Boundedness of certain automorphism groups of an open manifold

It is shown that certain diffeomorphism or homeomorphism groups with no restriction on support of an open manifold with finite number of ends are bounded. It follows that these groups are uniformly perfect. In order to characterize the boundedness several conditions on automorphism groups of an open manifold are introduced. In particular, it is shown that the commutator length diameter of the automorphism group $\mathcal D(M)$ of a portable manifold $M$ is estimated by $2fragd_{\mathcal D(M)}+2$, where $fragd_{\mathcal D(M)}$ is the diameter of $\mathcal D(M)$ in the fragmentation norm.Comment: revised versio

Modeling molecular hyperfine line emission

In this paper we discuss two approximate methods previously suggested for modeling hyperfine spectral line emission for molecules whose collisional transitions rates between hyperfine levels are unknown. Hyperfine structure is seen in the rotational spectra of many commonly observed molecules such as HCN, HNC, NH3, N2H+, and C17O. The intensities of these spectral lines can be modeled by numerical techniques such as Lambda-iteration that alternately solve the equations of statistical equilibrium and the equation of radiative transfer. However, these calculations require knowledge of both the radiative and collisional rates for all transitions. For most commonly observed radio frequency spectral lines, only the net collisional rates between rotational levels are known. For such cases, two approximate methods have been suggested. The first method, hyperfine statistical equilibrium (HSE), distributes the hyperfine level populations according to their statistical weight, but allows the population of the rotational states to depart from local thermodynamic equilibrium (LTE). The second method, the proportional method approximates the collision rates between the hyperfine levels as fractions of the net rotational rate apportioned according to the statistical degeneracy of the final hyperfine levels. The second method is able to model non-LTE hyperfine emission. We compare simulations of N2H+ hyperfine lines made with approximate and more exact rates and find that satisfactory results are obtained.Comment: 34 pages. Pages 22-34 are data tables. For ApJ

Periodic solutions of second order Hamiltonian systems bifurcating from infinity

The goal of this article is to study closed connected sets of periodic solutions, of autonomous second order Hamiltonian systems, emanating from infinity. The main idea is to apply the degree for SO(2)-equivariant gradient operators defined by the second author. Using the results due to Rabier we show that we cannot apply the Leray-Schauder degree to prove the main results of this article. It is worth pointing out that since we study connected sets of solutions, we also cannot use the Conley index technique and the Morse theory.Comment: 24 page

On the homeomorphism groups of manifolds and their universal coverings

Let $\mathcal H_c(M)$ stand for the path connected identity component of the group of all compactly supported homeomorphisms of a manifold $M$. It is shown that $\mathcal H_c(M)$ is perfect and simple under mild assumptions on $M$. Next, conjugation-invariant norms on \H_c(M) are considered and the boundedness of $\mathcal H_c(M)$ is investigated. Finally, the structure of the universal covering group of $\mathcal H_c(M)$ is studied.Comment: 19 page

Self-stabilising Byzantine Clock Synchronisation is Almost as Easy as Consensus

We give fault-tolerant algorithms for establishing synchrony in distributed systems in which each of the $n$ nodes has its own clock. Our algorithms operate in a very strong fault model: we require self-stabilisation, i.e., the initial state of the system may be arbitrary, and there can be up to $f<n/3$ ongoing Byzantine faults, i.e., nodes that deviate from the protocol in an arbitrary manner. Furthermore, we assume that the local clocks of the nodes may progress at different speeds (clock drift) and communication has bounded delay. In this model, we study the pulse synchronisation problem, where the task is to guarantee that eventually all correct nodes generate well-separated local pulse events (i.e., unlabelled logical clock ticks) in a synchronised manner. Compared to prior work, we achieve exponential improvements in stabilisation time and the number of communicated bits, and give the first sublinear-time algorithm for the problem: - In the deterministic setting, the state-of-the-art solutions stabilise in time $\Theta(f)$ and have each node broadcast $\Theta(f \log f)$ bits per time unit. We exponentially reduce the number of bits broadcasted per time unit to $\Theta(\log f)$ while retaining the same stabilisation time. - In the randomised setting, the state-of-the-art solutions stabilise in time $\Theta(f)$ and have each node broadcast $O(1)$ bits per time unit. We exponentially reduce the stabilisation time to $\log^{O(1)} f$ while each node broadcasts $\log^{O(1)} f$ bits per time unit. These results are obtained by means of a recursive approach reducing the above task of self-stabilising pulse synchronisation in the bounded-delay model to non-self-stabilising binary consensus in the synchronous model. In general, our approach introduces at most logarithmic overheads in terms of stabilisation time and broadcasted bits over the underlying consensus routine.Comment: 54 pages. To appear in JACM, preliminary version of this work has appeared in DISC 201

Byzantine Approximate Agreement on Graphs

Consider a distributed system with n processors out of which f can be Byzantine faulty. In the approximate agreement task, each processor i receives an input value x_i and has to decide on an output value y_i such that 1) the output values are in the convex hull of the non-faulty processors\u27 input values, 2) the output values are within distance d of each other. Classically, the values are assumed to be from an m-dimensional Euclidean space, where m >= 1. In this work, we study the task in a discrete setting, where input values with some structure expressible as a graph. Namely, the input values are vertices of a finite graph G and the goal is to output vertices that are within distance d of each other in G, but still remain in the graph-induced convex hull of the input values. For d=0, the task reduces to consensus and cannot be solved with a deterministic algorithm in an asynchronous system even with a single crash fault. For any d >= 1, we show that the task is solvable in asynchronous systems when G is chordal and n > (omega+1)f, where omega is the clique number of G. In addition, we give the first Byzantine-tolerant algorithm for a variant of lattice agreement. For synchronous systems, we show tight resilience bounds for the exact variants of these and related tasks over a large class of combinatorial structures