Anharmonicity-induced isostructural phase transition of Zirconium under pressure

We have performed a detailed x-ray diffraction structural study of Zr under pressure and unambiguously identify the existence of a first-order isostructural bcc-to-bcc phase transition near 58 GPa. First-principles quantum molecular dynamics lattice dynamics calculations support the existence of this phase transition, in excellent agreement with experimental results, triggered by anharmonic effects. Our results highlight the potential ubiquity of anharmonically driven isostructural transitions within the periodic table under pressure and calls for follow-up experimental and theoretical studies

The situation of women in seventeenth century Fife : as illustrated by the records of the Church courts

Women, particularly those from the lower ranks in society, have received little attention from historians. In part this is due to the limited nature of the available sources. The present thesis is largely based on evidence taken from the records of the post-Reformation church courts, particularly kirk sessions and presbyteries. These offer the best source for a study of low-life social conditions in the early-modern period and often the only source as far as low-ranking women are concerned. Furthermore, unlike the clientele of civil and criminal courts, almost as many women as men appeared before the church courts. Court records naturally emphasise deviancy but, by extension they can indicate what was considered normal and desirable behaviour. In order to put deviancy into perspective, reference is made to certain other sources, particularly diaries, even although these were written by a higher-ranking section of society than the miscreants who were hauled up before the kirk session. Sexual offences, particularly fornication and adultery, formed the staple business of the church courts. As with other offences, these have been examined both on a quantitative and a qualitative basis to show change and stability in the pattern of offences and to give some indication, however fragmentary, of the expectations and reality of love, courtship and marriage for the lower ranks. Witchcraft was the most sensational and serious offence prosecuted although it was not as common as has often been supposed. Its importance lies in the fact that the witch embodied a negative image of womankind, a symbol of all that was feared and reviled in women in the seventeenth century. The final chapter deals with a miscellany of offences against religion and good order Sabbath-breaking, drinking, conventicling and recusancy, assault, riot, infanticide, slander, flyting and scolding. Women were heavily involved in some, but not all of these offences. Although women suffered discrimination in civil and political rights, church court records suggest that among lower-ranking men and women there was a greater degree of equality in practice than was allowed in theory

Transport infrastructure: making more sustainable decisions for noise reduction

There is a global and growing sustainability agenda for surface transport yet there are no specific means of assessing the relative sustainability of infrastructure equipment. Transport noise reduction devices are a significant part of the surface transport infrastructure: they specifically address environmental and social needs, have a high economic impact, and involve a wide range of raw materials raising multiple technical issues. The paper presents an account of the bespoke tool developed for assessing the sustainability of transport noise reduction devices. Regulatory standards for noise reduction devices and the relevant sustainability assessment tools and procedures adopted worldwide were reviewed in order to produce a set of pertinent sustainability criteria and indicators for NRDs projects, which were reviewed and edited during a stakeholder engagement process. A decision making process for assessing the relative sustainability of noise reduction devices was formulated following the review of the literature. Two key stages were identified: (1) collection of data for criteria fulfillment evaluation and (2) multi-criteria analysis for assessing the sustainability of noise reduction devices. Appropriate tools and methods for achieving both objectives are recommended

Certified data-driven physics-informed greedy auto-encoder simulator

A parametric adaptive greedy Latent Space Dynamics Identification (gLaSDI) framework is developed for accurate, efficient, and certified data-driven physics-informed greedy auto-encoder simulators of high-dimensional nonlinear dynamical systems. In the proposed framework, an auto-encoder and dynamics identification models are trained interactively to discover intrinsic and simple latent-space dynamics. To effectively explore the parameter space for optimal model performance, an adaptive greedy sampling algorithm integrated with a physics-informed error indicator is introduced to search for optimal training samples on the fly, outperforming the conventional predefined uniform sampling. Further, an efficient k-nearest neighbor convex interpolation scheme is employed to exploit local latent-space dynamics for improved predictability. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves 121 to 2,658x speed-up with 1 to 5% relative errors for radial advection and 2D Burgers dynamical problems.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2204.1200