51,128 research outputs found
Towards a knowledge-based system to assist the Brazilian data-collecting system operation
A study is reported which was carried out to show how a knowledge-based approach would lead to a flexible tool to assist the operation task in a satellite-based environmental data collection system. Some characteristics of a hypothesized system comprised of a satellite and a network of Interrogable Data Collecting Platforms (IDCPs) are pointed out. The Knowledge-Based Planning Assistant System (KBPAS) and some aspects about how knowledge is organized in the IDCP's domain are briefly described
Chaos and a Resonance Mechanism for Structure Formation in Inflationary Models
We exhibit a resonance mechanism of amplification of density perturbations in
inflationary mo-dels, using a minimal set of ingredients (an effective
cosmological constant, a scalar field minimally coupled to the gravitational
field and matter), common to most models in the literature of inflation. This
mechanism is based on the structure of homoclinic cylinders, emanating from an
unstable periodic orbit in the neighborhood of a saddle-center critical point,
present in the phase space of the model. The cylindrical structure induces
oscillatory motions of the scales of the universe whenever the orbit visits the
neighborhood of the saddle-center, before the universe enters a period of
exponential expansion. The oscillations of the scale functions produce, by a
resonance mechanism, the amplification of a selected wave number spectrum of
density perturbations, and can explain the hierarchy of scales observed in the
actual universe. The transversal crossings of the homoclinic cylinders induce
chaos in the dynamics of the model, a fact intimately connected to the
resonance mechanism occuring immediately before the exit to inflation.Comment: 4 pages. This essay received an Honorable Mention from the Gravity
Research Foundation, 1998-Ed. To appear in Mod. Phys. Lett.
Efficient algorithms for tensor scaling, quantum marginals and moment polytopes
We present a polynomial time algorithm to approximately scale tensors of any
format to arbitrary prescribed marginals (whenever possible). This unifies and
generalizes a sequence of past works on matrix, operator and tensor scaling.
Our algorithm provides an efficient weak membership oracle for the associated
moment polytopes, an important family of implicitly-defined convex polytopes
with exponentially many facets and a wide range of applications. These include
the entanglement polytopes from quantum information theory (in particular, we
obtain an efficient solution to the notorious one-body quantum marginal
problem) and the Kronecker polytopes from representation theory (which capture
the asymptotic support of Kronecker coefficients). Our algorithm can be applied
to succinct descriptions of the input tensor whenever the marginals can be
efficiently computed, as in the important case of matrix product states or
tensor-train decompositions, widely used in computational physics and numerical
mathematics.
We strengthen and generalize the alternating minimization approach of
previous papers by introducing the theory of highest weight vectors from
representation theory into the numerical optimization framework. We show that
highest weight vectors are natural potential functions for scaling algorithms
and prove new bounds on their evaluations to obtain polynomial-time
convergence. Our techniques are general and we believe that they will be
instrumental to obtain efficient algorithms for moment polytopes beyond the
ones consider here, and more broadly, for other optimization problems
possessing natural symmetries
Corrections to Finite Size Scaling in Percolation
A 1/L-expansion for percolation problems is proposed, where L is the lattice
finite length. The square lattice with 27 different sizes L = 18, 22 ... 1594
is considered. Certain spanning probabilities were determined by Monte Carlo
simulations, as continuous functions of the site occupation probability p. We
estimate the critical threshold pc by applying the quoted expansion to these
data. Also, the universal spanning probability at pc for an annulus with aspect
ratio r=1/2 is estimated as C = 0.876657(45)
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