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Orbiting space objects have become in the last decade a major nuisance impacting ground astronomy and orbiting space assets, from observatories to satellites and space stations. In particular with the rise of the satellite population in Low Earth Orbits (LEOs), space objects are becoming an even bigger threat and a strong problem to astronomical observations. To tackle these threats several coordinated surveillance networks composed of dedicated sensors (telescopes, radars and laser ranging facilities) track and survey space objects, from debris to active satellites. As part of the European Space Surveillance \& Tracking (EU-SST) network, Portugal is developing the PAmpilhosa da Serra Space Observatory (PASO), with both radio and optical telescopes dedicated to the Space Situational Awareness (SSA) domain, deployed at a Dark Sky destination. To optimize telescope survey time, we developed {\tt{CLOWN}} (CLOud Watcher at Night), an application interface that automatically monitors clouds in real time. This software can correctly trace clouds positions in the sky, provides accurate pointing information to the observation planning of the optical telescope to avoid cloudy areas. {\tt{CLOWN}} only requires the use of an all-sky camera, which is already a norm in observatories with optical telescopes and can be used with any camera, including those for which no information about its model specification do exist. {\tt{CLOWN}} does not require great computing power and it does not require the installation of additional equipment. {\tt{CLOWN}} results are very promising and confirm that the app can correctly identify clouds in a variety of different conditions and cloud types., Comment: 15 pages, 22 figures. This is the Accepted Manuscript version of an article accepted for publication in Astromomical Journal. IOP Publishing Ltd is not responsible for any errors or omissions in this version of the manuscript or any version derived from it. The Version of Record will be available online at https://iopscience.iop.org/journal/1538-3881

Ethereum is a distributed, peer-to-peer blockchain infrastructure that has attracted billions of dollars. Perhaps due to its success, Ethereum has become a target for various kinds of attacks, motivating researchers to explore different techniques to identify vulnerabilities in EVM bytecode (the language of the Ethereum Virtual Machine), including formal verification, symbolic execution, and fuzz testing. Although recent studies empirically compare smart contract fuzzers, there is a lack of literature investigating how simpler greybox fuzzers compare to more advanced ones. To fill this gap, in this paper, we present DogeFuzz, an extensible infrastructure for fuzzing Ethereum smart contracts, currently supporting black-box fuzzing and two grey-box fuzzing strategies: coverage-guided grey-box fuzzing (DogeFuzz-G) and directed grey-box fuzzing (DogeFuzz-DG). We conduct a series of experiments using benchmarks already available in the literature and compare the DogeFuzz strategies with state-of-the-art fuzzers for smart contracts. Surprisingly, although DogeFuzz does not leverage advanced techniques for improving input generation (such as symbolic execution or machine learning), DogeFuzz outperforms sFuzz and ILF, two state-of-the-art fuzzers. Nonetheless, the Smartian fuzzer shows higher code coverage and bug-finding capabilities than DogeFuzz., Comment: 16 pages,published in SBSEG 2024 conference

MICADO is a first light instrument for the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), set to start operating later this decade. It will provide diffraction limited imaging, astrometry, high contrast imaging, and long slit spectroscopy at near-infrared wavelengths. During the initial phase operations, adaptive optics (AO) correction will be provided by its own natural guide star wavefront sensor. In its final configuration, that AO system will be retained and complemented by the laser guide star multi-conjugate adaptive optics module MORFEO (formerly known as MAORY). Among many other things, MICADO will study exoplanets, distant galaxies and stars, and investigate black holes, such as Sagittarius A* at the centre of the Milky Way. After their final design phase, most components of MICADO have moved on to the manufacturing and assembly phase. Here we summarize the final design of the instrument and provide an overview about its current manufacturing status and the timeline. Some lessons learned from the final design review process will be presented in order to help future instrumentation projects to cope with the challenges arising from the substantial differences between projects for 8-10m class telescopes (e.g. ESO-VLT) and the next generation Extremely Large Telescopes (e.g. ESO-ELT). Finally, the expected performance will be discussed in the context of the current landscape of astronomical observatories and instruments. For instance, MICADO will have similar sensitivity as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), but with six times the spatial resolution., Comment: Proceedings of the SPIE, Volume 13096, id. 1309611 11 pp. (2024)

Data Science (DS) has become a cornerstone for modern software, enabling data-driven decisions to improve companies services. Following modern software development practices, data scientists use third-party libraries to support their tasks. As the APIs provided by these tools often require an extensive list of arguments to be set up, data scientists rely on default values to simplify their usage. It turns out that these default values can change over time, leading to a specific type of breaking change, defined as Default Argument Breaking Change (DABC). This work reveals 93 DABCs in three Python libraries frequently used in Data Science tasks -- Scikit Learn, NumPy, and Pandas -- studying their potential impact on more than 500K client applications. We find out that the occurrence of DABCs varies significantly depending on the library; 35% of Scikit Learn clients are affected, while only 0.13% of NumPy clients are impacted. The main reason for introducing DABCs is to enhance API maintainability, but they often change the function's behavior. We discuss the importance of managing DABCs in third-party DS libraries and provide insights for developers to mitigate the potential impact of these changes in their applications., Comment: 38 pages, 3 figures, 13 tables

