80 results match your criteria: "The Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics[Affiliation]"

A number of human coronaviruses (HCoVs) were reported in the last and present centuries. Some outbreaks of which (eg, SARS and MERS CoVs) caused the mortality of hundreds of people worldwide. The problem of finding a potent drug against HCoV strains lies in the inability of finding a drug that stops the viral replication through inhibiting its important proteins.

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Learning to soar in turbulent environments.

Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A

August 2016

Department of Physics, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093;

Birds and gliders exploit warm, rising atmospheric currents (thermals) to reach heights comparable to low-lying clouds with a reduced expenditure of energy. This strategy of flight (thermal soaring) is frequently used by migratory birds. Soaring provides a remarkable instance of complex decision making in biology and requires a long-term strategy to effectively use the ascending thermals.

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The relation between seismic moment and fractured area is crucial to earthquake hazard analysis. Experimental catalogs show multiple scaling behaviors, with some controversy concerning the exponent value in the large earthquake regime. Here, we show that the original Olami, Feder, and Christensen model does not capture experimental findings.

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Frictional dynamics of viscoelastic solids driven on a rough surface.

Phys Rev E Stat Nonlin Soft Matter Phys

July 2015

Centro Atómico Bariloche and Instituto Balseiro (UNCu), Comisión Nacional de Energía Atómica, (8400) Bariloche, Argentina.

We study the effect of viscoelastic dynamics on the frictional properties of a (mean-field) spring-block system pulled on a rough surface by an external drive. When the drive moves at constant velocity V, two dynamical regimes are observed: at fast driving, above a critical threshold V(c), the system slides at the drive velocity and displays a friction force with velocity weakening. Below V(c) the steady sliding becomes unstable and a stick-slip regime sets in.

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Dynamics and Correlations among Soft Excitations in Marginally Stable Glasses.

Phys Rev Lett

June 2015

Department of Physics, Center for Soft Matter Research, New York University, 4 Washington Place, New York, New York 10003, USA.

Marginal stability is the notion that stability is achieved, but only barely so. This property constrains the ensemble of configurations explored at low temperature in a variety of systems, including spin, electron, and structural glasses. A key feature of marginal states is a (saturated) pseudogap in the distribution of soft excitations.

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We explore the high-temperature dynamics of the disordered, one-dimensional XXZ model near the many-body localization (MBL) transition, focusing on the delocalized (i.e., "metallic") phase.

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Ionospheric correction based on ingestion of global ionospheric maps into the NeQuick 2 model.

ScientificWorldJournal

April 2016

School of Electronic Information, Wuhan University, No. 129 Luoyu Road, Wuhan 430079, China.

The global ionospheric maps (GIMs), generated by Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and Center for Orbit Determination in Europe (CODE) during a period over 13 years, have been adopted as the primary source of data to provide global ionospheric correction for possible single frequency positioning applications. The investigation aims to assess the performance of new NeQuick model, NeQuick 2, in predicting global total electron content (TEC) through ingesting the GIMs data from the previous day(s). The results show good performance of the GIMs-driven-NeQuick model with average 86% of vertical TEC error less than 10 TECU, when the global daily effective ionization indices (Az) versus modified dip latitude (MODIP) are constructed as a second order polynomial.

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Nonequilibrium quantum Landauer principle.

Phys Rev Lett

February 2015

School of Physics, Monash University, Victoria 3800, Australia.

Using the operational framework of completely positive, trace preserving operations and thermodynamic fluctuation relations, we derive a lower bound for the heat exchange in a Landauer erasure process on a quantum system. Our bound comes from a nonphenomenological derivation of the Landauer principle which holds for generic nonequilibrium dynamics. Furthermore, the bound depends on the nonunitality of dynamics, giving it a physical significance that differs from other derivations.

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Many-body localization in dipolar systems.

Phys Rev Lett

December 2014

Department of Physics, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA.

