A bracketing metric entropy bound for the class of Laplace transforms of probability measures on [0,infty) is obtained through its connection with the small deviation probability of a smooth Gaussian process. Our results for the particular smooth Gaussian process seem to be of independent interest.
We introduce delta-graphic matroids, which are matroids whose bases form graphic delta-matroids. The class of delta-graphic matroids contains graphic matroids as well as cographic matroids and is a proper subclass of the class of regular matroids. We give a structural characterization of the class of delta-graphic matroids. We also show that every forbidden minor for the class of delta-graphic matroids has at most $48$ elements.
We show that the class of bicircular matroids has only a finite number of excluded minors. Key tools used in our proof include representations of matroids by biased graphs and the recently introduced class of quasi-graphic matroids. We show that if $N$ is an excluded minor of rank at least eight, then $N$ is quasi-graphic. Several small excluded minors are quasi-graphic. Using biased-graphic representations, we find that $N$ already contains one of these. We also provide an upper bound, in terms of rank, on the number of elements in an excluded minor, so the result follows.
For an abelian group $Gamma$, a $Gamma$-labelled graph is a graph whose vertices are labelled by elements of $Gamma$. We prove that a certain collection of edge sets of a $Gamma$-labelled graph forms a delta-matroid, which we call a $Gamma$-graphic delta-matroid, and provide a polynomial-time algorithm to solve the separation problem, which allows us to apply the symmetric greedy algorithm of Bouchet to find a maximum weight feasible set in such a delta-matroid. We present two algorithmic applications on graphs; Maximum Weight Packing of Trees of Order Not Divisible by $k$ and Maximum Weight $S$-Tree Packing. We also discuss various properties of $Gamma$-graphic delta-matroids.
We discuss the uniqueness or non-uniqueness problem of the decomposition of the gluon field into the physical and pure-gauge components, which is the basis of the recently proposed two physically inequivalent gauge-invariant decompositions of the nucleon spin. It is crucialy important to recognize the fact that the standard gauge fixing procedure is essentially a process of projecting out the physical components of the massless gauge field. A complexity of the nonabelian gauge theory as compared with the abelian case is that a closed expression for the physical component can be given only with use of the non-local Wilson line, which is generally path-dependent. It is known that, by choosing an infinitely long straight-line path in space and time, the direction of which is characterized by a constant 4-vector $n^mu$, one can cover a class of gauge called the general axial gauge, containing three popular gauges, i.e. the temporal, the light-cone, and the spatial axial gauge. Within this general axial gauge, we have calculated the 1-loop evolution matrix for the quark and gluon longitudinal spins in the nucleon. We found that the final answer is exactly the same independently of the choices of $n^mu$, which amounts to proving the gauge-independence and path-independence simultaneously, although within a restricted class of gauges and paths. By drawing on all of these findings together with well-established knowledge from gauge theories, we argue against the rapidly spreading view in the community that there are infinitely many decompositions of the nucleon spin.