new

Get trending papers in your email inbox!

Subscribe

Daily Papers

byAK and the research community

Apr 2

Learning Multiple-Scattering Solutions for Sphere-Tracing of Volumetric Subsurface Effects

Accurate subsurface scattering solutions require the integration of optical material properties along many complicated light paths. We present a method that learns a simple geometric approximation of random paths in a homogeneous volume of translucent material. The generated representation allows determining the absorption along the path as well as a direct lighting contribution, which is representative of all scattering events along the path. A sequence of conditional variational auto-encoders (CVAEs) is trained to model the statistical distribution of the photon paths inside a spherical region in presence of multiple scattering events. A first CVAE learns to sample the number of scattering events, occurring on a ray path inside the sphere, which effectively determines the probability of the ray being absorbed. Conditioned on this, a second model predicts the exit position and direction of the light particle. Finally, a third model generates a representative sample of photon position and direction along the path, which is used to approximate the contribution of direct illumination due to in-scattering. To accelerate the tracing of the light path through the volumetric medium toward the solid boundary, we employ a sphere-tracing strategy that considers the light absorption and is able to perform statistically accurate next-event estimation. We demonstrate efficient learning using shallow networks of only three layers and no more than 16 nodes. In combination with a GPU shader that evaluates the CVAEs' predictions, performance gains can be demonstrated for a variety of different scenarios. A quality evaluation analyzes the approximation error that is introduced by the data-driven scattering simulation and sheds light on the major sources of error in the accelerated path tracing process.

  • 3 authors
·
Nov 5, 2020

Sound propagation in realistic interactive 3D scenes with parameterized sources using deep neural operators

We address the challenge of sound propagation simulations in 3D virtual rooms with moving sources, which have applications in virtual/augmented reality, game audio, and spatial computing. Solutions to the wave equation can describe wave phenomena such as diffraction and interference. However, simulating them using conventional numerical discretization methods with hundreds of source and receiver positions is intractable, making stimulating a sound field with moving sources impractical. To overcome this limitation, we propose using deep operator networks to approximate linear wave-equation operators. This enables the rapid prediction of sound propagation in realistic 3D acoustic scenes with moving sources, achieving millisecond-scale computations. By learning a compact surrogate model, we avoid the offline calculation and storage of impulse responses for all relevant source/listener pairs. Our experiments, including various complex scene geometries, show good agreement with reference solutions, with root mean squared errors ranging from 0.02 Pa to 0.10 Pa. Notably, our method signifies a paradigm shift as no prior machine learning approach has achieved precise predictions of complete wave fields within realistic domains. We anticipate that our findings will drive further exploration of deep neural operator methods, advancing research in immersive user experiences within virtual environments.

  • 5 authors
·
Aug 9, 2023

Light Schrödinger Bridge

Despite the recent advances in the field of computational Schr\"odinger Bridges (SB), most existing SB solvers are still heavy-weighted and require complex optimization of several neural networks. It turns out that there is no principal solver which plays the role of simple-yet-effective baseline for SB just like, e.g., k-means method in clustering, logistic regression in classification or Sinkhorn algorithm in discrete optimal transport. We address this issue and propose a novel fast and simple SB solver. Our development is a smart combination of two ideas which recently appeared in the field: (a) parameterization of the Schr\"odinger potentials with sum-exp quadratic functions and (b) viewing the log-Schr\"odinger potentials as the energy functions. We show that combined together these ideas yield a lightweight, simulation-free and theoretically justified SB solver with a simple straightforward optimization objective. As a result, it allows solving SB in moderate dimensions in a matter of minutes on CPU without a painful hyperparameter selection. Our light solver resembles the Gaussian mixture model which is widely used for density estimation. Inspired by this similarity, we also prove an important theoretical result showing that our light solver is a universal approximator of SBs. Furthemore, we conduct the analysis of the generalization error of our light solver. The code for our solver can be found at https://github.com/ngushchin/LightSB

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 2, 2023

Utilizing localized fast radio bursts to constrain their progenitors and the expansion history of the Universe

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are increasingly being used for cosmological applications such as measuring the Hubble constant and baryon abundance. The increasing number of localized FRBs and precise measurement of dispersion measure (DM) make them a suitable probe for such an approach. We use a sample of 110 localized FRBs as well as a small sub-sample of 24 FRBs with scattering timescale measurements or limits. We infer the Hubble constant (H_0) and the DM distribution of the host galaxies simultaneously by fitting our model to the FRB DM measurements. With current data, our results are in agreement with both high and low redshift measurements of H_0, obtained using Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) and Type Ia supernovae data respectively. We project that with about 200 localized FRBs, we would be in a position to distinguish between the two scenarios at 4sigma confidence. In addition, the host DM is expected to be related to star formation in the host galaxy and the stellar age of the progenitors. We show that young progenitors with an age of less than 1 Myr are consistent with our inferred distribution of host DM at 95 percent confidence. These young sources may be associated with long scatter broadening times and large DM from their source environments. Indeed, we find that scatter broadening times of FRBs are inconsistent with the Milky Way ISM, but at the same time, do not appear to be strongly correlated with the FRBs' redshift or with the SFR or stellar mass of their host galaxies. This suggests that scattering is dominated by the immediate environment of the sources.

