Pre-earthquake signals ? Part II: Flow of battery currents in the crust

International audienceWhen rocks are subjected to stress, dormant electronic charge carriers are activated. They turn the stressed rock volume into a battery, from where currents can flow out. The charge carriers are electrons and defect electrons, also known as positive holes or pholes for short. The boundary between stressed and unstressed rock acts as a potential barrier that lets pholes pass but blocks electrons. One can distinguish two situations in the Earth's crust: (i) only pholes spread out of a stressed rock volume into the surrounding unstressed rocks. This is expected to lead to a positive surface charge over a wide area around the future epicenter, to perturbations in the ionosphere, to stimulated infrared emission from the ground, to ionization of the near-ground air, to cloud formation and to other phenomena that have been reported to precede major earthquakes. (ii) both pholes and electrons flow out of the stressed rock volume along different paths, sideward into the relatively cool upper layers of the crust and downward into the hot lower crust. This situation, which is likely to be realized late in the earthquake preparation process, is necessary for the battery circuit to close and for transient electric currents to flow. If burst-like, these currents should lead to the emission of low frequency electromagnetic radiation. Understanding how electronic charge carriers are stress-activated in rocks, how they spread or flow probably holds the key to deciphering a wide range of pre-earthquake signals. It opens the door to a global earthquake early warning system, provided resources are pooled through a concerted and constructive community effort, including seismologists, with international participation

Correlation of pre-earthquake electromagnetic signals with laboratory and field rock experiments

Analysis of the 2007 <i>M</i>5.4 Alum Rock earthquake near San José California showed that magnetic pulsations were present in large numbers and with significant amplitudes during the 2 week period leading up the event. These pulsations were 1–30 s in duration, had unusual polarities (many with only positive or only negative polarities versus both polarities), and were different than other pulsations observed over 2 years of data in that the pulse sequence was sustained over a 2 week period prior to the quake, and then disappeared shortly after the quake. A search for the underlying physics process that might explain these pulses was was undertaken, and one theory (Freund, 2002) demonstrated that charge carriers were released when various types of rocks were stressed in a laboratory environment. It was also significant that the observed charge carrier generation was transient, and resulted in pulsating current patterns. In an attempt to determine if this phenomenon occurred outside of the laboratory environment, the authors scaled up the physics experiment from a relatively small rock sample in a dry laboratory setting, to a large 7 metric tonne boulder comprised of Yosemite granite. This boulder was located in a natural, humid (above ground) setting at Bass Lake, Ca. The boulder was instrumented with two Zonge Engineering, Model ANT4 induction type magnetometers, two Trifield Air Ion Counters, a surface charge detector, a geophone, a Bruker Model EM27 Fourier Transform Infra Red (FTIR) spectrometer with Sterling cycle cooler, and various temperature sensors. The boulder was stressed over about 8 h using expanding concrete (Bustar<sup>tm</sup>), until it fractured into three major pieces. The recorded data showed surface charge build up, magnetic pulsations, impulsive air conductivity changes, and acoustical cues starting about 5 h before the boulder actually broke. These magnetic and air conductivity pulse signatures resembled both the laboratory rock stressing results and the 30 October 2007 <i>M</i>5.4 Alum Rock earthquake field data. <br><br> The second part of this paper examined other California earthquakes, prior to the Alum Rock earthquake, to see if magnetic pulsations were also present prior to those events. A search for field examples of medium earthquakes was performed to identify earthquakes where functioning magnetometers were present within 20 km, the expected detection range of the magnetometers. Two earthquakes identified in the search included the 12 August 1998 <i>M</i>5.1 San Juan Bautista (Hollister Ca.) earthquake and the 28 September 2004 <i>M</i>6.0 Parkfield Ca. earthquake. Both of these data sets were recorded using EMI Corp. Model BF4 induction magnetometers, installed in equipment owned and operated by UC Berkeley. Unfortunately, no air conductivity or IR data were available for these earthquake examples. This new analysis of old data used the raw time series data (40 samples per s), and examined the data for short duration pulsations that exceeded the normal background noise levels at each site, similar to the technique used at Alum Rock. Analysis of Hollister magnetometer, positioned 2 km from the epicenter, showed a significant increase in magnetic pulsations above quiescient threshold levels several weeks prior, and especially 2 days prior to the quake. The pattern of positive and negative pulsations observed at Hollister, were similar, but not identical to Alum Rock in that the pattern of pulsations were interspersed with Pc 1 pulsation trains, and did not start 2 weeks prior to the quake, but rather 2 days prior. The Parkfield data (magnetometer positioned 19 km from the epicenter) showed much smaller pre-earthquake pulsations, but the area had significantly higher conductivity (which attenuates the signals). More interesting was the fact that significant pulsations occurred between the aftershock sequences of quakes as the crustal stress patterns were migrating. <br><br> Comparing laboratory, field experiments with a boulder, and earthquake events, striking similarities were noted in magnetic pulsations and air conductivity changes, as well as IR signals (where instrumented). More earthquake samples, taken with the appropriate detectors and within 10–15 km proximity to large (><i>M</i>5) earthquakes, are still needed to provide more evidence to understand the variability between earthquakes and various electromagnetic signals detected prior to large earthquakes

