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Flour beetles (genus Tribolium) have long been used as a model organism to understand population dynamics in ecological research. A rich and rigorous body of work has cemented flour beetles' place in the field of mathematical biology. One of the most interesting results using flour beetles is the induction of chaos in a laboratory beetle population, in which the well-established LPA (larvae-pupae-adult) model was used to inform the experimental factors which would lead to chaos. However, whether chaos is an intrinsic property of flour beetles remains an open question. Inspired by new experimental data, we extend the LPA model by stratifying the adult population into newly emerged and mature adults and considering cannibalism as a function of mature adults. We fit the model to longitudinal data of larvae, pupae, and adult beetle populations to demonstrate the model's ability to recapitulate the transient dynamics of flour beetles. We present local and global stability results for the trivial and positive steady states and explore bifurcations and limit cycles numerically. Our results suggest that while chaos is a possibility, it is a rare phenomenon within realistic ranges of the parameters obtained from our experiment, and is likely induced by environmental changes connected to media changes and population censusing., Comment: 22 pages, 10 figures

In the last few decades the development of ultrafast lasers has revolutionized our ability to gain insight into light-matter interactions. The appearance of few-cycle light sources available from the visible to the mid-infrared spectral range and the development of attosecond extreme ultraviolet and x-ray technologies provide for the first time the possibility to directly observe and control ultrafast electron dynamics in matter on their natural time scale. However, few-fs sources have hardly been available in the deep ultraviolet (DUV; 4-6 eV, 300-200 nm) and are unavailable in the vacuum ultraviolet (VUV; 6-12 eV, 200-100 nm) spectral range, corresponding to the photon energies required for valence excitation of atoms and molecules. Here, we generate VUV pulses with $\mu$J energy tunable between 160 and 190 nm via resonant dispersive wave emission during soliton self-compression in a capillary. We fully characterize the pulses in situ using frequency-resolved optical gating based on two-photon photoionization in noble gases. The measurements reveal that in most of the cases the pulses are shorter than 3 fs. These findings unlock the potential to investigate ultrafast electron dynamics with a time-resolution that has been hitherto inaccessible when using VUV pulses.

We conduct a comprehensive study of anomalous charge transport in the quantum sine--Gordon model. Employing the framework of Generalized Hydrodynamics, we compute Drude weights and Onsager matrices across a wide range of coupling strengths to quantify ballistic and diffusive transport, respectively. We find that charge transport is predominantly diffusive at accessible timescales, indicated by the corresponding Onsager matrix significantly exceeding the Drude weight -- contrary to most integrable models where transport is primarily ballistic. Reducing the Onsager matrix to a few key two-particle scattering processes enables us to efficiently examine transport in both low- and high-temperature limits. The charge transport is dictated by non-diagonal scattering of the internal charge degree of freedom: At particular values of the coupling strength with diagonal, diffusive effects amount to merely subleading corrections. However, at couplings approaching these points, the charge Onsager matrix and corresponding diffusive time-scale diverge. Our findings relate to similar transport anomalies in XXZ spin chains, offering insights through their shared Bethe Ansatz structures., Comment: 17 pages, 8 figures. Comments are welcome

Morphisms, structure preserving maps, are everywhere in Mathematics as useful tools for thinking and problem solving, or as objects to study. Here, we argue that the idea of operations being compatible across two domains goes beyond its mathematical use: it is a fundamental mechanism of any intelligence. We precisely define morphisms, distinguish between dynamic morphisms (on operations, binary relations) and static ones (on $n$-ary relations), and describe how a flexible and pluralistic use of morphisms can serve as a general framework for understanding and explanation in a wide variety of fields., Comment: 19 pages, 2 figures, final version will be published elsewhere

We advance the study of pure de Sitter supergravity by introducing a finite formulation of unimodular supergravity via the super-St\"uckelberg mechanism. Building on previous works, we construct a complete four-dimensional action of spontaneously broken ${\cal N}\!\!=\!\!1$ supergravity to all orders, which allows for de Sitter solutions. The introduction of finite supergravity transformations extends the super-St\"uckelberg procedure beyond the second order, offering a recursive solution to all orders in the goldstino sector. This work bridges the earlier perturbative approaches and the complete finite theory, opening new possibilities for de Sitter vacua in supergravity models and eventually string theory., Comment: 23 pages

In a directed graph $D$, a vertex subset $S\subseteq V$ is a total dominating set if every vertex of $D$ has an in-neighbor from $S$. A total dominating set exists if and only if every vertex has at least one in-neighbor. We call the orientation of such directed graphs valid. The total domination number of $D$, denoted by $\gamma_t(D)$, is the size of the smallest total dominating set of $D$. For an undirected graph $G$, we investigate the upper (or lower) orientable total domination number of $G$, denoted by $\mathrm{DOM}_t(G)$ (or $\mathrm{dom}_t(G)$), that is the maximum (or minimum) of the total domination numbers over all valid orientations of $G$. We characterize those graphs for which $\mathrm{DOM}_t(G)=|V(G)|-1$, and consequently we show that there exists a family of graphs for which $\mathrm{DOM}_t(G)$ and $\mathrm{dom}_t(G)$ can be as far as possible, namely $\mathrm{DOM}_t(G)=|V(G)|-1$ and $\mathrm{dom}_t(G)=3$.