  • 2 authors
·
Mar 11, 2025

Multidimensional half-moment multigroup radiative transfer. Improving moment-based thermal models of circumstellar disks

Common moment-based radiative transfer methods, such as flux-limited diffusion (FLD) and the M1 closure, suffer from artificial interactions between crossing beams. In protoplanetary disks, this leads to an overestimation of the midplane temperature due to the merging of inward and outward vertical fluxes. Methods that avoid these artifacts typically require angular discretization, which can be computationally expensive. In the spirit of the two-stream approximation, we introduced a half-moment (HM) closure that integrates the radiative intensity over hemispheres, thereby suppressing beam interactions along a fixed spatial direction. We derived a multidimensional HM closure via entropy maximization and replaced this closure with an approximate expression that closely matches it, coinciding with it in the diffusion and free-streaming regimes while remaining expressible through simple operations. We implemented HM and M1 closures via implicit-explicit schemes, including multiple frequency groups. We tested these methods in numerical benchmarks such as computing the temperature in an irradiated disk around a T Tauri star, comparing our results with Monte Carlo (MC) radiative transfer simulations. The HM closure correctly reproduces the diffusion limit and prevents crossing flux interactions in a chosen spatial direction. In disk simulations, our multigroup HM method closely matches midplane temperature distributions obtained with classical MC methods. While the M1 closure produces midplane temperatures 44% higher than MC with one frequency group and 21% higher with 22 groups, HM reduces this discrepancy to 6% with 22 groups. Even with just three groups, HM significantly outperforms M1, with maximum departures of 8% compared to M1's 23%. Our results show that combining HM with a multigroup treatment yields more realistic disk temperatures than M1, particularly in optically thick regions.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 18, 2025

Wave optics lensing of gravitational waves: theory and phenomenology of triple systems in the LISA band

We study lensing of gravitational waves by a black hole in the deep wave optics regime, i.e. when the wavelength is much larger than the black hole Schwarzschild radius. We apply it to triple systems, with a binary of stellar mass objects in the inspiraling phase orbiting around a central massive black hole. We describe the full polarisation structure of the wave and derive predictions for the polarisation modes of the scattered wave measured by the observer. We show that lensing in the wave optics regime is not helicity preserving, as opposed to lensing in the geometric optics regime. The amplitude of the total wave is modulated due to interference between the directly transmitted and lensed components. The relative amplitude of the modulation is fixed by the lensing geometry and can reach unity in the most favourable settings. This indicates that wave optics lensing is potentially detectable by LISA for sufficiently high SNR systems. Our findings show that in the wave optics regime it is necessary to go beyond the usual lensing description where the amplification factor is assumed to be the same for both helicity modes. While motivated by GW190521 and the AGN formation scenario, our results apply more broadly to stellar-mass binaries orbiting a third body described as a Schwarzschild black hole, with a period comparable to the GW observation time.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 10, 2024

Analytical simulations of the resonant transmission of electrons in a closed nanocircuit for terahertz applications where a tunneling junction is shunted by a metallic nanowire

Earlier, in the CINT program at Los Alamos National Laboratory, we focused ultrafast mode-locked lasers on the tip-sample junction of a scanning tunneling microscope to generate currents at hundreds of harmonics of the laser pulse repetition frequency. Each harmonic has a signal-to-noise ratio of 20 dB with a 10-dB linewidth of only 3 Hz. Now we model closed quantum nanocircuits with rectangular, triangular, or delta-function barrier, shunted by a beryllium filament for quasi-coherent electron transport over mean-free paths as great as 68 nm. The time-independent Schrödinger equation is solved with the boundary conditions that the wavefunction and its derivative are continuous at both connections. These four boundary conditions are used to form a four-by-four complex matrix equation with only zeros in the right-hand column vector which is required to have a non-trivial solution with each of the closed nanocircuits. Each model has four parameters: (1) the barrier length, (2) the height and shape of the barrier, (3) the length of the pre-barrier, and (4) the electron energy. Any three of these may be specified and then the fourth is varied to bring the determinant to zero to find the solutions on lines or surfaces in the space defined by the four parameters. First, we use a simplistic model having a rectangular barrier. The second model has a triangular barrier as a first approximation to field emission, and we are considering applying this approach for a self-contained nanoscale extension of our earlier effort to generate the harmonics at Los Alamos. The third model has a delta-function barrier, and the fourth model is an extension of the first one where the width of the rectangular barrier is varied inversely with its height.

  • 1 authors
·
Oct 24, 2023

MuS-Polar3D: A Benchmark Dataset for Computational Polarimetric 3D Imaging under Multi-Scattering Conditions

Polarization-based underwater 3D imaging exploits polarization cues to suppress background scattering, exhibiting distinct advantages in turbid water. Although data-driven polarization-based underwater 3D reconstruction methods show great potential, existing public datasets lack sufficient diversity in scattering and observation conditions, hindering fair comparisons among different approaches, including single-view and multi-view polarization imaging methods. To address this limitation, we construct MuS-Polar3D, a benchmark dataset comprising polarization images of 42 objects captured under seven quantitatively controlled scattering conditions and five viewpoints, together with high-precision 3D models (+/- 0.05 mm accuracy), normal maps, and foreground masks. The dataset supports multiple vision tasks, including normal estimation, object segmentation, descattering, and 3D reconstruction. Inspired by computational imaging, we further decouple underwater 3D reconstruction under scattering into a two-stage pipeline, namely descattering followed by 3D reconstruction, from an imaging-chain perspective. Extensive evaluations using multiple baseline methods under complex scattering conditions demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed benchmark, achieving a best mean angular error of 15.49 degrees. To the best of our knowledge, MuS-Polar3D is the first publicly available benchmark dataset for quantitative turbidity underwater polarization-based 3D imaging, enabling accurate reconstruction and fair algorithm evaluation under controllable scattering conditions. The dataset and code are publicly available at https://github.com/WangPuyun/MuS-Polar3D.

