389 research outputs found
Data mining reactor fuel grab load trace data to support nuclear core condition monitoring
A critical component of an advanced-gas cooled reactor (AGR) station is the graphite core. As a station ages, the graphite bricks that comprise the core can distort and may eventually crack. As the core cannot be replaced the core integrity ultimately determines the station life. Monitoring these distortions is usually restricted to the routine outages, which occur every few years, as this is the only time that the reactor core can be accessed by external sensing equipment. However, during weekly refueling activities measurements are taken from the core for protection and control purposes. It is shown in this paper that these measurements may be interpreted for condition monitoring purposes, thus potentially providing information relating to core condition on a more frequent basis. This paper describes the data-mining approach adopted to analyze this data and also describes a software system designed and implemented to support this process. The use of this software to develop a model of expected behavior based on historical data, which may highlight events containing unusual features possibly indicative of brick cracking, is also described. Finally, the implementation of this newly acquired understanding in an automated analysis system is described
Modeling Bitcoin Contracts by Timed Automata
Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer cryptographic currency system. Since its
introduction in 2008, Bitcoin has gained noticeable popularity, mostly due to
its following properties: (1) the transaction fees are very low, and (2) it is
not controlled by any central authority, which in particular means that nobody
can "print" the money to generate inflation. Moreover, the transaction syntax
allows to create the so-called contracts, where a number of
mutually-distrusting parties engage in a protocol to jointly perform some
financial task, and the fairness of this process is guaranteed by the
properties of Bitcoin. Although the Bitcoin contracts have several potential
applications in the digital economy, so far they have not been widely used in
real life. This is partly due to the fact that they are cumbersome to create
and analyze, and hence risky to use.
In this paper we propose to remedy this problem by using the methods
originally developed for the computer-aided analysis for hardware and software
systems, in particular those based on the timed automata. More concretely, we
propose a framework for modeling the Bitcoin contracts using the timed automata
in the UPPAAL model checker. Our method is general and can be used to model
several contracts. As a proof-of-concept we use this framework to model some of
the Bitcoin contracts from our recent previous work. We then automatically
verify their security in UPPAAL, finding (and correcting) some subtle errors
that were difficult to spot by the manual analysis. We hope that our work can
draw the attention of the researchers working on formal modeling to the problem
of the Bitcoin contract verification, and spark off more research on this
topic
Stability estimates for resolvents, eigenvalues and eigenfunctions of elliptic operators on variable domains
We consider general second order uniformly elliptic operators subject to
homogeneous boundary conditions on open sets parametrized by
Lipschitz homeomorphisms defined on a fixed reference domain .
Given two open sets , we estimate the
variation of resolvents, eigenvalues and eigenfunctions via the Sobolev norm
for finite values of , under
natural summability conditions on eigenfunctions and their gradients. We prove
that such conditions are satisfied for a wide class of operators and open sets,
including open sets with Lipschitz continuous boundaries. We apply these
estimates to control the variation of the eigenvalues and eigenfunctions via
the measure of the symmetric difference of the open sets. We also discuss an
application to the stability of solutions to the Poisson problem.Comment: 34 pages. Minor changes in the introduction and the refercenes.
Published in: Around the research of Vladimir Maz'ya II, pp23--60, Int. Math.
Ser. (N.Y.), vol. 12, Springer, New York 201
Global Egr1-miRNAs Binding Analysis in PMA-Induced K562 Cells Using ChIP-Seq
Although much is known about microRNAs' regulation in gene expression and their contributions in cell fate, to date, globally lineage-(cell-) specific identification of the binding events between a transcription factor and its targeting microRNA genes is still waiting for elucidation. In this paper, we performed a ChIP-Seq experiment to find the targeting microRNA genes of a transcription factor, Egr1, in human erythroleukemia cell line K562. We found Egr1 binding sites near the promoters of 124 distinct microRNA genes, accounting for about 42% of the miRNAs which have high-confidence predicted promoters (294). We also found EGR1 bind to another 63 pre-miRNAs. We chose 12 of the 187 microRNAs with Egr1 binding sites to perform ChIP-PCR assays and the positive binding signal from ChIP-PCR confirmed the ChIP-Seq results. Our experiments provide the first global binding profile between Egr1 and its targeting microRNA genes in PMA-treated K562 cells, which may facilitate the understanding of pathways controlling microRNA biology in this specific cell line
Testing timed systems modeled by stream X-machines
