Network-Centric Systems for Military Operations in Urban Terrain: The Role of UAVs

Military systems are the motivational driver for much of the technology development conducted at applied research laboratories around the world. As the needs of the world's militaries change, so does the focus of this research and development. In this paper, we discuss how the fundamental characteristics of military operations in urban terrain (MOUT) impose requirements and constraints on sensing and reconnaissance. We highlight the importance of a new class of small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for network-centric military urban operations. We review some of the UAVs that have been developed in recent years, and that are under development, with particular attention to their endurance, portability, performance, payload, and communication capabilities. Selected university testbeds are also briefly noted. Over the last few years there has been considerable research focused on how these small UAVs, both individually and collectively, can operate autonomously in urban environments and help capture and communicate needed information. We discuss some of this research; specific topics covered include guidance and control for autonomous operation, multi-UAV coordination and route optimization, and ad-hoc networking with UAV nodes. A new concept of operations is described that relies on coordination and control of a heterogeneous suite of small UAVs for surveillance and reconnaissance operations in urban terrain     

Threshold and complexity results for the cover pebbling game

Given a configuration of pebbles on the vertices of a graph, a pebbling move is defined by removing two pebbles from some vertex and placing one pebble on an adjacent vertex. The cover pebbling number of a graph, γ(G), is the smallest number of pebbles such that through a sequence of pebbling moves, a pebble can eventually be placed on every vertex simultaneously, no matter how the pebbles are initially distributed. We determine Bose-Einstein and Maxwell-Boltzmann cover pebbling thresholds for the complete graph. Also, we show that the cover pebbling decision problem is NP-complete.     

The apparent excess in the Higgs to di-photon rate at the LHC: New Physics or QCD uncertainties?

The Higgs boson with a mass _MH≈126 GeV$M_H\approx 126\text{GeV}$ has been observed by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the LHC and a total significance of about five standard deviations has been reported by both collaborations when the channels H→γγ$H\to \gamma \gamma$ and H→ZZ→4?$H\to ZZ\to 4?$ are combined. Nevertheless, while the rates in the later search channel appear to be in accord with those predicted in the Standard Model, there seems to be an excess of data in the case of the H→γγ$H\to \gamma \gamma$ discovery channel. Before invoking new physics contributions to explain this excess in the di-photon Higgs rate, one should verify that standard QCD effects cannot account for it. We describe how the theoretical uncertainties in the Higgs boson cross section for the main production process at the LHC, gg→H$gg\to H$, which are known to be large, should be incorporated in practice. We further show that the discrepancy between the theoretical prediction and the measured value of the gg→H→γγ$gg\to H\to \gamma \gamma$ rate, reduces to about one standard deviation when the QCD uncertainties are taken into account.     

Heavy flavor production at high energyep colliders

The total production rates for heavy quark pairs due to gauge boson fusion processes at high energyep colliders are evaluated. At HERA,b \(\bar t\) production dominates overt \(\bar t\) production form _t ≧60 GeV and is observable up tom _t ?80(90)GeV where the number of expectedb \(\bar t\) events is about 15(10) for ∝L=200pb^?1. Including the contributions fromep→WX→btX the total number of expectedbt events amounts to about 50 events form _t ?80GeV. The influence of thresholds for heavy quark pair production is also studied for the relevant structure functionsF _i (x,Q ²) and shown to contribute to the measured scaling violations. All these effects are sensitive to the heavy quark massesand to the shape of the gluon distribution which can thus be tested experimentally by analyzing heavy quark pair signals.