenfisch Labs at UNC-Chapel Hill.
A family of polycyclic groups over which the uniform conjugacy problem is NP-complete

In this paper, we study the conjugacy problem in polycyclic groups. Our main result is that we construct polycyclic groups Gn whose conjugacy problem is at least as hard as the subset sum problem with n indeterminates. As such, the uniform conjugacy problem over the groups Gn is NP-complete where the parameters of the problem are taken in terms of n and the length of the elements given on input.
PRF: a framework for building automatic program repair prototypes for JVM-based languages

PRF is a Java-based framework that allows researchers to build prototypes of test-based generate-and-validate automatic program repair techniques for JVM languages by simply extending it with their patch generation plugins. The framework also provides other useful components for constructing automatic program repair tools, e.g., a fault localization component that provides spectrum-based fault localization information at different levels of granularity, a configurable and safe patch validation component that is 11+X faster than vanilla testing, and a customizable post-processing component to generate fix reports. A demo video of PRF is available at https://bit.ly/3ehduSS.
Koszulness and supersolvability for Dirichlet arrangements

We prove that the cone over a Dirichlet arrangement is supersolvable if and only if its Orlik-Solomon algebra is Koszul. This was previously shown for four other classes of arrangements. We exhibit an infinite family of cones over Dirichlet arrangements that are combinatorially distinct from these other four classes.
Renormalization and ultraviolet sensitivity of gauge vertices in universal extra dimensions

When computing radiative corrections in models with compactified extra dimensions, one has to sum over the entire tower of Kaluza-Klein excitations inside the loops. The loop corrections generate a difference between the coupling strength of a zero-mode gauge boson and the coupling strength of its Kaluza-Klein excitation, although both originate from the same higher-dimensional gauge interaction. Furthermore, this discrepancy will in general depend on the cutoff scale and assumptions about the UV completion of the extra-dimensional theory. In this article, these effects are studied in detail within the context of the minimal universal extra dimension model (MUED). The broad features of the cutoff scale dependence can be captured through the solution of the functional flow equation in five-dimensional space. However, an explicit diagrammatic calculation reveals some modifications due to the compactification of the extra dimension. Nevertheless, when imposing a physical renormalization condition, one finds that the UV sensitivity of the effective Kaluza-Klein gauge-boson vertex is relatively small and not very important for most phenomenological purposes. Similar conclusions should hold in a larger class of extra-dimensional models besides MUED.
ACER: A framework on the use of mathematics in upper-division physics

At the University of Colorado Boulder, as part of our broader efforts to transform middle- and upper-division physics courses, we research students' difficulties with particular concepts, methods, and tools in classical mechanics, electromagnetism, and quantum mechanics. Unsurprisingly, a number of difficulties are related to students' use of mathematical tools (e.g., approximation methods). Previous work has documented a number of challenges that students must overcome to use mathematical tools fluently in introductory physics (e.g., mapping meaning onto mathematical symbols). We have developed a theoretical framework to facilitate connecting students' difficulties to challenges with specific mathematical and physical concepts. In this paper, we motivate the need for this framework and demonstrate its utility for both researchers and course instructors by applying it to frame results from interview data on students' use of Taylor approximations.
A Central Limit Theorem for Costs in Bulinskaya’s Inventory Management Problem When Deliveries Face Delays

It is common in inventory theory to consider policies that minimize the expected cost of ordering and holding goods or materials. Nevertheless, the realized cost is a random variable, and, as the Saint Petersburg Paradox reminds us, the expected value does not always capture the full economic reality of a decision problem. Here we take the classic inventory model of Bulinskaya (Theory of Probability & Its Applications, 9, 3, 389–403, 1964), and, by proving an appropriate central limit theorem, we show in a reasonably rich (and practical) sense that the mean-optimal policies are economically appropriate. The motivation and the tools are applicable to a large class of Markov decision problems.
Moving beyond Chi-squared in nuclei and neutron stars

