TY - JOUR AB - Neuronal responses to complex stimuli and tasks can encompass a wide range of time scales. Understanding these responses requires measures that characterize how the information on these response patterns are represented across multiple temporal resolutions. In this paper we propose a metric – which we call multiscale relevance (MSR) – to capture the dynamical variability of the activity of single neurons across different time scales. The MSR is a non-parametric, fully featureless indicator in that it uses only the time stamps of the firing activity without resorting to any a priori covariate or invoking any specific structure in the tuning curve for neural activity. When applied to neural data from the mEC and from the ADn and PoS regions of freely-behaving rodents, we found that neurons having low MSR tend to have low mutual information and low firing sparsity across the correlates that are believed to be encoded by the region of the brain where the recordings were made. In addition, neurons with high MSR contain significant information on spatial navigation and allow to decode spatial position or head direction as efficiently as those neurons whose firing activity has high mutual information with the covariate to be decoded and significantly better than the set of neurons with high local variations in their interspike intervals. Given these results, we propose that the MSR can be used as a measure to rank and select neurons for their information content without the need to appeal to any a priori covariate. AU - Cubero, Ryan J AU - Marsili, Matteo AU - Roudi, Yasser ID - 7369 JF - Journal of Computational Neuroscience KW - Time series analysis KW - Multiple time scale analysis KW - Spike train data KW - Information theory KW - Bayesian decoding SN - 0929-5313 TI - Multiscale relevance and informative encoding in neuronal spike trains VL - 48 ER - TY - JOUR AB - We present nsCouette, a highly scalable software tool to solve the Navier–Stokes equations for incompressible fluid flow between differentially heated and independently rotating, concentric cylinders. It is based on a pseudospectral spatial discretization and dynamic time-stepping. It is implemented in modern Fortran with a hybrid MPI-OpenMP parallelization scheme and thus designed to compute turbulent flows at high Reynolds and Rayleigh numbers. An additional GPU implementation (C-CUDA) for intermediate problem sizes and a version for pipe flow (nsPipe) are also provided. AU - Lopez Alonso, Jose M AU - Feldmann, Daniel AU - Rampp, Markus AU - Vela-Martín, Alberto AU - Shi, Liang AU - Avila, Marc ID - 7364 JF - SoftwareX TI - nsCouette – A high-performance code for direct numerical simulations of turbulent Taylor–Couette flow VL - 11 ER - TY - JOUR AB - In many real-world systems, information can be transmitted in two qualitatively different ways: by copying or by transformation. Copying occurs when messages are transmitted without modification, e.g. when an offspring receives an unaltered copy of a gene from its parent. Transformation occurs when messages are modified systematically during transmission, e.g. when mutational biases occur during genetic replication. Standard information-theoretic measures do not distinguish these two modes of information transfer, although they may reflect different mechanisms and have different functional consequences. Starting from a few simple axioms, we derive a decomposition of mutual information into the information transmitted by copying versus the information transmitted by transformation. We begin with a decomposition that applies when the source and destination of the channel have the same set of messages and a notion of message identity exists. We then generalize our decomposition to other kinds of channels, which can involve different source and destination sets and broader notions of similarity. In addition, we show that copy information can be interpreted as the minimal work needed by a physical copying process, which is relevant for understanding the physics of replication. We use the proposed decomposition to explore a model of amino acid substitution rates. Our results apply to any system in which the fidelity of copying, rather than simple predictability, is of critical relevance. AU - Kolchinsky, Artemy AU - Corominas-Murtra, Bernat ID - 7431 IS - 162 JF - Journal of the Royal Society Interface TI - Decomposing information into copying versus transformation VL - 17 ER - TY - JOUR AB - Recently Kloeckner described the structure of the isometry group of the quadratic Wasserstein space W_2(R^n). It turned out that the case of the real line is exceptional in the sense that there exists an exotic isometry flow. Following this line of investigation, we compute Isom(W_p(R)), the isometry group of the Wasserstein space W_p(R) for all p \in [1,\infty) \setminus {2}. We show that W_2(R) is also exceptional regarding the parameter p: W_p(R) is isometrically rigid if and only if p is not equal to 2. Regarding the underlying space, we prove that the exceptionality of p = 2 disappears if we replace R by the compact interval [0,1]. Surprisingly, in that case, W_p([0,1]) is isometrically rigid if and only if p is not equal to 1. Moreover, W_1([0,1]) admits isometries that split mass, and Isom(W_1([0,1])) cannot be embedded into Isom(W_1(R)). AU - Geher, Gyorgy Pal AU - Titkos, Tamas AU - Virosztek, Daniel ID - 7389 IS - 8 JF - Transactions of the American Mathematical Society KW - Wasserstein space KW - isometric embeddings KW - isometric rigidity KW - exotic isometry flow SN - 00029947 TI - Isometric study of Wasserstein spaces - the real line VL - 373 ER - TY - JOUR AB - Nanomaterials produced from the bottom-up assembly of nanocrystals may incorporate ∼1020–1021 cm–3 not fully coordinated surface atoms, i.e., ∼1020–1021 cm–3 potential donor or acceptor states that can strongly affect transport properties. Therefore, to exploit the full potential of nanocrystal building blocks to produce functional nanomaterials and thin films, a proper control of their surface chemistry is required. Here, we analyze how the ligand stripping procedure influences the charge and heat transport properties of sintered PbSe nanomaterials produced from the bottom-up assembly of colloidal PbSe nanocrystals. First, we show that the removal of the native organic ligands by thermal decomposition in an inert atmosphere leaves relatively large amounts of carbon at the crystal interfaces. This carbon blocks crystal growth during consolidation and at the same time hampers charge and heat transport through the final nanomaterial. Second, we demonstrate that, by stripping ligands from the nanocrystal surface before consolidation, nanomaterials with larger crystal domains, lower porosity, and higher charge carrier concentrations are obtained, thus resulting in nanomaterials with higher electrical and thermal conductivities. In addition, the ligand displacement leaves the nanocrystal surface unprotected, facilitating oxidation and chalcogen evaporation. The influence of the ligand displacement on the nanomaterial charge transport properties is rationalized here using a two-band model based on the standard Boltzmann transport equation with the relaxation time approximation. Finally, we present an application of the produced functional nanomaterials by modeling, fabricating, and testing a simple PbSe-based thermoelectric device with a ring geometry. AU - Cadavid, Doris AU - Ortega, Silvia AU - Illera, Sergio AU - Liu, Yu AU - Ibáñez, Maria AU - Shavel, Alexey AU - Zhang, Yu AU - Li, Mengyao AU - López, Antonio M. AU - Noriega, Germán AU - Durá, Oscar Juan AU - López De La Torre, M. A. AU - Prades, Joan Daniel AU - Cabot, Andreu ID - 7467 IS - 3 JF - ACS Applied Energy Materials TI - Influence of the ligand stripping on the transport properties of nanoparticle-based PbSe nanomaterials VL - 3 ER -