8,230 research outputs found
Pore geometry as a control on rock strength
This study was funded via RJW's University of Leicester start-up fund, as part of AAB's PhD project. We thank Don Swanson and Mike Poland at HVO, Hawai'i, for their help and advice during fieldwork planning and sample collection in the Koa'e fault system, and the National Park Service for granting a research permit to collect rock samples. Sergio Vinciguerra is thanked for access to the Rock Mechanics and Physics lab at the British Geological Survey and Audrey Ougier-Simonin is thanked for her help preparing samples and advice during testing. We thank Mike Heap (EOST Strasbourg) and an anonymous reviewer for their detailed and careful comments that greatly improved the manuscript.Peer reviewedPostprin
A PCP Characterization of AM
We introduce a 2-round stochastic constraint-satisfaction problem, and show
that its approximation version is complete for (the promise version of) the
complexity class AM. This gives a `PCP characterization' of AM analogous to the
PCP Theorem for NP. Similar characterizations have been given for higher levels
of the Polynomial Hierarchy, and for PSPACE; however, we suggest that the
result for AM might be of particular significance for attempts to derandomize
this class.
To test this notion, we pose some `Randomized Optimization Hypotheses'
related to our stochastic CSPs that (in light of our result) would imply
collapse results for AM. Unfortunately, the hypotheses appear over-strong, and
we present evidence against them. In the process we show that, if some language
in NP is hard-on-average against circuits of size 2^{Omega(n)}, then there
exist hard-on-average optimization problems of a particularly elegant form.
All our proofs use a powerful form of PCPs known as Probabilistically
Checkable Proofs of Proximity, and demonstrate their versatility. We also use
known results on randomness-efficient soundness- and hardness-amplification. In
particular, we make essential use of the Impagliazzo-Wigderson generator; our
analysis relies on a recent Chernoff-type theorem for expander walks.Comment: 18 page
Asymptotically Fast Algorithms for Spherical and Related Transforms
This paper considers the problem of computing the harmonic expansion of functions defined on the sphere. We begin by proving convolution theorems that relate the convolution of two functions on the sphere to a multiplication in the sprectral domain, as well as the multiplication of two functions on the sphere to a convolution in the spectral domain. These convolution theorems are then used to develop a sampling theorem on the sphere
Intensive Mutagenesis of the Nisin Hinge Leads to the Rational Design of Enhanced Derivatives
peer-reviewedNisin A is the most extensively studied lantibiotic and has been used as a preservative by the food industry since 1953. This 34 amino acid peptide contains three dehydrated amino acids and five thioether rings. These rings, resulting from one lanthionine and four methyllanthionine bridges, confer the peptide with its unique structure. Nisin A has two mechanisms of action, with the N-terminal domain of the peptide inhibiting cell wall synthesis through lipid II binding and the C-terminal domain responsible for pore-formation. The focus of this study is the three amino acid ‘hinge’ region (N 20, M 21 and K 22) which separates these two domains and allows for conformational flexibility. As all lantibiotics are gene encoded, novel variants can be generated through manipulation of the corresponding gene. A number of derivatives in which the hinge region was altered have previously been shown to possess enhanced antimicrobial activity. Here we take this approach further by employing simultaneous, indiscriminate site-saturation mutagenesis of all three hinge residues to create a novel bank of nisin derivative producers. Screening of this bank revealed that producers of peptides with hinge regions consisting of AAK, NAI and SLS displayed enhanced bioactivity against a variety of targets. These and other results suggested a preference for small, chiral amino acids within the hinge region, leading to the design and creation of producers of peptides with hinges consisting of AAA and SAA. These producers, and the corresponding peptides, exhibited enhanced bioactivity against Lactococcus lactis HP, Streptococcus agalactiae ATCC 13813, Mycobacterium smegmatis MC2155 and Staphylococcus aureus RF122 and thus represent the first example of nisin derivatives that possess enhanced activity as a consequence of rational design.This work was financed by a grant from the Irish Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine through the Food Institutional Research Measure (08/RD/C/691) and with Science Foundation Investigator award (10/IN.1/B3027)
Non-perturbative renormalization of the KPZ growth dynamics
We introduce a non-perturbative renormalization approach which identifies
stable fixed points in any dimension for the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang dynamics of
rough surfaces. The usual limitations of real space methods to deal with
anisotropic (self-affine) scaling are overcome with an indirect functional
renormalization. The roughness exponent is computed for dimensions
to 8 and it results to be in very good agreement with the available
simulations. No evidence is found for an upper critical dimension. We discuss
how the present approach can be extended to other self-affine problems.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures. To appear in Phys. Rev. Let
Coastal oceanography and sedimentology in New Zealand, 1967-91.
This paper reviews research that has taken place on physical oceanography and sedimentology on New Zealand's estuaries and the inner shelf since c. 1967. It includes estuarine sedimentation, tidal inlets, beach morphodynamics, nearshore and inner shelf sedimentation, tides and coastal currents, numerical modelling, short-period waves, tsunamis, and storm surges. An extensive reference list covering both published and unpublished material is included. Formal teaching and research programmes dealing with coastal landforms and the processes that shape them were only introduced to New Zealand universities in 1964; the history of the New Zealand Journal of Marine and Freshwater Research parallels and chronicles the development of physical coastal science in New Zealand, most of which has been accomplished in last 25 years
Radiation from low-momentum zoom-whirl orbits
We study zoom-whirl behaviour of equal mass, non-spinning black hole binaries
in full general relativity. The magnitude of the linear momentum of the initial
data is fixed to that of a quasi-circular orbit, and its direction is varied.
We find a global maximum in radiated energy for a configuration which completes
roughly one orbit. The radiated energy in this case exceeds the value of a
quasi-circular binary with the same momentum by 15%. The direction parameter
only requires minor tuning for the localization of the maximum. There is
non-trivial dependence of the energy radiated on eccentricity (several local
maxima and minima). Correlations with orbital dynamics shortly before merger
are discussed. While being strongly gauge dependent, these findings are
intuitive from a physical point of view and support basic ideas about the
efficiency of gravitational radiation from a binary system.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures, Amaldi8 conference proceedings as publishe
Distance-generalized Core Decomposition
The -core of a graph is defined as the maximal subgraph in which every
vertex is connected to at least other vertices within that subgraph. In
this work we introduce a distance-based generalization of the notion of
-core, which we refer to as the -core, i.e., the maximal subgraph in
which every vertex has at least other vertices at distance within
that subgraph. We study the properties of the -core showing that it
preserves many of the nice features of the classic core decomposition (e.g.,
its connection with the notion of distance-generalized chromatic number) and it
preserves its usefulness to speed-up or approximate distance-generalized
notions of dense structures, such as -club.
Computing the distance-generalized core decomposition over large networks is
intrinsically complex. However, by exploiting clever upper and lower bounds we
can partition the computation in a set of totally independent subcomputations,
opening the door to top-down exploration and to multithreading, and thus
achieving an efficient algorithm
Comment on: Role of Intermittency in Urban Development: A Model of Large-Scale City Formation
Comment to D.H. Zanette and S.C. Manrubia, Phys. Rev. Lett. 79, 523 (1997).Comment: 1 page no figure
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