Quasi-Periodicity Under Mismatch Errors

Tracing regularities plays a key role in data analysis for various areas of science, including coding and automata theory, formal language theory, combinatorics, molecular biology and many others. Part of the scientific process is understanding and explaining these regularities. A common notion to describe regularity in a string T is a cover or quasi-period, which is a string C for which every letter of T lies within some occurrence of C. In many applications finding exact repetitions is not sufficient, due to the presence of errors. In this paper we initiate the study of quasi-periodicity persistence under mismatch errors, and our goal is to characterize situations where a given quasi-periodic string remains quasi-periodic even after substitution errors have been introduced to the string. Our study results in proving necessary conditions as well as a theorem stating sufficient conditions for quasi-periodicity persistence. As an application, we are able to close the gap in understanding the complexity of Approximate Cover Problem (ACP) relaxations studied by [Amir 2017a, Amir 2017b] and solve an open question

A new integral representation for quasiperiodic fields and its application to two-dimensional band structure calculations

In this paper, we consider band-structure calculations governed by the Helmholtz or Maxwell equations in piecewise homogeneous periodic materials. Methods based on boundary integral equations are natural in this context, since they discretize the interface alone and can achieve high order accuracy in complicated geometries. In order to handle the quasi-periodic conditions which are imposed on the unit cell, the free-space Green's function is typically replaced by its quasi-periodic cousin. Unfortunately, the quasi-periodic Green's function diverges for families of parameter values that correspond to resonances of the empty unit cell. Here, we bypass this problem by means of a new integral representation that relies on the free-space Green's function alone, adding auxiliary layer potentials on the boundary of the unit cell itself. An important aspect of our method is that by carefully including a few neighboring images, the densities may be kept smooth and convergence rapid. This framework results in an integral equation of the second kind, avoids spurious resonances, and achieves spectral accuracy. Because of our image structure, inclusions which intersect the unit cell walls may be handled easily and automatically. Our approach is compatible with fast-multipole acceleration, generalizes easily to three dimensions, and avoids the complication of divergent lattice sums.Comment: 25 pages, 6 figures, submitted to J. Comput. Phy

On the evaluation of quasi-periodic Green functions and wave-scattering at and around Rayleigh-Wood anomalies

This article presents full-spectrum, well-conditioned, Green-function methodologies for evaluation of scattering by general periodic structures, which remains applicable on a set of challenging singular configurations, usually called Rayleigh-Wood (RW) anomalies (at which the quasi-periodic Green function ceases to exist), where most existing quasi-periodic solvers break down. After reviewing a variety of existing fast-converging numerical procedures commonly used to compute the classical quasi-periodic Green-function, the present work explores the difficulties they present around RW-anomalies and introduces the concept of hybrid “spatial/spectral” representations. Such expressions allow both the modification of existing methods to obtain convergence at RW-anomalies as well as the application of a slight generalization of the Woodbury-Sherman-Morrison formulae together with a limiting procedure to bypass the singularities. (Although, for definiteness, the overall approach is applied to the scalar (acoustic) wave-scattering problem in the frequency domain, the approach can be extended in a straightforward manner to the harmonic Maxwell's and elasticity equations.) Ultimately, this thorough study of RW-anomalies yields fast and highly-accurate solvers, which are demonstrated with a variety of simulations of wave-scattering phenomena by arrays of particles, crossed impenetrable and penetrable diffraction gratings and other related structures. In particular, the methods developed in this article can be used to “upgrade” classical approaches, resulting in algorithms that are applicable throughout the spectrum, and it provides new methods for cases where previous approaches are either costly or fail altogether. In particular, it is suggested that the proposed shifted Green function approach may provide the only viable alternative for treatment of three-dimensional high-frequency configurations with either one or two directions of periodicity. A variety of computational examples are presented which demonstrate the flexibility of the overall approach

Simulation and experimental verification of W-band finite frequency selective surfaces on infinite background with 3D full wave solver NSPWMLFMA

We present the design, processing and testing of a W-band finite by infinite and a finite by finite Grounded Frequency Selective Surfaces (FSSs) on infinite background. The 3D full wave solver Nondirective Stable Plane Wave Multilevel Fast Multipole Algorithm (NSPWMLFMA) is used to simulate the FSSs. As NSPWMLFMA solver improves the complexity matrix-vector product in an iterative solver from O(N(2)) to O(N log N) which enables the solver to simulate finite arrays with faster execution time and manageable memory requirements. The simulation results were verified by comparing them with the experimental results. The comparisons demonstrate the accuracy of the NSPWMLFMA solver. We fabricated the corresponding FSS arrays on quartz substrate with photolithographic etching techniques and characterized the vector S-parameters with a free space Millimeter Wave Vector Network Analyzer (MVNA)

Can We Recover the Cover?

