Effects of surface roughness on the paramagnetic response of small unconventional superconductors

We theoretically study effects of surface roughness on the magnetic response of small unconventional superconductors by solving the Eilenberger equation for the quassiclassical Green function and the Maxwell equation for the vector potential simultaneously and self-consistently. The paramagnetic phase of spin-singlet $d$-wave superconducting disks is drastically suppressed by the surface roughness, whereas that of spin-triplet $p$-wave disks is robust even in the presence of the roughness. Such difference derives from the orbital symmetry of paramagnetic odd-frequency Cooper pairs appearing at the surface of disks. The orbital part of the paramagnetic pairing correlation is $p$-wave symmetry in the $d$-wave disks, whereas it is $s$-wave symmetry in the $p$-wave ones. Calculating the free-energy, we also confirm that the paramagnetic state is more stable than the normal state, which indicates a possibility of detecting the paramagnetic effect in experiments. Indeed our results are consistent with an experimental finding on high-$T_c$ thin films.Comment: 11 pages, 10 figure

Quantization of Conductance Minimum and Index Theorem

We discuss the minimum value of the zero-bias differential conductance $G_{\textrm{min}}$ in a junction consisting of a normal metal and a nodal superconductor preserving time-reversal symmetry. Using the quasiclassical Green function method, we show that $G_{\textrm{min}}$ is quantized at $(4e^2/h) N_{\mathrm{ZES}}$ in the limit of strong impurity scatterings in the normal metal. The integer $N_{\mathrm{ZES}}$ represents the number of perfect transmission channels through the junction. An analysis of the chiral symmetry of the Hamiltonian indicates that $N_{\mathrm{ZES}}$ corresponds to the Atiyah-Singer index in mathematics.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figur

Drive Video Analysis for the Detection of Traffic Near-Miss Incidents

Because of their recent introduction, self-driving cars and advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) equipped vehicles have had little opportunity to learn, the dangerous traffic (including near-miss incident) scenarios that provide normal drivers with strong motivation to drive safely. Accordingly, as a means of providing learning depth, this paper presents a novel traffic database that contains information on a large number of traffic near-miss incidents that were obtained by mounting driving recorders in more than 100 taxis over the course of a decade. The study makes the following two main contributions: (i) In order to assist automated systems in detecting near-miss incidents based on database instances, we created a large-scale traffic near-miss incident database (NIDB) that consists of video clip of dangerous events captured by monocular driving recorders. (ii) To illustrate the applicability of NIDB traffic near-miss incidents, we provide two primary database-related improvements: parameter fine-tuning using various near-miss scenes from NIDB, and foreground/background separation into motion representation. Then, using our new database in conjunction with a monocular driving recorder, we developed a near-miss recognition method that provides automated systems with a performance level that is comparable to a human-level understanding of near-miss incidents (64.5% vs. 68.4% at near-miss recognition, 61.3% vs. 78.7% at near-miss detection).Comment: Accepted to ICRA 201

Effects of the phase coherence on the local density of states in superconducting proximity structures

We theoretically study the local density of states in superconducting proximity structure where two superconducting terminals are attached to a side surface of a normal-metal wire. Using the quasiclassical Green's function method, the energy spectrum is obtained for both of spin-singlet $s$-wave and spin-triplet $p$-wave junctions. In both of the cases, the decay length of the proximity effect at the zero temperature is limited by a depairing effect due to inelastic scatterings. In addition to the depairing effect, in $p$-wave junctions, the decay length depends sensitively on the transparency at the junction interfaces, which is a unique property to odd-parity superconductors where the anomalous proximity effect occurs.Comment: 11 pages, 9 figure

A Simple Membrane Computing Method for Simulating Bio-Chemical Reactions

There are two formalisms for simulating spatially homogeneous chemical system; the deterministic approach, usually based on differential equations (reaction rate equations) and the stochastic approach which is based on a single differential-difference equation (the master equation). The stochastic approach has a firmer physical basis than the deterministic approach, but the master equation is often mathematically intractable. Thus, a method was proposed to make exact numerical calculations within the framework of the stochastic formulation without having to deal with the master equation directly. However, its drawback remains in great amount of computer time that is often required to simulate a desired amount of system time. A novel method that we propose is Deterministic Abstract Rewriting System on Multisets (DARMS), which is a deterministic approach based on an approximate procedure of an exact stochastic method. DARMS can produce significant gains in simulation speed with acceptable losses in accuracy. DARMS is a class of P Systems in which reaction rules are applied in parallel and deterministically. The feasibility and utility of DARMS are demonstrated by applying it to the Oregonator, which is a well-known model of the Belousov-Zhabotinskii (BZ) reaction. We also consider 1-dimensional and 2-dimensional cellular automata composed of DARMS and confirm that it can exhibit typical pattern formations of the BZ reaction. Since DARMS is a deterministic approach, it ignores the inherent fluctuations and correlations in chemical reactions; they are not so significant in spatially homogeneous chemical reactions but significant in bio-chemical systems. Thus, we also propose a stochastic approach, Stochastic ARMS (SARMS); SARMS is not an exact stochastic approach, but an approximate procedure of the exact stochastic method

