Participatory plant breeding in Denmark

Plant breeding gets more and more concentrated on a couple of multinational companies, and financing plant breeding via the traditional royalty founded certification system exclusive for the specific needs in organic farming is not profitable in most field crops. The seed certification system only allows pure line varieties, and the royalty funded breeding system tend to focus on monogenic resistance with s short durability on the marked. To develop new plant genetic material for organic farmers with durable stability and resistance, the Danish Organic Farmers Association has initiated a participatory plant breeding program with the aim to develop varieties and diverse populations for the organic farmers. The project is based within the advisory service in the organisation in cooperation with plant breeding research projects. In this way, it is the hope to overcome the economic and legal barrier for implementation of crop diversity and targeted selection for the different needs in the diverse organic sector

Four results on phi^4 oscillons in D+1 dimensions

We present four results for oscillons in classical phi^4 theory in D+1 space-time dimensions, based on numerical simulations. These include the oscillon lifetime and the dependence on D; evidence for the uniqueness of the oscillon; evidence for the existence of oscillons beyond D=7; and a brief study of the spectrum of the radiation emitted from the oscillons before, during and after its ultimate demise.Comment: 12 pages, 16 figure

Distributed Robustness Analysis of Interconnected Uncertain Systems Using Chordal Decomposition

Large-scale interconnected uncertain systems commonly have large state and uncertainty dimensions. Aside from the heavy computational cost of solving centralized robust stability analysis techniques, privacy requirements in the network can also introduce further issues. In this paper, we utilize IQC analysis for analyzing large-scale interconnected uncertain systems and we evade these issues by describing a decomposition scheme that is based on the interconnection structure of the system. This scheme is based on the so-called chordal decomposition and does not add any conservativeness to the analysis approach. The decomposed problem can be solved using distributed computational algorithms without the need for a centralized computational unit. We further discuss the merits of the proposed analysis approach using a numerical experiment.Comment: 3 figures. Submitted to the 19th IFAC world congres

Distributed Robust Stability Analysis of Interconnected Uncertain Systems

This paper considers robust stability analysis of a large network of interconnected uncertain systems. To avoid analyzing the entire network as a single large, lumped system, we model the network interconnections with integral quadratic constraints. This approach yields a sparse linear matrix inequality which can be decomposed into a set of smaller, coupled linear matrix inequalities. This allows us to solve the analysis problem efficiently and in a distributed manner. We also show that the decomposed problem is equivalent to the original robustness analysis problem, and hence our method does not introduce additional conservativeness.Comment: This paper has been accepted for presentation at the 51st IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, Maui, Hawaii, 201

Robust Stability Analysis of Sparsely Interconnected Uncertain Systems

In this paper, we consider robust stability analysis of large-scale sparsely interconnected uncertain systems. By modeling the interconnections among the subsystems with integral quadratic constraints, we show that robust stability analysis of such systems can be performed by solving a set of sparse linear matrix inequalities. We also show that a sparse formulation of the analysis problem is equivalent to the classical formulation of the robustness analysis problem and hence does not introduce any additional conservativeness. The sparse formulation of the analysis problem allows us to apply methods that rely on efficient sparse factorization techniques, and our numerical results illustrate the effectiveness of this approach compared to methods that are based on the standard formulation of the analysis problem.Comment: Provisionally accepted to appear in IEEE Transactions on Automatic Contro

Surface tension and the origin of the circular hydraulic jump in a thin liquid film

It was recently claimed by Bhagat et al. (J. Fluid Mech. vol. 851 (2018), R5) that the scientific literature on the circular hydraulic jump in a thin liquid film is flawed by improper treatment and severe underestimation of the influence of surface tension. Bhagat {\em et al.} use an energy equation with a new surface energy term that is introduced without reference, and they conclude that the location of the hydraulic jump is determined by surface tension alone. We show that this approach is incorrect and derive a corrected energy equation. Proper treatment of surface tension in thin film flows is of general interest beyond hydraulic jumps, and we show that the effect of surface tension is fully contained in the Laplace pressure due to the curvature of the surface. Following the same approach as Bhagat et al., i.e., keeping only the first derivative of the surface velocity, the influence of surface tension is, for thin films, much smaller than claimed by them. We further describe the influence of viscosity in thin film flows, and we conclude by discussing the distinction between time-dependent and stationary hydraulic jumps.Comment: 9 pages, 1 figur

Distributed Interior-point Method for Loosely Coupled Problems

In this paper, we put forth distributed algorithms for solving loosely coupled unconstrained and constrained optimization problems. Such problems are usually solved using algorithms that are based on a combination of decomposition and first order methods. These algorithms are commonly very slow and require many iterations to converge. In order to alleviate this issue, we propose algorithms that combine the Newton and interior-point methods with proximal splitting methods for solving such problems. Particularly, the algorithm for solving unconstrained loosely coupled problems, is based on Newton's method and utilizes proximal splitting to distribute the computations for calculating the Newton step at each iteration. A combination of this algorithm and the interior-point method is then used to introduce a distributed algorithm for solving constrained loosely coupled problems. We also provide guidelines on how to implement the proposed methods efficiently and briefly discuss the properties of the resulting solutions.Comment: Submitted to the 19th IFAC World Congress 201

Inverse magnetic catalysis and regularization in the quark-meson model

Motivated by recent work on inverse magnetic catalysis at finite temperature, we study the quark-meson model using both dimensional regularization and a sharp cutoff. We calculate the critical temperature for the chiral transition as a function of the Yukawa coupling in the mean-field approximation varying the renormalization scale and the value of the ultraviolet cutoff. We show that the results depend sensitively on how one treats the fermionic vacuum fluctuations in the model and in particular on the regulator used. Finally, we explore a $B$-dependent transition temperature for the Polyakov loop potential $T_0(B)$ using the functional renormalization group. These results show that even arbitrary freedom in the function $T_0(B)$ does not allow for a decreasing chiral transition temperature as a function of $B$. This is in agreement with previous mean-field calculations.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figure