19,622 research outputs found
Learning to Predict the Cosmological Structure Formation
Matter evolved under influence of gravity from minuscule density
fluctuations. Non-perturbative structure formed hierarchically over all scales,
and developed non-Gaussian features in the Universe, known as the Cosmic Web.
To fully understand the structure formation of the Universe is one of the holy
grails of modern astrophysics. Astrophysicists survey large volumes of the
Universe and employ a large ensemble of computer simulations to compare with
the observed data in order to extract the full information of our own Universe.
However, to evolve trillions of galaxies over billions of years even with the
simplest physics is a daunting task. We build a deep neural network, the Deep
Density Displacement Model (hereafter DM), to predict the non-linear
structure formation of the Universe from simple linear perturbation theory. Our
extensive analysis, demonstrates that DM outperforms the second order
perturbation theory (hereafter 2LPT), the commonly used fast approximate
simulation method, in point-wise comparison, 2-point correlation, and 3-point
correlation. We also show that DM is able to accurately extrapolate far
beyond its training data, and predict structure formation for significantly
different cosmological parameters. Our study proves, for the first time, that
deep learning is a practical and accurate alternative to approximate
simulations of the gravitational structure formation of the Universe.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, 1 tabl
Detecting and quantifying natural selection at two linked loci from time series data of allele frequencies with forward-in-time simulations
Recent advances in DNA sequencing techniques have made it possible to monitor genomes in great detail over time. This improvement provides an opportunity for us to study natural selection based on time serial samples of genomes while accounting for genetic recombination effect and local linkage information. Such time series genomic data allow for more accurate estimation of population genetic parameters and hypothesis testing on the recent action of natural selection. In this work, we develop a novel Bayesian statistical framework for inferring natural selection at a pair of linked loci by capitalising on the temporal aspect of DNA data with the additional flexibility of modeling the sampled chromosomes that contain unknown alleles. Our approach is built on a hidden Markov model where the underlying process is a two-locus Wright-Fisher diffusion with selection, which enables us to explicitly model genetic recombination and local linkage. The posterior probability distribution for selection coefficients is computed by applying the particle marginal Metropolis-Hastings algorithm, which allows us to efficiently calculate the likelihood. We evaluate the performance of our Bayesian inference procedure through extensive simulations, showing that our approach can deliver accurate estimates of selection coefficients, and the addition of genetic recombination and local linkage brings about significant improvement in the inference of natural selection. We also illustrate the utility of our method on real data with an application to ancient DNA data associated with white spotting patterns in horses
Demystify the mixed-parity pairing of attractive fermions with spin-orbit coupling in optical lattice
The admixture of spin-singlet and spin-triplet pairing states in
superconductors can be typically induced by breaking spatial inversion
symmetry. Employing the {\it numerically exact} auxiliary-field Quantum Monte
Carlo method, we study such mixed-parity pairing phenomena of attractive
fermions with Rashba spin-orbit coupling (SOC) in two-dimensional optical
lattice at finite temperature. We systematically demystify the evolution of the
essential pairing structure in both singlet and triplet channels versus the
temperature, fermion filling, SOC and interaction strengths, via computing the
condensate fraction and pair wave function. Our numerical results reveal that
the singlet channel dominates in the fermion pairing and the triplet pairing
has relatively small contribution to the superfluidity for physically relevant
parameters. In contrast to the singlet channel mainly consisted of the on-site
Cooper pairs, the triplet pairing has plentiful patterns in real space with the
largest contributions from several nearest neighbors. As the SOC strengh
increases, the pairing correlation is firstly enhanced and then suppressed for
triplet pairing while it's simply weakened in singlet channel. We have also
obtained the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless transition temperatures through
the finite-size analysis of condensate fraction. Our results can serve as
quantitative guide for future optical lattice experiments as well as accurate
benchmarks for theories and other numerical methods.Comment: 14 pages, 11+5 figure
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