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Multiple measures assessment (MMA) is an alternative placement system that involves the consideration of alternative measures of students' performance--such as high school grades or GPA--in addition to or in place of standardized test scores to better place students. While the evidence for MMA is strong, placement reform has yet to spread to many colleges and states. Moreover, despite growing support for MMA, many colleges may not be implementing the most promising MMA systems, and some may shift back to standardized testing in the post-pandemic environment. CAPR has sought to assist colleges and states nationwide with the adoption and implementation of MMA practices that place more students--and allow more students to be successful--in college-level courses. As part of these efforts, CAPR worked with colleges in Arkansas and Texas to adopt and expand MMA. The findings in this report are derived from interviews with personnel from 12 two- and four-year public colleges in those states that went through considerable effort to improve their placement systems and to make them sustainable on a large scale. The study focused on three questions: What was the design of the MMA system at each college? How were colleges adopting MMA practices and what were key facilitators and hindrances? And what was the average cost of implementation? The authors found that adoption of MMA at each study college required collaboration among institutional leaders, administrators, faculty members, and advisors. The report highlights the roles of key actors in the adoption of MMA and the important role that state context and policies played in implementation. It also describes challenges that colleges had to overcome during implementation, such as obtaining staff buy-in, managing student data, and ensuring sufficient staffing.

Evidence has emerged for a stochastic signal correlated among 67 pulsars within the 15-year pulsar-timing data set compiled by the NANOGrav collaboration. Similar signals have been found in data from the European, Indian, Parkes, and Chinese PTAs. This signal has been interpreted as indicative of the presence of a nanohertz stochastic gravitational wave background. To explore the internal consistency of this result we investigate how the recovered signal strength changes as we remove the pulsars one by one from the data set. We calculate the signal strength using the (noise-marginalized) optimal statistic, a frequentist metric designed to measure correlated excess power in the residuals of the arrival times of the radio pulses. We identify several features emerging from this analysis that were initially unexpected. The significance of these features, however, can only be assessed by comparing the real data to synthetic data sets. After conducting identical analyses on simulated data sets, we do not find anything inconsistent with the presence of a stochastic gravitational wave background in the NANOGrav 15-year data. The methodologies developed here can offer additional tools for application to future, more sensitive data sets. While this analysis provides an internal consistency check of the NANOGrav results, it does not eliminate the necessity for additional investigations that could identify potential systematics or uncover unmodeled physical phenomena in the data., Comment: 21 pages, 11 figures, 2 tables

Machine Learning (ML) has offered innovative perspectives for accelerating the discovery of new functional materials, leveraging the increasing availability of material databases. Despite the promising advances, data-driven methods face constraints imposed by the quantity and quality of available data. Moreover, ML is often employed in tandem with simulated datasets originating from density functional theory (DFT), and assessed through in-sample evaluation schemes. This scenario raises questions about the practical utility of ML in uncovering new and significant material classes for industrial applications. Here, we propose a data-driven framework aimed at accelerating the discovery of new transparent conducting materials (TCMs), an important category of semiconductors with a wide range of applications. To mitigate the shortage of available data, we create and validate unique experimental databases, comprising several examples of existing TCMs. We assess state-of-the-art (SOTA) ML models for property prediction from the stoichiometry alone. We propose a bespoke evaluation scheme to provide empirical evidence on the ability of ML to uncover new, previously unseen materials of interest. We test our approach on a list of 55 compositions containing typical elements of known TCMs. Although our study indicates that ML tends to identify new TCMs compositionally similar to those in the training data, we empirically demonstrate that it can highlight material candidates that may have been previously overlooked, offering a systematic approach to identify materials that are likely to display TCMs characteristics.

