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Jun 8

Low-energy Injection and Nonthermal Particle Acceleration in Relativistic Magnetic Turbulence

Relativistic magnetic turbulence has been proposed as a process for producing nonthermal particles in high-energy astrophysics. Particle energization may be contributed by both magnetic reconnection and turbulent fluctuations, but their interplay is poorly understood. It has been suggested that during magnetic reconnection the parallel electric field dominates particle acceleration up to the lower bound of the power-law particle spectrum, but recent studies show that electric fields perpendicular to magnetic field can play an important, if not dominant role. In this study, we carry out 2D fully kinetic particle-in-cell simulations of magnetically dominated decaying turbulence in a relativistic pair plasma. For a fixed magnetization parameter sigma_0=20, we find that the injection energy {varepsilon}_{rm inj} converges with increasing domain size to {varepsilon}_{rm inj}simeq 10m_ec^2. In contrast, the power-law index, the cut-off energy, and the power-law extent increase steadily with domain size. We trace a large number of particles and evaluate the contributions of the work done by the parallel (W_parallel) and perpendicular (W_perp) electric fields during both the injection phase and the post-injection phase. We find that during the injection phase, the W_perp contribution increases with domain size, suggesting that it may eventually dominate injection for a sufficiently large domain. In contrast, both components contribute equally during the post-injection phase, insensitive to the domain size. For high energy ({varepsilon}varepsilon_{rm inj}) particles, W_perp dominates the subsequent energization. These findings may improve our understanding of nonthermal particles and their emissions in astrophysical plasmas.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 29, 2024

Bell Instability and Cosmic-Ray Acceleration in AGN Ultrafast Outflow Shocks

We investigate magnetic-field amplification driven by the nonresonant hybrid (NRH or Bell) instability and its impact on cosmic-ray (CR) acceleration at reverse shocks of ultrafast outflows (UFOs) from active galactic nuclei (AGN). Previous kinetic studies by particle-in-cell simulations have demonstrated that when maximum CR energy is near the injection scale, NRH instability efficiently amplifies magnetic field up to the saturation level. However, the efficiency of NRH instability goes down as maximum energy increase since CR current is carried by escaping CRs near the maximum energy. We employ a one-dimensional MHD--CR framework solving telegraph-type diffusion--convection equations to trace the coupled evolution of CRs, magnetic fields, and shock dynamics under realistic parameters. We find a distinct transition with magnetic field strength: for weak background fields (B_{0}!lesssim!10^{-4},G), NRH instability efficiently amplifies upstream turbulence, driving a self-regulated state where E_{max} becomes independent of initial strength of magnetic turbulence. In contrast, for stronger background fields (B_{0}!gtrsim!10^{-3},G), the escaping CR current is too weak to drive NRH instability, and magnetic turbulence further decays through parametric instabilities, potentially reducing the acceleration efficiency. We give the physical interpretation for the transition and discuss conditions for PeV--EeV acceleration at UFO reverse shocks.

  • 2 authors
·
Oct 15, 2025

Modeling transport in weakly collisional plasmas using thermodynamic forcing

How momentum, energy, and magnetic fields are transported in the presence of macroscopic gradients is a fundamental question in plasma physics. Answering this question is especially challenging for weakly collisional, magnetized plasmas, where macroscopic gradients influence the plasma's microphysical structure. In this paper, we introduce thermodynamic forcing, a new method for systematically modeling how macroscopic gradients in magnetized or unmagnetized plasmas shape the distribution functions of constituent particles. In this method, we propose to apply an anomalous force to those particles inducing the anisotropy that would naturally emerge due to macroscopic gradients in weakly collisional plasmas. We implement thermodynamic forcing in particle-in-cell (TF-PIC) simulations using a modified Vay particle pusher and validate it against analytic solutions of the equations of motion. We then carry out a series of simulations of electron-proton plasmas with periodic boundary conditions using TF-PIC. First, we confirm that the properties of two electron-scale kinetic instabilities -- one driven by a temperature gradient and the other by pressure anisotropy -- are consistent with previous results. Then, we demonstrate that in the presence of multiple macroscopic gradients, the saturated state can differ significantly from current expectations. This work enables, for the first time, systematic and self-consistent transport modeling in weakly collisional plasmas, with broad applications in astrophysics, laser-plasma physics, and inertial confinement fusion.

