Minimal Envy and Popular Matchings

We study ex-post fairness in the object allocation problem where objects are valuable and commonly owned. A matching is fair from individual perspective if it has only inevitable envy towards agents who received most preferred objects -- minimal envy matching. A matching is fair from social perspective if it is supported by majority against any other matching -- popular matching. Surprisingly, the two perspectives give the same outcome: when a popular matching exists it is equivalent to a minimal envy matching. We show the equivalence between global and local popularity: a matching is popular if and only if there does not exist a group of size up to 3 agents that decides to exchange their objects by majority, keeping the remaining matching fixed. We algorithmically show that an arbitrary matching is path-connected to a popular matching where along the path groups of up to 3 agents exchange their objects by majority. A market where random groups exchange objects by majority converges to a popular matching given such matching exists. When popular matching might not exist we define most popular matching as a matching that is popular among the largest subset of agents. We show that each minimal envy matching is a most popular matching and propose a polynomial-time algorithm to find them

Spin crossover: the quantum phase transition induced by high pressure

The relationship is established between the Berry phase and spin crossover in condensed matter physics induced by high pressure. It is shown that the geometric phase has topological origin and can be considered as the order parameter for such transition.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure

3,5-Bis(4-chloro­benzyl­idene)-1-methyl­piperidin-4-one

In the title mol­ecule, C20H17Cl2NO, the central heterocyclic ring adopts a flattened boat conformation. The dihedral angles between the planar part of this central heterocyclic ring [maximum deviation = 0.004 (1) Å] and the two almost planar side-chain fragments [maximum deviations = 0.015 (1) and 0.019 (1) Å], that include the aromatic ring and bridging atoms, are 18.1 (1) and 18.0 (1)°. In the crystal, pairs of weak inter­molecular C—H⋯O hydrogen bonds link mol­ecules into inversion dimers that form stacks along the a axis. The structure is further stabilized by weak inter­molecular C—H⋯π inter­actions involving the benzene rings

Anomalous Josephson effect in semiconducting nanowires as a signature of the topologically nontrivial phase

We study Josephson junctions made of semiconducting nanowires with Rashba spin-orbit coupling, where superconducting correlations are induced by the proximity effect. In the presence of a suitably directed magnetic field, the system displays the anomalous Josephson effect: a nonzero supercurrent in the absence of a phase bias between two superconductors. We show that this anomalous current can be increased significantly by tuning the nanowire into the helical regime. In particular, in a short junction, a large anomalous current is a signature for topologically nontrivial superconductivity in the nanowire.Comment: 10 pages, 9 figures; published versio

1-Benzyl-3,5-bis­(4-chloro­benzyl­idene)piperidin-4-one

The title compound, C26H21Cl2NO, crystallizes with two symmetry-independent mol­ecules (A and B) in the asymmetric unit. In both mol­ecules, the central heterocyclic ring adopts a sofa conformation. The dihedral angles between the planar part of this central heterocyclic ring [maximum deviations of 0.011 (1) and 0.036 (1) Å in mol­ecules A and B, respectively] and the two almost planar [maximum deviations of 0.020 (1) and 0.008 (1) Å in A and 0.007 (1) and 0.011 (1) in B] side-chain fragments that include the aromatic ring and bridging atoms are 20.1 (1) and 31.2 (1)° in mol­ecule A, and 26.4 (1) and 19.6 (1)° in mol­ecule B. The dihedral angles between the planar part of the heterocyclic ring and the benzyl substituent are 79.7 (1) and 53.2 (1)° in mol­ecules A and B, respectively. In the crystal, weak inter­molecular C—H⋯O hydrogen bonds link the two independent mol­ecules into dimers

The coexistence of superconductivity and ferromagnetism in nano-scale metallic grains

A nano-scale metallic grain in which the single-particle dynamics are chaotic is described by the so-called universal Hamiltonian. This Hamiltonian includes a superconducting pairing term and a ferromagnetic exchange term that compete with each other: pairing correlations favor minimal ground-state spin, while the exchange interaction favors maximal spin polarization. Of particular interest is the fluctuation-dominated regime where the bulk pairing gap is comparable to or smaller than the single-particle mean level spacing and the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer theory of superconductivity breaks down. Superconductivity and ferromagnetism can coexist in this regime. We identify signatures of the competition between superconductivity and ferromagnetism in a number of quantities: ground-state spin, conductance fluctuations when the grain is weakly coupled to external leads and the thermodynamic properties of the grain, such as heat capacity and spin susceptibility.Comment: 13 pages, 13 figures, Proceedings of the Conference on the Frontiers of Quantum and Mesoscopic Thermodynamics (FQMT11

Mirror Descent and Convex Optimization Problems With Non-Smooth Inequality Constraints

We consider the problem of minimization of a convex function on a simple set with convex non-smooth inequality constraint and describe first-order methods to solve such problems in different situations: smooth or non-smooth objective function; convex or strongly convex objective and constraint; deterministic or randomized information about the objective and constraint. We hope that it is convenient for a reader to have all the methods for different settings in one place. Described methods are based on Mirror Descent algorithm and switching subgradient scheme. One of our focus is to propose, for the listed different settings, a Mirror Descent with adaptive stepsizes and adaptive stopping rule. This means that neither stepsize nor stopping rule require to know the Lipschitz constant of the objective or constraint. We also construct Mirror Descent for problems with objective function, which is not Lipschitz continuous, e.g. is a quadratic function. Besides that, we address the problem of recovering the solution of the dual problem

Study of High Energy Gamma-Quanta Beyond the Atmosphere

Measurements of primary cosmic radiation gamma quanta from Proton I and II satellite

Many-to-Many Graph Matching: a Continuous Relaxation Approach

Graphs provide an efficient tool for object representation in various computer vision applications. Once graph-based representations are constructed, an important question is how to compare graphs. This problem is often formulated as a graph matching problem where one seeks a mapping between vertices of two graphs which optimally aligns their structure. In the classical formulation of graph matching, only one-to-one correspondences between vertices are considered. However, in many applications, graphs cannot be matched perfectly and it is more interesting to consider many-to-many correspondences where clusters of vertices in one graph are matched to clusters of vertices in the other graph. In this paper, we formulate the many-to-many graph matching problem as a discrete optimization problem and propose an approximate algorithm based on a continuous relaxation of the combinatorial problem. We compare our method with other existing methods on several benchmark computer vision datasets.Comment: 1