Higgs Bosons: Intermediate Mass Range at e+e- Colliders

We elaborate on the production of the Standard Model Higgs particle at high-energy $e^+e^-$ colliders through the reaction $e^+e^- \rightarrow ZH$. Particular emphasis is put on the intermediate mass range. In addition to the signal we discuss in detail the background processes. Angular distributions which are sensitive to the spin and parity of the Higgs particle are analyzed.Comment: Standard Latex. 15 pages. 11 figures available by fax or regular mail. MAD/PH/749, DESY 93-064, UdeM-LPN-TH-93-143, NUHEP-TH-93-1

Wildlife markets in South China

China is one of the largest consumers of wild animals for food and traditional Chinese medicine in the world. A large volume of illegal trade has been recorded in the primary cities, such as Hong Kong and Guangzhou, but the wildlife markets in secondary Chinese cities have not been investigated. This study was carried out in 7 cities in Guangdong and Guangxi provinces. Wildlife trade data were collected using semi-structured interview, observation, and market survey. The study documented the selling of 97 animal species, \u3e7,000 individuals. The most frequently used animal groups by quantity were reptiles (51%), followed by birds (21%) and mammals (10%). Of the reported species, 23% were threatened, including 1 species critically endangered and 12 species endangered. In this study, there were 19 species observed that are recognized by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). The results show that the animals originated not only from south China but also Indochina and Southeast Asia. Our survey also verified that Guangzhou and Hong Kong are not the only wildlife markets in South China. A large volume of illegal trade also is occurring in secondary cities in South China

Characterisation for Fine-Grain Reconfigurable Fabrics

This paper proposes a benchmarking methodology for characterising the power consumption of the fine-grain fabric in reconfigurable architectures. This methodology is part of the GroundHog 2009 power benchmarking suite. It covers active and inactive power as well as advanced low-power modes. A method based on random number generators is adopted for comparing activity modes. We illustrate our approach using five field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) that span a range of process technologies: Xilinx Virtex-II Pro, Spartan-3E, Spartan-3AN, Virtex-5, and Silicon Blue iCE65. We find that, despite improvements through process technology and low-power modes, current devices need further improvements to be sufficiently power efficient for mobile applications. The Silicon Blue device demonstrates that performance can be traded off to achieve lower leakage

Accuracy to Throughput Trade-offs for Reduced Precision Neural Networks on Reconfigurable Logic

Modern CNN are typically based on floating point linear algebra based implementations. Recently, reduced precision NN have been gaining popularity as they require significantly less memory and computational resources compared to floating point. This is particularly important in power constrained compute environments. However, in many cases a reduction in precision comes at a small cost to the accuracy of the resultant network. In this work, we investigate the accuracy-throughput trade-off for various parameter precision applied to different types of NN models. We firstly propose a quantization training strategy that allows reduced precision NN inference with a lower memory footprint and competitive model accuracy. Then, we quantitatively formulate the relationship between data representation and hardware efficiency. Our experiments finally provide insightful observation. For example, one of our tests show 32-bit floating point is more hardware efficient than 1-bit parameters to achieve 99% MNIST accuracy. In general, 2-bit and 4-bit fixed point parameters show better hardware trade-off on small-scale datasets like MNIST and CIFAR-10 while 4-bit provide the best trade-off in large-scale tasks like AlexNet on ImageNet dataset within our tested problem domain.Comment: Accepted by ARC 201

statistical framework for dimensionality reduction implementation in fpgas

Abstract-Dimensionality reduction or feature extraction has been widely used in applications that require a set of data to be represented by a small set of variables. A linear projection is often chosen due to its computational attractiveness. The calculation of the linear basis that best explains the data is usually addressed using the Karhunen-Loeve Transform (KLT). Moreover, for applications where real-time performance and flexibility to accommodate new data are required, the linear projection is implemented in FPGAs due to their fine-grain parallelism and reconfigurability properties. Currently, the optimization of such a design in terms of area usage is considered as a separate problem to the basis calculation. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that couples the calculation of the linear projection basis and the area optimization problems under a probabilistic Bayesian framework. The power of the proposed framework is based on the flexibility to insert information regarding the implementation requirements of the linear basis by assigning a proper prior distribution. Results using real-life examples demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach

Radion Dynamics and Phenomenology in the Linear Dilaton Model

We investigate the properties of the radion in the 5D linear dilaton model arising from Little String Theory. A Goldberger-Wise type mechanism is used to stabilise a large interbrane distance, with the dilaton now playing the role of the stabilising field. We consider the coupled fluctuations of the metric and dilaton fields and identify the physical scalar modes of the system. The wavefunctions and masses of the radion and Kaluza-Klein modes are calculated, giving a radion mass of order the curvature scale. As a result of the direct coupling between the dilaton and Standard Model fields, the radion couples to the SM Lagrangian, in addition to the trace of the energy-momentum tensor. The effect of these additional interaction terms on the radion decay modes is investigated, with a notable increase in the branching fraction to photons. We also consider the effects of a non-minimal Higgs coupling to gravity, which introduces a mixing between the Higgs and radion modes. Finally, we calculate the production cross section of the radion at the LHC and use the current Higgs searches to place constraints on the parameter space.Comment: 28 pages, 7 figures; v2: error in radion-gauge boson Feynman rules corrected, version published in JHE