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At least 343 records · Page 19

Diffusion Monte Carlo approaches for studying nuclear quantum effects in fluxional molecules

Abstract Diffusion quantum Monte Carlo (DMC) provides a powerful approach for obtaining the ground state energy and wave function of molecules, ions, and molecular clusters. The approach is uniquely well suited for studies of fluxional molecules, which undergo large amplitude vibrational motions even in their ground state. In contrast to the electronic structure problem, where the wave function must be antisymmetric with respect to exchange of any pair of electrons, the wave function for the ground vibrational state is nodeless. This greatly simplifies the application of DMC for vibrational problems. Because there is not a single potential function that can be used to describe the intramolecular and intermolecular interactions in all molecular systems, most methods that are used to describe nuclear quantum effects rely on a carefully chosen zero‐order description of the molecular vibrations. In contrast, DMC calculations can be performed in Cartesian coordinates, making the DMC algorithm easily transferable between different chemical systems. In this contribution, the theory that underlies DMC will be discussed along with important considerations for performing DMC calculations. Extensions for evaluating vibrationally excited states and molecular properties are also discussed. Insights that can be obtained from DMC calculations are illustrated in the context of the protonated water clusters. This article is categorized under: Molecular and Statistical Mechanics > Molecular Dynamics and Monte‐Carlo Methods Theoretical and Physical Chemistry > Spectroscopy

Chemistry↗

Using observational mean-flow data to drive large-eddy simulations of a diurnal cycle at the SWiFT site

Reproducing realistic date- and site-specific unsteady wind conditions in large-eddy simulations is becoming increasingly useful in wind energy. How to run a large-eddy simulation to match observed conditions, however, remains an open research question. One approach that has received considerable attention is mesoscale-to-microscale coupling, in which information about the mesoscale weather, most commonly acquired from a mesoscale numerical weather model, is passed on to a microscale model. In this paper, we demonstrate how the recently developed profile-assimilation technique, a form of mesoscale-to-microscale coupling, can be used to drive large-eddy simulations solely based on observed mean-flow profiles at a single location, bypassing the need for auxiliary mesoscale simulations. The new approach is evaluated for a diurnal cycle at the Scaled Wind Farm Technology site. Observed mean-flow profiles from the ground up to a height of 2 km are reconstructed by aggregating measurements from multiple instruments, and gaps in the data are infilled with natural neighbor interpolation. We perform nine simulations using various forcing approaches to deal with data limitations. The results show that it is indeed possible to drive microscale large-eddy simulation with observations using the profile-assimilation technique, notwithstanding large gaps in virtual potential temperature measurements. However, profile assimilation with vertical smoothing of the error between the desired and actual profiles is required. Without that smoothing, the microscale simulations develop unrealistically high turbulence levels under many situations. Finally, we show that simulated mesoscale data can account for missing observations, although care is needed as both data sources are not necessarily compatible.

17 WIND ENERGY↗

Scalable statistical inference of photometric redshift via data subsampling

Handling big data has largely been a major bottleneck in traditional statistical models. Consequently, when accurate point prediction is the primary target, machine learning models are often preferred over their statistical counterparts for bigger problems. But full probabilistic statistical models often outperform other models in quantifying uncertainties associated with model predictions. We develop a data-driven statistical modeling framework that combines the uncertainties from an ensemble of statistical models learned on smaller subsets of data carefully chosen to account for imbalances in the input space. We demonstrate this method on a photometric redshift estimation problem in cosmology, which seeks to infer a distribution of the redshift—the stretching effect in observing the light of far-away galaxies—given multivariate color information observed for an object in the sky. Our proposed method performs balanced partitioning, graph-based data subsampling across the partitions, and training of an ensemble of Gaussian process models.

data subsampling↗

Transferable Adversarial Attack on 3D Object Tracking in Point Cloud

3D point cloud object tracking has recently witnessed considerable progress relying on deep learning. Such progress, however, mainly focuses on improving tracking accuracy. The risk, especially considering that deep neural network is vulnerable to adversarial perturbations, of a tracker being attacked is often neglected and rarely explored. In order to attract attentions to this potential risk and facilitate the study of robustness in point cloud tracking, we introduce a novel transferable attack network (TAN) to deceive 3D point cloud tracking. Specifically, TAN consists of a 3D adversarial generator, which is trained with a carefully designed multi-fold drift (MFD) loss. The MFD loss considers three common grounds, including classification, intermediate feature and angle drifts, across different 3D point cloud tracking frameworks for perturbation generation, leading to high transferability of TAN for attack. In our extensive experiments, we demonstrate the proposed TAN is able to not only drastically degrade the victim 3D point cloud tracker, \ie, P2B, but also effectively deceive other unseen state-of-the-art approaches such as BAT and M^2Track, posing a new threat to 3D point cloud tracking.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Decontamination Strategies to Increase Fuel and Product Conversion Yields of Municipal Solid Waste

