25,983 research outputs found

    Equivariant formality of istropy actions

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    Let GG be a compact connected Lie group and KK a connected Lie subgroup. In this paper, we collect an assortment of results on equivariant formality of the isotropy action of KK on G/KG/K and thus improving those from previous work. We show that if the isotropy action of KK on G/KG/K is equivariantly formal, then G/KG/K is formal in the sense of rational homotopy theory. This enables us to strengthen Shiga-Takahashi's theorem to a cohomological characterization of equivariant formality of isotropy actions. Using an analogue of equivariant formality in KK-theory introduced by the second author and shown to be equivalent to equivariant formality in the usual sense, we provide a representation theoretic characterization of equivariant formality of isotropy actions, and give a new, uniform proof of equivariant formality for previously known examples of homogeneous spaces.Comment: Accepted by Journal of the London Mathematical Society. Slightly different from the journal version in terms of formatting and wording. 26 page

    The effect of temperature evolution on the interior structure of H2{}_{2}O-rich planets

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    For most planets in the range of radii from 1 to 4 R_{\oplus}, water is a major component of the interior composition. At high pressure H2{}_{2}O can be solid, but for larger planets, like Neptune, the temperature can be too high for this. Mass and age play a role in determining the transition between solid and fluid (and mixed) water-rich super-Earth. We use the latest high-pressure and ultra-high-pressure phase diagrams of H2{}_{2}O, and by comparing them with the interior adiabats of various planet models, the temperature evolution of the planet interior is shown, especially for the state of H2{}_{2}O. It turns out that the bulk of H2{}_{2}O in a planet's interior may exist in various states such as plasma, superionic, ionic, Ice VII, Ice X, etc., depending on the size, age and cooling rate of the planet. Different regions of the mass-radius phase space are also identified to correspond to different planet structures. In general, super-Earth-size planets (isolated or without significant parent star irradiation effects) older than about 3 Gyr would be mostly solid.Comment: Accepted by ApJ, in print for March 2014 (14 pages, 3 colored figures, 1 table

    Excited Heavy Baryons and Their Symmetries II: Effective Theory

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    We develop an effective theory for heavy baryons and their excited states. The approach is based on the contracted O(8) symmetry recently shown to emerge from QCD for these states in the combined large N_c and heavy quark limits. The effective theory is based on perturbations about this limit; a power counting scheme is developed in which the small parameter is lambda^{1/2} where lambda ~ 1/N_c, Lambda /m_Q (with Lambda being a typical strong interaction scale). We derive the effective Hamiltonian for strong interactions at next-to-leading order. The next-to-leading order effective Hamiltonian depends on only two parameters beyond the known masses of the nucleon and heavy meson. We also show that the effective operators for certain electroweak transitions can be obtained with no unknown parameters at next-to-leading order.Comment: 17 pages, LaTeX; typos remove

    Credible, Truthful, and Two-Round (Optimal) Auctions via Cryptographic Commitments

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    We consider the sale of a single item to multiple buyers by a revenue-maximizing seller. Recent work of Akbarpour and Li formalizes \emph{credibility} as an auction desideratum, and prove that the only optimal, credible, strategyproof auction is the ascending price auction with reserves (Akbarpour and Li, 2019). In contrast, when buyers' valuations are MHR, we show that the mild additional assumption of a cryptographically secure commitment scheme suffices for a simple \emph{two-round} auction which is optimal, strategyproof, and credible (even when the number of bidders is only known by the auctioneer). We extend our analysis to the case when buyer valuations are α\alpha-strongly regular for any α>0\alpha > 0, up to arbitrary ε\varepsilon in credibility. Interestingly, we also prove that this construction cannot be extended to regular distributions, nor can the ε\varepsilon be removed with multiple bidders

    Batch Nonlinear Continuous-Time Trajectory Estimation as Exactly Sparse Gaussian Process Regression

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    In this paper, we revisit batch state estimation through the lens of Gaussian process (GP) regression. We consider continuous-discrete estimation problems wherein a trajectory is viewed as a one-dimensional GP, with time as the independent variable. Our continuous-time prior can be defined by any nonlinear, time-varying stochastic differential equation driven by white noise; this allows the possibility of smoothing our trajectory estimates using a variety of vehicle dynamics models (e.g., `constant-velocity'). We show that this class of prior results in an inverse kernel matrix (i.e., covariance matrix between all pairs of measurement times) that is exactly sparse (block-tridiagonal) and that this can be exploited to carry out GP regression (and interpolation) very efficiently. When the prior is based on a linear, time-varying stochastic differential equation and the measurement model is also linear, this GP approach is equivalent to classical, discrete-time smoothing (at the measurement times); when a nonlinearity is present, we iterate over the whole trajectory to maximize accuracy. We test the approach experimentally on a simultaneous trajectory estimation and mapping problem using a mobile robot dataset.Comment: Submitted to Autonomous Robots on 20 November 2014, manuscript # AURO-D-14-00185, 16 pages, 7 figure
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