Group percolation in interdependent networks

In many real network systems, nodes usually cooperate with each other and form groups, in order to enhance their robustness to risks. This motivates us to study a new type of percolation, group percolation, in interdependent networks under attacks. In this model, nodes belonging to the same group survive or fail together. We develop a theoretical framework for this novel group percolation and find that the formation of groups can improve the resilience of interdependent networks significantly. However, the percolation transition is always of first order, regardless of the distribution of group sizes. As an application, we map the interdependent networks with inter-similarity structures, which attract many attentions very recently, onto the group percolation and confirm the non-existence of continuous phase transitions

Superconducting energy gap versus pseudogap in hole-doped cuprates as revealed by infrared spectroscopy

We present in-plane infrared reflectance measurement on two superconducting cuprates with relatively low T$_c$: a nearly optimally-doped Bi$_2$Sr$_{1.6}$La$_{0.4}$CuO$_{6+\delta}$ with T$_c$=33 K and an underdoped La$_{1.89}$Sr$_{0.11}$CuO$_4$ with T$_c$=30 K. The measurement clearly reveals that the superconducting energy gap is distinct from the pseudogap. They have different energy scales and appear at different temperatures. The results suggest that the pseudogap is not a precursor to the superconducting state. The data also challenge the longstanding viewpoint that the superconductivity within the ab-plane is in the clean limit and the superconducting pairing energy gap could not be detected by in-plane infrared spectroscopy.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure

Is the X-ray pulsating companion of HD 49798 a possible type Ia supernova progenitor?

HD 49798 (a hydrogen depleted subdwarf O6 star) with its massive white dwarf (WD) companion has been suggested to be a progenitor candidate of type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia). However, it is still uncertain whether the companion of HD 49798 is a carbon-oxygen (CO) WD or an oxygen-neon (ONe) WD. A CO WD will explode as an SN Ia when its mass grows approach to Chandrasekhar mass, while the outcome of an accreting ONe WD is likely to be a neutron star. We followed a series of Monte Carlo binary population synthesis approach to simulate the formation of ONe WD + He star systems. We found that there is almost no orbital period as large as HD 49798 with its WD companion in these ONe WD + He star systems based on our simulations, which means that the companion of HD 49798 might not be an ONe WD. We suggest that the companion of HD 49798 is most likely a CO WD, which can be expected to increase its mass to the Chandrasekhar mass limit by accreting He-rich material from HD 49798. Thus, HD 49798 with its companion may produce an SN Ia in its future evolution.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figure

Quasi-Hamiltonian Method for Computation of Decoherence Rates

For many implementations of quantum computing, 1/f and other types of broad-spectrum noise are an important source of decoherence. An important step forward would be the ability to back out the characteristics of this noise from qubit measurements and to see if it leads to new physical effects. For certain types of qubits, the working point of the qubit can be varied. Using a new mathematical method that is suited to treat all working points, we present theoretical results that show how this degree of freedom can be used to extract noise parameters and to predict a new effect: noise-induced looping on the Bloch sphere. We analyze data on superconducting qubits to show that they are very near the parameter regime where this looping should be observed.Comment: 15 pages, 4 figure

SE2Net: Siamese Edge-Enhancement Network for Salient Object Detection

Deep convolutional neural network significantly boosted the capability of salient object detection in handling large variations of scenes and object appearances. However, convolution operations seek to generate strong responses on individual pixels, while lack the ability to maintain the spatial structure of objects. Moreover, the down-sampling operations, such as pooling and striding, lose spatial details of the salient objects. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective Siamese Edge-Enhancement Network (SE2Net) to preserve the edge structure for salient object detection. Specifically, a novel multi-stage siamese network is built to aggregate the low-level and high-level features, and parallelly estimate the salient maps of edges and regions. As a result, the predicted regions become more accurate by enhancing the responses at edges, and the predicted edges become more semantic by suppressing the false positives in background. After the refined salient maps of edges and regions are produced by the SE2Net, an edge-guided inference algorithm is designed to further improve the resulting salient masks along the predicted edges. Extensive experiments on several benchmark datasets have been conducted, which show that our method is superior than the state-of-the-art approaches

Frame-wise Motion and Appearance for Real-time Multiple Object Tracking

The main challenge of Multiple Object Tracking (MOT) is the efficiency in associating indefinite number of objects between video frames. Standard motion estimators used in tracking, e.g., Long Short Term Memory (LSTM), only deal with single object, while Re-IDentification (Re-ID) based approaches exhaustively compare object appearances. Both approaches are computationally costly when they are scaled to a large number of objects, making it very difficult for real-time MOT. To address these problems, we propose a highly efficient Deep Neural Network (DNN) that simultaneously models association among indefinite number of objects. The inference computation of the DNN does not increase with the number of objects. Our approach, Frame-wise Motion and Appearance (FMA), computes the Frame-wise Motion Fields (FMF) between two frames, which leads to very fast and reliable matching among a large number of object bounding boxes. As auxiliary information is used to fix uncertain matches, Frame-wise Appearance Features (FAF) are learned in parallel with FMFs. Extensive experiments on the MOT17 benchmark show that our method achieved real-time MOT with competitive results as the state-of-the-art approaches.Comment: 13 pages, 4 figures, 4 table

