Two-loop vacuum energy for Calabi-Yau orbifold models

A precise evaluation of the two-loop vacuum energy is provided for certain Z_2 x Z_2 Calabi-Yau orbifold models in the Heterotic string. The evaluation is based on the recent general prescription for superstring perturbation theory in terms of integration over cycles in supermoduli space, implemented at two-loops with the gauge-fixing methods based on the natural projection of supermoduli space onto moduli space using the super-period matrix. It is shown that the contribution from the interior of supermoduli space (computed with the procedure that has been used in previous two-loop computations) vanishes identically for both the E_8 x E_8 and Spin (32)/Z_2 Heterotic strings. The contribution from the boundary of supermoduli space is also evaluated, and shown to vanish for the E_8 x E_8 string but not for the Spin (32)/Z_2 string, thus breaking supersymmetry in this last model. As a byproduct, the vacuum energy in Type II superstrings is shown to vanish as well for these orbifolds.Comment: 70 pages, 2 figure

Higher Order Deformations of Complex Structures

Deformations of complex structures by finite Beltrami differentials are considered on general Riemann surfaces. Exact formulas to any fixed order are derived for the corresponding deformations of the period matrix, Green's functions, and correlation functions in conformal field theories with vanishing total central charge. The stress tensor is shown to give a simple representation of these deformations valid to all orders. Such deformation formulas naturally enter into the evaluation of superstring amplitudes at two-loop order with Ramond punctures, and at higher loop order, in the supergravity formulation of the RNS superstring

Audio style transfer

'Style transfer' among images has recently emerged as a very active research topic, fuelled by the power of convolution neural networks (CNNs), and has become fast a very popular technology in social media. This paper investigates the analogous problem in the audio domain: How to transfer the style of a reference audio signal to a target audio content? We propose a flexible framework for the task, which uses a sound texture model to extract statistics characterizing the reference audio style, followed by an optimization-based audio texture synthesis to modify the target content. In contrast to mainstream optimization-based visual transfer method, the proposed process is initialized by the target content instead of random noise and the optimized loss is only about texture, not structure. These differences proved key for audio style transfer in our experiments. In order to extract features of interest, we investigate different architectures, whether pre-trained on other tasks, as done in image style transfer, or engineered based on the human auditory system. Experimental results on different types of audio signal confirm the potential of the proposed approach.Comment: ICASSP 2018 - 2018 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), Apr 2018, Calgary, France. IEE

Chronoprints: Identifying Samples by Visualizing How They Change over Space and Time.

The modern tools of chemistry excel at identifying a sample, but the cost, size, complexity, and power consumption of these instruments often preclude their use in resource-limited settings. In this work, we demonstrate a simple and low-cost method for identifying a sample based on visualizing how the sample changes over space and time in response to a perturbation. Different types of perturbations could be used, and in this proof-of-concept we use a dynamic temperature gradient that rapidly cools different parts of the sample at different rates. We accomplish this by first loading several samples into long parallel channels on a "microfluidic thermometer chip." We then immerse one end of the chip in liquid nitrogen to create a dynamic temperature gradient along the channels, and we use an inexpensive USB microscope to record a video of how the samples respond to the changing temperature gradient. The video is then converted into several bitmap images (one per sample) that capture each sample's response to the perturbation in both space (the y-axis; the distance along the dynamic temperature gradient) and time (the x-axis); we call these images "chronological fingerprints" or "chronoprints" of each sample. If two samples' chronoprints are similar, this suggests that the samples are the same chemical substance or mixture, but if two samples' chronoprints are significantly different, this proves that the samples are chemically different. Since chronoprints are just bitmap images, they can be compared using a variety of techniques from computer science, and in this work we use three different image comparison algorithms to quantify chronoprint similarity. As a demonstration of the versatility of chronoprints, we use them in three different applications: distinguishing authentic olive oil from adulterated oil (an example of the over $10 billion global problem of food fraud), identifying adulterated or counterfeit medication (which represents around 10% of all medication in low- and middle-income countries), and distinguishing the occasionally confused pharmaceutical ingredients glycerol and diethylene glycol (whose accidental or intentional substitution has led to hundreds of deaths). The simplicity and versatility of chronoprints should make them valuable analytical tools in a variety of different fields

Dynamics of the Picking transformation on integer partitions

International audienceThis paper studies a conservative transformation defined on families of finite sets. It consists in removing one element from each set and adding a new set composed of the removed elements. This transformation is conservative in the sense that the union of all sets of the family always remains the same.We study the dynamical process obtained when iterating this deterministic transformation on a family of sets and we focus on the evolution of the cardinalities of the sets of the family. This point of view allows to consider the transformation as an application defined on the set of all partitions of a fixed integer (which is the total number of elements in the sets).We show that iterating this particular transformation always leads to a heterogeneous distribution of the cardinalities, where almost all integers within an interval are represented.We also tackle some issues concerning the structure of the transition graph which sums up the whole dynamics of this process for all partitions of a fixed integer

Faster and Enhanced Inclusion-Minimal Cograph Completion

We design two incremental algorithms for computing an inclusion-minimal completion of an arbitrary graph into a cograph. The first one is able to do so while providing an additional property which is crucial in practice to obtain inclusion-minimal completions using as few edges as possible : it is able to compute a minimum-cardinality completion of the neighbourhood of the new vertex introduced at each incremental step. It runs in $O(n+m')$ time, where $m'$ is the number of edges in the completed graph. This matches the complexity of the algorithm in [Lokshtanov, Mancini and Papadopoulos 2010] and positively answers one of their open questions. Our second algorithm improves the complexity of inclusion-minimal completion to $O(n+m\log^2 n)$ when the additional property above is not required. Moreover, we prove that many very sparse graphs, having only $O(n)$ edges, require $\Omega(n^2)$ edges in any of their cograph completions. For these graphs, which include many of those encountered in applications, the improvement we obtain on the complexity scales as $O(n/\log^2 n)$