Sharif Digital Repository

The volume change that occurs due to membrane penetration into peripheral voids of gravelly specimens during hydrostatic compression test in a conventional triaxial apparatus is studied by performing a set of hydrostatic compression tests on gravelly specimens with different initial relative densities. During the isotropic loading on the specimens, the total volume changes of the specimens were determined by measuring the amount of water seeping out of the specimens at different loading steps. Image processing technique was implemented simultaneously to determine the skeletal volume changes of the specimens. In this regard specimens were compressed to isotopic pressures from 10 to 500 kPa... 

In this study, the thermal cycles and the grain structure in the weld heat-affected zone (HAZ) are predicted. At the first stage, a combined heat transfer and fluid flow model is employed to assess the temperature fields during and after welding of 304 stainless steel and then, the evolution of grain structure is conducted using the predicted temperature distribution and an analytical model of grain growth. The grain sizes of the CGHAZ (coarse grain heat affected zone) achieved from the model are basically in agreement with those obtained from experimental measurement under different heat inputs in the range of 0.33-1.07 MJ/m. Both the experimental data and the calculated results show that... 

This project is a new pressure model for propagating pressure inside one or several tissues at the time of treatment with high intensity focus ultrasound (HIFU). Pressure's changes are converted to heat's changes in tissue and this is done oscillatory. When the treatment is done in deeper tissues, obtained heat can affect surficial tissues. This pressure effect also can enter surficial tissues. Amount of pressure and heat possible injury can be controlled and reduced through this mechanical modelling. In this model we have used three layers and pressure also is obtained within these three layers and is investigated averagely. Obtained tissue in this mood is kidney tissue and it is tried to... 

We study the problem of fair division of a heterogeneous resource among strategic players. Given a divisible heterogeneous cake, we wish to divide the cake among n players in a way that meets the following criteria: (I) every player (weakly) prefers his allocated cake to any other player's share (such notion is known as envy-freeness), (II) the mechanism is strategy-proof (truthful), and (III) the number of cuts made on the cake is minimal. We provide methods, namely expansion process and expansion process with unlocking, for dividing the cake under different assumptions on the valuation functions of the players. Copyright © 2017, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence... 

Language models, particularly generative models, are susceptible to hallucinations, generating outputs that contradict factual knowledge or the source text. This study explores methods for detecting hallucinations in three SemEval-2024 Task 6 tasks: Machine Translation, Definition Modeling, and Paraphrase Generation. We evaluate two methods: semantic similarity between the generated text and factual references, and an ensemble of language models that judge each other's outputs. Our results show that semantic similarity achieves moderate accuracy and correlation scores in trial data, while the ensemble method offers insights into the complexities of hallucination detection but falls short of... 

Detecting Machine-Generated Text (MGT) has emerged as a significant area of study within Natural Language Processing. While language models generate text, they often leave discernible traces, which can be scrutinized using either traditional feature-based methods or more advanced neural language models. In this research, we explore the effectiveness of fine-tuning a RoBERTa-base transformer, a powerful neural architecture, to address MGT detection as a binary classification task. Focusing specifically on Subtask A (Monolingual - English) within the SemEval-2024 competition framework, our proposed system achieves an accuracy of 78.9% on the test dataset, positioning us at 57th among... 

Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) are widely used for modern applications with huge data sizes. However, the performance benefit of GPUs is limited by their memory capacity and bandwidth. Although GPU vendors improve memory capacity and bandwidth using 3D memory technology (HBM), many important workloads with terabytes of data still cannot fit in the provided capacity and are bound by the provided bandwidth. With a limited GPU memory capacity, programmers should handle the data movement between GPU and host memories by themselves, causing a significant programming burden. To improve programming ease, GPUs use a unified address space with the host that allows over-subscribing GPU memory, but... 

Two-particle Bose-Einstein momentum correlation functions are studied for charged-hadron pairs in lead-lead collisions at a center-of-mass energy per nucleon pair of Formula Presented. The data sample, containing Formula Presented minimum bias events corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 0.607 Formula Presented, was collected by the CMS experiment in 2018. The experimental results are discussed in terms of a Lévy-type source distribution. The parameters of this distribution are extracted as functions of particle pair average transverse mass and collision centrality. These parameters include the Lévy index or shape parameter Formula Presented, the Lévy scale parameter Formula... 

Motivated by recent interest in exploring excitonic condensate as the ground state of some narrow-band-gap semiconductors, such as transition metal dichalcogenides and layered chalcogenide material Ta2NiSe5, in this paper, we theoretically study the dynamics of condensate in response to periodically driven laser fields with different polarizations and intensities. In particular, we consider laser light beams with bicircular and circular polarizations breaking the time-reversal symmetry, and linear polarization. We show that the amplitude of the condensate oscillates in time during irradiating by light with a magnitude depending on the light intensity. The dynamics survives even after the... 

A search for dark matter in events with a displaced nonresonant muon pair and missing transverse momentum is presented. The analysis is performed using an integrated luminosity of 138 fb-1 of protonproton (pp) collision data at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV produced by the LHC in 2016.2018. No significant excess over the predicted backgrounds is observed. Upper limits are set on the product of the inelastic dark matter production cross section σ(pp → A′ → χ1χ2) and the decay branching fraction ℬ(χ2 → χ1μ+μ-), where A′ is a dark photon and +++χ1 and χ2 are states in the dark sector with near mass degeneracy. This is the first dedicated collider search for inelastic dark matter. © 2024... 

The first search for scalar leptoquarks produced in τ-lepton–quark collisions is presented. It is based on a set of proton-proton collision data recorded with the CMS detector at the LHC at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 138 fb−1. The reconstructed final state consists of a jet, significant missing transverse momentum, and a τ lepton reconstructed through its hadronic or leptonic decays. Limits are set on the product of the leptoquark production cross section and branching fraction and interpreted as exclusions in the plane of the leptoquark mass and the leptoquark-τ-quark coupling strength. © 2024 American Physical Society. All rights reserved... 

