No Arabic abstract
We investigate parking in a one-dimensional lot, where cars enter at a rate $lambda$ and each attempts to park close to a target at the origin. Parked cars also depart at rate 1. An entering driver cannot see beyond the parked cars for more desirable open spots. We analyze a class of strategies in which a driver ignores open spots beyond $tau L$, where $tau$ is a risk threshold and $L$ is the location of the most distant parked car, and attempts to park at the first available spot encountered closer than $tau L$. When all drivers use this strategy, the probability to park at the best available spot is maximal when $tau=frac{1}{2}$, and parking at the best available spot occurs with probability $frac{1}{4}$.
In this work we study opinion formation in a population participating of a public debate with two distinct choices. We considered three distinct mechanisms of social interactions and individuals behavior: conformity, nonconformity and inflexibility. The conformity is ruled by the majority-rule dynamics, whereas the nonconformity is introduced in the population as an independent behavior, implying the failure to attempted group influence. Finally, the inflexible agents are introduced in the population with a given density. These individuals present a singular behavior, in a way that their stubbornness makes them reluctant to change their opinions. We consider these effects separately and all together, with the aim to analyze the critical behavior of the system. We performed numerical simulations in some lattice structures and for distinct population sizes, and our results suggest that the different formulations of the model undergo order-disorder phase transitions in the same universality class of the Ising model. Some of our results are complemented by analytical calculations.
The past few years have witnessed increased attention to the quest for Majorana-like excitations in the condensed matter community. As a promising candidate in this race, the one-dimensional chiral Majorana edge mode (CMEM) in topological insulator-superconductor heterostructures has gathered renewed interests during recent months after an experimental breakthrough. In this paper, we study the quantum transport of topological insulator-superconductor hybrid devices subject to light-matter interaction or general time-periodic modulation. We report half-integer quantized conductance plateaus at $frac{1}{2}frac{e^2}{h}$ and $frac{3}{2}frac{e^2}{h}$ upon applying the so-called sum rule in the theory of quantum transport in Floquet topological matter. In particular, in a photoinduced topological superconductor sandwiched between two Floquet Chern insulators, it is found that for each Floquet sideband, the CMEM admits equal probability for normal transmission and local Andreev reflection over a wide range of parameter regimes, yielding half-integer quantized plateaus that resist static and time-periodic disorder. The $frac{3}{2}frac{e^2}{h}$ plateau has not yet been computationally or experimentally observed in any other superconducting system, and indicates the possibility to simultaneously create and manipulate multiple pairs of CMEMs by light. The robust half-quantized conductance plateaus, due to CMEMs at quasienergies zero or half the driving frequency, are both fascinating and subtle because they only emerge after a summation over contributions from all Floquet sidebands. Such a distinctive transport signature can thus serve as a hallmark of photoinduced CMEMs in topological insulator-superconductor junctions.
Paleoclimate data show that climate sensitivity is ~3 deg-C for doubled CO2, including only fast feedback processes. Equilibrium sensitivity, including slower surface albedo feedbacks, is ~6 deg-C for doubled CO2 for the range of climate states between glacial conditions and ice-free Antarctica. Decreasing CO2 was the main cause of a cooling trend that began 50 million years ago, large scale glaciation occurring when CO2 fell to 450 +/- 100 ppm, a level that will be exceeded within decades, barring prompt policy changes. If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm. The largest uncertainty in the target arises from possible changes of non-CO2 forcings. An initial 350 ppm CO2 target may be achievable by phasing out coal use except where CO2 is captured and adopting agricultural and forestry practices that sequester carbon. If the present overshoot of this target CO2 is not brief, there is a possibility of seeding irreversible catastrophic effects.
We propose to reinterpret a standard discriminative classifier of p(y|x) as an energy based model for the joint distribution p(x,y). In this setting, the standard class probabilities can be easily computed as well as unnormalized values of p(x) and p(x|y). Within this framework, standard discriminative architectures may beused and the model can also be trained on unlabeled data. We demonstrate that energy based training of the joint distribution improves calibration, robustness, andout-of-distribution detection while also enabling our models to generate samplesrivaling the quality of recent GAN approaches. We improve upon recently proposed techniques for scaling up the training of energy based models and presentan approach which adds little overhead compared to standard classification training. Our approach is the first to achieve performance rivaling the state-of-the-artin both generative and discriminative learning within one hybrid model.
Recent low temperature heat capacity (C$_P$) measurements on polycrystalline samples of the pyrochlore antiferromagnet Tb$_{2+x}$Ti$_{2-x}$O$_{7+delta}$ have shown a strong sensitivity to the precise Tb concentration $x$, with a large anomaly exhibited for $x sim 0.005$ at $T_C sim 0.5$ K and no such anomaly and corresponding phase transition for $x le 0$. We have grown single crystal samples of Tb$_{2+x}$Ti$_{2-x}$O$_{7+delta}$, with approximate composition $x=-0.001, +0.0042$, and $+0.0147$, where the $x=0.0042$ single crystal exhibits a large C$_P$ anomaly at $T_C$=0.45 K, but neither the $x=-0.001$ nor the $x=+0.0147$ single crystals display any such anomaly. We present new time-of-flight neutron scattering measurements on the $x=-0.001$ and the $x=+0.0147$ samples which show strong $left(frac{1}{2},frac{1}{2},frac{1}{2}right)$ quasi-Bragg peaks at low temperatures characteristic of short range antiferromagnetic spin ice (AFSI) order at zero magnetic field but only under field-cooled conditions, as was previously observed in our $x = 0.0042$ single crystal. These results show that the strong $left(frac{1}{2},frac{1}{2},frac{1}{2}right)$ quasi-Bragg peaks and gapped AFSI state at low temperatures under field cooled conditions are robust features of Tb$_2$Ti$_2$O$_7$, and are not correlated with the presence or absence of the C$_P$ anomaly and phase transition at low temperatures. Further, these results show that the ordered state giving rise to the C$_P$ anomaly is confined to $0 leq x leq 0.01$ for Tb$_{2+x}$Ti$_{2-x}$O$_{7+delta}$, and is not obviously connected with conventional order of magnetic dipole degrees of freedom.