  • 4 authors
·
Dec 25, 2025

Non-convex optimization for self-calibration of direction-dependent effects in radio interferometric imaging

Radio interferometric imaging aims to estimate an unknown sky intensity image from degraded observations, acquired through an antenna array. In the theoretical case of a perfectly calibrated array, it has been shown that solving the corresponding imaging problem by iterative algorithms based on convex optimization and compressive sensing theory can be competitive with classical algorithms such as CLEAN. However, in practice, antenna-based gains are unknown and have to be calibrated. Future radio telescopes, such as the SKA, aim at improving imaging resolution and sensitivity by orders of magnitude. At this precision level, the direction-dependency of the gains must be accounted for, and radio interferometric imaging can be understood as a blind deconvolution problem. In this context, the underlying minimization problem is non-convex, and adapted techniques have to be designed. In this work, leveraging recent developments in non-convex optimization, we propose the first joint calibration and imaging method in radio interferometry, with proven convergence guarantees. Our approach, based on a block-coordinate forward-backward algorithm, jointly accounts for visibilities and suitable priors on both the image and the direction-dependent effects (DDEs). As demonstrated in recent works, sparsity remains the prior of choice for the image, while DDEs are modelled as smooth functions of the sky, i.e. spatially band-limited. Finally, we show through simulations the efficiency of our method, for the reconstruction of both images of point sources and complex extended sources. MATLAB code is available on GitHub.

  • 4 authors
·
Jan 13, 2017

Precision measurement of the last bound states in H_2 and determination of the H + H scattering length

The binding energies of the five bound rotational levels J=0-4 in the highest vibrational level v=14 in the X^1Sigma_g^+ ground electronic state of H_2 were measured in a three-step ultraviolet-laser experiment. Two-photon UV-photolysis of H_2S produced population in these high-lying bound states, that were subsequently interrogated at high precision via Doppler-free spectroscopy of the F^1Sigma_g^+ - X^1Sigma_g^+ system. A third UV-laser was used for detection through auto-ionizing resonances. The experimentally determined binding energies were found to be in excellent agreement with calculations based on non-adiabatic perturbation theory, also including relativistic and quantum electrodynamical contributions. The s-wave scattering length of the H + H system is derived from the binding energy of the last bound J=0 level via a direct semi-empirical approach, yielding a value of a_s = 0.2724(5) a_0, in good agreement with a result from a previously followed theoretical approach. The subtle effect of the malpha^4 relativity contribution to a_s was found to be significant. In a similar manner a value for the p-wave scattering volume is determined via the J=1 binding energy yielding a_p = -134.0000(6) a_0^3. The binding energy of the last bound state in H_2, the (v=14, J=4) level, is determined at 0.023(4) cm^{-1}, in good agreement with calculation. The effect of the hyperfine substructure caused by the two hydrogen atoms at large internuclear separation, giving rise to three distinct dissociation limits, is discussed.

  • 3 authors
·
Feb 3, 2025

High-order finite element method for atomic structure calculations

We introduce featom, an open source code that implements a high-order finite element solver for the radial Schr\"odinger, Dirac, and Kohn-Sham equations. The formulation accommodates various mesh types, such as uniform or exponential, and the convergence can be systematically controlled by increasing the number and/or polynomial order of the finite element basis functions. The Dirac equation is solved using a squared Hamiltonian approach to eliminate spurious states. To address the slow convergence of the kappa=pm1 states due to divergent derivatives at the origin, we incorporate known asymptotic forms into the solutions. We achieve a high level of accuracy (10^{-8} Hartree) for total energies and eigenvalues of heavy atoms such as uranium in both Schr\"odinger and Dirac Kohn-Sham solutions. We provide detailed convergence studies and computational parameters required to attain commonly required accuracies. Finally, we compare our results with known analytic results as well as the results of other methods. In particular, we calculate benchmark results for atomic numbers (Z) from 1 to 92, verifying current benchmarks. We demonstrate significant speedup compared to the state-of-the-art shooting solver dftatom. An efficient, modular Fortran 2008 implementation, is provided under an open source, permissive license, including examples and tests, wherein particular emphasis is placed on the independence (no global variables), reusability, and generality of the individual routines.

  • 8 authors
·
Jul 11, 2023

Efficient Physics-Based Learned Reconstruction Methods for Real-Time 3D Near-Field MIMO Radar Imaging

Near-field multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar imaging systems have recently gained significant attention. In this paper, we develop novel non-iterative deep learning-based reconstruction methods for real-time near-field MIMO imaging. The goal is to achieve high image quality with low computational cost at compressive settings. The developed approaches have two stages. In the first approach, physics-based initial stage performs adjoint operation to back-project the measurements to the image-space, and deep neural network (DNN)-based second stage converts the 3D backprojected measurements to a magnitude-only reflectivity image. Since scene reflectivities often have random phase, DNN processes directly the magnitude of the adjoint result. As DNN, 3D U-Net is used to jointly exploit range and cross-range correlations. To comparatively evaluate the significance of exploiting physics in a learning-based approach, two additional approaches that replace the physics-based first stage with fully connected layers are also developed as purely learning-based methods. The performance is also analyzed by changing the DNN architecture for the second stage to include complex-valued processing (instead of magnitude-only processing), 2D convolution kernels (instead of 3D), and ResNet architecture (instead of U-Net). Moreover, we develop a synthesizer to generate large-scale dataset for training with 3D extended targets. We illustrate the performance through experimental data and extensive simulations. The results show the effectiveness of the developed physics-based learned reconstruction approach in terms of both run-time and image quality at highly compressive settings. Our source codes and dataset are made available at GitHub.

