A Model for Quantum Stochastic Absorption in Absorbing Disordered Media

Wave propagation in coherently absorbing disordered media is generally modeled by adding a complex part to the real part of the potential. In such a case, it is already understood that the complex potential plays a duel role; it acts as an absorber as well as a reflector due to the mismatch of the phase of the real and complex parts of the potential. Although this model gives expected results for weakly absorbing disordered media, it gives unphysical results for the strong absorption regime where it causes the system to behave like a perfect reflector. To overcome this issue, we develop a model here using stochastic absorption for the modeling of absorption by "fake", or "side", channels obviating the need for a complex potential. This model of stochastic absorption eliminates the reflection that is coupled with the absorption in the complex potential model and absorption is proportional to the magnitude of the absorbing parameter. Solving the statistics of the reflection coefficient and its phase for both the models, we argue that stochastic absorption is a potentially better way of modeling absorbing disordered media.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure

Community and Institutional Led Multi-Disciplinary Approaches in Implementation of Integrated Watershed Management in India A Case study from Karnataka State

Since independence, reforms towards Panchayat Raj Institutions (PRIs) have focused on designing of legal and administrative structures that institutionalize decentralized governance and planning, while guaranteeing that such a system does not allow the local elite to dominate the marginalized units of the people. With the advent of the 73rd amendment in Indian constitution, the panchayat system is looked as a significant development in handling rural governance in India. In this aspect, the state of Karnataka can be considered in many ways as one of the active states in promoting decentralization. Karnataka is in the forefront when it comes to devolution of functions and financial powers to PRIs. Hence, the current study has the broad objective to undertake a situational and adopting SWOT analysis to determine the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) related to existing Watershed committees and Water User Co-operative Societies in Karnataka under Integrated Watershed Management Programme (IWMP) in terms of the structure, function and factors influencing in implementation of Watershed programme in the state of Karnataka, India. The findings revealed that about 90 % percent of all committees are found to exist on record (structural level), SWOT analysis clearly shown that community-led water use associations are performing better than the department led water user associations in the implementation of IWMP. While the structure and legal status of PRIs have matured over the years, it is clearly recognized that true public involvement in progress and governance through PRIs has a long way to go.KEYWORDS: Decentralisation, Participatory Development, Local Governance, Integrated Watershed Management Programm

DeepFuse: A Deep Unsupervised Approach for Exposure Fusion with Extreme Exposure Image Pairs

We present a novel deep learning architecture for fusing static multi-exposure images. Current multi-exposure fusion (MEF) approaches use hand-crafted features to fuse input sequence. However, the weak hand-crafted representations are not robust to varying input conditions. Moreover, they perform poorly for extreme exposure image pairs. Thus, it is highly desirable to have a method that is robust to varying input conditions and capable of handling extreme exposure without artifacts. Deep representations have known to be robust to input conditions and have shown phenomenal performance in a supervised setting. However, the stumbling block in using deep learning for MEF was the lack of sufficient training data and an oracle to provide the ground-truth for supervision. To address the above issues, we have gathered a large dataset of multi-exposure image stacks for training and to circumvent the need for ground truth images, we propose an unsupervised deep learning framework for MEF utilizing a no-reference quality metric as loss function. The proposed approach uses a novel CNN architecture trained to learn the fusion operation without reference ground truth image. The model fuses a set of common low level features extracted from each image to generate artifact-free perceptually pleasing results. We perform extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluation and show that the proposed technique outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches for a variety of natural images.Comment: ICCV 201

Weak Lensing Effect on CMB in the Presence of a Dipole Anisotropy

We investigate weak lensing effect on cosmic microwave background (CMB) in the presence of dipole anisotropy. The approach of flat-sky approximation is considered. We determine the functions $\sigma_0^2$ and $\sigma_2^2$ that appear in expressions of the lensed CMB power spectrum in the presence of a dipole anisotropy. We determine the correction to B-mode power spectrum which is found to be appreciable at low multipoles ($l$). However, the temperature and E-mode power spectrum are not altered significantly.Comment: 9 page

Significance of thermal fluctuations and hydrodynamic interactions in receptor-ligand mediated adhesive dynamics of a spherical particle in wall bound shear flow

The dynamics of adhesion of a spherical micro-particle to a ligand-coated wall, in shear flow, is studied using a Langevin equation that accounts for thermal fluctuations, hydrodynamic interactions and adhesive interactions. Contrary to the conventional assumption that thermal fluctuations play a negligible role at high P$\acute{e}$clet numbers, we find that for particles with low surface densities of receptors, rotational diffusion caused by fluctuations about the flow and gradient directions aids in bond formation, leading to significantly greater adhesion on average, compared to simulations where thermal fluctuations are completely ignored. The role of wall hydrodynamic interactions on the steady state motion of a particle, when the particle is close to the wall, has also been explored. At high P$\acute{e}$clet numbers, the shear induced force that arises due to the stresslet part of the Stokes dipole, plays a dominant role, reducing the particle velocity significantly, and affecting the states of motion of the particle. The coupling between the translational and rotational degrees of freedom of the particle, brought about by the presence of hydrodynamic interactions, is found to have no influence on the binding dynamics. On the other hand, the drag coefficient, which depends on the distance of the particle from the wall, plays a crucial role at low rates of bond formation. A significant difference in the effect of both the shear force and the position dependent drag force, on the states of motion of the particle, is observed when the P$\acute{e}$let number is small.Comment: The manuscript has been accepted as an article in Physical Review E Journa