No Arabic abstract
Optimally selecting a subset of targets from a larger catalog is a common problem in astronomy and cosmology. A specific example is the selection of targets from an imaging survey for multi-object spectrographic follow-up. We present a new heuristic algorithm, HYBRID, for this purpose and undertake detailed studies of its performance. HYBRID combines elements of the simulated annealing, MCMC and particle-swarm methods and is particularly successful in cases where the survey landscape has multiple curvature or clustering scales. HYBRID consistently outperforms the other methods, especially in high-dimensionality spaces with many extrema. This means many fewer simulations must be run to reach a given performance confidence level and implies very significant advantages in solving complex or computationally expensive optimisation problems.
Classical models with complex energy landscapes represent a perspective avenue for the near-term application of quantum simulators. Until now, many theoretical works studied the performance of quantum algorithms for models with a unique ground state. However, when the classical problem is in a so-called clustering phase, the ground state manifold is highly degenerate. As an example, we consider a 3-XORSAT model defined on simple hypergraphs. The degeneracy of classical ground state manifold translates into the emergence of an extensive number of $Z_2$ symmetries, which remain intact even in the presence of a quantum transverse magnetic field. We establish a general duality approach that restricts the quantum problem to a given sector of conserved $Z_2$ charges and use it to study how the outcome of the quantum adiabatic algorithm depends on the hypergraph geometry. We show that the tree hypergraph which corresponds to a classically solvable instance of the 3-XORSAT problem features a constant gap, whereas the closed hypergraph encounters a second-order phase transition with a gap vanishing as a power-law in the problem size. The duality developed in this work provides a practical tool for studies of quantum models with classically degenerate energy manifold and reveals potential connections between glasses and gauge theories.
In the small phylogeny problem we, are given a phylogenetic tree and gene orders of the extant species and our goal is to reconstruct all of the ancestral genomes so that the number of evolutionary operations is minimized. Algorithms for reconstructing evolutionary history from gene orders are usually based on repeatedly computing medians of genomes at neighbouring vertices of the tree. We propose a new, more general approach, based on an iterative local optimization procedure. In each step, we propose candidates for ancestral genomes and choose the best ones by dynamic programming. We have implemented our method and used it to reconstruct evolutionary history of 16 yeast mtDNAs and 13 Campanulaceae cpDNAs.
We point out that in theories where the gravitino mass, $M_{3/2}$, is in the range (10-50)TeV, with soft-breaking scalar masses and trilinear couplings of the same order, there exists a robust region of parameter space where the conditions for electroweak symmetry breaking (EWSB) are satisfied without large imposed cancellations. Compactified string/M-theory with stabilized moduli that satisfy cosmological constraints generically require a gravitino mass greater than about 30 TeV and provide the natural explanation for this phenomenon. We find that even though scalar masses and trilinear couplings (and the soft-breaking $B$ parameter) are of order (10-50)TeV, the Higgs vev takes its expected value and the $mu$ parameter is naturally of order a TeV. The mechanism provides a natural solution to the cosmological moduli and gravitino problems with EWSB.
Given the Thomas-Fermi equation sqrt(x)phi=phi*(3/2), this paper changes first the dependent variable by defining y(x)=sqrt(x phi(x)). The boundary conditions require that y(x) must vanish at the origin as sqrt(x), whereas it has a fall-off behaviour at infinity proportional to the power (1/2)(1-chi) of the independent variable x, chi being a positive number. Such boundary conditions lead to a 1-parameter family of approximate solutions in the form sqrt(x) times a ratio of finite linear combinations of integer and half-odd powers of x. If chi is set equal to 3, in order to agree exactly with the asymptotic solution of Sommerfeld, explicit forms of the approximate solution are obtained for all values of x. They agree exactly with the Majorana solution at small x, and remain very close to the numerical solution for all values of x. Remarkably, without making any use of series, our approximate solutions achieve a smooth transition from small-x to large-x behaviour. Eventually, the generalized Thomas-Fermi equation that includes relativistic, non-extensive and thermal effects is studied, finding approximate solutions at small and large x for small or finite values of the physical parameters in this equation.
We explore an optimal partition problem on surfaces using a computational approach. The problem is to minimise the sum of the first Dirichlet Laplace--Beltrami operator eigenvalues over a given number of partitions of a surface. We consider a method based on eigenfunction segregation and perform calculations using modern high performance computing techniques. We first test the accuracy of the method in the case of three partitions on the sphere then explore the problem for higher numbers of partitions and on other surfaces.