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At least 199 records · Page 11

Stochastic and mixed density functional theory within the projector augmented wave formalism for simulation of warm dense matter

Stochastic density functional theory (DFT) and mixed stochastic-deterministic DFT are burgeoning approaches for the calculation of the equation of state and transport properties in materials under extreme conditions. In the intermediate warm dense matter regime, a state between correlated condensed matter and kinetic plasma, electrons can range from being highly localized around nuclei to delocalized over the whole simulation cell. The plane-wave basis pseudopotential approach is thus the typical tool of choice for modeling such systems at the DFT level. Unfortunately, stochastic DFT methods scale as the square of the maximum plane-wave energy in this basis. To reduce the effect of this scaling and improve the overall description of the electrons within the pseudopotential approximation, we present stochastic and mixed DFT approaches developed and implemented within the projector augmented wave formalism. In conclusion, we compare results between the different DFT approaches for both single-point and molecular dynamics trajectories and present calculations of self-diffusion coefficients of solid density carbon from 1 to 50 eV.

75 CONDENSED MATTER PHYSICS, SUPERCONDUCTIVITY AND↗

Simulation of the Solar Energetic Particle Event on 2020 May 29 Observed by Parker Solar Probe

This paper presents a stochastic three-dimensional focused transport simulation of solar energetic particles (SEPs) produced by a data-driven coronal mass ejection (CME) shock propagating through a data-driven model of coronal and heliospheric magnetic fields. The injection of SEPs at the CME shock is treated using diffusive shock acceleration of post-shock suprathermal solar wind ions. A time-backward stochastic simulation is employed to solve the transport equation to obtain the SEP time–intensity profile at any location, energy, and pitch angle. The model is applied to a SEP event on 2020 May 29, observed by STEREO-A close to ∼1 au and by Parker Solar Probe (PSP) when it was about 0.33 au away from the Sun. The SEP event was associated with a very slow CME with a plane-of-sky speed of 337 km s −1 at a height below 6 RS as reported in the SOHO/LASCO CME catalog. We compute the time profiles of particle flux at PSP and STEREO-A locations, and estimate both the spectral index of the proton energy spectrum for energies between ∼2 and 16 MeV and the equivalent path length of the magnetic field lines experienced by the first arriving SEPs. We find that the simulation results are well correlated with observations. The SEP event could be explained by the acceleration of particles by a weak CME shock in the low solar corona that is not magnetically connected to the observers.

Solar energetic particles↗

Numerical simulations of laser-driven experiments of ion acceleration in stochastic magnetic fields

We present numerical simulations used to interpret laser-driven plasma experiments at the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research. The mechanisms by which non-thermal particles are accelerated in astrophysical environments, e.g., the solar wind, supernova remnants, and gamma ray bursts, is a topic of intense study. When shocks are present, the primary acceleration mechanism is believed to be first-order Fermi, which accelerates particles as they cross a shock. Second-order Fermi acceleration can also contribute, utilizing magnetic mirrors for particle energization. Despite this mechanism being less efficient, the ubiquity of magnetized turbulence in the universe necessitates its consideration. Another acceleration mechanism is the lower-hybrid drift instability, arising from gradients of both density and magnetic field, which produce lower-hybrid waves with an electric field that energizes particles as they cross these waves. With the combination of high-powered laser systems and particle accelerators, it is possible to study the mechanisms behind cosmic-ray acceleration in the laboratory. In this work, we combine experimental results and high-fidelity three-dimensional simulations to estimate the efficiency of ion acceleration in a weakly magnetized interaction region. We validate the FLASH magneto-hydrodynamic code with experimental results and use OSIRIS particle-in-cell code to verify the initial formation of the interaction region, showing good agreement between codes and experimental results. We find that the plasma conditions in the experiment are conducive to the lower-hybrid drift instability, yielding an increase in energy ΔE of ~ 264 keV for 242 MeV calcium ions.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗

Evaluation of a Stochastic Mixing Scheme in the Deep Convective Gray Zone Using a Tropical Oceanic Deep Convection Case Study