Free electrons in the interstellar medium refract and diffract radio waves along multiple paths, resulting in angular and temporal broadening of radio pulses that limits pulsar timing precision. We determine multifrequency, multi-epoch scattering times for the large dispersion measure millisecond pulsar J1903+0327 by developing a three component model for the emitted pulse shape that is convolved with a best fit pulse broadening function (PBF) identified from a family of thin-screen and extended-media PBFs. We show that the scattering time, $\tau$, at a fiducial frequency of 1500 MHz changes by approximately 10% over a 5.5yr span with a characteristic timescale of approximately 100 days. We also constrain the spectral index and inner scale of the wavenumber spectrum of electron density variations along this line of sight. We find that the scaling law for $\tau$ vs. radio frequency is strongly affected by any mismatch between the true and assumed PBF or between the true and assumed intrinsic pulse shape. We show using simulations that refraction is a plausible cause of the epoch dependence of $\tau$, manifesting as changes in the PBF shape and $1/e$ time scale. Finally, we discuss the implications of our scattering results on pulsar timing including time of arrival delays and dispersion measure misestimation., Comment: 16 pages, 14 figures, submitted to ApJ

Neutrinoless double beta decay ($0 \nu \beta \beta$) provides a way to probe physics beyond the Standard Model of particle physics. The upcoming nEXO experiment will search for $0\nu\beta\beta$ decay in $^{136}$Xe with a projected half-life sensitivity exceeding $10^{28}$ years at the 90\% confidence level using a liquid xenon (LXe) Time Projection Chamber (TPC) filled with 5 tonnes of Xe enriched to $\sim$90\% in the $\beta \beta$-decaying isotope $^{136}$Xe. In parallel, a potential future upgrade to nEXO is being investigated with the aim to further suppress radioactive backgrounds, and to confirm $\beta \beta$-decay events. This technique, known as Ba-tagging, comprises of extracting and identifying the $\beta \beta$-decay daughter $^{136}$Ba ion. One tagging approach being pursued involves extracting a small volume of LXe in the vicinity of a potential $\beta \beta$-decay using a capillary tube and facilitating a liquid to gas phase transition by heating the capillary exit. The Ba ion is then separated from the accompanying Xe gas using a radio-frequency (RF) carpet and RF funnel, conclusively identifying the ion as $^{136}$Ba via laser-fluorescence spectroscopy and mass spectrometry. Simultaneously, an accelerator-driven Ba ion source is being developed to validate and optimize this technique. The motivation for the project, the development of the different aspects along with current status and results are discussed here.

Naturally occurring materials are often disordered, with their bulk properties being challenging to predict from the structure, due to the lack of underlying crystalline axes. In this paper, we develop a digital pipeline from algorithmically-created configurations with tunable disorder to 3D printed materials, as a tool to aid in the study of such materials, using electrical resistance as a test case. The designed material begins with a random point cloud that is iteratively evolved using Lloyd's algorithm to approach uniformity, with the points being connected via a Delaunay triangulation to form a disordered network metamaterial. Utilizing laser powder bed fusion additive manufacturing with stainless steel 17-4 PH and titanium alloy Ti-6Al-4V, we are able to experimentally measure the bulk electrical resistivity of the disordered network. We found that the graph Laplacian accurately predicts the effective resistance of the structure, but is highly sensitive to anisotropy and global network topology, preventing a single network statistic or disorder characterization from predicting global resistivity., Comment: 9 pages, 8 figures

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have become an essential tool for analyzing graph-structured data, leveraging their ability to capture complex relational information. While the expressivity of GNNs, particularly their equivalence to the Weisfeiler-Leman (1-WL) isomorphism test, has been well-documented, understanding their generalization capabilities remains critical. This paper focuses on the generalization of GNNs by investigating their Vapnik-Chervonenkis (VC) dimension. We extend previous results to demonstrate that 1-dimensional GNNs with a single parameter have an infinite VC dimension for unbounded graphs. Furthermore, we show that this also holds for GNNs using analytic non-polynomial activation functions, including the 1-dimensional GNNs that were recently shown to be as expressive as the 1-WL test. These results suggest inherent limitations in the generalization ability of even the most simple GNNs, when viewed from the VC dimension perspective., Comment: 10 pages