What is the maximum number of $r$-term sums admitting rational values in $n$-element sets of irrational numbers? We determine the maximum when $r<4$ or $r\geq n/2$ and also in case when we drop the condition on the number of summands. It turns out that the $r$-term sum problem is equivalent to determine the maximum number of $r$-term zero-sum subsequences in $n$-element sequences of integers, which can be seen as a variant of the famous Erd\H{o}s-Ginzburg-Ziv theorem.

Self-dual Yang-Mills and Einstein gravity in Euclidean AdS$_4$ are useful toy models because they can be described by simple scalar Lagrangians exhibiting a new manifestation of the colour/kinematics duality, as recently shown by two of the authors. In this paper, we clarify how the self-dual sectors fit into the full theories. In particular, we explicitly construct the light-cone action for Yang-Mills theory and Einstein gravity in AdS$_4$ in terms of positive and negative helicity fields, where we are able to pinpoint the self-dual sector as expected. We then show that the boundary correlators of these theories take a remarkably simple form in terms of Feynman diagrams in half of flat space, acted on by certain differential operators. We also analyse their soft limits and show that they exhibit Weinberg-like soft factors, where the soft pole which appears in scattering amplitudes is replaced by a derivative with respect to the energy., Comment: 40 pages + 17 pages of appendix

Recent progress in quantum machine learning has sparked interest in using quantum methods to tackle classical control problems via quantum reinforcement learning. However, the classical reinforcement learning environments often scale to high dimensional problem spaces, which represents a challenge for the limited and costly resources available for quantum agent implementations. We propose to solve this dimensionality challenge by a classical autoencoder and a quantum agent together, where a compressed representation of observations is jointly learned in a hybrid training loop. The latent representation of such an autoencoder will serve as a tailored observation space best suited for both the control problem and the QPU architecture, aligning with the agent's requirements. A series of numerical experiments are designed for a performance analysis of the latent-space learning method. Results are presented for different control problems and for both photonic (continuous-variable) and qubit-based agents, to show how the QNN learning process is improved by the joint training., Comment: 20 pages, 7 figures

We describe the cryogenic system being developed for Taurus: a super-pressure balloon-borne microwave polarimeter scheduled to fly in 2027. The Taurus cryogenic system consists of a 660L liquid helium cryostat which achieves a base temperature of <100mK with the help of a capillary-fed superfluid tank and a closed cycle dilution refrigerator. The main tank is supported with fiberglass flexures and is encased in two layers of vapor-cooled shields which allow Taurus to make full use of the extended flight time offered by the super-pressure balloon platform. The Taurus cryostat is projected to hold for over 50 days while weighing under 1000lbs. We present the design, testing, and thermal analysis of the Taurus cryogenic systems.

The paper introduces an innovative approach to industrial maintenance leveraging augmented reality (AR) technology, focusing on enhancing the user experience and efficiency. The shift from traditional to proactive maintenance strategies underscores the significance of maintenance in industrial systems. The proposed solution integrates AR interfaces, particularly through Head-Mounted Display (HMD) devices, to provide expert personnel-aided decision support for maintenance technicians, with the association of Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions. The study explores the user experience aspect of AR interfaces in a simulated industrial environment, aiming to improve the maintenance processes' intuitiveness and effectiveness. Evaluation metrics such as the NASA Task Load Index (NASA-TLX) and the System Usability Scale (SUS) are employed to assess the usability, performance, and workload implications of the AR maintenance system. Additionally, the paper discusses the technical implementation, methodology, and results of experiments conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed solution.

Applications like program synthesis sometimes require proving that a property holds for all of the infinitely many programs described by a grammar - i.e., an inductively defined set of programs. Current verification frameworks overapproximate programs' behavior when sets of programs contain loops, including two Hoare-style logics that fail to be relatively complete when loops are allowed. In this work, we prove that compositionally verifying simple properties for infinite sets of programs requires tracking distinct program behaviors over unboundedly many executions. Tracking this information is both necessary and sufficient for verification. We prove this fact in a general, reusable theory of denotational semantics that can model the expressivity and compositionality of verification techniques over infinite sets of programs. We construct the minimal compositional semantics that captures simple properties of sets of programs and use it to derive the first sound and relatively complete Hoare-style logic for infinite sets of programs. Thus, our methods can be used to design minimally complex, compositional verification techniques for sets of programs., Comment: 44 pages, 8 Figures

Sputtering by solar wind ions is a key process driving the ejection of high-energy particles into the exospheres of airless bodies like asteroids, Mercury and the Moon. In view of upcoming missions which will deliver new in-situ data on these exospheres like the Artemis program at the Moon and BepiColombo at Mercury, a deeper understanding of sputtering effects is crucial. In this work, we combine sensitive quartz crystal microbalance measurements and numerical simulations to quantify sputter yields of Apollo soil 68501 under solar wind relevant conditions. We find that none of the commonly used simulation codes can reliably predict laboratory sputter yields without experimental benchmarks. All of the employed packages significantly overestimate the sputter yields of flat samples by at least a factor of 2 for the case of hydrogen. When accounting for surface roughness and regolith-like porosity, sputter yields are decreased even further to 7.3E-3 atoms\ion and 7.6E-2 atoms\ion for H and He at solar wind energies of 1 keV\amu, respectively. The reduced yields of porous regolith structures are largely independent of the ion incidence angle, making them applicable across a wide range of lunar latitudes. This study highlights the need for experimental validation of sputtering models to ensure accurate predictions for space weathering and lunar exosphere composition.

