45,773 research outputs found

    Modelling the overdiagnosis of breast cancer due to mammography screening in women aged 40 to 49 in the United Kingdom

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    This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, andreproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited

    Deep Eyes: Binocular Depth-from-Focus on Focal Stack Pairs

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    Human visual system relies on both binocular stereo cues and monocular focusness cues to gain effective 3D perception. In computer vision, the two problems are traditionally solved in separate tracks. In this paper, we present a unified learning-based technique that simultaneously uses both types of cues for depth inference. Specifically, we use a pair of focal stacks as input to emulate human perception. We first construct a comprehensive focal stack training dataset synthesized by depth-guided light field rendering. We then construct three individual networks: a Focus-Net to extract depth from a single focal stack, a EDoF-Net to obtain the extended depth of field (EDoF) image from the focal stack, and a Stereo-Net to conduct stereo matching. We show how to integrate them into a unified BDfF-Net to obtain high-quality depth maps. Comprehensive experiments show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art in both accuracy and speed and effectively emulates human vision systems

    The hidden horizon and black hole unitarity

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    We motivate through a detailed analysis of the Hawking radiation in a Schwarzschild background a scheme in accordance with quantum unitarity. In this scheme the semi-classical approximation of the unitary quantum - horizonless - black hole S-matrix leads to the conventional description of the Hawking radiation from a classical black hole endowed with an event horizon. Unitarity is borne out by the detailed exclusive S-matrix amplitudes. There, the fixing of generic out-states, in addition to the in-state, yields in asymptotic Minkowski space-time saddle-point contributions which are dominated by Planckian metric fluctuations when approaching the Schwarzschild radius. We argue that these prevent the corresponding macroscopic "exclusive backgrounds" to develop an event horizon. However, if no out-state is selected, a distinct saddle-point geometry can be defined, in which Planckian fluctuations are tamed. Such "inclusive background" presents an event horizon and constitutes a coarse-grained average over the aforementioned exclusive ones. The classical event horizon appears as a coarse-grained structure, sustaining the thermodynamic significance of the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy. This is reminiscent of the tentative fuzzball description of extremal black holes: the role of microstates is played here by a complete set of out-states. Although the computations of unitary amplitudes would require a detailed theory of quantum gravity, the proposed scheme itself, which appeals to the metric description of gravity only in the vicinity of stationary points, does not.Comment: 29 pages, 4 figures. Typos corrected. Two footnotes added (footnotes 3 and 5

    Brick Walls and AdS/CFT

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    We discuss the relationship between the bulk-boundary correspondence in Rehren's algebraic holography (and in other 'fixed-background' approaches to holography) and in mainstream 'Maldacena AdS/CFT'. Especially, we contrast the understanding of black-hole entropy from the viewpoint of QFT in curved spacetime -- in the framework of 't Hooft's 'brick wall' model -- with the understanding based on Maldacena AdS/CFT. We show that the brick-wall modification of a Klein Gordon field in the Hartle-Hawking-Israel state on 1+2-Schwarzschild AdS (BTZ) has a well-defined boundary limit with the same temperature and entropy as the brick-wall-modified bulk theory. One of our main purposes is to point out a close connection, for general AdS/CFT situations, between the puzzle raised by Arnsdorf and Smolin regarding the relationship between Rehren's algebraic holography and mainstream AdS/CFT and the puzzle embodied in the 'correspondence principle' proposed by Mukohyama and Israel in their work on the brick-wall approach to black hole entropy. Working on the assumption that similar results will hold for bulk QFT other than the Klein Gordon field and for Schwarzschild AdS in other dimensions, and recalling the first author's proposed resolution to the Mukohyama-Israel puzzle based on his 'matter-gravity entanglement hypothesis', we argue that, in Maldacena AdS/CFT, the algebra of the boundary CFT is isomorphic only to a proper subalgebra of the bulk algebra, albeit (at non-zero temperature) the (GNS) Hilbert spaces of bulk and boundary theories are still the 'same' -- the total bulk state being pure, while the boundary state is mixed (thermal). We also argue from the finiteness of its boundary (and hence, on our assumptions, also bulk) entropy at finite temperature, that the Rehren dual of the Maldacena boundary CFT cannot itself be a QFT and must, instead, presumably be something like a string theory.Comment: 54 pages, 3 figures. Arguments strengthened in the light of B.S. Kay `Instability of Enclosed Horizons' arXiv:1310.739

