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At least 505 records · Page 28

Fermilab Cryogenic Test Facilities

Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) has multiple cryogenic test facilities, undertaking testing of superconducting magnets, Superconducting Radio Frequency (SRF) cavities, SRF cryomodules and other helium cryogenic components. The test areas within Fermilab include: Meson Cryogenic Test facility (Meson), Industrial Building 1 (IB-1), Heavy Assembly Building/Illinois Accelerator Research Center (HAB/IARC), New Muon Lab, (NML) and the Cryomodule Test Facility (CMTF). Meson and HAB/IARC utilize repurposed Tevatron era reciprocating engine based cryogenic refrigerator systems, whereas CMTF and IB-1 utilize gas bearing turbine based coldboxes. Each of these test areas support the various Fermilab projects and collaborations including the Linear Coherent Light Source II (LCLS-II), Proton Improvement Plan II (PIP-II), High Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC), and Mu2e. This paper outlines the diverse and extensive cryogenic test capabilities within Fermilab.

43 PARTICLE ACCELERATORS↗

Establishing the quantum supremacy frontier with a 281 Pflop/s simulation

Noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) computers are entering an era in which they can perform computational tasks beyond the capabilities of the most powerful classical computers, thereby achieving 'quantum supremacy', a major milestone in quantum computing. NISQ supremacy requires comparison with a state-of-the-art classical simulator. In this paper, we report HPC simulations of hard random quantum circuits (RQC), which have been recently used as a benchmark for the first experimental demonstration of quantum supremacy, sustaining an average performance of 281 Pflop/s (true single precision) on Summit, currently the fastest supercomputer in the world. These simulations were carried out using qFlex, a tensor-network-based classical high-performance simulator of RQCs. Our results show an advantage of many orders of magnitude in energy consumption of NISQ devices over classical supercomputers. In addition, we propose a standard benchmark for NISQ computers based on qFlex.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

GALIC: hybrid multi-qubitwise pauli grouping for quantum computing measurement

Abstract Observable estimation is a core primitive in NISQ-era algorithms targeting quantum chemistry applications. To reduce the state preparation overhead required for accurate estimation, recent works have proposed various simultaneous measurement schemes to lower estimator variance. Two primary grouping schemes have been proposed: full commutativity (FC) and qubit-wise commutativity (QWC), with no compelling means of interpolation. In this work we propose a generalized framework for designing and analyzing context-aware hybrid FC/QWC commutativity relations. We use our framework to propose a noise-and-connectivity aware grouping strategy: Generalized backend-Aware pauLI Commutation (GALIC). We demonstrate how GALIC interpolates between FC and QWC, maintaining estimator accuracy in Hamiltonian estimation while lowering variance by an average of 20% compared to QWC. We also explore the design space of near-term quantum devices using the GALIC framework, specifically comparing device noise levels and connectivity. We find that error suppression has a more than 10 × larger impact on device-aware estimator variance than qubit connectivity with even larger correlation differences in estimator biases.

71 CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM MECHANICS, GENERAL PHYSIC↗

Roadmap for unconventional computing with nanotechnology

Abstract In the ‘Beyond Moore’s Law’ era, with increasing edge intelligence, domain-specific computing embracing unconventional approaches will become increasingly prevalent. At the same time, adopting a variety of nanotechnologies will offer benefits in energy cost, computational speed, reduced footprint, cyber resilience, and processing power. The time is ripe for a roadmap for unconventional computing with nanotechnologies to guide future research, and this collection aims to fill that need. The authors provide a comprehensive roadmap for neuromorphic computing using electron spins, memristive devices, two-dimensional nanomaterials, nanomagnets, and various dynamical systems. They also address other paradigms such as Ising machines, Bayesian inference engines, probabilistic computing with p-bits, processing in memory, quantum memories and algorithms, computing with skyrmions and spin waves, and brain-inspired computing for incremental learning and problem-solving in severely resource-constrained environments. These approaches have advantages over traditional Boolean computing based on von Neumann architecture. As the computational requirements for artificial intelligence grow 50 times faster than Moore’s Law for electronics, more unconventional approaches to computing and signal processing will appear on the horizon, and this roadmap will help identify future needs and challenges. In a very fertile field, experts in the field aim to present some of the dominant and most promising technologies for unconventional computing that will be around for some time to come. Within a holistic approach, the goal is to provide pathways for solidifying the field and guiding future impactful discoveries.

