First European interception of the brown fir longhorn beetle, Callidiellum villosulum (Fairmaire, 1900) (Coleoptera, Cerambycidae)

A specimen of the brown fir longhorn beetle, Callidiellum villosulum villosulum found in Malta represents the first record of this invasive species for Europe. Historical details on world invasion of this species are provided as well as a short description, origin and biology. A brief pest risk analysis of this species is also presented.peer-reviewe

Dynamical generation and detection of entanglement in neutral leviton pairs

The entanglement of coherently split electron-hole pairs in an electronic conductor is typically not considered accessible due to particle number conservation and fermionic super-selection rules. We demonstrate here that current cross-correlation measurements at the outputs of an electronic Mach-Zehnder interferometer can nevertheless provide a robust witness of electron-hole entanglement. Specifically, we consider neutral excitations generated by modulating the transmission of an unbiased quantum point contact periodically in time. For an optimized modulation profile, an entangled state with one positively-charged leviton (a hole) and one negatively-charged leviton (an electron) gets delocalized over the two paths of the interferometer and is detected at the output arms. We evaluate the influence of finite electronic temperatures and dephasing corresponding to recent experiments.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, 1 page of Supplemental Materia

Cylindric Reverse Plane Partitions and 2D TQFT

The ring of symmetric functions carries the structure of a Hopf algebra. When computing the coproduct of complete symmetric functions $h_\lambda$ one arrives at weighted sums over reverse plane partitions (RPP) involving binomial coefficients. Employing the action of the extended affine symmetric group at fixed level $n$ we generalise these weighted sums to cylindric RPP and define cylindric complete symmetric functions. The latter are shown to be $h$-positive, that is, their expansions coefficients in the basis of complete symmetric functions are non-negative integers. We state an explicit formula in terms of tensor multiplicities for irreducible representations of the generalised symmetric group. Moreover, we relate the cylindric complete symmetric functions to a 2D topological quantum field theory (TQFT) that is a generalisation of the celebrated $\mathfrak{\widehat{sl}}_n$-Verlinde algebra or Wess-Zumino-Witten fusion ring, which plays a prominent role in the context of vertex operator algebras and algebraic geometry.Comment: 13 pages, 1 figure, accepted conference proceedings article for FPSAC2018 (Hanover

Coalescence of Euclidean geodesics on the Poisson-Delaunay triangulation

Let us consider Euclidean first-passage percolation on the Poisson-Delaunay triangulation. We prove almost sure coalescence of any two semi-infinite geodesics with the same asymptotic direction. The proof is based on an adapted Burton-Keane argument and makes use of the concentration property for shortest-path lengths in the considered graphs. Moreover, by considering the specific example of the relative neighborhood graph, we illustrate that our approach extends to further well-known graphs in computational geometry. As an application, we show that the expected number of semi-infinite geodesics starting at a given vertex and leaving a disk of a certain radius grows at most sublinearly in the radius.Comment: 21 pages, 7 figure

Spectrally Similar Incommensurable 3-Manifolds

Reid has asked whether hyperbolic manifolds with the same geodesic length spectrum must be commensurable. Building toward a negative answer to this question, we construct examples of hyperbolic 3–manifolds that share an arbitrarily large portion of the length spectrum but are not commensurable. More precisely, for every n ≫ 0, we construct a pair of incommensurable hyperbolic 3–manifolds Nn and Nµn whose volume is approximately n and whose length spectra agree up to length n. Both Nn and Nµn are built by gluing two standard submanifolds along a complicated pseudo-Anosov map, ensuring that these manifolds have a very thick collar about an essential surface. The two gluing maps differ by a hyper-elliptic involution along this surface. Our proof also involves a new commensurability criterion based on pairs of pants

Maty's Biography of Abraham De Moivre, Translated, Annotated and Augmented

November 27, 2004, marked the 250th anniversary of the death of Abraham De Moivre, best known in statistical circles for his famous large-sample approximation to the binomial distribution, whose generalization is now referred to as the Central Limit Theorem. De Moivre was one of the great pioneers of classical probability theory. He also made seminal contributions in analytic geometry, complex analysis and the theory of annuities. The first biography of De Moivre, on which almost all subsequent ones have since relied, was written in French by Matthew Maty. It was published in 1755 in the Journal britannique. The authors provide here, for the first time, a complete translation into English of Maty's biography of De Moivre. New material, much of it taken from modern sources, is given in footnotes, along with numerous annotations designed to provide additional clarity to Maty's biography for contemporary readers.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/088342306000000268 in the Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Information-not-thing: further problems with and alternatives to the belief that information is physical

In this short paper, we show that a popular view in information science, information-as-thing, fails to account for a common example of information that seems physical. We then demonstrate how the distinction between types and tokens, recently used to analyse Shannon information, can account for this same example by viewing information as abstract, and discuss existing definitions of information that are consistent with this approach. Dans ce court article nous montrons qu'une vision populaire en sciences de l'information, l'information en tant qu’une chose, échoue à rendre compte d'un exemple commun d'information qui semble physique. Nous démontrons ensuite comment la distinction type/token, utilisée récemment pour analyser l'information de Shannon, peut rendre compte de ce même exemple en considérant l'information comme abstraite, et nous discutons des définitions existantes de l’information qui sont compatibles avec cette approche

Scale-invariant Perturbations from Chaotic Inflation

Vacuum fluctuations in the inflaton field driving chaotic inflation with a quadratic potential give a red spectrum of primordial density perturbations, n=0.97. However angular fluctuations in an O(N)-symmetric quadratic potential have a very nearly scale-invariant spectrum, n=0.9998. We investigate the possibility that these isocurvature field perturbations could give the dominant contribution to the primordial density perturbation after inflation.Comment: 10 pages, LaTeX with RevTex, no figure