Cavitation is a process where bubbles form and collapse within a fluid with dynamic, spatially varying pressure. This phenomenon can concentrate energy density by 12 orders of magnitude, creating light-emitting plasma or damaging nearby surfaces. A key question in cavitation theory and experiments is: what are the upper limits of energy density achievable through this spontaneous multiscale process? Among the many physical processes at play, we focus on fluid compressibility, modeled using the Tait-Murnaghan equation of state for a homentropic Euler fluid. We examine spherical cavities corresponding to experimentally realizable sonoluminescing bubbles, whose radius changes by a factor of over 100. These bubbles reach velocities exceeding the speed of sound of the surrounding fluid. However, all-Mach hydrodynamic solvers, such as those implemented using the Basilisk software, can exhibit unphysical behavior even at early times when motion is nearly incompressible. To accurately capture high Mach number motion and resolve dynamics in the sonoluminescence regime, we introduced a uniform bubble approximation for the ideal gas inside the bubble. This leading-order approximation clarifies the significant effects of compressibility. Our results reproduce the equation-of-state-dependent asymptotic power-law region predicted by analytic calculations. This confirms our method's ability to capture high Mach number motion and suggests that the asymptotic regime could be experimentally observed. Convergence of this method is demonstrated for bubbles in both water and liquid lithium, showing that compressibility slows collapse. Additionally, an outgoing shock wave in the compressible fluid is resolved., Comment: 19 pages, 9 figures

Volatile memristors have recently gained popularity as promising devices for neuromorphic circuits, capable of mimicking the leaky function of neurons and offering advantages over capacitor-based circuits in terms of power dissipation and area. Additionally, volatile memristors are useful as selector devices and for hardware security circuits such as physical unclonable functions. To facilitate the design and simulation of circuits, a compact behavioral model is essential. This paper proposes V-VTEAM, a compact, simple, general, and flexible behavioral model for volatile memristors, inspired by the VTEAM nonvolatile memristor model and developed in MATLAB. The validity of the model is demonstrated by fitting it to an ion drift/diffusion-based Ag/SiOx/C/W volatile memristor, achieving a relative root mean error square of 4.5%., Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, 1 table, to be published in proceedings of 2024 International Flexible Electronics Technology Conference (IFETC 2024)

This work presents a simple and robust method to construct a B-spline based Everett map, for application in the Preisach model of hysteresis, to predict static hysteresis behavior. Its strength comes from the ability to directly capture the Everett map as a well-founded closed-form B-spline surface expression, while also eliminating model artifacts that plague Everett map based Preisach models. Contrary to other works, that applied numerical descriptions for the Everett map, the presented approach is of completely analytic nature. In this work the B-spline surface fitting procedure and the necessary set of constraints are explained. Furthermore, the B-spline based Everett map is validated by ensuring that model artifacts were properly eliminated. Additionally, the model was compared with four benchmark excitations. Namely, a degaussing signal, a set of first-order reversal curves, an arbitrary excitation with high-order reversal curves, and a PWM like signal. The model was able to reproduce all benchmarks with high accuracy., Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures

The Big Data explosion has necessitated the development of search algorithms that scale sub-linearly in time and memory. While compression algorithms and search algorithms do exist independently, few algorithms offer both, and those which do are domain-specific. We present panCAKES, a novel approach to compressive search, i.e., a way to perform $k$-NN and $\rho$-NN search on compressed data while only decompressing a small, relevant, portion of the data. panCAKES assumes the manifold hypothesis and leverages the low-dimensional structure of the data to compress and search it efficiently. panCAKES is generic over any distance function for which the distance between two points is proportional to the memory cost of storing an encoding of one in terms of the other. This property holds for many widely-used distance functions, e.g. string edit distances (Levenshtein, Needleman-Wunsch, etc.) and set dissimilarity measures (Jaccard, Dice, etc.). We benchmark panCAKES on a variety of datasets, including genomic, proteomic, and set data. We compare compression ratios to gzip, and search performance between the compressed and uncompressed versions of the same dataset. panCAKES achieves compression ratios close to those of gzip, while offering sub-linear time performance for $k$-NN and $\rho$-NN search. We conclude that panCAKES is an efficient, general-purpose algorithm for exact compressive search on large datasets that obey the manifold hypothesis. We provide an open-source implementation of panCAKES in the Rust programming language.