Since the implementation of China’s Green Fence and National Sword policies, many areas lost a market for heavily contaminated municipal solid waste (MSW). Approximately 17.2 million tons of paper and 26.9 million tons of plastic were landfilled in the United States in 2018. This non-recyclable waste that would normally be landfilled can be converted into fuels and chemicals, but common contaminants that are present in non-recyclable waste can negatively affect low and high-temperature conversion yields. In addition, MSW is a heterogeneous feedstock whose composition can vary widely across geographical areas and socio-economic statuses. This presents a unique challenge for providing a consistent feedstock to biorefineries around the world. Techniques that are commonly used in other industries, in addition to pre-processing methods used for traditional biomass, can be used to increase conversion yields. Drawing on established techniques, as well as experimental decontamination strategies, non-recyclable MSW could represent a viable alternative to agricultural residues for biofuel production. Although many of the techniques explored in this chapter have been used extensively in other industries, the feedstock composition needs to be carefully considered when choosing prospective decontamination methods. It is likely that there is not a “one-size-fits-all” decontamination method for MSW. In conclusion, a pre-processing and decontamination plan will rely heavily on the composition of the individual waste stream.

09 BIOMASS FUELS↗

Multiplicative noise and the diffusion of conserved densities

Stochastic fluid dynamics governs the long time tails of hydrodynamic correlation functions, and the critical slowing down of relaxation phenomena in the vicinity of a critical point in the phase diagram. In this work we study the role of multiplicative noise in stochastic fluid dynamics. Multiplicative noise arises from the dependence of transport coefficients, such as the diffusion constants for charge and momentum, on fluctuating hydrodynamic variables. We study long time tails and relaxation in the diffusion of a conserved density (model B), and a conserved density coupled to the transverse momentum density (model H). Careful attention is paid to fluctuation-dissipation relations. We observe that multiplicative noise contributes at the same order as non-linear interactions in model B, but is a higher order correction to the relaxation of a scalar density and the tail of the stress tensor correlation function in model H.

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗

AdS/BCFT from conformal bootstrap: construction of gravity with branes and particles

We initiate a conformal bootstrap program to study AdS 3 /BCFT 2 with heavy excitations. We start by solving the bootstrap equations associated with two-point functions of scalar/non-scalar primaries under the assumption that one-point functions vanish. These correspond to gravity with a brane and a non-spinning/spinning particle where the brane and the particle do not intersect with each other. From the bootstrap equations, we obtain the energy spectrum and the modified black hole threshold. We then carefully analyze the gravity duals and find the results perfectly match the BCFT analysis. In particular, brane self-intersections, which are usually considered to be problematic, are nicely avoided by the black hole formation. Despite the assumption to solve the bootstrap equations, one-point functions of scalar primaries can be non-zero in general. We construct the holographic dual for a non-vanishing one-point function, in which the heavy particle can end on the brane, by holographically computing the Rényi entropy in AdS/BCFT. As a bonus, we find a refined formula for the holographic Rényi entropy, which appears to be crucial to correctly reproduce the boundary entropy term. On the other hand, we explain why one-point functions of non-scalar primaries always vanish from the gravity dual. The non-sensitivity of the solution for the bootstrap equation to the boundary entropy helps us to construct gravity duals with negative tension branes. We also find a holographic dual of boundary primaries.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗

Neural-network analysis of Parton Distribution Functions from Ioffe-time pseudodistributions

In this work, we extract two nonsinglet nucleon Parton Distribution Functions from lattice QCD data for reduced Ioffe-time pseudodistributions. We perform such analysis within the NNPDF framework, considering data coming from different lattice ensembles and dis- cussing in detail the treatment of the different source of systematics involved in the fit. We introduce a recipe for taking care of systematics and use it to perform our extraction of light-cone PDFs.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗

Light scalars at the cosmological collider

We study the self-energies of weakly interacting scalar fields in de Sitter space with one field much lighter than the Hubble scale. We argue that self-energies drastically simplify in this light limit. We illustrate this in theories with two scalar fields, one heavy and one light, interacting with one another through either cubic or quartic interactions. To regulate infrared divergences, we compute these self-energies in Euclidean de Sitter space and then carefully analytically continue to Lorentzian signature. In particular, we do this for the most general renormalizable theory of two scalar fields with even interactions to leading order in the coupling and the mass of the light field. These self-energies are determined by de Sitter sunset diagrams, whose analytic structure and UV divergences we derive. Even at very weak couplings, the light field can substantially change how the heavy field propagates over long distances. The light field’s existence may then be inferred from how it modifies the heavy field’s oscillatory contribution to the primordial bispectrum in the squeezed limit, i.e. its cosmological collider signal.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