Systems of strongly interacting dipoles offer an attractive platform to study many-body localized phases, owing to their long coherence times and strong interactions. We explore conditions under which such localized phases persist in the presence of power-law interactions and supplement our analytic treatment with numerical evidence of localized states in one dimension. We propose and analyze several experimental systems that can be used to observe and probe such states, including ultracold polar molecules and solid-state magnetic spin impurities.

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Collective spin 1 singlet phase in high-pressure oxygen.

Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A

July 2014

The Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics, 34151 Trieste, Italy; andInternational School for Advanced Studies and Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Istituto Officina dei Materiali Democritos, 34136 Trieste, Italy

Oxygen, one of the most common and important elements in nature, has an exceedingly well-explored phase diagram under pressure, up to and beyond 100 GPa. At low temperatures, the low-pressure antiferromagnetic phases below 8 GPa where O2 molecules have spin S = 1 are followed by the broad apparently nonmagnetic ε phase from about 8 to 96 GPa. In this phase, which is our focus, molecules group structurally together to form quartets while switching, as believed by most, to spin S = 0.

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Dynamics of matter-wave condensates with time-dependent two- and three-body interactions trapped by a linear potential in the presence of atom gain or loss.

Phys Rev E Stat Nonlin Soft Matter Phys

April 2014

Centre d'Excellence en Technologies de l'Information et de la Communication (CETIC), University of Yaounde I, Yaounde, Cameroon and Laboratory of Mechanics, Department of Physics, Faculty of Science, University of Yaounde I, P.O. Box 812, Yaounde, Cameroon and The Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics, Strada Costiera 11, 34014 Trieste, Italy.

Bose-Einstein condensates with time varying two- and three-body interatomic interactions, confined in a linear potential and exchanging atoms with the thermal cloud are investigated. Using the extended tanh-function method with an auxiliary equation, i.e.

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Testing the self-consistency of the excursion set approach to predicting the dark matter halo mass function.

Phys Rev Lett

December 2013

Laboratoire Univers et Théories (LUTh), UMR 8102 CNRS, Observatoire de Paris, Université Paris Diderot, 5 Place Jules Janssen, 92190 Meudon, France.

The excursion set approach provides a framework for predicting how the abundance of dark matter halos depends on the initial conditions. A key ingredient of this formalism is the specification of a critical overdensity threshold (barrier) which protohalos must exceed if they are to form virialized halos at a later time. However, to make its predictions, the excursion set approach explicitly averages over all positions in the initial field, rather than the special ones around which halos form, so it is not clear that the barrier has physical motivation or meaning.

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We investigate the temperature dependence of conductivity in ballistic graphene using Landauer transport theory. We obtain results which are qualitatively in agreement with many features recently observed in transport measurements on high mobility suspended graphene. The conductivity sigma at high temperature T and low density n grows linearly with T, while at high n we find sigma approximately square root(|n|) with negative corrections at small T due to the T dependence of the chemical potential.

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The quantification of the complexity of networks is, today, a fundamental problem in the physics of complex systems. A possible roadmap to solve the problem is via extending key concepts of information theory to networks. In this Rapid Communication we propose how to define the Shannon entropy of a network ensemble and how it relates to the Gibbs and von Neumann entropies of network ensembles.

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Modulational instability of charge transport in the Peyrard-Bishop-Holstein model.

J Phys Condens Matter

August 2009

Laboratory of Mechanics, Department of Physics, Faculty of Science, University of Yaounde I, PO Box 812, Yaounde, Cameroon. The Abdus Salam International Center For Theoretical Physics, PO Box 586, Strada Costiera 11, I-34014 Trieste, Italy.

We report on modulational instability (MI) on a DNA charge transfer model known as the Peyrard-Bishop-Holstein (PBH) model. In the continuum approximation, the system reduces to a modified Klein-Gordon-Schrödinger (mKGS) system through which linear stability analysis is performed. This model shows some possibilities for the MI region and the study is carried out for some values of the nearest-neighbor transfer integral.

