Darwinian Data Structure Selection

Data structure selection and tuning is laborious but can vastly improve an application's performance and memory footprint. Some data structures share a common interface and enjoy multiple implementations. We call them Darwinian Data Structures (DDS), since we can subject their implementations to survival of the fittest. We introduce ARTEMIS a multi-objective, cloud-based search-based optimisation framework that automatically finds optimal, tuned DDS modulo a test suite, then changes an application to use that DDS. ARTEMIS achieves substantial performance improvements for \emph{every} project in $5$ Java projects from DaCapo benchmark, $8$ popular projects and $30$ uniformly sampled projects from GitHub. For execution time, CPU usage, and memory consumption, ARTEMIS finds at least one solution that improves \emph{all} measures for $86\%$ ($37/43$) of the projects. The median improvement across the best solutions is $4.8\%$, $10.1\%$, $5.1\%$ for runtime, memory and CPU usage. These aggregate results understate ARTEMIS's potential impact. Some of the benchmarks it improves are libraries or utility functions. Two examples are gson, a ubiquitous Java serialization framework, and xalan, Apache's XML transformation tool. ARTEMIS improves gson by $16.5$\%, $1\%$ and $2.2\%$ for memory, runtime, and CPU; ARTEMIS improves xalan's memory consumption by $23.5$\%. \emph{Every} client of these projects will benefit from these performance improvements.Comment: 11 page

Asymptotically Universal Crossover in Perturbation Theory with a Field Cutoff

We discuss the crossover between the small and large field cutoff (denoted x_{max}) limits of the perturbative coefficients for a simple integral and the anharmonic oscillator. We show that in the limit where the order k of the perturbative coefficient a_k(x_{max}) becomes large and for x_{max} in the crossover region, a_k(x_{max}) is proportional to the integral from -infinity to x_{max} of e^{-A(x-x_0(k))^2}dx. The constant A and the function x_0(k) are determined empirically and compared with exact (for the integral) and approximate (for the anharmonic oscillator) calculations. We discuss how this approach could be relevant for the question of interpolation between renormalization group fixed points.Comment: 15 pages, 11 figs., improved and expanded version of hep-th/050304

The Effect of Scattering on Pulsar Polarization Angle

The low-frequency profiles of some pulsars manifest temporal broadening due to scattering, usually accompanied by flat polarization position angle (PA) curves. Assuming that the scattering works on the 4 Stokes parameters in the same way, we have simulated the effect of scattering on polarization profiles and find that the scattering can indeed flatten the PA curves. Since the higher-frequency profiles suffer less from scattering, they are convolved with scattering models to fit the observed low-frequency profiles. The calculated flat PA curves exactly reproduce the corresponding observations.Comment: 4 pages. Accepted by A&

Chiral expansion of the π0→γγ\pi^0\rightarrow\gamma\gamma decay width

A chiral field theory of mesons has been applied to study the contribution of the current quark masses to the $\pi^0\rightarrow\gamma\gamma$ decay width at the next leading order. $2\%$ enhancement has been predicted and there is no new parameter.Comment: 9 page

Optical Properties of Quantum-Dot-Doped Liquid Scintillators

Semiconductor nanoparticles (quantum dots) were studied in the context of liquid scintillator development for upcoming neutrino experiments. The unique optical and chemical properties of quantum dots are particularly promising for the use in neutrinoless double beta decay experiments. Liquid scintillators for large scale neutrino detectors have to meet specific requirements which are reviewed, highlighting the peculiarities of quantum-dot-doping. In this paper, we report results on laboratory-scale measurements of the attenuation length and the fluorescence properties of three commercial quantum dot samples. The results include absorbance and emission stability measurements, improvement in transparency due to filtering of the quantum dot samples, precipitation tests to isolate the quantum dots from solution and energy transfer studies with quantum dots and the fluorophore PPO.Comment: version 2, minor text update

Swift Observations of X-ray supernovae

We present a result of X-ray supernovae (SNe) survey using the Swift satellite public archive. An automatic searching program was designed to search X-ray SNe among all of the Swift archival observations between November 2004 and February 2011. Using the C++ program, 24 X-ray detectable supernovae have been found in the archive and 3 of them were newly-discovered in X-rays which are SN 1986L, SN 2003lx, and SN 2007od. In addition, SN 2003lx is a Type Ia supernova which may be the second X-ray detectable Type Ia after SN 2005ke (Immler et al. 2006). Calibrated data of luminous type Ib/c supernovae was consistent to the X-ray emission model done by Chevalier & Fransson (1994). Statistics about the luminosities and hardness ratio have been done to purpose of getting the X-ray emission features of the X-ray supernovae. The results from this work help investigating the X-ray evolution of SNe and developing similar X-ray SNe surveys in various X-rays missions