Solitary and shock waves in discrete double power-law materials

A novel strongly nonlinear laminar metamaterial supporting new types of solitary and shock waves with impact energy mitigating capabilities is presented. It consists of steel plates with intermittent polymer toroidal rings acting as strongly nonlinear springs with large allowable strain. Their force-displacement relationship is described by the addition of two power-law relationships resulting in a solitary wave speed and width depending on the amplitude. This double nonlinearity allows splitting of an initial impulse into two separate strongly nonlinear solitary wave trains. Solitary and shock waves are observed experimentally and analyzed numerically in an assembly with Teflon o-rings.Comment: 14 pages, 6 figure

Making a smart city legible

This chapter discusses Lancaster City Council's AI for Lancaster Programme. The programme has been a collaboration between the City Council, the International Organization for Artificial Intelligence Legibility, PETRAS and Imagination Lancaster. The chapter describes the design concepts implemented in the city in order to communicate the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to citizens, juxtaposing the designs themselves with extracts from interviews and research conducted to evaluate them. Any innovation supporting the implementation of responsible AI systems in urban contexts should be welcomed, and tools like Design Fiction should be employed to smooth the way for this process. In conclusion, the chapter also discusses how the insights derived from the AI for Lancaster Programme can help inform smart city initiatives while supporting the emergence of hybrid sociologies to describe the urban, social, and technological world we live in

Making AI-Infused Products and Services More Legible

The increasing availability of large data sets has initiated a resurgence in artificial intelligence (AI) research. Today AI is integrated into a wide variety of so-called smart products to personalize user experiences. Smart technologies are typically designed for ease of use, with their complex underlying procedures (intentionally) obfuscated; explaining particular outcomes is hampered by their inherent ambiguity. This lack of legibility leads to misconceptions about how AI works. Through design research, the authors address the challenge of AI legibility by designing AI iconography as an accessible way to communicate and better understand the role AI and data increasingly play in our everyday interactions

Hybrid Session Verification through Endpoint API Generation

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2016.This paper proposes a new hybrid session verification methodology for applying session types directly to mainstream languages, based on generating protocol-specific endpoint APIs from multiparty session types. The API generation promotes static type checking of the behavioural aspect of the source protocol by mapping the state space of an endpoint in the protocol to a family of channel types in the target language. This is supplemented by very light run-time checks in the generated API that enforce a linear usage discipline on instances of the channel types. The resulting hybrid verification guarantees the absence of protocol violation errors during the execution of the session. We implement our methodology for Java as an extension to the Scribble framework, and use it to specify and implement compliant clients and servers for real-world protocols such as HTTP and SMTP

HELIUM PHOTODISINTEGRATION AND NUCLEOSYNTHESIS: IMPLICATIONS FOR TOPOLOGICAL DEFECTS, HIGH ENERGY COSMIC RAYS, AND MASSIVE BLACK HOLES

We consider the production of $^3$He and $^2$H by $^4$He photodisintegration initiated by non-thermal energy releases during early cosmic epochs. We find that this process cannot be the predominant source of primordial $^2$H since it would result in anomalously high $^3$He/D ratios in conflict with standard chemical evolution assumptions. We apply this fact to constrain topological defect models of highest energy cosmic ray (HECR) production. Such models have been proposed as possible sources of ultrahigh energy particles and gamma-rays with energies above $10^{20}$eV. The constraints on these models derived from $^4$He-photodisintegration are compared to corresponding limits from spectral distortions of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR) and from the observed diffuse gamma-ray background. It is shown that for reasonable primary particle injection spectra superconducting cosmic strings, unlike ordinary strings or annihilating monopoles, cannot produce the HECR flux at the present epoch without violating at least the $^4$He-photodisintegration bound. The constraint from the diffuse gamma-ray background rules out the dominant production of HECR by the decay of Grand Unification particles in models with cosmological evolution assuming standard fragmentation functions. Constraints on massive black hole induced photodisintegration are also discussed.Comment: 20 latex pages, 1 figure added via figures comman

Electromagnetic Cascades and Cascade Nucleosynthesis in the Early Universe

We describe a calculation of electromagnetic cascading in radiation and matter in the early universe initiated by the decay of massive particles or by some other process. We have used a combination of Monte Carlo and numerical techniques which enables us to use exact cross sections, where known, for all the relevant processes. In cascades initiated after the epoch of big bang nucleosynthesis $\gamma$-rays in the cascades will photodisintegrate $^4$He, producing $^3$He and deuterium. Using the observed $^3$He and deuterium abundances we are able to place constraints on the cascade energy deposition as a function of cosmic time. In the case of the decay of massive primordial particles, we place limits on the density of massive primordial particles as a function of their mean decay time, and on the expected intensity of decay neutrinos.Comment: compressed and uuencoded postscript. We now include a comparison with previous work of the photon spectrum in the cascade and the limits we calculate for the density of massive particles. The method of calculation of photon spectra at low energies has been improved. Most figures are revised. Our conclusions are substantially unchange

Lithium-6: A Probe of the Early Universe

I consider the synthesis of 6Li due to the decay of relic particles, such as gravitinos or moduli, after the epoch of Big Bang Nucleosynthesis. The synthesized 6Li/H ratio may be compared to 6Li/H in metal-poor stars which, in the absence of stellar depletion of 6Li, yields significantly stronger constraints on relic particle densities than the usual consideration of overproduction of 3He. Production of 6Li during such an era of non-thermal nucleosynthesis may also be regarded as a possible explanation for the relatively high 6Li/H ratios observed in metal-poor halo stars.Comment: final version, Physical Review Letters, additional figure giving limits on relic decaying particle

Hypercharge and the Cosmological Baryon Asymmetry

Stringent bounds on baryon and lepton number violating interactions have been derived from the requirement that such interactions, together with electroweak instantons, do not destroy a cosmological baryon asymmetry produced at an extremely high temperature in the big bang. While these bounds apply in specific models, we find that they are generically evaded. In particular, the only requirement for a theory to avoid these bounds is that it contain charged particles which, during a certain cosmological epoch, carry a non-zero hypercharge asymmetry. Hypercharge neutrality of the universe then dictates that the remaining particles must carry a compensating hypercharge density, which is necessarily shared amongst them so as to give a baryon asymmetry. Hence the generation of a hypercharge density in a sector of the theory forces the universe to have a baryon asymmetry.Comment: 12 pages plus 1 Postscript figure available upon request. LBL 3482