This paper investigates photonic continuous-variable Born machines (CVBMs), which utilize photonic quantum states as resources for continuous probability distributions. Implementing exact gradient descent in the CVBM training process is often infeasible, bringing forward the need to approximate the gradients using an estimator obtained from a smaller number of samples, obtaining a quantum stochastic gradient descent (SGD) method. In this work, the ability to train CVBMs is analyzed using stochastic gradients obtained using relatively few samples from the probability distribution corresponding to homodyne measurement. The main obstacle to this analysis is that classically simulating CVBMs and obtaining samples is a demanding task, while a large number of iterations are needed to achieve convergence. The present research is enabled by a novel strategy to simulate homodyne detections of generic multimode photonic states using a classical computer. With this approach, a more comprehensive study of CVBMs is made possible, and the training of multimode CVBMs is demonstrated with parametric quantum circuits considerably larger than in previous articles. More specifically, we use the proposed algorithm to demonstrate learning of multimode quantum distributions using CVBMs. Moreover, successful CVBM trainings were demonstrated with the use of stochastic gradients., Comment: 7 pages, 8 figures

Semiconductor components based on silicon carbide (SiC) are a key component for high-power electronics. Their behavior is determined by the interplay of charges and electric fields, which is typically described by modeling and simulations that are calibrated by nonlocal electric properties. So far, there are no experimental methods that allow for the 3D mapping of both the electric field and the concentrations of free charge carriers inside an electronic device. To fulfill this information gap, we propose an operando method that utilizes single silicon vacancy (VSi) centers in 4H-SiC. The VSi centers are at various positions in the intrinsic region of a pin-diode. To monitor the local static electric field, we perform Stark shift measurements based on photoluminescence excitation (PLE), which allows us to infer the expansion of the depletion zone and therefore to determine the local concentration of dopants. Besides this, we show that our measurements allow us to additionally obtain the local concentration of free charge carriers. The method presented here therefore paves the way for a new quantum-enhanced electronic device technology, capable of mapping the interplay of mobile charges and electric fields in a working semiconductor device with nanometer precision.

We study a new extension formula for right Bol loops. We prove the necessary or sufficient conditions for the extension to be right Bol. We describe the most important invariants: right multiplication group, nuclei, and center. We show that the core is an involutory quandle which is the disjoint union of two isomorphic involutory quandles. We also derive further results on the structure group of the core of the extension., Comment: 17 pages

In this paper, we improve, complement and generalize (from N\"or\-lund to matrix transform means) a result of M\'oricz and Siddiqi \cite{MS} and some statements of Areshidze and Tephnadze \cite{AT}, and (from $T$ (weighted) to matrix transform means) Anakidze, Areshidze, Persson and Tephnadze \cite{AAPT}., Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2304.06003

In this paper, we study the cardinality of the smallest set of lines of the finite projective spaces $\operatorname{PG}(n,q)$ such that every plane is incident with at least one line of the set. This is the first main open problem concerning the minimum size of $(s,t)$-blocking sets in $\operatorname{PG}(n,q)$, where we set $s=2$ and $t=1$. In $\operatorname{PG}(n,q)$, an $(s,t)$-blocking set refers to a set of $t$-spaces such that each $s$-space is incident with at least one chosen $t$-space. This is a notoriously difficult problem, as it is equivalent to determining the size of certain $q$-Tur\'an designs and $q$-covering designs. We present an improvement on the upper bounds of Etzion and of Metsch via a refined scheme for a recursive construction, which in fact enables improvement in the general case as well., Comment: 21 pages

Current evaluation practices in speech-driven gesture generation lack standardisation and focus on aspects that are easy to measure over aspects that actually matter. This leads to a situation where it is impossible to know what is the state of the art, or to know which method works better for which purpose when comparing two publications. In this position paper, we review and give details on issues with existing gesture-generation evaluation, and present a novel proposal for remedying them. Specifically, we announce an upcoming living leaderboard to benchmark progress in conversational motion synthesis. Unlike earlier gesture-generation challenges, the leaderboard will be updated with large-scale user studies of new gesture-generation systems multiple times per year, and systems on the leaderboard can be submitted to any publication venue that their authors prefer. By evolving the leaderboard evaluation data and tasks over time, the effort can keep driving progress towards the most important end goals identified by the community. We actively seek community involvement across the entire evaluation pipeline: from data and tasks for the evaluation, via tooling, to the systems evaluated. In other words, our proposal will not only make it easier for researchers to perform good evaluations, but their collective input and contributions will also help drive the future of gesture-generation research., Comment: 15 pages, 2 figures, project page: https://genea-workshop.github.io/leaderboard/

