Myocardium wall thickness transducer and measuring method

A miniature transducer for measuring changes of thickness of the myocardium is described. The device is easily implantable without traumatizing the subject, without affecting the normal muscle behavior, and is removable and implantable at a different muscle location. Operating features of the device are described

Catheter tip force transducer for cardiovascular research

A force transducer for measuring dynamic force activity within the heart of a subject essentially consists of a U-shaped beam of low elastic compliance material. Two lines extend from the beams's legs and a long coil spring is attached to the beam. A strain gauge is coupled to one of the beam's legs to sense deflections thereof. The beam with the tines and most of the spring are surrounded by a flexible tube, defining a catheter, which is insertable into a subject's heart through an appropriate artery. The tines are extractable from the catheter for implantation into the myocardium by pushing on the end of the spring which extends beyond the external end of the catheter

Spin-excitation spectra and resistance minima in amorphous ferromagnetic alloys

Resistance minima have been found in recent years to occur in amorphous ferromagnetic alloys below the magnetic ordering temperature. Although a well-developed theory exists for resistance minima in very dilute alloys, the meaning of the phenomena has remained in question for alloys in which the neglect of spin-spin interactions is not justifiable. In this paper it is shown that the observation of resistance minima implies that these alloys have a finite density of near zero frequency excitations. Specifically, the theory of inverse transport coefficients, reformulated in terms of linear response, is used to derive a general expression for the resistivity due to the conduction-electron-spin interaction. Expanding perturbatively, the nth-order contribution is determined by an nth-order spin correlation function. To third order it is shown that the coefficient of the lnk T term responsible for the resistance anomaly according to the accepted Kondo theory receives contributions in the low-temperature limit only from those parts of the spin correlation functions which have frequencies less than k TK /ℏ where TK is the Kondo temperature

Control of the finite size corrections in exact diagonalization studies

We study the possibility of controlling the finite size corrections in exact diagonalization studies quantitatively. We consider the one- and two dimensional Hubbard model. We show that the finite-size corrections can be be reduced systematically by a grand-canonical integration over boundary conditions. We find, in general, an improvement of one order of magnitude with respect to studies with periodic boundary conditions only. We present results for ground-state properties of the 2D Hubbard model and an evaluation of the specific heat for the 1D and 2D Hubbard model.Comment: Phys. Rev. B (Brief Report), in pres

Sample-Efficient Model-Free Reinforcement Learning with Off-Policy Critics

Value-based reinforcement-learning algorithms provide state-of-the-art results in model-free discrete-action settings, and tend to outperform actor-critic algorithms. We argue that actor-critic algorithms are limited by their need for an on-policy critic. We propose Bootstrapped Dual Policy Iteration (BDPI), a novel model-free reinforcement-learning algorithm for continuous states and discrete actions, with an actor and several off-policy critics. Off-policy critics are compatible with experience replay, ensuring high sample-efficiency, without the need for off-policy corrections. The actor, by slowly imitating the average greedy policy of the critics, leads to high-quality and state-specific exploration, which we compare to Thompson sampling. Because the actor and critics are fully decoupled, BDPI is remarkably stable, and unusually robust to its hyper-parameters. BDPI is significantly more sample-efficient than Bootstrapped DQN, PPO, and ACKTR, on discrete, continuous and pixel-based tasks. Source code: https://github.com/vub-ai-lab/bdpi.Comment: Accepted at the European Conference on Machine Learning 2019 (ECML

A Monte Carlo Method for Fermion Systems Coupled with Classical Degrees of Freedom

A new Monte Carlo method is proposed for fermion systems interacting with classical degrees of freedom. To obtain a weight for each Monte Carlo sample with a fixed configuration of classical variables, the moment expansion of the density of states by Chebyshev polynomials is applied instead of the direct diagonalization of the fermion Hamiltonian. This reduces a cpu time to scale as $O(N_{\rm dim}^{2} \log N_{\rm dim})$ compared to $O(N_{\rm dim}^{3})$ for the diagonalization in the conventional technique; $N_{\rm dim}$ is the dimension of the Hamiltonian. Another advantage of this method is that parallel computation with high efficiency is possible. These significantly save total cpu times of Monte Carlo calculations because the calculation of a Monte Carlo weight is the bottleneck part. The method is applied to the double-exchange model as an example. The benchmark results show that it is possible to make a systematic investigation using a system-size scaling even in three dimensions within a realistic cpu timescale.Comment: 6 pages including 4 figure

Calculation of Densities of States and Spectral Functions by Chebyshev Recursion and Maximum Entropy

We present an efficient algorithm for calculating spectral properties of large sparse Hamiltonian matrices such as densities of states and spectral functions. The combination of Chebyshev recursion and maximum entropy achieves high energy resolution without significant roundoff error, machine precision or numerical instability limitations. If controlled statistical or systematic errors are acceptable, cpu and memory requirements scale linearly in the number of states. The inference of spectral properties from moments is much better conditioned for Chebyshev moments than for power moments. We adapt concepts from the kernel polynomial approximation, a linear Chebyshev approximation with optimized Gibbs damping, to control the accuracy of Fourier integrals of positive non-analytic functions. We compare the performance of kernel polynomial and maximum entropy algorithms for an electronic structure example.Comment: 8 pages RevTex, 3 postscript figure

Lower Cretaceous Pre-Batholithic Rocks of Northern Baja California, Mexico

Cretaceous fossils have been found at scattered localities in the pre-batholithic metamorphic rocks of northern Baja California by investigators during the past half-century. The resulting information has been inadequate, however, for the explanation of regional stratigraphic and structural relations, particularly those correlations between the less metamorphosed coastal sections and the more deformed rocks of the mountainous interior

Competition Between Antiferromagnetic Order and Spin-Liquid Behavior in the Two-Dimensional Periodic Anderson Model at Half-Filling

We study the two-dimensional periodic Anderson model at half-filling using quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) techniques. The ground state undergoes a magnetic order-disorder transition as a function of the effective exchange coupling between the conduction and localized bands. Low-lying spin and charge excitations are determined using the maximum entropy method to analytically continue the QMC data. At finite temperature we find a competition between the Kondo effect and antiferromagnetic order which develops in the localized band through Ruderman-Kittel-Kasuya-Yosida interactions.Comment: Revtex 3.0, 10 pages + 5 figures, UCSBTH-94-2