Measuring effective temperatures in a generalized Gibbs ensemble.

The local physical properties of an isolated quantum statistical system in the stationary state reached long after a quench are generically described by the Gibbs ensemble, which involves only its Hamiltonian and the temperature as a parameter. If the system is instead integrable, additional quantities conserved by the dynamics intervene in the description of the stationary state. The resulting generalized Gibbs ensemble involves a number of temperature-like parameters, the determination of which is practically difficult.

Impact of Next-to-Leading Order Contributions to Cosmic Microwave Background Lensing.

In this Letter we study the impact on cosmological parameter estimation, from present and future surveys, due to lensing corrections on cosmic microwave background temperature and polarization anisotropies beyond leading order. In particular, we show how post-Born corrections, large-scale structure effects, and the correction due to the change in the polarization direction between the emission at the source and the detection at the observer are non-negligible in the determination of the polarization spectra. They have to be taken into account for an accurate estimation of cosmological parameters sensitive to or even based on these spectra.

Dynamical Crossovers in Prethermal Critical States.

We study the prethermal dynamics of an interacting quantum field theory with an N-component order parameter and O(N) symmetry, suddenly quenched in the vicinity of a dynamical critical point. Depending on the initial conditions, the evolution of the order parameter, and of the response and correlation functions, can exhibit a temporal crossover between universal dynamical scaling regimes governed, respectively, by a quantum and a classical prethermal fixed point, as well as a crossover from a Gaussian to a non-Gaussian prethermal dynamical scaling. Together with a recent experiment, this suggests that quenches may be used in order to explore the rich variety of dynamical critical points occurring in the nonequilibrium dynamics of a quantum many-body system.

Short-Time Behavior and Criticality of Driven Lattice Gases.

The nonequilibrium short-time critical behaviors of driven and undriven lattice gases are investigated via Monte Carlo simulations in two spatial dimensions starting from a fully disordered initial configuration. In particular, we study the time evolution of suitably defined order parameters, which account for the strong anisotropy introduced by the homogeneous drive. We demonstrate that, at short times, the dynamics of all these models is unexpectedly described by an effective continuum theory in which transverse fluctuations, i.

Phase separation transition in a nonconserved two-species model.

A one-dimensional stochastic exclusion process with two species of particles, + and -, is studied where density of each species can fluctuate but the total particle density is conserved. From the exact stationary state weights we show that, in the limiting case where density of negative particles vanishes, the system undergoes a phase separation transition where a macroscopic domain of vacancies form in front of a single surviving negative particle. We also show that the phase-separated state is associated with a diverging correlation length for any density and that the critical exponents characterizing the behavior in this region are different from those at the transition line.

Relative Contribution of Odour Intensity and Valence to Moral Decisions.

Meta-analytic evidence showed that the chemical senses affect moral decisions. However, how odours impact on morality is currently unclear. Through a set of three studies, we assess whether and how odour intensity biases moral choices (Study 1a), its psychophysiological responses (Study 1b), as well as the behavioural and psychophysiological effects of odour valence on moral choices (Study 2).

Rhythm in language acquisition.

Spoken language is governed by rhythm. Linguistic rhythm is hierarchical and the rhythmic hierarchy partially mimics the prosodic as well as the morpho-syntactic hierarchy of spoken language. It can thus provide learners with cues about the structure of the language they are acquiring.

Toward Accurate Adsorption Energetics on Clay Surfaces.

Clay minerals are ubiquitous in nature, and the manner in which they interact with their surroundings has important industrial and environmental implications. Consequently, a molecular-level understanding of the adsorption of molecules on clay surfaces is crucial. In this regard computer simulations play an important role, yet the accuracy of widely used empirical force fields (FF) and density functional theory (DFT) exchange-correlation functionals is often unclear in adsorption systems dominated by weak interactions.

fMRI single trial discovery of spatio-temporal brain activity patterns.

There is growing interest in the description of short-lived patterns in the spatiotemporal cortical activity monitored via neuroimaging. Most traditional analysis methods, designed to estimate relatively long-term brain dynamics, are not always appropriate to capture these patterns. Here we introduce a novel data-driven approach for detecting short-lived fMRI brain activity patterns.

Critical adsorption and critical Casimir forces in the canonical ensemble.

Critical properties of a liquid film between two planar walls are investigated in the canonical ensemble, within which the total number of fluid particles, rather than their chemical potential, is kept constant. The effect of this constraint is analyzed within mean-field theory (MFT) based on a Ginzburg-Landau free-energy functional as well as via Monte Carlo simulations of the three-dimensional Ising model with fixed total magnetization. Within MFT and for finite adsorption strengths at the walls, the thermodynamic properties of the film in the canonical ensemble can be mapped exactly onto a grand canonical ensemble in which the corresponding chemical potential plays the role of the Lagrange multiplier associated with the constraint.

Brain potentials predict learning, transmission and modification of an artificial symbolic system.

It has recently been argued that symbolic systems evolve while they are being transmitted across generations of learners, gradually adapting to the relevant brain structures and processes. In the context of this hypothesis, little is known on whether individual differences in neural processing capacity account for aspects of 'variation' observed in symbolic behavior and symbolic systems. We addressed this issue in the domain of auditory processing.

A simple strategy guides the complex metabolic regulation in Escherichia coli.

A way to decipher the complexity of the cellular metabolism is to study the effect of different external perturbations. Through an analysis over a sufficiently large set of gene knockouts and growing conditions, one aims to find a unifying principle that governs the metabolic regulation. For instance, it is known that the cessation of the microorganism proliferation after a gene deletion is only transient.

