arXiv subjects

Liang Wang

Publications and source records attributed to Liang Wang.

At least 667 records · Page 37Linked to original sources

arXiv2015

NIHAO V: Too big doesn't fail -- reconciling the conflict between LCDM predictions and the circular velocities of nearby field galaxies

We compare the half-light circular velocities, V_{1/2}, of dwarf galaxies in the Local Group to the predicted circular velocity curves of galaxies in the NIHAO suite of LCDM simulations. We use a subset of 34 simulations in which the central galaxy has a stellar luminosity in the range 0.5 x 10^5 < L_V < 2 x 10^8 L_{sun}. The NIHAO galaxy simulations reproduce the relation between stellar mass and halo mass from abundance matching, as well as the observed half-light size vs luminosity relation. The corresponding dissipationless simulations over-predict the V_{1/2}, recovering the problem known as too big to fail (TBTF). By contrast, the NIHAO simulations have expanded dark matter haloes, and provide an excellent match to the distribution of V_{1/2} for galaxies with L_V > 2 x 10^6 L_{sun}. For lower luminosities our simulations predict very little halo response, and tend to over predict the observed circular velocities. In the context of LCDM, this could signal the increased stochasticity of star formation in haloes below M_{halo} \sim 10^{10} M_{sun}, or the role of environmental effects. Thus, haloes that are "too big to fail", do not fail LCDM, but haloes that are "too small to pass" (the galaxy formation threshold) provide a future test of LCDM.

astro-ph.GA↗

arXiv2015

The Plasma Simulation Code: A modern particle-in-cell code with load-balancing and GPU support

Recent increases in supercomputing power, driven by the multi-core revolution and accelerators such as the IBM Cell processor, graphics processing units (GPUs) and Intel's Many Integrated Core (MIC) technology have enabled kinetic simulations of plasmas at unprecedented resolutions, but changing HPC architectures also come with challenges for writing efficient numerical codes. This paper describes the Plasma Simulation Code (PSC), an explicit, electromagnetic particle-in-cell code with support for different order particle shape functions. We focus on two distinguishing feature of the code: patch-based load balancing using space-filling curves, and support for Nvidia GPUs, which achieves substantial speed-up of up to more than 6x on the Cray XK7 architecture compared to a CPU-only implementation.

physics.plasm-ph↗

arXiv2015

The island coalescence problem: scaling of reconnection in extended fluid models including higher-order moments

As modeling of collisionless magnetic reconnection in most space plasmas with realistic parameters is beyond the capability of today's simulations, due to the separation between global and kinetic length scales, it is important to establish scaling relations in model problems so as to extrapolate to realistic scales. Recently, large scale particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations of island coalescence have shown that the time averaged reconnection rate decreases with system size, while fluid systems at such large scales in the Hall regime have not been studied. Here we perform the complementary resistive MHD, Hall MHD and two fluid simulations using a ten-moment model with the same geometry. In contrast to the standard Harris sheet reconnection problem, Hall MHD is insufficient to capture the physics of the reconnection region. Additionally, motivated by the results of a recent set of hybrid simulations which show the importance of ion kinetics in this geometry, we evaluate the efficacy of the ten-moment model in reproducing such results.

physics.plasm-ph↗

arXiv2015

NIHAO project I: Reproducing the inefficiency of galaxy formation across cosmic time with a large sample of cosmological hydrodynamical simulations

We introduce project NIHAO (Numerical Investigation of a Hundred Astrophysical Objects), a set of 100 cosmological zoom-in hydrodynamical simulations performed using the gasoline code, with an improved implementation of the SPH algorithm. The haloes in our study range from dwarf to Milky Way masses, and represent an unbiased sampling of merger histories, concentrations and spin parameters. The particle masses and force softenings are chosen to resolve the mass profile to below 1% of the virial radius at all masses, ensuring that galaxy half-light radii are well resolved. Using the same treatment of star formation and stellar feedback for every object, the simulated galaxies reproduce the observed inefficiency of galaxy formation across cosmic time as expressed through the stellar mass vs halo mass relation, and the star formation rate vs stellar mass relation. We thus conclude that stellar feedback is the chief piece of physics required to limit the efficiency of star formation in galaxies less massive than the Milky Way.

