Creating mock catalogues of stellar haloes from cosmological simulations

We present a new technique for creating mock catalogues of the individual stars that make up the accreted component of stellar haloes in cosmological simulations and show how the catalogues can be used to test and interpret observational data. The catalogues are constructed from a combination of methods. A semi-analytic galaxy formation model is used to calculate the star formation history in haloes in an N-body simulation and dark matter particles are tagged with this stellar mass. The tags are converted into individual stars using a stellar population synthesis model to obtain the number density and evolutionary stage of the stars, together with a phase-space sampling method that distributes the stars while ensuring that the phase-space structure of the original N-body simulation is maintained. A set of catalogues based on the Λ cold dark matter Aquarius simulations of Milky Way mass haloes have been created and made publicly available on a website. Two example applications are discussed that demonstrate the power and flexibility of the mock catalogues. We show how the rich stellar substructure that survives in the stellar halo precludes a simple measurement of its density profile and demonstrate explicitly how pencil-beam surveys can return almost any value for the slope of the profile. We also show that localized variations in the abundance of particular types of stars, a signature of differences in the composition of stellar populations, allow streams to be easily identified

Good covers are algorithmically unrecognizable

A good cover in R^d is a collection of open contractible sets in R^d such that the intersection of any subcollection is either contractible or empty. Motivated by an analogy with convex sets, intersection patterns of good covers were studied intensively. Our main result is that intersection patterns of good covers are algorithmically unrecognizable. More precisely, the intersection pattern of a good cover can be stored in a simplicial complex called nerve which records which subfamilies of the good cover intersect. A simplicial complex is topologically d-representable if it is isomorphic to the nerve of a good cover in R^d. We prove that it is algorithmically undecidable whether a given simplicial complex is topologically d-representable for any fixed d \geq 5. The result remains also valid if we replace good covers with acyclic covers or with covers by open d-balls. As an auxiliary result we prove that if a simplicial complex is PL embeddable into R^d, then it is topologically d-representable. We also supply this result with showing that if a "sufficiently fine" subdivision of a k-dimensional complex is d-representable and k \leq (2d-3)/3, then the complex is PL embeddable into R^d.Comment: 22 pages, 5 figures; result extended also to acyclic covers in version

A Vehicular Traffic Flow Model Based on a Stochastic Acceleration Process

A new vehicular traffic flow model based on a stochastic jump process in vehicle acceleration and braking is introduced. It is based on a master equation for the single car probability density in space, velocity and acceleration with an additional vehicular chaos assumption and is derived via a Markovian ansatz for car pairs. This equation is analyzed using simple driver interaction models in the spatial homogeneous case. Velocity distributions in stochastic equilibrium, together with the car density dependence of their moments, i.e. mean velocity and scattering and the fundamental diagram are presented.Comment: 27 pages, 6 figure

Subtidal macrozoobenthos communities from northern Chile during and post El Niño 1997–1998

Despite a large amount of climatic and oceanographic information dealing with the recurring climate phenomenon El Niño (EN) and its well known impact on diversity of marine benthic communities, most published data are rather descriptive and consequently our understanding of the underlying mechanisms and processes that drive community structure during EN are still very scarce. In this study, we address two questions on the effects of EN on macrozoobenthic communities: (1) how does EN affect species diversity of the communities in northern Chile? and (2) is EN a phenomenon that restarts community assembling processes by affecting species interactions in northern Chile? To answer these questions, we compared species diversity and co-occurrence patterns of soft-bottoms macrozoobenthos communities from the continental shelf off northern Chile during (March 1998) and after (September 1998) the strong EN event 1997–1998. The methods used varied from species diversity and species co-occurrence analyses to multivariate ordination methods. Our results indicate that EN positively affects diversity of macrozoobenthos communities in the study area, increasing the species richness and diversity and decreasing the species dominance. EN represents a strong disturbance that affects species interactions that rule the species assembling processes in shallow-water, sea-bottom environments

Understanding Galaxy Formation and Evolution

The old dream of integrating into one the study of micro and macrocosmos is now a reality. Cosmology, astrophysics, and particle physics intersect in a scenario (but still not a theory) of cosmic structure formation and evolution called Lambda Cold Dark Matter (LCDM) model. This scenario emerged mainly to explain the origin of galaxies. In these lecture notes, I first present a review of the main galaxy properties, highlighting the questions that any theory of galaxy formation should explain. Then, the cosmological framework and the main aspects of primordial perturbation generation and evolution are pedagogically detached. Next, I focus on the ``dark side'' of galaxy formation, presenting a review on LCDM halo assembling and properties, and on the main candidates for non-baryonic dark matter. It is shown how the nature of elemental particles can influence on the features of galaxies and their systems. Finally, the complex processes of baryon dissipation inside the non-linearly evolving CDM halos, formation of disks and spheroids, and transformation of gas into stars are briefly described, remarking on the possibility of a few driving factors and parameters able to explain the main body of galaxy properties. A summary and a discussion of some of the issues and open problems of the LCDM paradigm are given in the final part of these notes.Comment: 50 pages, 10 low-resolution figures (for normal-resolution, DOWNLOAD THE PAPER (PDF, 1.9 Mb) FROM http://www.astroscu.unam.mx/~avila/avila.pdf). Lectures given at the IV Mexican School of Astrophysics, July 18-25, 2005 (submitted to the Editors on March 15, 2006