We present the first principles construction of the low-energy effective action for bosonic self-organized quantum quasicrystals. Our generalized elasticity approach retains the appropriate number of phase- and corresponding conjugate density- degrees-of-freedom required for a proper description of the Goldstone modes. For the dodecagonal and decagonal quasicrystal structures we obtain collective longitudinal and transversal excitations with an isotropic speed of sound. Meanwhile, for the octagonal structure, the coupling between phononic and phasonic degrees of freedom leads in turn to hybridization of the latter with the condensate sound mode, producing collective excitations with a longitudinal and transversal component, and an anisotropic speed of sound. Finally, we discuss the fate of each excitation mode at the low and high density phase transitions limiting the quantum quasicrystal phase., Comment: 4 pages main document, 8 pages supplemental material, 5 figures

We compute the lattice operations for the (pairwise) stable set in two-sided matching markets where only substitutability on agents' choice functions is imposed. To do this, we use Tarski operators defined on the lattices of worker-quasi-stable and firm-quasi-stable matchings. These operators resemble lay-off and vacancy chain dynamics, respectively. First, we compute the lattice operations in the many-to-one model. Then, we extend these operations to a many-to-many model with substitutable choice functions on one side and responsive preferences on the other, via a morphism that relates many-to-one with many-to-many matchings in a natural way. Finally, we present the lattice operations in the many-to-many model with substitutable choice functions on both sides.

The line of sight toward Sk 143 (AzV 456), an O9.5 Ib star in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), shows significant absorption from neutral atoms and molecules. We report a new study of this line of sight by means of high-resolution spectra obtained with the ESPRESSO spectrograph at the VLT of ESO. The absorption from neutral and ionized species is well characterized by a single component at vhel about +132 km/s that was modeled with the ASTROCOOK code. The rubidium Rb I 780.0 nm line is detected for the first time outside the Galaxy, and we derive [Rb/H]= -1.86 +/- 0.09. As a result of the high resolution, the 85Rb and 87Rb isotope lines are also exceptionally well resolved. The 85Rb/87Rb isotope ratio is 0.46, which is opposite of the meteoritic value of 2.43. This implies that Rb is made through a dominant contribution of the r-process, which is dominant for the 87Rb isotope. We also confirm the presence of 7LiI 670.7 nm and set a limit on the isotopic ratio of 6Li/7Li < 0.1.The dominance of the 87Rb isotope implies that Rb is made through a dominant contribution of the r-process. At the low metallicity of the cloud of [Zn/H] = -1.28 +/- 0.09 , neutron rich material may have occurred in rotating metal-poor massive stars. Moreover, the low metallicity of the cloud leads to an absolute Li abundance of A(7Li) about 2.2, which differs from the expectation from big bang nucleosynthesis. Because the gas-phase abundance is not affected by stellar depletion, the burning of Li inside the halo stars is probably not the solution for the cosmological 7Li problem., Comment: 9 pages,3 figures, 2 Tables. Accepted A&A

The zero-shot effectiveness of neural retrieval models is often evaluated on the BEIR benchmark -- a combination of different IR evaluation datasets. Interestingly, previous studies found that particularly on the BEIR subset Touch\'e 2020, an argument retrieval task, neural retrieval models are considerably less effective than BM25. Still, so far, no further investigation has been conducted on what makes argument retrieval so "special". To more deeply analyze the respective potential limits of neural retrieval models, we run a reproducibility study on the Touch\'e 2020 data. In our study, we focus on two experiments: (i) a black-box evaluation (i.e., no model retraining), incorporating a theoretical exploration using retrieval axioms, and (ii) a data denoising evaluation involving post-hoc relevance judgments. Our black-box evaluation reveals an inherent bias of neural models towards retrieving short passages from the Touch\'e 2020 data, and we also find that quite a few of the neural models' results are unjudged in the Touch\'e 2020 data. As many of the short Touch\'e passages are not argumentative and thus non-relevant per se, and as the missing judgments complicate fair comparison, we denoise the Touch\'e 2020 data by excluding very short passages (less than 20 words) and by augmenting the unjudged data with post-hoc judgments following the Touch\'e guidelines. On the denoised data, the effectiveness of the neural models improves by up to 0.52 in nDCG@10, but BM25 is still more effective. Our code and the augmented Touch\'e 2020 dataset are available at \url{https://github.com/castorini/touche-error-analysis}., Comment: SIGIR 2024 (Resource & Reproducibility Track)