The bulk behaviour of granular materials is tied to its mesoscale and particle-scale features: strength properties arise from the buildup of various anisotropic structures at the particle-scale induced by grain connectivity (fabric), force transmission, and frictional mobilization. More fundamentally, these anisotropic structures work collectively to define features like the bulk friction coefficient and the stress tensor at the macroscale and can be explained by the Stress-Force-Fabric (SFF) relationship stemming from the microscale. Although the SFF relation has been extensively verified by discrete numerical simulations, a laboratory realization has remained elusive due to the challenge of measuring both normal and frictional contact forces. In this study, we analyze experiments performed on a photoelastic granular system under four different loading conditions: uniaxial compression, isotropic compression, pure shear, and annular shear. During these experiments, we record particle locations, contacts, and normal and frictional forces vectors to measure the particle-scale response to progressing strain. We track microscale measures like the packing fraction, average coordination number and average normal force along with anisotropic distributions of contacts and forces. We match the particle-scale anisotropy to the bulk using the SFF relation, which is founded on two key principles, a Stress Rule to describe the stress tensor and a Sum Rule to describe the bulk friction coefficient; we find that the Sum and Stress Rules accurately describe bulk measurements. Additionally, we test the assumption that fabric and forces transmit load equally through our granular packings and show that this assumption is sufficient at large strain values, and can be applied to areas like rock mechanics, soft colloids, or cellular tissue where force information is inaccessible., Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, 5 pages supplemental with 6 figures

Let $E/\mathbb{Q}$ be an elliptic curve. We say that $E$ has a near coincidence of level $(n,m)$ if $m \mid n$ and $\mathbb{Q}(E[n]) = \mathbb{Q}(E[m],\zeta_{n})$. In the present paper we classify near coincidences of prime power level. We use this result to give a classification of values of $n$ for which ${\rm Gal}(\mathbb{Q}(E[n])/\mathbb{Q})$ is a nilpotent group. In particular, if we assume that there are no non-CM rational points on the modular curves $X_{ns}^{+}(p)$ for primes $p > 11$, then ${\rm Gal}(\mathbb{Q}(E[n])/\mathbb{Q})$ nilpotent implies that $n$ is a power of $2$ or $n \in \{ 3, 5, 6, 7, 15, 21 \}$., Comment: 26 pages

To help the nation respond to the pandemic, Congress injected about $4.6 trillion into the U.S. economy through the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act and subsequent legislation. Of this amount, over $75 billion was directed to institutions of higher education through the Higher Education Emergency Relief (HEER) Fund, including nearly $25 billion to community colleges. Using data from the U.S. Department of Education's Education Stabilization Fund Transparency Portal and the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, this ARCC Network report examines how HEER funds were distributed to community colleges and the extent to which the colleges spent those funds. It also explores how HEER funding and spending patterns differed by institutional and student characteristics. HEER funding was based mostly on particular kinds of enrollments: States and community colleges with higher enrollments received more funds, and those with higher percentages of Pell recipients and full-time students tended to receive larger awards. The majority of HEER funds were intended to aid in the transition to distance learning, support faculty and staff training, and maintain core instruction and services at colleges. A substantial portion of HEER funding also went to students in the form of emergency aid, and some colleges received "other" HEER funding based on institutional characteristics to address additional unmet needs. Community colleges spent nearly all the HEER funding they received: Collectively, 976 community colleges spent 95% of funds, and nearly half the colleges (484) spent virtually all of their HEER funds. Colleges that spent less of their HEER funding tended to have received larger per-student awards. [This report was written with the Accelerating Recovery in Community Colleges (ARCC) Network.]

The NANOGrav 15-year data provides compelling evidence for a stochastic gravitational-wave (GW) background at nanohertz frequencies. The simplest model-independent approach to characterizing the frequency spectrum of this signal consists in a simple power-law fit involving two parameters: an amplitude A and a spectral index \gamma. In this paper, we consider the next logical step beyond this minimal spectral model, allowing for a running (i.e., logarithmic frequency dependence) of the spectral index, \gamma_run(f) = \gamma + \beta \ln(f/f_ref). We fit this running-power-law (RPL) model to the NANOGrav 15-year data and perform a Bayesian model comparison with the minimal constant-power-law (CPL) model, which results in a 95% credible interval for the parameter \beta consistent with no running, \beta \in [-0.80,2.96], and an inconclusive Bayes factor, B(RPL vs. CPL) = 0.69 +- 0.01. We thus conclude that, at present, the minimal CPL model still suffices to adequately describe the NANOGrav signal; however, future data sets may well lead to a measurement of nonzero \beta. Finally, we interpret the RPL model as a description of primordial GWs generated during cosmic inflation, which allows us to combine our results with upper limits from big-bang nucleosynthesis, the cosmic microwave background, and LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA., Comment: 17 pages, 4 figures, 2 tables