  • 3 authors
·
Dec 28, 2023

Multiphysics Bench: Benchmarking and Investigating Scientific Machine Learning for Multiphysics PDEs

Solving partial differential equations (PDEs) with machine learning has recently attracted great attention, as PDEs are fundamental tools for modeling real-world systems that range from fundamental physical science to advanced engineering disciplines. Most real-world physical systems across various disciplines are actually involved in multiple coupled physical fields rather than a single field. However, previous machine learning studies mainly focused on solving single-field problems, but overlooked the importance and characteristics of multiphysics problems in real world. Multiphysics PDEs typically entail multiple strongly coupled variables, thereby introducing additional complexity and challenges, such as inter-field coupling. Both benchmarking and solving multiphysics problems with machine learning remain largely unexamined. To identify and address the emerging challenges in multiphysics problems, we mainly made three contributions in this work. First, we collect the first general multiphysics dataset, the Multiphysics Bench, that focuses on multiphysics PDE solving with machine learning. Multiphysics Bench is also the most comprehensive PDE dataset to date, featuring the broadest range of coupling types, the greatest diversity of PDE formulations, and the largest dataset scale. Second, we conduct the first systematic investigation on multiple representative learning-based PDE solvers, such as PINNs, FNO, DeepONet, and DiffusionPDE solvers, on multiphysics problems. Unfortunately, naively applying these existing solvers usually show very poor performance for solving multiphysics. Third, through extensive experiments and discussions, we report multiple insights and a bag of useful tricks for solving multiphysics with machine learning, motivating future directions in the study and simulation of complex, coupled physical systems.

  • 5 authors
·
May 23, 2025

The circular law for random band matrices: improved bandwidth for general models

We consider the convergence of the ESD for non-Hermitian random band matrices with independent entries to the circular law, which is the uniform measure on the unit disk in the center of the complex plane. We assume that the bandwidth of the matrix scales like n^γ for some γin(0,1], where n is the matrix size, and the variance profile of the matrix is only assumed to be doubly stochastic with no additional assumption on its specific mixing properties. We prove that the circular law limit holds either (1) when γ>5{6} and the entries are independent Gaussians, (2) or when γ>8{9} and the entries are independent subgaussian random variables. This new threshold improves the previous threshold γ>32{33} which was only proven for block band matrices and periodic band matrices. After the initial version of this paper, the author further extended the range of circular law for much smaller values of γ in 2508.18143 and 2511.01744 when the variance profile has specific mixing properties, but not for an arbitrary doubly stochastic variance profile. Thus the main contribution of this paper is the circular law for a genuine power law bandwidth for any doubly stochastic variance profile. We also prove an extended form of product circular law with a growing number of matrices. Weak delocalization estimates on eigenvectors are also derived. The new technical input is new polynomial lower bounds on some intermediate small singular values, and this estimate does not depend on the specific structure of the variance profile beyond the fact that it is doubly stochastic.

  • 1 authors
·
Oct 21, 2024

An efficient Asymptotic-Preserving scheme for the Boltzmann mixture with disparate mass

In this paper, we develop and implement an efficient asymptotic-preserving (AP) scheme to solve the gas mixture of Boltzmann equations under the disparate mass scaling relevant to the so-called "epochal relaxation" phenomenon. The disparity in molecular masses, ranging across several orders of magnitude, leads to significant challenges in both the evaluation of collision operators and the designing of time-stepping schemes to capture the multi-scale nature of the dynamics. A direct implementation of the spectral method faces prohibitive computational costs as the mass ratio increases due to the need to resolve vastly different thermal velocities. Unlike [I. M. Gamba, S. Jin, and L. Liu, Commun. Math. Sci., 17 (2019), pp. 1257-1289], we propose an alternative approach based on proper truncation of asymptotic expansions of the collision operators, which significantly reduces the computational complexity and works well for small varepsilon. By incorporating the separation of three time scales in the model's relaxation process [P. Degond and B. Lucquin-Desreux, Math. Models Methods Appl. Sci., 6 (1996), pp. 405-436], we design an AP scheme that captures the specific dynamics of the disparate mass model while maintaining computational efficiency. Numerical experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme in handling large mass ratios of heavy and light species, as well as capturing the epochal relaxation phenomenon.

  • 3 authors
·
Nov 20, 2024

Harnessing Selective State Space Models to Enhance Semianalytical Design of Fabrication-Ready Multilayered Huygens' Metasurfaces: Part I - Field-based Semianalytical Synthesis

Planar metasurfaces can profoundly control electromagnetic scattering. At microwave frequencies, such devices are typically implemented using multilayer cascades of patterned metallic sheets, whose design often requires time-consuming full-wave optimization. Here, we extend analytical models originally developed for sparse loaded-wire metagratings to accurately describe densely packed Jerusalem-cross meta-atoms embedded in standard printed circuit board (PCB) dielectric stacks. The model captures both near- and far-field coupling within and between layers, enabling efficient prediction of the dual-polarized response. Using this framework, we identify highly transmissive meta-atoms whose phase is controlled by the leg lengths of the Jerusalem crosses (microscopic design stage). This (phase)-(leg-length) "lookup table" allows rapid synthesis of Huygens' metasurfaces (macroscopic design stage), demonstrated through a full-wave-validated metalens exhibiting low-reflection beam manipulation. Notably, we implement a judicious scaling method to further extend the model to predict wideband meta-atom responses. In the companion paper (Part II), a hybrid machine-learning approach leverages this semianalytical framework to enhance accuracy without requiring the conventional exhaustive full-wave training, enabling ultrafast inverse design across the full parameter space. Overall, the presented methodology -- the standalone semianlytical scheme (Part I) and the machine-learning enhanced version (Part II) -- establishes an effective open-source toolkit for versatile, rapid, and highly accurate synthesis of fabrication-ready dual-polarized transmissive Huygens' meta-atoms and metasurfaces.

