Autoplot: A browser for scientific data on the web

Autoplot is software developed for the Virtual Observatories in Heliophysics to provide intelligent and automated plotting capabilities for many typical data products that are stored in a variety of file formats or databases. Autoplot has proven to be a flexible tool for exploring, accessing, and viewing data resources as typically found on the web, usually in the form of a directory containing data files with multiple parameters contained in each file. Data from a data source is abstracted into a common internal data model called QDataSet. Autoplot is built from individually useful components, and can be extended and reused to create specialized data handling and analysis applications and is being used in a variety of science visualization and analysis applications. Although originally developed for viewing heliophysics-related time series and spectrograms, its flexible and generic data representation model makes it potentially useful for the Earth sciences.Comment: 16 page

Cross-correlations in scaling analyses of phase transitions

Thermal or finite-size scaling analyses of importance sampling Monte Carlo time series in the vicinity of phase transition points often combine different estimates for the same quantity, such as a critical exponent, with the intent to reduce statistical fluctuations. We point out that the origin of such estimates in the same time series results in often pronounced cross-correlations which are usually ignored even in high-precision studies, generically leading to significant underestimation of statistical fluctuations. We suggest to use a simple extension of the conventional analysis taking correlation effects into account, which leads to improved estimators with often substantially reduced statistical fluctuations at almost no extra cost in terms of computation time.Comment: 4 pages, RevTEX4, 3 tables, 1 figur

One-dimensional infinite component vector spin glass with long-range interactions

We investigate zero and finite temperature properties of the one-dimensional spin-glass model for vector spins in the limit of an infinite number m of spin components where the interactions decay with a power, \sigma, of the distance. A diluted version of this model is also studied, but found to deviate significantly from the fully connected model. At zero temperature, defect energies are determined from the difference in ground-state energies between systems with periodic and antiperiodic boundary conditions to determine the dependence of the defect-energy exponent \theta on \sigma. A good fit to this dependence is \theta =3/4-\sigma. This implies that the upper critical value of \sigma is 3/4, corresponding to the lower critical dimension in the d-dimensional short-range version of the model. For finite temperatures the large m saddle-point equations are solved self-consistently which gives access to the correlation function, the order parameter and the spin-glass susceptibility. Special attention is paid to the different forms of finite-size scaling effects below and above the lower critical value, \sigma =5/8, which corresponds to the upper critical dimension 8 of the hypercubic short-range model.Comment: 27 pages, 27 figures, 4 table

Substorm classification with the WINDMI model

International audienceThe results of a genetic algorithm optimization of the WINDMI model using the Blanchard-McPherron substorm data set is presented. A key result from the large-scale computations used to search for convergence in the predictions over the database is the finding that there are three distinct types of vx Bs -AL waveforms characterizing substorms. Type I and III substorms are given by the internally-triggered WINDMI model. The analysis reveals an additional type of event, called a type II substorm, that requires an external trigger as in the northward turning of the IMF model of Lyons (1995). We show that incorporating an external trigger, initiated by a fast northward turning of the IMF, into WINDMI, a low-dimensional model of substorms, yields improved predictions of substorm evolution in terms of the AL index. Intrinsic database uncertainties in the timing between the ground-based AL electrojet signal and the arrival time at the magnetopause of the IMF data measured by spacecraft in the solar wind prevent a sharp division between type I and II events. However, within these timing limitations we find that the fraction of events is roughly 40% type I, 40% type II, and 20% type III

Football fever: goal distributions and non-Gaussian statistics

Analyzing football score data with statistical techniques, we investigate how the not purely random, but highly co-operative nature of the game is reflected in averaged properties such as the probability distributions of scored goals for the home and away teams. As it turns out, especially the tails of the distributions are not well described by the Poissonian or binomial model resulting from the assumption of uncorrelated random events. Instead, a good effective description of the data is provided by less basic distributions such as the negative binomial one or the probability densities of extreme value statistics. To understand this behavior from a microscopical point of view, however, no waiting time problem or extremal process need be invoked. Instead, modifying the Bernoulli random process underlying the Poissonian model to include a simple component of self-affirmation seems to describe the data surprisingly well and allows to understand the observed deviation from Gaussian statistics. The phenomenological distributions used before can be understood as special cases within this framework. We analyzed historical football score data from many leagues in Europe as well as from international tournaments, including data from all past tournaments of the “FIFA World Cup” series, and found the proposed models to be applicable rather universally. In particular, here we analyze the results of the German women's premier football league and consider the two separate German men's premier leagues in the East and West during the cold war times as well as the unified league after 1990 to see how scoring in football and the component of self-affirmation depend on cultural and political circumstances