Multi-component Dark Matter and small scale structure formation

We consider the evolution of non-thermal dark matter perturbations in models which contain both Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) and axions. Using constraints from existing observations we examine the percentage of WIMPs and axions that may comprise the cosmological dark matter budget in models with an Early Matter Dominated Epoch (EMDE) — where entropy production is important. After carefully tracking the thermal evolution of the various species by solving the Boltzmann equations, we consider the enhancement of perturbations that may have led to early structure formation for axions and WIMPs. We investigate the impact of enhanced perturbations on the parameter space of both species, after imposing existing constraints from indirect detection experiments. Given these constraints we establish the feasibility of axions to form miniclusters in the early universe in EMDEs for a given percentage of allowed WIMPs. We find that EMDEs with low reheat temperatures near the BBN limit are preferred for axion minicluster formation. When the EMDE is caused by string moduli, the WIMP contribution to the relic density is set by the moduli branching to dark matter at the level of ≲ $\mathcal{O}$ (10 −4 ).

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

Modified instanton sum in QCD and higher-groups

We consider the SU(N) Yang-Mills theory, whose topological sectors are restricted to the instanton number with integer multiples of p. We can formulate such a quantum field theory maintaining locality and unitarity, and the model contains both 2π-periodic scalar and 3-form gauge fields. This can be interpreted as coupling a topological theory to Yang-Mills theory, so the local dynamics becomes identical with that of pure Yang-Mills theory. The theory has not only $\mathbb{Z}$ N 1-form symmetry but also $\mathbb{Z}$ p 3-form symmetry, and we study the global nature of this theory from the recent ’t Hooft anomaly matching. The computation of ’t Hooft anomaly incorporates an intriguing higher-group structure. We also carefully examine that how such kinematical constraint is realized in the dynamics by using the large-N and also the reliable semiclassics on $\mathbb{R}$ 3 × S 1 , and we find that the topological susceptibility plays a role of the order parameter for the $\mathbb{Z}$ p 3-form symmetry. Introducing a fermion in the fundamental or adjoint representation, we find that the chiral symmetry becomes larger than the usual case by $\mathbb{Z}$ p , and it leads to the extra p vacua by discrete chiral symmetry breaking. No dynamical domain wall can interpolate those extra vacua since such objects must be charged under the 3-form symmetry in order to match the ’t Hooft anomaly.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗

Covariant phase space and soft factorization in non-Abelian gauge theories

We perform a careful study of the infrared sector of massless non-abelian gauge theories in four-dimensional Minkowski spacetime using the covariant phase space formalism, taking into account the boundary contributions arising from the gauge sector of the theory. Upon quantization, we show that the boundary contributions lead to an infinite degeneracy of the vacua. The Hilbert space of the vacuum sector is not only shown to be remarkably simple, but also universal. We derive a Ward identity that relates the n-point amplitude between two generic in- and out-vacuum states to the one computed in standard QFT. In addition, we demonstrate that the familiar single soft gluon theorem and multiple consecutive soft gluon theorem are consequences of the Ward identity.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗

Light(ly)-coupled dark matter in the keV range: freeze-in and constraints

Dark matter produced from thermal freeze-out is typically restricted to have masses above roughly 1 MeV. However, if the couplings are small, the freeze-in mechanism allows for production of dark matter down to keV masses. We consider dark matter coupled to a dark photon that mixes with the photon and dark matter coupled to photons through an electric or magnetic dipole moment. We discuss contributions to the freeze-in production of such dark matter particles from standard model fermion-antifermion annihilation and plasmon decay. We also derive constraints on such dark matter from the cooling of red giant stars and horizontal branch stars, carefully evaluating the thermal processes as well as the bremsstrahlung process that dominates for masses above the plasma frequency. We find that the parameters needed to obtain the observed relic abundance from freeze-in are excluded below a few tens of keV, depending on the value of the dark gauge coupling constant for the dark photon portal model, and below a few keV, depending on the reheating temperature for dark matter with an electric or magnetic dipole moment. While laboratory probes are unlikely to probe these freeze-in scenarios in general, we show that for dark matter with an electric or magnetic dipole moment and for dark matter masses above the reheating temperature, the couplings needed for freeze-in to produce the observed relic abundance can be probed partially by upcoming direct-detection experiments.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