    Brane-world black holes and the scale of gravity

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    A particle in four dimensions should behave like a classical black hole if the horizon radius is larger than the Compton wavelength or, equivalently, if its degeneracy (measured by entropy in units of the Planck scale) is large. For spherically symmetric black holes in 4 + d dimensions, both arguments again lead to a mass threshold MC and degeneracy scale Mdeg of the order of the fundamental scale of gravity MG. In the brane-world, deviations from the Schwarzschild metric induced by bulk effects alter the horizon radius and effective four-dimensional Euclidean action in such a way that MC \simeq Mdeg might be either larger or smaller than MG. This opens up the possibility that black holes exist with a mass smaller than MG and might be produced at the LHC even if M>10 TeV, whereas effects due to bulk graviton exchanges remain undetectable because suppressed by inverse powers of MG. Conversely, even if black holes are not found at the LHC, it is still possible that MC>MG and MG \simeq 1TeV.Comment: 4 pages, no figur

    The holographic principle

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    There is strong evidence that the area of any surface limits the information content of adjacent spacetime regions, at 10^(69) bits per square meter. We review the developments that have led to the recognition of this entropy bound, placing special emphasis on the quantum properties of black holes. The construction of light-sheets, which associate relevant spacetime regions to any given surface, is discussed in detail. We explain how the bound is tested and demonstrate its validity in a wide range of examples. A universal relation between geometry and information is thus uncovered. It has yet to be explained. The holographic principle asserts that its origin must lie in the number of fundamental degrees of freedom involved in a unified description of spacetime and matter. It must be manifest in an underlying quantum theory of gravity. We survey some successes and challenges in implementing the holographic principle.Comment: 52 pages, 10 figures, invited review for Rev. Mod. Phys; v2: reference adde

    Quantum corrections and black hole spectroscopy

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    In the work \cite{BRM,RBE}, black hole spectroscopy has been successfully reproduced in the tunneling picture. As a result, the derived entropy spectrum of black hole in different gravity (including Einstein's gravity, Einstein-Gauss-Bonnet gravity and Ho\v{r}ava-Lifshitz gravity) are all evenly spaced, sharing the same forms as Sn=nS_n=n, where physical process is only confined in the semiclassical framework. However, the real physical picture should go beyond the semiclassical approximation. In this case, the physical quantities would undergo higher-order quantum corrections, whose effect on different gravity shares in different forms. Motivated by these facts, in this paper we aim to observe how quantum corrections affect black hole spectroscopy in different gravity. The result shows that, in the presence of higher-order quantum corrections, black hole spectroscopy in different gravity still shares the same form as Sn=nS_n=n, further confirming the entropy quantum is universal in the sense that it is not only independent of black hole parameters, but also independent of higher-order quantum corrections. This is a desiring result for the forthcoming quantum gravity theory.Comment: 14 pages, no figure, use JHEP3.cls. to be published in JHE

    The Friedmann-Lemaitre-Robertson-Walker Big Bang singularities are well behaved

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    We show that the Big Bang singularity of the Friedmann-Lemaitre-Robertson-Walker model does not raise major problems to General Relativity. We prove a theorem showing that the Einstein equation can be written in a non-singular form, which allows the extension of the spacetime before the Big Bang. The physical interpretation of the fields used is discussed. These results follow from our research on singular semi-Riemannian geometry and singular General Relativity.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figure

    Theoretical survey of tidal-charged black holes at the LHC

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    We analyse a family of brane-world black holes which solve the effective four-dimensional Einstein equations for a wide range of parameters related to the unknown bulk/brane physics. We first constrain the parameters using known experimental bounds and, for the allowed cases, perform a numerical analysis of their time evolution, which includes accretion through the Earth. The study is aimed at predicting the typical behavior one can expect if such black holes were produced at the LHC. Most notably, we find that, under no circumstances, would the black holes reach the (hazardous) regime of Bondi accretion. Nonetheless, the possibility remains that black holes live long enough to escape from the accelerator (and even from the Earth's gravitational field) and result in missing energy from the detectors.Comment: RevTeX4, 12 pages, 4 figures, 5 tables, minor changes to match the accepted version in JHE
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