astro-ph.GA↗

arXiv2015

Palladium and silver abundances in stars with [Fe/H] > -2.6

Palladium (Pd) and silver (Ag) are the key elements for probing the weak component in the rapid neutron-capture process (r-process) of stellar nucleosynthesis. We performed a detailed analysis of the high-resolution and high signal-to-noise ratio near-UV spectra from the archive of HIRES on the Keck telescope, UVES on the VLT, and HDS on the Subaru Telescope, to determine the Pd and Ag abundances of 95 stars. This sample covers a wide metallicity range with -2.6 $\lesssim$ [Fe/H] $\lesssim$ +0.1, and most of them are dwarfs. The plane-parallel LTE MAFAGS-OS model atmosphere was adopted, and the spectral synthesis method was used to derive the Pd and Ag abundances from Pd I λ 3404 Å and Ag I λ 3280/3382 Å lines. We found that both elements are enhanced in metal-poor stars, and their ratios to iron show flat trends at -0.6 < [Fe/H] < +0.1. The abundance ratios of [Ag/H] and [Pd/H] are well correlated over the whole abundance range. This implies that Pd and Ag have similar formation mechanisms during the Galactic evolution.

astro-ph.SR↗

arXiv2015

A modified lattice Bhatnagar-Gross-Krook model for convection heat transfer in porous media

The lattice Bhatnagar-Gross-Krook (LBGK) model has become the most popular one in the lattice Boltzmann method for simulating the convection heat transfer in porous media. However, the LBGK model generally suffers from numerical instability at low fluid viscosities and effective thermal diffusivities. In this paper, a modified LBGK model is developed for incompressible thermal flows in porous media at the representative elementary volume scale, in which the shear rate and temperature gradient are incorporated into the equilibrium distribution functions. With two additional parameters, the relaxation times in the collision process can be fixed at a proper value invariable to the viscosity and the effective thermal diffusivity. In addition, by constructing a modified equilibrium distribution function and a source term in the evolution equation of temperature field, the present model can recover the macroscopic equations correctly through the Chapman-Enskog analysis, which is another key point different from previous LBGK models. Several benchmark problems are simulated to validate the present model with the proposed local computing scheme for the shear rate and temperature gradient, and the numerical results agree well with analytical solutions and/or those well-documented data in previous studies. It is also shown that the present model and the computational schemes for the gradient operators have a second-order accuracy in space, and better numerical stability of the present modified LBGK model than previous LBGK models is demonstrated.

physics.comp-ph↗

arXiv2015

Asteroseismic based estimation of the surface gravity for the LAMOST giant stars

Asteroseismology is one of the most accurate approaches to estimate the surface gravity of a star. However, most of the data from the current spectroscopic surveys do not have asteroseismic measurements, which is very expensive and time consuming. In order to improve the spectroscopic surface gravity estimates for a large amount of survey data with the help of the small subset of the data with seismic measurements, we set up a support vector regression model for the estimation of the surface gravity supervised by 1,374 LAMOST giant stars with Kepler seismic surface gravity. The new approach can reduce the uncertainty of the estimates down to about 0.1 dex, which is better than the LAMOST pipeline by at least a factor of 2, for the spectra with signal-to-noise ratio higher than 20. Compared with the logg estimated from the LAMOST pipeline, the revised logg values provide a significantly improved match to the expected distribution of red clump and RGB stars from stellar isochrones. Moreover, even the red bump stars, which extend to only about 0.1 dex in logg, can be discriminated from the new estimated surface gravity. The method is then applied to about 350,000 LAMOST metal-rich giant stars to provide improved surface gravity estimates. In general, the uncertainty of the distance estimate based on the SVR surface gravity can be reduced to about 12% for the LAMOST data.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2015