There are several assumptions made in a standard χ2 analysis of data, including the frequent assumption that the likelihood function is well approximated by a multivariate Gaussian distribution. This article briefly reviews the standard approach and describes how Bayesian inference can be used to go beyond the assumption that the likelihood is Gaussian. Two separate types of analysis relevant to nuclear physics are used as test cases. The first is the determination of the equation of state of dense matter from neutron star mass and radius data. The second is the use of theoretical nuclear mass models to fit currently available data and predict the value of masses which have not yet been measured. For the problem of predicting nuclear masses, it is demonstrated that approximating the likelihood function with a Gaussian can produce biased predictions of unmeasured masses. Finally, the lessons learned from these fitting problems are used to propose a method for improving constraints on the nuclear symmetry energy.
The number of independent sets in an irregular graph

Abstract Settling Kahn's conjecture (2001), we prove the following upper bound on the number i ( G ) of independent sets in a graph G without isolated vertices: i ( G ) ≤ ∏ u v ∈ E ( G ) i ( K d u , d v ) 1 / ( d u d v ) , where d u is the degree of vertex u in G . Equality occurs when G is a disjoint union of complete bipartite graphs. The inequality was previously proved for regular graphs by Kahn and Zhao. We also prove an analogous tight lower bound: i ( G ) ≥ ∏ v ∈ V ( G ) i ( K d v + 1 ) 1 / ( d v + 1 ) , where equality occurs for G a disjoint union of cliques. More generally, we prove bounds on the weighted versions of these quantities, i.e., the independent set polynomial, or equivalently the partition function of the hard-core model with a given fugacity on a graph.
From double Lie groupoids to local Lie 2-groupoids

We apply the bar construction to the nerve of a double Lie groupoid to obtain a local Lie 2-groupoid. As an application, we recover Haefliger’s fundamental groupoid from the fundamental double groupoid of a Lie groupoid. In the case of a symplectic double groupoid, we study the induced closed 2-form on the associated local Lie 2-groupoid, which leads us to propose a definition of a symplectic 2-groupoid.
Axion misalignment driven to the bottom

Several theoretical motivations point to ultralight QCD axions with large decay constants $$ {f}_a\simeq \mathcal{O}\left({10}^{16}-{10}^{17}\right)\ \mathrm{GeV} $$ , to which experimental proposals are dedicated. This regime is known to face the problem of overproduction of axion dark matter from the misalignment mechanism unless the misalignment angle θmis is as small as $$ \mathcal{O}\left({10}^{-3}-{10}^{-4}\right) $$ , which is generally considered a fine-tuning problem. We investigate a dynamical explanation for a small θmis. The axion mass arises from strong dynamics and may be sufficiently enhanced by early dynamics so as to overcome Hubble friction and drive the field value to the bottom of the potential long before the QCD phase transition. Together with an approximate CP symmetry in the theory, this minimum is very closely related to today’s value and thus θmis can automatically be well under unity. Owing to such efficient relaxation, the isocurvature perturbations are essentially damped. As an existence proof, using supersymmetric theories we illustrate that the Higgs coupling with the inflaton energy can successfully achieve this axion damping in a consistent inflationary cosmology.
Mathematical quantum Yang–Mills theory revisited

A mathematically rigorous relativistic quantum Yang–Mills theory with an arbitrary semisimple compact gauge Lie group is set up in the Hamiltonian canonical formalism. The theory is nonperturbative, without cut-offs, and agrees with the causality and stability principles. This paper presents a fully revised, simplified, and corrected version of the corresponding material in the previous papers Dynin ([11] and [12]). The principal result is established anew: due to the quartic self-interaction term in the Yang–Mills Lagrangian along with the semisimplicity of the gauge group, the quantum Yang–Mills energy spectrum has a positive mass gap. Furthermore, the quantum Yang–Mills Hamiltonian has a countable orthogonal eigenbasis in a Fock space, so that the quantum Yang–Mills spectrum is point and countable. In addition, a fine structure of the spectrum is elucidated.
Cross-Lingual Text Classification with Minimal Resources by Transferring a Sparse Teacher

