Lamellar phase separation and dynamic competition in La0.23Ca0.77MnO3

We report the coexistence of lamellar charge-ordered (CO) and charge-disordered (CD) domains, and their dynamical behavior, in La0.23Ca0.77MnO3. Using high resolution transmission electron microscopy (TEM), we show that below Tcd~170K a CD-monoclinic phase forms within the established CO-orthorhombic matrix. The CD phase has a sheet-like morphology, perpendicular to the q vector of the CO superlattice (a axis of the Pnma structure). For temperatures between 64K and 130K, both the TEM and resistivity experiments show a dynamic competition between the two phases: at constant T, the CD phase slowly advances over the CO one. This slow dynamics appears to be linked to the magnetic transitions occurring in this compound, suggesting important magnetoelastic effects.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

Heavy Color-Octet Particles at the LHC

Many new-physics models, especially those with a color-triplet top-quark partner, contain a heavy color-octet state. The "naturalness" argument for a light Higgs boson requires that the color-octet state be not much heavier than a TeV, and thus it can be pair-produced with large cross sections at high-energy hadron colliders. It may decay preferentially to a top quark plus a top-partner, which subsequently decays to a top quark plus a color-singlet state. This singlet can serve as a WIMP dark-matter candidate. Such decay chains lead to a spectacular signal of four top quarks plus missing energy. We pursue a general categorization of the color-octet states and their decay products according to their spin and gauge quantum numbers. We review the current bounds on the new states at the LHC and study the expected discovery reach at the 8-TeV and 14-TeV runs. We also present the production rates at a future 100-TeV hadron collider, where the cross sections will be many orders of magnitude greater than at the 14-TeV LHC. Furthermore, we explore the extent to which one can determine the color octet's mass, spin, and chiral couplings. Finally, we propose a test to determine whether the fermionic color octet is a Majorana particle.Comment: 20 pages, 9 figures; journal versio

Dynamics of the two-dimensional S=1/2 dimer system (C5H6N2F)2CuCl4

Inelastic neutron scattering was used to study a quantum S=1/2 antiferromagnetic Heisenberg system-Bis(2-amino-5-fluoropyridinium) Tetrachlorocuprate(II). The magnetic excitation spectrum was shown to be dominated by long-lived excitations with an energy gap as 1.07(3) meV. The measured dispersion relation is consistent with a simple two-dimensional square lattice of weakly-coupled spin dimers. Comparing the data to a random phase approximation treatment of this model gives the intra-dimer and inter-dimer exchange constants J=1.45(2) meV and J'=0.31(3) meV, respectively.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

Information on the Pion Distribution Amplitude from the Pion-Photon Transition Form Factor with the Belle and BaBar Data

The pion-photon transition form factor (TFF) provides strong constraints on the pion distribution amplitude (DA). We perform an analysis of all existing data (CELLO, CLEO, BaBar, Belle) on the pion-photon TFF by means of light-cone pQCD approach in which we include the next-to-leading order correction to the valence-quark contribution and estimate the non-valence-quark contribution by a phenomenological model based on the TFF's limiting behavior at both $Q^2\to 0$ and $Q^2\to\infty$. At present, the pion DA is not definitely determined, it is helpful to have a pion DA model that can mimic all the suggested behaviors, especially to agree with the constraints from the pion-photon TFF in whole measured region within a consistent way. For the purpose, we adopt the conventional model for pion wavefunction/DA that has been constructed in our previous paper \cite{hw1}, whose broadness is controlled by a parameter $B$. We fix the DA parameters by using the CELLO, CLEO, BABAR and Belle data within the smaller $Q^2$ region ($Q^2 \leq 15$ GeV$^2$), where all the data are consistent with each other. And then the pion-photon TFF is extrapolated into larger $Q^2$ region. We observe that the BABAR favors $B=0.60$ which has the behavior close to the Chernyak-Zhitnitsky DA, whereas the recent Belle favors $B=0.00$ which is close to the asymptotic DA. We need more accurate data at large $Q^2$ region to determine the precise value of $B$, and the definite behavior of pion DA can be concluded finally by the consistent data in the coming future.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures. Slightly changed and references update

