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Jun 16

The nature of an imaginary quasi-periodic oscillation in the soft-to-hard transition of MAXI J1820+070

A recent study shows that if the power spectra (PS) of accreting compact objects consist of a combination of Lorentzian functions that are coherent in different energy bands but incoherent with each other, the same is true for the Real and Imaginary parts of the cross spectrum (CS). Using this idea, we discovered imaginary quasi-periodic oscillations (QPOs) in NICER observations of the black hole candidate MAXI J1820+070. The imaginary QPOs appear as narrow features with a small Real and large Imaginary part in the CS but are not significantly detected in the PS when they overlap in frequency with other variability components. The coherence function drops and the phase lags increase abruptly at the frequency of the imaginary QPO. We show that the multi-Lorentzian model that fits the PS and CS of the source in two energy bands correctly reproduces the lags and the coherence, and that the narrow drop of the coherence is caused by the interaction of the imaginary QPO with other variability components. The imaginary QPO appears only in the decay of the outburst, during the transition from the high-soft to the low-hard state of MAXI J1820+070, and its frequency decreases from approximately 5 Hz to around 1 Hz as the source spectrum hardens. We also analysed the earlier observations of the transition, where no narrow features were seen, and we identified a QPO in the PS that appears to evolve into the imaginary QPO as the source hardens. As for the type-B and C QPOs in this source, the rms spectrum of the imaginary QPO increases with energy. The lags of the imaginary QPO are similar to those of the type-B and C QPOs above 2 keV but differ from the lags of those other QPOs below that energy. While the properties of this imaginary QPO resemble those of type-C QPOs, we cannot rule out that it is a new type of QPO.

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 17, 2025

Pattern and Origin for the Extreme γ-ray Flares of 3C 454.3 and 3C 279: An Astrophysical Critical Damper?

We apply a Gaussian process method to the extreme gamma-ray flares of 3C 454.3 and 3C 279 to discover the variable patterns and then to investigate the physical origins of the giant flares. The kernels of stochastically driven damped simple harmonic oscillator (SHO), the damped random-walk (DRW), and Matrm ern-3/2 are respectively used to describe the adaptive-binning gamma-ray light curves of the two flares. Our findings show that both the extreme gamma-ray flares of 3C 454.3 and 3C 279 clearly prefer the SHO kernel in the over-damped mode and the Matrm ern-3/2 kernel over the DRW kernel. The resulted SHO and Matrm ern-3/2 power spectral densities (PSDs) are the same for each object, with the index changing from -4 at high frequencies to 0 at low frequencies. The patterns of the two flares are both approaching the critical damping mode with the quality factor Q approx 0.4 (i.e., the damping ratio eta approx 1.25), but with slightly different damping timescales. The characteristic timescale (corresponding to the broken frequency in the PSD) for 3C 454.3 is 2-3 days and 3-5 days for 3C 279. The variable patterns found here suggest that once the system responds to the energy injection disturbance, the release of the energy in the system is finished abruptly. The obtained timescale provides a constraint on the size of energy dissipation region for each source.

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 28, 2025

Optimised angular power spectra for spectroscopic galaxy surveys

The angular power spectrum is a gauge-independent observable that is in principle the natural tool for analysing galaxy number counts. In practice, the problem is that the computational requirements for next-generation spectroscopic surveys such as Euclid and the Square Kilometre Array are currently unfeasible. We propose a new method to save computational time for spectroscopic angular power spectra. This hybrid method is modelled on the Fourier power spectrum approach of treating relatively thick redshift bins (redshift width ~0.1) as separate surveys. In the hybrid method, each thick bin is further subdivided into thin bins (redshift width ~0.01); all the correlations within each thick bin are computed, while cross-bin correlations beyond the thick bins are neglected. Constraints on cosmological parameters from the hybrid method are comparable to those from the standard galaxy power spectrum analysis - but they have the advantage that cosmic evolution, wide-angle and lensing effects are naturally included, while no Alcock-Paczynski correction is needed. The hybrid method delivers much tighter constraints than a 2D tomographic approach that is typical for photometric surveys, which considers only thick bins and the correlations between them. Furthermore, for standard cosmological parameters our method is not biased by neglecting the effects of lensing on number counts, while the tomographic method is strongly biased.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 28, 2018

When Less Is More: Simplicity Beats Complexity for Physics-Constrained InSAR Phase Unwrapping