The Li-rich stars are a class of rare objects with A(Li) higher than that of other stars in the same evolutionary stage. Their origin is still debated and valuable routes are the Cameron-Fowler mechanism, mass transfer process in a binary system or engulfment of small bodies. Metal-poor ([Fe/H]<-1 dex) stars are only a small fraction of the entire population of Li-rich stars. We observed with MIKE at the Magellan Telescope the metal-poor ([Fe/H]=-3.95+-0.11 dex) giant star HE0057-5959, deriving A(Li)=+2.09+-0.07 dex. Such A(Li) is higher by about 1 dex than that of other stars in the same evolutionary stage. A previous analysis of the same target suggested that its high A(Li) reflects a still ongoing First Dredge-Up process. We revise the nature of HE0057-5959 by comparing its stellar parameters and A(Li) with appropriate stellar evolution models. This comparison rules out that HE0057-5959 is caught during its First Dredge-Up, being this latter already ended according to the parameters of this star. Its A(Li), remarkably higher than the typical lithium plateau drawn by similar giant stars, demonstrates that HE0057-5959 joins the class of the rare metal-poor Li-rich stars. HE0057-5959 is the most metal-poor Li-rich star discovered so far. We consider different scenarios to explain this star. No internal mixing able to activate the Cameron-Fowler mechanism is known for metal-poor stars at this evolutionary stage. Also the engulfment of planets is disfavored because such metal-poor stars should not host planets. Finally, HE0057-5959 is one of the most Na-rich among the Li-rich stars and we found that a strong excess of Na is common to the three Li-rich stars with [Fe/H]<-3 dex. This finding could support the scenario of mass transfer from a massive companion star in a binary system, even if we found no evidence of radial velocity variations., Comment: Accepted for publication in A&A

Experimental platforms based on ultracold atomic gases have significantly advanced the quantum simulation of complex systems, yet the exploration of phenomena driven by long-range interactions remains a formidable challenge. Currently available methods utilizing dipolar quantum gases or multi-mode cavities allow to implement long-range interactions with a $1/r^3$ character or with a spatial profile fixed by the mode-structure of the vacuum electromagnetic field surrounding the atoms, respectively. Here we propose an experimental scheme employing laser-painted cavity-mediated interactions, which enables the realization of atom-atom interactions that are fully tunable in range, shape, and sign. Our approach combines the versatility of cavity quantum electrodynamics with the precision of laser manipulation, thus providing a highly flexible platform for simulating and understanding long-range interactions in quantum many-body systems. Our analytical predictions are supported by numerical simulations describing the full dynamics of atoms, laser, and cavity. The latter demonstrate that there is a wide and experimentally accessible parameter regime where our protocol optimally works. The methodology not only paves the way for exploring new territories in quantum simulation but also enhances the understanding of fundamental physics, potentially leading to the discovery of novel quantum states and phases.

We study a one-to-one labor matching market. If a worker considers resigning from her current job to obtain a better one, how long does it take for this worker to actually get it? We present an algorithm that models this situation as a re-stabilization process involving a vacancy chain. Each step of the algorithm is a link of such a chain. We show that the length of this vacancy chain, which can be interpreted as the time the worker has to wait for her new job, is intimately connected with the lattice structure of the set of stable matchings of the market. Namely, this length can be computed by considering the cardinalities of cycles in preferences derived from the initial and final stable matchings involved.

We report on simulations of a novel design of optical titanium nitride (TiN)- based Kinetic Inductance Detectors (KIDs) in order to improve their response to optical photons. We propose to separate the meander from the substrate to trap hot phonons generated by optical photons, preventing their rapid propagation through the substrate. These phonons would in turn contribute to the breaking of more Cooper pairs, thereby increasing the response of the detector. In our design, the meander is suspended a few hundred nanometers above the substrate. Furthermore, reflective gold (Au) or aluminum (Al)-based layers can be placed under the meander to improve photon coupling in the optical wavelengths.

The aim of this work is to measure the abundances of n-capture elements in a sample of six metal-poor N-rich dwarfs that were formed in globular clusters, and subsequently became unbound from the cluster. These N-rich stars, HD 25329, HD 74000, HD 160617, G 24-3, G 53-41, and G 90-3, were previously studied in Paper I. The abundances of the n-capture elements in these stars were compared to the abundances in normal metal-poor dwarfs and in globular cluster stars in the same metallicity range in order to find evidence of an enrichment of the material from which these N-rich stars were formed, by the ejecta of massive asymptotic giant branch stars (AGB) inside the cluster.The abundances of 15 elements, from Sr to Yb, were derived line by line by comparing the observed profiles to synthetic spectra in a sample of six metal-poor N-rich dwarfs and nine classical metal-poor dwarfs. We show that, generally speaking, the behaviours of the intermediate metal-poor stars here studied and the extremely metal-poor stars are very different. In particular, the scatter of the [X/Fe] ratios is much smaller since many more stars contribute to the enrichment.Among our six metal-poor N-rich stars, three stars (G24-3 and HD 74000 and maybe also HD 160617) present an enrichment in elements formed by the s-process, typical of a contribution of AGB stars, unexpected at the metallicity of these stars. This suggests that the intracluster medium from which these stars were formed was enriched by a first generation of massive AGB stars. Another N-rich star, G53-41, is also rich in s-process elements, but since it is more metal-rich this could be due to the normal galactic enrichment by low-mass AGB stars before the formation of the cluster. In contrast, two stars (G90-3 and HD 25329) have an abundance pattern compatible with a pure r-process such as that seen in metal-poor stars with [Fe/H]<--1.5.

