She came in from the cold for a two-day spate of press conferences, meetings, and photoshoots, and then sailed off towards the ice again. The German research icebreaker Polarstern, run by the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI), has become a minor celebrity with the busy lifestyle to match. Upon completing her latest tour of duty, which mainly involved studies of carbon cycles in the southern oceans...

We consider a multi-agent framework for distributed optimization where each agent has access to local smooth strongly convex function, and the collective goal is achieve consensus on parameters that minimize sum of agents' functions. propose an algorithm wherein operates asynchronously independently other agents. When functions are strongly-convex with Lipschitz-continuous gradients, we show it...

The initial stages of spinodal decomposition were studied by subjecting a critical blend of model polyolefins to a pressure quench and monitoring the evolution by time-resolved small angle neutron scattering. Contrary to the predictions of the widely accepted Cahn-Hilliard-Cook theory, we demonstrate that coarsening of the phase-separated structure begins immediately after the quench and occurs...

This paper presents a theoretical model for studying the dynamics of ordering in alloys which exhibit modulated phases. The model is different from the standard time-dependent Ginzburg-Landau description of the evolution of a non-conserved order parameter and resembles the Swift-Hohenberg model. The early-stage growth kinetics is analyzed and compared to the Cahn-Hilliard theory of continuous o...