Heat transport and spin-charge separation in the normal state of high temperature superconductors

Hill et al. have recently measured both the thermal and charge conductivities in the normal state of a high temperature superconductor. Based on the vanishing of the Wiedemann-Franz ratio in the extrapolated zero temperature limit, they conclude that the charge carriers in this material are not fermionic. Here I make a simple observation that the prefactor in the temperature dependence of the measured thermal conductivity is unusually large, corresponding to an extremely small energy scale $T_0 \approx 0.15$ K. I argue that $T_0$ should be interpreted as a collective scale. Based on model-independent considerations, I also argue that the experiment leads to two possibilities: 1) The charge-carrying excitations are non-fermionic. And much of the heat current is in fact carried by distinctive charge-neutral excitations; 2) The charge-carrying excitations are fermionic, but a subtle ordering transition occurs at $T_0$.Comment: 3 pages, 1 figur

Destruction of the Kondo effect in a multi-channel Bose-Fermi Kondo model

We consider the SU(N) x SU(kappa N) generalization of the spin-isotropic Bose-Fermi Kondo model in the limit of large N. There are three fixed points corresponding to a multi-channel non-Fermi liquid phase, a local spin-liquid phase, and a Kondo-destroying quantum critical point (QCP). We show that the QCP has strong similarities with its counterpart in the single-channel model, even though the Kondo phase is very different from the latter. We also discuss the evolution of the dynamical scaling properties away from the QCP.Comment: 2 papes, 2 figures, submittet to SCES'0

Commissioning and Operation of the New CMS Phase-1 Pixel Detector

The Phase-1 upgrade of the CMS pixel detector is built out of four barrel layers (BPix) and three forward disks in each endcap (FPix). It comprises a total of 124M pixel channels in 1,856 modules, and it is designed to withstand instantaneous luminosities of up to $2 \times 10^{34}\,$cm$^{-2}$s$^{-1}$. Different parts of the detector were assembled over the last year and later brought to CERN for installation inside the CMS tracker. At various stages during the assembly tests have been performed to ensure that the readout and power electronics and the cooling system meet the design specifications. After tests of the individual components, system tests were performed before the installation inside CMS. In addition to reviewing these tests, we also present results from the final commissioning of the detector in-situ using the central CMS DAQ system. Finally we review results from the initial operation of the detector first with cosmic rays and then with pp collisions.Comment: Talk presented at the APS Division of Particles and Fields Meeting (DPF 2017), July 31-August 4, 2017, Fermilab. C17073

Optimistic versus Pessimistic--Optimal Judgemental Bias with Reference Point

This paper develops a model of reference-dependent assessment of subjective beliefs in which loss-averse people optimally choose the expectation as the reference point to balance the current felicity from the optimistic anticipation and the future disappointment from the realisation. The choice of over-optimism or over-pessimism depends on the real chance of success and optimistic decision makers prefer receiving early information. In the portfolio choice problem, pessimistic investors tend to trade conservatively, however, they might trade aggressively if they are sophisticated enough to recognise the biases since low expectation can reduce their fear of loss

Food poisoning due to yam flour consumption in Kano (Northwest) Nigeria

Food poisoning is known to occur sporadically from time to time due to poor hygienic preparations. Its occurrence rarely assumes epidemic proportion. The objective was to report the occurrence of food poisoning due to yam flour among three families which occurred almost in quick succession between March and July 2007 among three families in Kano. They presented with diarrhea, vomiting, abdominal pain, convulsion and loss of consciousness. They all recovered within 48hours of admission. Investigations indicated that the use of certain lethal preservatives for the processing of the yam flour might be responsible. Poisoning from consumption of yam flour should be a differential diagnosis of acute seizure disorders or occurrence of vomiting, diarrhea and abdominal pain in the tropics. It is recommended that education on proper processing of all food products in view of the public health implicatio

High-speed Video from Asynchronous Camera Array

This paper presents a method for capturing high-speed video using an asynchronous camera array. Our method sequentially fires each sensor in a camera array with a small time offset and assembles captured frames into a high-speed video according to the time stamps. The resulting video, however, suffers from parallax jittering caused by the viewpoint difference among sensors in the camera array. To address this problem, we develop a dedicated novel view synthesis algorithm that transforms the video frames as if they were captured by a single reference sensor. Specifically, for any frame from a non-reference sensor, we find the two temporally neighboring frames captured by the reference sensor. Using these three frames, we render a new frame with the same time stamp as the non-reference frame but from the viewpoint of the reference sensor. Specifically, we segment these frames into super-pixels and then apply local content-preserving warping to warp them to form the new frame. We employ a multi-label Markov Random Field method to blend these warped frames. Our experiments show that our method can produce high-quality and high-speed video of a wide variety of scenes with large parallax, scene dynamics, and camera motion and outperforms several baseline and state-of-the-art approaches.Comment: 10 pages, 82 figures, Published at IEEE WACV 201