4,799 research outputs found
Geoneutrinos in Borexino
This paper describes the Borexino detector and the high-radiopurity studies
and tests that are integral part of the Borexino technology and development.
The application of Borexino to the detection and studies of geoneutrinos is
discussed.Comment: Conference: Neutrino Geophysics Honolulu, Hawaii December 14-16, 200
On Approximating Restricted Cycle Covers
A cycle cover of a graph is a set of cycles such that every vertex is part of
exactly one cycle. An L-cycle cover is a cycle cover in which the length of
every cycle is in the set L. The weight of a cycle cover of an edge-weighted
graph is the sum of the weights of its edges.
We come close to settling the complexity and approximability of computing
L-cycle covers. On the one hand, we show that for almost all L, computing
L-cycle covers of maximum weight in directed and undirected graphs is APX-hard
and NP-hard. Most of our hardness results hold even if the edge weights are
restricted to zero and one.
On the other hand, we show that the problem of computing L-cycle covers of
maximum weight can be approximated within a factor of 2 for undirected graphs
and within a factor of 8/3 in the case of directed graphs. This holds for
arbitrary sets L.Comment: To appear in SIAM Journal on Computing. Minor change
Producing geothermal energy with a deep borehole heat exchanger. Exergy optimization of different applications and preliminary design criteria
This paper aims at proposing fast and plain design tools to evaluate the best energy application for deep borehole heat exchangers, exploiting geothermal resources. Exergy efficiency has been chosen as a performance index. Five possible utilization solutions have been analyzed: district heating, adsorption cooling, ORC power production, a thermal cascade system, and combined heat and power configuration. An extensive sensitivity analysis on source characteristics and well geometry has been performed to find the design criteria that ensure the maximum exergy performance. Results show that configurations involving district heating are recommended for exclusive power production. If optimized, district heating exergy efficiency can reach values in the range 40%–50% when a geothermal source at the well bottom is lower than 300 °C. For higher values, the combined heat and power production is a preferable choice, reaching an exergy efficiency of up to 60%. Design charts are also provided to read first-attempt values of the well operative temperatures and flow rate to maximize exergy efficiency for each utilization layouts
Grid-Obstacle Representations with Connections to Staircase Guarding
In this paper, we study grid-obstacle representations of graphs where we
assign grid-points to vertices and define obstacles such that an edge exists if
and only if an -monotone grid path connects the two endpoints without
hitting an obstacle or another vertex. It was previously argued that all planar
graphs have a grid-obstacle representation in 2D, and all graphs have a
grid-obstacle representation in 3D. In this paper, we show that such
constructions are possible with significantly smaller grid-size than previously
achieved. Then we study the variant where vertices are not blocking, and show
that then grid-obstacle representations exist for bipartite graphs. The latter
has applications in so-called staircase guarding of orthogonal polygons; using
our grid-obstacle representations, we show that staircase guarding is
\textsc{NP}-hard in 2D.Comment: To appear in the proceedings of the 25th International Symposium on
Graph Drawing and Network Visualization (GD 2017
Fast algorithms for min independent dominating set
We first devise a branching algorithm that computes a minimum independent
dominating set on any graph with running time O*(2^0.424n) and polynomial
space. This improves the O*(2^0.441n) result by (S. Gaspers and M. Liedloff, A
branch-and-reduce algorithm for finding a minimum independent dominating set in
graphs, Proc. WG'06). We then show that, for every r>3, it is possible to
compute an r-((r-1)/r)log_2(r)-approximate solution for min independent
dominating set within time O*(2^(nlog_2(r)/r))
Algorithmic aspects of disjunctive domination in graphs
For a graph , a set is called a \emph{disjunctive
dominating set} of if for every vertex , is either
adjacent to a vertex of or has at least two vertices in at distance
from it. The cardinality of a minimum disjunctive dominating set of is
called the \emph{disjunctive domination number} of graph , and is denoted by
. The \textsc{Minimum Disjunctive Domination Problem} (MDDP)
is to find a disjunctive dominating set of cardinality .
Given a positive integer and a graph , the \textsc{Disjunctive
Domination Decision Problem} (DDDP) is to decide whether has a disjunctive
dominating set of cardinality at most . In this article, we first propose a
linear time algorithm for MDDP in proper interval graphs. Next we tighten the
NP-completeness of DDDP by showing that it remains NP-complete even in chordal
graphs. We also propose a -approximation
algorithm for MDDP in general graphs and prove that MDDP can not be
approximated within for any unless NP
DTIME. Finally, we show that MDDP is
APX-complete for bipartite graphs with maximum degree
Placing regenerators in optical networks to satisfy multiple sets of requests.
The placement of regenerators in optical networks has become an active area of research during the last years. Given a set of lightpaths in a network G and a positive integer d, regenerators must be placed in such a way that in any lightpath there are no more than d hops without meeting a regenerator. While most of the research has focused on heuristics and simulations, the first theoretical study of the problem has been recently provided in [10], where the considered cost function is the number of locations in the network hosting regenerators. Nevertheless, in many situations a more accurate estimation of the real cost of the network is given by the total number of regenerators placed at the nodes, and this is the cost function we consider. Furthermore, in our model we assume that we are given a finite set of p possible traffic patterns (each given by a set of lightpaths), and our objective is to place the minimum number of regenerators at the nodes so that each of the traffic patterns is satisfied. While this problem can be easily solved when d = 1 or p = 1, we prove that for any fixed d,p ≥ 2 it does not admit a PTASUnknown control sequence '\textsc', even if G has maximum degree at most 3 and the lightpaths have length O(d)(d). We complement this hardness result with a constant-factor approximation algorithm with ratio ln (d ·p). We then study the case where G is a path, proving that the problem is NP-hard for any d,p ≥ 2, even if there are two edges of the path such that any lightpath uses at least one of them. Interestingly, we show that the problem is polynomial-time solvable in paths when all the lightpaths share the first edge of the path, as well as when the number of lightpaths sharing an edge is bounded. Finally, we generalize our model in two natural directions, which allows us to capture the model of [10] as a particular case, and we settle some questions that were left open in [10]
Constant-degree graph expansions that preserve the treewidth
Many hard algorithmic problems dealing with graphs, circuits, formulas and
constraints admit polynomial-time upper bounds if the underlying graph has
small treewidth. The same problems often encourage reducing the maximal degree
of vertices to simplify theoretical arguments or address practical concerns.
Such degree reduction can be performed through a sequence of splittings of
vertices, resulting in an _expansion_ of the original graph. We observe that
the treewidth of a graph may increase dramatically if the splittings are not
performed carefully. In this context we address the following natural question:
is it possible to reduce the maximum degree to a constant without substantially
increasing the treewidth?
Our work answers the above question affirmatively. We prove that any simple
undirected graph G=(V, E) admits an expansion G'=(V', E') with the maximum
degree <= 3 and treewidth(G') <= treewidth(G)+1. Furthermore, such an expansion
will have no more than 2|E|+|V| vertices and 3|E| edges; it can be computed
efficiently from a tree-decomposition of G. We also construct a family of
examples for which the increase by 1 in treewidth cannot be avoided.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figures, the main result used by quant-ph/051107
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