747 research outputs found
Is the New Resonance Spin 0 or 2? Taking a Step Forward in the Higgs Boson Discovery
The observation of a new boson of mass \sim 125\gev at the CERN LHC may
finally have revealed the existence of a Higgs boson. Now we have the
opportunity to scrutinize its properties, determining its quantum numbers and
couplings to the standard model particles, in order to confirm or not its
discovery. We show that by the end of the 8 TeV run, combining the entire data
sets of ATLAS and CMS, it will be possible to discriminate between the
following discovery alternatives: a scalar or a tensor
particle with minimal couplings to photons, at a statistical
confidence level at least, using only diphotons events. Our results are based
on the calculation of a center-edge asymmetry measure of the reconstructed {\it
sPlot} scattering polar angle of the diphotons. The results based on
asymmetries are shown to be rather robust against systematic uncertainties with
comparable discrimination power to a log likelihood ratio statistic.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figures, 1 table. References added, minor typos correcte
Asymptotic behavior of the Kleinberg model
We study Kleinberg navigation (the search of a target in a d-dimensional
lattice, where each site is connected to one other random site at distance r,
with probability proportional to r^{-a}) by means of an exact master equation
for the process. We show that the asymptotic scaling behavior for the delivery
time T to a target at distance L scales as (ln L)^2 when a=d, and otherwise as
L^x, with x=(d-a)/(d+1-a) for ad+1. These
values of x exceed the rigorous lower-bounds established by Kleinberg. We also
address the situation where there is a finite probability for the message to
get lost along its way and find short delivery times (conditioned upon arrival)
for a wide range of a's
Manifesto for a European research network into Problematic Usage of the Internet
Copyright © 2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.The Internet is now all-pervasive across much of the globe. While it has positive uses (e.g. prompt access to information, rapid news dissemination), many individuals develop Problematic Use of the Internet (PUI), an umbrella term incorporating a range of repetitive impairing behaviours. The Internet can act as a conduit for, and may contribute to, functionally impairing behaviours including excessive and compulsive video gaming, compulsive sexual behaviour, buying, gambling, streaming or social networks use. There is growing public and National health authority concern about the health and societal costs of PUI across the lifespan. Gaming Disorder is being considered for inclusion as a mental disorder in diagnostic classification systems, and was listed in the ICD-11 version released for consideration by Member States (http://www.who.int/classifications/icd/revision/timeline/en/). More research is needed into disorder definitions, validation of clinical tools, prevalence, clinical parameters, brain-based biology, socio-health-economic impact, and empirically validated intervention and policy approaches. Potential cultural differences in the magnitudes and natures of types and patterns of PUI need to be better understood, to inform optimal health policy and service development. To this end, the EU under Horizon 2020 has launched a new four-year European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) Action Programme (CA 16207), bringing together scientists and clinicians from across the fields of impulsive, compulsive, and addictive disorders, to advance networked interdisciplinary research into PUI across Europe and beyond, ultimately seeking to inform regulatory policies and clinical practice. This paper describes nine critical and achievable research priorities identified by the Network, needed in order to advance understanding of PUI, with a view towards identifying vulnerable individuals for early intervention. The network shall enable collaborative research networks, shared multinational databases, multicentre studies and joint publications.Peer reviewe
Facet ridge end points in crystal shapes
Equilibrium crystal shapes (ECS) near facet ridge end points (FRE) are
generically complex. We study the body-centered solid-on-solid model on a
square lattice with an enhanced uniaxial interaction range to test the
stability of the so-called stochastic FRE point where the model maps exactly
onto one dimensional Kardar-Parisi-Zhang type growth and the local ECS is
simple. The latter is unstable. The generic ECS contains first-order ridges
extending into the rounded part of the ECS, where two rough orientations
coexist and first-order faceted to rough boundaries terminating in
Pokrovsky-Talapov type end points.Comment: Contains 4 pages, 5 eps figures. Uses RevTe
A network model for field and quenched disorder effects in artificial spin ice
We have performed a systematic study of the effects of field strength and
quenched disorder on the driven dynamics of square artificial spin ice. We
construct a network representation of the configurational phase space, where