Finocchio, Giovanni (ORCID:0000000210433876)↗

Classical versus quantum models in machine learning: insights from a finance application

Although several models have been proposed towards assisting machine learning (ML) tasks with quantum computers, a direct comparison of the expressive power and efficiency of classical versus quantum models for datasets originating from real-world applications is one of the key milestones towards a quantum ready era. Here, we take a first step towards addressing this challenge by performing a comparison of the widely used classical ML models known as restricted Boltzmann machines (RBMs), against a recently proposed quantum model, now known as quantum circuit Born machines (QCBMs). Both models address the same hard tasks in unsupervised generative modeling, with QCBMs exploiting the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics and a candidate for near-term quantum computers, as experimentally demonstrated in three different quantum hardware architectures to date. To address the question of the performance of the quantum model on real-world classical data sets, we construct scenarios from a probabilistic version out of the well-known portfolio optimization problem in finance, by using time-series pricing data from asset subsets of the S&P500 stock market index. It is remarkable to find that, under the same number of resources in terms of parameters for both classical and quantum models, the quantum models seem to have superior performance on typical instances when compared with the canonical training of the RBMs. Our simulations are grounded on a hardware efficient realization of the QCBMs on ion-trap quantum computers, by using their native gate sets, and therefore readily implementable in near-term quantum devices.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Pile-up mitigation using attention

Abstract Particle production from secondary proton-proton collisions, commonly referred to as pile-up, impair the sensitivity of both new physics searches and precision measurements at large hadron collider (LHC) experiments. We propose a novel algorithm, Puma , for modeling pile-up with the help of deep neural networks based on sparse transformers. These attention mechanisms were developed for natural language processing but have become popular in other applications. In a realistic detector simulation, our method outperforms classical benchmark algorithms for pile-up mitigation in key observables. It provides a perspective for mitigating the effects of pile-up in the high luminosity era of the LHC, where up to 200 proton-proton collisions are expected to occur simultaneously.

47 OTHER INSTRUMENTATION↗

DIGS: deep inference of galaxy spectra with neural posterior estimation

Abstract With the advent of billion-galaxy surveys with complex data, the need of the hour is to efficiently model galaxy spectral energy distributions (SEDs) with robust uncertainty quantification. The combination of simulation-based inference (SBI) and amortized neural posterior estimation (NPE) has been successfully used to analyse simulated and real galaxy photometry both precisely and efficiently. In this work, we utilise this combination and build on existing literature to analyse simulated noisy galaxy spectra. Here, we demonstrate a proof-of-concept study of spectra that is (a) an efficient analysis of galaxy SEDs and inference of galaxy parameters with physically interpretable uncertainties; and (b) amortized calculations of posterior distributions of said galaxy parameters at the modest cost of a few galaxy fits with Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods. We utilise the SED generator and inference framework Prospector to generate simulated spectra, and train a dataset of 2 × 10 6 spectra (corresponding to a five-parameter SED model) with NPE. We show that SBI—with its combination of fast and amortized posterior estimations—is capable of inferring accurate galaxy stellar masses and metallicities. Our uncertainty constraints are comparable to or moderately weaker than traditional inverse-modelling with Bayesian MCMC methods (e.g. 0.17 and 0.26 dex in stellar mass and metallicity for a given galaxy, respectively). We also find that our inference framework conducts rapid SED inference (0.9–1.2 × 10 5 galaxy spectra via SBI/NPE at the cost of 1 MCMC-based fit). With this work, we set the stage for further work that focuses of SED fitting of galaxy spectra with SBI, in the era of JWST galaxy survey programs and the wide-field Roman Space Telescope spectroscopic surveys.

