The Causal Boundary of spacetimes revisited

We present a new development of the causal boundary of spacetimes, originally introduced by Geroch, Kronheimer and Penrose. Given a strongly causal spacetime (or, more generally, a chronological set), we reconsider the GKP ideas to construct a family of completions with a chronology and topology extending the original ones. Many of these completions present undesirable features, like those appeared in previous approaches by other authors. However, we show that all these deficiencies are due to the attachment of an ``excessively big'' boundary. In fact, a notion of ``completion with minimal boundary'' is then introduced in our family such that, when we restrict to these minimal completions, which always exist, all previous objections disappear. The optimal character of our construction is illustrated by a number of satisfactory properties and examples.Comment: 37 pages, 10 figures; Definition 6.1 slightly modified; multiple minor changes; one figure added and another replace

Strongly minimal pseudofinite structures

We observe that the nonstandard finite cardinality of a definable set in a strongly minimal pseudofinite structure D is a polynomial over the integers in the nonstandard finite cardinality of D. We conclude that D is unimodular, hence also locally modular. We also deduce a regularity lemma for graphs definable in strongly minimal pseudofinite structures. The paper is elementary, and the only surprising thing about it is that the results were not explicitly noted before. In the new version we add a comment on relations to work of Macpherson and Steinhorn, as well as on the limited nature of the examplesComment: 11 page

Continuous invertibility and stable QML estimation of the EGARCH(1,1) model

We introduce the notion of continuous invertibility on a compact set for volatility models driven by a Stochastic Recurrence Equation (SRE). We prove the strong consistency of the Quasi Maximum Likelihood Estimator (QMLE) when the optimization procedure is done on a continuously invertible domain. This approach gives for the first time the strong consistency of the QMLE used by Nelson in \cite{nelson:1991} for the EGARCH(1,1) model under explicit but non observable conditions. In practice, we propose to stabilize the QMLE by constraining the optimization procedure to an empirical continuously invertible domain. The new method, called Stable QMLE (SQMLE), is strongly consistent when the observations follow an invertible EGARCH(1,1) model. We also give the asymptotic normality of the SQMLE under additional minimal assumptions

Super- and Anti-Principal Modes in Multi-Mode Waveguides

We introduce a new type of states for light in multimode waveguides featuring strongly enhanced or reduced spectral correlations. Based on the experimentally measured multi-spectral transmission matrix of a multimode fiber, we generate a set of states that outperform the established "principal modes" in terms of the spectral stability of their output spatial field profiles. Inverting this concept also allows us to create states with a minimal spectral correlation width, whose output profiles are considerably more sensitive to a frequency change than typical input wavefronts. The resulting "super-" and "anti-principal" modes are made orthogonal to each other even in the presence of mode-dependent loss. By decomposing them in the principal mode basis, we show that the super-principal modes are formed via interference of principal modes with closeby delay times, whereas the anti-principal modes are a superposition of principal modes with the most different delay times available in the fiber. Such novel states are expected to have broad applications in fiber communication, imaging, and spectroscopy.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, plus supplementary materia

A slave mode expansion for obtaining ab-initio interatomic potentials

Here we propose a new approach for performing a Taylor series expansion of the first-principles computed energy of a crystal as a function of the nuclear displacements. We enlarge the dimensionality of the existing displacement space and form new variables (ie. slave modes) which transform like irreducible representations of the space group and satisfy homogeneity of free space. Standard group theoretical techniques can then be applied to deduce the non-zero expansion coefficients a priori. At a given order, the translation group can be used to contract the products and eliminate terms which are not linearly independent, resulting in a final set of slave mode products. While the expansion coefficients can be computed in a variety of ways, we demonstrate that finite difference is effective up to fourth order. We demonstrate the power of the method in the strongly anharmonic system PbTe. All anharmonic terms within an octahedron are computed up to fourth order. A proper unitary transformation demonstrates that the vast majority of the anharmonicity can be attributed to just two terms, indicating that a minimal model of phonon interactions is achievable. The ability to straightforwardly generate polynomial potentials will allow precise simulations at length and time scales which were previously unrealizable