CsCl-type compounds in binary alloys of rare-earth metals with gold and silver

In binary alloys of silver with Sm, Tb, Ho, and Tm, and of gold with Y, Pr, Nd, Sm, Gd, Tb, Dy, Ho, Er, and Tm, intermediate phases containing stoichiometric proportions of the two metals were found to crystallize into the CsCl (B2)-type structure. The lattice parameters of these phases are reported and a correlation has been found between these lattice parameters and the trivalent ionic radii of the rare-earth metals

Unbounded Human Learning: Optimal Scheduling for Spaced Repetition

In the study of human learning, there is broad evidence that our ability to retain information improves with repeated exposure and decays with delay since last exposure. This plays a crucial role in the design of educational software, leading to a trade-off between teaching new material and reviewing what has already been taught. A common way to balance this trade-off is spaced repetition, which uses periodic review of content to improve long-term retention. Though spaced repetition is widely used in practice, e.g., in electronic flashcard software, there is little formal understanding of the design of these systems. Our paper addresses this gap in three ways. First, we mine log data from spaced repetition software to establish the functional dependence of retention on reinforcement and delay. Second, we use this memory model to develop a stochastic model for spaced repetition systems. We propose a queueing network model of the Leitner system for reviewing flashcards, along with a heuristic approximation that admits a tractable optimization problem for review scheduling. Finally, we empirically evaluate our queueing model through a Mechanical Turk experiment, verifying a key qualitative prediction of our model: the existence of a sharp phase transition in learning outcomes upon increasing the rate of new item introductions.Comment: Accepted to the ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining 201

Non-Newtonian gravity or gravity anomalies?

Geophysical measurements of G differ from laboratory values, indicating that gravity may be non-Newtonian. A spherical harmonic formulation is presented for the variation of (Newtonian) gravity inside the Earth. Using the GEM-10B Earth Gravitational Field Model, it is shown that long-wavelength gravity anomalies, if not corrected, may masquerade as non-Newtonian gravity by providing significant influences on experimental observation of delta g/delta r and G. An apparent contradiction in other studies is also resolved: i.e., local densities appear in equations when average densities of layers seem to be called for

A tracking algorithm for the stable spin polarization field in storage rings using stroboscopic averaging

Polarized protons have never been accelerated to more than about $25$GeV. To achieve polarized proton beams in RHIC (250GeV), HERA (820GeV), and the TEVATRON (900GeV), ideas and techniques new to accelerator physics are needed. In this publication we will stress an important aspect of very high energy polarized proton beams, namely the fact that the equilibrium polarization direction can vary substantially across the beam in the interaction region of a high energy experiment when no countermeasure is taken. Such a divergence of the polarization direction would not only diminish the average polarization available to the particle physics experiment, but it would also make the polarization involved in each collision analyzed in a detector strongly dependent on the phase space position of the interacting particle. In order to analyze and compensate this effect, methods for computing the equilibrium polarization direction are needed. In this paper we introduce the method of stroboscopic averaging, which computes this direction in a very efficient way. Since only tracking data is needed, our method can be implemented easily in existing spin tracking programs. Several examples demonstrate the importance of the spin divergence and the applicability of stroboscopic averaging.Comment: 39 page

Cancellation of Infrared Divergences in Hadronic Annihilation Decays of Heavy Quarkonia

In the framework of a newly developed factorization formalism which is based on NRQCD, explicit cancellations are shown for the infrared divergences that appeared in the previously calculated hadronic annihilation decay rates of P-wave and D-wave heavy quarkonia. We extend them to a more general case that to leading order in $v^2$ and next-to-leading order in $\alpha_s$, the infrared divergences in the annihilation amplitudes of color-singlet $Q\bar{Q}(^{2S+1}L_J)$ pair can be removed by including the contributions of color-octet operators $Q\bar{Q}(^{2S+1}(L-1)_{J'})$, $Q\bar{Q}(^{2S+1}(L-3)_{J''})$, ... in NRQCD. We also give the decay widths of $^3D_J\rightarrow LH$ at leading order in $\alpha_s$.Comment: 8 pages, LaTex(3 figures included), to be publishe

The meson BcB_c annihilation to leptons and inclusive light hadrons

The annihilation of the $B_c$ meson to leptons and inclusive light hadrons is analyzed in the framework of nonrelativistic QCD (NRQCD) factorization. We find that the decay mode, which escapes from the helicity suppression, contributes a sizable fraction width. According to the analysis, the branching ratio due to the contribution from the color-singlet component of the meson $B_c$ can be of order (10^{-2}). We also estimate the contributions from the color-octet components. With the velocity scaling rule of NRQCD, we find that the color-octet contributions are sizable too, especially, in certain phase space of the annihilation they are greater than (or comparative to) the color-singlet component. A few observables relevant to the spectrum of charged lepton are suggested, that may be used as measurements on the color-octet and color-singlet components in the future $B_c$ experiments. A typical long distance contribution in the annihilation is estimated too.Comment: 26 pages, 5 figures (6 eps-files), submitted to Phys. Rev.

π0→γ∗γ\pi^0\to\gamma^*\gamma transition form factor within Light Front Quark Model

We study the transition form factor of $\pi^0\to\gamma^* \gamma$ as a function of the momentum transfer $Q^2$ within the light-front quark model (LFQM). We compare our result with the experimental data by BaBar as well as other calculations based on the LFQM in the literature. We show that our predicted form factor fits well with the experimental data, particularly those at the large $Q^2$ region.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figures, accepted for publication in PR