Linear chaos for the Quick-Thinking-Driver model

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00233-015-9704-6In recent years, the topic of car-following has experimented an increased importance in traffic engineering and safety research. This has become a very interesting topic because of the development of driverless cars (Google driverless cars, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_driverless_car).Driving models which describe the interaction between adjacent vehicles in the same lane have a big interest in simulation modeling, such as the Quick-Thinking-Driver model. A non-linear version of it can be given using the logistic map, and then chaos appears. We show that an infinite-dimensional version of the linear model presents a chaotic behaviour using the same approach as for studying chaos of death models of cell growth.The authors were supported by a grant from the FPU program of MEC and MEC Project MTM2013-47093-P.Conejero, JA.; Murillo Arcila, M.; Seoane-Sepúlveda, JB. (2016). Linear chaos for the Quick-Thinking-Driver model. Semigroup Forum. 92(2):486-493. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00233-015-9704-6S486493922Aroza, J., Peris, A.: Chaotic behaviour of birth-and-death models with proliferation. J. Differ. Equ. Appl. 18(4), 647–655 (2012)Banasiak, J., Lachowicz, M.: Chaos for a class of linear kinetic models. C. R. Acad. Sci. Paris Série II 329, 439–444 (2001)Banasiak, J., Lachowicz, M.: Topological chaos for birth-and-death-type models with proliferation. Math. Models Methods Appl. Sci. 12(6), 755–775 (2002)Banasiak, J., Lachowicz, M., Moszyński, M.: Topological chaos: when topology meets medicine. Appl. Math. Lett. 16(3), 303–308 (2003)Banasiak, J., Moszyński, M.: A generalization of Desch–Schappacher–Webb criteria for chaos. Discret. Contin. Dyn. Syst. 12(5), 959–972 (2005)Banasiak, J., Moszyński, M.: Dynamics of birth-and-death processes with proliferation–stability and chaos. Discret. Contin. Dyn. Syst. 29(1), 67–79 (2011)Banks, J., Brooks, J., Cairns, G., Davis, G., Stacey, P.: On Devaney’s definition of chaos. Am. Math. Mon. 99(4), 332–334 (1992)Barrachina, X., Conejero, J.A.: Devaney chaos and distributional chaos in the solution of certain partial differential equations. Abstr. Appl. Anal. 457,019, 11 (2012)Bermúdez, T., Bonilla, A., Martínez-Giménez, F., Peris, A.: Li-Yorke and distributionally chaotic operators. J. Math. Anal. Appl. 373(1), 83–93 (2011)Brackstone, M., McDonald, M.: Car-following: a historical review. Transp. Res. Part F 2(4), 181–196 (1999)Brzeźniak, Z., Dawidowicz, A.L.: On periodic solutions to the von Foerster–Lasota equation. Semigroup Forum 78, 118–137 (2009)Chandler, R.E., Herman, R., Montroll, E.W.: Traffic dynamics: studies in car following. Op. Res. 6, 165–184 (1958)Chung, C.C., Gartner, N.: Acceleration noise as a measure of effectiveness in the operation of traffic control systems. Operations Research Center. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Cambridge (1973)CNN (2014) Driverless car tech gets serious at CES. http://edition.cnn.com/2014/01/09/tech/innovation/self-driving-cars-ces/ . Accessed 7 Apr 2014Conejero, J.A., Rodenas, F., Trujillo, M.: Chaos for the hyperbolic bioheat equation. Discret. Contin. Dyn. Syst. 35(2), 653–668 (2015)DARPA Grand Challenge. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_DARPA_Grand_Challenge#2005_Grand_Challengede Laubenfels, R., Emamirad, H., Protopopescu, V.: Linear chaos and approximation. J. Approx. Theory 105(1), 176–187 (2000)Desch, W., Schappacher, W., Webb, G.F.: Hypercyclic and chaotic semigroups of linear operators. Ergod. Theory Dyn. Syst. 17(4), 793–819 (1997)El Mourchid, S.: The imaginary point spectrum and hypercyclicity. Semigroup Forum 73(2), 313–316 (2006)El Mourchid, S., Metafune, G., Rhandi, A., Voigt, J.: On the chaotic behaviour of size structured cell populations. J. Math. Anal. 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Swift: A modern highly-parallel gravity and smoothed particle hydrodynamics solver for astrophysical and cosmological applications

