Search for Event Rate Modulation in XENON100 Electronic Recoil Data

We have searched for periodic variations of the electronic recoil event rate in the (2-6) keV energy range recorded between February 2011 and March 2012 with the XENON100 detector, adding up to 224.6 live days in total. Following a detailed study to establish the stability of the detector and its background contributions during this run, we performed an un-binned profile likelihood analysis to identify any periodicity up to 500 days. We find a global significance of less than 1 sigma for all periods suggesting no statistically significant modulation in the data. While the local significance for an annual modulation is 2.8 sigma, the analysis of a multiple-scatter control sample and the phase of the modulation disfavor a dark matter interpretation. The DAMA/LIBRA annual modulation interpreted as a dark matter signature with axial-vector coupling of WIMPs to electrons is excluded at 4.8 sigma.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figure

AMPLITUDE OF HEART RATE MODULATION WITH THE PERIOD OF\ud 3 CARDIOCYCLES DEPENDS ON THE PHYSIOLOGICAL AROUSAL OF THE BRAIN

Amplitude of the 3-cardiocycle modulation of heart rate in records of 300 cardiointervals depends of the physiological arousal of brain. As arousal is a physiological component of stress, the amplitude of this heart rate modulation may be used as a diagnostic parameter on the arousal in stress related studies.\u

Metal-to-insulator transition in anatase TiO2 thin films induced by growth rate modulation

We demonstrate control of the carrier density of single phase anatase TiO2 thin films by nearly two orders of magnitude by modulating the growth kinetics during pulsed laser deposition, under fixed thermodynamic conditions. The resistivity and the intensity of the photoluminescence spectra of these TiO2 samples, both of which correlate with the number of oxygen vacancies, are shown to depend strongly on the growth rate. A quantitative model is used to explain the carrier density changes.Comment: 13 pages 3 figure

Detection of task-related synchronous firing patterns

Poster presentation: Background To test the importance of synchronous neuronal firing for information processing in the brain, one has to investigate if synchronous firing strength is correlated to the experimental subjects. This requires a tool that can compare the strength of the synchronous firing across different conditions, while at the same time it should correct for other features of neuronal firing such as spike rate modulation or the auto-structure of the spike trains that might co-occur with synchronous firing. Here we present the bi- and multivariate extension of previously developed method NeuroXidence [1,2], which allows for comparing the amount of synchronous firing between different conditions. ..

Forecast analysis of optical waveguide bus performance

Elements to be considered in the design of a data bus include: architecture; data rate; modulation, encoding, detection; power distribution requirements; protocol, work structure; bus reliability, maintainability; interterminal transmission medium; cost; and others specific to application. Fiber- optic data bus considerations for a 32 port transmissive star architecture, are discussed in a tutorial format. General optical-waveguide bus concepts, are reviewed. The electrical and optical performance of a 32 port transmissive star bus, and the effects of temperature on the performance of optical-waveguide buses are examined. A bibliography of pertinent references and the bus receiver test results are included

Experience-driven rate modulation is reinstated during hippocampal replay

Replay, the sequential reactivation within a neuronal ensemble, is a central hippocampal mechanism postulated to drive memory processing. While both rate and place representations are used by hippocampal place cells to encode behavioral episodes, replay has been largely defined by only the latter - based on the fidelity of sequential activity across neighboring place fields. Here we show that dorsal CA1 place cells in rats can modulate their firing rate between replay events of two different contexts. This experience-dependent phenomenon mirrors the same pattern of rate modulation observed during behavior and can be used independently from place information within replay sequences to discriminate between contexts. Our results reveal the existence of two complementary neural representations available for memory processes

Sub-Millisecond Firing Synchrony of Closely Neighboring Pyramidal Neurons in Hippocampal CA1 of Rats During Delayed Non-Matching to Sample Task

Firing synchrony among neurons is thought to play functional roles in several brain regions. In theoretical analyses, firing synchrony among neurons within sub-millisecond precision is feasible to convey information. However, little is known about the occurrence and the functional significance of the sub-millisecond synchrony among closely neighboring neurons in the brain of behaving animals because of a technical issue: spikes simultaneously generated from closely neighboring neurons are overlapped in the extracellular space and are not easily separated. As described herein, using a unique spike sorting technique based on independent component analysis together with extracellular 12-channel multi-electrodes (dodecatrodes), we separated such overlapping spikes and investigated the firing synchrony among closely neighboring pyramidal neurons in the hippocampal CA1 of rats during a delayed non-matching to sample task. Results showed that closely neighboring pyramidal neurons in the hippocampal CA1 can co-fire with sub-millisecond precision. The synchrony generally co-occurred with the firing rate modulation in relation to both internal (retention and comparison) and external (stimulus input and motor output) events during the task. However, the synchrony occasionally occurred in relation to stimulus inputs even when rate modulation was clearly absent, suggesting that the synchrony is not simply accompanied with firing rate modulation and that the synchrony and the rate modulation might code similar information independently. We therefore conclude that the sub-millisecond firing synchrony in the hippocampus is an effective carrier for propagating information – as represented by the firing rate modulations – to downstream neurons

Model Accuracy and Runtime Tradeoff in Distributed Deep Learning:A Systematic Study

This paper presents Rudra, a parameter server based distributed computing framework tuned for training large-scale deep neural networks. Using variants of the asynchronous stochastic gradient descent algorithm we study the impact of synchronization protocol, stale gradient updates, minibatch size, learning rates, and number of learners on runtime performance and model accuracy. We introduce a new learning rate modulation strategy to counter the effect of stale gradients and propose a new synchronization protocol that can effectively bound the staleness in gradients, improve runtime performance and achieve good model accuracy. Our empirical investigation reveals a principled approach for distributed training of neural networks: the mini-batch size per learner should be reduced as more learners are added to the system to preserve the model accuracy. We validate this approach using commonly-used image classification benchmarks: CIFAR10 and ImageNet.Comment: Accepted by The IEEE International Conference on Data Mining 2016 (ICDM 2016