Operational phase unwrapping is the primary computational bottleneck in InSAR-based volcanic and seismic monitoring. We challenge the industry trend of adopting high-complexity computer vision architectures, such as attention mechanisms, without validating their suitability for physics-constrained geophysical regression. We present the first large-scale architectural ablation study on a global LiCSAR benchmark (20 frames, 39,724 patches, 651M pixels). Our results reveal a significant "complexity penalty": a vanilla U-Net (7.76M parameters) achieves R^2=0.834 and RMSE = 1.01 cm, outperforming 11.37M-parameter attention-based models by 34% in R^2 and 51% in RMSE. Power Spectral Density (PSD) analysis provides the physical justification: while attention excels at capturing sharp semantic edges in natural images, it injects unphysical high-frequency artifacts (>0.3 cycles/pixel) into geophysical fields, violating the fundamental smoothness constraints of elastic surface deformation. With a 2.92ms inference latency (a 2.5times speedup), the vanilla U-Net is the only candidate to comfortably meet the sub-100ms requirement for operational early-warning systems. This work bridges the "publication-to-practice" gap by proving that convolutional locality outperforms modern complexity for smooth-field regression, advocating for physics-informed simplicity in ML4RS. Code available at https://github.com/prabhjotschugh/When-Less-is-More-InSAR-Phase-Unwrapping

  • 2 authors
·
Apr 27

Probing X-ray Timing and Spectral Variability in the Blazar PKS 2155-304 Over a Decade of XMM-Newton Observations

Blazars, a class of active galactic nuclei (AGN) powered by supermassive black holes, are known for their remarkable variability across multiple timescales and wavelengths. With advancements in both ground- and space-based telescopes, our understanding of AGN central engines has significantly improved. However, the mechanisms driving this variability remain elusive, and continue to fascinate both theorists and observers alike. The primary objective of this study is to constrain the X-ray variability properties of the TeV blazar PKS 2155-304. We conduct a comprehensive X-ray spectral and timing analysis, focusing on both long-term and intra-day variability. This analysis uses data from 22 epochs of XMM-Newton EPIC-pn observations, collected over 15 years (2000-2014). To investigate the variability of the source, we applied both timing and spectral analyses. For the timing analysis, we estimated fractional variability, variability amplitude, minimum variability timescales, flux distribution, and power spectral density (PSD). In the spectral analysis, we fitted the X-ray spectra using power-law, log-parabola, and broken power-law (BPL) models to determine the best-fitting parameters. Additionally, we studied the hardness ratio (HR). We observed moderate intra-day variability in most of the light curves. Seven out of the twenty-two observations showed a clear bimodal flux distribution, indicating the presence of two distinct flux states. Our analysis revealed a variable power-law PSD slope. Most HR plots did not show significant variation with flux, except for one observation (OBSID 0124930501), where HR increased with flux (Count/s). The fitted X-ray spectra favored the BPL model for the majority of observations. The findings of this work shed light on the intraday variability of blazars, providing insights into the non-thermal jet processes that drive the observed flux variations.

  • 8 authors
·
Oct 2, 2024

The Simons Observatory: Combining cross-spectral foreground cleaning with multitracer B-mode delensing for improved constraints on inflation

The Simons Observatory (SO), due to start full science operations in early 2025, aims to set tight constraints on inflationary physics by inferring the tensor-to-scalar ratio r from measurements of CMB polarization B-modes. Its nominal design targets a precision σ(r=0) leq 0.003 without delensing. Achieving this goal and further reducing uncertainties requires the mitigation of other sources of large-scale B-modes such as Galactic foregrounds and weak gravitational lensing. We present an analysis pipeline aiming to estimate r by including delensing within a cross-spectral likelihood, and demonstrate it on SO-like simulations. Lensing B-modes are synthesised using internal CMB lensing reconstructions as well as Planck-like CIB maps and LSST-like galaxy density maps. This B-mode template is then introduced into SO's power-spectrum-based foreground-cleaning algorithm by extending the likelihood function to include all auto- and cross-spectra between the lensing template and the SAT B-modes. Within this framework, we demonstrate the equivalence of map-based and cross-spectral delensing and use it to motivate an optimized pixel-weighting scheme for power spectrum estimation. We start by validating our pipeline in the simplistic case of uniform foreground spectral energy distributions (SEDs). In the absence of primordial B-modes, σ(r) decreases by 37% as a result of delensing. Tensor modes at the level of r=0.01 are successfully detected by our pipeline. Even with more realistic foreground models including spatial variations in the dust and synchrotron spectral properties, we obtain unbiased estimates of r by employing the moment-expansion method. In this case, delensing-related improvements range between 27% and 31%. These results constitute the first realistic assessment of the delensing performance at SO's nominal sensitivity level. (Abridged)