  • 7 authors
·
Mar 4

Pre-perihelion Development of Interstellar Comet 3I/ATLAS

We describe pre-perihelion optical observations of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS taken during July - September 2025 using the Nordic Optical Telescope. Fixed aperture photometry of the comet is well described by a power law function of heliocentric distance, rH, with the exponent (``index") n = 3.8+/-0.3 across the 4.6 au to 1.8 au distance range (phase function 0.04+/-0.02 magnitude/degree assumed). This indicates that the dust production rates vary in proportion to rH**(-1.8+/-0.3). An rH**(-2) variation is expected of a strongly volatile material, and consistent with independent spectroscopic observations showing that carbon dioxide is the primary driver of activity. The measured heliocentric index is unremarkable in the context of solar system comets, for which n is widely dispersed, and provides no basis on which to describe 3I as either dynamically old (thermally processed) or new (pristine). The morphology of the comet changes from a Sun-facing dust fan in the early 2025 July observations, to one dominated by an antisolar dust tail at later dates. We attribute the delayed emergence of the tail to the large size (effective radius 0.1 mm) and slow ejection (5 m/s) of the optically dominant dust particles, and their consequently sluggish response to solar radiation pressure. Small (micron-sized) particles may be present but not in numbers sufficient to dominate the scattering cross-section. Their relative depletion possibly reflects interparticle cohesion, which binds small particles more effectively than large ones. A similar preponderance of 0.1 mm grains was reported in 2I/Borisov. However, 2I differed from 3I in having a much smaller (asteroid-like) heliocentric index, n = 1.9+/-0.1. Dust production rates in 3I are 180 kg/s at 2 au, compared with 70 kg/s in 2I/Borisov at the same distance.

  • 2 authors
·
Oct 21, 2025

Combining Electron-Phonon and Dynamical Mean-Field Theory Calculations of Correlated Materials: Transport in the Correlated Metal Sr_2RuO_4

Electron-electron (e-e) and electron-phonon (e-ph) interactions are challenging to describe in correlated materials, where their joint effects govern unconventional transport, phase transitions, and superconductivity. Here we combine first-principles e-ph calculations with dynamical mean field theory (DMFT) as a step toward a unified description of e-e and e-ph interactions in correlated materials. We compute the e-ph self-energy using the DMFT electron Green's function, and combine it with the e-e self-energy from DMFT to obtain a Green's function including both interactions. This approach captures the renormalization of quasiparticle dispersion and spectral weight on equal footing. Using our method, we study the e-ph and e-e contributions to the resistivity and spectral functions in the correlated metal Sr_2RuO_4. In this material, our results show that e-e interactions dominate transport and spectral broadening in the temperature range we study (50-310~K), while e-ph interactions are relatively weak and account for only sim10\% of the experimental resistivity. We also compute effective scattering rates, and find that the e-e interactions result in scattering several times greater than the Planckian value k_BT, whereas e-ph interactions are associated with scattering rates lower than k_BT. Our work demonstrates a first-principles approach to combine electron dynamical correlations from DMFT with e-ph interactions in a consistent way, advancing quantitative studies of correlated materials.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 13, 2023

Dynamical Model of J/Ψ photo-production on the nucleon

A dynamical model based on a phenomenological charm quark-nucleon(c-N) potential v_{cN} and the Pomeron-exchange mechanism is constructed to investigate the J/Psi photo-production on the nucleon from threshold to invariant mass W=300 GeV. The J/Psi-N potential,V_{J/Psi N}(r),is constructed by folding v_{cN} into the wavefunction Phi_{J/Psi}(cc) of J/Psi within a Constituent Quark Model(CQM) of Ref.[43]. A photo-production amplitude is also generated by v_{cN} by a cc-loop integration over the gammarightarrow cc vertex function and Phi_{J/Psi}(cc). No commonly used Vector Meson Dominance assumption is used to define this photo-production amplitude which is needed to describe the data near the threshold. The potential v_{cN}(r) is parameterized in a form such that the predicted V_{J/Psi N}(r) at large distances has the same Yukawa potential form extracted from a Lattice QCD(LQCD) calculation of Ref.[18]. The parameters of v_{cN} are determined by fitting the total cross section data of JLab by performing calculations that include J/Psi-N final state interactions(FSI). The resulting differential cross sections are found in good agreements with the data. It is shown that the FSI effects dominate the cross section in the very near threshold region, allowing for sensitive testing of the predicted J/Psi-N scattering amplitudes. By imposing the constraints of J/Psi-N potential extracted from the LQCD calculation, we have obtained three J/Psi-N potentials which fit the JLab data equally well. The resulting J/Psi-N scattering lengths are in the range of a=(-0.05 fm sim -0.25 fm). With the determined v_{cN}(r) and the wavefunctions generated from the same CQM, the constructed model is used to predict the cross sections of photo-production of eta_c(1S) and Psi(2S) mesons for future experimental tests.

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 4, 2024

Cybloids - Creation and Control of Cybernetic Colloids

Colloids play an important role in fundamental science as well as in nature and technology. They have had a strong impact on the fundamental understanding of statistical physics. For example, colloids have helped to obtain a better understanding of collective phenomena, ranging from phase transitions and glass formation to the swarming of active Brownian particles. Yet the success of colloidal systems hinges crucially on the specific physical and chemical properties of the colloidal particles, i.e. particles with the appropriate characteristics must be available. Here we present an idea to create particles with freely selectable properties. The properties might depend, for example, on the presence of other particles (hence mimicking specific pair or many-body interactions), previous configurations (hence introducing some memory or feedback), or a directional bias (hence changing the dynamics). Without directly interfering with the sample, each particle is fully controlled and can receive external commands through a predefined algorithm that can take into account any input parameters. This is realized with computer-controlled colloids, which we term cybloids - short for cybernetic colloids. The potential of cybloids is illustrated by programming a time-delayed external potential acting on a single colloid and interaction potentials for many colloids. Both an attractive harmonic potential and an annular potential are implemented. For a single particle, this programming can cause subdiffusive behavior or lend activity. For many colloids, the programmed interaction potential allows to select a crystal structure at wish. Beyond these examples, we discuss further opportunities which cybloids offer.

