Experience with mural in formalising Dust-Expert

The mural system was an outcome of a significant effort to develop a support tool for the effective use of a full formal methods development cycle. Experience with it, however, has been limited to a small number of illustrative examples that have been carried out by those closely associated with its development and implementation. This paper aims to remedy this situation by describing the experience of using mural for specifying Dust-Expert, an expert system for the relief venting of dust explosions in chemical processes. The paper begins by summarising the main requirements for Dust-Expert, and then gives a ¯avour of the VDM speci®cation that was formalised using mural. The experience of using mural is described with respect to users' expectations that a formal methods tool should: (i) spot any inconsistencies; (ii) help manage and organise the specifications and allow one to easily add, access, update and delete specifications; (iii) help manage and carry out the refinement process; (iv) help manage and organise theories; (v) help manage and carry out proofs. The paper concludes by highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of mural that could be of interest to those developing the next generation of formal methods development tools

GRB afterglows: deep Newtonian phase and its application

Gamma-ray burst afterglows have been observed for months or even years in a few cases. It deserves noting that at such late stages, the remnants should have entered the deep Newtonian phase, during which the majority of shock-accelerated electrons will no longer be highly relativistic. To calculate the afterglows, we must assume that the electrons obey a power-law distribution according to their kinetic energy, not simply the Lorentz factor.Comment: Poster at the 4th workshop "Gamma-Ray Bursts in the Afterglow Era" (Rome, 2004), accepted for publication in the proceedings. 4 pages, with 3 figures inserte

Dressing the electromagnetic nucleon current

A field-theory-based approach to pion photoproduction off the nucleon is used to derive a microscopically consistent formulation of the fully dressed electromagnetic nucleon current in an effective Lagrangian formalism. It is shown how the rigorous implementation of local gauge invariance at all levels of the reaction dynamics provides equations that lend themselves to practically manageable truncations of the underlying nonlinearities of the problem. The requirement of consistency also suggests a novel way of treating the pion photoproduction problem. Guided by a phenomenological implementation of gauge invariance for the truncated equations that has proved successful for pion photoproduction, an expression for the fully dressed nucleon current is given that satisfies the Ward-Takahashi identity for a fully dressed nucleon propagator as a matter of course. Possible applications include meson photo- and electroproduction processes, bremsstrahlung, Compton scattering, and $ee'$ processes off nucleons.Comment: 10 pages, 9 figure

Alice-Bob Physics: Coherent Solutions of Nonlocal KdV Systems

In natural and social science, many events happened at different space-times may be closely correlated. Two events, $A$ (Alice) and $B$ (Bob) are defined correlated if one event is determined by another, say, $B=\hat{f}A$ for suitable $\hat{f}$ operators. Taking KdV and coupled KdV systems as examples, we can find some types of models (AB-KdV systems) to exhibit the existence on the correlated solutions linked with two events. The idea of this report is valid not only for physical problems related to KdV systems but also for problems described by arbitrary continuous or discrete models. The parity and time reversal symmetries are extended to shifted parity and delayed time reversal. The new symmetries are found to be useful not only to establish AB-systems but also to find group invariant solutions of numerous AB-systems. A new elegant form of the $N$-soliton solutions of the KdV equation and then the AB-KdV systems is obtained. A concrete AB-KdV system derived from the nonlinear inviscid dissipative and barotropic vorticity equation in a $\beta$-plane channel is applied to the two correlated monople blocking events which is responsible for the snow disaster in the winter of 2007/2008 happened in Southern China.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figur

The Electromagnetically Induced Transparency in Mechanical Effects of Light

We consider the dynamical behavior of a nanomechanical mirror in a high-quality cavity under the action of a coupling laser and a probe laser. We demonstrate the existence of the analog of electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) in the output field at the probe frequency. Our calculations show explicitly the origin of EIT-like dips as well as the characteristic changes in dispersion from anomalous to normal in the range where EIT dips occur. Remarkably the pump-probe response for the opto mechanical system shares all the features of the Lambda system as discovered by Harris and collaborators.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figure

Beaming effects in GRBs and orphan afterglows

The overall dynamical evolution and radiation mechanism of $\gamma$-ray burst jets are briefly introduced. Various interesting topics concerning beaming in $\gamma$-ray bursts are discussed, including jet structures, orphan afterglows and cylindrical jets. The possible connection between $\gamma$-ray bursts and neutron star kicks is also addressed.Comment: 10 Pages, 4 figures, to appear in a special issue of ApSS. Oral report presented at "The Multiwavelength Approach to Unidentified Gamma-Ray Sources" (Hong Kong, June 1 - 4, 2004; Conference organizers: K.S. Cheng and G.E. Romero

Characterization Of Thermal Stresses And Plasticity In Through-Silicon Via Structures For Three-Dimensional Integration

Through-silicon via (TSV) is a critical element connecting stacked dies in three-dimensional (3D) integration. The mismatch of thermal expansion coefficients between the Cu via and Si can generate significant stresses in the TSV structure to cause reliability problems. In this study, the thermal stress in the TSV structure was measured by the wafer curvature method and its unique stress characteristics were compared to that of a Cu thin film structure. The thermo-mechanical characteristics of the Cu TSV structure were correlated to microstructure evolution during thermal cycling and the local plasticity in Cu in a triaxial stress state. These findings were confirmed by microstructure analysis of the Cu vias and finite element analysis (FEA) of the stress characteristics. In addition, the local plasticity and deformation in and around individual TSVs were measured by synchrotron x-ray microdiffraction to supplement the wafer curvature measurements. The importance and implication of the local plasticity and residual stress on TSV reliabilities are discussed for TSV extrusion and device keep-out zone (KOZ).Microelectronics Research Cente

Numerical Study of a Particle Method for Gradient Flows

We study the numerical behaviour of a particle method for gradient flows involving linear and nonlinear diffusion. This method relies on the discretisation of the energy via non-overlapping balls centred at the particles. The resulting scheme preserves the gradient flow structure at the particle level, and enables us to obtain a gradient descent formulation after time discretisation. We give several simulations to illustrate the validity of this method, as well as a detailed study of one-dimensional aggregation-diffusion equations.Comment: 27 pages, 21 figure

A Morphological Approach to the Pulsed Emission from Soft Gamma Repeaters

We present a geometrical methodology to interpret the periodical light curves of Soft Gamma Repeaters based on the magnetar model and the numerical arithmetic of the three-dimensional magnetosphere model for the young pulsars. The hot plasma released by the star quake is trapped in the magnetosphere and photons are emitted tangent to the local magnetic field lines. The variety of radiation morphologies in the burst tails and the persistent stages could be well explained by the trapped fireballs on different sites inside the closed field lines. Furthermore, our numerical results suggests that the pulse profile evolution of SGR 1806-20 during the 27 December 2004 giant flare is due to a lateral drift of the emitting region in the magnetosphere.Comment: 7 figures, accepted by Ap