On the convergence of interior-reflective Newton methods for nonlinear minimization subject to bounds

We consider a new algorithm, an interior-reflective Newton approach, for the problem of minimizing a smooth nonlinear function of many variables, subject to upper and/or lower bounds on some of the variables. This approach generatesstrictly feasible iterates by using a new affine scaling transformation and following piecewise linear paths (reflection paths). The interior-reflective approach does not require identification of an activity set. In this paper we establish that the interior-reflective Newton approach is globally and quadratically convergent. Moreover, we develop a specific example of interior-reflective Newton methods which can be used for large-scale and sparse problems.Research partially supported by the Applied Mathematical Sciences Research Program (KC-04-02) of the Office of Energy Research of the U.S. Department of Energy under grant DE-FG02-86ER25013.A000, and in part by NSF, AFOSR, and ONR through grant DMS-8920550, and by the Advanced Computing Research Institute, a unit of the Cornell Theory Center which receives major funding from the National Science Foundation and IBM Corporation, with additional support from New York State and members of its Corporate Research Institute.Corresponding author.     

R andRτ ratios at the five-loop level of perturbative QCD

We study perturbative QCD at the five-loop level. In particular we considerR = _tot(e ⁺ e ^– hadrons)/(e ⁺ e ^{– + –}) andR = ( v+hadrons)/( ev). We use our method to estimate the five-loop coefficients. As a result, we obtain _s (M _z ) = 0.1186(11) and _s (34 GeV) = 0.1396(16), which are accurate at the 1% level. We also findR = 3.8350(18), which is consistent withR and is accurate to 0.05%.     

Radiation patterns of electric dipole antenna in the presence of a biisotropic sphere

Analytic expressions of the dyadic Green's function of an arbitrary electric current source embedded in a general biisotropic sphere are presented at first, and the radiation characteristics of an electric dipole antenna placed on the surface of a biisotropic sphere lens are examined. The effects of the electric-and the magnetic-coefficients ( _e and _m ) of biisotropic medium on the radiation patterns of electric dipole antenna are investigated in detail.