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 1, 2024

Plug-and-Play Regularization on Magnitude with Deep Priors for 3D Near-Field MIMO Imaging

Near-field radar imaging systems are recently used in a wide range of applications, such as medical diagnosis, through-wall imaging, concealed weapon detection, and nondestructive evaluation. In this paper, we consider the problem of reconstructing the three-dimensional (3D) complex-valued reflectivity distribution of the near-field scene from sparse multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) array measurements. Using the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) framework, we solve this inverse problem by enforcing regularization on the magnitude of the complex-valued reflectivity distribution. For this, we provide a general expression for the proximal mapping associated with such regularization functionals. This equivalently corresponds to the solution of a complex-valued denoising problem which involves regularization on the magnitude. By utilizing this expression, we develop a novel and efficient plug-and-play (PnP) reconstruction method that consists of simple update steps. Due to the success of data-adaptive deep priors in various imaging problems, we also train a 3D deep denoiser to exploit within the developed PnP framework for MIMO imaging. The effectiveness of the developed learning-based PnP approach is illustrated under various compressive and noisy observation scenarios using both simulated data and experimental measurements. The performance is also compared with sparsity priors and the commonly used analytical approaches such as back-projection and Kirchhoff migration. The results demonstrate that the developed technique not only provides state-of-the-art reconstruction performance for 3D real-world targets, but also enables fast computation. Our approach provides a unified general framework to effectively handle arbitrary regularization on the magnitude of a complex-valued unknown and is equally applicable to other radar image formation problems (including SAR).

  • 2 authors
·
Dec 26, 2023

Polarization aberrations in next-generation Giant Segmented Mirror Telescopes (GSMTs). II. Influence of segment-to-segment coating variations on high-contrast imaging and polarimetry

Direct exo-Earth imaging is a key science goal for astronomy in the next decade. This ambitious task imposes a target contrast of ~10^-7 at wavelengths from I to J-band. In our prior study, we determined that polarization aberrations can limit the achievable contrast to 10^-5 to 10^-6 in the infrared. However, these results assumed a perfect coronagraph coupled to a telescope with an ideal coating on each of the mirrors. In this study we seek to understand the influence of polarization aberrations from segment-to-segment coating variations on coronagraphy and polarimetry. We use the Poke open-source polarization ray tracing package to compute the Jones pupil of each GSMT with spatially-varying coatings applied to the segments. The influence of the resultant polarization aberrations is simulated by propagating the Jones pupil through physical optics models of coronagraphs using HCIPy. After applying wavefront control from an ideal adaptive optics system, we determine that the segment-to-segment variations applied limit the performance of coronagraphy to a raw contrast of approximately 10^-8 in I-band, which is 2-3 orders of magnitude lower the target performance for high-contrast imaging systems on the ground. This is a negligible addition to the nominal polarization aberrations for ground-based systems. We further observe negligible degradation in polarimetric imaging of debris disks from segment-to-segment aberrations above and beyond the impact of nominal polarization aberration.

  • 11 authors
·
Jan 7, 2025

DIRECT-3D: Learning Direct Text-to-3D Generation on Massive Noisy 3D Data

We present DIRECT-3D, a diffusion-based 3D generative model for creating high-quality 3D assets (represented by Neural Radiance Fields) from text prompts. Unlike recent 3D generative models that rely on clean and well-aligned 3D data, limiting them to single or few-class generation, our model is directly trained on extensive noisy and unaligned `in-the-wild' 3D assets, mitigating the key challenge (i.e., data scarcity) in large-scale 3D generation. In particular, DIRECT-3D is a tri-plane diffusion model that integrates two innovations: 1) A novel learning framework where noisy data are filtered and aligned automatically during the training process. Specifically, after an initial warm-up phase using a small set of clean data, an iterative optimization is introduced in the diffusion process to explicitly estimate the 3D pose of objects and select beneficial data based on conditional density. 2) An efficient 3D representation that is achieved by disentangling object geometry and color features with two separate conditional diffusion models that are optimized hierarchically. Given a prompt input, our model generates high-quality, high-resolution, realistic, and complex 3D objects with accurate geometric details in seconds. We achieve state-of-the-art performance in both single-class generation and text-to-3D generation. We also demonstrate that DIRECT-3D can serve as a useful 3D geometric prior of objects, for example to alleviate the well-known Janus problem in 2D-lifting methods such as DreamFusion. The code and models are available for research purposes at: https://github.com/qihao067/direct3d.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 6, 2024

On the Higgs spectra of the 3-3-1 model with the sextet of scalars engendering the type II seesaw mechanism

In the 3-3-1 model with right-handed neutrinos, three triplets of scalars engender the correct sequence of symmetry breaking, SU(3)_C times SU(3)_L times U(1)_X rightarrow SU(3)_C times SU(2)_L times U(1)_Y rightarrow SU(3)_C times U(1)_{EM}, generating mass for all fermions, except neutrinos. Tiny neutrino masses may be achieved by adding one sextet of scalars to the original scalar content. As consequence, it emerges a very complex scalar sector, involving terms that violate lepton number explicitly, too. The main obstacle to the development of the phenomenology of such scenario is the knowledge of its spectrum of scalars since, now, there are 15 massive scalar particles on it. The proposal of this work is to do an exhaustive analysis of such scalar sector with lepton number being explicitly violated at low, electroweak and high energy scales by means of trilinear terms in the potential. The first case can be addressed analytically and, as a nice result, we have observed that the scalar content of such case is split into two categories: One belonging to the 331 energy scale and the other belonging to the EWSB energy scale, with the last recovering the well known THDM+triplet. For the other cases, the scalar sector can be addressed only numerically. Hence, we proposed a very general approach for the numerical study of the potential, avoiding simplifications that can make us reach conclusions without foundation. We show that, in the case of lepton number being explicitly violated at electroweak scale, it is possible to recover the same physics of the THDM+triplet, as the previous case. Among all the possibilities, we call the attention to one special case which generates the 3HDM+triplet scenario. For the last case, when lepton number is violated at high energy scale, the sextet become very massive and decouples from the original scalar content of the 3-3-1 model.