Zero-shot keyword spotting for visual speech recognition in-the-wild

Visual keyword spotting (KWS) is the problem of estimating whether a text query occurs in a given recording using only video information. This paper focuses on visual KWS for words unseen during training, a real-world, practical setting which so far has received no attention by the community. To this end, we devise an end-to-end architecture comprising (a) a state-of-the-art visual feature extractor based on spatiotemporal Residual Networks, (b) a grapheme-to-phoneme model based on sequence-to-sequence neural networks, and (c) a stack of recurrent neural networks which learn how to correlate visual features with the keyword representation. Different to prior works on KWS, which try to learn word representations merely from sequences of graphemes (i.e. letters), we propose the use of a grapheme-to-phoneme encoder-decoder model which learns how to map words to their pronunciation. We demonstrate that our system obtains very promising visual-only KWS results on the challenging LRS2 database, for keywords unseen during training. We also show that our system outperforms a baseline which addresses KWS via automatic speech recognition (ASR), while it drastically improves over other recently proposed ASR-free KWS methods.Comment: Accepted at ECCV-201

Kinetics of viral self-assembly: the role of ss RNA antenna

A big class of viruses self-assemble from a large number of identical capsid proteins with long flexible N-terminal tails and ss RNA. We study the role of the strong Coulomb interaction of positive N-terminal tails with ss RNA in the kinetics of the in vitro virus self-assembly. Capsid proteins stick to unassembled chain of ss RNA (which we call "antenna") and slide on it towards the assembly site. We show that at excess of capsid proteins such one-dimensional diffusion accelerates self-assembly more than ten times. On the other hand at excess of ss RNA, antenna slows self-assembly down. Several experiments are proposed to verify the role of ss RNA antenna.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, several experiments are proposed, a new idea of experiment is adde

The fidelity of general bosonic channels with pure state input

We first derive for the general form of the fidelity for various bosonic channels. Thereby we give the fidelity of different quantum bosonic channel, possibly with product input and entangled input respectively, as examples. The properties of the fidelity are carefully examined.Comment: 3 pages, comments welcom

Small ball probability, Inverse theorems, and applications

Let $\xi$ be a real random variable with mean zero and variance one and $A={a_1,...,a_n}$ be a multi-set in $\R^d$. The random sum $$S_A := a_1 \xi_1 + ... + a_n \xi_n$$ where $\xi_i$ are iid copies of $\xi$ is of fundamental importance in probability and its applications. We discuss the small ball problem, the aim of which is to estimate the maximum probability that $S_A$ belongs to a ball with given small radius, following the discovery made by Littlewood-Offord and Erdos almost 70 years ago. We will mainly focus on recent developments that characterize the structure of those sets $A$ where the small ball probability is relatively large. Applications of these results include full solutions or significant progresses of many open problems in different areas.Comment: 47 page

Langevin Dynamics of the vortex matter two-stage melting transition in Bi_2Sr_2CaCu_2O8+δ_{8+\delta} in the presence of straight and of tilted columnar defects

In this paper we use London Langevin molecular dynamics simulations to investigate the vortex matter melting transition in the highly anisotropic high-temperature superconductor material Bi_2Sr_2CaCu_2O$_{8+\delta}$ in the presence of low concentration of columnar defects (CDs). We reproduce with further details our previous results obtained by using Multilevel Monte Carlo simulations that showed that the melting of the nanocrystalline vortex matter occurs in two stages: a first stage melting into nanoliquid vortex matter and a second stage delocalization transition into a homogeneous liquid. Furthermore, we report on new dynamical measurements in the presence of a current that identifies clearly the irreversibility line and the second stage delocalization transition. In addition to CDs aligned along the c-axis we also simulate the case of tilted CDs which are aligned at an angle with respect to the applied magnetic field. Results for CDs tilted by $45^{\circ}$ with respect to c-axis show that the locations of the melting and delocalization transitions are not affected by the tilt when the ratio of flux lines to CDs remains constant. On the other hand we argue that some dynamical properties and in particular the position of the irreversibility line should be affected.Comment: 13 pages, 11 figure