Salt precipitation triggered by the evaporation of formation brine into injected supercritical CO2 can cause injectivity and containment issues in near-wellbore regions. Predicting the distribution of precipitated salts and their impact on near-wellbore properties remains challenging. This study investigates the influence of surface wettability on CO2-induced halite precipitation and growth within hydrophilic and hydrophobic microfluidic chips designed to mimic rock-structure porous geometries. A series of high-pressure brine-CO2 flow experiments, direct microscopic observations, and detailed image processing were conducted to explore how substrate wettability affects salt precipitation. The experiments show that wettability markedly controls residual brine relocation, film flow movement, solute consumption, and salt formation. Tracking halite precipitation dynamics revealed distinct crystal formation signatures: hydrophilic chips exhibited irregular, larger aggregation patches, while the hydrophobic network showed more numerous, smaller, and limited aggregations. Large individual crystals were observed in both chips, with a notable dominance in the hydrophobic one. Crystallization dynamics varied, with nucleation and growth occurring earlier, progressing faster, and forming bulkier aggregates in the hydrophilic chip. Despite these differences, the three identified temporal stages of brine evaporation and halite surface coverage were comparable. Spatial analysis along the chips indicated that crystal aggregation properties, such as size and distribution, were position-dependent, with hydrophilic chips exhibiting greater probabilistic variability. These observations underscore the impact of surface wettability on salt precipitation through brine accessibility and capillarity, with implications for mitigating and remediating salt issues in saline aquifers.

We present a purely deep neural network-based approach for estimating long memory parameters of time series models that incorporate the phenomenon of long-range dependence. Parameters, such as the Hurst exponent, are critical in characterizing the long-range dependence, roughness, and self-similarity of stochastic processes. The accurate and fast estimation of these parameters holds significant importance across various scientific disciplines, including finance, physics, and engineering. We harnessed efficient process generators to provide high-quality synthetic training data, enabling the training of scale-invariant 1D Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) models. Our neural models outperform conventional statistical methods, even those augmented with neural networks. The precision, speed, consistency, and robustness of our estimators are demonstrated through experiments involving fractional Brownian motion (fBm), the Autoregressive Fractionally Integrated Moving Average (ARFIMA) process, and the fractional Ornstein-Uhlenbeck (fOU) process. We believe that our work will inspire further research in the field of stochastic process modeling and parameter estimation using deep learning techniques., Comment: 14 pages, 16 figures, https://github.com/aielte-research/LMSParEst

A novel balanced air-biased coherent detection scheme for capturing ultrabroadband terahertz (THz) waveforms is implemented. The balanced detection scheme allows for coherent detection at the full repetition rate of the laser system without requiring bias modulation, signal generators, or lock-in amplifiers while doubling the dynamic range and quadrupling the signal-to-noise ratio compared to conventional air-biased coherent detection. These advantages are achieved by rotating the bias electrodes by 90{\deg} relative to the conventional scheme. With a 1 kHz driving laser, the scheme enables sub-second, high-fidelity waveform acquisition with a continuously moving delay stage, demonstrated by collecting 200 waveforms in 100 s. The balanced detection scheme paves the way for much faster and higher quality 2D ultrabroadband terahertz spectroscopy., Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures

This paper answers the question of which functional depth to use to construct a boxplot for functional data. It shows that integrated depths, e.g., the popular modified band depth, do not result in well-defined boxplots. Instead, we argue that infimal depths are the only functional depths that provide a valid construction of a functional boxplot. We also show that the properties of the boxplot are completely determined by properties of the one-dimensional depth function used in defining the infimal depth for functional data. Our claims are supported by (i) a motivating example, (ii) theoretical results concerning the properties of the boxplot, and (iii) a simulation study.

Pilz's conjecture states that for any finite set $A=\{a_1,a_2,\dots,a_k\}$ of positive integers and positive integer $n$ in the union of the sets $\{a_1,2a_1,\dots,na_1\},\dots, \{a_k,2a_k,\dots,na_k\}$ (considered as a multiset) at least $n$ values appear an odd number of times. In this short note we consider a variant of this problem. Namely, we show that in the sumset $\{a_1,2a_1,\dots,na_1\}+\dots+\{a_k,2a_k,\dots,na_k\}$ (considered as a multiset) at least $n$ values appear an odd number of times.

Let $q$ be a prime power and $k$ be a natural number. What are the possible cardinalities of point sets ${S}$ in a projective plane of order $q$, which do not intersect any line at exactly $k$ points? This problem and its variants have been investigated before, in relation with blocking sets, untouchable sets or sets of even type, among others. In this paper we show a series of results which point out the existence of all or almost all possible values $m\in [0, q^2+q+1]$ for $|S|=m$, provided that $k$ is not close to the extremal values $0$ or $q+1$. Moreover, using polynomial techniques we show the existence of a point set $S$ with the following property: for every prescribed list of numbers $t_1, \ldots t_{q^2+q+1}$, $|S\cap \ell_i|\neq t_i$ holds for the $i$th line $\ell_i$, $\forall i \in \{1, 2, \ldots, q^2+q+1\}$.

