Hidden solitons in the Zabusky-Kruskal experiment: Analysis using the periodic, inverse scattering transform

Recent numerical work on the Zabusky--Kruskal experiment has revealed, amongst other things, the existence of hidden solitons in the wave profile. Here, using Osborne's nonlinear Fourier analysis, which is based on the periodic, inverse scattering transform, the hidden soliton hypothesis is corroborated, and the \emph{exact} number of solitons, their amplitudes and their reference level is computed. Other "less nonlinear" oscillation modes, which are not solitons, are also found to have nontrivial energy contributions over certain ranges of the dispersion parameter. In addition, the reference level is found to be a non-monotone function of the dispersion parameter. Finally, in the case of large dispersion, we show that the one-term nonlinear Fourier series yields a very accurate approximate solution in terms of Jacobian elliptic functions.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures (9 images); v2: minor revision, version accepted for publication in Math. Comput. Simula

AUGUR: Forecasting the Emergence of New Research Topics

Being able to rapidly recognise new research trends is strategic for many stakeholders, including universities, institutional funding bodies, academic publishers and companies. The literature presents several approaches to identifying the emergence of new research topics, which rely on the assumption that the topic is already exhibiting a certain degree of popularity and consistently referred to by a community of researchers. However, detecting the emergence of a new research area at an embryonic stage, i.e., before the topic has been consistently labelled by a community of researchers and associated with a number of publications, is still an open challenge. We address this issue by introducing Augur, a novel approach to the early detection of research topics. Augur analyses the diachronic relationships between research areas and is able to detect clusters of topics that exhibit dynamics correlated with the emergence of new research topics. Here we also present the Advanced Clique Percolation Method (ACPM), a new community detection algorithm developed specifically for supporting this task. Augur was evaluated on a gold standard of 1,408 debutant topics in the 2000-2011 interval and outperformed four alternative approaches in terms of both precision and recall

Black hole hunting in the Andromeda Galaxy

We present a new technique for identifying stellar mass black holes in low mass X-ray binaries (LMXBs), and apply it to XMM-Newton observations of M31. We examine X-ray time series variability seeking power density spectra (PDS) typical of LMXBs accreting at a low accretion rate (which we refer to as Type A PDS); these are very similar for black hole and neutron star LMXBs. Galactic neutron star LMXBs exhibit Type A PDS at low luminosities (~10^36--10^37 erg/s) while black hole LMXBs can exhibit them at luminosities >10^38 erg/s. We propose that Type A PDS are confined to luminosities below a critical fraction of the Eddington limit, $l_c$ that is constant for all LMXBs; we have examined asample of black hole and neutron star LMXBs and find they are all consistent with $l_c$ = 0.10+/-0.04 in the 0.3--10 keV band. We present luminosity and PDS data from 167 observations of X-ray binaries in M31 that provide strong support for our hypothesis. Since the theoretical maximum mass for a neutron star is \~3.1 M_Sun, we therefore assert that any LMXB that exhibits a Type A PDS at a 0.3--10 keV luminosity greater than 4 x 10^37 erg/s is likely to contain a black hole primary. We have found eleven new black hole candidates in M31 using this method. We focus on XMM-Newton observations of RX J0042.4+4112, an X-ray source in M31 and find the mass of the primary to be 7+/-2 M_Sun, if our assumptions are correct. Furthermore, RX J0042.4+4112 is consistently bright in \~40 observations made over 23 years, and is likely to be a persistently bright LMXB; by contrast all known Galactic black hole LMXBs are transient. Hence our method may be used to find black holes in known, persistently bright Galactic LMXBs and also in LMXBs in other galaxies.Comment: 6 Pages, 6 figures. To appear in the conference proceedings of "Interacting Binaries: Accretion, Evolution and Outcomes" (Cefalu, July 4-10 2004

TechMiner: Extracting Technologies from Academic Publications

In recent years we have seen the emergence of a variety of scholarly datasets. Typically these capture ‘standard’ scholarly entities and their connections, such as authors, affiliations, venues, publications, citations, and others. However, as the repositories grow and the technology improves, researchers are adding new entities to these repositories to develop a richer model of the scholarly domain. In this paper, we introduce TechMiner, a new approach, which combines NLP, machine learning and semantic technologies, for mining technologies from research publications and generating an OWL ontology describing their relationships with other research entities. The resulting knowledge base can support a number of tasks, such as: richer semantic search, which can exploit the technology dimension to support better retrieval of publications; richer expert search; monitoring the emergence and impact of new technologies, both within and across scientific fields; studying the scholarly dynamics associated with the emergence of new technologies; and others. TechMiner was evaluated on a manually annotated gold standard and the results indicate that it significantly outperforms alternative NLP approaches and that its semantic features improve performance significantly with respect to both recall and precision

Time and dose-dependent effects of phenobarbital on the rat liver miRNAome.

In a previous study we had shown that treatment of male Fischer rats with exogenous chemicals for three months resulted in prominent, mode-of-action dependent effects on liver microRNA (miRNA) (Koufaris et al., 2012). Here we investigated how the effects of chemicals on liver miRNA in male Fischer rats relate to the length and dose of exposure to phenobarbital (PB), a drug with multiple established hepatic effects. Importantly, although acute PB treatment (1-7 days) had significant effects on liver mRNA and the expected effects on the liver phenotype (transient hyperplasia, hepatomegaly, cytochrome P450 induction), limited effects on liver miRNA were observed. However, at 14 days of PB treatment clear dose-dependent effects on miRNA were observed. The main effect of PB treatment from days 1 to 90 on liver miRNA was found to be the persistent, progressive, and highly correlated induction of the miR-200a/200b/429 and miR-96/182 clusters, occurring after the termination of the xenobiotic-induced transient hyperplasia. Moreover, in agreement with their reported functions in the literature we found associations between perturbations of miR-29b and miR-200a/200b by PB with global DNA methylation and zeb1/zeb2 proteins respectively. Our data suggest that miRNA are unlikely to play an important role in the acute responses of the adult rodent liver to PB treatment. However, the miRNA responses to longer PB exposures suggest a potential role for maintaining liver homeostasis in response to sub-chronic and chronic xenobiotic-induced perturbations. Similar studies for more chemicals are needed to clarify whether the temporal and dose pattern of miRNA-toxicant interaction identified here for PB are widely applicable to other xenobiotics. © 2013 Elsevier Ireland Ltd

Exact relaxation in a class of non-equilibrium quantum lattice systems

A reasonable physical intuition in the study of interacting quantum systems says that, independent of the initial state, the system will tend to equilibrate. In this work we study a setting where relaxation to a steady state is exact, namely for the Bose-Hubbard model where the system is quenched from a Mott quantum phase to the strong superfluid regime. We find that the evolving state locally relaxes to a steady state with maximum entropy constrained by second moments, maximizing the entanglement, to a state which is different from the thermal state of the new Hamiltonian. Remarkably, in the infinite system limit this relaxation is true for all large times, and no time average is necessary. For large but finite system size we give a time interval for which the system locally "looks relaxed" up to a prescribed error. Our argument includes a central limit theorem for harmonic systems and exploits the finite speed of sound. Additionally, we show that for all periodic initial configurations, reminiscent of charge density waves, the system relaxes locally. We sketch experimentally accessible signatures in optical lattices as well as implications for the foundations of quantum statistical mechanics.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures, replaced with final versio