Deep Semantic Ranking Based Hashing for Multi-Label Image Retrieval

With the rapid growth of web images, hashing has received increasing interests in large scale image retrieval. Research efforts have been devoted to learning compact binary codes that preserve semantic similarity based on labels. However, most of these hashing methods are designed to handle simple binary similarity. The complex multilevel semantic structure of images associated with multiple labels have not yet been well explored. Here we propose a deep semantic ranking based method for learning hash functions that preserve multilevel semantic similarity between multi-label images. In our approach, deep convolutional neural network is incorporated into hash functions to jointly learn feature representations and mappings from them to hash codes, which avoids the limitation of semantic representation power of hand-crafted features. Meanwhile, a ranking list that encodes the multilevel similarity information is employed to guide the learning of such deep hash functions. An effective scheme based on surrogate loss is used to solve the intractable optimization problem of nonsmooth and multivariate ranking measures involved in the learning procedure. Experimental results show the superiority of our proposed approach over several state-of-the-art hashing methods in term of ranking evaluation metrics when tested on multi-label image datasets.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2015

Spectroscopic analysis of metal-poor stars from LAMOST: early results

We report on early results from a pilot program searching for metal-poor stars with LAMOST and follow-up high-resolution observation acquired with the MIKE spectrograph attached to the Magellan~II telescope. We performed detailed abundance analysis for eight objects with iron abundances [Fe/H] < -2.0, including five extremely metal-poor (EMP; [Fe/H] < -3.0) stars with two having [Fe/H] < -3.5. Among these objects, three are newly discovered EMP stars, one of which is confirmed for the first time with high-resolution spectral observations. Three program stars are regarded as carbon-enhanced metal-poor (CEMP) stars, including two stars with no enhancement in their neutron-capture elements, which thus possibly belong to the class of CEMP-no stars; one of these objects also exhibits significant enhancement in nitrogen, and is thus a potential carbon and nitrogen-enhanced metal-poor star. The [X/Fe] ratios of the sample stars generally agree with those reported in the literature for other metal-poor stars in the same [Fe/H] range. We also compared the abundance patterns of individual program stars with the average abundance pattern of metal-poor stars, and find only one chemically peculiar object with abundances of at least two elements (other than C and N) showing deviations larger than 0.5dex. The distribution of [Sr/Ba] versus [Ba/H] agrees that an additional nucleosynthesis mechanism is needed aside from a single r-process. Two program stars with extremely low abundances of Sr and Ba support the prospect that both main and weak r-process may have operated during the early phase of Galactic chemical evolution. The distribution of [C/N] shows that there are two groups of carbon-normal giants with different degrees of mixing. However, it is difficult to explain the observed behavior of the [C/N] of the nitrogen-enhanced unevolved stars based on current data.

astro-ph.SR↗

arXiv2014

The Pan-Pacific Planet Search. II. Confirmation of a two-planet system around HD 121056

Precise radial velocities from the Anglo-Australian Telescope confirm the presence of a rare short-period planet around the K0 giant HD 121056. An independent two-planet solution using the AAT data shows that the inner planet has P=89.1+/-0.1 days, and m sin i=1.35+/-0.17 Mjup. These data also confirm the planetary nature of the outer companion, with m sin i=3.9+/-0.6 Mjup and a=2.96+/-0.16 AU. HD 121056 is the most-evolved star to host a confirmed multiple-planet system, and is a valuable example of a giant star hosting both a short-period and a long-period planet.

astro-ph.EP↗

arXiv2014

Renewable Energy-Aware Information-Centric Networking

The ICT industry today is placed as one of the major consumers of energy, where recent reports have also shown that the industry is a major contributor to global carbon emissions. While renewable energy-aware data centers have been proposed, these solutions have certain limitations. The primary limitation is due to the design of data centers which focus on large-size facilities located in selected locations. This paper addresses this problem, by utilizing in-network caching with each router having storage and being powered by renewable energy sources (wind and solar). Besides placing contents closer to end users, utilizing in-network caching could potentially increase probability of capturing renewable energy in diverse geographical locations. Our proposed solution is dual- layered: on the first layer a distributed gradient-based routing protocol is used to discover the paths along routers that are powered by the highest renewable energy, and on the second layer, a caching mechanism will pull the contents from the data centre and place them on routers of the paths that are discovered by our routing protocol. Through our experiments on a testbed utilizing real meteorological data, our proposed solution has demonstrated increased quantity of renewable energy consumption, while reducing the workload on the data centers.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2014