Data analysis typically involves error recovery and detection of regularities as two different key tasks. In this paper we show that there are data types for which these two tasks can be powerfully combined. A common notion of regularity in strings is that of a cover. Data describing measures of a natural coverable phenomenon may be corrupted by errors caused by the measurement process, or by the inexact features of the phenomenon itself. Due to this reason, different variants of approximate covers have been introduced, some of which are NP-hard to compute. In this paper we assume that the Hamming distance metric measures the amount of corruption experienced, and study the problem of recovering the correct cover from data corrupted by mismatch errors, formally defined as the cover recovery problem (CRP). We show that for the Hamming distance metric, coverability is a powerful property allowing detecting the original cover and correcting the data, under suitable conditions. We also study a relaxation of another problem, which is called the approximate cover problem (ACP). Since the ACP is proved to be NP-hard [Amir,Levy,Lubin,Porat, CPM 2017], we study a relaxation, which we call the candidate-relaxation of the ACP, and show it has a polynomial time complexity. As a result, we get that the ACP also has a polynomial time complexity in many practical situations. An important application of our ACP relaxation study is also a polynomial time algorithm for the cover recovery problem (CRP)

Reconstructing Detailed Line Profiles of Lamellar Gratings from GISAXS Patterns with a Maxwell Solver

Laterally periodic nanostructures were investigated with grazing incidence small angle X-ray scattering (GISAXS) by using the diffraction patterns to reconstruct the surface shape. To model visible light scattering, rigorous calculations of the near and far field by numerically solving Maxwell's equations with a finite-element method are well established. The application of this technique to X-rays is still challenging, due to the discrepancy between incident wavelength and finite-element size. This drawback vanishes for GISAXS due to the small angles of incidence, the conical scattering geometry and the periodicity of the surface structures, which allows a rigorous computation of the diffraction efficiencies with sufficient numerical precision. To develop dimensional metrology tools based on GISAXS, lamellar gratings with line widths down to 55 nm were produced by state-of-the-art e-beam lithography and then etched into silicon. The high surface sensitivity of GISAXS in conjunction with a Maxwell solver allows a detailed reconstruction of the grating line shape also for thick, non-homogeneous substrates. The reconstructed geometrical line shape models are statistically validated by applying a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampling technique which reveals that GISAXS is able to reconstruct critical parameters like the widths of the lines with sub-nm uncertainty

Approximate Cover of Strings

Regularities in strings arise in various areas of science, including coding and automata theory, formal language theory, combinatorics, molecular biology and many others. A common notion to describe regularity in a string T is a cover, which is a string C for which every letter of T lies within some occurrence of C. The alignment of the cover repetitions in the given text is called a tiling. In many applications finding exact repetitions is not sufficient, due to the presence of errors. In this paper, we use a new approach for handling errors in coverable phenomena and define the approximate cover problem (ACP), in which we are given a text that is a sequence of some cover repetitions with possible mismatch errors, and we seek a string that covers the text with the minimum number of errors. We first show that the ACP is NP-hard, by studying the cover-size relaxation of the ACP, in which the requested size of the approximate cover is also given with the input string. We show this relaxation is already NP-hard. We also study another two relaxations of the ACP, which we call the partial-tiling relaxation of the ACP and the full-tiling relaxation of the ACP, in which a tiling of the requested cover is also given with the input string. A given full tiling retains all the occurrences of the cover before the errors, while in a partial tiling there can be additional occurrences of the cover that are not marked by the tiling. We show that the partial-tiling relaxation has a polynomial time complexity and give experimental evidence that the full-tiling also has polynomial time complexity. The study of these relaxations, besides shedding another light on the complexity of the ACP, also involves a deep understanding of the properties of covers, yielding some key lemmas and observations that may be helpful for a future study of regularities in the presence of errors

Multiscale Finite Element Methods for Nonlinear Problems and their Applications

In this paper we propose a generalization of multiscale finite element methods (Ms-FEM) to nonlinear problems. We study the convergence of the proposed method for nonlinear elliptic equations and propose an oversampling technique. Numerical examples demonstrate that the over-sampling technique greatly reduces the error. The application of MsFEM to porous media flows is considered. Finally, we describe further generalizations of MsFEM to nonlinear time-dependent equations and discuss the convergence of the method for various kinds of heterogeneities