Conceptual Engineers want to make words better. However, they often underestimate how varied our usage of words is. In this paper, we take the first steps in exploring the contextual nuances of words by creating conceptual landscapes -- 2D surfaces representing the pragmatic usage of words -- that conceptual engineers can use to inform their projects. We use the spoken component of the British National Corpus and BERT to create contextualised word embeddings, and use Gaussian Mixture Models, a selection of metrics, and qualitative analysis to visualise and numerically represent lexical landscapes. Such an approach has not yet been used in the conceptual engineering literature and provides a detailed examination of how different words manifest in various contexts that is potentially useful to conceptual engineering projects. Our findings highlight the inherent complexity of conceptual engineering, revealing that each word exhibits a unique and intricate landscape. Conceptual Engineers cannot, therefore, use a one-size-fits-all approach when improving words -- a task that may be practically intractable at scale.

Recent advancements in sensors have led to high resolution and high data throughput at the pixel level. Simultaneously, the adoption of increasingly large (deep) neural networks (NNs) has lead to significant progress in computer vision. Currently, visual intelligence comes at increasingly high computational complexity, energy, and latency. We study a data-driven system that combines dynamic sensing at the pixel level with computer vision analytics at the video level and propose a feedback control loop to minimize data movement between the sensor front-end and computational back-end without compromising detection and tracking precision. Our contributions are threefold: (1) We introduce anticipatory attention and show that it leads to high precision prediction with sparse activation of pixels; (2) Leveraging the feedback control, we show that the dimensionality of learned feature vectors can be significantly reduced with increased sparsity; and (3) We emulate analog design choices (such as varying RGB or Bayer pixel format and analog noise) and study their impact on the key metrics of the data-driven system. Comparative analysis with traditional pixel and deep learning models shows significant performance enhancements. Our system achieves a 10X reduction in bandwidth and a 15-30X improvement in Energy-Delay Product (EDP) when activating only 30% of pixels, with a minor reduction in object detection and tracking precision. Based on analog emulation, our system can achieve a throughput of 205 megapixels/sec (MP/s) with a power consumption of only 110 mW per MP, i.e., a theoretical improvement of ~30X in EDP., Comment: Accepted to the Conference on Dynamic Data-Driven Applications Systems (DDDAS2024)

Computational modelling of materials using machine learning, ML, and historical data has become integral to materials research. The efficiency of computational modelling is strongly affected by the choice of the numerical representation for describing the composition, structure and chemical elements. Structure controls the properties, but often only the composition of a candidate material is available. Existing elemental descriptors lack direct access to structural insights such as the coordination geometry of an element. In this study, we introduce Local Environment-induced Atomic Features, LEAFs, which incorporate information about the statistically preferred local coordination geometry for atoms in crystal structure into descriptors for chemical elements, enabling the modelling of materials solely as compositions without requiring knowledge of their crystal structure. In the crystal structure, each atomic site can be described by similarity to common local structural motifs; by aggregating these features of similarity from the experimentally verified crystal structures of inorganic materials, LEAFs formulate a set of descriptors for chemical elements and compositions. The direct connection of LEAFs to the local coordination geometry enables the analysis of ML model property predictions, linking compositions to the underlying structure-property relationships. We demonstrate the versatility of LEAFs in structure-informed property predictions for compositions, mapping of chemical space in structural terms, and prioritising elemental substitutions. Based on the latter for predicting crystal structures of binary ionic compounds, LEAFs achieve the state-of-the-art accuracy of 86 per cent. These results suggest that the structurally informed description of chemical elements and compositions developed in this work can effectively guide synthetic efforts in discovering new materials., Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, supplementary information