spectroscopy↗

Maven: a multimodal foundation model for supernova science

Abstract A common setting in astronomy is the availability of a small number of high-quality observations, and larger amounts of either lower-quality observations or synthetic data from simplified models. Time-domain astrophysics is a canonical example of this imbalance, with the number of supernovae observed photometrically outpacing the number observed spectroscopically by multiple orders of magnitude. At the same time, no data-driven models exist to understand these photometric and spectroscopic observables in a common context. Contrastive learning objectives, which have grown in popularity for aligning distinct data modalities in a shared embedding space, provide a potential solution to extract information from these modalities. We present Maven, the first foundation model for supernova science. To construct Maven, we first pre-train our model to align photometry and spectroscopy from 0.5 M synthetic supernovae using a contrastive objective. We then fine-tune the model on 4702 observed supernovae from the Zwicky transient facility. Maven reaches state-of-the-art performance on both classification and redshift estimation, despite the embeddings not being explicitly optimized for these tasks. Through ablation studies, we show that pre-training with synthetic data improves overall performance. In the upcoming era of the Vera C. Rubin observatory, Maven will serve as a valuable tool for leveraging large, unlabeled and multimodal time-domain datasets.

Zhang, Gemma (ORCID:0000000280198082)↗

Infrastructure first principles for the Anthropocene

Abstract There appears to be a growing decoupling between the conditions that infrastructures were designed for and today’s rapidly changing environments. Infrastructures today are largely predicated on the technologies, goals, and governance structures from a century ago. While infrastructures continue to deliver untold value, there is growing evidence that these critical, basic, and lifeline systems appear ill-equipped to confront the volatility, uncertainty, accelerating conditions, and complexity that define them and their changing environments. Innovative and disruptive first principles are needed to guide infrastructures in the Anthropocene. Drawing from emerging infrastructure research and disciplines that appear better able to confront disruption and change, a novel set of first principles are identified: (1) Plan for complex conditions and surprise; (2) Recouple with agility and flexibility; (3) Govern for exploration and instability; (4) Build consensus as control decentralizes; (5) Restructure to engage with porous boundaries; and, (6) Cyberthreat planning is now mission critical. These principles should guide infrastructure planning recognizing the changing nature and increasingly obsolete boundaries that have defined engineered systems in the modern era.

Chester, Mikhail (ORCID:0000000293542102)↗

A roadmap for the functional annotation of protein families: a community perspective

Over the last 25 years, biology has entered the genomic era and is becoming a science of ‘big data’. Most interpretations of genomic analyses rely on accurate functional annotations of the proteins encoded by more than 500 000 genomes sequenced to date. By different estimates, only half the predicted sequenced proteins carry an accurate functional annotation, and this percentage varies drastically between different organismal lineages. Such a large gap in knowledge hampers all aspects of biological enterprise and, thereby, is standing in the way of genomic biology reaching its full potential. A brainstorming meeting to address this issue funded by the National Science Foundation was held during 3–4 February 2022. Bringing together data scientists, biocurators, computational biologists and experimentalists within the same venue allowed for a comprehensive assessment of the current state of functional annotations of protein families. Further, major issues that were obstructing the field were identified and discussed, which ultimately allowed for the proposal of solutions on how to move forward.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

Genomic Mysteries of Giant Bacteria: Insights and Implications

Bacteria and Archaea are traditionally regarded as organisms with a simple morphology constrained to a size of 2–3 µm. Nevertheless, the history of microbial research is rich in the description of giant bacteria exceeding tens and even hundreds of micrometers in length or diameter already from its early days, for example, Beggiatoa spp., to the present, for example, Candidatus Thiomargarita magnifica. While some of these giants are still being studied, some were lost to science, with merely drawings and photomicrographs as evidence for their existence. The physiology and biogeochemical role of giant bacteria have been studied, with a large focus on those involved in the sulfur cycle. With the onset of the genomic era, no special emphasis has been given to this group, in an attempt to gain a novel, evolutionary, and molecular understanding of the phenomenon of bacterial gigantism. The few existing genomic studies reveal a mysterious world of hyperpolyploid bacteria with hundreds to hundreds of thousands of chromosomes that are, in some cases, identical and in others, extremely different. These studies on giant bacteria reveal novel organelles, cellular compartmentalization, and novel mechanisms to combat the accumulation of deleterious mutations in polyploid bacteria. In this perspective paper, we provide a brief overview of what is known about the genomics of giant bacteria and build on that to highlight a few burning questions that await to be addressed.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗

A SynBio explosion: a whole new world for Rubisco engineering

The first Escherichia coli synthetic biology (SynBio) system to successfully heterologously assemble chloroplast Rubisco represented the culmination of decades of Rubisco biogenesis research (Aigner et al., 2017). This system for Arabidopsis Rubisco ushered in a new era of higher throughput Rubisco studies, and has since been adapted for a limited number of other Rubiscos, accelerating both fundamental and applied Rubisco research. Archer et al. (2025) have developed new SynBio systems to assemble a larger variety of C 3 Rubiscos and the first C 4 and monocot Rubiscos, greatly expanding crop Rubisco engineering capabilities. Their explorations of chaperone selectivity and versatility could enable rapid production of SynBio systems for additional species.