Co-occurrence statistics as a language-dependent cue for speech segmentation.

To what extent can language acquisition be explained in terms of different associative learning mechanisms? It has been hypothesized that distributional regularities in spoken languages are strong enough to elicit statistical learning about dependencies among speech units. Distributional regularities could be a useful cue for word learning even without rich language-specific knowledge. However, it is not clear how strong and reliable the distributional cues are that humans might use to segment speech.

Multiple neural representations of elementary logical connectives.

A defining trait of human cognition is the capacity to form compounds out of simple thoughts. This ability relies on the logical connectives AND, OR and IF. Simple propositions, e.

Nonadditivity of critical Casimir forces.

In soft condensed matter physics, effective interactions often emerge due to the spatial confinement of fluctuating fields. For instance, microscopic particles dissolved in a binary liquid mixture are subject to critical Casimir forces whenever their surfaces confine the thermal fluctuations of the order parameter of the solvent close to its critical demixing point. These forces are theoretically predicted to be nonadditive on the scale set by the bulk correlation length of the fluctuations.

Assessing the orbital selective Mott transition with variational wave functions.

We study the Mott metal-insulator transition in the two-band Hubbard model with different hopping amplitudes t1 and t2 for the two orbitals on the two-dimensional square lattice by using non-magnetic variational wave functions, similarly to what has been considered in the limit of infinite dimensions by dynamical mean-field theory. We work out the phase diagram at half filling (i.e.

Listening natively across perceptual domains?

Our native tongue influences the way we perceive other languages. But does it also determine the way we perceive nonlinguistic sounds? The authors investigated how speakers of Italian, Turkish, and Persian group sequences of syllables, tones, or visual shapes alternating in either frequency or duration. We found strong native listening effects with linguistic stimuli.

Hydraulic Fracture and Toughening of a Brittle Layer Bonded to a Hydrogel.

Brittle materials propagate opening cracks under tension. When stress increases beyond a critical magnitude, then quasistatic crack propagation becomes unstable. In the presence of several precracks, a brittle material always propagates only the weakest crack, leading to catastrophic failure.

Aging and coarsening in isolated quantum systems after a quench: Exact results for the quantum O(N) model with N → ∞.

The nonequilibrium dynamics of an isolated quantum system after a sudden quench to a dynamical critical point is expected to be characterized by scaling and universal exponents due to the absence of time scales. We explore these features for a quench of the parameters of a Hamiltonian with O(N) symmetry, starting from a ground state in the disordered phase. In the limit of infinite N, the exponents and scaling forms of the relevant two-time correlation functions can be calculated exactly.

Probing the Excitations of a Lieb-Liniger Gas from Weak to Strong Coupling.

We probe the excitation spectrum of an ultracold one-dimensional Bose gas of cesium atoms with a repulsive contact interaction that we tune from the weakly to the strongly interacting regime via a magnetic Feshbach resonance. The dynamical structure factor, experimentally obtained using Bragg spectroscopy, is compared to integrability-based calculations valid at arbitrary interactions and finite temperatures. Our results unequivocally underlie the fact that holelike excitations, which have no counterpart in higher dimensions, actively shape the dynamical response of the gas.

A proposed mechanism for rapid adaptation to spectrally distorted speech.

The mechanisms underlying perceptual adaptation to severely spectrally-distorted speech were studied by training participants to comprehend spectrally-rotated speech, which is obtained by inverting the speech spectrum. Spectral-rotation produces severe distortion confined to the spectral domain while preserving temporal trajectories. During five 1-hour training sessions, pairs of participants attempted to extract spoken messages from the spectrally-rotated speech of their training partner.

(99m)Tc-human serum albumin nanocolloids: particle sizing and radioactivity distribution.

Several parameters affect the biodistribution of administered nanocolloids (NC) for Sentinel Lymph Node (SLN) detection: particle size distribution, number of Tc atoms per particle and specific activity (SA). Relatively few data are available with frequently conflicting results. (99m)Tc-NC-human serum albumin (HSA) Nanocoll®, Nanoalbumon® and Nanotop® were analysed for particles' dimensional and radioactivity distribution, and a mathematical model was elaborated to estimate the number of particles involved.

Ab initio molecular dynamics simulation of liquid water by quantum Monte Carlo.

Although liquid water is ubiquitous in chemical reactions at roots of life and climate on the earth, the prediction of its properties by high-level ab initio molecular dynamics simulations still represents a formidable task for quantum chemistry. In this article, we present a room temperature simulation of liquid water based on the potential energy surface obtained by a many-body wave function through quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) methods. The simulated properties are in good agreement with recent neutron scattering and X-ray experiments, particularly concerning the position of the oxygen-oxygen peak in the radial distribution function, at variance of previous density functional theory attempts.

Fixation properties of subdivided populations with balancing selection.

In subdivided populations, migration acts together with selection and genetic drift and determines their evolution. Building upon a recently proposed method, which hinges on the emergence of a time scale separation between local and global dynamics, we study the fixation properties of subdivided populations in the presence of balancing selection. The approximation implied by the method is accurate when the effective selection strength is small and the number of subpopulations is large.

Disrupting morphosyntactic and lexical semantic processing has opposite effects on the sample entropy of neural signals.

Converging evidence in neuroscience suggests that syntax and semantics are dissociable in brain space and time. However, it is possible that partly disjoint cortical networks, operating in successive time frames, still perform similar types of neural computations. To test the alternative hypothesis, we collected EEG data while participants read sentences containing lexical semantic or morphosyntactic anomalies, resulting in N400 and P600 effects, respectively.