517 research outputs found
Coherent and incoherent atomic scattering: Formalism and application to pionium interacting with matter
The experimental determination of the lifetime of pionium provides a very
important test on chiral perturbation theory. This quantity is determined in
the DIRAC experiment at CERN. In the analysis of this experiment, the breakup
probabilities of of pionium in matter are needed to high accuracy as a
theoretical input. We study in detail the influence of the target electrons.
They contribute through screening and incoherent effects. We use Dirac-Hartree-
Fock-Slater wavefunctions in order to determine the corresponding form factors.
We find that the inner-shell electrons contribute less than the weakly bound
outer electrons. Furthermore, we establish a more rigorous estimate for the
magnitude of the contributions form the transverse current (magnetic terms thus
far neglected in the calculations).Comment: Journal of Physics B: Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics;
(accepted; 22 pages, 6 figures, 26 references) Revised version: more detailed
description of DIRAC experiment; failure of simplest models for incoherent
scattering demonstrated by example
Positivity in Lorentzian Barrett-Crane Models of Quantum Gravity
The Barrett-Crane models of Lorentzian quantum gravity are a family of spin
foam models based on the Lorentz group. We show that for various choices of
edge and face amplitudes, including the Perez-Rovelli normalization, the
amplitude for every triangulated closed 4-manifold is a non-negative real
number. Roughly speaking, this means that if one sums over triangulations,
there is no interference between the different triangulations. We prove
non-negativity by transforming the model into a ``dual variables'' formulation
in which the amplitude for a given triangulation is expressed as an integral
over three copies of hyperbolic space for each tetrahedron. Then we prove that,
expressed in this way, the integrand is non-negative. In addition to implying
that the amplitude is non-negative, the non-negativity of the integrand is
highly significant from the point of view of numerical computations, as it
allows statistical methods such as the Metropolis algorithm to be used for
efficient computation of expectation values of observables.Comment: 13 page
Fast Evaluation of Feynman Diagrams
We develop a new representation for the integrals associated with Feynman
diagrams. This leads directly to a novel method for the numerical evaluation of
these integrals, which avoids the use of Monte Carlo techniques. Our approach
is based on based on the theory of generalized sinc () functions,
from which we derive an approximation to the propagator that is expressed as an
infinite sum. When the propagators in the Feynman integrals are replaced with
the approximate form all integrals over internal momenta and vertices are
converted into Gaussians, which can be evaluated analytically. Performing the
Gaussians yields a multi-dimensional infinite sum which approximates the
corresponding Feynman integral. The difference between the exact result and
this approximation is set by an adjustable parameter, and can be made
arbitrarily small. We discuss the extraction of regularization independent
quantities and demonstrate, both in theory and practice, that these sums can be
evaluated quickly, even for third or fourth order diagrams. Lastly, we survey
strategies for numerically evaluating the multi-dimensional sums. We illustrate
the method with specific examples, including the the second order sunset
diagram from quartic scalar field theory, and several higher-order diagrams. In
this initial paper we focus upon scalar field theories in Euclidean spacetime,
but expect that this approach can be generalized to fields with spin.Comment: uses feynmp macros; v2 contains improved description of
renormalization, plus other minor change
On the Selection of a Good Shape Parameter for RBF Approximation and Its Application for Solving PDEs
Meshless methods utilizing Radial Basis Functions~(RBFs) are a numerical method that require no mesh connections within the computational domain. They are useful for solving numerous real-world engineering problems. Over the past decades, after the 1970s, several RBFs have been developed and successfully applied to recover unknown functions and to solve Partial Differential Equations (PDEs).However, some RBFs, such as Multiquadratic (MQ), Gaussian (GA), and Matern functions, contain a free variable, the shape parameter, c. Because c exerts a strong influence on the accuracy of numerical solutions, much effort has been devoted to developing methods for determining shape parameters which provide accurate results. Most past strategies, which have utilized a trail-and-error approach or focused on mathematically proven values for c, remain cumbersome and impractical for real-world implementations.This dissertation presents a new method, Residue-Error Cross Validation (RECV), which can be used to select good shape parameters for RBFs in both interpolation and PDE problems. The RECV method maps the original optimization problem of defining a shape parameter into a root-finding problem, thus avoiding the local optimum issue associated with RBF interpolation matrices, which are inherently ill-conditioned.With minimal computational time, the RECV method provides shape parameter values which yield highly accurate interpolations. Additionally, when considering smaller data sets, accuracy and stability can be further increased by using the shape parameter provided by the RECV method as the upper bound of the c interval considered by the LOOCV method. The RECV method can also be combined with an adaptive method, knot insertion, to achieve accuracy up to two orders of magnitude higher than that achieved using Halton uniformly distributed points
Forced motion near black holes
We present two methods for integrating forced geodesic equations in the Kerr spacetime. The methods can accommodate arbitrary forces. As a test case, we compute inspirals caused by a simple drag force, mimicking motion in the presence of gas.We verify that both methods give the same results for this simple force. We find that drag generally causes eccentricity to increase throughout the inspiral. This is a relativistic effect qualitatively opposite to what is seen in gravitational-radiation-driven inspirals, and similar to what others have observed in hydrodynamic simulations of gaseous binaries. We provide an
analytic explanation by deriving the leading order relativistic correction to the Newtonian dynamics. If
observed, an increasing eccentricity would thus provide clear evidence that the inspiral was occurring in a
nonvacuum environment. Our two methods are especially useful for evolving orbits in the adiabatic regime. Both use the method of osculating orbits, in which each point on the orbit is characterized by the parameters of the geodesic with the same instantaneous position and velocity. Both methods describe the orbit in terms of the geodesic energy, axial angular momentum, Carter constant, azimuthal phase, and two angular variables that increase monotonically and are relativistic generalizations of the eccentric anomaly. The two methods differ in their treatment of the orbital phases and the representation of the force. In the first method, the geodesic phase and phase constant are evolved together as a single orbital phase parameter, and the force is expressed in terms of its components on the Kinnersley orthonormal tetrad. In
the second method, the phase constants of the geodesic motion are evolved separately and the force is
expressed in terms of its Boyer-Lindquist components. This second approach is a direct generalization of earlier work by Pound and Poisson [A. Pound and E. Poisson, Phys. Rev. D 77, 044013 (2008).] for planar forces in a Schwarzschild background
Convergence of the Sinc method applied to Volterra integral equations
A collocation procedure is developed for the linear and nonlinear Volterra integral equations, using the globally defined Sinc and auxiliary basis functions. We analytically show the exponential convergence of the Sinc collocation method for approximate solution of Volterra integral equations. Numerical examples are included to confirm applicability and justify rapid convergence of our method
Improvements on "Fast space-variant elliptical filtering using box splines"
It is well-known that box filters can be efficiently computed using
pre-integrations and local finite-differences
[Crow1984,Heckbert1986,Viola2001]. By generalizing this idea and by combining
it with a non-standard variant of the Central Limit Theorem, a constant-time or
O(1) algorithm was proposed in [Chaudhury2010] that allowed one to perform
space-variant filtering using Gaussian-like kernels. The algorithm was based on
the observation that both isotropic and anisotropic Gaussians could be
approximated using certain bivariate splines called box splines. The attractive
feature of the algorithm was that it allowed one to continuously control the
shape and size (covariance) of the filter, and that it had a fixed
computational cost per pixel, irrespective of the size of the filter. The
algorithm, however, offered a limited control on the covariance and accuracy of
the Gaussian approximation. In this work, we propose some improvements by
appropriately modifying the algorithm in [Chaudhury2010].Comment: 7 figure
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