  • 19 authors
·
Sep 9, 2024

Multimodal Sleep Stage and Sleep Apnea Classification Using Vision Transformer: A Multitask Explainable Learning Approach

Sleep is an essential component of human physiology, contributing significantly to overall health and quality of life. Accurate sleep staging and disorder detection are crucial for assessing sleep quality. Studies in the literature have proposed PSG-based approaches and machine-learning methods utilizing single-modality signals. However, existing methods often lack multimodal, multilabel frameworks and address sleep stages and disorders classification separately. In this paper, we propose a 1D-Vision Transformer for simultaneous classification of sleep stages and sleep disorders. Our method exploits the sleep disorders' correlation with specific sleep stage patterns and performs a simultaneous identification of a sleep stage and sleep disorder. The model is trained and tested using multimodal-multilabel sensory data (including photoplethysmogram, respiratory flow, and respiratory effort signals). The proposed method shows an overall accuracy (cohen's Kappa) of 78% (0.66) for five-stage sleep classification and 74% (0.58) for sleep apnea classification. Moreover, we analyzed the encoder attention weights to clarify our models' predictions and investigate the influence different features have on the models' outputs. The result shows that identified patterns, such as respiratory troughs and peaks, make a higher contribution to the final classification process.

  • 6 authors
·
Feb 18, 2025

A Markov-Chain-Monte-Carlo-based Hybrid Noise Inference for Continuous Wavelet Power Spectra: with Applications to Solar and Stellar Oscillatory Signals

Detecting oscillations in solar and stellar time series is complicated by non-stationary red noise and evolving background emission. Methods based on detrending and AR(1)-based wavelet analysis can introduce spurious periodicities and do not adequately describe time-dependent backgrounds. We develop a Bayesian approach that combines the continuous wavelet transform with MCMC sampling to infer a time-dependent background spectrum. The background is represented by a power-law plus white-noise component, with parameters allowed to vary smoothly in time, so that significance levels can be evaluated locally without explicit detrending. Tests with synthetic data show that injected oscillations are recovered reliably, while false detections are suppressed in pure-noise cases. Using a frequency-domain signal-to-noise ratio (S/N), we find that oscillations can be identified robustly when the S/N is greater than or equal to 2 under mixed noise conditions. The detectable period range is limited by wavelet resolution, from about 3-4 sampling intervals up to roughly one-quarter of the total duration. Application to GOES soft X-ray flare observations shows that the method isolates quasi-periodic oscillations with improved temporal localization compared to standard wavelet and Fourier-based approaches. Meanwhile, this behavior is consistent across a range of noise conditions and signal morphologies.

  • 3 authors
·
May 21

PFΔ: A Benchmark Dataset for Power Flow under Load, Generation, and Topology Variations

Power flow (PF) calculations are the backbone of real-time grid operations, across workflows such as contingency analysis (where repeated PF evaluations assess grid security under outages) and topology optimization (which involves PF-based searches over combinatorially large action spaces). Running these calculations at operational timescales or across large evaluation spaces remains a major computational bottleneck. Additionally, growing uncertainty in power system operations from the integration of renewables and climate-induced extreme weather also calls for tools that can accurately and efficiently simulate a wide range of scenarios and operating conditions. Machine learning methods offer a potential speedup over traditional solvers, but their performance has not been systematically assessed on benchmarks that capture real-world variability. This paper introduces PFΔ, a benchmark dataset for power flow that captures diverse variations in load, generation, and topology. PFΔ contains 859,800 solved power flow instances spanning six different bus system sizes, capturing three types of contingency scenarios (N , N -1, and N -2), and including close-to-infeasible cases near steady-state voltage stability limits. We evaluate traditional solvers and GNN-based methods, highlighting key areas where existing approaches struggle, and identifying open problems for future research. Our dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/pfdelta/pfdelta/tree/main and our code with data generation scripts and model implementations is at https://github.com/MOSSLab-MIT/pfdelta.