Dynamic ductile to brittle transition in a one-dimensional model of viscoplasticity

We study two closely related, nonlinear models of a viscoplastic solid. These models capture essential features of plasticity over a wide range of strain rates and applied stresses. They exhibit inelastic strain relaxation and steady flow above a well defined yield stress. In this paper, we describe a first step in exploring the implications of these models for theories of fracture and related phenomena. We consider a one dimensional problem of decohesion from a substrate of a membrane that obeys the viscoplastic constitutive equations that we have constructed. We find that, quite generally, when the yield stress becomes smaller than some threshold value, the energy required for steady decohesion becomes a non-monotonic function of the decohesion speed. As a consequence, steady state decohesion at certain speeds becomes unstable. We believe that these results are relevant to understanding the ductile to brittle transition as well as fracture stability.Comment: 10 pages, REVTeX, 12 postscript figure

Community rotorcraft air transportation benefits and opportunities

Information about rotorcraft that will assist community planners in assessing and planning for the use of rotorcraft transportation in their communities is provided. Information useful to helicopter researchers, manufacturers, and operators concerning helicopter opportunities and benefits is also given. Three primary topics are discussed: the current status and future projections of rotorcraft technology, and the comparison of that technology with other transportation vehicles; the community benefits of promising rotorcraft transportation opportunities; and the integration and interfacing considerations between rotorcraft and other transportation vehicles. Helicopter applications in a number of business and public service fields are examined in various geographical settings

A Simple Linear Ranking Algorithm Using Query Dependent Intercept Variables

The LETOR website contains three information retrieval datasets used as a benchmark for testing machine learning ideas for ranking. Algorithms participating in the challenge are required to assign score values to search results for a collection of queries, and are measured using standard IR ranking measures (NDCG, precision, MAP) that depend only the relative score-induced order of the results. Similarly to many of the ideas proposed in the participating algorithms, we train a linear classifier. In contrast with other participating algorithms, we define an additional free variable (intercept, or benchmark) for each query. This allows expressing the fact that results for different queries are incomparable for the purpose of determining relevance. The cost of this idea is the addition of relatively few nuisance parameters. Our approach is simple, and we used a standard logistic regression library to test it. The results beat the reported participating algorithms. Hence, it seems promising to combine our approach with other more complex ideas.Comment: 5 page

Macdonald Polynomials from Sklyanin Algebras: A Conceptual Basis for the pp-Adics-Quantum Group Connection

We establish a previously conjectured connection between $p$-adics and quantum groups. We find in Sklyanin's two parameter elliptic quantum algebra and its generalizations, the conceptual basis for the Macdonald polynomials, which ``interpolate'' between the zonal spherical functions of related real and $p$\--adic symmetric spaces. The elliptic quantum algebras underlie the $Z_n$\--Baxter models. We show that in the n \air \infty limit, the Jost function for the scattering of {\em first} level excitations in the $Z_n$\--Baxter model coincides with the Harish\--Chandra\--like $c$\--function constructed from the Macdonald polynomials associated to the root system $A_1$. The partition function of the $Z_2$\--Baxter model itself is also expressed in terms of this Macdonald\--Harish\--Chandra\ $c$\--function, albeit in a less simple way. We relate the two parameters $q$ and $t$ of the Macdonald polynomials to the anisotropy and modular parameters of the Baxter model. In particular the $p$\--adic ``regimes'' in the Macdonald polynomials correspond to a discrete sequence of XXZ models. We also discuss the possibility of ``$q$\--deforming'' Euler products.Comment: 25 page