Abstract A stochastic horizontal subgrid‐scale mixing scheme is evaluated in ensemble simulations of a tropical oceanic deep convection case using a horizontal grid spacing (Δ h ) of 3 km. The stochastic scheme, which perturbs the horizontal mixing coefficient according to a prescribed spatiotemporal autocorrelation scale, is found to generally increase mesoscale organization and convective intensity relative to a non‐stochastic control simulation. Perturbations applied at relatively short autocorrelation scales induce differences relative to the control that are more systematic than those from perturbations applied at relatively long scales that yield more variable outcomes. A simulation with mixing enhanced by a constant factor of 4 significantly increases mesoscale organization and convective intensity, while turning off horizontal subgrid‐scale mixing decreases both. Total rainfall is modulated by a combination of mesoscale organization, areal coverage of convection, and convective intensity. The stochastic simulations tend to behave more similarly to the constant enhanced mixing simulation owing to greater impacts from enhanced mixing as compared to reduced mixing. The impacts of stochastic mixing are robust, ascertained by comparing the stochastic mixing ensembles with a non‐stochastic mixing ensemble that has grid‐scale noise added to the initial thermodynamic field. Compared to radar observations and a higher resolution Δ h = 1 km simulation, stochastic mixing seemingly degrades the simulation performance. These results imply that stochastic mixing produces non‐negligible impacts on convective system properties and evolution but does not lead to an improved representation of convective cloud characteristics in the case studied here.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Validation of the stochastic inversion algorithm for acoustic travel-time tomography: a large eddy simulation study

Acoustic tomography (AT) is explored as a remote sensing technique to obtain instantaneous snapshots of temperature and velocity fluctuations for wind energy applications. This study integrates Large Eddy Simulation (LES) with the Stochastic Inversion (SI) method to validate the algorithm’s capacity for accurate reconstruction of atmospheric fluctuations. The initial findings demonstrate the efficacy of the method in accurately capturing the predominant flow structures. Normalized L2 error evaluations further inform the algorithm’s precision, with errors accentuated in less sampled peripheral regions. The results underscore the method’s promise as a non-intrusive observational tool, with ongoing development poised to improve its precision and reliability.

17 WIND ENERGY↗

Stochastic Error Cancellation in Analog Quantum Simulation

Analog quantum simulation is a promising path towards solving classically intractable problems in many-body physics on near-term quantum devices. However, the presence of noise limits the size of the system and the length of time that can be simulated. In our work, we consider an error model in which the actual Hamiltonian of the simulator differs from the target Hamiltonian we want to simulate by small local perturbations, which are assumed to be random and unbiased. We analyze the error accumulated in observables in this setting and show that, due to stochastic error cancellation, with high probability the error scales as the square root of the number of qubits instead of linearly. We explore the concentration phenomenon of this error as well as its implications for local observables in the thermodynamic limit. Moreover, we show that stochastic error cancellation also manifests in the fidelity between the target state at the end of time-evolution and the actual state we obtain in the presence of noise. This indicates that, to reach a certain fidelity, more noise can be tolerated than implied by the worst-case bound if the noise comes from many statistically independent sources.

Analog quantum simulation↗

Comparison of effects of copropagated and precomputed atmosphere profiles on Monte Carlo trajectory simulation

A realization of a stochastic atmosphere model for use in simulations is presented. The model provides pressure, density, temperature, and wind velocity as a function of latitude, longitude, and altitude, and is implemented in a three degree of freedom simulation package. This implementation is used in the Monte Carlo simulation of an aeroassisted orbital transfer maneuver and results are compared to those of a more traditional approach.

Queen, Eric M.↗

An empirical analysis of the distribution of overshoots in a stationary Gaussian stochastic process

The frequency distribution of overshoots in a stationary Gaussian stochastic process is analyzed. The primary processes involved in this analysis are computer simulation and statistical estimation. Computer simulation is used to simulate stationary Gaussian stochastic processes that have selected autocorrelation functions. An analysis of the simulation results reveals a frequency distribution for overshoots with a functional dependence on the mean and variance of the process. Statistical estimation is then used to estimate the mean and variance of a process. It is shown that for an autocorrelation function, the mean and the variance for the number of overshoots, a frequency distribution for overshoots can be estimated.