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Hydrodynamics and collision-dominated transport are crucial to understand the slow dynamics of many correlated quantum liquids. The ratio eta/s of the shear viscosity eta to the entropy density s is uniquely suited to determine how strongly the excitations in a quantum fluid interact. We determine eta/s in clean undoped graphene using a quantum kinetic theory.

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Entropy of network ensembles.

Phys Rev E Stat Nonlin Soft Matter Phys

March 2009

The Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics, Strada Costiera 11, 34014 Trieste, Italy.

In this paper we generalize the concept of random networks to describe network ensembles with nontrivial features by a statistical mechanics approach. This framework is able to describe undirected and directed network ensembles as well as weighted network ensembles. These networks might have nontrivial community structure or, in the case of networks embedded in a given space, they might have a link probability with a nontrivial dependence on the distance between the nodes.

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We study a statistical model describing the steady-state distribution of the fluxes in a metabolic network. The resulting model defined on continuous variables can be solved by the cavity method. In particular, analytical tractability is possible, solving the cavity equation over an ensemble of networks with the same degree distribution as a real metabolic network.

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Previous work on undirected small-world networks established the paradigm that locally structured networks tend to have a high density of short loops. On the other hand, many realistic networks are directed. Here we investigate the local organization of directed networks and find, surprisingly, that real networks often have very few short loops as compared to random models.

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We present a statistical mechanics approach for the description of complex networks. We first define an energy and an entropy, associated with a degree distribution, which have a geometrical interpretation. Next we evaluate the distribution that extremizes the free energy of the network.

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In this paper we study the impact of degree correlations in the subgraph statistics of scale-free networks. In particular we consider loops, simple cases of network subgraphs which encode the redundancy of the paths passing through every two nodes of the network. We provide an understanding of the scaling of the clustering coefficient in modular networks in terms of the maximal eigenvector of the average adjacency matrix of the ensemble.

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The origin of the correlation between surface reactivity and quantum-size effects, observed in recent experiments on the oxidation of ultrathin magnesium films, is addressed by means of ab initio calculations and model predictions. We show that the decay length in vacuum of the electronic local density of states at the Fermi energy exhibits systematic oscillations with film thickness, with local maxima induced when a quantum-well state at crosses the Fermi energy. The predicted changes in the decay length are expected to have a major impact on the electron transfer rate by tunneling, which has been proposed to control the initial sticking of in the oxidation process.

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We present here a study of the clustering and loops in a graph of the Internet at the autonomous systems level. We show that, even if the whole structure is changing with time, the statistical distributions of loops of order 3, 4, and 5 remain stable during the evolution. Moreover, we will bring evidence that the Internet graphs show characteristic Markovian signatures, since the structure is very well described by two-point correlations between the degrees of the vertices.

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Clogging and self-organized criticality in complex networks.

Phys Rev E Stat Nonlin Soft Matter Phys

September 2004

The Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics, Strada Costiera 11, 34014 Trieste, Italy.

We propose a simple model that aims at describing, in a stylized manner, how local breakdowns due to imbalances or congestion propagate in real dynamical networks. The model converges to a self-organized critical stationary state in which the network shapes itself as a consequence of avalanches of rewiring processes. Depending on the model's specification, we obtain either single-scale or scale-free networks.

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Kac limit for finite-range spin glasses.

Phys Rev Lett

January 2004

The Abdus Salam International Center for Theoretical Physics, Condensed Matter Group, Strada Costiera 11, P.O. Box 586, I-34100 Trieste, Italy.

We consider a finite-range spin glass model in arbitrary dimension, where the strength of the two-body coupling decays to zero over some distance gamma(-1). We show that, under mild assumptions on the interaction potential, the infinite-volume free energy of the system converges to that of the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick one, in the Kac limit gamma-->0. This could be a first step toward an expansion around mean-field theory, for spin glass systems.

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