The MINCE (Measuring at Intermediate metallicity Neutron-Capture Elements) project aims to gather the abundances of neutron-capture elements but also of light elements and iron peak elements in a large sample of giant stars in this metallicity range. T The aim of this work is to study the chemical evolution of galactic sub-components recently identified (i.e. Gaia Sausage Enceladus (GSE), Sequoia). We used high signal-to-noise ratios, high-resolution spectra and standard 1D LTE spectrum synthesis to determine the detailed abundances. We could determine the abundances for up to 10 neutron-capture elements (Sr, Y, Zr, Ba, La, Ce, Pr, Nd, Sm and Eu) in 33 stars. The general trends of abundance ratios [n-capture element/Fe] versus [Fe/H] are in agreement with the results found in the literature. When our sample is divided in sub-groups depending on their kinematics, we found that the run of [Sr/Ba] vs [Ba/H] for the stars belonging to the GSE accretion event shows a tight anti-correlation. The results for the Sequoia stars, although based on a very limited sample, shows a [Sr/Ba] systematically higher than the [Sr/Ba] found in the GSE stars at a given [Ba/H] hinting at a different nucleosynthetic history. Stochastic chemical evolution models have been computed to understand the evolution of the GSE chemical composition of Sr and Ba. The first conclusions are that the GSE chemical evolution is similar to the evolution of a dwarf galaxy with galactic winds and inefficient star formation. Detailed abundances of neutron-capture elements have been measured in high-resolution, high signal-to-noise spectra of intermediate metal-poor stars, the metallicity range covered by the MINCE project. These abundances have been compared to detailed stochastic models of galactic chemical evolution., Comment: 18 pages, 15 figures

In this paper, we investigate the quasi-particle (QP) relaxation of strongly disordered superconducting resonators under optical illumination at different bath temperatures with the Rothwarf and Taylor equations and the gap-broadening theory described by the Usadal equation. The analysis is validated with various single-photon responses of Titanium Nitride (TiN) microwave kinetic inductance detectors (MKIDs) under pulsed 405~nm laser illumination. The QP relaxation in TiN is dominated by QPs with energy below the energy gap smeared by the disorder, and its duration is still inversely proportional to the QP density. The QP lifetime versus temperature can be fitted. The relaxation of the resonator can be further modeled with QP diffusion. The fitted QP diffusion coefficient of TiN is significantly smaller than expected. Our result also shows a significant increase in QP generation efficiency as the bath temperature increases., Comment: Accepted by Superconductor Science and Technology

The Gaia satellite has provided the community with three releases containing astrometrical and photometric data as well as by products, such as stellar parameters and variability indicators. By selecting in the Gaia database, one can select stars with the requested characteristics, such as high speed. At present any selection is based on available Gaia releases including a subset of the observations. This, for some stars, can show some limitations, for example there is still not a sufficient number of observations to detect binarity. We investigated a star selected in Gaia EDR3 for its high speed that appears unbound to the Galaxy. We requested high-quality spectra to derive more information on the star. {From the spectroscopic investigation we confirm the low metallicity content of the star, and we derive a detailed chemical composition. The star is poor in carbon and very rich in oxygen: [(C+N+O)/Fe]=+0.65. From the two spectra observed we conclude that the star is in a binary system and from the investigation of the ionisation balance we derive that the star is closer than implied by the Gaia DR3 parallax, and thus has a a lower intrinsic luminosity. The star is probably still unbound, but there is the possibility that it is bound to the Galaxy. Its low carbon abundance suggests that the star was formed in a dwarf galaxy., Comment: A&A Volume 684, April 2024

Developers often use crash reports to understand the root cause of bugs. However, locating the buggy source code snippet from such information is a challenging task, mainly when the log database contains many crash reports. To mitigate this issue, recent research has proposed and evaluated approaches for grouping crash report data and using stack trace information to locate bugs. The effectiveness of such approaches has been evaluated by mainly comparing the candidate buggy code snippets with the actual changed code in bug-fix commits -- which happens in the context of retrospective repository mining studies. Therefore, the existing literature still lacks discussing the use of such approaches in the daily life of a software company, which could explain the developers' perceptions on the use of these approaches. In this paper, we report our experience of using an approach for grouping crash reports and finding buggy code on a weekly basis for 18 months, within three development teams in a software company. We grouped over 750,000 crash reports, opened over 130 issues, and collected feedback from 18 developers and team leaders. Among other results, we observe that the amount of system logs related to a crash report group is not the only criteria developers use to choose a candidate bug to be analyzed. Instead, other factors were considered, such as the need to deliver customer-prioritized features and the difficulty of solving complex crash reports (e.g., architectural debts), to cite some. The approach investigated in this study correctly suggested the buggy file most of the time -- the approach's precision was around 80%. In this study, the developers also shared their perspectives on the usefulness of the suspicious files and methods extracted from crash reports to fix related bugs.

