Galaxy Modeling with Compound Elliptical Shapelets

Gauss-Hermite and Gauss-Laguerre ("shapelet") decompositions of images have become important tools in galaxy modeling, particularly for the purpose of extracting ellipticity and morphological information from astronomical data. However, the standard shapelet basis functions cannot compactly represent galaxies with high ellipticity or large Sersic index, and the resulting underfitting bias has been shown to present a serious challenge for weak-lensing methods based on shapelets. We present here a new convolution relation and a compound "multi-scale" shapelet basis to address these problems, and provide a proof-of-concept demonstration using a small sample of nearby galaxies.Comment: 14 pages, 7 figure

Parabolic stable surfaces with constant mean curvature

We prove that if u is a bounded smooth function in the kernel of a nonnegative Schrodinger operator $-L=-(\Delta +q)$ on a parabolic Riemannian manifold M, then u is either identically zero or it has no zeros on M, and the linear space of such functions is 1-dimensional. We obtain consequences for orientable, complete stable surfaces with constant mean curvature $H\in\mathbb{R}$ in homogeneous spaces $\mathbb{E}(\kappa,\tau)$ with four dimensional isometry group. For instance, if M is an orientable, parabolic, complete immersed surface with constant mean curvature H in $\mathbb{H}^2\times\mathbb{R}$, then $|H|\leq 1/2$ and if equality holds, then M is either an entire graph or a vertical horocylinder.Comment: 15 pages, 1 figure. Minor changes have been incorporated (exchange finite capacity by parabolicity, and simplify the proof of Theorem 1)

Chiral perturbation theory

The main elements and methods of chiral perturbation theory, the effective field theory of the Standard Model below the scale of spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking, are summarized. Applications to the interactions of mesons and baryons at low energies are reviewed, with special emphasis on developments of the last three years. Among the topics covered are the strong, electromagnetic and semileptonic weak interactions of mesons at and beyond next--to--leading order in the chiral expansion, nonleptonic weak interactions of mesons, virtual photon corrections and the meson--baryon system. The discussion is limited to processes at zero temperature, for infinite volume and with at most one baryon.Comment: 84 pages, Latex, 11 PostScript figures (in separate file) embedded with epsfig.sty, complete ps file (compressed, uuencoded, 0.6 MB) available via email on request; to appear in Progr. Part. Nucl. Phys., vol. 3

Feller semigroups, Lp-sub-Markovian semigroups, and applications to pseudo-differential operators with negative definite symbols

The question of extending L-p-sub-Markovian semigroups to the spaces L-q, q > P, and the interpolation of LP-sub-Markovian semigroups with Feller semigroups is investigated. The structure of generators of L-p-sub-Markovian semigroups is studied. Subordination in the sense of Bochner is used to discuss the construction of refinements of L-p-sub-Markovian semigroups. The role played by some function spaces which are domains of definition for L-p-generators is pointed out. The problem of regularising powers of generators as well as some perturbation results are discussed

On non-local ergodic Jacobi semigroups: spectral theory, convergence-to-equilibrium and contractivity

In this paper, we introduce and study non-local Jacobi operators, which generalize the classical (local) Jacobi operators. We show that these operators extend to generators of ergodic Markov semigroups with unique invariant probability measures and study their spectral and convergence properties. In particular, we derive a series expansion of the semigroup in terms of explicitly defined polynomials, which generalize the classical Jacobi orthogonal polynomials. In addition, we give a complete characterization of the spectrum of the non-self-adjoint generator and semigroup. We show that the variance decay of the semigroup is hypocoercive with explicit constants, which provides a natural generalization of the spectral gap estimate. After a random warm-up time, the semigroup also decays exponentially in entropy and is both hypercontractive and ultracontractive. Our proofs hinge on the development of commutation identities, known as intertwining relations, between local and non-local Jacobi operators and semigroups, with the local objects serving as reference points for transferring properties from the local to the non-local case

Universal Constraints on the Location of Extrema of Eigenfunctions of Non-Local Schr\"odinger Operators

We derive a lower bound on the location of global extrema of eigenfunctions for a large class of non-local Schr\"odinger operators in convex domains under Dirichlet exterior conditions, featuring the symbol of the kinetic term, the strength of the potential, and the corresponding eigenvalue, and involving a new universal constant. We show a number of probabilistic and spectral geometric implications, and derive a Faber-Krahn type inequality for non-local operators. Our study also extends to potentials with compact support, and we establish bounds on the location of extrema relative to the boundary edge of the support or level sets around minima of the potential.Comment: 30 pages, To appear in Jour. Diff. Equation, 201