Calculations of the number of curves on a Calabi-Yau manifold via an instanton expansion do not always agree with what one would expect naively. It is explained how to account for continuous families of instantons via deformation theory and excess intersection theory. The essential role played by degenerate instantons is also explained.

Abstract. RAID systems are ubiquitously deployed in storage environments, both as standalone storage solutions and as fundamental components of virtualised storage platforms. Accurate models of their performance are crucial to delivering storage infrastructures that meet given quality of service requirements. To this end, this paper presents a flexible fork-join queueing simulation model of RAI...

Army ants form nomadic insect colonies whose chief food is other social insects. Here we compare the rate of army ant raids with the average density of their potential prey from 28 New World subtropical and tropical localities. We estimate that army ant raids occur at the rate of 1.22 m per day in tropical forests. Army ant raid rates increased with primary productivity, and with the density of...

We study the discovery reach for Non-Standard Interactions (NSIs) in a neutrino factory experiment. After giving a theoretical, but model-independent, overview of the most relevant classes of NSIs, we present detailed numerical results for some of them. Our simulations take into account matter effects, uncertainties in the neutrino oscillation parameters, systematical errors, parameter correlat...

Polynomial vector fields which admit a prescribed Darboux integrating factor are quite well-understood when the geometry of the underlying curve is nondegenerate. In the general setting morphisms of the affine plane may remove degeneracies of the curve, and thus allow more structural insight. In the present paper we establish some properties of integrating factors subjected to morphisms, and we...

Strong gravitational lensing and stellar dynamics provide two complementary and orthogonal constraints on the density profiles of galaxies. Based on spherically symmetric, scale-free, mass models, it is shown that the combination of both techniques is powerful in breaking the mass-sheet and mass-anisotropy degeneracies. Second, observational results are presented from the Lenses Structure & Dyn...

The accelerating expansion of the universe suggests that an unknown component with strongly negative pressure, called dark energy, currently dominates the dynamics of the universe. Such a component makes up ∼ 70% of the energy density of the universe yet has not been predicted by the standard model of particle physics. The best method for exploring the nature of this dark energy is to map the r...