The Strangeness Radius and Magnetic Moment of the Nucleon Revisited

We update Jaffe's estimate of the strange isoscalar radius and magnetic moment of the nucleon. We make use of a recent dispersion--theoretical fit to the nucleon electromagnetic form factors and an improved description of symmetry breaking in the vector nonet. We find $\mu_s = -0.24 \pm 0.03$~n.m. and $r_s^2 = 0.21 \pm 0.03$~fm$^2$. The strange formfactor $F_2^s (t)$ follows a dipole with a cut--off mass of 1.46~GeV, $F_2^s (t)= \mu_s (1-t/2.14 \, {\rm GeV}^2 )^{-2}$. These numbers should be considered as upper limits on the strange vector current matrix--elements in the nucleon.Comment: 8 pp, LaTeX, uses epsf, 1 figure in separate fil

Error estimation and reduction with cross correlations

Besides the well-known effect of autocorrelations in time series of Monte Carlo simulation data resulting from the underlying Markov process, using the same data pool for computing various estimates entails additional cross correlations. This effect, if not properly taken into account, leads to systematically wrong error estimates for combined quantities. Using a straightforward recipe of data analysis employing the jackknife or similar resampling techniques, such problems can be avoided. In addition, a covariance analysis allows for the formulation of optimal estimators with often significantly reduced variance as compared to more conventional averages.Comment: 16 pages, RevTEX4, 4 figures, 6 tables, published versio

Universal amplitude-exponent relation for the Ising model on sphere-like lattices

Conformal field theory predicts finite-size scaling amplitudes of correlation lengths universally related to critical exponents on sphere-like, semi-finite systems $S^{d-1}\times\mathbb{R}$ of arbitrary dimensionality $d$. Numerical studies have up to now been unable to validate this result due to the intricacies of lattice discretisation of such curved spaces. We present a cluster-update Monte Carlo study of the Ising model on a three-dimensional geometry using slightly irregular lattices that confirms the validity of a linear amplitude-exponent relation to high precision.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures, Europhys. Lett., in prin

Fractal dimension of domain walls in two-dimensional Ising spin glasses

We study domain walls in 2d Ising spin glasses in terms of a minimum-weight path problem. Using this approach, large systems can be treated exactly. Our focus is on the fractal dimension $d_f$ of domain walls, which describes via \simL^{d_f} the growth of the average domain-wall length with %% systems size $L\times L$. %% 20.07.07 OM %% Exploring systems up to L=320 we yield $d_f=1.274(2)$ for the case of Gaussian disorder, i.e. a much higher accuracy compared to previous studies. For the case of bimodal disorder, where many equivalent domain walls exist due to the degeneracy of this model, we obtain a true lower bound $d_f=1.095(2)$ and a (lower) estimate $d_f=1.395(3)$ as upper bound. Furthermore, we study the distributions of the domain-wall lengths. Their scaling with system size can be described also only by the exponent $d_f$, i.e. the distributions are monofractal. Finally, we investigate the growth of the domain-wall width with system size (``roughness'') and find a linear behavior.Comment: 8 pages, 8 figures, submitted to Phys. Rev. B; v2: shortened versio

Generalization of the Bound State Model

In the bound state approach the heavy baryons are constructed by binding, with any orbital angular momentum, the heavy meson multiplet to the nucleon considered as a soliton in an effective meson theory. We point out that this picture misses an entire family of states, labeled by a different angular momentum quantum number, which are expected to exist according to the geometry of the three-body constituent quark model (for N_C=3). To solve this problem we propose that the bound state model be generalized to include orbitally excited heavy mesons bound to the nucleon. In this approach the missing angular momentum is ``locked-up'' in the excited heavy mesons. In the simplest dynamical realization of the picture we give conditions on a set of coupling constants for the binding of the missing heavy baryons of arbitrary spin. The simplifications made include working in the large M limit, neglecting nucleon recoil corrections, neglecting mass differences among different heavy spin multiplets and also neglecting the effects of light vector mesons.Comment: 35 pages (ReVTeX), 2 PostScript Figure