Island formation without attractive interactions

We show that adsorbates on surfaces can form islands even if there are no attractive interactions. Instead strong repulsion between adsorbates at short distances can lead to islands, because such islands increase the entropy of the adsorbates that are not part of the islands. We suggest that this mechanism cause the observed island formation in O/Pt(111), but it may be important for many other systems as well.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figure

The phase structure of a chirally invariant lattice Higgs-Yukawa model - numerical simulations

The phase diagram of a chirally invariant lattice Higgs-Yukawa model is explored by means of numerical simulations. The results revealing a rich phase structure are compared to analytical large Nf calculations which we performed earlier. The analytical and numerical results are in excellent agreement at large values of Nf. In the opposite case the large Nf computation still gives a good qualitative description of the phase diagram. In particular we find numerical evidence for the predicted ferrimagnetic phase at intermediate values of the Yukawa coupling constant and for the symmetric phase at strong Yukawa couplings. Emphasis is put on the finite size effects which can hide the existence of the latter symmetric phase.Comment: 14 pages, 11 figure

A note on the practical feasibility of domain-wall fermions

Domain-wall fermions preserve chiral symmetry up to terms that decrease exponentially when the lattice size in the fifth dimension is taken to infinity. The associated rates of convergence are given by the low-lying eigenvalues of a simple local operator in four dimensions. These can be computed using the Ritz functional technique and it turns out that the convergence tends to be extremely slow in the range of lattice spacings relevant to large-volume numerical simulations of lattice QCD. Two methods to improve on this situation are discussed.Comment: 14 pages, talk given by P. H. at the workshop on {\em Current theoretical problems in lattice field theory}, Ringberg, German

Optimal Sparsification for Some Binary CSPs Using Low-degree Polynomials

This paper analyzes to what extent it is possible to efficiently reduce the number of clauses in NP-hard satisfiability problems, without changing the answer. Upper and lower bounds are established using the concept of kernelization. Existing results show that if NP is not contained in coNP/poly, no efficient preprocessing algorithm can reduce n-variable instances of CNF-SAT with d literals per clause, to equivalent instances with $O(n^{d-e})$ bits for any e > 0. For the Not-All-Equal SAT problem, a compression to size $\~O(n^{d-1})$ exists. We put these results in a common framework by analyzing the compressibility of binary CSPs. We characterize constraint types based on the minimum degree of multivariate polynomials whose roots correspond to the satisfying assignments, obtaining (nearly) matching upper and lower bounds in several settings. Our lower bounds show that not just the number of constraints, but also the encoding size of individual constraints plays an important role. For example, for Exact Satisfiability with unbounded clause length it is possible to efficiently reduce the number of constraints to n+1, yet no polynomial-time algorithm can reduce to an equivalent instance with $O(n^{2-e})$ bits for any e > 0, unless NP is a subset of coNP/poly.Comment: Updated the cross-composition in lemma 18 (minor update), since the previous version did NOT satisfy requirement 4 of lemma 18 (the proof of Claim 20 was incorrect

FPT is Characterized by Useful Obstruction Sets

Many graph problems were first shown to be fixed-parameter tractable using the results of Robertson and Seymour on graph minors. We show that the combination of finite, computable, obstruction sets and efficient order tests is not just one way of obtaining strongly uniform FPT algorithms, but that all of FPT may be captured in this way. Our new characterization of FPT has a strong connection to the theory of kernelization, as we prove that problems with polynomial kernels can be characterized by obstruction sets whose elements have polynomial size. Consequently we investigate the interplay between the sizes of problem kernels and the sizes of the elements of such obstruction sets, obtaining several examples of how results in one area yield new insights in the other. We show how exponential-size minor-minimal obstructions for pathwidth k form the crucial ingredient in a novel OR-cross-composition for k-Pathwidth, complementing the trivial AND-composition that is known for this problem. In the other direction, we show that OR-cross-compositions into a parameterized problem can be used to rule out the existence of efficiently generated quasi-orders on its instances that characterize the NO-instances by polynomial-size obstructions.Comment: Extended abstract with appendix, as accepted to WG 201

The choice of model in the construction of input-output coefficients matrices

Models

Ten-dimensional wave packet simulations of methane scattering

We present results of wavepacket simulations of scattering of an oriented methane molecule from a flat surface including all nine internal vibrations. At a translational energy up to 96 kJ/mol we find that the scattering is almost completely elastic. Vibrational excitations when the molecule hits the surface and the corresponding deformation depend on generic features of the potential energy surface. In particular, our simulation indicate that for methane to dissociate the interaction of the molecule with the surface should lead to an elongated equilibrium C--H bond length close to the surface.Comment: RevTeX 15 pages, 3 eps figures: This article may be found at http://link.aip.org/link/?jcp/109/1966