A Unified Approach to Difference Sets with gcd(\u3ci\u3eV, N\u3c/i\u3e) \u3e 1

The five known families of difference sets whose parameters (v, k, λ; n) satisfy the condition gcd(v,n) \u3e 1 are the McFarland, Spence, Davis-Jedwab, Hadamard and Chen families. We survey recent work which uses recursive techniques to unify these difference set families, placing particular emphasis on examples. This unified approach has also proved useful for studying semi-regular relative difference sets and for constructing new symmetric designs

Universal Indexes for Highly Repetitive Document Collections

Indexing highly repetitive collections has become a relevant problem with the emergence of large repositories of versioned documents, among other applications. These collections may reach huge sizes, but are formed mostly of documents that are near-copies of others. Traditional techniques for indexing these collections fail to properly exploit their regularities in order to reduce space. We introduce new techniques for compressing inverted indexes that exploit this near-copy regularity. They are based on run-length, Lempel-Ziv, or grammar compression of the differential inverted lists, instead of the usual practice of gap-encoding them. We show that, in this highly repetitive setting, our compression methods significantly reduce the space obtained with classical techniques, at the price of moderate slowdowns. Moreover, our best methods are universal, that is, they do not need to know the versioning structure of the collection, nor that a clear versioning structure even exists. We also introduce compressed self-indexes in the comparison. These are designed for general strings (not only natural language texts) and represent the text collection plus the index structure (not an inverted index) in integrated form. We show that these techniques can compress much further, using a small fraction of the space required by our new inverted indexes. Yet, they are orders of magnitude slower.Comment: This research has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sk{\l}odowska-Curie Actions H2020-MSCA-RISE-2015 BIRDS GA No. 69094

Artin's primitive root conjecture -a survey -

This is an expanded version of a write-up of a talk given in the fall of 2000 in Oberwolfach. A large part of it is intended to be understandable by non-number theorists with a mathematical background. The talk covered some of the history, results and ideas connected with Artin's celebrated primitive root conjecture dating from 1927. In the update several new results established after 2000 are also discussed.Comment: 87 pages, 512 references, to appear in Integer

Phase diagram of an extended quantum dimer model on the hexagonal lattice

We introduce a quantum dimer model on the hexagonal lattice that, in addition to the standard three-dimer kinetic and potential terms, includes a competing potential part counting dimer-free hexagons. The zero-temperature phase diagram is studied by means of quantum Monte Carlo simulations, supplemented by variational arguments. It reveals some new crystalline phases and a cascade of transitions with rapidly changing flux (tilt in the height language). We analyze perturbatively the vicinity of the Rokhsar-Kivelson point, showing that this model has the microscopic ingredients needed for the "devil's staircase" scenario [E. Fradkin et al., Phys. Rev. B 69, 224415 (2004)], and is therefore expected to produce fractal variations of the ground-state flux.Comment: Published version. 5 pages + 8 (Supplemental Material), 31 references, 10 color figure

Combinatorics of r-Dyck paths, r-Parking functions, and the r-Tamari lattices

This paper's aim is to present recent combinatorial considerations on r-Dyck paths, r-Parking functions, and the r-Tamari lattices. Giving a better understanding of the combinatorics of these objects has become important in view of their (conjectural) role in the description of the graded character of the Sn-modules of bivariate and trivariate diagonal coinvariant spaces for the symmetric group.Comment: 36 pages, 12 figure