nodes represent the microscopic configurations and a directed link between node
i and node j means that the field may induce a transition between the
corresponding configurations. In this way, we are able to quantitatively
describe how the field and the disorder affect the connectedness of states and
the reversibility of dynamics. In particular, we have shown that for optimal
field strengths, a substantial fraction of all states can be accessed using
external driving fields, and this fraction is increased by disorder. We discuss
how this relates to control and potential information storage applications for
artificial spin ices
Spontaneous magnetization and Hall effect in superconductors with broken time-reversal symmetry
Broken time reversal symmetry (BTRS) in d wave superconductors is studied and
is shown to yield current carrying surface states. The corresponding
spontaneous magnetization is temperature independent near the critical
temperature Tc for weak BTRS, in accord with recent data. For strong BTRS and
thin films we expect a temperature dependent spontaneous magnetization with a
paramagnetic anomaly near Tc. The Hall conductance is found to vanish at zero
wavevector q and finite frequency w, however at finite q,w it has an unusual
structure.Comment: 7 pages, 1 eps figure, Europhysics Letters (in press
On The Mobile Behavior of Solid He at High Temperatures
We report studies of solid helium contained inside a torsional oscillator, at
temperatures between 1.07K and 1.87K. We grew single crystals inside the
oscillator using commercially pure He and He-He mixtures containing
100 ppm He. Crystals were grown at constant temperature and pressure on the
melting curve. At the end of the growth, the crystals were disordered,
following which they partially decoupled from the oscillator. The fraction of
the decoupled He mass was temperature and velocity dependent. Around 1K, the
decoupled mass fraction for crystals grown from the mixture reached a limiting
value of around 35%. In the case of crystals grown using commercially pure
He at temperatures below 1.3K, this fraction was much smaller. This
difference could possibly be associated with the roughening transition at the
solid-liquid interface.Comment: 15 pages, 6 figure
Crossover interference and sex-specific genetic maps shape identical by descent sharing in close relatives
Simulations of close relatives and identical by descent (IBD) segments are common in genetic studies, yet most past efforts have utilized sex averaged genetic maps and ignored crossover interference, thus omitting features known to affect the breakpoints of IBD segments. We developed Ped-sim, a method for simulating relatives that can utilize either sex-specific or sex averaged genetic maps and also either a model of crossover interference or the traditional Poisson model for inter-crossover distances. To characterize the impact of previously ignored mechanisms, we simulated data for all four combinations of these factors. We found that modeling crossover interference decreases the standard deviation of pairwise IBD proportions by 10.4% on average in full siblings through second cousins. By contrast, sex-specific maps increase this standard deviation by 4.2% on average, and also impact the number of segments relatives share. Most notably, using sex-specific maps, the number of segments half-siblings share is bimodal; and when combined with interference modeling, the probability that sixth cousins have non-zero IBD sharing ranges from 9.0 to 13.1%, depending on the sexes of the individuals through which they are related. We present new analytical results for the distributions of IBD segments under these models and show they match results from simulations. Finally, we compared IBD sharing rates between simulated and real relatives and find that the combination of sex-specific maps and interference modeling most accurately captures IBD rates in real data. Ped-sim is open source and available from https://github.com/williamslab/ped-sim
Optimization viewpoint on Kalman smoothing, with applications to robust and sparse estimation
In this paper, we present the optimization formulation of the Kalman
filtering and smoothing problems, and use this perspective to develop a variety
of extensions and applications. We first formulate classic Kalman smoothing as
a least squares problem, highlight special structure, and show that the classic
filtering and smoothing algorithms are equivalent to a particular algorithm for
solving this problem. Once this equivalence is established, we present
extensions of Kalman smoothing to systems with nonlinear process and
measurement models, systems with linear and nonlinear inequality constraints,
systems with outliers in the measurements or sudden changes in the state, and
systems where the sparsity of the state sequence must be accounted for. All
extensions preserve the computational efficiency of the classic algorithms, and
most of the extensions are illustrated with numerical examples, which are part
of an open source Kalman smoothing Matlab/Octave package.Comment: 46 pages, 11 figure
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