Planets orbiting members of open or globular clusters offer a great opportunity to study exoplanet populations systematically as stars within clusters provide a mostly homogeneous sample at least in chemical composition and stellar age. However, even though there have been coordinated efforts to search for exoplanets in stellar clusters, only a small number of planets has been detected. One successful example is the seven-year radial velocity (RV) survey "Search for giant planets in M67" of 88 stars in the open cluster M67 which led to the discovery of five giant planets, including three close-in ($P < 10$ days) hot-Jupiters. In this work, we continue and extend the observation of stars in M67 with the aim to search for additional planets. We conducted spectroscopic observations with the HPF, HARPS, HARPS-North, and SOPHIE spectrographs of 11 stars in M67. Six of our targets showed a variation or long-term trends in their RV during the original survey, while the other five were not observed in the original sample bringing the total number of stars to 93. An analysis of the radial velocities revealed one additional planet around the turn-off point star S1429 and gave solutions for the orbits of stellar companions around S2207 and YBP2018. S1429 b is a warm Jupiter on a likely circular orbit with a period of $77.48_{-0.19}^{+0.18}$ days and a minimum mass $\text{M} \sin i = 1.80 \pm 0.2$ M$_\text{J}$. We update the hot-Jupiter occurrence rate in M67 to include the five new stars, deriving $4.2_{-2.3}^{+4.1} \%$ when considering all stars, and $5.4_{-3.0}^{+5.1} \%$ if binary star systems are removed., Comment: 27 pages, 20 figures. Accepted for publication in A&A

The Gaia-ESO Survey is an European Southern Observatory (ESO) public spectroscopic survey that targeted $10^5$ stars in the Milky Way covering the major populations of the disk, bulge and halo. The observations were made using FLAMES on the VLT obtaining both UVES high ($R\sim47,000$) and GIRAFFE medium ($R\sim20,000$) resolution spectra. The analysis of the Gaia-ESO spectra was the work of multiple analysis teams (nodes) within five working groups (WG). The homogenisation of the stellar parameters within WG11 (high resolution observations of FGK stars) and the homogenisation of the stellar parameters within WG10 (medium resolution observations of FGK stars) is described here. In both cases, the homogenisation was carried out using a bayesian Inference method developed specifically for the Gaia-ESO Survey by WG11. The WG10 homogenisation primarily used the cross-match of stars with WG11 as the reference set in both the stellar parameter and chemical abundance homogenisation. In this way the WG10 homogenised results have been placed directly onto the WG11 stellar parameter and chemical abundance scales. The reference set for the metal-poor end was sparse which limited the effectiveness of the homogenisation in that regime. For WG11, the total number of stars for which stellar parameters were derived was 6,231 with typical uncertainties for Teff, log g and [Fe/H] of 32~K, 0.05 and 0.05 respectively. One or more chemical abundances out of a possible 39 elements were derived for 6,188 of the stars. For WG10, the total number of stars for which stellar parameters were derived was 76,675 with typical uncertainties for Teff, log g and [Fe/H] of 64~K, 0.15 and 0.07 respectively. One or more chemical abundances out of a possible 30 elements were derived for 64,177 of the stars., Comment: 31 pages, 19 figures

The Gaia satellite has already provided the astronomical community with three data releases, and the Radial Velocity Spectrometer (RVS) on board Gaia has provided the radial velocity for 33 million stars. When deriving the radial velocity from the RVS spectra, several stars are measured to have large values. To verify the credibility of these measurements, we selected some bright stars with the modulus of radial velocity in excess of 500\ to be observed with SOPHIE at OHP and UVES at VLT. This paper is devoted to investigating the chemical composition of the stars observed with UVES. We derived atmospheric parameters using Gaia photometry and parallaxes, and we performed a chemical analysis using the code. We find that the sample consists of metal-poor stars, although none have extremely low metallicities. The abundance patterns match what has been found in other samples of metal-poor stars selected irrespective of their radial velocities. We highlight the presence of three stars with low Cu and Zn abundances that are likely descendants of pair-instability supernovae. Two stars are apparently younger than 1\,Ga, and their masses exceed twice the turn-off mass of metal-poor populations. This makes it unlikely that they are blue stragglers because it would imply they formed from triple or multiple systems. We suggest instead that they are young metal-poor stars accreted from a dwarf galaxy. Finally, we find that the star RVS721 is associated with the Gjoll stream, which itself is associated with the Globular Cluster NGC\,3201., Comment: Astronomy and Astrophysics - A\&A, In press

The data from the Gaia satellite led us to revise our conception of the Galaxy structure and history. Hitherto unknown components have been discovered and a deep re-thinking of what the Galactic halo is is in progress. We selected from the Gaia catalogue stars with extreme transverse velocities with respect to the Sun ($|V_T| > 500 $ and observed them with FORS2 at the ESO VLT, to classify them using both their chemical and dynamical properties. Two apparently young stars, identified in paper\,I, were observed with UVES. We derived abundances for Na, Mg, Ca, Ti, Mn, and Fe, analysing the spectra with while for Ba we used line profile fitting. We computed actions from parallaxes and kinematical data. The stars span the metallicity range $ Fe/H -0.5$ with $ Fe/H = -1.6$. Star GHS143 has a total speed of about 1440 which is almost three times faster than the local escape velocity of 522 strongly implying this star is unbound to the Galaxy. Remarkably, this star is not escaping from the Galaxy, but it is falling into it. Ten stars are apparently young with masses in excess of 1.3M. Their interpretation as evolved blue stragglers is doubtful. The existence of a young metal-poor population is possible. The two stars observed with UVES show no lithium, suggesting they are blue stragglers. We detected a metal-poor population, confined to the bulge, that we call SpiteF, and argue that it is the result of a recent accretion event. We detect 102 candidates of the Aurora population that should have formed prior to the formation of the disc. Our sample is non-homogeneous and mainly retrograde. The stars are metal poor, and 23 have Fe/H -2.0$. Our selection is efficient at finding very metal-poor stars, but it selects peculiar populations., Comment: Astronomy and Astrophysics - In press

