Hypothesis test for normal mixture models: The EM approach

Normal mixture distributions are arguably the most important mixture models, and also the most technically challenging. The likelihood function of the normal mixture model is unbounded based on a set of random samples, unless an artificial bound is placed on its component variance parameter. Moreover, the model is not strongly identifiable so it is hard to differentiate between over dispersion caused by the presence of a mixture and that caused by a large variance, and it has infinite Fisher information with respect to mixing proportions. There has been extensive research on finite normal mixture models, but much of it addresses merely consistency of the point estimation or useful practical procedures, and many results require undesirable restrictions on the parameter space. We show that an EM-test for homogeneity is effective at overcoming many challenges in the context of finite normal mixtures. We find that the limiting distribution of the EM-test is a simple function of the $0.5\chi^2_0+0.5\chi^2_1$ and $\chi^2_1$ distributions when the mixing variances are equal but unknown and the $\chi^2_2$ when variances are unequal and unknown. Simulations show that the limiting distributions approximate the finite sample distribution satisfactorily. Two genetic examples are used to illustrate the application of the EM-test.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/08-AOS651 the Annals of Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Subsystem Rényi Entropy of Thermal Ensembles for SYK-like models

The Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model is an N-modes fermionic model with infinite range random interactions. In this work, we study the thermal Rényi entropy for a subsystem of the SYK model using the path-integral formalism in the large-N limit. The results are consistent with exact diagonalization [1] and can be well approximated by thermal entropy with an effective temperature [2] when subsystem size M ≤ N/2. We also consider generalizations of the SYK model with quadratic random hopping term or U(1) charge conservation

Anti-shadowing Effect on Charmonium Production at a Fixed-target Experiment Using LHC Beams

We investigate charmonium production in Pb+Pb collisions at LHC beam energy $E_{\text {lab}}$=2.76 A TeV at fixed-target experiment ($\sqrt {s_{\text{NN}}}$=72 GeV). In the frame of a transport approach including cold and hot nuclear matter effects on charmonium evolution, we focus on the anti-shadowing effect on the nuclear modification factors $R_{AA}$ and $r_{AA}$ for the $J/\psi$ yield and transverse momentum. The yield is more suppressed at less forward rapidity ($y_\text{lab}\simeq$2) than that at very forward rapidity ($y_\text{lab}\simeq$4) due to the shadowing and anti-shadowing in different rapidity bins.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures; submitted to Advances in High Energy Physics. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1409.555

Tunable Quantum Chaos in the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev Model Coupled to a Thermal Bath

The Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model describes Majorana fermions with random interaction, which displays many interesting properties such as non-Fermi liquid behavior, quantum chaos, emergent conformal symmetry and holographic duality. Here we consider a SYK model or a chain of SYK models with $N$ Majorana fermion modes coupled to another SYK model with $N^2$ Majorana fermion modes, in which the latter has many more degrees of freedom and plays the role as a thermal bath. For a single SYK model coupled to the thermal bath, we show that although the Lyapunov exponent is still proportional to temperature, it monotonically decreases from $2\pi/\beta$ ($\beta=1/(k_BT)$, $T$ is temperature) to zero as the coupling strength to the thermal bath increases. For a chain of SYK models, when they are uniformly coupled to the thermal bath, we show that the butterfly velocity displays a crossover from a $\sqrt{T}$-dependence at relatively high temperature to a linear $T$-dependence at low temperature, with the crossover temperature also controlled by the coupling strength to the thermal bath. If only the end of the SYK chain is coupled to the thermal bath, the model can introduce a spatial dependence of both the Lyapunov exponent and the butterfly velocity. Our models provide canonical examples for the study of thermalization within chaotic models.Comment: 28 pages, 9 figures. References adde