We construct functorial Igusa stacks for all Hodge-type Shimura varieties, proving a conjecture of Scholze and extending earlier results of the fourth-named author for PEL-type Shimura varieties. Using the Igusa stack, we construct a sheaf on $\mathrm{Bun}_G$ that controls the cohomology of the corresponding Shimura variety. We use this sheaf and the spectral action of Fargues-Scholze to prove a compatibility between the cohomology of Shimura varieties of Hodge type and the semisimple local Langlands correspondence of Fargues-Scholze, generalizing the Eichler-Shimura relation of Blasius-Rogawski to arbitrary level at $p$. When the given Shimura variety is proper, we show moreover that the sheaf is perverse, which allows us to prove new torsion vanishing results for the cohomology of Shimura varieties., Comment: 121 pages, comments welcome!

Pulsar-timing-array experiments have reported evidence for a stochastic background of nanohertz gravitational waves consistent with the signal expected from a population of supermassive--black-hole binaries. Those analyses assume power-law spectra for intrinsic pulsar noise and for the background, as well as a Hellings--Downs cross-correlation pattern among the gravitational-wave--induced residuals across pulsars. These assumptions are idealizations that may not be realized in actuality. We test them in the NANOGrav 15 yr data set using Bayesian posterior predictive checks: after fitting our fiducial model to real data, we generate a population of simulated data-set replications, and use them to assess whether the optimal-statistic significance, inter-pulsar correlations, and spectral coefficients assume extreme values for the real data when compared to the replications. We confirm that the NANOGrav 15 yr data set is consistent with power-law and Hellings--Downs assumptions. We also evaluate the evidence for the stochastic background using posterior-predictive versions of the frequentist optimal statistic and of Bayesian model comparison, and find comparable significance (3.2\ $\sigma$ and 3\ $\sigma$ respectively) to what was previously reported for the standard statistics. We conclude with novel visualizations of the reconstructed gravitational waveforms that enter the residuals for each pulsar. Our analysis strengthens confidence in the identification and characterization of the gravitational-wave background as reported by NANOGrav., Comment: 20 pages, 14 Figures

Based on the rate of change of its orbital period, PSR J2043+1711 has a substantial peculiar acceleration of 3.5 $\pm$ 0.8 mm/s/yr, which deviates from the acceleration predicted by equilibrium Milky Way models at a $4\sigma$ level. The magnitude of the peculiar acceleration is too large to be explained by disequilibrium effects of the Milky Way interacting with orbiting dwarf galaxies ($\sim$1 mm/s/yr), and too small to be caused by period variations due to the pulsar being a redback. We identify and examine two plausible causes for the anomalous acceleration: a stellar flyby, and a long-period orbital companion. We identify a main-sequence star in \textit{Gaia} DR3 and Pan-STARRS DR2 with the correct mass, distance, and on-sky position to potentially explain the observed peculiar acceleration. However, the star and the pulsar system have substantially different proper motions, indicating that they are not gravitationally bound. However, it is possible that this is an unrelated star that just happens to be located near J2043+1711 along our line of sight (chance probability of 1.6\%). Therefore, we also constrain possible orbital parameters for a circumbinary companion in a hierarchical triple system with J2043+1711; the changes in the spindown rate of the pulsar are consistent with an outer object that has an orbital period of 80 kyr, a companion mass of 0.3 $M_\odot$ (indicative of a white dwarf or low-mass star), and a semi-major axis of 2000 AU. Continued timing and/or future faint optical observations of J2043+1711 may eventually allow us to differentiate between these scenarios.

Hysteresis modeling is crucial to comprehend the behavior of magnetic devices, facilitating optimal designs. Hitherto, deep learning-based methods employed to model hysteresis, face challenges in generalizing to novel input magnetic fields. This paper addresses the generalization challenge by proposing neural operators for modeling constitutive laws that exhibit magnetic hysteresis by learning a mapping between magnetic fields. In particular, three neural operators-deep operator network, Fourier neural operator, and wavelet neural operator-are employed to predict novel first-order reversal curves and minor loops, where novel means they are not used to train the model. In addition, a rate-independent Fourier neural operator is proposed to predict material responses at sampling rates different from those used during training to incorporate the rate-independent characteristics of magnetic hysteresis. The presented numerical experiments demonstrate that neural operators efficiently model magnetic hysteresis, outperforming the traditional neural recurrent methods on various metrics and generalizing to novel magnetic fields. The findings emphasize the advantages of using neural operators for modeling hysteresis under varying magnetic conditions, underscoring their importance in characterizing magnetic material based devices. The codes related to this paper are at github.com/chandratue/magnetic_hysteresis_neural_operator., Comment: 11 pages, 6 figures

