Internet comments as a barometer of public opinion

Social susceptibility is defined and analyzed using data from CNN news website. The current models of opinion dynamics, voting, and herding in closed communities are extended, and the community's response to the injection of a group with predetermined and permanent opinions is calculated. A method to estimate the values of possible response in Internet communities that follow a specific developing subject is developed. The level of social influence in a community follows from the statistics of responses ("like" and "dislike" votes) to the comments written by the members of the same community. Three real cases of developing news stories are analyzed. We suggest that Internet comments may predict the level of social response similar to a barometer that predicts the intensity of a coming storm in still calm environment

Study and evaluation of the Ronen Method accuracy at material interfaces

The Ronen method (RM) demands for successive resolutions of the diffusion equation where local diffusion constants are modified to reproduce more accurate estimates of the currents by a transport operator. The methodology is currently formulated by using the formalism of the collision probability method (CPM) for the current evaluation and RM was recently tested on a complete suite of one-dimensional multigroup benchmark problems. Small differences in the flux (less than 2%) were reported at material interfaces and close to the vacuum boundary with respect to the reference solution from transport (CPM). In this work, a verification check is first set to prove an equivalence between diffusion and transport when optimal diffusion coefficients are computed by the transport solution itself and employed in a standard diffusion calculation. 1G and 2G criticality problems from the same criticality benchmark test suite of previous publications are tested. Then, the accuracy of the flux distribution near the vacuum boundary and material interfaces is computed using the RM for different approximations of the vacuum boundary and with respect to decreasing values of the RM convergence criterion set in its iterative scheme. Indeed, the RM calculates more accurate flux distribution at all material interfaces, regardless of the initial values used for the diffusion coefficient and the extrapolated distance at the beginning of the iterative process. Maximal flux deviations fall everywhere around 0.01% when the RM convergence criterion is set to ten significant digits, leading to two orders of magnitude improvement in the flux deviation

Gauged cooling of topological excitations and emergent fermions on quantum simulators

Simulated cooling is a robust method for preparing low-energy states of many-body Hamiltonians on near-term quantum simulators. In such schemes, a subset of the simulator's spins (or qubits) are treated as a "bath," which extracts energy and entropy from the system of interest. However, such protocols are inefficient when applied to systems whose excitations are highly non-local in terms of the microscopic degrees of freedom, such as topological phases of matter; such excitations are difficult to extract by a local coupling to a bath. We explore a route to overcome this obstacle by encoding of the system's degrees of freedom into those of the quantum simulator in a non-local manner. To illustrate the approach, we show how to efficiently cool the ferromagnetic phase of the quantum Ising model, whose excitations are domain walls, via a "gauged cooling" protocol in which the Ising spins are coupled to a $Z_2$ gauge field that simultaneously acts as a reservoir for removing excitations. We show that our protocol can prepare the ground states of the ferromagnetic and paramagnetic phases equally efficiently. The gauged cooling protocol naturally extends to (interacting) fermionic systems, where it is equivalent to cooling by coupling to a fermionic bath via single-fermion hopping

Banded vegetation: Biological Productivity and Resilience

Abstract Vegetation band patterns on hill slopes are studied using a mathematical model. The model applies to drylands, where the limiting resource is water, and takes into account positive feedback effects between biomass and water. Multiple band patterns coexisting in wide precipitation ranges are found. For given precipitation and slope conditions band patterns with higher wavenumbers are more biologically productive. High-wavenumber patterns, however, are less resilient to environmental changes. r 2005 Published by Elsevier B.V

The MATHUSLA Test Stand

The rate of muons from LHC $pp$ collisions reaching the surface above the ATLAS interaction point is measured and compared with expected rates from decays of $W$ and $Z$ bosons and $b$- and $c$-quark jets. In addition, data collected during periods without beams circulating in the LHC provide a measurement of the background from cosmic ray inelastic backscattering that is compared to simulation predictions. Data were recorded during 2018 in a 2.5 $\times$ 2.5 $\times$ 6.5~$\rm{m}^3$ active volume MATHUSLA test stand detector unit consisting of two scintillator planes, one at the top and one at the bottom, which defined the trigger, and six layers of RPCs between them, grouped into three $(x,y)$-measuring layers separated by 1.74 m from each other. Triggers selecting both upward-going tracks and downward-going tracks were used.Comment: 18 pages, 11 figures, 1 tabl

Recent Progress and Next Steps for the MATHUSLA LLP Detector

We report on recent progress and next steps in the design of the proposed MATHUSLA Long Lived Particle (LLP) detector for the HL-LHC as part of the Snowmass 2021 process. Our understanding of backgrounds has greatly improved, aided by detailed simulation studies, and significant R&D has been performed on designing the scintillator detectors and understanding their performance. The collaboration is on track to complete a Technical Design Report, and there are many opportunities for interested new members to contribute towards the goal of designing and constructing MATHUSLA in time for HL-LHC collisions, which would increase the sensitivity to a large variety of highly motivated LLP signals by orders of magnitude.Comment: Contribution to Snowmass 2021 (EF09, EF10, IF6, IF9), 18 pages, 12 figures. v2: included additional endorser