Cross-lingual text classification alleviates the need for manually labeled documents in a target language by leveraging labeled documents from other languages. Existing approaches for transferring supervision across languages require expensive cross-lingual resources, such as parallel corpora, while less expensive cross-lingual representation learning approaches train classifiers without target labeled documents. In this work, we propose a cross-lingual teacher-student method, CLTS, that generates “weak” supervision in the target language using minimal cross-lingual resources, in the form of a small number of word translations. Given a limited translation budget, CLTS extracts and transfers only the most important task-specific seed words across languages and initializes a teacher classifier based on the translated seed words. Then, CLTS iteratively trains a more powerful student that also exploits the context of the seed words in unlabeled target documents and outperforms the teacher. CLTS is simple and surprisingly effective in 18 diverse languages: by transferring just 20 seed words, even a bag-of-words logistic regression student outperforms state-of-the-art cross-lingual methods (e.g., based on multilingual BERT). Moreover, CLTS can accommodate any type of student classifier: leveraging a monolingual BERT student leads to further improvements and outperforms even more expensive approaches by up to 12% in accuracy. Finally, CLTS addresses emerging tasks in low-resource languages using just a small number of word translations.
Reference based genome compression

DNA sequencing technology has advanced to a point where storage is becoming the central bottleneck in the acquisition and mining of more data. Large amounts of data are vital for genomics research, and generic compression tools, while viable, cannot offer the same savings as approaches tuned to inherent biological properties. We propose an algorithm to compress a target genome given a known reference genome. The proposed algorithm first generates a mapping from the reference to the target genome, and then compresses this mapping with an entropy coder. As an illustration of the performance: applying our algorithm to James Watson's genome with hg18 as a reference, we are able to reduce the 2991 megabyte (MB) genome down to 6.99 MB, while Gzip compresses it to 834.8 MB.
Anti-anthropic solutions to the cosmic coincidence problem

A cosmological constant fits all current dark energy data, but requires two extreme fine tunings, both of which are currently explained by anthropic arguments. Here we discuss anti-anthropic solutions to one of these problems: the cosmic coincidence problem- that today the dark energy density is nearly equal to the matter density. We replace the ensemble of Universes used in the anthropic solution with an ensemble of tracking scalar fields that do not require fine-tuning. This not only does away with the coincidence problem, but also allows for a Universe that has a very different future than the one currently predicted by a cosmological constant. These models also allow for transient periods of significant scalar field energy (SSFE) over the history of the Universe that can give very different observational signatures as compared with a cosmological constant, and so can be confirmed or disproved in current and upcoming experiments.
On monoidal Koszul duality for the Hecke category

espanolProcuramos dar una amable, si bien ahistorica, introduccion a los fenomenos de dualidad de Koszul en la categoria de Hecke, con foco en la forma de esta dualidad estudiada en los trabajos [1, 2] en colaboracion con Achar, Riche y Williamson. Ilustramos algunos fenomenos y construcciones claves en el ejemplo no trivial mas simple, SL2 finito, usando bimodulos de Soergel, un modelo algebraico concreto de la categoria de Hecke. EnglishWe attempt to give a gentle (though ahistorical) introduction to Koszul duality phenomena for the Hecke category, focusing on the form of this duality studied in joint work [1, 2] of Achar, Riche, Williamson, and the author. We illustrate some key phenomena and constructions for the simplest nontrivial case of (finite) SL2 using Soergel bimodules, a concrete algebraic model of the Hecke category.
ASCA Observations of Type 2 Seyfert Galaxies. II. The Importance of X-Ray Scattering and Reflection

