Use of threshold activation technique in estimating energy distributions of accelerator produced neutrons

A study of effective implementation of threshold activation technique for neutron spectral analysis in the environment of an alpha-cyclotron target is presented. The activation data are analysed using LOUHI-82 code. Optimal choices of the regularization parameters of the code are studied and discussed. Energy distribution of neutrons emitted from thick targets of Be, C and Ta irradiated by 40–45 MeV alphas is discussed.     

General considerations of numerical stability and accuracy in inviscid,compressible flow calculations employing primitive variables

The numerical stability of a number of computation schemes currently used for three-dimensional, inviscid, compressible flow is analysed using one-dimensional Fourier analysis. Whereas Reference 1 analysed schemes which were modified to render them amenable to simple analysis, the present work analyses the stability of schemes as actually used by Highton,³ Ahrabian,¹ Denton² and Spalding.⁶ The use of current values of the variables as they become available is shown to bring a general improvement to stability margin. The manner of damping introduced by the time marching formulation is shown to be deleterious to modifications which reduce truncation error. Staggered grid schemes can be formulated to second order accuracy with better stability margin than the corresponding first order scheme. While unstaggered grid schemes can be formulated to second order error and remain stable, their stability margin becomes very small. Agreement of the theory with numerical experiments continues to be of a high order for both one and three-dimensional disturbances.     

XOR-based Visual Cryptography Schemes

A recent publication introduced a Visual Crypto (VC) system, based on the polarisation of light. This VC system has goodresolution, contrast and colour properties.Mathematically, the VC system is described by the XOR operation (modulo two addition). In this paper we investigate Threshold Visual Secret Sharing schemes associated to XOR-based VC systems. Firstly, we show that n out of n schemes with optimal resolution and contrast exist, and that (2,n) schemes are equivalent to binary codes. It turns out that these schemes have much better resolution than their OR-based counterparts. Secondly, we provide two explicit constructions for general k out of n schemes. Finally, we derive bounds on the contrast and resolution of XOR-based schemes. It follows from these bounds that for k<n, the contrast is strictly smaller than one. Moreover, the bounds imply that XOR-based k out of n schemes for even k are fundamentally different from those for odd k.AMS Classification: 94A60     

Data on subglottal pressure and SPL at varied vocalloudness and pitch in 8- to 11-year-old children

Phonation threshold pressure has been defined as the minimum subglottalpressure to generate phonation. Previous research has indicated that children may habitually employ higher subglottal pressures than adults. In the present investigation sound pressure level (SPL) and subglottal pressures at different pitch levels were measured at and above phonation threshold in nine children. Phonation threshold values were scattered in reasonable agreement with Titzes' prediction, although a discrepancy was noted regarding the frequency dependence in some voices. At normal conversational loudness and loudest level of phonation the children's PS values were between two to four and four to eight times the predicted threshold values, respectively. At normal conversational loudness and habitual pitch subglottal pressures were lower than those previously observed for children, but similar to those found for female adults. The SPL in softest and loudest phonation were somewhat lower as compared to previous phonetogram data for children and for female adults. At normal loudness and habitual pitch the SPL values were similar to those of female adults. For a doubling of P_s mean SPL increased by 10.5 dB on the average.     

A critical evaluation of seven discretization schemes for convection–diffusion equations

A comparative study of seven discretization schemes for the equations describing convection-diffusion transport phenomena is presented. The (differencing) schemes considered are the conventional central- and upwind-difference schemes, together with the Leonard,¹ Leonard upwind¹ and Leonard super upwind difference¹ schemes. Also tested are the so called locally exact difference scheme² and the quadratic-upstream difference scheme.^3,4 In multidimensional problems errors arise from ‘false-diffusion’ and function approximations. It is asserted that false diffusion is essentially a multidimensional source of error. No mesh constraints are associated with errors in function approximation and discretization. Hence errors associated with discretization only may be investigated via one-dimensional problems. Thus, although the above schemes have been tested for one- and two-dimensional flows with sources, only the former are presented here. For 1D flows, the Leonard super upwind difference scheme and the locally exact scheme are shown to be far superior in accuracy to the others at all Peclet numbers and for most source distributions, for the test cases considered. Furthermore, the latter is shown to be considerably cheaper in computational terms than the former. The stability of the schemes and their CPU time requirements are also discussed.     

