Palaeolimnology of Lake Sapanca and identification of historic earthquake signals, Northern Anatolian Fault Zone (Turkey)

Lake Sapanca is located on a strand of the Northern Anatolian Fault Zone (NAFZ, Turkey), where a series of strong earthquakes (Ms >6.0) have occurred over the past hundred years. Identifying prehistoric earthquakes in and around Lake Sapanca is key to a better understanding of plate movements along the NAFZ. This study contributes to the development of palaeolimnological tools to identify past earthquakes in Lake Sapanca. To this end several promising proxies were investigated, specifically lithology, magnetic susceptibility, grain size (thin-section and laser analysis), geochemistry, pollen concentration, diatom assemblages, 137Cs and 210Pb. Sedimentological indicators provided evidence for reworked, turbidite-like or homogeneous facies (event layers) in several short cores (<45 cm). Other indicators of sediment input and the historical chronicles available for the area suggest that three of these event layers likely originated from the AD 1957, 1967 and 1999 earthquakes. Recent changes in sediment deposition and nutrient levels have also been identified, but are probably not related to earthquakes. This study demonstrates that a combination of indicators can be used to recognize earthquake-related event layers in cores that encompass a longer period of time

The magnetic field of the double-lined spectroscopic binary system HD 5550

(Abridged) In the framework of the BinaMicS project, we have begun a study of the magnetic properties of a sample of intermediate-mass and massive short-period binary systems, as a function of binarity properties. We report in this paper the characterisation of the magnetic field of HD 5550, a double-lined spectroscopic binary system of intermediate-mass, using high-resolution spectropolarimetric Narval observations of HD 5550. We first fit the intensity spectra using Zeeman/ATLAS9 LTE synthetic spectra to estimate the effective temperatures, microturbulent velocities, and the abundances of some elements of both components, as well as the light-ratio of the system. We then fit the least-square deconvolved $I$ profiles to determine the radial and projected rotational velocities of both stars. We then analysed the shape and evolution of the LSD $V$ profiles using the oblique rotator model to characterise the magnetic fields of both stars. We confirm the Ap nature of the primary, previously reported in the literature, and find that the secondary displays spectral characteristics typical of an Am star. While a magnetic field is clearly detected in the lines of the primary, no magnetic field is detected in the secondary, in any of our observation. If a dipolar field were present at the surface of the Am star, its polar strength must be below 40 G. The faint variability observed in the Stokes $V$ profiles of the Ap star allowed us to propose a rotation period of $6.84_{-0.39}^{+0.61}$ d, close to the orbital period ($\sim$6.82 d), suggesting that the star is synchronised with its orbit. By fitting the variability of the $V$ profiles, we propose that the Ap component hosts a dipolar field inclined with the rotation axis at an angle $\beta=156\pm17$ $^{\circ}$ and a polar strength $B_{\rm d}=65 \pm 20$ G. The field strength is the weakest known for an Ap star.Comment: 13 pages, 12 figures, accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysic

Exploring Outliers in Crowdsourced Ranking for QoE

Outlier detection is a crucial part of robust evaluation for crowdsourceable assessment of Quality of Experience (QoE) and has attracted much attention in recent years. In this paper, we propose some simple and fast algorithms for outlier detection and robust QoE evaluation based on the nonconvex optimization principle. Several iterative procedures are designed with or without knowing the number of outliers in samples. Theoretical analysis is given to show that such procedures can reach statistically good estimates under mild conditions. Finally, experimental results with simulated and real-world crowdsourcing datasets show that the proposed algorithms could produce similar performance to Huber-LASSO approach in robust ranking, yet with nearly 8 or 90 times speed-up, without or with a prior knowledge on the sparsity size of outliers, respectively. Therefore the proposed methodology provides us a set of helpful tools for robust QoE evaluation with crowdsourcing data.Comment: accepted by ACM Multimedia 2017 (Oral presentation). arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1407.763

Fractal Markets Hypothesis and the Global Financial Crisis: Scaling, Investment Horizons and Liquidity

We investigate whether fractal markets hypothesis and its focus on liquidity and invest- ment horizons give reasonable predictions about dynamics of the financial markets during the turbulences such as the Global Financial Crisis of late 2000s. Compared to the mainstream efficient markets hypothesis, fractal markets hypothesis considers financial markets as com- plex systems consisting of many heterogenous agents, which are distinguishable mainly with respect to their investment horizon. In the paper, several novel measures of trading activity at different investment horizons are introduced through scaling of variance of the underlying processes. On the three most liquid US indices - DJI, NASDAQ and S&P500 - we show that predictions of fractal markets hypothesis actually fit the observed behavior quite well.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figure