Rubisco↗

Do We Really Need All That Data: From Data to Agency in Automated Microscopy

Microscopy is entering an era of automated laboratories and AI-enabled instruments, often justified by a simple narrative of automating experiments to collect more data and train better models. In this work, we argue that, for microscopy, this framing is incomplete and can be counterproductive.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Multiplicity functions of quasars: predictions from the MassiveBlackII simulation

ABSTRACT We examine multiple active galactic nucleus (AGN) systems (triples and quadruples, in particular) in the MassiveBlackII simulation over a redshift range of 0.06 ≲ z ≲ 4. We identify AGN systems (with bolometric luminosity $L_{\mathrm{bol}}\gt 10^{42}~\mathrm{erg\, s}^{-1}$) at different scales (defined by the maximum distance between member AGNs) to determine the AGN multiplicity functions. This is defined as the volume/surface density of AGN systems per unit richness R, the number of AGNs in a system. We find that gravitationally bound multiple AGN systems tend to populate scales of ${\lesssim}0.7~\mathrm{cMpc}\, h^{-1}$; this corresponds to angular separations of ≲100 arcsec and a line-of-sight velocity difference ${\lesssim}200~\mathrm{km\, s}^{-1}$. The simulation contains ∼10 and ∼100 triples/quadruples per deg2 up to depths of DESI (g ≲ 24) and LSST (g ≲ 26) imaging, respectively; at least $20{{\ \rm per\ cent}}$ of these should be detectable in spectroscopic surveys. The simulated quasar ($L_{\mathrm{bol}}\gt 10^{44}~\mathrm{erg\, s}^{-1}$) triples and quadruples predominantly exist at 1.5 ≲ z ≲ 3. Their members have black hole masses $10^{6.5}\lesssim M_{\mathrm{ bh}}\lesssim 10^{9}~\mathrm{M}_{\odot }\, h^{-1}$ and live in separate (one central and multiple satellite) galaxies with stellar masses $10^{10}\lesssim M_{*}\lesssim 10^{12}~\mathrm{M}_{\odot }\, h^{-1}$. They live in the most massive haloes (e.g. ${\sim}10^{13}~\mathrm{M}_{\odot }\, h^{-1}$ at z = 2.5; ${\sim}10^{14}~\mathrm{M}_{\odot }\, h^{-1}$ at z = 1) in the simulation. Their detections provide an exciting prospect for understanding massive black hole growth and their merger rates in galaxies in the era of multimessenger astronomy.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

First cosmology results using type Ia supernovae from the Dark Energy Survey: the effect of host galaxy properties on supernova luminosity

ABSTRACT We present improved photometric measurements for the host galaxies of 206 spectroscopically confirmed type Ia supernovae discovered by the Dark Energy Survey Supernova Program (DES-SN) and used in the first DES-SN cosmological analysis. For the DES-SN sample, when considering a 5D (z, x1, c, α, β) bias correction, we find evidence of a Hubble residual ‘mass step’, where SNe Ia in high-mass galaxies (>1010M⊙) are intrinsically more luminous (after correction) than their low-mass counterparts by $\gamma =0.040\pm 0.019$ mag. This value is larger by 0.031 mag than the value found in the first DES-SN cosmological analysis. This difference is due to a combination of updated photometric measurements and improved star formation histories and is not from host-galaxy misidentification. When using a 1D (redshift-only) bias correction the inferred mass step is larger, with $\gamma =0.066\pm 0.020$ mag. The 1D−5D γ difference for DES-SN is $0.026\pm 0.009$ mag. We show that this difference is due to a strong correlation between host galaxy stellar mass and the x1 component of the 5D distance-bias correction. Including an intrinsic correlation between the observed properties of SNe Ia, stretch and colour, and stellar mass in simulated SN Ia samples, we show that a 5D fit recovers γ with −9 mmag bias compared to a +2 mmag bias for a 1D fit. This difference can explain part of the discrepancy seen in the data. Improvements in modelling correlations between galaxy properties and SN is necessary to ensure unbiased precision estimates of the dark energy equation of state as we enter the era of LSST.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

