The Stochastic Green Function (SGF) algorithm

We present the Stochastic Green Function (SGF) algorithm designed for bosons on lattices. This new quantum Monte Carlo algorithm is independent of the dimension of the system, works in continuous imaginary time, and is exact (no error beyond statistical errors). Hamiltonians with several species of bosons (and one-dimensional Bose-Fermi Hamiltonians) can be easily simulated. Some important features of the algorithm are that it works in the canonical ensemble and gives access to n-body Green functions.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figure

Comparison of energy consumption and costs of different HEVs and PHEVs in European and American context

This paper will analyse on the one hand the potential of Plug in Hybrid electric Vehicles to significantly reduce fuel consumption and displace it torward various primary energies thanks to the electricity sector. On the other hand the total cost of ownership of two different PHEV architectures will be compared to a conventional cehicle and a HEV without external charging

Interstitial Electronic Localization

We investigate the ground-state properties of a collection of \textit{N} non-interacting electrons in a macroscopic volume $\Omega$ also containing a crystalline array of \textit{N} spheres of radius $r_c$ each taken as largely impenetrable to electrons and with proximity of neighboring excluding regions playing a key physical role. The sole parameter of this quantum system is the ratio $r_c/r_s$, where $r_s$ is the Wigner- Seitz radius. Two lattices (FCC and BCC) are selected to illustrate the behavior of the system as a function of $r_c/r_s$. As this ratio increases valence electrons localize in the interstitial regions and the relative band-width $\epsilon_F/\epsilon_F^0$ is found to decrease monotonically for both. The system is motivated by the behavior of the alkali metals at significant compression. It accounts for band narrowing, leads to electronic densities with interstitially centered maxima, and can be taken as a model which clearly may be improved upon by perturbation and other methods.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figure

Harold Jeffreys's Theory of Probability Revisited

Published exactly seventy years ago, Jeffreys's Theory of Probability (1939) has had a unique impact on the Bayesian community and is now considered to be one of the main classics in Bayesian Statistics as well as the initiator of the objective Bayes school. In particular, its advances on the derivation of noninformative priors as well as on the scaling of Bayes factors have had a lasting impact on the field. However, the book reflects the characteristics of the time, especially in terms of mathematical rigor. In this paper we point out the fundamental aspects of this reference work, especially the thorough coverage of testing problems and the construction of both estimation and testing noninformative priors based on functional divergences. Our major aim here is to help modern readers in navigating in this difficult text and in concentrating on passages that are still relevant today.Comment: This paper commented in: [arXiv:1001.2967], [arXiv:1001.2968], [arXiv:1001.2970], [arXiv:1001.2975], [arXiv:1001.2985], [arXiv:1001.3073]. Rejoinder in [arXiv:0909.1008]. Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/09-STS284 the Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Data augmentation from RGB to chlorophyll fluorescence imaging Application to leaf segmentation of Arabidopsis thaliana from top view images

Résumé en françai

High-contrast Ultrabroadband Frontend Source for High Intensity Few-Cycle Lasers

An ultrabroadband seed source for high-power, high-contrast OPCPA systems at 800 nm is presented. The source is based on post compression in a hollow-core fiber followed by crossed polarized waves (XPW) filtering and is capable of delivering 80$\mu$J, 5fs, CEP-stable (0.3rad RMS) pulses with excellent spectral and temporal qualit

