22,416 research outputs found
Impact of Dynamical Fermions on QCD Vacuum Structure
We examine how dynamical fermions affect both the UV and infrared structure
of the QCD vacuum. We consider large lattices from the MILC
collaboration, using a gluonic definition of the topological charge density,
founded on a new over-improved stout-link smearing algorithm. The algorithm
reproduces established results from the overlap formalism and is designed to
preserve nontrivial topological objects including instantons. At short
distances we focus on the topological charge correlator, , where
negative values at small $x$ reveal a sign-alternating layered structure to the
topological-charge density of the QCD vacuum. We find that the magnitudes of
the negative dip in the correlator and the positive
contact term are both increased with the introduction of dynamical fermion
degrees of freedom. This is in accord with expectations based on charge
renormalization and the vanishing of the topological susceptibility in the
chiral limit. At large distances we examine the extent to which instanton-like
objects are found on the lattice, and how their distributions vary between
quenched and dynamical gauge fields. We show that dynamical gauge fields
contain more instanton-like objects with an average size greater than in the
quenched vacuum. Finally, we directly visualize the topological charge density
in order to investigate the effects of dynamical sea-quark degrees of freedom
on topology.Comment: 9 pages, 8 figure
Individual Budgets : Lessons from Early Users' Experiences
Within the context of modernization, there has been a trend towards 'cash-for-care' schemes designed to bring choice and control closer to the service user. In England, Individual Budgets (IBs) are being piloted, with the aim of promoting personalized support for disabled people and other users of social care services. This paper reports on the experiences and outcomes of early IB users two to three months after first being offered an IB. The users included adults with physical/sensory impairments, learning difficulties, mental health problems and older people. Semi-structured interviews were carried out with nine service users and five proxies. The findings suggest that IBs have the potential to be innovative and life-enhancing. However, achieving this potential in practice depends on a range of other factors, including changes in the routine practices and organizational culture of adult social care services and ensuring users have access to appropriate documentation and support. Any conclusions drawn from the experiences of these early IB users must be treated with caution. The findings nevertheless indicate some of the issues that will need to be addressed as IBs are implemented more widely to replace conventional forms of adult social care provision
X-ray Emission from the Weak-lined T Tauri Binary System KH 15D
The unique eclipsing, weak-lined T Tauri star KH 15D has been detected as an
X-ray source in a 95.7 ks exposure from the Chandra X-ray Observatory archives.
A maximum X-ray luminosity of 1.5 x 10^{29} erg s is derived in the
0.5--8 keV band, corresponding to L_{X}/L_bol = 7.5 x 10^{-5}. Comparison with
samples of stars of similar effective temperature in NGC 2264 and in the Orion
Nebula Cluster shows that this is about an order of magnitude low for a typical
star of its mass and age. We argue that the relatively low luminosity cannot be
attributed to absorption along the line of sight but implies a real deficiency
in X-ray production. Possible causes for this are considered in the context of
a recently proposed eccentric binary model for KH 15D. In particular, we note
that the visible component rotates rather slowly for a weak-lined T Tauri star
and has possibly been pseudosynchronized by tidal interaction with the primary
near periastron
Hypothesis Testing in Feedforward Networks with Broadcast Failures
Consider a countably infinite set of nodes, which sequentially make decisions
between two given hypotheses. Each node takes a measurement of the underlying
truth, observes the decisions from some immediate predecessors, and makes a
decision between the given hypotheses. We consider two classes of broadcast
failures: 1) each node broadcasts a decision to the other nodes, subject to
random erasure in the form of a binary erasure channel; 2) each node broadcasts
a randomly flipped decision to the other nodes in the form of a binary
symmetric channel. We are interested in whether there exists a decision
strategy consisting of a sequence of likelihood ratio tests such that the node
decisions converge in probability to the underlying truth. In both cases, we
show that if each node only learns from a bounded number of immediate
predecessors, then there does not exist a decision strategy such that the
decisions converge in probability to the underlying truth. However, in case 1,
we show that if each node learns from an unboundedly growing number of
predecessors, then the decisions converge in probability to the underlying
truth, even when the erasure probabilities converge to 1. We also derive the
convergence rate of the error probability. In case 2, we show that if each node
learns from all of its previous predecessors, then the decisions converge in
probability to the underlying truth when the flipping probabilities of the
binary symmetric channels are bounded away from 1/2. In the case where the
flipping probabilities converge to 1/2, we derive a necessary condition on the
convergence rate of the flipping probabilities such that the decisions still
converge to the underlying truth. We also explicitly characterize the
relationship between the convergence rate of the error probability and the
convergence rate of the flipping probabilities
Frequency-dependent fitness induces multistability in coevolutionary dynamics
Evolution is simultaneously driven by a number of processes such as mutation,
competition and random sampling. Understanding which of these processes is
dominating the collective evolutionary dynamics in dependence on system
properties is a fundamental aim of theoretical research. Recent works
quantitatively studied coevolutionary dynamics of competing species with a
focus on linearly frequency-dependent interactions, derived from a
game-theoretic viewpoint. However, several aspects of evolutionary dynamics,
e.g. limited resources, may induce effectively nonlinear frequency
dependencies. Here we study the impact of nonlinear frequency dependence on
evolutionary dynamics in a model class that covers linear frequency dependence
as a special case. We focus on the simplest non-trivial setting of two
genotypes and analyze the co-action of nonlinear frequency dependence with
asymmetric mutation rates. We find that their co-action may induce novel
metastable states as well as stochastic switching dynamics between them. Our
results reveal how the different mechanisms of mutation, selection and genetic
drift contribute to the dynamics and the emergence of metastable states,
suggesting that multistability is a generic feature in systems with
frequency-dependent fitness.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figures; J. R. Soc. Interface (2012
Priorities for ecological research in 1987/88: recommendations to technical subcommittee (COTSARC)
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