Finite Size Scaling Analysis of Exact Ground States for +/-J Spin Glass Models in Two Dimensions

With the help of EXACT ground states obtained by a polynomial algorithm we compute the domain wall energy at zero-temperature for the bond-random and the site-random Ising spin glass model in two dimensions. We find that in both models the stability of the ferromagnetic AND the spin glass order ceases to exist at a UNIQUE concentration p_c for the ferromagnetic bonds. In the vicinity of this critical point, the size and concentration dependency of the first AND second moment of the domain wall energy are, for both models, described by a COMMON finite size scaling form. Moreover, below this concentration the stiffness exponent turns out to be slightly negative \theta_S = -0.056(6) indicating the absence of any intermediate spin glass phase at non-zero temperature.Comment: 7 pages Latex, 5 postscript-figures include

Statistically Motivated Second Order Pooling

Second-order pooling, a.k.a.~bilinear pooling, has proven effective for deep learning based visual recognition. However, the resulting second-order networks yield a final representation that is orders of magnitude larger than that of standard, first-order ones, making them memory-intensive and cumbersome to deploy. Here, we introduce a general, parametric compression strategy that can produce more compact representations than existing compression techniques, yet outperform both compressed and uncompressed second-order models. Our approach is motivated by a statistical analysis of the network's activations, relying on operations that lead to a Gaussian-distributed final representation, as inherently used by first-order deep networks. As evidenced by our experiments, this lets us outperform the state-of-the-art first-order and second-order models on several benchmark recognition datasets.Comment: Accepted to ECCV 2018. Camera ready version. 14 page, 5 figures, 3 table

Self-organization of traffic jams in cities: effects of stochastic dynamics and signal periods

We propose a cellular automata model for vehicular traffic in cities by combining (and appropriately modifying) ideas borrowed from the Biham-Middleton-Levine (BML) model of city traffic and the Nagel-Schreckenberg (NS) model of highway traffic. We demonstrate a phase transition from the "free-flowing" dynamical phase to the completely "jammed" phase at a vehicle density which depends on the time periods of the synchronized signals and the separation between them. The intrinsic stochasticity of the dynamics, which triggers the onset of jamming, is similar to that in the NS model, while the phenomenon of complete jamming through self-organization as well as the final jammed configurations are similar to those in the BML model. Using our new model, we have made an investigation of the time-dependence of the average speeds of the cars in the "free-flowing" phase as well as the dependence of flux and jamming on the time period of the signals.Comment: 4 pages, REVTEX, 4 eps figures include

One-Center Charge Transfer Transitions in Manganites

In frames of a rather conventional cluster approach, which combines the crystal field and the ligand field models we have considered different charge transfer (CT) states and O 2p-Mn 3d CT transitions in MnO$_{6}^{9-}$ octahedra. The many-electron dipole transition matrix elements were calculated using the Racah algebra for the cubic point group. Simple "local" approximation allowed to calculate the relative intensity for all dipole-allowed $\pi -\pi$ and $\sigma -\sigma$ CT transitions. We present a self-consistent description of the CT bands in insulating stoichiometric LaMn$^{3+}$O$_3$ compound with the only Mn$^{3+}$ valent state and idealized octahedral MnO$_{6}^{9-}$ centers which allows to substantially correct the current interpretation of the optical spectra. Our analysis shows the multi-band structure of the CT optical response with the weak low-energy edge at 1.7 eV, associated with forbidden $t_{1g}(\pi)-e_{g}$ transition and a series of the weak and strong dipole-allowed high-energy transitions starting from 2.5 and 4.5 eV, respectively, and extending up to nearly 11 eV. The most intensive features are associated with two strong composite bands near $4.6\div 4.7$ eV and $8\div 9$ eV, respectively, resulting from the superposition of the dipole-allowed $\sigma -\sigma$ and $\pi -\pi$ CT transitions. These predictions are in good agreement with experimental spectra. The experimental data point to a strong overscreening of the crystal field parameter $Dq$ in the CT states of MnO$_{6}^{9-}$ centers.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figure