La modélisation hydrologique et la gestion de l'eau

Cet article brosse un portrait de différents types de modélisation hydrologique développés à ce jour. Nous passerons donc en revue l'hydrologie, à l'érosion hydrique des sols, au transport et aux transformations des polluants et à la qualité de l'eau en rivière. Ce bref survol, nous amène à conclure que si le développement de la modélisation hydrologique s'est fait jusqu'ici essentiellement en affinant la description des processus et en considérant des échelles spatiales et temporelles plus fines, l'étape suivante passe par l'intégration de ces divers modèles. Cette intégration permettra dès lors de considérer un ensemble de problématiques directement liées aux aspects de gestion environnementale.This paper presents an overview of physically-based hydrological modeling approaches and a look at the future of hydrological modeling within the context of water management. It extends beyond classical hydrological modeling by surveying the modeling of water contaminants transport in porous media and surface waters, as well as soil erosion.Increasing concerns in predicting the impacts of land use management on the hydrological cycle have led researchers to construct two types of physically-based distributed models. The first type of model views the watershed as an ensemble of inter-connected reservoirs and mimics water routing with various types of discharge expressions and conceptual models (e.g., the infiltration models of Green and Ampt (1911), Holtan (1961) or Smith and Parlange (1978); the unit hydrographs of Sherman (1932) and Dooge (1973) and the geomorphological unit hydrograph of Rodriguez-Iturbe and Valdes (1979); the ground water discharge model of Beven and Kirby (1979); etc...). It is noteworthy that the pioneering Stanford Watershed Model of Crawford and Linsley (1966) led to the development of many currently used hydrological models including HBV (Bergstršm and Forsman, 1973), SLURP (Kite, 1978), TOPMODEL ( Beven and Kirby, 1979) and CEQUEAU (Morin et al., 1981), to name a few. The second type of model discretizes the watershed into an ensemble of control volumes and mimics water routing using combinations of partial differential equations for mass and momentum conservation and phenomenological models (e.g., Darcy's (1856), Dupuit's (1863), Boussinesq's (1904) and Richards (1931) equations for unsaturated and saturated flow in porous media; Saint-Venant's (1871) and Manning's (1891) equations for overland and open channel flows). Hydrological models such as SHE (Abbott et al.,1986a, b), IHDM (Calver, 1988), KINEROS (Woolhiser et al., 1990), THALES (Grayson et al.,1992) and HYDROTEL (Fortin et al., 1995), among others, represent classical examples of this type of modeling. It is noteworthy that recent advances in remote sensing and in digital elevation modeling have greatly facilitated and simplified the use of most of the hydrological models.On another front, the adverse effects of agricultural, industrial and urban runoff on surface and ground waters have motivated the development and application of different approaches to predict the fate and transport of various water contaminants in the environment (i.e., eroded soil particles, adsorbed and dissolved nutrients and pesticides as well organic matter).In soil erosion modeling, these concerns have led researchers to construct nonpoint source pollution models for evaluating the impacts of alternative land management practices on water quality. Based on the empirical Universal Soil Loss Equation (Wischmeier and Smith, 1978), the first nonpoint source models included CREAMS (Knisel et al., 1980), AGNPS (Young et al., 1987) and SWRRB (Williams et al., 1985). However, the lack of physical realism in these empirical formulations prompted the development of physically-based erosion models such as GUEST (Rose et al., 1983; Hairshine and Rose, 1992a, b), WEPP (Nearing et al., 1989), LISEM (De Roo et al., 1994) and EUROSEM (Morgan et al., 1992). The advantage of these models over the USLE resides in their ease of integration with physically-based hydrological models. Because of its close ties with the hydrological cycle and the soil erosion process (adsorbed and dissolved contaminants), the development of physically-based models for nutrient and pesticide transport benefited directly from advances in soil erosion modeling, soil chemistry and soil physics. The modeling of nitrogen transport is a representative example of this. Early modeling efforts involved the coupling of first-order kinetics models for the nitrogen cycle (Mehran and Tanji, 1974) with two types of mass conservation equation in porous media: the convection-dispersion equation and the capacity transport equation. Well known soil nitrogen dynamics models include NCSOIL (Molina et al., 1983), SOILN (Johnsson et al, 1987), EPIC (Sharpley and Williams, 1990), LEACHN and LEACHA (Hutson and Wagenet, 1991, 1992, 1993), DAISY (Hansen et al., 1991) and AgriFlux (Banton et al., 1993).The first attempt to model surface water quality goes back to the work of Streeter and Phelps (1925) who studied the impacts of a municipal waste water discharge on dissolved oxygen (DO) and biological oxygen demand (BOD) of an Ohio river. To predict DO and BOD dynamics, Streeter and Phelps assumed uniform and steady flow conditions and used first-order kinetics to model atmospheric supply of oxygen and oxygen consumption. The advances in computational power during the 70s and 80s allowed several researchers to substantially increase the complexity of the Streeter-Phelps approach. This was achieved by accounting for advection-dispersion phenomena, unsteady two and three dimensional flow conditions, as well as the effect of temperature on various chemical reactions. The QUAL2E model of Brown and Barnwell (1987) is a good example of a moderately complex water quality model where advection-dispersion and temperature effects on several water characteristics and contaminants are considered under one-dimensional steady flow conditions.At present, the state of hydrological modeling and software engineering has reached a point where it is now possible to construct spatial decision support systems (SDDS) capable of simulating the impacts of various management practices (i.e., industrial, municipal and agricultural) on the water quantity and the quality of a watershed's river network. These systems, which idealy should be user-friendly for decision makers, will be both integrated modeling systems (including a database system, hydrologic, soil erosion, agricultural-chemical transport and water quality models) and spatial data analysis systems (including a geographical information system). Currently developed SDDS include PÉGASE (Smitz et al., 1997) and GIBSI (Villeneuve et al., 1996, 1997a,b). In a sustainable water management context, the use of such systems will provide decision makers with a complete tool for exploring a variety of integrated watershed management programs

