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The New Horizons spacecraft mapped colors and infrared spectra across the encounter hemispheres of Pluto and Charon. The volatile ices CH$_4$, CO, and N$_2$, that dominate Pluto's surface, have complicated spatial distributions resulting from sublimation, condensation, and glacial flow acting over seasonal and geological timescales. Pluto's H$_2$O ice "bedrock" is also mapped, with isolated outcrops occurring in a variety of settings. Pluto's surface exhibits complex regional color diversity associated with its distinct provinces. Charon's color pattern is simpler, dominated by neutral low latitudes and a reddish northern polar region. Charon near infrared spectra reveal highly localized areas with strong NH$_3$ absorption tied to small craters with relatively fresh-appearing impact ejecta., Comment: in Science 351, aad9189 (2016)

The New Horizons mission has provided resolved measurements of Pluto's moons Styx, Nix, Kerberos, and Hydra. All four are small, with equivalent spherical diameters of $\approx$40 km for Nix and Hydra and ~10 km for Styx and Kerberos. They are also highly elongated, with maximum to minimum axis ratios of $\approx$2. All four moons have high albedos ( $\approx$50-90 %) suggestive of a water-ice surface composition. Crater densities on Nix and Hydra imply surface ages $\gtrsim$ 4 Ga. The small moons rotate much faster than synchronous, with rotational poles clustered nearly orthogonal to the common pole directions of Pluto and Charon. These results reinforce the hypothesis that the small moons formed in the aftermath of a collision that produced the Pluto-Charon binary., Comment: in Science 351, aae0030 (2016)

We discuss two semi-independent calibration techniques used to determine the in-flight radiometric calibration for the New Horizons' Multi-spectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC). The first calibration technique compares the observed stellar flux to modeled values. The difference between the two provides a calibration factor that allows the observed flux to be adjusted to the expected levels for all observations, for each detector. The second calibration technique is a channel-wise relative radiometric calibration for MVIC's blue, near-infrared and methane color channels using observations of Charon and scaling from the red channel stellar calibration. Both calibration techniques produce very similar results (better than 7% agreement), providing strong validation for the techniques used. Since the stellar calibration can be performed without a color target in the field of view and covers all of MVIC's detectors, this calibration was used to provide the radiometric keywords delivered by the New Horizons project to the Planetary Data System (PDS). These keywords allow each observation to be converted from counts to physical units; a description of how these keywords were generated is included. Finally, mitigation techniques adopted for the gain drift observed in the near-infrared detector and one of the panchromatic framing cameras is also discussed.

Density matrix quantum Monte Carlo (DMQMC) is used to sample exact-on-average $N$-body density matrices for uniform electron gas systems of up to 10$^{124}$ matrix elements via a stochastic solution of the Bloch equation. The results of these calculations resolve a current debate over the accuracy of the data used to parametrize finite-temperature density functionals. Exchange-correlation energies calculated using the real-space restricted path-integral formalism and the $k$-space configuration path-integral formalism disagree by up to $\sim$$10$\% at certain reduced temperatures $T/T_F \le 0.5$ and densities $r_s \le 1$. Our calculations confirm the accuracy of the configuration path-integral Monte Carlo results available at high density and bridge the gap to lower densities, providing trustworthy data in the regime typical of planetary interiors and solids subject to laser irradiation. We demonstrate that DMQMC can calculate free energies directly and present exact free energies for $T/T_F \ge 1$ and $r_s \le 2$., Comment: Accepted version: added free energy data and restructured text. Now includes supplementary material

Within Full Configuration Interaction Quantum Monte Carlo, we investigate how the statistical error behaves as a function of the parameters which control the stochastic sampling. We define the inefficiency as a measure of the statistical error per particle sampling the space and per timestep and show there is a sizeable parameter regime where this is minimised. We find that this inefficiency increases sublinearly with Hilbert space size and can be reduced by localising the canonical Hartree--Fock molecular orbitals, suggesting that the choice of basis impacts the method beyond that of the sign problem., Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures, Supplementary material available as 'Ancillary Files'

The Pluto system was recently explored by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, making closest approach on 14 July 2015. Pluto's surface displays diverse landforms, terrain ages, albedos, colors, and composition gradients. Evidence is found for a water-ice crust, geologically young surface units, surface ice convection, wind streaks, volatile transport, and glacial flow. Pluto's atmosphere is highly extended, with trace hydrocarbons, a global haze layer, and a surface pressure near 10 microbars. Pluto's diverse surface geology and long-term activity raise fundamental questions about how small planets remain active many billions of years after formation. Pluto's large moon Charon displays tectonics and evidence for a heterogeneous crustal composition, its north pole displays puzzling dark terrain. Small satellites Hydra and Nix have higher albedos than expected., Comment: 8 pages - Initial Science paper from NASA's New Horizons Pluto Encounter

In this article we present recent developments in numerical methods for performing a Large Eddy Simulation (LES) of the formation and evolution of a wingtip vortex. The development of these vortices in the near wake, in combination with the large Reynolds numbers present in these cases, make these types of test cases particularly challenging to investigate numerically. We first give an overview of the Spectral Vanishing Viscosity--implicit LES (SVV-iLES) solver that is used to perform the simulations, and highlight techniques that have been adopted to solve various numerical issues that arise when studying such cases. To demonstrate the method's viability, we present results from numerical simulations of flow over a NACA 0012 profile wingtip at $Re_c = 1.2\cdot 10^6$ and compare them against experimental data, which is to date the highest Reynolds number achieved for a LES that has been correlated with experiments for this test case. Our model correlates favorably with experiment, both for the characteristic jetting in the primary vortex and pressure distribution on the wing surface. The proposed method is of general interest for the modeling of transitioning vortex dominated flows over complex geometries.

