Causality and dispersion relations and the role of the S-matrix in the ongoing research

The adaptation of the Kramers-Kronig dispersion relations to the causal localization structure of QFT led to an important project in particle physics, the only one with a successful closure. The same cannot be said about the subsequent attempts to formulate particle physics as a pure S-matrix project. The feasibility of a pure S-matrix approach are critically analyzed and their serious shortcomings are highlighted. Whereas the conceptual/mathematical demands of renormalized perturbation theory are modest and misunderstandings could easily be corrected, the correct understanding about the origin of the crossing property requires the use of the mathematical theory of modular localization and its relation to the thermal KMS condition. These new concepts, which combine localization, vacuum polarization and thermal properties under the roof of modular theory, will be explained and their potential use in a new constructive (nonperturbative) approach to QFT will be indicated. The S-matrix still plays a predominant role but, different from Heisenberg's and Mandelstam's proposals, the new project is not a pure S-matrix approach. The S-matrix plays a new role as a "relative modular invariant"..Comment: 47 pages expansion of arguments and addition of references, corrections of misprints and bad formulation

Grid-free compressive beamforming

The direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation problem involves the localization of a few sources from a limited number of observations on an array of sensors, thus it can be formulated as a sparse signal reconstruction problem and solved efficiently with compressive sensing (CS) to achieve high-resolution imaging. On a discrete angular grid, the CS reconstruction degrades due to basis mismatch when the DOAs do not coincide with the angular directions on the grid. To overcome this limitation, a continuous formulation of the DOA problem is employed and an optimization procedure is introduced, which promotes sparsity on a continuous optimization variable. The DOA estimation problem with infinitely many unknowns, i.e., source locations and amplitudes, is solved over a few optimization variables with semidefinite programming. The grid-free CS reconstruction provides high-resolution imaging even with non-uniform arrays, single-snapshot data and under noisy conditions as demonstrated on experimental towed array data.Comment: 14 pages, 8 figures, journal pape

A Distributed Asynchronous Method of Multipliers for Constrained Nonconvex Optimization

This paper presents a fully asynchronous and distributed approach for tackling optimization problems in which both the objective function and the constraints may be nonconvex. In the considered network setting each node is active upon triggering of a local timer and has access only to a portion of the objective function and to a subset of the constraints. In the proposed technique, based on the method of multipliers, each node performs, when it wakes up, either a descent step on a local augmented Lagrangian or an ascent step on the local multiplier vector. Nodes realize when to switch from the descent step to the ascent one through an asynchronous distributed logic-AND, which detects when all the nodes have reached a predefined tolerance in the minimization of the augmented Lagrangian. It is shown that the resulting distributed algorithm is equivalent to a block coordinate descent for the minimization of the global augmented Lagrangian. This allows one to extend the properties of the centralized method of multipliers to the considered distributed framework. Two application examples are presented to validate the proposed approach: a distributed source localization problem and the parameter estimation of a neural network.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1803.0648

Holography with Schroedinger Potentials

We examine the analogue one-dimensional quantum mechanics problem associated with bulk scalars and fermions in a slice of AdS_5. The ``Schroedinger'' potential can take on different qualitative shapes depending on the values of the mass parameters in the bulk theory. Several interesting correlations between the shape of the Schroedinger potential and the holographic theory exist. We show that the quantum mechanical picture is a useful guide to the holographic theory by examining applications from phenomenology.Comment: 22 pages, 4 figure

Dual approach to circuit quantization using loop charges

The conventional approach to circuit quantization is based on node fluxes and traces the motion of node charges on the islands of the circuit. However, for some devices, the relevant physics can be best described by the motion of polarization charges over the branches of the circuit that are in general related to the node charges in a highly nonlocal way. Here, we present a method, dual to the conventional approach, for quantizing planar circuits in terms of loop charges. In this way, the polarization charges are directly obtained as the differences of the two loop charges on the neighboring loops. The loop charges trace the motion of fluxes through the circuit loops. We show that loop charges yield a simple description of the flux transport across phase-slip junctions. We outline a concrete construction of circuits based on phase-slip junctions that are electromagnetically dual to arbitrary planar Josephson junction circuits. We argue that loop charges also yield a simple description of the flux transport in conventional Josephson junctions shunted by large impedances. We show that a mixed circuit description in terms of node fluxes and loop charges yields an insight into the flux decompactification of a Josephson junction shunted by an inductor. As an application, we show that the fluxonium qubit is well approximated as a phase-slip junction for the experimentally relevant parameters. Moreover, we argue that the $0$-$\pi$ qubit is effectively the dual of a Majorana Josephson junction.Comment: 20 pages, 11 figures. Version accepted for publication in PRB. Changes: introduction has become less technical and an example for the inclusion of offset charges has been adde