  • 2 authors
·
Apr 18, 2025

GPU Acceleration and Portability of the TRIMEG Code for Gyrokinetic Plasma Simulations using OpenMP

The field of plasma physics heavily relies on simulations to model various phenomena, such as instabilities, turbulence, and nonlinear behaviors that would otherwise be difficult to study from a purely theoretical approach. Simulations are fundamental in accurately setting up experiments, which can be extremely costly and complex. As high-fidelity tools, gyrokinetic simulations play a crucial role in discovering new physics, interpreting experimental results, and improving the design of next-generation devices. However, their high computational costs necessitate the use of acceleration platforms to reduce execution time. This work revolves around the TRIangular MEsh based Gyrokinetic (TRIMEG) code, which performs high-accuracy particle-in-cell plasma simulations in tokamak geometries, leveraging a novel finite element approach. The rise of graphical processing units (GPUs) constitutes an occasion to satisfy such computational needs, by offloading the most expensive portion of the code to the accelerators. The chosen approach features GPU offloading with the OpenMP API, which grants portability of the code to different architectures, namely AMD and NVIDIA. The particle pushing as well as the grid-to-particle operations have been ported to GPU platforms. Compiler limitations had to be overcome, and portions of the code were restructured to be suitable for GPU acceleration. Kernel performance was evaluated by carrying out GPU grid size exploration, as well as scalability studies. In addition, the efficiency of hybrid MPI-OpenMP offloading parallelization was assessed. The speedup of the GPU implementation was calculated by comparing it with the pure CPU version using different rationales. The Ion Temperature Gradient (ITG) mode was simulated using the GPU-accelerated version, and its correctness was verified in terms of the energy growth rate and the two-dimensional mode structures.

  • 1 authors
·
Jan 17 1

Nonequilibrium Phenomena in Driven and Active Coulomb Field Theories

The classical Coulomb gas model has served as one of the most versatile frameworks in statistical physics, connecting a vast range of phenomena across many different areas. Nonequilibrium generalisations of this model have so far been studied much more scarcely. With the abundance of contemporary research into active and driven systems, one would naturally expect that such generalisations of systems with long-ranged Coulomb-like interactions will form a fertile playground for interesting developments. Here, we present two examples of novel macroscopic behaviour that arise from nonequilibrium fluctuations in long-range interacting systems, namely (1) unscreened long-ranged correlations in strong electrolytes driven by an external electric field and the associated fluctuation-induced forces in the confined Casimir geometry, and (2) out-of-equilibrium critical behaviour in self-chemotactic models that incorporate the particle polarity in the chemotactic response of the cells. Both of these systems have nonlocal Coulomb-like interactions among their constituent particles, namely, the electrostatic interactions in the case of the driven electrolyte, and the chemotactic forces mediated by fast-diffusing signals in the case of self-chemotactic systems. The results presented here hint to the rich phenomenology of nonequilibrium effects that can arise from strong fluctuations in Coulomb interacting systems, and a rich variety of potential future directions, which are discussed.

  • 2 authors
·
Jul 1, 2022

Mitigating Premature Exploitation in Particle-based Monte Carlo for Inference-Time Scaling