  • 2 authors
·
Dec 20, 2022

HoloBeam: Learning Optimal Beamforming in Far-Field Holographic Metasurface Transceivers

Holographic Metasurface Transceivers (HMTs) are emerging as cost-effective substitutes to large antenna arrays for beamforming in Millimeter and TeraHertz wave communication. However, to achieve desired channel gains through beamforming in HMT, phase-shifts of a large number of elements need to be appropriately set, which is challenging. Also, these optimal phase-shifts depend on the location of the receivers, which could be unknown. In this work, we develop a learning algorithm using a {\it fixed-budget multi-armed bandit framework} to beamform and maximize received signal strength at the receiver for far-field regions. Our algorithm, named \Algo exploits the parametric form of channel gains of the beams, which can be expressed in terms of two {\it phase-shifting parameters}. Even after parameterization, the problem is still challenging as phase-shifting parameters take continuous values. To overcome this, {\it\HB} works with the discrete values of phase-shifting parameters and exploits their unimodal relations with channel gains to learn the optimal values faster. We upper bound the probability of {\it\HB} incorrectly identifying the (discrete) optimal phase-shift parameters in terms of the number of pilots used in learning. We show that this probability decays exponentially with the number of pilot signals. We demonstrate that {\it\HB} outperforms state-of-the-art algorithms through extensive simulations.

  • 3 authors
·
Dec 29, 2023

Exact Diffusion Inversion via Bi-directional Integration Approximation

Recently, various methods have been proposed to address the inconsistency issue of DDIM inversion to enable image editing, such as EDICT [36] and Null-text inversion [22]. However, the above methods introduce considerable computational overhead. In this paper, we propose a new technique, named bi-directional integration approximation (BDIA), to perform exact diffusion inversion with neglible computational overhead. Suppose we would like to estimate the next diffusion state z_{i-1} at timestep t_i with the historical information (i,z_i) and (i+1,z_{i+1}). We first obtain the estimated Gaussian noise boldsymbol{epsilon}(z_i,i), and then apply the DDIM update procedure twice for approximating the ODE integration over the next time-slot [t_i, t_{i-1}] in the forward manner and the previous time-slot [t_i, t_{t+1}] in the backward manner. The DDIM step for the previous time-slot is used to refine the integration approximation made earlier when computing z_i. A nice property of BDIA-DDIM is that the update expression for z_{i-1} is a linear combination of (z_{i+1}, z_i, boldsymbol{epsilon}(z_i,i)). This allows for exact backward computation of z_{i+1} given (z_i, z_{i-1}), thus leading to exact diffusion inversion. It is demonstrated with experiments that (round-trip) BDIA-DDIM is particularly effective for image editing. Our experiments further show that BDIA-DDIM produces markedly better image sampling qualities than DDIM for text-to-image generation. BDIA can also be applied to improve the performance of other ODE solvers in addition to DDIM. In our work, it is found that applying BDIA to the EDM sampling procedure produces consistently better performance over four pre-trained models.

  • 3 authors
·
Jul 10, 2023

Effects of Dark Matter Self Interactions on Sagittarius and Its Stream

This work explores how assumptions regarding the particle-physics nature of dark matter can alter the evolution of the Sagittarius (Sgr) dwarf spheroidal galaxy and its expansive stellar stream. We run a large suite of N-body simulations to model the infall of a Sgr-like dwarf, exploring how the presence of dark matter self interactions impacts its evolution. For a scattering cross section of sigma/m_chi = 30 cm^2/g (at orbital velocity scales), these interactions result in significantly less stellar mass and little to no dark matter bound to the progenitor at the present day. To isolate the cause of this mass loss, we introduce a novel technique for controlling which pairs of dark matter simulation particles can interact. This enables us to identify ram-pressure evaporation - the scattering of satellite and host dark matter particles - as the primary source of the enhanced mass loss. The rapid disintegration of the Sgr progenitor when self interactions are allowed alters some key properties of the resulting stellar stream, most dramatically suppressing the presence of a "spur" on the apocenter of the trailing stream arm that correlates with the mass of the satellite at last pericenter. We demonstrate how the effects on the Sgr system scale with the particular choice of self-interaction cross section, which affects the degree of ram-pressure evaporation. These findings generalize beyond the Sgr system, underscoring that dwarf stellar streams and dwarf galaxies with close passages may serve as sensitive probes for dark matter self interactions.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 19, 2025

An SIDM simulation of the merging cluster El Gordo and its tension between the post collision DM density profiles and weak lensing constraints