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) grounds large language model (LLM) output by leveraging external knowledge sources to reduce factual hallucinations. However, prior works lack a comprehensive evaluation of different language families, making it challenging to evaluate LLM robustness against errors in external retrieved knowledge. To overcome this, we establish NoMIRACL, a human-annotated dataset for evaluating LLM robustness in RAG across 18 typologically diverse languages. NoMIRACL includes both a non-relevant and a relevant subset. Queries in the non-relevant subset contain passages judged as non-relevant, whereas queries in the relevant subset include at least a single judged relevant passage. We measure LLM robustness using two metrics: (i) hallucination rate, measuring model tendency to hallucinate an answer, when the answer is not present in passages in the non-relevant subset, and (ii) error rate, measuring model inaccuracy to recognize relevant passages in the relevant subset. In our work, we measure robustness for a wide variety of multilingual-focused LLMs and observe that most of the models struggle to balance the two capacities. Models such as LLAMA-2, Orca-2, and FLAN-T5 observe more than an 88% hallucination rate on the non-relevant subset, whereas, Mistral overall hallucinates less, but can achieve up to a 74.9% error rate on the relevant subset. Overall, GPT-4 is observed to provide the best tradeoff on both subsets, highlighting future work necessary to improve LLM robustness.

We study extended shift symmetries that arise for fermionic fields on anti-de Sitter (AdS) space and de Sitter (dS) space for particular values of the mass relative to the curvature scale. We classify these symmetries for general mixed-symmetry fermionic fields in arbitrary dimension and describe how fields with these symmetries arise as the decoupled longitudinal modes of massive fermions as they approach partially massless points. For the particular case of AdS$_4$, we look for non-trivial Lie superalgebras that can underly interacting theories that involve these fields. We study from this perspective the minimal such theory, the Akulov--Volkov theory on AdS$_4$, which is a non-linear theory of a spin-$1/2$ Goldstino field that describes the spontaneous breaking of ${\cal N}=1$ supersymmetry on AdS$_4$ down to the isometries of AdS$_4$. We show how to write the nonlinear supersymmetry transformation for this theory using the fermionic ambient space formalism. We also study the Lie superalgebras of candidate multi-field examples and rule out the existence of a supersymmetric special galileon on AdS$_4$., Comment: 40 pages, 2 figures

SpectroPhotometric Imaging in Astronomy with Kinetic Inductance Detectors (SPIAKID) aims at designing, building, and deploying on the sky a spectrophotometric imager based on microwave kinetic inductance detectors (MKIDs) in the optical and near-infrared bands. MKIDs show a fast response and the ability to resolve photon energy compared to the conventional Charge-coupled Devices (CCDs). In this paper, we present the design and simulation of the MKID arrays for SPIAKID. The detectors consist of four arrays with each array of 20,000 lumped-element pixels, and each array will be read with 10 readout lines. %The array is designed to have resonances between 4-8GHz with a frequency spacing of 2 MHz and a coupling quality factor (Qc) of about 50000. The meander material of the resonators is trilayer TiN/Ti/TiN to have better uniformity of the critical temperature across the array. We also present the measurement result for a test array with $30\times30$ pixels which is a subset of the designed 2000-pixel array to verify the design and fabrication. The current measured best energy resolving power $R = E/\Delta E$ is 2.4 at $\lambda = 405~$nm and the current medium R is around 1.7. We have also observed the response of the TiN/Ti/TiN is much smaller than expected., Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures. Accepted by the Journal of Low Temperature Physics

We study how structural properties of globular clusters and dwarf galaxies are linked to their orbits in the Milky Way halo. From the inner to the outer halo, orbital energy increases and stellar-systems gradually move out of internal equilibrium: in the inner halo, high-surface brightness globular clusters are at pseudo-equilibrium, while further away, low-surface brightness clusters and dwarfs appear more tidally disturbed. Dwarf galaxies are the latest to arrive into the halo as indicated by their large orbital energies and pericenters, and have no time for more than one orbit. Their (gas-rich) progenitors likely lost their gas during their recent arrival in the Galactic halo. If dwarfs are at equilibrium with their dark matter (DM) content, the DM density should anti-correlate with pericenter. However, the transformation of DM dominated dwarfs from gas-rich rotation-supported into gas-poor dispersion-supported systems is unlikely accomplished during a single orbit. We suggest instead that the above anti-correlation is brought by the combination of ram-pressure stripping and of Galactic tidal shocks. Recent gas removal leads to an expansion of their stellar content caused by the associated gravity loss, making them sufficiently fragile to be transformed near pericenter passage. Out of equilibrium dwarfs would explain the observed anti-correlation of kinematics-based DM density with pericenter without invoking DM density itself, questioning its previous estimates. Ram-pressure stripping and tidal shocks may contribute to the dwarf velocity dispersion excess. It predicts the presence of numerous stars in their outskirts and a few young stars in their cores., Comment: Paper II, 18 pages, 15 Figures, MNRAS 527, 2178-2733 (2024), see also paper III with simulations (arXiv:2311.05687), as well as a video showing the transformation of a dwarf recently falling into the MW halo at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwxSdmfQis4