We discuss the importance of X-ray scattering and Compton reflection in type 2 Seyfert Galaxies, based upon the analysis of ASCA observations of 25 such sources. Consideration of the iron Kα complex, [O III] line, and X-ray variability suggest that NGC 1068, NGC 4945, NGC 2992, Mrk 3, Mrk 463E, and Mrk 273 are dominated by reprocessed X-rays. We examine the properties of these sources in more detail. We find that the iron Kα complex contains significant contributions from neutral and high-ionization species of iron. Compton reflection, hot gas and starburst emission all appear to make significant contributions to the observed X-ray spectra. Mrk 3 is the only source in this subsample that does not have a significant starburst contamination. The ASCA spectrum below 3 keV is dominated by hot scattering gas with UX ~ 5, NH ~ 4 × 1023 cm-2. This material is more highly ionized than the zone of material comprising the warm absorber seen in Seyfert 1 galaxies, but may contain a contribution from shock-heated gas associated with the jet. Estimates of the X-ray scattering fraction cover 0.02%-5%. The spectrum above 3 keV appears to be dominated by a Compton reflection component, although there is evidence that the primary continuum component becomes visible close to ~10 keV.
USING SPECTRAL RADIUS RATIO FOR NODE DEGREE TO ANALYZE THE EVOLUTION OF SCALE -FREE NETWORKS AND SMALL -WORLD NETWORKS

In this paper, we show the evaluation of the spectral radius for node degree as the basis to analyze the variation in the node degrees during the evolution of scale-free networks and smallworld networks. Spectral radius is the principal eigenvalue of the adjacency matrix of a network graph and spectral radius ratio for node degree is the ratio of the spectral radius and the average node degree. We observe a very high positive correlation between the spectral radius ratio for node degree and the coefficient of variation of node degree (ratio of the standard deviation of node degree and average node degree). We show how the spectral radius ratio for node degree can be used as the basis to tune the operating parameters of the evolution models for scale-free networks and small-world networks as well as evaluate the impact of the number of links added per node introduced during the evolution of a scale-free network and evaluate the impact of the probability of rewiring during the evolution of a small-world network from a regular network.
SOFIA/FORCAST IMAGING OF THE CIRCUMNUCLEAR RING AT THE GALACTIC CENTER

We present 19.7, 31.5, and 37.1 μm images of the inner 6 pc of the Galactic center of the Milky Way with a spatial resolution of 3.''2-4.''6 taken by the Faint Object Infrared Camera on the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy. The images reveal in detail the clumpy structure of the circumnuclear ring (CNR)—the inner edge of the molecular torus orbiting the supermassive black hole at the Galactic center—and the prominent streamers of hot, ionized gas and dust within the CNR that compose the H II region Sgr A West. The CNR exhibits features of a classic H II region: the dust emission at 19.7 μm closely traces the ionized gas emission observed in the radio while the 31.5 and 37.1 μm emission traces the photo-dissociation region beyond the ionized gas. The 19.7/37.1 color temperature map reveals a radial temperature gradient across the CNR with temperatures ranging from 65 to 85 K, consistent with the prevailing paradigm in which the dust is centrally heated by the inner cluster of hot, young stars. We model the 37.1 μm intensity of the CNR as an inclined (θ i = 67°) ring with a thickness and radius of 0.34 pc and 1.4 pc, respectively, and find that it is consistent with the observed 37.1 μm map of the CNR. The 37.1 μm optical depth map also reveals the clumpy dust distribution of the CNR and implies a total gas mass of ~610 M ☉. Dense (5-9 × 104 cm–3) clumps with an FWHM of ~0.15 pc exist along the inner edge of the CNR and shadow the material deeper into the ring. We find that the clumps are unlikely to be long-lived structures since they are not dense enough to be stable against tidal shear from the supermassive black hole and will be sheared out on a timescale of an orbital period (~105 yr).
Road Grade Estimation Using Crowd-Sourced Smartphone Data

Estimates of road grade/slope can add another dimension of information to existing 2D digital road maps. Integration of road grade information will widen the scope of digital map’s applications, which is primarily used for navigation, by enabling driving safety and efficiency applications such as Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), eco-driving, etc. The huge scale and dynamic nature of road networks make sensing road grade a challenging task. Traditional methods oftentimes suffer from limited scalability and update frequency, as well as poor sensing accuracy. To overcome these problems, we propose a cost-effective and scalable road grade estimation framework using sensor data from smartphones. Based on our understanding of the error characteristics of smartphone sensors, we intelligently combine data from accelerometer, gyroscope and vehicle speed data from OBD-II/smartphone’s GPS to estimate road grade. To improve accuracy and robustness of the system, the estimations of road grade from multiple sources/vehicles are crowd-sourced to compensate for the effects of varying quality of sensor data from different sources. Extensive experimental evaluation on a test route of 9km demonstrates the superior performance of our proposed method, achieving 5× improvement on road grade estimation accuracy over baselines, with 90% of errors below 0.3°.
Solar and Planetary Oscillation Control on Climate Change: Hind-Cast, Forecast and a Comparison with the Cmip5 Gcms:

Global surface temperature records (e.g. HadCRUT4) since 1850 are characterized by climatic oscillations synchronous with specific solar, planetary and lunar harmonics superimposed on a background warming modulation. The latter is related to a long millennial solar oscillation and to changes in the chemical composition of the atmosphere (e.g. aerosol and greenhouse gases). However, current general circulation climate models, e.g. the CMIP5 GCMs, to be used in the AR5 IPCC Report in 2013, fail to reconstruct the observed climatic oscillations. As an alternate, an empirical model is proposed that uses: (1) a specific set of decadal, multidecadal, secular and millennial astronomic harmonics to simulate the observed climatic oscillations; (2) a 0.45 attenuation of the GCM ensemble mean simulations to model the anthropogenic and volcano forcing effects. The proposed empirical model outperforms the GCMs by better hind-casting the observed 1850-2012 climatic patterns. It is found that: (1) about 50-60% of the wa...
Unlocking CO Depletion in Protoplanetary Disks. II. Primordial C/H Predictions inside the CO Snowline

NSF [AST-1514670]; NASA [NNX16AB48G, NAS5-26555]; NASA through Hubble Fellowship Program - Space Telescope Science Institute [HST-HF2-51419.001, HST-HF2-51401.001]
WEAK LIMITS FOR QUANTUM WALKS ON THE HALF-LINE

For a discrete two-state quantum walk (QW) on the half-line with a general condition at the boundary, we formulate and prove a weak limit theorem describing the terminal behavior of its transition probabilities. In this context, localization is possible even for a walk predicated on the assumption of homogeneity. For the Hadamard walk on the half-line, the weak limit is shown to be independent of the initial coin state and to exhibit no localization.
The Effects of Dark Matter Annihilation on Cosmic Reionization

We revisit the possibility of constraining the properties of dark matter (DM) by studying the epoch of cosmic reionization. Previous studies have shown that DM annihilation was unlikely to have provided a large fraction of the photons that ionized the universe, but instead played a subdominant role relative to stars and quasars. The DM, however, begins to efficiently annihilate with the formation of primordial microhalos at z 100- 200, much earlier than the formation of the first stars. Therefore, if DM annihilation ionized the universe at even the percent level over the interval z 20- 100, it can leave a significant imprint on the global optical depth, . Moreover, we show that cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization data and future 21 cm measurements will enable us to more directly probe the DM contribution to the optical depth. In order to compute the annihilation rate throughout the epoch of reionization, we adopt the latest results from structure formation studies and explore the impact of various free parameters on our results. We show that future measurements could make it possible to place constraints on the dark matter’s annihilation cross section that are at a level comparable to those obtained from the observations of dwarf galaxies, cosmic ray measurements, and studies of recombination. Subject headings: cosmology, reionization, intergalactic medium; FERMILAB-PUB-15-510-A
Efficient bidirectional piezo-optomechanical transduction between microwave and optical frequency.