Leading logarithmic large-x resummation of off-diagonal splitting functions and coefficient functions

We analyze the iterative structure of unfactorized partonic structure functions in the large-x   limit, and derive all-order expressions for the leading-logarithmic off-diagonal splitting functions Pgq$P_{\mathrm{gq}}$ and Pqg$P_{\mathrm{qg}}$ and the corresponding coefficient functions C_?,q$C_{?,\mathrm{q}}$ and C_2,g$C_{2,\mathrm{g}}$ in Higgs- and gauge-boson exchange deep-inelastic scattering. The splitting functions are given in terms of a new function not encountered in perturbative QCD so far, and vanish maximally in the supersymmetric limit CA−CF→0$C_A-C_F\to 0$. The coefficient functions do not vanish in this limit, and are given by simple expressions in terms of the above new function and the well-known leading-logarithmic threshold exponential. Our results also apply to the evolution of parton fragmentation functions and semi-inclusive e⁺e⁻$e^{+}{e}^{-}$ annihilation.     

A pulsed, optically-pumped rubidium laser at high pump intensity

A rubidium laser operating at 795 nm is optically pumped by a pulsed titanium sapphire laser to investigate the dynamics of Diode Pumped Alkali Lasers (DPALs). Linear scaling of output intensity for longitudinal excitation at intensities of 1.3-43 kW/cm² and as much as 32 times threshold is observed. The slope efficiency depends directly on the number of absorbed photons for alkali concentrations of 0.8-2.0 × 10¹³ atoms/cm³ with no evidence for second order kinetics. The effective absorption cross section is reduced in part by the broad spectral width of the pump source relative to the pressure broadened lineshape. Spin orbit relaxation between the pumped and upper laser levels is sufficiently fast at 550 Torr of methane to prevent bottlenecking at all but the highest intensities. Comparison of laser characteristics with a quasi-two level analytic model suggests performance near the ideal steady-state limit, with the exception of modest mode matching.     

An adjustable approach to fuzzy soft set based decision making

Molodtsov’s soft set theory was originally proposed as a general mathematical tool for dealing with uncertainty. Recently, decision making based on (fuzzy) soft sets has found paramount importance. This paper aims to give deeper insights into decision making based on fuzzy soft sets. We discuss the validity of the Roy-Maji method and show its true limitations. We point out that the choice value designed for the crisp case is no longer fit to solve decision making problems involving fuzzy soft sets. By means of level soft sets, we present an adjustable approach to fuzzy soft set based decision making and give some illustrative examples. Moreover, the weighted fuzzy soft set is introduced and its application to decision making is also investigated.     

A Hessian Regularized Nonlinear Time Series Model

We introduce a nonparametric nonlinear time series model. The novel idea is to fit a model via penalization, where the penalty term is an unbiased estimator of the integrated Hessian of the underlying function. The underlying model assumption is very general: it has Hessian almost everywhere in its domain. Numerical experiments demonstrate that our model has better predictive power: if the underlying model complies with an existing parametric/semiparametric form (e.g., a threshold autoregressive model (TAR), an additive autoregressive model (AAR), or a functional coefficient autoregressive model (FAR)), our model performs comparably; if the underlying model does not comply with any preexisting form, our model outperforms in nearly all simulations. We name our model a Hessian regularized nonlinear model for time series (HRM). We conjecture on theoretical properties and use simulations to verify. Our method can be viewed as a way to generalize splines to high dimensions (when the number of variates is more than three), under which an analogous analytical derivation cannot work due to the curse of dimensionality. Supplemental materials are provided, and will help readers reproduce all results in the article.