Multiblob coarse-graining for mixtures of long polymers and soft colloids

Soft nanocomposites represent both a theoretical and an experimental challenge due to the high number of the microscopic constituents that strongly influence the behaviour of the systems. An effective theoretical description of such systems invokes a reduction of the degrees of freedom to be analysed, hence requiring the introduction of an efficient, quantitative, coarse-grained description. We here report on a novel coarse graining approach based on a set of transferable potentials that quantitatively reproduces properties of mixtures of linear and star-shaped homopolymeric nanocomposites. By renormalizing groups of monomers into a single effective potential between a $f$-functional star polymer and an homopolymer of length $N_0$, and through a scaling argument, it will be shown how a substantial reduction of the to degrees of freedom allows for a full quantitative description of the system. Our methodology is tested upon full monomer simulations for systems of different molecular weight, proving its full predictive potential

Deep multi-telescope photometry of NGC 5466. II. The radial behaviour of the mass function slope

We use a combination of data acquired with the Advanced Camera for Survey (ACS) on board the Hubble Space Telescope and the Large Binocular Camera (LBC-blue) mounted on the Large Binocular Telescope, to sample the main sequence stars of the globular cluster NGC~5466 in the mass range $0.3<M/M_\odot<0.8$. We derive the cluster's Luminosity Function in several radial regions, from the center of the cluster out to the tidal radius. After corrections for incompleteness and field-contamination, this has been compared to theoretical Luminosity Functions, obtained by multiplying a simple power law Mass Function in the form dN/dm$\propto m^{\alpha}$ by the derivative of the mass-luminosity relationship of the best-fit isochrone. We find that $\alpha$ varies from -0.6 in the core region to -1.9 in the outer region. This fact allows us to observationally prove that the stars in NGC 5466 have experienced the effects of mass segregation. We compare the radial variation of $\alpha$ from the center out to 5 core radii (r$_c$) in NGC 5466 and the globular cluster M10, finding that the gradient of $\alpha$ in the first 5r$_c$ is more than a factor of 2 shallower in NGC 5466 than in M10, in line with the differences in the clusters' relaxation timescales. NGC 5466 is dynamically younger than M10, with two-body relaxation processes only recently starting to shape the distribution of main sequence stars. This result fully agrees with the conclusion obtained in our previous works on the radial distribution of Blue Straggler Stars, further confirming that this can be used as an efficient clock to measure the dynamical age of stellar systems.Comment: Accepted for publications on Ap

Sport and Tourism Between Modernity and Postmodernity

Abstract The text presents and analyses manifestations of modernity and postmodernity in the field of competitive and recreational sport, physical education, leisure, and tourism. The paper builds upon an extensive literature survey and presents the concept and key features of postmodern societies and the modernity-postmodernity debate in sports with reference to postmodern tendencies in tourism. We have attempted to determine the proportions of tradition, modernity, and postmodernity in contemporary sport and tourism, keeping in mind that, similarly to contemporary societies as a whole, sport is undoubtedly a mixture of traditional, modern, and Fordist elements with postmodern and post-Fordist features. We present and discuss the prevailing belief that the key elements of leisure sport are mostly postmodern and focused on the notion of individualisation and freedom expressed especially in alternative sports, while commercialised mainstream sport follows the regular mass-media show-business development path, maintaining a significant amount of modern concepts, such as the importance of national identities. Special attention is also paid to the Olympic Games as a specific and very efficient mixture of modernity and postmodernity. More so than at any point in the past, and despite the actual proportions of modernity and postmodernity that it contains, contemporary sport has become an integral part of postmodern societies and their lifestyle, with technology-determined individualisation of sport consumption and leisure sport participation

Enabling VLSI processing blocks for MIMO-OFDM Communications

Multi-input multi-output (MIMO) systems combined with orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) gained a wide popularity in wireless applications due to the potential of providing increased channel capacity and robustness against multipath fading channels. However these advantages come at the cost of a very high processing complexity and the efficient implementation of MIMO-OFDM receivers is today a major research topic. In this paper, efficient architectures are proposed for the hardware implementation of the main building blocks of a MIMO-OFDM receiver. A sphere decoder architecture flexible to different modulation without any loss in BER performance is presented while the proposed matrix factorization implementation allows to achieve the highest throughput specified in the IEEE 802.11n standard. Finally a novel sphere decoder approach is presented, which allows for the realization of new golden space time trellis coded modulation (GST-TCM) scheme. Implementation cost and offered throughput are provided for the proposed architectures synthesized on a 0.13  CMOS standard cell technology or on advanced FPGA devices