Testing reanalysis datasets in Antarctica: Trends, persistence properties and trend significance

The reanalysis datasets provide very important sources for investigating the climate dynamics and climate changes in Antarctica. In this paper, three major reanalysis data are compared with Antarctic station data over the last 35 years: the National Centers for Environmental Prediction and the National Center for Atmospheric Research reanalysis (NCEP1), NCEP-DOE Reanalysis 2 (NCEP2), and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts Interim Re-Analysis (ERA-Interim). In our assessment, we compare the linear trends, the fluctuations around the trends, the persistence properties and the significance level of warming trends in the reanalysis data with the observational ones. We find that NCEP1 and NCEP2 show spurious warming trends in all parts of Antarctica except the Peninsula, while ERA-Interim is quite reliable except at Amundsen-Scott. To investigate the persistence of the data sets, we consider the lag-1 autocorrelation $C(1)$ and the Hurst exponent. While $C(1)$ varies quite erratically in different stations, the Hurst exponent shows similar patterns all over Antarctica. Regarding the significance of the trends, NCEP1 and NCEP2 differ considerably from the observational datasets by strongly exaggerating the warming trends. In contrast, ERA-Interim gives reliable results at most stations except at Amundsen-Scott where it shows a significant cooling trend.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figure

Diagnostics From Three Rising Submillimeter Bursts

In the paper we investigate three novel rising submillimeter (THz) bursts occurred sequentially in a super-Active Region NOAA 10486. The average rising rate of the flux density above 200 GHz is only 20 sfu/GHz (corresponding spectral index $\alpha$ of 1.6) for the THz spectral components of 2003 October 28 and November 4 bursts, while it can attain values of 235 sfu/GHz ($\alpha$=4.8) for 2003 November 2 burst. The steeply rising THz spectrum can be produced by a population of high relativistic electrons with a low-energy cutoff of 1 MeV , while it only requires a low-energy cutoff of 30 keV for the two slowly rising THz bursts, via gyrosynchrotron (GS) radiation based on our numerical simulations of burst spectra in the magnetic dipole field case. The electron density variation is much larger in the THz source than that in microwave (MW) one. It is interesting that the THz source radius decreased by 20--50$\%$ during the decay phase for the three events, but the MW one increased by 28$\%$ for the 2003 November 2 event. In the paper we will present a calculation formula of energy released by ultrarelativistic electrons, accounting the relativistic correction for the first time. We find that the energy released by energetic electrons in the THz source exceeds that in microwave one due to the strong GS radiation loss at THz range, although the modeled THz source area is 3--4 orders smaller than the modeled MW one. The total energies released by energetic electrons via the GS radiation in radio sources are estimated, respectively, to be $5.2\times10^{33}$, $3.9\times10^{33}$ and $3.7\times10^{32}$ erg for the October 28, November 2 and 4 bursts, which are 131, 76 and 4 times as large as the thermal energies of $2.9\times10^{31}$, $2.1\times10^{31}$ and $5.2\times10^{31}$ erg estimated from the soft x-ray GOES observations

Finding a Nonnegative Solution to an M-Tensor Equation

We are concerned with the tensor equation with an M-tensor or Z-tensor, which we call the M- tensor equation or Z-tensor equation respectively. We derive a necessary and sufficient condition for a Z (or M)-tensor equation to have nonnegative solutions. We then develop a monotone iterative method to find a nonnegative solution to an M-tensor equation. The method can be regarded as an approximation to Newton's method for solving the equation. At each iteration, we solve a system of linear equations. An advantage of the proposed method is that the coefficient matrices of the linear systems are independent of the iteration. We show that if the initial point is appropriately chosen, then the sequence of iterates generated by the method converges to a nonnegative solution of the M- tensor equation monotonically and linearly. At last, we do numerical experiments to test the proposed methods. The results show the efficiency of the proposed methods

Differences in Halo-Scale Environments between Type 1 and Type 2 AGNs at Low Redshift

Using low-redshift (z<0.09) samples of AGNs, normal galaxies and groups of galaxies selected from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), we study the environments of type 1 and type 2 AGNs both on small and large scales. Comparisons are made for galaxy samples matched in redshift, $r$-band luminosity, [OIII] luminosity, and also the position in groups (central or satellite). We find that type 2 AGNs and normal galaxies reside in similar environments. Type 1 and type 2 AGNs have similar clustering properties on large scales ($\gtrsim1$Mpc), but at scales smaller than 100 kpc, type 2s have significant more neighbors than type 1s ($3.09\pm0.69$ times more for central AGNs at $\lesssim30$kpc). These results suggest that type 1 and type 2 AGNs are hosted by halos of similar masses, as is also seen directly from the mass distributions of their host groups ($\sim10^{12}h^{-1} M_{\odot}$ for centrals and $\sim10^{13}h^{-1} M_{\odot}$ for satellites). Type~2s have significantly more satellites around them, and the distribution of their satellites is also more centrally concentrated. The host galaxies of both types of AGNs have similar optical properties, but their infrared colors are significantly different. Our results suggest that the simple unified model based solely on torus orientation is not sufficient, but that galaxy interactions in dark matter halos must have played an important role in the formation of the dust structure that obscures AGNs.Comment: accepted for publication in ApJ, 12 pages, 9 figures, 1 tabl