Inference on the Network Evolution in BitTorrent Mainline DHT

Network size is a fundamental statistic for a peer-to-peer system but is generally considered to contain too little information to be useful. However, most existing work only considers the metric by itself and does not explore what features could be extracted from this seem- ingly trivial metric. In this paper, we show that Fourier transform allows us to extract frequency features from such time series data, which can further be used to characterize user behaviors and detect system anoma- lies in a peer-to-peer system automatically without needing to resort to visual comparisons. By using the proposed algorithm, our system suc- cessfully discovers and clusters countries of similar user behavior and captures the anomalies like Sybil attacks and other real-world events with high accuracy. Our work in this paper highlights the usefulness of more advanced time series processing techniques in analyzing network measurements.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2014

Cross-Modal Learning via Pairwise Constraints

In multimedia applications, the text and image components in a web document form a pairwise constraint that potentially indicates the same semantic concept. This paper studies cross-modal learning via the pairwise constraint, and aims to find the common structure hidden in different modalities. We first propose a compound regularization framework to deal with the pairwise constraint, which can be used as a general platform for developing cross-modal algorithms. For unsupervised learning, we propose a cross-modal subspace clustering method to learn a common structure for different modalities. For supervised learning, to reduce the semantic gap and the outliers in pairwise constraints, we propose a cross-modal matching method based on compound ?21 regularization along with an iteratively reweighted algorithm to find the global optimum. Extensive experiments demonstrate the benefits of joint text and image modeling with semantically induced pairwise constraints, and show that the proposed cross-modal methods can further reduce the semantic gap between different modalities and improve the clustering/retrieval accuracy.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2014

Comparison of multi-fluid moment models with Particle-in-Cell simulations of collisionless magnetic reconnection

We introduce an extensible multi-fluid moment model in the context of collisionless magnetic reconnection. This model evolves full Maxwell equations, and simultaneously moments of the Vlasov-Maxwell equation for each species in the plasma. Effects like electron inertia and pressure gradient are self-consistently embedded in the resulting multi-fluid moment equations, without the need to explicitly solving a generalized Ohms's law. Two limits of the multi-fluid moment model are discussed, namely, the five-moment limit that evolves a scalar pressures for each species, and the ten-moment limit that evolves the full anisotropic, non-gyrotropic pressure tensor for each species. We first demonstrate, analytically and numerically, that the five-moment model reduces to the widely used Hall Magnetohydrodynamics (Hall MHD) model under the assumptions of vanishing electron inertia, infinite speed of light, and quasi-neutrality. Then, we compare ten-moment and fully kinetic Particle-In-Cell (PIC) simulations of a large scale Harris sheet reconnection problem, where the ten-moment equations are closed with a local linear collisionless approximation for the heat flux. The ten-moment simulation gives reasonable agreement with the PIC results regarding the structures and magnitudes of the electron flows, the polarities and magnitudes of elements of the electron pressure tensor, and the decomposition of the generalized Ohm's law. Possible ways to improve the simple local closure towards a nonlocal fully three-dimensional closure are also discussed.

physics.plasm-ph↗

arXiv2014

A Long-period Eccentric Substellar Companion to the Evovled Intermediate-Mass Star HD 14067