Natural Computing and Beyond

This book contains the joint proceedings of the Winter School of Hakodate (WSH) 2011 held in Hakodate, Japan, March 15–16, 2011, and the 6th International Workshop on Natural Computing (6th IWNC) held in Tokyo, Japan, March 28–30, 2012, organized by the Special Interest Group of Natural Computing (SIG-NAC), the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence (JSAI). This volume compiles refereed contributions to various aspects of natural computing, ranging from computing with slime mold, artificial chemistry, eco-physics, and synthetic biology, to computational aesthetics

New Constructions for Query-Efficient Locally Decodable Codes of Subexponential Length

A $(k,\delta,\epsilon)$-locally decodable code $C: F_{q}^{n} \to F_{q}^{N}$ is an error-correcting code that encodes each message $\vec{x}=(x_{1},x_{2},...,x_{n}) \in F_{q}^{n}$ to $C(\vec{x}) \in F_{q}^{N}$ and has the following property: For any $\vec{y} \in {\bf F}_{q}^{N}$ such that $d(\vec{y},C(\vec{x})) \leq \delta N$ and each $1 \leq i \leq n$, the symbol $x_{i}$ of $\vec{x}$ can be recovered with probability at least $1-\epsilon$ by a randomized decoding algorithm looking only at $k$ coordinates of $\vec{y}$. The efficiency of a $(k,\delta,\epsilon)$-locally decodable code $C: F_{q}^{n} \to F_{q}^{N}$ is measured by the code length $N$ and the number $k$ of queries. For any $k$-query locally decodable code $C: F_{q}^{n} \to F_{q}^{N}$, the code length $N$ is conjectured to be exponential of $n$, however, this was disproved. Yekhanin [In Proc. of STOC, 2007] showed that there exists a 3-query locally decodable code $C: F_{2}^{n} \to F_{2}^{N}$ such that $N=\exp(n^{(1/\log \log n)})$ assuming that the number of Mersenne primes is infinite. For a 3-query locally decodable code $C: F_{q}^{n} \to F_{q}^{N}$, Efremenko [ECCC Report No.69, 2008] reduced the code length further to $N=\exp(n^{O((\log \log n/ \log n)^{1/2})})$, and also showed that for any integer $r>1$, there exists a $k$-query locally decodable code $C: F_{q}^{n} \to F_{q}^{N}$ such that $k \leq 2^{r}$ and $N=\exp(n^{O((\log \log n/ \log n)^{1-1/r})})$. In this paper, we present a query-efficient locally decodable code and show that for any integer $r>1$, there exists a $k$-query locally decodable code $C: F_{q}^{n} \to F_{q}^{N}$ such that $k \leq 3 \cdot 2^{r-2}$ and $N=\exp(n^{O((\log \log n/ \log n)^{1-1/r})})$.Comment: 13 pages, 1 figure, 2 table

The effects of anisotropic pressure on plasma displacement and its deviation from flux surfaces

A significant impact of pressure anisotropy on the plasma displacement associated with ideal Magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) stability is found. A heliotron plasma, such as a large helical device plasma, is analyzed. Simulations are performed using the equilibrium solver Anisotropic Neumann Inverse Moments Equilibrium Code and the ideal MHD stability code TERPSICHORE. Both codes provide a treatment of the pressure anisotropy by the bi-Maxwellian model. The ratio of hot particle pressure to total pressure &lt; β h &gt; / &lt; β &gt; has been scanned over. Other simulation parameters have been chosen such that the simulations represent an experimentally relevant condition with an external, off-axis heating scheme. The radial location of the peak of the plasma displacement of the n = 1, m = 2 mode number has been compared to the radial location of the ι = 0.5 resonant surface. This comparison shows that this difference in location increases monotonically for increasing &lt; β h &gt; / &lt; β &gt; . These results provide insight on the effect of external heating schemes on MHD stability.</p

The effects of anisotropic pressure on plasma displacement and its deviation from flux surfaces

A significant impact of pressure anisotropy on the plasma displacement associated with ideal Magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) stability is found. A heliotron plasma, such as a large helical device plasma, is analyzed. Simulations are performed using the equilibrium solver Anisotropic Neumann Inverse Moments Equilibrium Code and the ideal MHD stability code TERPSICHORE. Both codes provide a treatment of the pressure anisotropy by the bi-Maxwellian model. The ratio of hot particle pressure to total pressure &lt; β h &gt; / &lt; β &gt; has been scanned over. Other simulation parameters have been chosen such that the simulations represent an experimentally relevant condition with an external, off-axis heating scheme. The radial location of the peak of the plasma displacement of the n = 1, m = 2 mode number has been compared to the radial location of the ι = 0.5 resonant surface. This comparison shows that this difference in location increases monotonically for increasing &lt; β h &gt; / &lt; β &gt; . These results provide insight on the effect of external heating schemes on MHD stability.</p