Efficient interconversion of both classical and quantum information between microwave and optical frequency is an important engineering challenge. The optomechanical approach with gigahertz-frequency mechanical devices has the potential to be extremely efficient due to the large optomechanical response of common materials, and the ability to localize mechanical energy into a micron-scale volume. However, existing demonstrations suffer from some combination of low optical quality factor, low electrical-to-mechanical transduction efficiency, and low optomechanical interaction rate. Here we demonstrate an on-chip piezo-optomechanical transducer that systematically addresses all these challenges to achieve nearly three orders of magnitude improvement in conversion efficiency over previous work. Our modulator demonstrates acousto-optic modulation with $${V}_{\pi }$$ = 0.02 V. We show bidirectional conversion efficiency of $$1{0}^{-5}$$ with 3.3 μW red-detuned optical pump, and $$5.5 \%$$ with 323 μW blue-detuned pump. Further study of quantum transduction at millikelvin temperatures is required to understand how the efficiency and added noise are affected by reduced mechanical dissipation, thermal conductivity, and thermal capacity. Current optomechanical implementations of microwave and optical frequency interconversion are lacking in efficiency and interaction strength. The authors design and demonstrate an on-chip piezo-optomechanical solution which overcomes several technical barriers to reach several orders of magnitude improvement in efficiency.
X-ray photon detection using superconducting resonators in thermal quasi-equilibrium

Superconducting resonators have to date been used for photon detection in a non-equilibrium manner. In this paper, we demonstrate that such devices can also be used in a thermal quasi-equilibrium manner to detect x-ray photons. We have used a resonator to measure the temperature rise induced by an x-ray photon absorbed in normal metal and superconducting absorbers on continuous and perforated silicon nitride membranes. We observed two distinct pulses with vastly different decay times. We attribute the shorter pulses to non-equilibrium quasiparticle relaxation and the longer pulses to a thermal relaxation process. In addition, we have measured the temperature dependence of the x-ray induced temperature rise and decay times. Finally, we have measured the resonator sensitivity and energy resolution.
Hypoelliptic heat kernels on infinite-dimensional Heisenberg groups

We study the law of a hypoelliptic Brownian motion on an infinite-dimensional Heisenberg group based on an abstract Wiener space. We show that the endpoint distribution, which can be seen as a heat kernel measure, is absolutely continuous with respect to a certain product of Gaussian and Lebesgue measures, that the heat kernel is quasi-invariant under translation by the Cameron-Martin subgroup, and that the Radon-Nikodym derivative is Malliavin smooth.
Turbulent-diffusion Mediated CO Depletion in Weakly Turbulent Protoplanetary Disks

Volatiles, especially CO, are important gas tracers of protoplanetary disks (PPDs). Freeze-out and sublimation processes determine their division between gas and solid phases, which affects both which disk regions can be traced by which volatiles, and the formation and composition of planets. Recently, multiple lines of evidence suggest that CO is substantially depleted from the gas in the outer regions of PPDs. In this letter, we show that the gas dynamics in the outer PPDs facilitates volatile depletion through a mechanism which we term "runaway freeze-out". Using a simple 1D model that incorporates dust settling, turbulent diffusion of dust and volatiles, as well as volatile freeze-out/sublimation processes, we show that as long as turbulence in the cold midplane is sufficiently weak to allow majority of the small grains to settle, CO in the warm surface layer can be turbulently mixed into the midplane region and depleted by freeze-out. The level of depletion sensitively depends on the level of disk turbulence. Based on recent disk simulations that suggest a layered turbulence profile with very weak midplane turbulence and strong turbulence at disk surface, CO and other volatiles can be efficiently depleted by a factor of a few over Myr timescales.
Black hole one-loop determinants in the large dimension limit

We calculate the contributions to the one-loop determinant for transverse traceless gravitons in an n + 3-dimensional Schwarzschild black hole background in the large dimension limit, due to the SO(n + 2)-type tensor and vector fluctuations, using the quasinormal mode method. Accordingly we find the quasinormal modes for these fluctuations as a function of a fiducial mass parameter ∆. We show that the behavior of the one-loop determinant at large ∆ accords with a heat kernel curvature expansion in one lower dimension, lending further evidence towards a membrane picture for black holes in the large dimension limit.
Higgs bundles and exceptional isogenies

We explore relations between Higgs bundles that result from isogenies between low-dimensional Lie groups, with special attention to the spectral data for the Higgs bundles. We focus on isogenies onto \(\mathrm {SO}(4,\mathbb {C})\) and \(\mathrm {SO}(6,\mathbb {C})\) and their split real forms. Using fiber products of spectral curves, we obtain directly the desingularizations of the (necessarily singular) spectral curves associated with orthogonal Higgs bundles. In the case of \(\mathrm {SO}(6,\mathbb {C})\), our construction can be interpreted as a new description of Recillas’ trigonal construction.
DeepIST: Deep Image-based Spatio-Temporal Network for Travel Time Estimation