  • 4 authors
·
Jan 25

Evidence for Widespread Hydrogen Sequestration within the Moon's South Polar Cold Traps

The measured neutron flux from the Moons south polar region shows evidence of locally enhanced hydrogen concentrations, likely in the form of water ice, within most permanently shadowed regions (PSR), poleward of 77 deg S latitude. Results are consistent with the original findings of Watson et al, 1961, which found that the PSRs cryogenic surfaces create exclusive conditions for the sequestration of water ice, due to their extremely low sublimation rates. Widespread PSR hydrogenation is demonstrated in several studies by showing that the contrasting PSR area distribution is being instrumentally blurred. The PSRs expected hydrogen observations are correlated by their area fraction of the fixed 30 km diameter footprint area of the Collimated Sensor for Epithermal Neutrons (CSETN), which is part of the Lunar Exploration Neutron Detector (LEND) onboard the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO). The correlation indicates that the PSRs are similarly hydrogenated, with an expected concentration = 0.27 wt%, relative to that of the anhydrous reference terrain (lower bounds). Hydrogen concentrations are demonstrated to be correlated to maximum temperature distributions within the basins of Haworth, Shoemaker and Faustini PSRs. Cabeus-1 PSR shows an anomalously enhanced hydrogen concentration indicating a second process contributes to its hydrogen budget. Results are consistent with ongoing processes that introduce volatiles to the surface including outgassing, solar wind production with regolith silicates, and mixing from small scale meteor impacts and diurnal temperature variation. We validate the bandpass filter used to subtract CSETNs detection of uncollimated neutrons with profiles of several PSRs neutron suppression before and after processing. Keywords: Moon, Epithermal Neutron, Hydrogen, Water, Ice, Volatiles, LRO, LEND, Diviner, LOLA

  • 8 authors
·
Mar 7, 2023

Interpretable Electrophysiological Features of Resting-State EEG Capture Cortical Network Dynamics in Parkinsons Disease

Parkinsons disease (PD) alters cortical neural dynamics, yet reliable non-invasive electrophysiological biomarkers remain elusive. This study examined whether interpretable EEG features capturing complementary aspects of neural dynamics can discriminate Parkinsonian neural states. A comprehensive set of interpretable features was extracted and grouped into Standard descriptors (spectral power, phase synchronization, time-domain statistics) and Dynamical descriptors (aperiodic activity, cross-frequency coupling, scale-free dynamics, neuronal avalanche statistics, and instantaneous frequency measures). A multi-head attention transformer classifier was trained using strict LOSO validation. Group-level comparisons were performed to identify electrophysiological differences associated with disease and medication state. Standard feature sets achieved strongest performance in discriminating medication states (PDoff vs PDon), whereas Dynamical performed competitively in contrasts between PD patients and healthy controls. Random feature ablation analyses indicated that Dynamical descriptors provide complementary information distributed across features while correlation analysis revealed low redundancy within both feature sets. Group-level comparisons revealed medication-sensitive reductions in delta power and voltage variance, modulation of neuronal avalanche statistics, persistent increases in theta phase synchronization in PD patients, and disease-related alterations in cross-frequency interactions. Traditional spectral and synchronization features primarily reflect medication-related neural modulation, whereas dynamical descriptors reveal broader alterations in cortical network organization associated with disease but also with medication. These findings support multivariate EEG representations as a promising framework for developing non-invasive biomarkers of PD.

  • 1 authors
·
Mar 31

Bayesian Physics-informed Neural Networks for System Identification of Inverter-dominated Power Systems

While the uncertainty in generation and demand increases, accurately estimating the dynamic characteristics of power systems becomes crucial for employing the appropriate control actions to maintain their stability. In our previous work, we have shown that Bayesian Physics-informed Neural Networks (BPINNs) outperform conventional system identification methods in identifying the power system dynamic behavior under measurement noise. This paper takes the next natural step and addresses the more significant challenge, exploring how BPINN perform in estimating power system dynamics under increasing uncertainty from many Inverter-based Resources (IBRs) connected to the grid. These introduce a different type of uncertainty, compared to noisy measurements. The BPINN combines the advantages of Physics-informed Neural Networks (PINNs), such as inverse problem applicability, with Bayesian approaches for uncertainty quantification. We explore the BPINN performance on a wide range of systems, starting from a single machine infinite bus (SMIB) system and 3-bus system to extract important insights, to the 14-bus CIGRE distribution grid, and the large IEEE 118-bus system. We also investigate approaches that can accelerate the BPINN training, such as pretraining and transfer learning. Throughout this paper, we show that in presence of uncertainty, the BPINN achieves orders of magnitude lower errors than the widely popular method for system identification SINDy and significantly lower errors than PINN, while transfer learning helps reduce training time by up to 80 %.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 20, 2024

