3,019 research outputs found
Age-at-death estimation in archaeological samples: Differences in population means resulting from different aging methods can be predicted from the mean ages of method-specific reference samples
Age mimicry is a well-known phenomenon in the application of osteological age-estimation methods. Age mimicry refers to the fact that predicting age-at-death from a specific trait (age indicator) based on the relation observed in a specific reference sample implies that age estimates to some degree reflect the age structure of the reference sample. In particular, the estimated population mean in a target population in which an age-estimation method is applied is shifted towards the mean in the method-specific reference sample. Consequently, differences in population means between different age-estimation methods in the same target population may be due to differences in mean age of the reference samples used to develop the age-estimation methods. We aim at quantifying the expected magnitude for such differences. Fifteen different traditional age-estimation methods were applied to a sample of 675 adult individuals from the early medieval cemetery of Mannheim-Seckenheim. The relation of the observed estimated population age means and the mean age in the reference samples was analyzed by linear regression. We find that up to 80% of the variation in the estimated population age means can be explained by the variation of the mean age in the reference samples. Furthermore, differences in the magnitude of 3 to 4 years in the mean age between two reference samples can imply a 1-year difference in estimated target population age means. Because large differences in mean age between reference samples used to develop different age-estimation methods are common, some care is needed in interpreting differences between individual age estimates or population mean age estimates in cases where different age-estimation techniques are used
Correlation functions of scattering matrix elements in microwave cavities with strong absorption
The scattering matrix was measured for microwave cavities with two antennas.
It was analyzed in the regime of overlapping resonances. The theoretical
description in terms of a statistical scattering matrix and the rescaled
Breit-Wigner approximation has been applied to this regime. The experimental
results for the auto-correlation function show that the absorption in the
cavity walls yields an exponential decay. This behavior can only be modeled
using a large number of weakly coupled channels. In comparison to the
auto-correlation functions, the cross-correlation functions of the diagonal
S-matrix elements display a more pronounced difference between regular and
chaotic systems
Scanning Fourier Spectroscopy: A microwave analog study to image transmission paths in quantum dots
We use a microwave cavity to investigate the influence of a movable absorbing
center on the wave function of an open quantum dot. Our study shows that the
absorber acts as a position-selective probe, which may be used to suppress
those wave function states that exhibit an enhancement of their probability
density near the region where the impurity is located. For an experimental
probe of this wave function selection, we develop a technique that we refer to
as scanning Fourier spectroscopy, which allows us to identify, and map out, the
structure of the classical trajectories that are important for transmission
through the cavity.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figure
Review of Results from the NA49 Collaboration
New results of the NA49 collaboration on strange particle production are
presented. Rapidity and transverse mass spectra as well as total multiplicities
are discussed. The study of their evolution from AGS over SPS to the highest
RHIC energy reveals a couple of interesting features. These include a sudden
change in the energy dependence of the mt-spectra and of the yields of strange
hadrons around 30 AGeV. Both are found to be difficult to be reproduced in a
hadronic scenario, but might be an indication for a phase transition to a quark
gluon plasma.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figures. Proceedings of the SQM04 conference, Capetow
The QGP phase in relativistic heavy-ion collisions
The dynamics of partons, hadrons and strings in relativistic nucleus-nucleus
collisions is analyzed within the novel Parton-Hadron-String Dynamics (PHSD)
transport approach, which is based on a dynamical quasiparticle model for
partons (DQPM) matched to reproduce recent lattice-QCD results - including the
partonic equation of state - in thermodynamic equilibrium. The transition from
partonic to hadronic degrees of freedom is described by covariant transition
rates for the fusion of quark-antiquark pairs or three quarks (antiquarks),
respectively, obeying flavor current-conservation, color neutrality as well as
energy-momentum conservation. The PHSD approach is applied to nucleus-nucleus
collisions from low SIS to RHIC energies. The traces of partonic interactions
are found in particular in the elliptic flow of hadrons as well as in their
transverse mass spectra.Comment: To be published by Springer in Proceedings of the International
Symposium on `Exciting Physics', Makutsi-Range, South Africa, 13-20 November,
201
Time-resolved dynamics of electron wave packets in chaotic and regular quantum billiards with leads
We perform numerical studies of the wave packet propagation through open
quantum billiards whose classical counterparts exhibit regular and chaotic
dynamics. We show that for t less or similar to tau (tau being the Heisenberg
time), the features in the transmitted and reflected currents are directly
related to specific classical trajectories connecting the billiard leads. In
contrast, the long-time asymptotics of the wave packet dynamics is
qualitatively different for classical and quantum billiards. In particularly,
the decay of the quantum system obeys a power law that depends on the number of
decay channels, and is not sensitive to the nature of classical dynamics
(chaotic or regular).Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure
Quantum localization and cantori in chaotic billiards
We study the quantum behaviour of the stadium billiard. We discuss how the
interplay between quantum localization and the rich structure of the classical
phase space influences the quantum dynamics. The analysis of this model leads
to new insight in the understanding of quantum properties of classically
chaotic systems.Comment: 4 pages in RevTex with 4 eps figures include
Practical approximation scheme for the pion dynamics in the three-nucleon system
We discuss a working approximation scheme to a recently developed formulation
of the coupled piNNN-NNN problem. The approximation scheme is based on the
physical assumption that, at low energies, the 2N-subsystem dynamics in the
elastic channel is conveniently described by the usual 2N-potential approach,
while the explicit pion dynamics describes small, correction-type effects.
Using the standard separable-expansion method, we obtain a dynamical equation
of the Alt-Grassberger-Sandhas (AGS) type. This is an important result, because
the computational techniques used for solving the normal AGS equation can also
be used to describe the pion dynamics in the 3N system once the matrix
dimension is increased by one component. We have also shown that this
approximation scheme treats the conventional 3N problem once the pion degrees
of freedom are projected out. Then the 3N system is described with an extended
AGS-type equation where the spin-off of the pion dynamics (beyond the 2N
potential) is taken into account in additional contributions to the driving
term. These new terms are shown to reproduce the diagrams leading to modern
3N-force models. We also recover two sets of irreducible diagrams that are
commonly neglected in 3N-force discussions, and conclude that these sets should
be further investigated, because a claimed cancellation is questionable.Comment: 18 pages, including 5 figures, RevTeX, Eps
Chemical-protein relation extraction with ensembles of carefully tuned pretrained language models
The identification of chemical-protein interactions described in the literature is an important task with applications in drug design, precision medicine and biotechnology. Manual extraction of such relationships from the biomedical literature is costly and often prohibitively time-consuming. The BioCreative VII DrugProt shared task provides a benchmark for methods for the automated extraction of chemical-protein relations from scientific text. Here we describe our contribution to the shared task and report on the achieved results. We define the task as a relation classification problem, which we approach with pretrained transformer language models. Upon this basic architecture, we experiment with utilizing textual and embedded side information from knowledge bases as well as additional training data to improve extraction performance. We perform a comprehensive evaluation of the proposed model and the individual extensions including an extensive hyperparameter search leading to 2647 different runs. We find that ensembling and choosing the right pretrained language model are crucial for optimal performance, whereas adding additional data and embedded side information did not improve results. Our best model is based on an ensemble of 10 pretrained transformers and additional textual descriptions of chemicals taken from the Comparative Toxicogenomics Database. The model reaches an F1 score of 79.73% on the hidden DrugProt test set and achieves the first rank out of 107 submitted runs in the official evaluation. Database URL: https://github.com/leonweber/drugprot
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