Blinding multiprobe cosmological experiments

ABSTRACT The goal of blinding is to hide an experiment’s critical results – here the inferred cosmological parameters – until all decisions affecting its analysis have been finalized. This is especially important in the current era of precision cosmology, when the results of any new experiment are closely scrutinized for consistency or tension with previous results. In analyses that combine multiple observational probes, like the combination of galaxy clustering and weak lensing in the Dark Energy Survey (DES), it is challenging to blind the results while retaining the ability to check for (in)consistency between different parts of the data. We propose a simple new blinding transformation, which works by modifying the summary statistics that are input to parameter estimation, such as two-point correlation functions. The transformation shifts the measured statistics to new values that are consistent with (blindly) shifted cosmological parameters while preserving internal (in)consistency. We apply the blinding transformation to simulated data for the projected DES Year 3 galaxy clustering and weak lensing analysis, demonstrating that practical blinding is achieved without significant perturbation of internal-consistency checks, as measured here by degradation of the χ2 between the data and best-fitting model. Our blinding method’s performance is expected to improve as experiments evolve to higher precision and accuracy.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗

The clustering of the SDSS-IV extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey quasar sample: testing observational systematics on the Baryon Acoustic Oscillation measurement

ABSTRACT Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (BAO) are considered to be a very robust standard ruler against various systematics. This premise has been tested against observational systematics, but not to the level required for the next generation of galaxy surveys such as the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) and Euclid. In this paper, we investigate the effect of observational systematics on the BAO measurement of the final sample of quasars from the extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey Data Release 16 in order to prepare and hone a similar analysis for upcoming surveys. We employ catalogues with various treatments of imaging systematic effects using linear and neural network-based non-linear approaches and consider how the BAO measurement changes. We also test how the variations to the BAO fitting model respond to the observational systematics. As expected, we confirm that the BAO measurements obtained from the DR16 quasar sample are robust against imaging systematics well within the statistical error, while reporting slightly modified constraints that shift the line-of-sight BAO signal by less than 1.1 per cent. We use realistic simulations with similar redshift and angular distributions as the DR16 sample to conduct statistical tests for validating the pipeline, quantifying the significance of differences, and estimating the expected bias on the BAO scale in future high-precision data sets. Although we find a marginal impact for the eBOSS QSO data, the work presented here is of vital importance for constraining the nature of dark energy with the BAO feature in the new era of big data cosmology.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

Predicting bulge to total luminosity ratio of galaxies using deep learning

ABSTRACT We present a deep learning model to predict the r-band bulge-to-total luminosity ratio (B/T) of nearby galaxies using their multiband JPEG images alone. Our Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based regression model is trained on a large sample of galaxies with reliable decomposition into the bulge and disc components. The existing approaches to estimate the B/T ratio use galaxy light-profile modelling to find the best fit. This method is computationally expensive, prohibitively so for large samples of galaxies, and requires a significant amount of human intervention. Machine learning models have the potential to overcome these shortcomings. In our CNN model, for a test set of 20 000 galaxies, 85.7 per cent of the predicted B/T values have absolute error (AE) less than 0.1. We see further improvement to 87.5 per cent if, while testing, we only consider brighter galaxies (with r-band apparent magnitude <17) with no bright neighbours. Our model estimates the B/T ratio for the 20 000 test galaxies in less than a minute. This is a significant improvement in inference time from the conventional fitting pipelines, which manage around 2–3 estimates per minute. Thus, the proposed machine learning approach could potentially save a tremendous amount of time, effort, and computational resources while predicting B/T reliably, particularly in the era of next-generation sky surveys such as the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) and the Euclid sky survey which will produce extremely large samples of galaxies.

Grover, Harsh (ORCID:0000000321338142)↗