Neutrinoless double beta decay is one of the most sensitive probes for new physics beyond the Standard Model of particle physics. One of the isotopes under investigation is $^{136}$Xe, which would double beta decay into $^{136}$Ba. Detecting the single $^{136}$Ba daughter provides a sort of ultimate tool in the discrimination against backgrounds. Previous work demonstrated the ability to perform single atom imaging of Ba atoms in a single-vacancy site of a solid xenon matrix. In this paper, the effort to identify signal from individual barium atoms is extended to Ba atoms in a hexa-vacancy site in the matrix and is achieved despite increased photobleaching in this site. Abrupt fluorescence turn-off of a single Ba atom is also observed. Significant recovery of fluorescence signal lost through photobleaching is demonstrated upon annealing of Ba deposits in the Xe ice. Following annealing, it is observed that Ba atoms in the hexa-vacancy site exhibit antibleaching while Ba atoms in the tetra-vacancy site exhibit bleaching. This may be evidence for a matrix site transfer upon laser excitation. Our findings offer a path of continued research toward tagging of Ba daughters in all significant sites in solid xenon., Comment: 9 pages, 8 figures

Pulsar timing array experiments have recently uncovered evidence for a nanohertz gravitational wave background by precisely timing an ensemble of millisecond pulsars. The next significant milestones for these experiments include characterizing the detected background with greater precision, identifying its source(s), and detecting continuous gravitational waves from individual supermassive black hole binaries. To achieve these objectives, generating accurate and precise times of arrival of pulses from pulsar observations is crucial. Incorrect polarization calibration of the observed pulsar profiles may introduce errors in the measured times of arrival. Further, previous studies (e.g., van Straten 2013; Manchester et al. 2013) have demonstrated that robust polarization calibration of pulsar profiles can reduce noise in the pulsar timing data and improve timing solutions. In this paper, we investigate and compare the impact of different polarization calibration methods on pulsar timing precision using three distinct calibration techniques: the Ideal Feed Assumption (IFA), Measurement Equation Modeling (MEM), and Measurement Equation Template Matching (METM). Three NANOGrav pulsars-PSRs J1643$-$1224, J1744$-$1134, and J1909$-$3744-observed with the 800 MHz and 1.5 GHz receivers at the Green Bank Telescope (GBT) are utilized for our analysis. Our findings reveal that all three calibration methods enhance timing precision compared to scenarios where no polarization calibration is performed. Additionally, among the three calibration methods, the IFA approach generally provides the best results for timing analysis of pulsars observed with the GBT receiver system. We attribute the comparatively poorer performance of the MEM and METM methods to potential instabilities in the reference noise diode coupled to the receiver and temporal variations in the profile of the reference pulsar, respectively., Comment: 21 pages, 6 figures, 1 table, Accepted for Publication in Astrophysical Journal

Many cognitive models, including those for predicting the time of future events, can be mapped onto a particular form of neural representation in which activity across a population of neurons is restricted to manifolds that specify the Laplace transform of functions of continuous variables. These populations coding Laplace transform are associated with another population that inverts the transform, approximating the original function. This paper presents a neural circuit that uses continuous attractor dynamics to represent the Laplace transform of a delta function evolving in time. One population places an edge at any location along a 1-D array of neurons; another population places a bump at a location corresponding to the edge. Together these two populations can estimate a Laplace transform of delta functions in time along with an approximate inverse transform. Building the circuit so the edge moves at an appropriate speed enables the network to represent events as a function of log time. Choosing the connections appropriately within the edge network make the network states map onto Laplace transform with exponential change as a function of time. In this paper we model a learned temporal association in which one stimulus predicts another at some fixed delay $T$. Shortly after $t=0$ the first stimulus recedes into the past. The Laplace Neural Manifold representing the past maintains the Laplace transform $\exp(-st)$. Another Laplace Neural Manifold represents the predicted future. At $t=0$, the second stimulus is represented a time $T$ in the future. At each moment between 0 and $T$, firing over the Laplace transform predicting the future changes as $\exp[-s(T-t)]$. Despite exponential growth in firing, the circuit is robust to noise, making it a practical means to implement Laplace Neural Manifolds in populations of neurons for a variety of cognitive models., Comment: 32 pages, 9 figures