We report the detection of a substellar companion orbiting an evolved intermediate-mass ($M_\star=2.4\,M_\odot$) star HD 14067 (G9 III) using precise Doppler technique. Radial velocities of this star can be well fitted either by a periodic Keplerian variation with a decreasing linear velocity trend (P=1455 days, $K_1=92.2$ m s$^{-1}$, $e=0.533$, and $\dotγ=-22.4$ m s$^{-1}$ yr$^{-1}$) or a single Keplerian orbit without linear trend (P=2850 days, $K_1=100.1$ m s$^{-1}$, and $e=0.697$). The minimum mass ($m_2\sin{i}=7.8\,M_{\rm J}$ for the model with a linear trend, or $m_2\sin{i}=9.0\,M_{\rm J}$ for the model without a linear trend) suggests a long-period giant planet around an evolved intermediate-mass star. The eccentricity of the orbit is among the highest known for planets ever detected around evolved stars.

astro-ph.SR↗

arXiv2014

High resolution transmission spectrum of the Earth's atmosphere -- Seeing Earth as an exoplanet using a lunar eclipse

With the rapid developments in the exoplanet field, more and more terrestrial exoplanets are being detected. Characterising their atmospheres using transit observations will become a key datum in the quest for detecting an Earth-like exoplanet. The atmospheric transmission spectrum of our Earth will be an ideal template for comparison with future exo-Earth candidates. By observing a lunar eclipse, which offers a similar configuration to that of an exoplanet transit, we have obtained a high resolution and high signal-to-noise ratio transmission spectrum of the Earth's atmosphere. This observation was performed with the High Resolution Spectrograph at Xinglong Station, China during the total lunar eclipse in December 2011. We compare the observed transmission spectrum with our atmospheric model, and determine the characteristics of the various atmospheric species in detail. In the transmission spectrum, O2, O3, O2-O2, NO2 and H2O are detected, and their column densities are measured and compared with the satellites data. The visible Chappuis band of ozone produces the most prominent absorption feature, which suggests that ozone is a promising molecule for the future exo-Earth characterization. The individual O2 lines are resolved and O2 isotopes are clearly detected. Our new observations do not confirm the absorption features of Ca II or Na I which have been reported in previous lunar eclipse observations. However, features in these and some other strong Fraunhofer line positions do occur in the observed spectrum. We propose that these are due to a Raman-scattered component in the forward-scattered sunlight appearing in the lunar umbral spectrum. Water vapour absorption is found to be rather weak in our spectrum because the atmosphere we probed is relatively dry, which prompts us to discuss the detectability of water vapour in Earth-like exoplanet atmospheres.

astro-ph.EP↗

arXiv2014

Volume-averaged macroscopic equation for fluid flow in moving porous media

Darcy's law and the Brinkman equation are two main models used for creeping fluid flows inside moving permeable particles. For these two models, the time derivative and the nonlinear convective terms of fluid velocity are neglected in the momentum equation. In this paper, a new momentum equation including these two terms are rigorously derived from the pore-scale microscopic equations by the volume-averaging method, which can reduces to Darcy's law and the Brinkman equation under creeping flow conditions. Using the lattice Boltzmann equation method, the macroscopic equations are solved for the problem of a porous circular cylinder moving along the centerline of a channel. Galilean invariance of the equations are investigated both with the intrinsic phase averaged velocity and the phase averaged velocity. The results demonstrate that the commonly used phase averaged velocity cannot serve as the superficial velocity, while the intrinsic phase averaged velocity should be chosen for porous particulate systems.

physics.comp-ph↗

arXiv2014

Cold stream stability during minor mergers

We use high-resolution Eulerian simulations to study the stability of cold gas flows in a galaxy size dark matter halo (10^12 Msun) at redshift z=2. Our simulations show that a cold stream penetrating a hot gaseous halo is stable against thermal convection and Kelvin-Helmholtz instability. We then investigate the effect of a satellite orbiting the main halo in the plane of the stream. The satellite is able to perturb the stream and to inhibit cold gas accretion towards the center of the halo for 0.5 Gyr. However, if the supply of cold gas at large distances is kept constant, the cold stream is able to re-establish itself after 0.3 Gyr. We conclude that cold streams are very stable against a large variety of internal and external perturbations.

astro-ph.GA↗