We define new energy momentum surface density and quasilocal mass for the boundary surface of a spacelike region in spacetime. Isometric embeddings of such a surface into the Minkowski space are used as reference surfaces in the definition. When the reference surface lies in a flat three-dimensional space slice of the Minkowski space, our expression recovers the Brown-York and Liu-Yau quasilocal mass. Moreover, we prove the positivity of the new quasilocal mass under the dominant energy condition and show that it is zero for surfaces in the Minkowski space.

We prove the existence of reaction-diffusion traveling fronts in mean zero space-time periodic shear flows for nonnegative reactions including the classical KPP (Kolmogorov-Petrovsky-Piskunov) nonlinearity. For the KPP nonlinearity, the minimal front speed is characterized by a variational principle involving the principal eigenvalue of a space-time periodic parabolic operator. Analysis of the variational principle shows that adding a mean-zero space time periodic shear flow to an existing mean zero space-periodic shear flow leads to speed enhancement. Computation of KPP minimal speeds is performed based on the variational principle and a spectrally accurate discretization of the principal eigenvalue problem. It shows that the enhancement is monotone decreasing in temporal shear frequency, and that the total enhancement from pure reaction-diffusion obeys quadratic and linear laws at small and large shear amplitudes.

We study the problem of globally recovering a dictionary from a set of signals via ℓ1-minimization. We assume that the signals are generated as i.i.d. random linear combinations of the K atoms from a complete reference dictionary D∗∈RK×K, where the linear combination coefficients are from either a Bernoulli type model or exact sparse model. First, we obtain a necessary and sufficient norm condition for the reference dictionary D∗ to be a sharp local minimum of the expected ℓ1 objective function. Our result substantially extends that of Wu and Yu (2015) and allows the combination coefficient to be non-negative. Secondly, we obtain an explicit bound on the region within which the objective value of the reference dictionary is minimal. Thirdly, we show that the reference dictionary is the unique sharp local minimum, thus establishing the first known global property of ℓ1-minimization dictionary learning. Motivated by the theoretical results, we introduce a perturbation based test to determine whether a dictionary is a sharp local minimum of the objective function. In addition, we also propose a new dictionary learning algorithm based on Block Coordinate Descent, called DL-BCD, which is guaranteed to decrease the obective function monotonically. Simulation studies show that DL-BCD has competitive performance in terms of recovery rate compared to other state-of-the-art dictionary learning algorithms when the reference dictionary is generated from random Gaussian matrices.

Edge states attract more and more research interests owing to the novel topologically protected properties. In this work, we studied edge modes and traveling edge states via the linear Dirac equation with so-called edge-admissible masses. The unidirectional edge state provides a heuristic approach to more general traveling edge states through the localized behavior along slowly varying edges. We show the dominated asymptotic solutions of two typical edge states that follow circular and curved edges with small curvature by the analytic and quantitative arguments.

For a smooth projective toric surface we determine the Donaldson invariants and their wallcrossing in terms of the Nekrasov partition function. Using the solution of the Nekrasov conjecture [33, 38, 3] and its refinement [34], we apply this result to give a generating function for the wallcrossing of Donaldson invariants of good walls of simply connected projective surfaces with b+ = 1 in terms of modular forms. This formula was proved earlier in [19] more generally for simply connected 4-manifolds with b+ = 1, as- suming the Kotschick-Morgan conjecture, and it was also derived by physical arguments in [31].