Chirp Localization via Fine-Tuned Transformer Model: A Proof-of-Concept Study

Spectrograms are pivotal in time-frequency signal analysis, widely used in audio processing and computational neuroscience. Chirp-like patterns in electroencephalogram (EEG) spectrograms (marked by linear or exponential frequency sweep) are key biomarkers for seizure dynamics, but automated tools for their detection, localization, and feature extraction are lacking. This study bridges this gap by fine-tuning a Vision Transformer (ViT) model on synthetic spectrograms, augmented with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to boost adaptability. We generated 100000 synthetic spectrograms with chirp parameters, creating the first large-scale benchmark for chirp localization. These spectrograms mimic neural chirps using linear or exponential frequency sweep, Gaussian noise, and smoothing. A ViT model, adapted for regression, predicted chirp parameters. LoRA fine-tuned the attention layers, enabling efficient updates to the pre-trained backbone. Training used MSE loss and the AdamW optimizer, with a learning rate scheduler and early stopping to curb overfitting. Only three features were targeted: Chirp Start Time (Onset Time), Chirp Start Frequency (Onset Frequency), and Chirp End Frequency (Offset Frequency). Performance was evaluated via Pearson correlation between predicted and actual labels. Results showed strong alignment: 0.9841 correlation for chirp start time, with stable inference times (137 to 140s) and minimal bias in error distributions. This approach offers a tool for chirp analysis in EEG time-frequency representation, filling a critical methodological void.

  • 2 authors
·
Mar 24, 2025

Learning Distribution Grid Topologies: A Tutorial

Unveiling feeder topologies from data is of paramount importance to advance situational awareness and proper utilization of smart resources in power distribution grids. This tutorial summarizes, contrasts, and establishes useful links between recent works on topology identification and detection schemes that have been proposed for power distribution grids. The primary focus is to highlight methods that overcome the limited availability of measurement devices in distribution grids, while enhancing topology estimates using conservation laws of power-flow physics and structural properties of feeders. Grid data from phasor measurement units or smart meters can be collected either passively in the traditional way, or actively, upon actuating grid resources and measuring the feeder's voltage response. Analytical claims on feeder identifiability and detectability are reviewed under disparate meter placement scenarios. Such topology learning claims can be attained exactly or approximately so via algorithmic solutions with various levels of computational complexity, ranging from least-squares fits to convex optimization problems, and from polynomial-time searches over graphs to mixed-integer programs. Although the emphasis is on radial single-phase feeders, extensions to meshed and/or multiphase circuits are sometimes possible and discussed. This tutorial aspires to provide researchers and engineers with knowledge of the current state-of-the-art in tractable distribution grid learning and insights into future directions of work.

  • 3 authors
·
Apr 26, 2023

High-Fidelity Digital Twin Dataset Generation for Inverter-Based Microgrids Under Multi-Scenario Disturbances

Public power-system datasets often lack electromagnetic transient (EMT) waveforms, inverter control dynamics, and diverse disturbance coverage, which limits their usefulness for training surrogate models and studying cyber-physical behavior in inverter-based microgrids. This paper presents a high-fidelity digital twin dataset generated from a MATLAB/Simulink EMT model of a low-voltage AC microgrid with ten inverter-based distributed generators. The dataset records synchronized three-phase PCC voltages and currents, per-DG active power, reactive power, and frequency, together with embedded scenario labels, producing 38 aligned channels sampled at Δt = 2~μs over T = 1~s (N = 500{,}001 samples) per scenario. Eleven operating and disturbance scenarios are included: normal operation, load step, voltage sag (temporary three-phase fault), load ramp, frequency ramp, DG trip, tie-line trip, reactive power step, single-line-to-ground faults, measurement noise injection, and communication delay. To ensure numerical stability without altering sequence length, invalid samples (NaN, Inf, and extreme outliers) are repaired using linear interpolation. Each scenario is further validated using system-level evidence from mean frequency, PCC voltage magnitude, total active power, voltage unbalance, and zero-sequence current to confirm physical observability and correct timing. The resulting dataset provides a consistent, labeled EMT benchmark for surrogate modeling, disturbance classification, robustness testing under noise and delay, and cyber-physical resilience analysis in inverter-dominated microgrids. The dataset and processing scripts will be released upon acceptance

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 9