We report the first measurement of the azimuthal anisotropy of J$/\psi$ at forward rapidity ($1.2<|\eta|<2.2$) in Au$+$Au collisions at $\sqrt{s_{_{NN}}}=200$ GeV at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. The data were collected by the PHENIX experiment in 2014 and 2016 with integrated luminosity of 14.5~nb$^{-1}$. The second Fourier coefficient ($v_2$) of the azimuthal distribution of $J/\psi$ is determined as a function of the transverse momentum ($p_T$) using the event-plane method. The measurements were performed for several selections of collision centrality: 0\%--50\%, 10\%--60\%, and 10\%-40\%. We find that in all cases the values of $v_2(p_T)$, which quantify the elliptic flow of J$/\psi$, are consistent with zero. The results are consistent with measurements at midrapidity, indicating no significant elliptic flow of the J$/\psi$ within the quark-gluon-plasma medium at collision energies of $\sqrt{s_{_{NN}}}=200$ GeV., Comment: 369 authors from 72 institutions, 12 pages, 7 figures, 5 tables. v1 is version submitted to Physical Review C. HEPdata tables for the points plotted in figures for this and previous PHENIX publications are (or will be) publicly available at http://www.phenix.bnl.gov/papers.html

We present the first forward-rapidity measurements of elliptic anisotropy of open-heavy-flavor muons at the BNL Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. The measurements are based on data samples of Au$+$Au collisions at $\sqrt{s_{_{NN}}}=200$ GeV collected by the PHENIX experiment in 2014 and 2016 with integrated luminosity of 14.5~nb$^{-1}$. The measurements are performed in the pseudorapidity range $1.2<|\eta|<2$ and cover transverse momenta $1

The process of L\'evy walk, i.e., movement patterns described by heavy-tailed random walks, play a role in many different phenomena, from chemical and microbiological systems through marine predators to climate change. Recent experiments have suggested that this phenomenon also appears in heavy-ion collisions. However, the theoretical background is not yet well understood. In high-energy collisions of heavy nuclei, the strongly interacting Quark Gluon Plasma is created, which, similarly to the early Universe, undergoes a rapid expansion and transition back to normal hadronic matter. In the subsequent expanding hadron gas, particles interact until kinetic freeze-out, when their momenta become fixed, and they freely transition toward the detectors. Measuring spatial freeze-out distributions is a crucial tool in understanding the dynamics of the created matter as well as the interactions among its constituents. In this paper, we present a novel three-dimensional analysis of the spatial freeze-out distribution of pions (the most abundant particles in such collisions). Utilizing Monte-Carlo simulations of high-energy collisions, we show that the chain of processes ending in a final state pion has a step length distribution leading to L\'evy-stable distributions. Subsequently, we show that pion freeze-out distributions indeed exhibit heavy tails and can be described by a three-dimensional elliptically contoured symmetric L\'evy-stable distribution., Comment: 19 pages, 6 figures

This study investigates the iterative refinement method applied to the solution of linear discrete inverse problems by considering its application to the Tikhonov problem in mixed precision. Previous works on mixed precision iterative refinement methods for the solution of symmetric positive definite linear systems and least-squares problems have shown regularization to be a key requirement when computing low precision factorizations. For problems that are naturally severely ill-posed, we formulate the iterates of iterative refinement in mixed precision as a filtered solution using the preconditioned Landweber method with a Tikhonov-type preconditioner. Through numerical examples simulating various mixed precision choices, we showcase the filtering properties of the method and the achievement of comparable or superior accuracy compared to results computed in double precision as well as another approximate method., Comment: 22 pages

We introduce the Faetar Automatic Speech Recognition Benchmark, a benchmark corpus designed to push the limits of current approaches to low-resource speech recognition. Faetar, a Franco-Proven\c{c}al variety spoken primarily in Italy, has no standard orthography, has virtually no existing textual or speech resources other than what is included in the benchmark, and is quite different from other forms of Franco-Proven\c{c}al. The corpus comes from field recordings, most of which are noisy, for which only 5 hrs have matching transcriptions, and for which forced alignment is of variable quality. The corpus contains an additional 20 hrs of unlabelled speech. We report baseline results from state-of-the-art multilingual speech foundation models with a best phone error rate of 30.4%, using a pipeline that continues pre-training on the foundation model using the unlabelled set.

Watson-Crick (WK) finite automata work on a Watson-Crick tape representing a DNA molecule. They have two reading heads. In 5'->3' WK automata, the heads move and read the input in opposite physical directions. In this paper, we consider such inputs which are necklaces, i.e., they represent circular DNA molecules. In sensing 5'->3' WK automata, the computation on the input is finished when the heads meet. As the original model is capable of accepting the linear context-free languages, the necklace languages we are investigating here have strong relations to that class. Here, we use these automata in two different acceptance modes. On the one hand, in weak acceptance mode the heads are starting nondeterministically at any point of the input, like the necklace is cut at a nondeterministically chosen point), and if the input is accepted, it is in the accepted necklace language. These languages can be seen as the languages obtained from the linear context-free languages by taking their closure under cyclic shift operation. On the other hand, in strong acceptance mode, it is required that the input is accepted starting the heads in the computation from every point of the cycle. These languages can be seen as the maximal cyclic shift closed languages included in a linear language. On the other hand, as it will be shown, they have a kind of locally testable property. We present some hierarchy results based on restricted variants of the WK automata, such as stateless or all-final variants., Comment: In Proceedings NCMA 2024, arXiv:2409.06120

