42,844 research outputs found
First detection of GeV emission from an ultraluminous infrared galaxy: Arp 220 as seen with the Fermi Large Area Telescope
Cosmic rays (CRs) in starburst galaxies produce high energy gamma-rays by
colliding with the dense interstellar medium (ISM). Arp 220 is the nearest
ultra luminous infrared galaxy (ULIRG) that has star-formation at extreme
levels, so it has long been predicted to emit high-energy gamma-rays. However,
no evidence of gamma-ray emission was found despite intense efforts of search.
Here we report the discovery of high-energy gamma-ray emission above 200 MeV
from Arp 220 at a confidence level of using 7.5 years of
\textsl {Fermi} Large Area Telescope observations. The gamma-ray emission shows
no significant variability over the observation period and it is consistent
with the quasi-linear scaling relation between the gamma-ray luminosity and
total infrared luminosity for star-forming galaxies, suggesting that these
gamma-rays arise from CR interactions. As the high density medium of Arp 220
makes it an ideal CR calorimeter, the gamma-ray luminosity can be used to
measure the efficiency of powering CRs by supernova (SN) remnants given a known
supernova rate in Arp 220. We find that this efficiency is about
for CRs above 1 GeV.Comment: Accepted by ApJL, 6 pages, 3 figure
IRGAN: A Minimax Game for Unifying Generative and Discriminative Information Retrieval Models
This paper provides a unified account of two schools of thinking in
information retrieval modelling: the generative retrieval focusing on
predicting relevant documents given a query, and the discriminative retrieval
focusing on predicting relevancy given a query-document pair. We propose a game
theoretical minimax game to iteratively optimise both models. On one hand, the
discriminative model, aiming to mine signals from labelled and unlabelled data,
provides guidance to train the generative model towards fitting the underlying
relevance distribution over documents given the query. On the other hand, the
generative model, acting as an attacker to the current discriminative model,
generates difficult examples for the discriminative model in an adversarial way
by minimising its discrimination objective. With the competition between these
two models, we show that the unified framework takes advantage of both schools
of thinking: (i) the generative model learns to fit the relevance distribution
over documents via the signals from the discriminative model, and (ii) the
discriminative model is able to exploit the unlabelled data selected by the
generative model to achieve a better estimation for document ranking. Our
experimental results have demonstrated significant performance gains as much as
23.96% on Precision@5 and 15.50% on MAP over strong baselines in a variety of
applications including web search, item recommendation, and question answering.Comment: 12 pages; appendix adde
Linear Convergence of Adaptively Iterative Thresholding Algorithms for Compressed Sensing
This paper studies the convergence of the adaptively iterative thresholding
(AIT) algorithm for compressed sensing. We first introduce a generalized
restricted isometry property (gRIP). Then we prove that the AIT algorithm
converges to the original sparse solution at a linear rate under a certain gRIP
condition in the noise free case. While in the noisy case, its convergence rate
is also linear until attaining a certain error bound. Moreover, as by-products,
we also provide some sufficient conditions for the convergence of the AIT
algorithm based on the two well-known properties, i.e., the coherence property
and the restricted isometry property (RIP), respectively. It should be pointed
out that such two properties are special cases of gRIP. The solid improvements
on the theoretical results are demonstrated and compared with the known
results. Finally, we provide a series of simulations to verify the correctness
of the theoretical assertions as well as the effectiveness of the AIT
algorithm.Comment: 15 pages, 5 figure
Priming effects on labile and stable soil organic carbon decomposition: Pulse dynamics over two years.
Soil organic carbon (SOC) is a major component in the global carbon cycle. Yet how input of plant litter may influence the loss of SOC through a phenomenon called priming effect remains highly uncertain. Most published results about the priming effect came from short-term investigations for a few weeks or at the most for a few months in duration. The priming effect has not been studied at the annual time scale. In this study for 815 days, we investigated the priming effect of added maize leaves on SOC decomposition of two soil types and two treatments (bare fallow for 23 years, and adjacent old-field, represent stable and relatively labile SOC, respectively) of SOC stabilities within each soil type, using a natural 13C-isotope method. Results showed that the variation of the priming effect through time had three distinctive phases for all soils: (1) a strong negative priming phase during the first period (≈0-90 days); (2) a pulse of positive priming phase in the middle (≈70-160 and 140-350 days for soils from Hailun and Shenyang stations, respectively); and (3) a relatively stabilized phase of priming during the last stage of the incubation (>160 days and >350 days for soils from Hailun and Shenyang stations, respectively). Because of major differences in soil properties, the two soil types produced different cumulative priming effects at the end of the experiment, a positive priming effect of 3-7% for the Mollisol and a negative priming effect of 4-8% for the Alfisol. Although soil types and measurement times modulated most of the variability of the priming effect, relative SOC stabilities also influenced the priming effect for a particular soil type and at a particular dynamic phase. The stable SOC from the bare fallow treatment tended to produce a narrower variability during the first phase of negative priming and also during the second phase of positive priming. Averaged over the entire experiment, the stable SOC (i.e., the bare fallow) was at least as responsive to priming as the relatively labile SOC (i.e., the old-field) if not more responsive. The annual time scale of our experiment allowed us to demonstrate the three distinctive phases of the priming effect. Our results highlight the importance of studying the priming effect by investigating the temporal dynamics over longer time scales
- …