Three exceptionally strong East-Asian summer monsoon events during glacial times in the past 470 kyr

Chinese loess sequences are interpreted as a reliable record of the past variation of the East Asian monsoon regime through the alternation of loess and paleosols units, dominated by the winter and summer monsoon, respectively. Different proxies have been used to describe this system, mostly geophysical, geochemical or sedimentological. Terrestrial mollusks are also a reliable proxy of past environmental conditions and are often preserved in large numbers in loess deposits. The analysis of the mollusk remains in the Luochuan sequence, comprising L5 loess to S0 soil, i.e. the last 500 ka, shows that for almost all identified species, the abundance is higher at the base of the interval (L5 to L4) than in the younger deposits. Using the present ecological requirements of the identified mollusk species in the Luochuan sequence allows the definition of two main mollusk groups varying during the last 500 kyr. The cold-aridiphilous individuals indicate the so-called Asian winter monsoon regime and predominantly occur during glacials, when dust is deposited. The thermal-humidiphilous mollusks are prevalent during interglacial or interstadial conditions of the Asian summer monsoon, when soil formation takes place. In the sequence, three events with exceptionally high abundance of the Asian summer monsoon indicators are recorded during the L5, L4 and L2 glacial intervals, i.e., at about 470, 360 and 170 kyr, respectively. The L5 and L4 events appear to be the strongest (high counts). Similar variations have also been identified in the Xifeng sequence, distant enough from Luochuan, but also in Lake Baikal further North, to suggest that this phenomenon is regional rather than local. The indicators of the summer monsoon within the glacial intervals imply a strengthened East-Asian monsoon interpreted as corresponding to marine isotope stages 12, 10 and 6, respectively. The L5 and L2 summer monsoons are coeval with Mediterranean sapropels S12 and S6, which characterize a strong African summer monsoon with relatively low surface water salinity in the Indian Ocean. Changes in the precipitation regime could correspond to a response to a particular astronomical configuration (low obliquity, low precession, summer solstice at perihelion) leading to an increased summer insolation gradient between the tropics and the high latitudes and resulting in enhanced atmospheric water transport from the tropics to the African and Asian continents. However, other climate drivers such as reorganization of marine and atmospheric circulations, tectonic, and the extent of the Northern Hemisphere ice sheet are also discussed

Pyqcm: An open-source Python library for quantum cluster methods

Pyqcm is a Python/C++ library that implements a few quantum cluster methods with an exact diagonalization impurity solver. Quantum cluster methods are used in the study of strongly correlated electrons to provide an approximate solution to Hubbard-like models. The methods covered by this library are Cluster Perturbation Theory (CPT), the Variational Cluster Approach (VCA) and Cellular (or Cluster) Dynamical Mean Field Theory (CDMFT). The impurity solver (the technique used to compute the cluster's interacting Green function) is exact diagonalization from sparse matrices, using the Lanczos algorithm and variants thereof. The core library is written in C++ for performance, but the interface is in Python, for ease of use and inter-operability with the numerical Python ecosystem. The library is distributed under the GPL license.Comment: Submission to SciPost. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:0806.269

Quantum Monte Carlo study of the visibility of one-dimensional Bose-Fermi mixtures

The study of ultracold optically trapped atoms has opened new vistas in the physics of correlated quantum systems. Much attention has now turned to mixtures of bosonic and fermionic atoms. A central puzzle is the disagreement between the experimental observation of a reduced bosonic visibility ${\cal V}_b$, and quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) calculations which show ${\cal V}_b$ increasing. In this paper, we present QMC simulations which evaluate the density profiles and ${\cal V}_b$ of mixtures of bosons and fermions in one-dimensional optical lattices. We resolve the discrepancy between theory and experiment by identifying parameter regimes where ${\cal V}_b$ is reduced, and where it is increased. We present a simple qualitative picture of the different response to the fermion admixture in terms of the superfluid and Mott-insulating domains before and after the fermions are included. Finally, we show that ${\cal V}_b$ exhibits kinks which are tied to the domain evolution present in the pure case, and also additional structure arising from the formation of boson-fermion molecules, a prediction for future experiments.Comment: 4 pages, 6 figure