Carter, M. C.↗

Gaussian Process Emulators for Volcanic Ash Dispersion Model Tephra2

It is necessary to predict volcanic ash deposition since falling ash is harmful to human activities. Because simulators built for this purpose are computationally expensive, it is popular to use statistical emulators for geophysical hazard analyses, where a large number of simulations are required. Gaussian stochastic process emulators are able to approximate expensive simulations in an accurate and efficient way. Using a relatively small number of simulation runs, a well-trained emulator can accurately predict simulation outputs at massive new input points in a few seconds. Under different explosive eruption conditions, we constructed Gaussian stochastic process emulators for Tephra2, a simulation tool for estimating the accumulation of volcanic ash over a region. Historical wind records are used as input wind data, without assuming a Gaussian wind speed profile or common wind direction among elevations. While there are several inputs for Tephra2, we use no more than three physically motivated variables as emulator inputs to reduce the computational cost of emulations. The emulator outputs predict the mass of tephra per unit area at 50281 grid points around a predetermined vent location.

58 GEOSCIENCES↗

Stochastic Approximation for Multi-period Simulation Optimization with Streaming Input Data

We consider a continuous-valued simulation optimization (SO) problem, where a simulator is built to optimize an expected performance measure of a real-world system while parameters of the simulator are estimated from streaming data collected periodically from the system. At each period, a new batch of data is combined with the cumulative data and the parameters are re-estimated with higher precision. The system requires the decision variable to be selected in all periods. Therefore, it is sensible for the decision-maker to update the decision variable at each period by solving a more precise SO problem with the updated parameter estimate to reduce the performance loss with respect to the target system. We define this decision-making process as the multi-period SO problem and introduce a multi-period stochastic approximation (SA) framework that generates a sequence of solutions. Two algorithms are proposed: Re-start SA (ReSA) reinitializes the stepsize sequence in each period, whereas Warm-start SA (WaSA) carefully tunes the stepsizes, taking both fewer and shorter gradient-descent steps in later periods as parameter estimates become increasingly more precise. We show that under suitable strong convexity and regularity conditions, ReSA and WaSA achieve the best possible convergence rate in expected sub-optimality either when an unbiased or a simultaneous perturbation gradient estimator is employed, while WaSA accrues significantly lower computational cost as the number of periods increases. In addition, we present the regularized ReSA, which obviates the need to know the strong convexity constant and achieves the same convergence rate at the expense of additional computation.

Computer Science↗

Stochastic search in structural optimization - Genetic algorithms and simulated annealing

An account is given of illustrative applications of genetic algorithms and simulated annealing methods in structural optimization. The advantages of such stochastic search methods over traditional mathematical programming strategies are emphasized; it is noted that these methods offer a significantly higher probability of locating the global optimum in a multimodal design space. Both genetic-search and simulated annealing can be effectively used in problems with a mix of continuous, discrete, and integer design variables.

Hajela, Prabhat↗

Closures and Simulation for Thermal Radiation Transport in Stochastic Media with Nonlinear Temperature Dependence

Because of the practical challenge of rendering very complex realistic spatial structures for numerical work, it is common practice to resort to characterizing such media as stochastic mixtures of materials, ideally parametrized with low order statistics such as the mean, variance, and correlation functions of the now random material properties. This enables realizations of the medium to be repeatedly generated and radiation transport computations to, in principle, be performed for a large ensemble of these realizations to obtain a statistically well-characterized radiation field. Statistical post-processing yields desired quantities such as conditional and unconditional mean radiation flux and probability distributions of transmitted radiation. However, such computations prove expensive for all but the simplest stochastic geometries and are most suited for benchmarking approximate models. The most common approximations lead to homogenized media so that transport computations are required only on a single medium realization but by construct provide only limited statistical information on the radiation field. Almost all approximate approaches to this problem attempt to develop equations for low order moments of the radiation intensity (mean, second moment, correlation function) but inevitably encounter a closure problem: the equation for any statistical moment will contain terms depending on unknown higher-order moments. Thus, the challenge shifts to one of developing closure relations that relate the unknown moments to the lower order moments. Under very special conditions, an exact closure can be derived but in general closures are heuristically stated constitutive relations. Also, closure approaches depend on whether the mixing statistics are spatially and/or temporally continuous as in fluctuating turbulent fields, or discontinuous as in randomly mixed solid chunks of material. Thus, unconditional averaging is generally applied in the former case but conditional averaging is more appropriate when the mixing is discontinuous. In this work, the emphasis is on binary statistical mixtures of immiscible fluids as as such the quantities of interest are averages (flux, temperature) conditioned on the material type.