In this study, we introduce two new Krylov subspace methods for solving rectangular large-scale linear inverse problems. The first approach is a modification of the Hessenberg iterative algorithm that is based off an LU factorization and is therefore referred to as the least squares LU (LSLU) method. The second approach incorporates Tikhonov regularization in an efficient manner; we call this the Hybrid LSLU method. Both methods are inner-product free, making them advantageous for high performance computing and mixed precision arithmetic. Theoretical findings and numerical results show that Hybrid LSLU can be effective in solving large-scale inverse problems and has comparable performance with existing iterative projection methods.

Thermal soaring enables birds to perform cost-efficient flights during foraging or migration trips. Yet, although all soaring birds exploit vertical winds effectively, this group contains species that vary strongly in their morphologies. Aerodynamic rules dictate the costs and benefits of flight, but, depending on their ecological needs, species may use different behavioural strategies. To quantify these morphology-related differences in behavioural cross-country strategies, we compiled and analysed a large dataset, which includes data from over a hundred individuals from 12 soaring species recorded with high frequency tracking devices. We quantified the performance during thermalling and gliding flights, and the overall cross-country behaviour that is the combination of both. Our results confirmed aerodynamic theory across the 12 species; species with higher wing loading typically flew faster, and consequently turned on a larger radius, than lighter ones. Furthermore, the combination of circling radius and minimum sink speed determines the maximum benefits soaring birds can obtain from thermals. Also, we observed a spectrum of strategies regarding the adaptivity to thermal strength and uncovered a universal rule for cross-country strategies for all analysed species. Finally, our newly described behavioural rules can provide inspirations for technical applications, like the development of autopilot systems for autonomous robotic gliders., Comment: 31 pages, 5 figures. SI included (5 Supplementary Figures, 5 Supplementary Tables, Supplementary Text)

The $J/\psi$ and $\psi(2S)$ charmonium states, composed of $c\bar{c}$ quark pairs and known since the 1970s, are widely believed to serve as ideal probes to test quantum chromodynamics in high-energy hadronic interactions. However, there is not yet a complete understanding of the charmonium-production mechanism. Recent measurements of $J/\psi$ production as a function of event charged-particle multiplicity at the collision energies of both the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) show enhanced $J/\psi$ production yields with increasing multiplicity. One potential explanation for this type of dependence is multiparton interactions (MPI). We carry out the first measurements of self-normalized $J/\psi$ yields and the $\psi(2S)$ to $J/\psi$ ratio at both forward and backward rapidities as a function of self-normalized charged-particle multiplicity in $p$$+$$p$ collisions at $\sqrt{s}=200$ GeV. In addition, detailed {\sc pythia} studies tuned to RHIC energies were performed to investigate the MPI impacts. We find that the PHENIX data at RHIC are consistent with recent LHC measurements and can only be described by {\sc pythia} calculations that include MPI effects. The forward and backward $\psi(2S)$ to $J/\psi$ ratio, which serves as a unique and powerful approach to study final-state effects on charmonium production, is found to be less dependent on the charged-particle multiplicity., Comment: 301 authors from 69 institutions, 8 pages, 3 figures. v1 is version submitted to Physical Review D Letters. HEPdata tables for the points plotted in figures for this and previous PHENIX publications are (or will be) publicly available at http://www.phenix.bnl.gov/papers.html

We characterise the set of fundamental groups for which there exist $n$-manifolds that are $h$-cobordant (hence homotopy equivalent) but not simple homotopy equivalent, when $n$ is sufficiently large. In particular, for $n \ge 12$ even, we show that examples exist for any finitely presented group $G$ such that the involution on the Whitehead group $Wh(G)$ is nontrivial. This expands on previous work, where we constructed the first examples of even-dimensional manifolds that are homotopy equivalent but not simple homotopy equivalent. Our construction is based on doubles of thickenings, and a key ingredient of the proof is a formula for the Whitehead torsion of a homotopy equivalence between such manifolds., Comment: 25 pages. Following the suggestion of a referee, this paper has been extracted from arXiv:2312.00322

This paper describes in detail how erasure codes are implemented in the Swarm system. First, in Section 1, we introduce erasure codes, and show how to apply them to files in Swarm (Section 2). In Section 3, we introduce security levels of data availability and derive their respective parameterisations. In Section 4, we describe a construct that enables cross-neighbourhood redundancy for singleton chunks and which completes erasure coding. Finally, in 5, we propose a number of retrieval strategies applicable to erasure-coded files., Comment: 14 pages, 7 figures, 4 tables

By considering linear scattering of cold atoms inside an undriven high-finesse optical resonator, we experimentally demonstrate effects unique to a strongly coupled vacuum field. Arranging the atoms in an incommensurate lattice, with respect to the resonator mode, the scattering can be suppressed by destructive interference: resulting in a subradiant atomic array. We show however, that strong coupling leads to a drastic modification of the excitation spectrum, as evidenced by well-resolved vacuum Rabi splitting in the intensity of the fluctuations. Furthermore, we demonstrate a significant polarization rotation in the linear scattering off the subradiant array via Raman scattering induced by the strongly coupled vacuum field.

