91,643 research outputs found
Solution of a Braneworld Big Crunch/Big Bang Cosmology
We solve for the cosmological perturbations in a five-dimensional background
consisting of two separating or colliding boundary branes, as an expansion in
the collision speed V divided by the speed of light c. Our solution permits a
detailed check of the validity of four-dimensional effective theory in the
vicinity of the event corresponding to the big crunch/big bang singularity. We
show that the four-dimensional description fails at the first nontrivial order
in (V/c)^2. At this order, there is nontrivial mixing of the two relevant
four-dimensional perturbation modes (the growing and decaying modes) as the
boundary branes move from the narrowly-separated limit described by
Kaluza-Klein theory to the well-separated limit where gravity is confined to
the positive-tension brane. We comment on the cosmological significance of the
result and compute other quantities of interest in five-dimensional
cosmological scenarios.Comment: 54 pages, 12 figures, URL updated & 3 references adde
New results for the degree/diameter problem
The results of computer searches for large graphs with given (small) degree
and diameter are presented. The new graphs are Cayley graphs of semidirect
products of cyclic groups and related groups. One fundamental use of our
``dense graphs'' is in the design of efficient communication network
topologies.Comment: 15 page
What is a Good Plan? Cultural Variations in Expert Planners’ Concepts of Plan Quality
This article presents the results of a field research study examining commonalities and differences between American and British operational planners’ mental models of planning. We conducted Cultural Network Analysis (CNA) interviews with 14 experienced operational planners in the US and UK. Our results demonstrate the existence of fundamental differences between the way American and British expert planners conceive of a high quality plan. Our results revealed that the American planners’ model focused on specification of action to achieve synchronization, providing little autonomy at the level of execution, and included the belief that increasing contingencies reduces risk. The British planners’ model stressed the internal coherence of the plan, to support shared situational awareness and thereby flexibility at the level of execution. The British model also emphasized the belief that reducing the number of assumptions decreases risk. Overall, the American ideal plan serves a controlling function, whereas the British ideal plan supports an enabling function. Interestingly, both the US and UK would view the other’s ideal plan as riskier than their own. The implications of cultural models of plans and planning are described for establishing performance measures and designing systems to support multinational planning teams
A molecular dynamics study of the thermal properties of thorium oxide
There is growing interest in the exploitation of the thorium nuclear fuel cycle as an alternative to that of uranium. As part of a wider study of the suitability of thorium dioxide (thoria) as a nuclear fuel, we have used molecular dynamics to investigate the thermal expansion, oxygen diffusion, and heat capacity of pure thoria and uranium doped (1-10%) thoria between 1500K and 3600 K. Our results indicate that the thermal performance of the thoria matrix, even when doped with 10%U, is comparable to, and possibly better than, that of UO2
US/UK Mental Models of Planning: The Relationship Between Plan Detail and Plan Quality
This paper presents the results of a research study applying a new cultural analysis method to capture commonalities and differences between US and UK mental models of operational planning. The results demonstrate the existence of fundamental differences between the way US and UK planners think about what it means to have a high quality plan. Specifically, the present study captures differences in how US and UK planners conceptualize plan quality. Explicit models of cultural differences in conceptions of plan quality are useful for establishing performance metrics for multinational planning teams. This paper discusses the prospects of enabling automatic evaluation of multinational team performance by combining recent advances in cultural modelling with enhanced ontology languages
Rationale and protocol for a systematic review and meta-analysis on reduced data gathering in people with delusions
Viscosity Information from Relativistic Nuclear Collisions: How Perfect is the Fluid Observed at RHIC?
Relativistic viscous hydrodynamic fits to RHIC data on the centrality
dependence of multiplicity, transverse and elliptic flow for sqrt{s}=200 GeV
Au+Au collisions are presented. For Glauber-type initial conditions, while data
on integrated v_2 is consistent with a ratio of viscosity over entropy density
up to eta/s=0.16, data on minimum bias v_2 seems to favor a much smaller
viscosity over entropy ratio, below the bound from the AdS/CFT conjecture. Some
caveats on this result are discussed.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figures; v2: matches published version, title changed by
journa
Coulomb blockade in silicon based structures at temperatures up to 50 K
Coulomb blockade has been observed in the current-voltage characteristics of structures fabricated in silicon germanium delta-doped material at temperatures up to 50 K. This is consistent with the estimated effective tunnel capacitance of 10 aF which is significantly smaller than the reported capacitances of tunnel junctions made from Al or GaAs/AlGaAs heterostructures
The Relation between Approximation in Distribution and Shadowing in Molecular Dynamics
Molecular dynamics refers to the computer simulation of a material at the
atomic level. An open problem in numerical analysis is to explain the apparent
reliability of molecular dynamics simulations. The difficulty is that
individual trajectories computed in molecular dynamics are accurate for only
short time intervals, whereas apparently reliable information can be extracted
from very long-time simulations. It has been conjectured that long molecular
dynamics trajectories have low-dimensional statistical features that accurately
approximate those of the original system. Another conjecture is that numerical
trajectories satisfy the shadowing property: that they are close over long time
intervals to exact trajectories but with different initial conditions. We prove
that these two views are actually equivalent to each other, after we suitably
modify the concept of shadowing. A key ingredient of our result is a general
theorem that allows us to take random elements of a metric space that are close
in distribution and embed them in the same probability space so that they are
close in a strong sense. This result is similar to the Strassen-Dudley Theorem
except that a mapping is provided between the two random elements. Our results
on shadowing are motivated by molecular dynamics but apply to the approximation
of any dynamical system when initial conditions are selected according to a
probability measure.Comment: 21 pages, final version accepted in SIAM Dyn Sy
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