Inference-Time Scaling (ITS) improves language models by allocating more computation at generation time. Particle Filtering (PF) has emerged as a strong ITS method for complex mathematical reasoning tasks, but it is vulnerable when guided by process reward models, which often assign overconfident scores early in the reasoning process. This causes PF to suffer from premature exploitation: it myopically commits to locally promising trajectories, prunes potentially correct hypotheses, and converges to suboptimal solutions. This failure mode, known as particle impoverishment, is especially severe under constrained computational budgets. To address this, we analyze the problem and identify two root causes: a lack of diversity in the particle set due to overconfident resampling and consequent inability to assess the potential of a reasoning path. We introduce Entropic Particle Filtering (ePF), an algorithm that integrates two new techniques to solve these issues. The first technique, Entropic Annealing (EA), directly mitigates particle impoverishment by monitoring search diversity via entropy; when diversity drops, it intervenes by dynamically annealing the resampling distribution to preserve exploration. The second, an enhancement called Look-ahead Modulation (LaM), adds a predictive guide to evaluate a state's potential based on its successors. On several challenging math benchmarks, ePF significantly outperforms strong baselines and achieves up to a 50 % relative improvement in task reward. Together, these methods improve PF's resilience by balancing the exploration of diverse solution spaces with the exploitation of high-reward regions, ultimately leading to higher-quality solutions.

  • 7 authors
·
Oct 7, 2025

Particle contact dynamics as the origin for non-integer power expansion rheology in attractive suspension networks

We show that Hertzian particle contacts are the underlying cause of the as-yet-unexplained noninteger power laws in weakly nonlinear rheology. In the medium amplitude oscillatory shear (MAOS) region, the cubic scaling of the leading order nonlinear shear stress (σ_3 sim γ_0^{m_3}, m_3=3) is the standard expectation. Expanding on the work by Natalia et al. [J. Rheol. 64 625-635 (2020)], we report an extensive data set of noncubical, noninteger power law scalings m_3 for particle suspensions in two immiscible fluids with a capillary attractive interaction, known as capillary suspensions. Here, we show that distinct power law exponents are found for the storage and loss moduli and these noninteger scalings occur at every secondary fluid concentration for two different contact angles. These compelling results indicate that the noninteger scalings are related to the underlying microstructure of capillary suspensions. We show that the magnitude of the third harmonic elastic stress scaling m_3,elastic originates from Hertzian-like contacts in combination with the attractive capillary force. The related third harmonic viscous stress scaling m_3,viscous is, found to be associated with adhesive-controlled friction. These observations, conducted for a wide range of compositions, can help explain previous reports of noninteger scaling for materials involving particle contacts and offers a new opportunity using the variable power law exponent of MAOS rheology to reveal the physics of particle bonds and friction in the rheological response under low deformation instead of at very high shear rates.

  • 3 authors
·
Nov 11, 2021

Weyl, Dirac and high-fold chiral fermions in topological quantum materials

Quantum materials hosting Weyl fermions have opened a new era of research in condensed matter physics. First proposed in 1929 in particle physics, Weyl fermions have yet to be observed as elementary particles. In 2015, Weyl fermions were detected as collective electronic excitations in the strong spin-orbit coupled material tantalum arsenide, TaAs. This discovery was followed by a flurry of experimental and theoretical explorations of Weyl phenomena in materials. Weyl materials naturally lend themselves to the exploration of the topological index associated with Weyl fermions and their divergent Berry curvature field, as well as the topological bulk-boundary correspondence giving rise to protected conducting surface states. Here, we review the broader class of Weyl topological phenomena in materials, starting with the observation of emergent Weyl fermions in the bulk and of Fermi arc states on the surface of the TaAs family of crystals by photoemission spectroscopy. We then discuss some of the exotic optical and magnetic responses observed in these materials, as well as the progress in developing some of the related chiral materials. We discuss the conceptual development of high-fold chiral fermions, which generalize Weyl fermions, and we review the observation of high-fold chiral fermion phases by taking the rhodium silicide, RhSi, family of crystals as a prime example. Lastly, we discuss recent advances in Weyl-line phases in magnetic topological materials. With this Review, we aim to provide an introduction to the basic concepts underlying Weyl physics in condensed matter, and to representative materials and their electronic structures and topology as revealed by spectroscopic studies. We hope this work serves as a guide for future theoretical and experimental explorations of chiral fermions and related topological quantum systems with potentially enhanced functionalities.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 2, 2021

Multiplicity dependence of (multi)strange hadrons in oxygen-oxygen collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\mathrm{NN}}}~=~7$ TeV using EPOS4 and AMPT