The Level-0 Muon Trigger for the LHCb Experiment

A very compact architecture has been developed for the first level Muon Trigger of the LHCb experiment that processes 40 millions of proton-proton collisions per second. For each collision, it receives 3.2 kBytes of data and it finds straight tracks within a 1.2 microseconds latency. The trigger implementation is massively parallel, pipelined and fully synchronous with the LHC clock. It relies on 248 high density Field Programable Gate arrays and on the massive use of multigigabit serial link transceivers embedded inside FPGAs.Comment: 33 pages, 16 figures, submitted to NIM

Microstructure Effects on Daily Return Volatility in Financial Markets

We simulate a series of daily returns from intraday price movements initiated by microstructure elements. Significant evidence is found that daily returns and daily return volatility exhibit first order autocorrelation, but trading volume and daily return volatility are not correlated, while intraday volatility is. We also consider GARCH effects in daily return series and show that estimates using daily returns are biased from the influence of the level of prices. Using daily price changes instead, we find evidence of a significant GARCH component. These results suggest that microstructure elements have a considerable influence on the return generating process.Comment: 15 pages, as presented at the Complexity Workshop in Aix-en-Provenc

Charge Transport in Non-Irradiated and Irradiated Silicon Diodes

A model describing the transport of charge carriers generated in silicon detectors (standard planar float zone and MESA diodes) by ionizing particles is presented. The current pulse response induced by $\alpha$ and $\beta$ particles in non-irradiated detectors and detectors irradiated up to fluences $\Phi \approx 3 \cdot 10^{14}$ particles/cm$^2$ is reproduced through this model: i) by adding a small n-type region 15 $\mu$m deep on the $p^+$ side for the standard planar float zone detectors at fluences beyond the n to p-type inversion and ii) for the MESA detectors, by considering one dead layer 14 $\mu$m deep (observed experimentally) on each side, and introducing a second (delayed) component. For both types of detectors, the model gives mobilities decreasing linearily up to fluences of about $5 \cdot 10^{13}$ particles/cm$^2$ and converging, beyond, to saturation values of about 1000 cm$^2$/Vs and 455 cm$^2$/Vs for electrons and holes, respectively. At a fluence $\Phi \approx 10^{14}$ particles/cm$^2$, charge collection deficits of about 13\% for $\beta$ particles, 25\% for $\alpha$ particles incident on the front and 35\% for $\alpha$ particles incident on the back of the detector are found for both type of diodes

Study of charge Transport in Silicon Detectors: Non-Irradiated and Irradiated

The electrical characteristics of silicon detectors (standard planar float zone and MESA detectors) as a function of the particle fluence can be extracted by the application of a model describing the transport of charge carriers generated in the detectors by ionizing particles. The current pulse response induced by $\alpha$ and $\beta$ particles in non-irradiated detectors and detectors irradiated up to fluences $\Phi \approx 3 \cdot 10^{14}$ particles/cm$^2$ is reproduced via this model: i) by adding a small n-type region 15 $\mu$m deep on the $p^+$ side for the detectors at fluences beyond the n to p-type inversion and ii) for the MESA detectors, by considering one additional dead layer of 14 $\mu$m (observed experimentally) on each side of the detector, and introducing a second (delayed) component to the current pulse response. For both types of detectors, the model gives mobilities decreasing linearily up to fluences of about $5 \cdot 10^{13}$ particles/cm$^2$ and converging, beyond, to saturation values of about 1050 cm$^2$/Vs and 450 cm$^2$/Vs for electrons and holes, respectively. At a fluence $\Phi \approx 10^{14}$ particles/cm$^2$ (corresponding to about ten years of operation at the CERN-LHC), charge collection deficits of about 14\% for $\beta$ particles, 25\% for $\alpha$ particles incident on the front and 35\% for $\alpha$ particles incident on the back of the detector are found for both type of detectors

Optimizing a Certified Proof Checker for a Large-Scale Computer-Generated Proof

In recent work, we formalized the theory of optimal-size sorting networks with the goal of extracting a verified checker for the large-scale computer-generated proof that 25 comparisons are optimal when sorting 9 inputs, which required more than a decade of CPU time and produced 27 GB of proof witnesses. The checker uses an untrusted oracle based on these witnesses and is able to verify the smaller case of 8 inputs within a couple of days, but it did not scale to the full proof for 9 inputs. In this paper, we describe several non-trivial optimizations of the algorithm in the checker, obtained by appropriately changing the formalization and capitalizing on the symbiosis with an adequate implementation of the oracle. We provide experimental evidence of orders of magnitude improvements to both runtime and memory footprint for 8 inputs, and actually manage to check the full proof for 9 inputs.Comment: IMADA-preprint-c