It is challenging to coordinate multiple distributed energy resources in a single or multiple buildings to ensure efficient and flexible operation. Advanced control algorithms such as model predictive control and reinforcement learning control provide solutions to this problem by effectively managing a distribution of distributed energy resource control tasks while adapting to unique building characteristics, and cooperating towards improving multi-objective key performance indicator. Yet, a research gap for advanced control adoption is the ability to benchmark algorithm performance. CityLearn addresses this gap an open-source Gym environment for the easy implementation and benchmarking of simple rule-based control and advanced algorithms that has an advantage of modeling simplicity, multi-agent control, district-level objectives, and control resiliency assessment. Here we demonstrate the functionalities of CityLearn using 17 different building control problems that have varying complexity with respect to the number of controllable distributed energy resources in buildings, the simplicity of the control algorithm, the control objective, and district size., Comment: To be published in IBPSA-USA SimBuild 2024 Conference

We consider the matching problem on the line with advice complexity. We give a 1-competitive online algorithm with advice complexity $n-1,$ and show that there is no 1-competitive online algorithm reading less than $n-1$ bits of advice. Moreover, for each $0

The jet cross-section and jet-substructure observables in $p$$+$$p$ collisions at $\sqrt{s}=200$ GeV were measured by the PHENIX Collaboration at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). Jets are reconstructed from charged-particle tracks and electromagnetic-calorimeter clusters using the anti-$k_{t}$ algorithm with a jet radius $R=0.3$ for jets with transverse momentum within $8.0

SPIDER is a balloon-borne instrument designed to map the cosmic microwave background at degree-angular scales in the presence of Galactic foregrounds. SPIDER has mapped a large sky area in the Southern Hemisphere using more than 2000 transition-edge sensors (TESs) during two NASA Long Duration Balloon flights above the Antarctic continent. During its first flight in January 2015, SPIDER observed in the 95 GHz and 150 GHz frequency bands, setting constraints on the B-mode signature of primordial gravitational waves. Its second flight in the 2022-23 season added new receivers at 280 GHz, each using an array of TESs coupled to the sky through feedhorns formed from stacks of silicon wafers. These receivers are optimized to produce deep maps of polarized Galactic dust emission over a large sky area, providing a unique data set with lasting value to the field. In this work, we describe the instrument's performance during SPIDER's second flight., Comment: Submitted to SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation 2024, JATIS

Rodents serve as an important model for examining both individual and collective behavior. Dominance within rodent social structures can determine access to critical resources, such as food and mating opportunities. Yet, many aspects of the intricate interplay between individual behaviors and the resulting group social hierarchy, especially its evolution over time, remain unexplored. In this study, we utilized an automated tracking system that continuously monitored groups of male rats for over 250 days to enable an in-depth analysis of individual behavior and the overarching group dynamic. We describe the evolution of social structures within a group and additionally investigate how past behaviors influence the emergence of new social hierarchies when group composition and experimental area changes. Notably, we find that conventional individual and pairwise tests exhibit a weak correlation with group behavior, highlighting their limited accuracy in predicting behavioral outcomes in a collective context. These results emphasize the context-dependence of social behavior as an emergent property of interactions within a group and highlight the need to measure and quantify social behavior in more naturalistic environments.

Image-with-text memes combine text with imagery to achieve comedy, but in today's world, they also play a pivotal role in online communication, influencing politics, marketing, and social norms. A "meme template" is a preexisting layout or format that is used to create memes. It typically includes specific visual elements, characters, or scenes with blank spaces or captions that can be customized, allowing users to easily create their versions of popular meme templates by adding personal or contextually relevant content. Despite extensive research on meme virality, the task of automatically identifying meme templates remains a challenge. This paper presents a comprehensive comparison and evaluation of existing meme template identification methods, including both established approaches from the literature and novel techniques. We introduce a rigorous evaluation framework that not only assesses the ability of various methods to correctly identify meme templates but also tests their capacity to reject non-memes without false assignments. Our study involves extensive data collection from sites that provide meme annotations (Imgflip) and various social media platforms (Reddit, X, and Facebook) to ensure a diverse and representative dataset. We compare meme template identification methods, highlighting their strengths and limitations. These include supervised and unsupervised approaches, such as convolutional neural networks, distance-based classification, and density-based clustering. Our analysis helps researchers and practitioners choose suitable methods and points to future research directions in this evolving field., Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures

SuperBIT was a 0.5-meter near-ultraviolet to near-infrared wide-field telescope that launched on a NASA superpressure balloon into the stratosphere from New Zealand for a 45-night flight. SuperBIT acquired multi-band images of galaxy clusters to study the properties of dark matter using weak gravitational lensing. We provide an overview of the instrument and its various subsystems. We then present the instrument performance from the flight, including the telescope and image stabilization system, the optical system, the power system, and the thermal system. SuperBIT successfully met the instrument's technical requirements, achieving a telescope pointing stability of 0.34 +/- 0.10 arcseconds, a focal plane image stability of 0.055 +/- 0.027 arcseconds, and a PSF FWHM of ~ 0.35 arcseconds over 5-minute exposures throughout the 45-night flight. The telescope achieved a near-diffraction limited point-spread function in all three science bands (u, b, and g). SuperBIT served as a pathfinder to the GigaBIT observatory, which will be a 1.34-meter near-ultraviolet to near-infrared balloon-borne telescope., Comment: 17 pages, 25 pages, published in the Astronomical Journal

Using data from the first flight of SPIDER and from Planck HFI, we probe the properties of polarized emission from interstellar dust in the SPIDER observing region. Component separation algorithms operating in both the spatial and harmonic domains are applied to probe their consistency and to quantify modeling errors associated with their assumptions. Analyses spanning the full SPIDER region demonstrate that i) the spectral energy distribution of diffuse Galactic dust emission is broadly consistent with a modified-blackbody (MBB) model with a spectral index of $\beta_\mathrm{d}=1.45\pm0.05$ $(1.47\pm0.06)$ for $E$ ($B$)-mode polarization, slightly lower than that reported by Planck for the full sky; ii) its angular power spectrum is broadly consistent with a power law; and iii) there is no significant detection of line-of-sight decorrelation of the astrophysical polarization. The size of the SPIDER region further allows for a statistically meaningful analysis of the variation in foreground properties within it. Assuming a fixed dust temperature $T_\mathrm{d}=19.6$ K, an analysis of two independent sub-regions of that field results in inferred values of $\beta_\mathrm{d}=1.52\pm0.06$ and $\beta_\mathrm{d}=1.09\pm0.09$, which are inconsistent at the $3.9\,\sigma$ level. Furthermore, a joint analysis of SPIDER and Planck 217 and 353 GHz data within a subset of the SPIDER region is inconsistent with a simple MBB at more than $3\,\sigma$, assuming a common morphology of polarized dust emission over the full range of frequencies. These modeling uncertainties have a small--but non-negligible--impact on limits on the cosmological tensor-to-scalar ratio derived from the \spider dataset. The fidelity of the component separation approaches of future CMB polarization experiments may thus have a significant impact on their constraining power., Comment: 21 pages, 15 figures

Cybersecurity is a big challenge as hackers are always trying to find new methods to attack and exploit system vulnerabilities. Cybersecurity threats and risks have increased in recent years, due to the increasing number of devices and networks connected. This has led to the development of new cyberattack patterns, such as ransomware, data breaches, and advanced persistent threats (APT). Consequently, defending such complicated attacks needs to stay up to date with the latest system vulnerabilities and weaknesses to set a proper cybersecurity defense strategy. This paper aims to propose a defense strategy for the presented security threats by determining and prioritizing which security control to put in place based on combining the MITRE ATT&CK framework with multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) techniques. This approach helps organizations achieve a more robust and resilient cybersecurity posture.

Neutron scattering experiments have played vital roles in exploring materials properties in the past decades. While user interfaces have been improved over time, neutron scattering experiments still require specific knowledge or training by an expert due to the complexity of such advanced instrumentation and the limited number of experiments each person may perform each year. This paper introduces an innovative chatbot application that leverages Large Language Models(LLM) and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) technologies to significantly enhance the user experience at the EQ-SANS, a small-angle neutron scattering instrument at the Spallation Neutron Source of Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Through a user-centric design approach, the EQ-SANS Assisting Chatbot (ESAC) serves as an interactive reference for users, thereby facilitating the use of the instrument by visiting scientists. By bridging the gap between the users of EQ-SANS and the control systems required to perform their experiments, the ESAC sets a new standard for interactive learning and support for the scientific community using large-scale scientific facilities.

Let $M_k$ be a $2n$-vertex graph with $n$ pairwise disjoint edges and let $\mathcal{H}^{(p,s)}(n)$ be the family of subsets of $V(M_n)$ that span exactly $p$ edges and $s$ isolated vertices. We prove that for $n\ge 2p+s$ this family has the Erd\H{o}s--Ko--Rado property: the size of the largest intersecting family equals to the number of sets containing a fixed vertex. The bound $n\ge 2p+s$ is the best possible, improving a recent theorem with $n\ge 2p+2s$ by Fuentes and Kamat., Comment: 4 pages

We develop new techniques in order to deal with Riccati-type equations, subject to a further algebraic constraint, on Riemannian manifolds $(M^3,g)$. We find that the obstruction to solve the aforementioned equation has order $4$ in the metric coefficients and is fully described by an homogeneous polynomial in $\mathrm{Sym}^{16}TM$. Techniques from real algebraic geometry, reminiscent of those used for the "PositiveStellen-Satz " problem, allow determining the geometry in terms of explicit exterior differential systems. Analysis of the latter shows flatness for the metric $g$; in particular we complete the classification of asymptotically harmonic manifolds of dimension $3$, establishing those are either flat or real hyperbolic spaces., Comment: minor changes, a few typos caught