Version control system tools empower developers to independently work on their development tasks. These tools also facilitate the integration of changes through merging operations, and report textual conflicts. However, when developers integrate their changes, they might encounter other types of conflicts that are not detected by current merge tools. In this paper, we focus on dynamic semantic conflicts, which occur when merging reports no textual conflicts but results in undesired interference - causing unexpected program behavior at runtime. To address this issue, we propose a technique that explores the use of static analysis to detect interference when merging contributions from two developers. We evaluate our technique using a dataset of 99 experimental units extracted from merge scenarios. The results provide evidence that our technique presents significant interference detection capability. It outperforms, in terms of F1 score and recall, previous methods that rely on dynamic analysis for detecting semantic conflicts, but these show better precision. Our technique precision is comparable to the ones observed in other studies that also leverage static analysis or use theorem proving techniques to detect semantic conflicts, albeit with significantly improved overall performance.

The known Mega and Hyper Metal-Poor (MMP-HMP) stars with [Fe/H]<-6.0 and <-5.0, respectively, likely belong to the CEMP-no class, i.e. carbon-enhanced stars with low or absent second peak neutron capture elements. They are likely second generation stars and the few elements measurable in their atmospheres are used to infer the properties of single or very few progenitors. The high carbon abundance in the CEMP-no stars offers a unique opportunity to measure the carbon isotopic ratio, which directly monitors the presence of mixing between the He and H-burning layers either within the star or in the progenitor(s). By means of high-resolution spectra acquired with the ESPRESSO spectrograph at the VLT we aim to derive values for the 12C/13C ratio at the lowest metallicities. A spectral synthesis technique based on the SYNTHE code and on ATLAS models is used within a Markov-chain Monte Carlo methodology to derive 12C/13C in the stellar atmospheres of five of the most metal poor stars. These are the Mega Metal-Poor giant SMS J0313-6708 ([Fe/H]<-7.1), the Hyper Metal-Poor dwarf HE1327-2326 ([Fe/H]=-5.8),the Hyper Metal-Poor giant SDSS J1313-0019 ([Fe/H] = -5.0) and the Ultra Metal-Poor subgiant HE0233-0343 ([Fe/H]=-4.7). We also revise a previous value for the Mega Metal-Poor giant SMSS J1605-1443 with ([Fe/H] = -6.2). In four stars we derive an isotopic value while for HE1327-2326 we provide a lower limit. All Measurements are in the range 39<12C/13C<100 showing that the He- and H-burning layers underwent partial mixing either in the stars or, more likely, in their progenitors. This provides evidence of a primary production of 13C at the dawn of chemical evolution. [abridged], Comment: 10 pages, 6 figure, accepted A&A

In the problem of allocating a single non-disposable commodity among agents whose preferences are single-peaked, we study a weakening of strategy-proofness called not obvious manipulability (NOM). If agents are cognitively limited, then NOM is sufficient to describe their strategic behavior. We characterize a large family of own-peak-only rules that satisfy efficiency, NOM, and a minimal fairness condition. We call these rules "simple". In economies with excess demand, simple rules fully satiate agents whose peak amount is less than or equal to equal division and assign, to each remaining agent, an amount between equal division and his peak. In economies with excess supply, simple rules are defined symmetrically. These rules can be thought of as a two-step procedure that involves solving a claims problem. We also show that the single-plateaued domain is maximal for the characterizing properties of simple rules. Therefore, even though replacing strategy-proofness with NOM greatly expands the family of admissible rules, the maximal domain of preferences involved remains basically unaltered.

We constrain the low-energy spectra of Laplace operators on closed hyperbolic manifolds and orbifolds in three dimensions, including the standard Laplace-Beltrami operator on functions and the Laplacian on powers of the cotangent bundle. Our approach employs linear programming techniques to derive rigorous bounds by leveraging two types of spectral identities. The first type, inspired by the conformal bootstrap, arises from the consistency of the spectral decomposition of the product of Laplace eigensections, and involves the Laplacian spectra as well as integrals of triple products of eigensections. We formulate these conditions in the language of representation theory of $\mathrm{PSL}_2(\mathbb{C})$ and use them to prove upper bounds on the first and second Laplacian eigenvalues. The second type of spectral identities follows from the Selberg trace formula. We use them to find upper bounds on the spectral gap of the Laplace-Beltrami operator on hyperbolic 3-orbifolds, as well as on the systole length of hyperbolic 3-manifolds, as a function of the volume. Further, we prove that the spectral gap $\lambda_1$ of the Laplace-Beltrami operator on all closed hyperbolic 3-manifolds satisfies $\lambda_1 < 47.32$. Along the way, we use the trace formula to estimate the low-energy spectra of a large set of example orbifolds and compare them with our general bounds, finding that the bounds are nearly sharp in several cases., Comment: v1: 61 pages + appendices and references