Hubbard-like Hamiltonians are widely used to describe on-site Coulomb interactions in magnetic and strongly-correlated solids, but there is much confusion in the literature about the form these Hamiltonians should take for shells of p and d orbitals. This paper derives the most general s, p and d orbital Hubbard-like Hamiltonians consistent with the relevant symmetries, and presents them in ways convenient for practical calculations. We use the full configuration interaction method to study p and d orbital dimers and compare results obtained using the correct Hamiltonian and the collinear and vector Stoner Hamiltonians. The Stoner Hamiltonians can fail to describe properly the nature of the ground state, the time evolution of excited states, and the electronic heat capacity., Comment: Updated the paper to make some clarifications and include colour figures

The recently developed density matrix quantum Monte Carlo (DMQMC) algorithm stochastically samples the N -body thermal density matrix and hence provides access to exact properties of many-particle quantum systems at arbitrary temperatures. We demonstrate that moving to the interaction picture provides substantial benefits when applying DMQMC to interacting fermions. In this first study, we focus on a system of much recent interest: the uniform electron gas in the warm dense regime. The basis set incompleteness error at finite temperature is investigated and extrapolated via a simple Monte Carlo sampling procedure. Finally, we provide benchmark calculations for a four-electron system, comparing our results to previous work where possible., Comment: Minor text modifications and added deviation subplot to Fig. 9 following referee's review comments. Include link to supplementary material in references

We consider a smooth forward facing step defined by the Gauss error function of height 4-30\% and four times the width of the local boundary layer thickness $\delta_{99}$. The boundary layer flow over a smooth forward-facing stepped plate is studied with particular emphasis on stabilisation and destabilisation of the Tollmien-Schlichting (TS) waves and subsequently on transition. The interaction between TS waves at a range of frequencies and a base flow over a single/two forward facing smooth steps is conducted by linear analysis. The results indicate that for a high frequency TS wave, the amplitude of the TS wave is attenuated in the unstable regime of the neutral stability curve corresponding to a flat plate boundary layer. Furthermore, it is observed that two smooth forward facing steps lead to a more acute reduction of the amplitude of the TS wave. When the height of a step is increased to more than 20\% of the local boundary layer thickness for a fixed width parameter, the TS wave is amplified and thereby a destabilisation effect is introduced. Therefore, stabilisation or destabilisation effect of a smooth step is typically dependent on its shape parameters. To validate the results of the linear stability analysis, where a high-frequency TS wave is damped by the forward facing smooth steps direct numerical simulation (DNS) is performed. The results of the DNS correlate favorably with the linear analysis and show that for the investigated high frequency TS wave, the K-type transition process is altered whereas the onset of the H-type transition is postponed. The results of the DNS suggest that for a high-frequency perturbation $\mathcal{F}=150$ and in the absence of other external perturbations, two forward facing steps of height 5\% and 12\% of the boundary layer thickness delayed H-type transition scenario and completely suppresses it for the K-type transition., Comment: 23 pages

We expand upon the recent semi-stochastic adaptation to full configuration interaction quantum Monte Carlo (FCIQMC). We present an alternate method for generating the deterministic space without a priori knowledge of the wave function and present stochastic efficiencies for a variety of both molecular and lattice systems. The algorithmic details of an efficient semi-stochastic implementation are presented, with particular consideration given to the effect that the adaptation has on parallel performance in FCIQMC. We further demonstrate the benefit for calculation of reduced density matrices in FCIQMC through replica sampling, where the semi-stochastic adaptation seems to have even larger efficiency gains. We then combine these ideas to produce explicitly correlated corrected FCIQMC energies for the Beryllium dimer, for which stochastic errors on the order of wavenumber accuracy are achievable., Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures

The selective frequency damping (SFD) method is an alternative to classical Newton's method to obtain unstable steady-state solutions of dynamical systems. However this method has two main limitations: it does not converge for arbitrary control parameters; and when it does converge, the time necessary to reach the steady-state solution may be very long. In this paper we present an adaptive algorithm to address these two issues. We show that by evaluating the dominant eigenvalue of a "partially converged" steady flow, we can select a control coefficient and a filter width that ensure an optimum convergence of the SFD method. We apply this adaptive method to several classical test cases of computational fluid dynamics and we show that a steady-state solution can be obtained without any a priori knowledge of the flow stability properties.