It is anticipated that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will collect data from oxygen-oxygen (O+O) collisions at a center-of-mass energy of s_{mathrm{NN}} = 7 TeV to explore the effects observed in high multiplicity proton-proton (p+p) and proton-lead (p+pb) collisions that closely related to lead-lead (Pb+Pb) collisions. These effects include azimuthal asymmetries in particle production, as well as variations in the abundances and momentum distributions across different hadron species, which are indicative of collective particle production mechanisms induced by the interactions in the presence of a QGP. The upcoming data on O+O collisions at the LHC are expected to constrain the model parameters and refine our understanding of theoretical models. In this work, the predicted transverse momentum (p_T) spectra, rapidity density distributions (dN/dy), particle yield ratios, and p_T-differential ratios of (multi)strange hadrons produced in O+O collisions at s_{mathrm{NN}} = 7 TeV using AMPT and EPOS4 models are presented. AMPT focuses on preformed hadronic interactions, while EPOS4 incorporates a QGP phase. Stronger radial flow in EPOS4 as compared to AMPT is also observed. AMPT incorporates some flow effects, but the implementation of full hydrodynamic flow in EPOS4 appears to be significantly more effective in reproducing the existing experimental data. Both models predict the final state multiplicity overlap with p+p, p+pb, and Pb+Pb collisions.

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 22, 2025

Power-SMC: Low-Latency Sequence-Level Power Sampling for Training-Free LLM Reasoning

Many recent reasoning gains in large language models can be explained as distribution sharpening: biasing generation toward high-likelihood trajectories already supported by the pretrained model, rather than modifying its weights. A natural formalization is the sequence-level power distribution π_α(ymid x)propto p_θ(ymid x)^α (α>1), which concentrates mass on whole sequences instead of adjusting token-level temperature. Prior work shows that Metropolis--Hastings (MH) sampling from this distribution recovers strong reasoning performance, but at order-of-magnitude inference slowdowns. We introduce Power-SMC, a training-free Sequential Monte Carlo scheme that targets the same objective while remaining close to standard decoding latency. Power-SMC advances a small particle set in parallel, corrects importance weights token-by-token, and resamples when necessary, all within a single GPU-friendly batched decode. We prove that temperature τ=1/α is the unique prefix-only proposal minimizing incremental weight variance, interpret residual instability via prefix-conditioned Rényi entropies, and introduce an exponent-bridging schedule that improves particle stability without altering the target. On MATH500, Power-SMC matches or exceeds MH power sampling while reducing latency from 16--28times to 1.4--3.3times over baseline decoding. The code is available at https://github.com/ArminAzizi98/Power-SMC.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 22

Synthetic Lagrangian Turbulence by Generative Diffusion Models

Lagrangian turbulence lies at the core of numerous applied and fundamental problems related to the physics of dispersion and mixing in engineering, bio-fluids, atmosphere, oceans, and astrophysics. Despite exceptional theoretical, numerical, and experimental efforts conducted over the past thirty years, no existing models are capable of faithfully reproducing statistical and topological properties exhibited by particle trajectories in turbulence. We propose a machine learning approach, based on a state-of-the-art diffusion model, to generate single-particle trajectories in three-dimensional turbulence at high Reynolds numbers, thereby bypassing the need for direct numerical simulations or experiments to obtain reliable Lagrangian data. Our model demonstrates the ability to reproduce most statistical benchmarks across time scales, including the fat-tail distribution for velocity increments, the anomalous power law, and the increased intermittency around the dissipative scale. Slight deviations are observed below the dissipative scale, particularly in the acceleration and flatness statistics. Surprisingly, the model exhibits strong generalizability for extreme events, producing events of higher intensity and rarity that still match the realistic statistics. This paves the way for producing synthetic high-quality datasets for pre-training various downstream applications of Lagrangian turbulence.