Testing pushdown reactive systems is deemed important to guarantee a precise and robust software development process. Usually, such systems can be specified by the formalism of Input/Output Visibly Pushdown Labeled Transition System (IOVPTS), where the interaction with the environment is regulated by a pushdown memory. Hence a conformance checking can be applied in a testing process to verify whether an implementation is in compliance to a specification using an appropriate conformance relation. In this work we establish a novelty conformance relation based on Visibly Pushdown Languages (VPLs) that can model sets of desirable and undesirable behaviors of systems. Further, we show that test suites with a complete fault coverage can be generated using this conformance relation for pushdown reactive systems., Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2107.11421

Background: Test smells indicate potential problems in the design and implementation of automated software tests that may negatively impact test code maintainability, coverage, and reliability. When poorly described, manual tests written in natural language may suffer from related problems, which enable their analysis from the point of view of test smells. Despite the possible prejudice to manually tested software products, little is known about test smells in manual tests, which results in many open questions regarding their types, frequency, and harm to tests written in natural language. Aims: Therefore, this study aims to contribute to a catalog of test smells for manual tests. Method: We perform a two-fold empirical strategy. First, an exploratory study in manual tests of three systems: the Ubuntu Operational System, the Brazilian Electronic Voting Machine, and the User Interface of a large smartphone manufacturer. We use our findings to propose a catalog of eight test smells and identification rules based on syntactical and morphological text analysis, validating our catalog with 24 in-company test engineers. Second, using our proposals, we create a tool based on Natural Language Processing (NLP) to analyze the subject systems' tests, validating the results. Results: We observed the occurrence of eight test smells. A survey of 24 in-company test professionals showed that 80.7% agreed with our catalog definitions and examples. Our NLP-based tool achieved a precision of 92%, recall of 95%, and f-measure of 93.5%, and its execution evidenced 13,169 occurrences of our cataloged test smells in the analyzed systems. Conclusion: We contribute with a catalog of natural language test smells and novel detection strategies that better explore the capabilities of current NLP mechanisms with promising results and reduced effort to analyze tests written in different idioms., Comment: The 17th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM), 2023

We use the spectro-photometric information of ~219 million stars from Gaia's DR3 to calculate synthetic, narrow-band, metallicity-sensitive CaHK magnitudes that mimic the observations of the Pristine survey, a survey of photometric metallicities of Milky Way stars that has been mapping more than 6,500 deg^2 of the northern sky with the CFHT since 2015. These synthetic magnitudes are used for an absolute re-calibration of the deeper Pristine photometry and, combined with broadband Gaia information, synthetic and Pristine CaHK magnitudes are used to estimate photometric metallicities over the whole sky. The resulting metallicity catalogue is accurate down to [Fe/H]~-3.5 and is particularly suited for the exploration of the metal-poor Milky Way ([Fe/H]<-1.0). We make available here the catalogue of synthetic CaHK_syn magnitudes for all stars with BP/RP information in Gaia DR3, as well as an associated catalogue of more than ~30 million photometric metallicities for high S/N FGK stars. This paper further provides the first public DR of the Pristine catalogue in the form of higher quality recalibrated Pristine CaHK magnitudes and photometric metallicities for all stars in common with the BP/RP information in Gaia DR3. We demonstrate that, when available, the much deeper Pristine data greatly enhances the quality of the derived metallicities, in particular at the faint end of the catalogue (G_BP>16). Combined, both catalogues include more than 2 million metal-poor star candidates as well as more than 200,000 and ~8,000 very and extremely metal-poor candidates. Finally, we show that these metallicity catalogues can be used efficiently, among other applications, for Galactic archaeology, to hunt for the most metal-poor stars, and to study how the structure of the Milky Way varies with metallicity, from the flat distribution of disk stars to the spheroid-shaped metal-poor halo. (Shortened), Comment: 30 pages, 24 figures, submitted to A&A. First two authors are co-first author. The CaHK photometry catalogue and the two photometric metallicity catalogues are available, before acceptance, as large compressed csv files at: https://seafile.unistra.fr/d/ee0c0f05719d4368bcbb/

Recent work has explored Large Language Models (LLMs) to overcome the lack of training data for Information Retrieval (IR) tasks. The generalization abilities of these models have enabled the creation of synthetic in-domain data by providing instructions and a few examples on a prompt. InPars and Promptagator have pioneered this approach and both methods have demonstrated the potential of using LLMs as synthetic data generators for IR tasks. This makes them an attractive solution for IR tasks that suffer from a lack of annotated data. However, the reproducibility of these methods was limited, because InPars' training scripts are based on TPUs -- which are not widely accessible -- and because the code for Promptagator was not released and its proprietary LLM is not publicly accessible. To fully realize the potential of these methods and make their impact more widespread in the research community, the resources need to be accessible and easy to reproduce by researchers and practitioners. Our main contribution is a unified toolkit for end-to-end reproducible synthetic data generation research, which includes generation, filtering, training and evaluation. Additionally, we provide an interface to IR libraries widely used by the community and support for GPU. Our toolkit not only reproduces the InPars method and partially reproduces Promptagator, but also provides a plug-and-play functionality allowing the use of different LLMs, exploring filtering methods and finetuning various reranker models on the generated data. We also made available all the synthetic data generated in this work for the 18 different datasets in the BEIR benchmark which took more than 2,000 GPU hours to be generated as well as the reranker models finetuned on the synthetic data. Code and data are available at https://github.com/zetaalphavector/InPars