We present a hybrid asymptotic/numerical method for the accurate computation of single- and double-layer heat potentials in two dimensions. It has been shown in previous work that simple quadrature schemes suffer from a phenomenon called “geometrically induced stiffness,” meaning that formally high-order accurate methods require excessively small time steps before the rapid convergence rate is observed. This can be overcome by analytic integration in time, requiring the evaluation of a collection of spatial boundary integral operators with non-physical, weakly singular kernels. In our hybrid scheme, we combine a local asymptotic approximation with the evaluation of a few boundary integral operators involving only Gaussian kernels, which are easily accelerated by a new version of the fast Gauss transform. This new scheme is robust, avoids geometrically induced stiffness, and is easy to use in the presence of moving geometries. Its extension to three dimensions is natural and straightforward, and should permit layer heat potentials to become flexible and powerful tools for modeling diffusion processes.

A unital ring is called clean (resp. strongly clean) if every element can be written as the sum of an invertible element and an idempotent (resp. an invertible element and an idempotent that commutes). T.Y. Lam proposed a question: which von Neumann algebras are clean as rings? In this paper, we characterize strongly clean von Neumann algebras and prove that all finite von Neumann algebras and all separable infinite factors are clean.

A variety of problems in computational physics and engineering require the convolu- tion of the heat kernel (a Gaussian) with either discrete sources, densities supported on boundaries, or continuous volume distributions. We present a unified fast Gauss transform for this purpose in two dimensions, making use of an adaptive quad-tree discretization on a unit square which is assumed to contain all sources. Our implementation permits either free-space or periodic boundary conditions to be imposed, and is efficient for any choice of variance in the Gaussian.

As a discrete-time quantum walk model on the one-dimensional integer lattice Z, the quantum walk recently constructed byWang and Ye [CaishiWang and Xiaojuan Ye, Quantum walk in terms of quantum Bernoulli noises, Quantum Information Processing 15 (2016), 1897–1908] exhibits quite different features. In this paper, we extend this walk to a higher dimensional case. More precisely, for a general positive integer d ≥ 2, by using quantum Bernoulli noises we introduce a model of discrete-time quantum walk on the d-dimensional integer lattice Z^d, which we call the d-dimensional QBN walk. The d-dimensional QBN walk shares the same coin space with the quantum walk constructed by Wang and Ye, although it is a higher dimensional extension of the latter. Moreover we prove that, for a range of choices of its initial state, the d-dimensional QBN walk has a limit probability distribution of d-dimensional standard Gauss type, which is in sharp contrast with the case of the usual higher dimensional quantum walks. Some other results are also obtained.

We study the cluster combinatorics of d-cluster tilting objects in d-cluster categories. Using mutations of maximal rigid objects in d-cluster categories, which are defined in a similar way to mutations for d-cluster tilting objects, we prove the equivalences between d-cluster tilting objects, maximal rigid objects and complete rigid objects. Using the chain of d+1 triangles of d-cluster tilting objects in [O. Iyama, Y. Yoshino, Mutations in triangulated categories and rigid Cohen–Macaulay modules, Invent. Math. 172 (1) (2008) 117–168], we prove that any almost complete d-cluster tilting object has exactly d+1 complements, compute the extension groups between these complements, and study the middle terms of these d+1 triangles. All results are the extensions of corresponding results on cluster tilting objects in cluster categories established for d-cluster categories in [A. Buan, R. Marsh, M. Reineke, I. Reiten, G. Todorov, Tilting theory and cluster combinatorics, Adv. Math. 204 (2006) 572–618]. They are applied to the Fomin–Reading generalized cluster complexes of finite root systems defined and studied in [S. Fomin, N. Reading, Generalized cluster complexes and Coxeter combinatorics, Int. Math. Res. Not. 44 (2005) 2709–2757; H. Thomas, Defining an m-cluster category, J. Algebra 318 (2007) 37–46; K. Baur, R. Marsh, A geometric description of m-cluster categories, Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 360 (2008) 5789–5803; K. Baur, R. Marsh, A geometric description of the m-cluster categories of type D_n, preprint, arXiv:math.RT/0610512; see also Int. Math. Res. Not. 2007 (2007), doi:10.1093/imrn/rnm011], and to that of infinite root systems [B. Zhu, Generalized cluster complexes via quiver representations, J. Algebraic Combin. 27 (2008) 25–54].