Estimating the travel time for a given path is a fundamental problem in many urban transportation systems. However, prior works fail to well capture moving behaviors embedded in paths and thus do not estimate the travel time accurately. To fill in this gap, in this work, we propose a novel neural network framework, namely Deep Image-based Spatio-Temporal network (DeepIST), for travel time estimation of a given path. The novelty of DeepIST lies in the following aspects:1) we propose to plot a path as a sequence of -generalized images"which include sub-paths along with additional information, such as traffic conditions, road network and traffic signals, in order to harness the power of convolutional neural network model (CNN)on image processing; 2) we design a novel two-dimensional CNN, namely PathCNN, to extract spatial patterns for lines in images by regularization and adopting multiple pooling methods; and 3) we apply a one-dimensional CNN to capture temporal patterns among the spatial patterns along the paths for the estimation. Empirical results show that DeepIST soundly outperforms the state-of-the-art travel time estimation models by 24.37% to 25.64% of mean absolute error (MAE) in multiple large-scale real-world datasets
Finding the Needle in a Haystack: Detrending Photometric Timeseries Data of Strictly Periodic Astrophysical Objects

Light curves of astrophysical objects frequently contain strictly periodic signals. In those cases we can use that property to aid the detrending algorithm to fully disentangle an unknown periodic signal and an unknown baseline signal with no power at that period. The periodic signal is modeled as a discrete probability distribution function (pdf), while the baseline signal is modeled as a residual timeseries. Those two components are disentangled by minimizing the length of the residual timeseries w.r.t. the per-bin pdf fluxes. We demonstrate the use of the algorithm on a synthetic case, on the eclipsing binary KIC 3953981 and on the eccentric ellipsoidal variable KIC 3547874. We further discuss the parameters and the limitations of the algorithm and speculate on the two most common use cases: detrending the periodic signal of interest and measuring the dependence of instrumental response on controlled instrumental variables. A more sophisticated version of the algorithm is released as open source on github and available via pip.
Non-global logarithms, factorization, and the soft substructure of jets

An outstanding problem in QCD and jet physics is the factorization and resummation of logarithms that arise due to phase space constraints, so-called non-global logarithms (NGLs). In this paper, we show that NGLs can be factorized and resummed down to an unresolved infrared scale by making suciently many measurements on a jet or other restricted phase space region. Resummation is accomplished by renormalization group evolution of the objects in the factorization theorem and anomalous dimensions can be calculated to any perturbative accuracy and with any number of colors. To connect with the NGLs of more inclusive measurements, we present a novel perturbative expansion which is controlled by the volume of the allowed phase space for unresolved emissions. Arbitrary accuracy can be obtained by making more and more measurements so to resolve lower and lower scales. Wend that even a minimal number of measurements produces agreement with Monte Carlo methods for leading-logarithmic resummation of NGLs at the sub-percent level over the full dynamical range relevant for the Large Hadron Collider. We also discuss other applications of our factorization theorem to soft jet dynamics and how to extend to higher-order accuracy.
WikiLingua: A New Benchmark Dataset for Cross-Lingual Abstractive Summarization

We introduce WikiLingua, a large-scale, multilingual dataset for the evaluation of cross-lingual abstractive summarization systems. We extract article and summary pairs in 18 languages from WikiHow, a high quality, collaborative resource of how-to guides on a diverse set of topics written by human authors. We create gold-standard article-summary alignments across languages by aligning the images that are used to describe each how-to step in an article. As a set of baselines for further studies, we evaluate the performance of existing cross-lingual abstractive summarization methods on our dataset. We further propose a method for direct cross-lingual summarization (i.e., without requiring translation at inference time) by leveraging synthetic data and Neural Machine Translation as a pre-training step. Our method significantly outperforms the baseline approaches, while being more cost efficient during inference.