Gravitational Lensing and Anisotropies of CBR on the Small Angular Scales

We investigate the effect of gravitational lensing, produced by linear density perturbations, for anisotropies of the Cosmic Background Radiation (CBR) on scales of arcminutes. In calculations, a flat universe ($\Omega=1$) and the Harrison-Zel'dovich spectrum ($n=1$) are assumed. The numerical results show that on scales of a few arcminutes, gravitational lensing produces only negligible anisotropies in the temperature of the CBR. Our conclusion disagrees with that of Cay\'{o}n {\it et al.} who argue that the amplification of $\Delta T/T$ on scales $\le 3'$ may even be larger than 100\%.Comment: Accepted by MNRAS. 16 pages, 2 figures, tarred, compressed and uuencoded Postscript file

Independence Test for High Dimensional Random Vectors

This paper proposes a new mutual independence test for a large number of high dimensional random vectors. The test statistic is based on the characteristic function of the empirical spectral distribution of the sample covariance matrix. The asymptotic distributions of the test statistic under the null and local alternative hypotheses are established as dimensionality and the sample size of the data are comparable. We apply this test to examine multiple MA(1) and AR(1) models, panel data models with some spatial cross-sectional structures. In addition, in a flexible applied fashion, the proposed test can capture some dependent but uncorrelated structures, for example, nonlinear MA(1) models, multiple ARCH(1) models and vandermonde matrices. Simulation results are provided for detecting these dependent structures. An empirical study of dependence between closed stock prices of several companies from New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) demonstrates that the feature of cross-sectional dependence is popular in stock marketsIndependence test, cross-sectional dependence, empirical spectral distribution, characteristic function, Marcenko-Pastur Law

The Effects of Halo Assembly Bias on Self-Calibration in Galaxy Cluster Surveys

Self-calibration techniques for analyzing galaxy cluster counts utilize the abundance and the clustering amplitude of dark matter halos. These properties simultaneously constrain cosmological parameters and the cluster observable-mass relation. It was recently discovered that the clustering amplitude of halos depends not only on the halo mass, but also on various secondary variables, such as the halo formation time and the concentration; these dependences are collectively termed assembly bias. Applying modified Fisher matrix formalism, we explore whether these secondary variables have a significant impact on the study of dark energy properties using the self-calibration technique in current (SDSS) and the near future (DES, SPT, and LSST) cluster surveys. The impact of the secondary dependence is determined by (1) the scatter in the observable-mass relation and (2) the correlation between observable and secondary variables. We find that for optical surveys, the secondary dependence does not significantly influence an SDSS-like survey; however, it may affect a DES-like survey (given the high scatter currently expected from optical clusters) and an LSST-like survey (even for low scatter values and low correlations). For an SZ survey such as SPT, the impact of secondary dependence is insignificant if the scatter is 20% or lower but can be enhanced by the potential high scatter values introduced by a highly correlated background. Accurate modeling of the assembly bias is necessary for cluster self-calibration in the era of precision cosmology.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figures, replaced to match published versio

From Electrons to Finite Elements: A Concurrent Multiscale Approach for Metals

We present a multiscale modeling approach that concurrently couples quantum mechanical, classical atomistic and continuum mechanics simulations in a unified fashion for metals. This approach is particular useful for systems where chemical interactions in a small region can affect the macroscopic properties of a material. We discuss how the coupling across different scales can be accomplished efficiently, and we apply the method to multiscale simulations of an edge dislocation in aluminum in the absence and presence of H impurities.Comment: 4 page

SOS-convex Semi-algebraic Programs and its Applications to Robust Optimization: A Tractable Class of Nonsmooth Convex Optimization

In this paper, we introduce a new class of nonsmooth convex functions called SOS-convex semialgebraic functions extending the recently proposed notion of SOS-convex polynomials. This class of nonsmooth convex functions covers many common nonsmooth functions arising in the applications such as the Euclidean norm, the maximum eigenvalue function and the least squares functions with $\ell_1$-regularization or elastic net regularization used in statistics and compressed sensing. We show that, under commonly used strict feasibility conditions, the optimal value and an optimal solution of SOS-convex semi-algebraic programs can be found by solving a single semi-definite programming problem (SDP). We achieve the results by using tools from semi-algebraic geometry, convex-concave minimax theorem and a recently established Jensen inequality type result for SOS-convex polynomials. As an application, we outline how the derived results can be applied to show that robust SOS-convex optimization problems under restricted spectrahedron data uncertainty enjoy exact SDP relaxations. This extends the existing exact SDP relaxation result for restricted ellipsoidal data uncertainty and answers the open questions left in [Optimization Letters 9, 1-18(2015)] on how to recover a robust solution from the semi-definite programming relaxation in this broader setting