Statistical emulation of a tsunami model for sensitivity analysis and uncertainty quantification

Due to the catastrophic consequences of tsunamis, early warnings need to be issued quickly in order to mitigate the hazard. Additionally, there is a need to represent the uncertainty in the predictions of tsunami characteristics corresponding to the uncertain trigger features (e.g. either position, shape and speed of a landslide, or sea floor deformation associated with an earthquake). Unfortunately, computer models are expensive to run. This leads to significant delays in predictions and makes the uncertainty quantification impractical. Statistical emulators run almost instantaneously and may represent well the outputs of the computer model. In this paper, we use the Outer Product Emulator to build a fast statistical surrogate of a landslide-generated tsunami computer model. This Bayesian framework enables us to build the emulator by combining prior knowledge of the computer model properties with a few carefully chosen model evaluations. The good performance of the emulator is validated using the Leave-One-Out method

Renormalization Group and Conformal Symmetry Breaking in the Chern-Simons Theory Coupled to Matter

The three-dimensional Abelian Chern-Simons theory coupled to a scalar and a fermionic field of arbitrary charge is considered in order to study conformal symmetry breakdown and the effective potential stability. We present an improved effective potential computation based on two-loop calculations and the renormalization group equation: the later allows us to sum up series of terms in the effective potential where the power of the logarithms are one, two and three units smaller than the total power of coupling constants (i.e., leading, next-to-leading and next-to-next-to-leading logarithms). For the sake of this calculation we determined the beta function of the fermion-fermion-scalar-scalar interaction and the anomalous dimension of the scalar field. We shown that the improved effective potential provides a much more precise determination of the properties of the theory in the broken phase, compared to the standard effective potential obtained directly from the loop calculations. This happens because the region of the parameter space where dynamical symmetry breaking occurs is drastically reduced by the improvement discussed here.Comment: 29 pages, 10 figures, 1 tabl

Crop Flexibility in Dryland Corn and Soybeans Using Predicted Yields and Prices

Crop Production/Industries,

Non-perturbative fixed points and renormalization group improved effective potential

The stability conditions of a renormalization group improved effective potential have been discussed in the case of scalar QED and QCD with a colorless scalar. We calculate the same potential in these models assuming the existence of non-perturbative fixed points associated to a conformal phase. In the case of scalar QED the barrier of instability found previously is barely displaced as we approach the fixed point, and in the case of QCD with a colorless scalar not only the barrier is changed but the local minimum of the potential is also changed.Comment: 6 pages, 8 figures, References added. Matching the journal versio

Fitting isochrones to open cluster photometric data III. Estimating metallicities from UBV photometry

The metallicity is a critical parameter that affects the correct determination fundamental characteristics stellar cluster and has important implications in Galactic and Stellar evolution research. Fewer than 10 % of the 2174 currently catalog open clusters have their metallicity determined in the literature. In this work we present a method for estimating the metallicity of open clusters via non-subjective isochrone fitting using the cross-entropy global optimization algorithm applied to UBV photometric data. The free parameters distance, reddening, age, and metallicity simultaneously determined by the fitting method. The fitting procedure uses weights for the observational data based on the estimation of membership likelihood for each star, which considers the observational magnitude limit, the density profile of stars as a function of radius from the center of the cluster, and the density of stars in multi-dimensional magnitude space. We present results of [Fe/H] for nine well-studied open clusters based on 15 distinct UBV data sets. The [Fe/H] values obtained in the ten cases for which spectroscopic determinations were available in the literature agree, indicating that our method provides a good alternative to determining [Fe/H] by using an objective isochrone fitting. Our results show that the typical precision is about 0.1 dex

Enhancement of the Benjamin-Feir instability with dissipation

It is shown that there is an overlooked mechanism whereby some kinds of dissipation can enhance the Benjamin-Feir instability of water waves. This observation is new, and although it is counterintuitive, it is due to the fact that the Benjamin-Feir instability involves the collision of modes with opposite energy sign (relative to the carrier wave), and it is the negative energy perturbations which are enhanced.Comment: 15 pages, 2 figures To download more papers, go to http://www.cmla.ens-cachan.fr/~dias. Physics of Fluids (2007) to appea

Generation of higher derivatives operators and electromagnetic wave propagation in a Lorentz-violation scenario

We study the perturbative generation of higher-derivative operators as corrections to the photon effective action, which are originated from a Lorentz violation background. Such corrections are obtained, at one-loop order, through the proper-time method, using the zeta function regularization. We focus over the lowest order corrections and investigate their influence in the propagation of electromagnetic waves through the vacuum, in the presence of a strong, constant magnetic field. This is a setting of experimental relevance, since it bases active efforts to measure non linear electromagnetic effects. After surprising cancellations of Lorentz violating corrections to the Maxwell's equation, we show that no effects of the kind of Lorentz violation we consider can be detected in such a context.Comment: v2: 13 pages, no figures, section IV considerably rewritten, main results unchanged and are now obtained in a simpler way. To appear in PL