Symmetric ideals in group rings and simplicial homotopy

In this paper homotopical methods for the description of subgroups determined by ideals in group rings are introduced. It is shown that in certain cases the subgroups determined by symmetric product of ideals in group rings can be described with the help of homotopy groups of spheres.Comment: 10 pages, to appear in J. Pure Appl. Algebr

2-D Compass Codes

The compass model on a square lattice provides a natural template for building subsystem stabilizer codes. The surface code and the Bacon-Shor code represent two extremes of possible codes depending on how many gauge qubits are fixed. We explore threshold behavior in this broad class of local codes by trading locality for asymmetry and gauge degrees of freedom for stabilizer syndrome information. We analyze these codes with asymmetric and spatially inhomogeneous Pauli noise in the code capacity and phenomenological models. In these idealized settings, we observe considerably higher thresholds against asymmetric noise. At the circuit level, these codes inherit the bare-ancilla fault-tolerance of the Bacon-Shor code.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures, added discussion on fault-toleranc

Vector Meson Propagator and Baryon Current Conservation

If baryons couple only with $\omega$-mesons, one found the baryon spectral function may be negative. We show this unacceptable result is caused by the $k_\mu k_\nu$-terms in the $\omega$-meson propagator. Their contribution may not vanish in approximate calculations which violate the baryon current conserves. A rule is suggested, by which the calculated baryon spectral function is well behaved.Comment: 9 pages (LaTeX file), 3 figures (PostScript file

Painting Analysis Using Wavelets and Probabilistic Topic Models

In this paper, computer-based techniques for stylistic analysis of paintings are applied to the five panels of the 14th century Peruzzi Altarpiece by Giotto di Bondone. Features are extracted by combining a dual-tree complex wavelet transform with a hidden Markov tree (HMT) model. Hierarchical clustering is used to identify stylistic keywords in image patches, and keyword frequencies are calculated for sub-images that each contains many patches. A generative hierarchical Bayesian model learns stylistic patterns of keywords; these patterns are then used to characterize the styles of the sub-images; this in turn, permits to discriminate between paintings. Results suggest that such unsupervised probabilistic topic models can be useful to distill characteristic elements of style.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, ICIP 201

A multi-photon magneto-optical trap

We demonstrate a Magneto-Optical Trap (MOT) configuration which employs optical forces due to light scattering between electronically excited states of the atom. With the standard MOT laser beams propagating along the {\it x}- and {\it y}- directions, the laser beams along the {\it z}-direction are at a different wavelength that couples two sets of {\it excited} states. We demonstrate efficient cooling and trapping of cesium atoms in a vapor cell and sub-Doppler cooling on both the red and blue sides of the two-photon resonance. The technique demonstrated in this work may have applications in background-free detection of trapped atoms, and in assisting laser-cooling and trapping of certain atomic species that require cooling lasers at inconvenient wavelengths.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figure

Coupled Dyson-Schwinger Equations and Effects of Self-Consistency

Using the $\sigma -\omega$ model as an effective tool, the effects of self-consistency are studied in some detail. A coupled set of Dyson-Schwinger equations for the renormalized baryon and meson propagators in the $\sigma -\omega$ model is solved self-consistently according to the dressed Hartree-Fock scheme, where the hadron propagators in both the baryon and meson self-energies are required to also satisfy this coupled set of equations. It is found that the self-consistency affects the baryon spectral function noticeably, if only the interaction with $\sigma$ mesons is considered. However, there is a cancellation between the effects due to the $\sigma$ and $\omega$ mesons and the additional contribution of $\omega$ mesons makes the above effect insignificant. In both the $\sigma$ and $\sigma -\omega$ cases the effects of self-consistency on meson spectral function are perceptible, but they can nevertheless be taken account of without a self-consistent calculation. Our study indicates that to include the meson propagators in the self-consistency requirement is unnecessary and one can stop at an early step of an iteration procedure to obtain a good approximation to the fully self-consistent results of all the hadron propagators in the model, if an appropriate initial input is chosen. Vertex corrections and their effects on ghost poles are also studied.Comment: 20 pages (include 5 tables), 17 figures (PostScript file

ArrayBridge: Interweaving declarative array processing with high-performance computing

Scientists are increasingly turning to datacenter-scale computers to produce and analyze massive arrays. Despite decades of database research that extols the virtues of declarative query processing, scientists still write, debug and parallelize imperative HPC kernels even for the most mundane queries. This impedance mismatch has been partly attributed to the cumbersome data loading process; in response, the database community has proposed in situ mechanisms to access data in scientific file formats. Scientists, however, desire more than a passive access method that reads arrays from files. This paper describes ArrayBridge, a bi-directional array view mechanism for scientific file formats, that aims to make declarative array manipulations interoperable with imperative file-centric analyses. Our prototype implementation of ArrayBridge uses HDF5 as the underlying array storage library and seamlessly integrates into the SciDB open-source array database system. In addition to fast querying over external array objects, ArrayBridge produces arrays in the HDF5 file format just as easily as it can read from it. ArrayBridge also supports time travel queries from imperative kernels through the unmodified HDF5 API, and automatically deduplicates between array versions for space efficiency. Our extensive performance evaluation in NERSC, a large-scale scientific computing facility, shows that ArrayBridge exhibits statistically indistinguishable performance and I/O scalability to the native SciDB storage engine.Comment: 12 pages, 13 figure