Modelling the Observed Stellar Mass Function and its Radial Variation in Galactic Globular Clusters

We measure how the slope $\alpha$ of the stellar mass function (MF) changes as a function of clustercentric distance $r$ in five Galactic globular clusters and compare $\alpha(r)$ to predictions from direct $N$-body star cluster simulations. Theoretical studies predict that $\alpha(r)$ (which traces the degree of mass segregation in a cluster) should steepen with time as a cluster undergoes two-body relaxation and that the amount by which the global MF can evolve from its initial state due to stellar escape is directly linked to $\alpha(r)$. We find that the amount of mass segregation in M10, NGC 6218, and NGC 6981 is consistent with their dynamical ages, but only the global MF of M10 is consistent with its degree of mass segregation as well. NGC 5466 and NGC 6101 on the other hand appear to be less segregated than their dynamical ages would indicate. Furthermore, despite the fact that the escape rate of stars in non-segregated clusters is independent of stellar mass, both NGC 5466 and NGC 6101 have near-flat MFs. We discuss various mechanisms which could produce non-segregated clusters with near-flat MFs, including higher mass-loss rates and black hole retention, but argue that for some clusters (NGC 5466 and NGC 6101) explaining the present-day properties might require either a non-universal IMF or a much more complex dynamical history.Comment: 12 pages, 9 figures, Accepted for publication in MNRA

Attività svolta nell’ambito delle verifiche di agibilità nella provincia de L’Aquila e considerazioni sulle registrazioni accelerometriche del 06/04/2009

Nel presente articolo si illustra l’attività svolta dagli Autori nell’ambito delle verifiche di agibilità. In N. 5 - 2009 13 particolare tra tutti gli edifici esaminati ne sono stati selezionati tre, uno per tipologia strutturale (c.a., c.a.p. e muratura), ritenuti più rappresentativi. Si fornisce poi un breve resoconto della situazione riscontrata a Castelnuovo, una delle Località maggiormente colpite. Vengono inoltre date delle indicazioni preliminari sulla risposta del costruito, in base a quanto osservato sul campo ed in base ad alcune valutazioni che è già possibile fare sulle registrazioni accelerometriche del 06/04/2009. L’evento sismico in oggetto è stato inquadrato nella storia sismica del territorio de L’Aquila e messo in relazione con i terremoti più significativi verificatisi in Italia negli ultimi decenni: Friuli 1976, Irpinia 1980, Umbria– Marche 1997, Molise 2002. Infine si è proceduto ad un confronto con l’azione sismica prevista dall’attuale Normativa (D.M. LL.PP. del 14/01/2008 [3] e relativa C.M. LL.PP. N. 617 del 02/02/2009 [4]), confronto dal quale non può prescindere una lettura critica del grado di danneggiamento prodotto sulle diverse tipologie strutturali

Bid premiums and cumulative abnormal returns: An empirical investigation on the consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic

Economic conditions within the market affect the likelihood of performing a business combination between firms. Indeed, the level of uncertainty during period of crisis plays a relevant role in M&amp;A transactions. This paper is one of the first attempts to investigate the relationship between health crisis and business combinations. The findings show that while the bid premiums computed using the target's share price thirty days before the transaction announcement increase for M&amp;A operations performed during health crises, the cumulative abnormal returns decrease

Domain generalization through audio-visual relative norm alignment in first person action recognition

First person action recognition is becoming an increasingly researched area thanks to the rising popularity of wearable cameras. This is bringing to light cross-domain issues that are yet to be addressed in this context. Indeed, the information extracted from learned representations suffers from an intrinsic "environmental bias". This strongly affects the ability to generalize to unseen scenarios, limiting the application of current methods to real settings where labeled data are not available during training. In this work, we introduce the first domain generalization approach for egocentric activity recognition, by proposing a new audiovisual loss, called Relative Norm Alignment loss. It rebalances the contributions from the two modalities during training, over different domains, by aligning their feature norm representations. Our approach leads to strong results in domain generalization on both EPIC-Kitchens-55 and EPIC-Kitchens-100, as demonstrated by extensive experiments, and can be extended to work also on domain adaptation settings with competitive results