Spontaneously broken subsystem symmetries

We investigate the spontaneous breaking of subsystem symmetries directly in the context of continuum field theories by calculating the correlation function of charged operators. Our methods confirm the lack of spontaneous symmetry breaking in some of the existing continuum field theories with subsystem symmetries, as had previously been established based on a careful analysis of the spectrum. We present some novel continuum field theory constructions that do exhibit spontaneous symmetry breaking whenever allowed by general principles. These interesting patterns of symmetry breaking occur despite the fact that all the theories we study are non-interacting.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗

Leading order corrections to the quantum extremal surface prescription

We show that a naïve application of the quantum extremal surface (QES) prescription can lead to paradoxical results and must be corrected at leading order. The corrections arise when there is a second QES (with strictly larger generalized entropy at leading order than the minimal QES), together with a large amount of highly incompressible bulk entropy between the two surfaces. We trace the source of the corrections to a failure of the assumptions used in the replica trick derivation of the QES prescription, and show that a more careful derivation correctly computes the corrections. Using tools from one-shot quantum Shannon theory (smooth min- and max-entropies), we generalize these results to a set of refined conditions that determine whether the QES prescription holds. We find similar refinements to the conditions needed for entanglement wedge reconstruction (EWR), and show how EWR can be reinterpreted as the task of one-shot quantum state merging (using zero-bits rather than classical bits), a task gravity is able to achieve optimally efficiently.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

Rescuing a black hole in the large- q coupled SYK model

In this paper, we develop a general effective theory for two copies of the Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model with a time-dependent bilinear coupling. For a quantum quench problem with an initial state of the thermofield double state, we show how the evolution of the system is described by a complex reparametrization field with a classical Hamiltonian. We study correlation functions in this system and compare the large-q theory with the bulk low energy effective theory. In particular, we study the special case of a “rescued black hole”, which describes how a time-evolved thermofield double state can evolve to the ground state of a coupled SYK model by a carefully tuned time-dependent coupling. In the low energy region, there is a holographic dual interpretation, which is a geometry that crosses over from an eternal black hole to a global AdS2 vacuum. This family of geometries allow us to access the bulk region that would be the black hole interior without the rescue process. By comparing the large-q and low energy theory, we find that even in the low energy region the deviation from the low energy theory cannot be neglected if the rescue process starts late. This provides evidence that the low energy effective theory of the bulk fails near the inner horizon of the black hole. We note the possibility of a connection to a two-dimensional analog of the higher-dimensional black hole singularity.

2D Gravity↗

Comments on the quantum field theory of the Coulomb gas formalism

The holomorphic Coulomb gas formalism, as developed by Feigin-Fuchs, Dotsenko-Fateev and Felder, is a set of rules for computing minimal model observables using free field techniques. We attempt to derive and clarify these rules using standard techniques of quantum field theory. We begin with a careful examination of the timelike linear dilaton. Although the background charge of the model breaks the scalar field’s continuous shift symmetry, the exponential of the action remains invariant under a discrete shift because the background charge is imaginary. Gauging this symmetry makes the dilaton compact and introduces winding modes into the spectrum. One of these winding operators corresponds to the anti-holomorphic completion of the BRST current first introduced by Felder, and the full left/right cohomology of this BRST charge isolates the irreducible representations of the Virasoro algebra within the degenerate Fock space of the linear dilaton. The “supertrace” in the BRST complex reproduces the minimal model partition function and exhibits delicate cancellations between states with both momentum and winding. The model at the radius $R=\sqrt{pp^{\prime }}$ has two marginal operators corresponding to the Dotsenko-Fateev “screening charges”. Deforming by them, we obtain a model that might be called a “BRST quotiented compact timelike Liouville theory”. The Hamiltonian of the zero-mode quantum mechanics of this model is not Hermitian, but it is PT -symmetric and exactly solvable. Its eigenfunctions have support on an infinite number of plane waves, suggesting an infinite reduction in the number of independent states in the full quantum field theory. Applying conformal perturbation theory to the exponential interactions reproduces the Coulomb gas calculations of minimal model correlation functions. In contrast to spacelike Liouville, these “resonance correlators” are finite because the zero mode is compact. We comment on subtleties regarding the reflection operator identification, as well as naive violations of truncation in correlators with multiple reflection operators inserted. This work is part of an attempt to understand the relationship between the JT model of two dimen- sional gravity and the worldsheet description of the (2 , p ) minimal string as suggested by Seiberg and Stanford.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