Truncated unity functional renormalization group for multiband systems with spin-orbit coupling

Although the functional renormalization group (fRG) is by now a well-established method for investigating correlated electron systems, it is still undergoing significant technical and conceptual improvements. In particular, the motivation to optimally exploit the parallelism of modern computing platforms has recently led to the development of the "truncated-unity" functional renormalization group (TU-fRG). Here, we review this fRG variant, and we provide its extension to multiband systems with spin-orbit coupling. Furthermore, we discuss some aspects of the implementation and outline opportunities and challenges ahead for predicting the ground-state ordering and emergent energy scales for a wide class of quantum materials.Comment: consistent with published version in Frontiers in Physics (2018

IL-3-Mediated Osteoblast Inhibition in Multiple Myeloma

Multiple myeloma is a plasma cell malignancy that localizes to the bone. It is diagnosed in 15,000 new patients per year, making it the second most common hematologic malignancy. The major source of morbidity in these patients is due to bone destruction induced by the myeloma cells leading to severe bone pain and pathologic fractures. Bone destruction in myeloma is mediated by an increase in osteoclast activity, the cells that normally resorb bone, with a concomitant decrease in osteoblast number and function, the cells that normally rebuild bone. The cause of the decrease in osteoblasts is not well understood. Interleukin-3 (IL-3) is upregulated in myeloma compared to normal controls and can mediate osteoclast activation in myeloma. This dissertation investigates the potential role of IL-3 as an osteoblast inhibitor in myeloma. First, IL-3 blocked osteoblast differentiation in a primary murine osteoblast culture system in a dose-dependant manner. Importantly, IL-3-mediated osteoblast inhibition occurred at IL-3 levels present in bone marrow samples from patients with myeloma. IL-3 did not inhibit osteoblast differentiation in cell lines, indicating that the IL-3 effects were not direct. Conversely, IL-3 caused proliferation in CD45+ hematopoietic cells present in the primary murine cultures, and depletion of CD45+ cells from these cultures resulted in a loss of IL-3 inhibition of osteoblast differentiation. Reconstitution of cultures with CD45+ cells resulted in restoration of the ability of IL-3 to inhibit osteoblasts. These CD45+ cells were shown to be CD11b+ and in the monocyte/macrophage lineage. Further studies were conducted into the mechanism of IL-3-mediated osteoblast inhibition. Cell-to-cell contact was required between osteoblasts and CD45+ hematopoietic cells, and separation of the cell population by transwell cultures abolished IL-3 inhibition of osteoblasts. Transcript levels of several integrins expressed on osteoblasts were not increased by treatment with IL-3, indicating that increased binding of CD45+ cells to osteoblasts is not the mechanism required for osteoblast inhibition. Contact between CD45+ cells and osteoblasts could result in increased expression of a juxtacrine factor that mediates IL-3 inhibition of osteoblasts. In myeloma, IL-3 can mediate proliferation of malignant cells, stimulation of osteoclast activity, and inhibition of osteoblast activity, which ultimately leads to exacerbation of lytic lesions in these patients. Thus, IL-3 is a potential target for myeloma therapy

Gradient free parameter estimation for hidden Markov models with intractable likelihoods

In this article we focus on Maximum Likelihood estimation (MLE) for the static model parameters of hidden Markov models (HMMs). We will consider the case where one cannot or does not want to compute the conditional likelihood density of the observation given the hidden state because of increased computational complexity or analytical intractability. Instead we will assume that one may obtain samples from this conditional likelihood and hence use approximate Bayesian computation (ABC) approximations of the original HMM. Although these ABC approximations will induce a bias, this can be controlled to arbitrary precision via a positive parameter , so that the bias decreases with decreasing . We first establish that when using an ABC approximation of the HMM for a fixed batch of data, then the bias of the resulting log- marginal likelihood and its gradient is no worse than O(n), where n is the total number of data-points. Therefore, when using gradient methods to perform MLE for the ABC approximation of the HMM, one may expect parameter estimates of reasonable accuracy. To compute an estimate of the unknown and fixed model parameters, we propose a gradient approach based on simultaneous perturbation stochastic approximation (SPSA) and Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) for the ABC approximation of the HMM. The performance of this method is illustrated using two numerical examples

Habitat conversion and global avian biodiversity loss

The magnitude of the impacts of human activities on global biodiversity has been documented at several organizational levels. However, although there have been numerous studies of the effects of local-scale changes in land use (e.g. logging) on the abundance of groups of organisms, broader continental or global-scale analyses addressing the same basic issues remain largely wanting. None the less, changing patterns of land use, associated with the appropriation of increasing proportions of net primary productivity by the human population, seem likely not simply to have reduced the diversity of life, but also to have reduced the carrying capacity of the environment in terms of the numbers of other organisms that it can sustain. Here, we estimate the size of the existing global breeding bird population, and then make a first approximation as to how much this has been modified as a consequence of land-use changes wrought by human activities. Summing numbers across different land-use classes gives a best current estimate of a global population of less than 100 billion breeding bird individuals. Applying the same methodology to estimates of original land-use distributions suggests that conservatively this may represent a loss of between a fifth and a quarter of pre-agricultural bird numbers. This loss is shared across a range of temperate and tropical land-use types