Statistical physics of cerebral embolization leading to stroke

We discuss the physics of embolic stroke using a minimal model of emboli moving through the cerebral arteries. Our model of the blood flow network consists of a bifurcating tree, into which we introduce particles (emboli) that halt flow on reaching a node of similar size. Flow is weighted away from blocked arteries, inducing an effective interaction between emboli. We justify the form of the flow weighting using a steady flow (Poiseuille) analysis and a more complicated nonlinear analysis. We discuss free flowing and heavily congested limits and examine the transition from free flow to congestion using numerics. The correlation time is found to increase significantly at a critical value, and a finite size scaling is carried out. An order parameter for non-equilibrium critical behavior is identified as the overlap of blockages' flow shadows. Our work shows embolic stroke to be a feature of the cerebral blood flow network on the verge of a phase transition.Comment: 11 pages, 11 figures. Major rewrite including improved justification of the model and a finite size scalin

Ultra-High Energy Cosmic Rays: The Annihilation of Super-Heavy Relics

We investigate the possibility that ultra-high energy cosmic rays (UHECRs) originate from the annihilation of relic superheavy (SH) dark matter in the Galactic halo. In order to fit the data on UHECRs, a cross section of $\sim 10^{-26}\textrm{cm}^2 (M_X/10^{12} \textrm{GeV})^{3/2}$ is required if the SH dark matter follows a Navarro--Frenk--White (NFW) density profile. This would require extremely large-$l$ contributions to the annihilation cross section. An interesting finding of our calculation is that the annihilation in sub-galactic clumps of dark matter dominates over the annihilations in the smooth dark matter halo, thus implying much smaller values of the cross section needed to explain the observed fluxes of UHECRs.Comment: To appear in the proceedings of the TAUP conference, September 8-12, 2001 - Gran Sasso Laboratory, Ital

Evolution of the single-hole spectral function across a quantum phase transition in the anisotropic-triangular-lattice antiferromagnet

We study the evolution of the single-hole spectral function when the ground state of the anisotropic-triangular-lattice antiferromagnet changes from the incommensurate magnetically-ordered phase to the spin-liquid state. In order to describe both of the ground states on equal footing, we use the large-N approach where the transition between these two phases can be obtained by controlling the quantum fluctuations via an 'effective' spin magnitude. Adding a hole into these ground states is described by a t-J type model in the slave-fermion representation. Implications of our results to possible future ARPES experiments on insulating frustrated magnets, especially Cs$_2$CuCl$_4$, are discussed.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figure

Induced Lorentz- and CPT-violating Chern-Simons term in QED: Fock-Schwinger proper time method

Using the Fock-Schwinger proper time method, we calculate the induced Chern-Simons term arising from the Lorentz- and CPT-violating sector of quantum electrodynamics with a $b_\mu \bar{\psi}\gamma^\mu \gamma_5 \psi$ term. Our result to all orders in $b$ coincides with a recent linear-in-$b$ calculation by Chaichian et al. [hep-th/0010129 v2]. The coincidence was pointed out by Chung [Phys. Lett. {\bf B461} (1999) 138] and P\'{e}rez-Victoria [Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 83} (1999) 2518] in the standard Feynman diagram calculation with the nonperturbative-in-$b$ propagator.Comment: 11 pages, no figur

Spontaneous patterning of quantum dots at the air-water interface

Nanoparticles deposited at the air-water interface are observed to form circular domains at low density and stripes at higher density. We interpret these patterns as equilibrium phenomena produced by a competition between an attraction and a longer-ranged repulsion. Computer simulations of a generic pair potential with attractive and repulsive parts of this kind, reproduce both the circular and stripe patterns. Such patterns have a potential use in nanoelectronic applications

Numerical study on diverging probability density function of flat-top solitons in an extended Korteweg-de Vries equation

We consider an extended Korteweg-de Vries (eKdV) equation, the usual Korteweg-de Vries equation with inclusion of an additional cubic nonlinearity. We investigate the statistical behaviour of flat-top solitary waves described by an eKdV equation in the presence of weak dissipative disorder in the linear growth/damping term. With the weak disorder in the system, the amplitude of solitary wave randomly fluctuates during evolution. We demonstrate numerically that the probability density function of a solitary wave parameter $\kappa$ which characterizes the soliton amplitude exhibits loglognormal divergence near the maximum possible $\kappa$ value.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figure

Sensitivity of tensor analyzing power in the process d+p→d+Xd+p\to d+X to the longitudinal isoscalar form factor of the Roper resonance electroexcitation

The tensor analyzing power of the process $d + p \to d + X$, for forward deuteron scattering in the momentum interval 3.7 to 9 GeV/c, is studied in the framework of $\omega$ exchange in an algebraic collective model for the electroexcitation of nucleon resonances. We point out a special sensitivity of the tensor analyzing power to the isoscalar longitudinal form factor of the Roper resonance excitation. The main argument is that the $S_{11}(1535)$, $D_{13}(1520)$ and $S_{11}(1650)$ resonances have only isovector longitudinal form factors. It is the longitudinal form factor of the Roper excitation, which plays an important role in the $t-$dependence of the tensor analyzing power. We discuss possible evidence of swelling of hadrons with increasing excitation energy.Comment: 12 pages, 10 figure

Connectionist Temporal Modeling for Weakly Supervised Action Labeling

We propose a weakly-supervised framework for action labeling in video, where only the order of occurring actions is required during training time. The key challenge is that the per-frame alignments between the input (video) and label (action) sequences are unknown during training. We address this by introducing the Extended Connectionist Temporal Classification (ECTC) framework to efficiently evaluate all possible alignments via dynamic programming and explicitly enforce their consistency with frame-to-frame visual similarities. This protects the model from distractions of visually inconsistent or degenerated alignments without the need of temporal supervision. We further extend our framework to the semi-supervised case when a few frames are sparsely annotated in a video. With less than 1% of labeled frames per video, our method is able to outperform existing semi-supervised approaches and achieve comparable performance to that of fully supervised approaches.Comment: To appear in ECCV 201

Water Vapour Effects in Mass Measurement

Water vapour inside the mass comparator enclosure is a critical parameter. In fact, fluctuations of this parameter during mass weighing can lead to errors in the determination of an unknown mass. To control that, a proposal method is given and tested. Preliminary results of our observation of water vapour sorption and desorption processes from walls and mass standard are reported

From Lyapunov modes to the exponents for hard disk systems

We demonstrate the preservation of the Lyapunov modes by the underlying tangent space dynamics of hard disks. This result is exact for the zero modes and correct to order $\epsilon$ for the transverse and LP modes where $\epsilon$ is linear in the mode number. For sufficiently large mode numbers the dynamics no longer preserves the mode structure. We propose a Gram-Schmidt procedure based on orthogonality with respect to the centre space that determines the values of the Lyapunov exponents for the modes. This assumes a detailed knowledge of the modes, but from that predicts the values of the exponents from the modes. Thus the modes and the exponents contain the same information