Numerical simulations have become one of the key tools used by theorists in all the fields of astrophysics and cosmology. The development of modern tools that target the largest existing computing systems and exploit state-of-the-art numerical methods and algorithms is thus crucial. In this paper, we introduce the fully open-source highly-parallel, versatile, and modular coupled hydrodynamics, gravity, cosmology, and galaxy-formation code Swift. The software package exploits hybrid shared- and distributed-memory task-based parallelism, asynchronous communications, and domain-decomposition algorithms based on balancing the workload, rather than the data, to efficiently exploit modern high-performance computing cluster architectures. Gravity is solved for using a fast-multipole-method, optionally coupled to a particle mesh solver in Fourier space to handle periodic volumes. For gas evolution, multiple modern flavours of Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics are implemented. Swiftalso evolves neutrinos using a state-of-the-art particle-based method. Two complementary networks of sub-grid models for galaxy formation as well as extensions to simulate planetary physics are also released as part of the code. An extensive set of output options, including snapshots, light-cones, power spectra, and a coupling to structure finders are also included. We describe the overall code architecture, summarise the consistency and accuracy tests that were performed, and demonstrate the excellent weak-scaling performance of the code using a representative cosmological hydrodynamical problem with ≈300 billion particles. The code is released to the community alongside extensive documentation for both users and developers, a large selection of example test problems, and a suite of tools to aid in the analysis of large simulations run with Swift

Swift: A modern highly-parallel gravity and smoothed particle hydrodynamics solver for astrophysical and cosmological applications

Numerical simulations have become one of the key tools used by theorists in all the fields of astrophysics and cosmology. The development of modern tools that target the largest existing computing systems and exploit state-of-the-art numerical methods and algorithms is thus crucial. In this paper, we introduce the fully open-source highly-parallel, versatile, and modular coupled hydrodynamics, gravity, cosmology, and galaxy-formation code Swift. The software package exploits hybrid task-based parallelism, asynchronous communications, and domain-decomposition algorithms based on balancing the workload, rather than the data, to efficiently exploit modern high-performance computing cluster architectures. Gravity is solved for using a fast-multipole-method, optionally coupled to a particle mesh solver in Fourier space to handle periodic volumes. For gas evolution, multiple modern flavours of Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics are implemented. Swift also evolves neutrinos using a state-of-the-art particle-based method. Two complementary networks of sub-grid models for galaxy formation as well as extensions to simulate planetary physics are also released as part of the code. An extensive set of output options, including snapshots, light-cones, power spectra, and a coupling to structure finders are also included. We describe the overall code architecture, summarize the consistency and accuracy tests that were performed, and demonstrate the excellent weak-scaling performance of the code using a representative cosmological hydrodynamical problem with $\approx$$300$ billion particles. The code is released to the community alongside extensive documentation for both users and developers, a large selection of example test problems, and a suite of tools to aid in the analysis of large simulations run with Swift.Comment: 39 pages, 18 figures, submitted to MNRAS. Code, documentation, and examples available at www.swiftsim.co

The FLAMINGO project: revisiting the S8 tension and the role of baryonic physics

A number of recent studies have found evidence for a tension between observations of large-scale structure (LSS) and the predictions of the standard model of cosmology with the cosmological parameters fit to the cosmic microwave background (CMB). The origin of this ‘S8 tension’ remains unclear, but possibilities include new physics beyond the standard model, unaccounted for systematic errors in the observational measurements and/or uncertainties in the role that baryons play. Here, we carefully examine the latter possibility using the new FLAMINGO suite of large-volume cosmological hydrodynamical simulations. We project the simulations onto observable harmonic space and compare with observational measurements of the power and cross-power spectra of cosmic shear, CMB lensing, and the thermal Sunyaev-Zel’dovich (tSZ) effect. We explore the dependence of the predictions on box size and resolution and cosmological parameters, including the neutrino mass, and the efficiency and nature of baryonic ‘feedback’. Despite the wide range of astrophysical behaviours simulated, we find that baryonic effects are not sufficiently large to remove the S8 tension. Consistent with recent studies, we find the CMB lensing power spectrum is in excellent agreement with the standard model, while the cosmic shear power spectrum, tSZ effect power spectrum, and the cross-spectra between shear, CMB lensing, and the tSZ effect are all in varying degrees of tension with the CMB-specified standard model. These results suggest that some mechanism is required to slow the growth of fluctuations at late times and/or on non-linear scales, but that it is unlikely that baryon physics is driving this modification

Electronic data publication in geochemistry

Many disciplines of geochemistry have no data reporting standards, and their use of metadata is inadequately developed. This presents problems to the quality of the published science, and it limits the utility of computers in data analysis and the exploitation of Information Technology (IT). We discuss problems of data and metadata publication, in particular for geochemistry, and offer solutions to these problems in the form of consistent data publication formats and a proposal for publication of metadata in geochemistry. Metadata are grouped according to types (location, sampling, characterization), and this grouping allows for the transfer of these formats to other Earth science disciplines. In a companion paper [Helly et al., 2003], we illustrate how these metadata groupings can be used in an IT context. Formats presented here are comprehensive and allow for modification and expansion. It is the hope of the authors that this paper initiates a constructive discussion of data formats and metadata in geochemistry. The most recent contributions to this discussion may be found at http:\\earthref.org\metadata\GERM\.Keywords: sample characterization, database, geochemistry, information technology, Metadata, cyberinfrastructur