Prethermalization Production of Dark Matter

At the end of inflation, the inflaton field decays into an initially nonthermal population of relativistic particles which eventually thermalize. We consider the production of dark matter from this relativistic plasma, focusing on the prethermal phase. We find that for a production cross section $\sigma(E)\sim E^n$ with $n> 2$, the present dark matter abundance is produced during the prethermal phase of its progenitors. For $n\le 2$, entropy production during reheating makes the nonthermal contribution to the present dark matter abundance subdominant compared to that produced thermally. As specific examples, we verify that the nonthermal contribution is irrelevant for gravitino production in low scale supersymmetric models ($n=0$) and is dominant for gravitino production in high scale supersymmetry models ($n=6$).Comment: 12 pages, 4 figure

Does Microcredit Reach the Poor and Vulnerable? Evidence from Northern Bangldesh.

The Grameen Bank's success in Bangladesh has made microcredit the hot new idea for reducing poverty. This paper uses panel data from two Bangladeshi villages to test if loan recipients are poorer and more vulnerable than non-recipients. Poverty is measured by levels of consumption. Vulnerablitiy is measured as fluctuations in consumption (associated with inefficient risk sharing). We find that loan recipients are poorer than non-recipients in both villages, but are more vulnerable than non-recipients only in the richer and more diversified village. Though microcredit programs target the landless, there is substantial leakage to the landed. Landlessness is not significangly associated with either poverty or vulnerablitiy, but female headship is. Female headed households may be a more appropriate target group for anti-poverty credit programs.POVERTY ; RISK ; ECONOMIC GROWTH

Resummed thermodynamic perturbation theory for bond cooperativity in associating fluids with small bond angles: Effects of steric hindrance and ring formation

In this paper we develop a thermodynamic perturbation theory for two site associating fluids which exhibit bond cooperativity. We include both steric hindrance and ring formation such that the equation of state is bond angle dependent. Here the bond angle is the angle separating the centers of the two association sites. As a test, new Monte Carlo simulations are performed, and the theory is found to accurately predict the internal energy as well as the distribution of associated clusters as a function of bond angle and bond cooperativity.Comment: To appear in The Journal of Chemical Physic

Sparse Recovery of Positive Signals with Minimal Expansion

We investigate the sparse recovery problem of reconstructing a high-dimensional non-negative sparse vector from lower dimensional linear measurements. While much work has focused on dense measurement matrices, sparse measurement schemes are crucial in applications, such as DNA microarrays and sensor networks, where dense measurements are not practically feasible. One possible construction uses the adjacency matrices of expander graphs, which often leads to recovery algorithms much more efficient than $\ell_1$ minimization. However, to date, constructions based on expanders have required very high expansion coefficients which can potentially make the construction of such graphs difficult and the size of the recoverable sets small. In this paper, we construct sparse measurement matrices for the recovery of non-negative vectors, using perturbations of the adjacency matrix of an expander graph with much smaller expansion coefficient. We present a necessary and sufficient condition for $\ell_1$ optimization to successfully recover the unknown vector and obtain expressions for the recovery threshold. For certain classes of measurement matrices, this necessary and sufficient condition is further equivalent to the existence of a "unique" vector in the constraint set, which opens the door to alternative algorithms to $\ell_1$ minimization. We further show that the minimal expansion we use is necessary for any graph for which sparse recovery is possible and that therefore our construction is tight. We finally present a novel recovery algorithm that exploits expansion and is much faster than $\ell_1$ optimization. Finally, we demonstrate through theoretical bounds, as well as simulation, that our method is robust to noise and approximate sparsity.Comment: 25 pages, submitted for publicatio

Sparse Array DFT Beamformers for Wideband Sources

Sparse arrays are popular for performance optimization while keeping the hardware and computational costs down. In this paper, we consider sparse arrays design method for wideband source operating in a wideband jamming environment. Maximizing the signal-to-interference plus noise ratio (MaxSINR) is adopted as an optimization objective for wideband beamforming. Sparse array design problem is formulated in the DFT domain to process the source as parallel narrowband sources. The problem is formulated as quadratically constraint quadratic program (QCQP) alongside the weighted mixed $l_{1-\infty}$-norm squared penalization of the beamformer weight vector. The semidefinite relaxation (SDR) of QCQP promotes sparse solutions by iteratively re-weighting beamformer based on previous iteration. It is shown that the DFT approach reduces the computational cost considerably as compared to the delay line approach, while efficiently utilizing the degrees of freedom to harness the maximum output SINR offered by the given array aperture

Hunger and Satiety Mechanisms and Their Potential Exploitation in the Regulation of Food Intake

Acknowledgments Tehmina Amin is the Project Manager and Julian Mercer is Project Coordinator for Full4Health. Both are funded by the Full4Health project (grant agreement no. 266408) under the EU Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013). Julian Mercer is funded by the Scottish Government, Rural and Environment Science and Analytical Services Division, Food, Land and People programme. He is also a partner in FP7 projects: NeuroFAST (grant agreement no. 245099) and SATIN (grant agreement no. 289800).Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Nonlocal mixing of supercurrents in Josephson ballistic point contact

We study coherent current states in the mesoscopic superconducting weak link simultaneously subjected to the order parameter phase difference on the contact and to the tangential to the junction interface superfluid velocity in the banks. The Josephson current-phase relation controlled by the external transport current is obtained. At phase difference close to pi the nonlocal nature of the Josephson phase-dependent current results in the appearance of two vortexlike states in the vicinity of the contact.Comment: 4 pages, 6 figures; to be published in Phys. Rev. B; e-mail: [email protected]