Stream X-machines have been used to specify real systems where complex data structures. They are a variety of extended finite state machine where a shared memory is used to represent communications between the components of systems. In this paper we introduce an extension of the Stream X-machines formalism in order to specify systems that present temporal requirements. We add time in two different ways. First, we consider that (output) actions take time to be performed. Second, our formalism allows to specify timeouts. Timeouts represent the time a system can wait for the environment to react without changing its internal state. Since timeous affect the set of available actions of the system, a relation focusing on the functional behavior of systems, that is, the actions that they can perform, must explicitly take into account the possible timeouts. In this paper we also propose a formal testing methodology allowing to systematically test a system with respect to a specification. Finally, we introduce a test derivation algorithm. Given a specification, the derived test suite is sound and complete, that is, a system under test successfully passes the test suite if and only if this system conforms to the specification
Towards a construction of inclusive collision cross-sections in the massless Nelson model
The conventional approach to the infrared problem in perturbative quantum
electrodynamics relies on the concept of inclusive collision cross-sections. A
non-perturbative variant of this notion was introduced in algebraic quantum
field theory. Relying on these insights, we take first steps towards a
non-perturbative construction of inclusive collision cross-sections in the
massless Nelson model. We show that our proposal is consistent with the
standard scattering theory in the absence of the infrared problem and discuss
its status in the infrared-singular case.Comment: 23 pages, LaTeX. As appeared in Ann. Henri Poincar\'
Finite-temperature Fermi-edge singularity in tunneling studied using random telegraph signals
We show that random telegraph signals in metal-oxide-silicon transistors at
millikelvin temperatures provide a powerful means of investigating tunneling
between a two-dimensional electron gas and a single defect state. The tunneling
rate shows a peak when the defect level lines up with the Fermi energy, in
excellent agreement with theory of the Fermi-edge singularity at finite
temperature. This theory also indicates that defect levels are the origin of
the dissipative two-state systems observed previously in similar devices.Comment: 5 pages, REVTEX, 3 postscript figures included with epsfi
Quantum harmonic oscillator systems with disorder
We study many-body properties of quantum harmonic oscillator lattices with
disorder. A sufficient condition for dynamical localization, expressed as a
zero-velocity Lieb-Robinson bound, is formulated in terms of the decay of the
eigenfunction correlators for an effective one-particle Hamiltonian. We show
how state-of-the-art techniques for proving Anderson localization can be used
to prove that these properties hold in a number of standard models. We also
derive bounds on the static and dynamic correlation functions at both zero and
positive temperature in terms of one-particle eigenfunction correlators. In
particular, we show that static correlations decay exponentially fast if the
corresponding effective one-particle Hamiltonian exhibits localization at low
energies, regardless of whether there is a gap in the spectrum above the ground
state or not. Our results apply to finite as well as to infinite oscillator
systems. The eigenfunction correlators that appear are more general than those
previously studied in the literature. In particular, we must allow for
functions of the Hamiltonian that have a singularity at the bottom of the
spectrum. We prove exponential bounds for such correlators for some of the
standard models
Spectrum of non-Hermitian heavy tailed random matrices
Let (X_{jk})_{j,k>=1} be i.i.d. complex random variables such that |X_{jk}|
is in the domain of attraction of an alpha-stable law, with 0< alpha <2. Our
main result is a heavy tailed counterpart of Girko's circular law. Namely,
under some additional smoothness assumptions on the law of X_{jk}, we prove
that there exists a deterministic sequence a_n ~ n^{1/alpha} and a probability
measure mu_alpha on C depending only on alpha such that with probability one,
the empirical distribution of the eigenvalues of the rescaled matrix a_n^{-1}
(X_{jk})_{1<=j,k<=n} converges weakly to mu_alpha as n tends to infinity. Our
approach combines Aldous & Steele's objective method with Girko's Hermitization
using logarithmic potentials. The underlying limiting object is defined on a
bipartized version of Aldous' Poisson Weighted Infinite Tree. Recursive
relations on the tree provide some properties of mu_alpha. In contrast with the
Hermitian case, we find that mu_alpha is not heavy tailed.Comment: Expanded version of a paper published in Communications in
Mathematical Physics 307, 513-560 (2011
Continuous Spectrum of Automorphism Groups and the Infraparticle Problem
This paper presents a general framework for a refined spectral analysis of a
group of isometries acting on a Banach space, which extends the spectral theory
of Arveson. The concept of continuous Arveson spectrum is introduced and the
corresponding spectral subspace is defined. The absolutely continuous and
singular-continuous parts of this spectrum are specified. Conditions are given,
in terms of the transposed action of the group of isometries, which guarantee
that the pure-point and continuous subspaces span the entire Banach space. In
the case of a unitarily implemented group of automorphisms, acting on a
-algebra, relations between the continuous spectrum of the automorphisms
and the spectrum of the implementing group of unitaries are found. The group of
spacetime translation automorphisms in quantum field theory is analyzed in
detail. In particular, it is shown that the structure of its continuous
spectrum is relevant to the problem of existence of (infra-)particles in a
given theory.Comment: 31 pages, LaTeX. As appeared in Communications in Mathematical
Physic
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