  • 5 authors
·
Apr 27, 2024

Lorentz-Equivariant Quantum Graph Neural Network for High-Energy Physics

The rapid data surge from the high-luminosity Large Hadron Collider introduces critical computational challenges requiring novel approaches for efficient data processing in particle physics. Quantum machine learning, with its capability to leverage the extensive Hilbert space of quantum hardware, offers a promising solution. However, current quantum graph neural networks (GNNs) lack robustness to noise and are often constrained by fixed symmetry groups, limiting adaptability in complex particle interaction modeling. This paper demonstrates that replacing the Lorentz Group Equivariant Block modules in LorentzNet with a dressed quantum circuit significantly enhances performance despite using nearly 5.5 times fewer parameters. Additionally, quantum circuits effectively replace MLPs by inherently preserving symmetries, with Lorentz symmetry integration ensuring robust handling of relativistic invariance. Our Lorentz-Equivariant Quantum Graph Neural Network (Lorentz-EQGNN) achieved 74.00% test accuracy and an AUC of 87.38% on the Quark-Gluon jet tagging dataset, outperforming the classical and quantum GNNs with a reduced architecture using only 4 qubits. On the Electron-Photon dataset, Lorentz-EQGNN reached 67.00% test accuracy and an AUC of 68.20%, demonstrating competitive results with just 800 training samples. Evaluation of our model on generic MNIST and FashionMNIST datasets confirmed Lorentz-EQGNN's efficiency, achieving 88.10% and 74.80% test accuracy, respectively. Ablation studies validated the impact of quantum components on performance, with notable improvements in background rejection rates over classical counterparts. These results highlight Lorentz-EQGNN's potential for immediate applications in noise-resilient jet tagging, event classification, and broader data-scarce HEP tasks.

  • 5 authors
·
Nov 3, 2024

Training-free CryoET Tomogram Segmentation

Cryogenic Electron Tomography (CryoET) is a useful imaging technology in structural biology that is hindered by its need for manual annotations, especially in particle picking. Recent works have endeavored to remedy this issue with few-shot learning or contrastive learning techniques. However, supervised training is still inevitable for them. We instead choose to leverage the power of existing 2D foundation models and present a novel, training-free framework, CryoSAM. In addition to prompt-based single-particle instance segmentation, our approach can automatically search for similar features, facilitating full tomogram semantic segmentation with only one prompt. CryoSAM is composed of two major parts: 1) a prompt-based 3D segmentation system that uses prompts to complete single-particle instance segmentation recursively with Cross-Plane Self-Prompting, and 2) a Hierarchical Feature Matching mechanism that efficiently matches relevant features with extracted tomogram features. They collaborate to enable the segmentation of all particles of one category with just one particle-specific prompt. Our experiments show that CryoSAM outperforms existing works by a significant margin and requires even fewer annotations in particle picking. Further visualizations demonstrate its ability when dealing with full tomogram segmentation for various subcellular structures. Our code is available at: https://github.com/xulabs/aitom

  • 8 authors
·
Jul 7, 2024

Inference-Time Scaling for Flow Models via Stochastic Generation and Rollover Budget Forcing

We propose an inference-time scaling approach for pretrained flow models. Recently, inference-time scaling has gained significant attention in LLMs and diffusion models, improving sample quality or better aligning outputs with user preferences by leveraging additional computation. For diffusion models, particle sampling has allowed more efficient scaling due to the stochasticity at intermediate denoising steps. On the contrary, while flow models have gained popularity as an alternative to diffusion models--offering faster generation and high-quality outputs in state-of-the-art image and video generative models--efficient inference-time scaling methods used for diffusion models cannot be directly applied due to their deterministic generative process. To enable efficient inference-time scaling for flow models, we propose three key ideas: 1) SDE-based generation, enabling particle sampling in flow models, 2) Interpolant conversion, broadening the search space and enhancing sample diversity, and 3) Rollover Budget Forcing (RBF), an adaptive allocation of computational resources across timesteps to maximize budget utilization. Our experiments show that SDE-based generation, particularly variance-preserving (VP) interpolant-based generation, improves the performance of particle sampling methods for inference-time scaling in flow models. Additionally, we demonstrate that RBF with VP-SDE achieves the best performance, outperforming all previous inference-time scaling approaches.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 25, 2025 4