We review recent findings from a detailed simulation study of the merging cluster El Gordo and present new results inferred from weak lensing data. We found that the observed spatial offsets between the different mass components are well reproduced in merging simulations that include self-interacting dark matter (DM), with an elastic cross-section per unit mass of approximately \sigma_DM/m_X ~ 4 -5 cm^2/gr. Moreover, a relative line-of-sight peculiar velocity on the order of several hundred km/s is found between the two stellar components of the colliding subclusters. These findings strongly suggest the possibility that, in a very energetic cluster collision, DM could possess collisional properties. However, the self-interacting DM merger model presented here is not without difficulties. The values found for \sigma_DM/m_X being in conflict with the current upper bounds on cluster scales. As a solution to this tension we argue that in major cluster mergers the physical modeling of DM interactions, based on the scattering of DM particles, should be considered too simplistic. Additionally, the DM halos of the post-collision clusters have cored density profiles with core radii r_c ~ 300 kpc. Consequently, the associated reduced tangential shear lensing profiles consistently tend to zero at angles \theta <~ 40^{''}. This result is inconsistent with what is deduced from the measured profiles. These profiles exhibit a diverging behavior when \theta --> 0, as predicted by an NFW mass model. We argue that such contradictions cannot be easily reconciled within the DM models presented so far as an alternative to the collisionless paradigm. However, we suggest that this tension can be used as a unique test bed to probe new DM physics.

  • 1 authors
·
Sep 1, 2025

A Neural Network Perturbation Theory Based on the Born Series

Deep Learning using the eponymous deep neural networks (DNNs) has become an attractive approach towards various data-based problems of theoretical physics in the past decade. There has been a clear trend to deeper architectures containing increasingly more powerful and involved layers. Contrarily, Taylor coefficients of DNNs still appear mainly in the light of interpretability studies, where they are computed at most to first order. However, especially in theoretical physics numerous problems benefit from accessing higher orders, as well. This gap motivates a general formulation of neural network (NN) Taylor expansions. Restricting our analysis to multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) and introducing quantities we refer to as propagators and vertices, both depending on the MLP's weights and biases, we establish a graph-theoretical approach. Similarly to Feynman rules in quantum field theories, we can systematically assign diagrams containing propagators and vertices to the corresponding partial derivative. Examining this approach for S-wave scattering lengths of shallow potentials, we observe NNs to adapt their derivatives mainly to the leading order of the target function's Taylor expansion. To circumvent this problem, we propose an iterative NN perturbation theory. During each iteration we eliminate the leading order, such that the next-to-leading order can be faithfully learned during the subsequent iteration. After performing two iterations, we find that the first- and second-order Born terms are correctly adapted during the respective iterations. Finally, we combine both results to find a proxy that acts as a machine-learned second-order Born approximation.

  • 2 authors
·
Sep 7, 2020

First principles simulations of dense hydrogen

Accurate knowledge of the properties of hydrogen at high compression is crucial for astrophysics (e.g. planetary and stellar interiors, brown dwarfs, atmosphere of compact stars) and laboratory experiments, including inertial confinement fusion. There exists experimental data for the equation of state, conductivity, and Thomson scattering spectra. However, the analysis of the measurements at extreme pressures and temperatures typically involves additional model assumptions, which makes it difficult to assess the accuracy of the experimental data. rigorously. On the other hand, theory and modeling have produced extensive collections of data. They originate from a very large variety of models and simulations including path integral Monte Carlo (PIMC) simulations, density functional theory (DFT), chemical models, machine-learned models, and combinations thereof. At the same time, each of these methods has fundamental limitations (fermion sign problem in PIMC, approximate exchange-correlation functionals of DFT, inconsistent interaction energy contributions in chemical models, etc.), so for some parameter ranges accurate predictions are difficult. Recently, a number of breakthroughs in first principle PIMC and DFT simulations were achieved which are discussed in this review. Here we use these results to benchmark different simulation methods. We present an update of the hydrogen phase diagram at high pressures, the expected phase transitions, and thermodynamic properties including the equation of state and momentum distribution. Furthermore, we discuss available dynamic results for warm dense hydrogen, including the conductivity, dynamic structure factor, plasmon dispersion, imaginary-time structure, and density response functions. We conclude by outlining strategies to combine different simulations to achieve accurate theoretical predictions.

  • 27 authors
·
May 17, 2024

Harnessing Selective State Space Models to Enhance Semianalytical Design of Fabrication-Ready Multilayered Huygens' Metasurfaces: Part II - Generative Inverse Design (MetaMamba)

We present a generative framework for inverse design of five-layer transmissive Huygens' metasurfaces (HMSs), addressing a longstanding challenge in achieving full-phase, high-efficiency unit cell designs with minimal full-wave simulations. The key to achieving this is our reliance on the field-based semianalytical (SA) scheme developed in Part I of this paper, which allows rapid and highly effective synthesis of such multilayer composites, however with limited accuracy. To overcome the prohibitive data demands of traditional pipelines, we employ Mamba, a selective state space model well suited for long-range sequence modeling as the backbone of our learning framework. A bidirectional Mamba (Bi-Mamba) forward surrogate is first trained on SA-generated data and subsequently fine-tuned with full-wave CST samples. An ablation over a 1080-sample CST pool shows that as few as 270 full-wave calibration samples suffice to reach near-CST-level agreement at a fraction of the simulation cost. An autoregressive Mamba inverse generator is subsequently trained on surrogate-augmented data, treating unit-cell synthesis as a sequential generation task. The resulting one-to-many generative model produces diverse unit cell geometries conditioned on target scattering responses. It achieves CST-validated designs with field transmission magnitude 0.9 across the full 0-2π phase range at 20 GHz. Moreover, a CST-calibrated surrogate trained to accurately predict frequency responses (18-22 GHz) enables functional post-selection of inverse generated designs. Together, the hybrid SA-generative methodology in this two-part compilation establishes a scalable and data-efficient solution for multilayer HMS synthesis, with natural extensions toward broadband, oblique-incidence, and higher-dimensional electromagnetic inverse-design problems.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 4