In fall 2016, CAPR began a randomized controlled trial of multiple measures assessment (MMA) in community colleges in the State University of New York (SUNY) to learn whether MMA yields placement determinations that lead to better student outcomes than a system based on test scores alone. In 2020, a report was released on students' outcomes after three terms. CAPR then launched a follow-up study to estimate outcomes for a longer time period. In this follow-up study, student outcomes, including college-level math and English enrollment and completion and college-level credit attainment, were tracked for at least nine terms from the time of testing, through spring 2021. The findings were disaggregated by race/ethnicity, Pell recipient status, and gender subgroups; a cost analysis of MMA was also conducted. This brief focuses on "bump-zone" findings--those for the subset of students whose placements changed (or would have changed) under MMA. The study finds that--four and a half years after random assignment--students who were "bumped up" into college-level math and English courses through MMA were much more likely to have enrolled in and completed a college-level course (with a grade of C or higher) than similar business-as-usual group students. The benefits of MMA were likely driven primarily by increased access to college-level courses rather than by any improved accuracy from using MMA. Regardless of subject area, program group students who were bumped up through MMA had better outcomes than similar students in the business-as-usual group, and program group students who were bumped down through MMA had worse outcomes than similar business-as-usual group students. It is important to recognize that MMA can be designed in a way that promotes more access and that prevents students from receiving a lower placement. [For the accompanying working paper, see ED632523.]

Multiple measures assessment (MMA) has gained considerable momentum over the past decade as an alternative to traditional test-based procedures for placing incoming students into developmental or college-level coursework in math and English at broad-access colleges. Compared to standardized tests, which measure student performance at a single point in time, MMA (which often emphasizes high school GPA as a measure) provides a more holistic picture of students' academic preparation. Despite positive impacts on student outcomes that have been found by recent research on MMA, questions remain about whether the positive effects of MMA are sustained over time. This study--a follow-up to prior research using the same sample of students--employs a randomized controlled trial to investigate whether algorithmic MMA placement used at seven State University of New York (SUNY) community colleges led to better student outcomes, for up to four and a half years after randomization, than a system based on test scores alone. Nearly 13,000 incoming students who arrived at the seven colleges in fall 2016, spring 2017, and fall 2017 took placement tests and were randomly assigned to be placed using either the status quo method (business-as-usual group) or the alternative, algorithmic MMA method (program group). Using this sample, we estimate the overall treatment effects on placement into, enrollment in, and completion of college-level math and English as well as effects on other outcomes. We conduct similar analyses on race/ethnicity, Pell recipient status, and gender subgroups. We also descriptively examine the proportion of program group students who were bumped up (i.e., their placement changed from a developmental course placement to a college-level course placement) and bumped down (i.e., their placement changed from a college-level course placement to a developmental course placement) by the MMA algorithm, and we perform a cost-effectiveness analysis. We find that the MMA method used at the colleges improved access to and success in college-level courses and that lower cut scores in English rather than math are associated with larger and longer lasting impacts on completion of college-level coursework. While MMA improved outcomes among student subgroups, it had little to no impact on gaps in outcomes between subgroups. We also find that bumped-up students had substantially better outcomes in both math and English, while bumped-down students had substantially worse outcomes. Our results suggest that increased access to college-level courses is the driving factor in the positive outcomes experienced by program group students and that placement into standalone developmental courses can have detrimental effects on student outcomes. In the discussion of the study's results, we make recommendations for adopting MMA at colleges. Implemented together with other initiatives to support students, MMA can be a first step on the path to success for incoming students. [For the accompanying research brief, see ED632528.]