Colour strings vs. hard pomeron in perturbative QCD

Average multiplicities and transverse momenta in AA collisions are studied in the soft and hard regions, in fusing string and perturbative QCD scenarios respectively. Striking similarities are found between the predictions of the two approaches. Multiplicities per string and average p_t^2 are found to, respectively, drop and rise with A in a very similar manner, so that their product is nearly a constant. In both approaches total multiplicities grow as A, that is as the number of participants. The high tail of the p_t distribution is found to behave as A^1.1 in the perturbative QCD scenario.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figure

ptp_t- dependence of the flow coefficients for pp collisions in the color string scenario. Monte-Carlo simulations

In the color string picture with fusion and percolation the dependence of the flow coefficients $v_n$ on the transverse momentum is studied for pp collisions the LHC energy respectively. Monte-Carlo simulations are used to locate simple strings and their fused clusters. The results favorably agree with the CMS data in the region $0.2 \le p_t\le 3.$ GeV/c appropriate for the string scenario.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1407.459

Fusion of strings vs. percolation and the transition to the quark-gluon plasma

In most of the models of hadronic collisions the number of exchanged colour strings grows with energy and atomic numbers of the projectile and target. At high string densities interaction between them should melt them into the quark-gluon plasma state. It is shown that under certain assumptions about the the string interaction, a phase transition to the quark gluon plasma indeed takes place in the system of many colour strings. It may be of the first or second order (percolation), depending on the particular mechanism of the interaction. The critical string density is about unity in both cases. The critical density may have been already reached in central Pb-Pb collisions at 158 A GeV.Comment: 16 pages, 3 Postscript figure

ΔπN\Delta\pi N coupling constant in light cone QCD sum rules

We employ the light cone QCD sum rules to calculate $\Delta\pi N$ coupling constant by studying the two point correlation function between the vacuum and the pion state. Our result is consistent with the traditional QCD sum rules calculations and it is in agreement with the experimental value.Comment: 8 pages, latex, 2 figure

Helioseismic holography of simulated sunspots: magnetic and thermal contributions to travel times

Wave propagation through sunspots involves conversion between waves of acoustic and magnetic character. In addition, the thermal structure of sunspots is very different than that of the quiet Sun. As a consequence, the interpretation of local helioseismic measurements of sunspots has long been a challenge. With the aim of understanding these measurements, we carry out numerical simulations of wave propagation through sunspots. Helioseismic holography measurements made from the resulting simulated wavefields show qualitative agreement with observations of real sunspots. We use additional numerical experiments to determine, separately, the influence of the thermal structure of the sunspot and the direct effect of the sunspot magnetic field. We use the ray approximation to show that the travel-time shifts in the thermal (non-magnetic) sunspot model are primarily produced by changes in the wave path due to the Wilson depression rather than variations in the wave speed. This shows that inversions for the subsurface structure of sunspots must account for local changes in the density. In some ranges of horizontal phase speed and frequency there is agreement (within the noise level in the simulations) between the travel times measured in the full magnetic sunspot model and the thermal model. If this conclusion proves to be robust for a wide range of models, it would suggest a path towards inversions for sunspot structure.Comment: Accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journa

Sample-to-sample fluctuations and bond chaos in the mm-component spin glass

We calculate the finite size scaling of the sample-to-sample fluctuations of the free energy $\Delta F$ of the $m$ component vector spin glass in the large-$m$ limit. This is accomplished using a variant of the interpolating Hamiltonian technique which is used to establish a connection between the free energy fluctuations and bond chaos. The calculation of bond chaos then shows that the scaling of the free energy fluctuaions with system size $N$ is $\Delta F \sim N^\mu$ with ${1/5}\leq\mu <{3/10}$, and very likely $\mu={1}{5}$ exactly.Comment: 12 pages, 1 figur

Prospects for the Detection of the Deep Solar Meridional Circulation

We perform helioseismic holography to assess the noise in p-mode travel-time shifts which would form the basis of inferences of large-scale flows throughout the solar convection zone. We also derive the expected travel times from a parameterized return (equatorward) flow component of the meridional circulation at the base of the convection zone from forward models under the assumption of the ray and Born approximations. From estimates of the signal-to-noise ratio for measurements focused near the base of the convection zone, we conclude that the helioseismic detection of the deep meridional flow including the return component may not be possible using data spanning an interval less than a solar cycle

On the relation between Differential Privacy and Quantitative Information Flow

Differential privacy is a notion that has emerged in the community of statistical databases, as a response to the problem of protecting the privacy of the database's participants when performing statistical queries. The idea is that a randomized query satisfies differential privacy if the likelihood of obtaining a certain answer for a database $x$ is not too different from the likelihood of obtaining the same answer on adjacent databases, i.e. databases which differ from $x$ for only one individual. Information flow is an area of Security concerned with the problem of controlling the leakage of confidential information in programs and protocols. Nowadays, one of the most established approaches to quantify and to reason about leakage is based on the R\'enyi min entropy version of information theory. In this paper, we analyze critically the notion of differential privacy in light of the conceptual framework provided by the R\'enyi min information theory. We show that there is a close relation between differential privacy and leakage, due to the graph symmetries induced by the adjacency relation. Furthermore, we consider the utility of the randomized answer, which measures its expected degree of accuracy. We focus on certain kinds of utility functions called "binary", which have a close correspondence with the R\'enyi min mutual information. Again, it turns out that there can be a tight correspondence between differential privacy and utility, depending on the symmetries induced by the adjacency relation and by the query. Depending on these symmetries we can also build an optimal-utility randomization mechanism while preserving the required level of differential privacy. Our main contribution is a study of the kind of structures that can be induced by the adjacency relation and the query, and how to use them to derive bounds on the leakage and achieve the optimal utility