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗

Computational Modeling, Simulation, and Potential Applications of Optical Stochastic Cooling

With the rising demand for intense particles beams, much research is being conducted in the area of particle beam cooling. One of these methods, called Stochastic Cooling (SC) (developed at CERN in the 1970's), delivered a feedback method to improve the quality and lifetime of circulating proton beams by reducing their 6D phase-space and has been widely implemented in a number of hadron machines. However, traditional stochastic cooling schemes are limited by the bandwidth of microwave frequency systems. Optical Stochastic Cooling (OSC) is a promising extension of the stochastic cooling beam cooling technique. OSC instead uses optical wavelengths which allows for improved control and increased cooling but creates its own technical challenges. This lays out work conducted toward the experimental demonstration of OSC at Fermilab's Integrable Optics Test Accelerator (IOTA) storage ring. This includes the design and characterization of parts of the optical delay system, the development and validation of a high-fidelity computational model of the OSC process, and the investigations into possible applications of the OSC mechanism to advanced beam manipulations.

43 PARTICLE ACCELERATORS↗

A Simulation Framework for Analyzing the Impact of Stochastic Occupant Behaviors on Demand Flexibility in Typical Commercial Buildings

As one of the primary users of the electric grid, buildings and building equipment, including heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems, can be leveraged to provide the flexible demand needed to balance the grid. Typical strategies to achieve demand flexibility are to reduce electricity use during peak or critical periods by shutting down equipment or relaxing system setpoints, which will inevitably impact the occupants’ comfort. When occupants feel uncomfortable, they may take actions to regain their comfort, and some of those actions (such as turning on a personal fan) may have a negative impact on meeting the demand response goal. Therefore, it is important to incorporate occupant behaviors into the assessment ofthe building demand flexibility potential. In this study, a simulation framework that includes simulation of zone thermal loads, an HVAC system, and occupant behaviors, was developed to investigate the impact of occupant behaviors on demand flexibility. A case study was conducted using a small office model from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Commercial Prototype Building Models to simulate the building envelope and zone loads. An agent-based occupant thermal behavior model was adapted to forecast occupants’ thermal comfort and their resulting thermal behaviors. An artificial neural network (ANN) based airflow model trained from a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model of the zone was adopted to better predict the ambient environment of each occupant. An air-source heat pump simulation model that was calibrated from a real two-stage air-source heat pump system was used as the HVAC system. A typical load shedding event during peak hours was studied. Repeated simulations were conducted to capture the stochastic effects of occupant behaviors. The interplay between the demand flexibility, occupant comfort and behavior were analyzed by evaluating key performance indicators, including the energy use, occupant discomfort duration, and occupant behavior duration during the peak period. The results suggest that this framework can be used to analyze typical commercial buildings and their HVAC systems in terms ofdemand flexibility potential under the impact of occupant behaviors.

Chen, Zhelun↗

Learning stochastic dynamics with statistics-informed neural network

We introduce a machine-learning framework named statistics-informed neural network (SINN) for learning stochastic dynamics from data. This new architecture was theoretically inspired by a universal approximation theorem for stochastic systems, which we introduce in this paper, and the projection-operator formalism for stochastic modeling. Here, we devise mechanisms for training the neural network model to reproduce the correct statistical behavior of a target stochastic process. Numerical simulation results demonstrate that a well-trained SINN can reliably approximate both Markovian and non-Markovian stochastic dynamics. We demonstrate the applicability of SINN to coarse-graining problems and the modeling of transition dynamics. Furthermore, we show that the obtained reduced-order model can be trained on temporally coarse-grained data and hence is well suited for rare-event simulations.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