Proton Decay and Fermion Masses in Supersymmetric SO(10) Model with Unified Higgs Sector

We make a detailed analysis on the proton decay in a supersymmetric SO(10) model proposed by K.Babu, I.Gogoladze, P.Nath, and R. Syed. We introduce quark mixing, and find that this model can generate fermion mass without breaking the experimental bound on proton decay. We also predict large CKM unitarity violations.Comment: 7 page

Yard 21

Yard 21 by Yunfei Zhang, M.F.A. Thesis, Rochester Institute of Technology 2011 An overview of the process of the proposal, production, and ultimate result of the live-action documentary film，Yard 21. The goal of Yard 21 on the technical level was to generate a story idea, develop the idea, and produce and finish the film. The aesthetic purpose of Yard 21 is to evoke a spiritual response from the audience as they watch these un-acclaimed characters\u27 lives. Included are the original proposal and developed proposal, schedule breakdown, budget, editing schedule, final script, animation sequence samples, and frame style samples

Accelerating federated learning via momentum gradient descent

Federated learning (FL) provides a communication-efficient approach to solve machine learning problems concerning distributed data, without sending raw data to a central server. However, existing works on FL only utilize first-order gradient descent (GD) and do not consider the preceding iterations to gradient update which can potentially accelerate convergence. In this article, we consider momentum term which relates to the last iteration. The proposed momentum federated learning (MFL) uses momentum gradient descent (MGD) in the local update step of FL system. We establish global convergence properties of MFL and derive an upper bound on MFL convergence rate. Comparing the upper bounds on MFL and FL convergence rates, we provide conditions in which MFL accelerates the convergence. For different machine learning models, the convergence performance of MFL is evaluated based on experiments with MNIST and CIFAR-10 datasets. Simulation results confirm that MFL is globally convergent and further reveal significant convergence improvement over FL

Continuous fabrication of calcium sulfate whiskers with adjustable aspect ratio in microdroplets

Hemi-hydrate and anhydrous CaSO₄ whiskers with adjustable aspect ratio were continuously synthesized by the reactive crystallization of CaCl₂ to K₂ S₂ O₈ in microdroplets. The effects of solvent and reactive temperature were examined, with SEM and XRD characterizations. Hemi-hydrate and anhydrous CaSO₄ whiskers can be, respectively, obtained in aqueous and N,N-dimethylformamide solutions at 90 °C in 180 s. The addition of ethylene glycol or glycerol as well as increasing temperature could lead to the increase in length and aspect ratio of the whiskers. Thus this preparation technique provides a simple continuous route to synthesize CaSO₄ whiskers with two kinds of crystal structures in a short time, and adjustable lengths and aspect ratios

Dimension- and shape-dependent thermal transport in nano-patterned thin films investigated by scanning thermal microscopy

Scanning thermal microscopy (SThM) is a technique which is often used for the measurement of the thermal conductivity of materials at the nanometre scale. The impact of nano-scale feature size and shape on apparent thermal conductivity, as measured using SThM, has been investigated. To achieve this, our recently developed topography-free samples with 200 and 400 nm wide gold wires (50 nm thick) of length of 400–2500 nm were fabricated and their thermal resistance measured and analysed. This data was used in the development and validation of a rigorous but simple heat transfer model that describes a nanoscopic contact to an object with finite shape and size. This model, in combination with a recently proposed thermal resistance network, was then used to calculate the SThM probe signal obtained by measuring these features. These calculated values closely matched the experimental results obtained from the topography-free sample. By using the model to analyse the dimensional dependence of thermal resistance, we demonstrate that feature size and shape has a significant impact on measured thermal properties that can result in a misinterpretation of material thermal conductivity. In the case of a gold nanowire embedded within a silicon nitride matrix it is found that the apparent thermal conductivity of the wire appears to be depressed by a factor of twenty from the true value. These results clearly demonstrate the importance of knowing both probe-sample thermal interactions and feature dimensions as well as shape when using SThM to quantify material thermal properties. Finally, the new model is used to identify the heat flux sensitivity, as well as the effective contact size of the conventional SThM system used in this study

Exponential Approximation of Band-limited Signals from Nonuniform Sampling

Reconstructing a band-limited function from its finite sample data is a fundamental task in signal analysis. A simple Gaussian or hyper-Gaussian regularized Shannon sampling series has been proved to be able to achieve exponential convergence for uniform sampling. In this paper, we prove that exponential approximation can also be attained for general nonuniform sampling. The analysis is based on the the residue theorem to represent the truncated error by a contour integral. Several concrete examples of nonuniform sampling with exponential convergence will be presented