A new type of aggregation-induced emission (AIE) luminogen containing a dimeric metal fragment and two or three phthalazine ligands is described, which shows dynamic motions of ligands around the metal centers in solution. Based on the variable-temperature and EXSY NMR spectroscopy data, X-ray crystallography structures, and computational results, three different pathways (i.e., reversible exchange with haptotropic shifts, circulation of ligands around the dimeric metal fragment, and walking on the spot of ligands on the metal centers) were considered for this dynamic behavior. Restriction of these dynamic processes in the aggregate forms of the compounds (in H2O/CH3CN solvent mixtures)... 

Water pollution, especially by heavy metals, continues to pose significant challenges, emphasizing the urgency to develop sustainable processes to remove pollutants while developing sustainable materials derived from renewable sources. In the present research, a nanoscale adsorbent was prepared to remove cadmium (Cd(II)) ions from wastewater by hybridizing zeolitic imidazolate framework-8 (ZIF-8) with a cellulose nanocrystal (CNC). The prepared nanohybrid exhibited an interconnected structure in which the ZIF-8 particles were connected to each other via CNC nanoneedles. The hybridization of ZIF-8 with CNC caused a significant enhancement in the adsorption performance of the fabricated... 

Biocompatible and bioactive carbon-based nanocomposites are ingeniously designed and fabricated with the aim of enhancing drug delivery applicability in breast cancer treatment. Reduced graphene oxide (rGO) and multiwalled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) are utilized as nanocarriers for increasing penetrability into cells and the loading capacity. What sets our study apart is the strategic incorporation of the two different complexes of silver (AgL2) and palladium (PdL2) with the carboxamide-based ligand C9H7N3OS (L), which have been synthesized and decorated on nanocarriers alongside doxorubicin (DOX) for stabilizing DOX by π-π interactions and hydrogen bonding. Although DOX is a well-known... 

Asphaltene deposition in the early stage of the oil reservoir life and later during any stimulation process emerges critical problems to the petroleum industry. Deposition of asphaltene aggregates raises strict problems in industries and demands markedly a practical and scientific knowledge of the mechanisms of aggregation and precipitation. Fluorescence emission spectroscopy has been widely used to illuminate the fundamental properties of crude oils and asphaltenes. It proposes analysis of some details of equilibrium, dynamic behavior, and aggregation composition of crude oil under specific condition. In this work, the fluorescence spectra of crude-oil extracted asphaltene samples were... 

The bale packings that are used as catalyst containing packings in reactive distillation columns are made and geometrically characterized. Pressure drop and holdup values are measured in a 10.4 cm i.d. glass column packed with bales using an air/water system. The arrangement of the bales in the bed is similar to that of industrial columns. The obtained data are used for evaluating the Stichlmair and the Eckert pressure drop models. Neither of these two models could fit the data properly. When a slight modification is made in the Eckert model, a specific model which fits the data well is prepared. This model also accounts for the effect of geometrical characteristics of the packed bed on... 

Osteocalcin is the most abundant noncollagenous bone protein and the functions in bone remineralization as well as in inhibition of bone growth have remained unclear. In this contribution, we explain the dual role of osteocalcin in the nucleation of new calcium phosphate during bone remodeling and in the inhibition of hydroxyapatite crystal growth at the molecular scale. The mechanism was derived using pH-resolved all-atom models for the protein, phosphate species, and hydroxyapatite, along with molecular dynamics simulations and experimental and clinical observations. Osteocalcin binds to (hkl) hydroxyapatite surfaces through multiple residues, identified in this work, and the fingerprint... 

The perovskite oxide BaTiO3, doped with Ge oxides oxidized methane to C2 coupled hydrocarbons. The ultraviolet-visible spectra of pure barium titanate and Ge doped BaTi(1-x)GexO3(x=0.05,0.1) were compared. The pure barium titanate exhibited an ultraviolet absorption effect. The addition of GeO2 resulted in an increase in absorption of wavelength. Therefore, small amount of Ge decreased band gap energy. Oxygen is inserted by nucleophilic attack which may be considered as an acid-base process. For promoted BaTiO3catalysts with stable cation valance, electron donation ability of lattice oxygen is parallels to its ability of adsorb and active oxygen, and decrease the chance of deep oxidation of... 

The problem of finding necessary and sufficient conditions to decompose a complete tripartite graph K(r, s, t) into 5-cycles was first considered by Mahmoodian and Mirzakhani (1995). They stated some necessary conditions and conjectured that these conditions are also sufficient. Since then, many cases of the problem have been solved by various authors; however the case when the partite sets r ≤ s ≤ t have odd and distinct sizes remains open. A necessary condition is t ≤ 3r. Billington and Cavenagh (2011) have shown that when r, s, and t are all odd and r ≤ s ≤ t ≤ κr, where κ ≈ 1.0806, then the conjectured necessary conditions for decomposing are also sufficient. We extend this result... 

Silver can inhibit bacterial activity. Previous studies showed that high concentration of silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) in compared to its lower concentrations is toxic for human health. However, by decreasing concentration of AgNPs, antibacterial activity also decreases. In this study, we investigated synergistic inhibitory activity of the combination of AgNPs and garlic oil nanoemulsion (GONE) for increase antibacterial activity of AgNPs at lower concentrations. AgNPs and GONE with sizes of 30.7 and 19.3 nm were synthesized and prepared by chemical reduction and low energy method, respectively. Physicochemical properties of AgNPs and GONE were investigated. The minimum inhibitory...