Heegaard Floer correction terms and rational genus bounds

Given an element in the first homology of a rational homology 3-sphere $Y$, one can consider the minimal rational genus of all knots in this homology class. This defines a function $\Theta$ on $H_1(Y;\mathbb Z)$, which was introduced by Turaev as an analogue of Thurston norm. We will give a lower bound for this function using the correction terms in Heegaard Floer homology. As a corollary, we show that Floer simple knots in L-spaces are genus minimizers in their homology classes, hence answer questions of Turaev and Rasmussen about genus minimizers in lens spaces.Comment: 21 pages. V2: corrects a mistake in the proof of Proposition 1.5, incorporates the referee's comment

Learning Loosely Connected Markov Random Fields

We consider the structure learning problem for graphical models that we call loosely connected Markov random fields, in which the number of short paths between any pair of nodes is small, and present a new conditional independence test based algorithm for learning the underlying graph structure. The novel maximization step in our algorithm ensures that the true edges are detected correctly even when there are short cycles in the graph. The number of samples required by our algorithm is C*log p, where p is the size of the graph and the constant C depends on the parameters of the model. We show that several previously studied models are examples of loosely connected Markov random fields, and our algorithm achieves the same or lower computational complexity than the previously designed algorithms for individual cases. We also get new results for more general graphical models, in particular, our algorithm learns general Ising models on the Erdos-Renyi random graph G(p, c/p) correctly with running time O(np^5).Comment: 45 pages, minor revisio

Chaos in two black holes with next-to-leading order spin-spin interactions

We take into account the dynamics of a complete third post-Newtonian conservative Hamiltonian of two spinning black holes, where the orbital part arrives at the third post-Newtonian precision level and the spin-spin part with the spin-orbit part includes the leading-order and next-to-leading-order contributions. It is shown through numerical simulations that the next-to-leading order spin-spin couplings play an important role in chaos. A dynamical sensitivity to the variation of single parameter is also investigated. In particular, there are a number of \textit{observable} orbits whose initial radii are large enough and which become chaotic before coalescence