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Pulsar electrodynamics could be relevant to the physics of stellar surface, which remains poorly understood for more than half a centenary and is difficult to probe due to the absence of direct and clear observational evidence. Nevertheless, highly-sensitive telescopes (e.g., China's Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope, FAST) may play an essential role in solving the problem since the predicted surface condition would have quite different characteristics in some models of pulsar structure, especially after the establishment of the standard model of particle physics. For instance, small hills (or ``zit'') may exist on solid strangeon star surface with rigidity, preferential discharge, i.e., gap sparking, may occur around the hills in the polar cap region. In this work, with the 110-min polarization observation of PSR B0950+08 targeted by FAST, we report that the gap sparking is significantly non-symmetrical to the meridian plane on which the rotational and magnetic axes lie. It is then speculated that this asymmetry could be the result of preferential sparking around zits which might rise randomly on pulsar surface. Some polarization features of both single pulses and the mean pulse, as well as the cross-correlation function of different emission regions, have also been presented., Comment: Accepted for publication in Astronomische Nachrichten

As one of the paradigm examples to probe into pulsar magnetospheric dynamics, PSR B0943+10 (J0946+0951) manifests representatively, showing mode switch, orthogonal polarization and subpulse drifting. Both integrated and single pulses are studied with the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST). The mode switch phenomenon of this pulsar is studied using an eigen-mode searching method, based on parameter estimation. A phase space evolution for the pulsar's mode switch shows a strange-attractor-like pattern. The radiative geometry is proposed by fitting polarization position angles with the rotating vector model. The pulsar pulse profile is then mapped to the sparking location on pulsar surface, and the differences between the main pulse's and the precursor component's radiative process may explain the X-ray's synchronization with radio mode switch. Detailed single pulse studies on B0943+10's orthogonally polarized radiation are presented, which may support for certain models of radiative transfer of polarized emission. B0943+10's B and Q modes evolve differently with frequency and with proportions of orthogonal modes, which indicates possible magnetospheric changes during mode switch. An extra component is found in B mode, and it shows distinct polarization and modulation properties compared with main part of B mode pulse component. For Q mode pulse profile, the precursor and the main pulse components are orthogonally polarized, showing that the precursor component radiated farther from the pulsar could be radiated in O-mode (X-mode) if the main pulse originates from low altitude in X-mode (O-mode). The findings could impact significantly on pulsar electrodynamics and the radiative mechanism related., Comment: 27 pages, 28 figures, 2 tables, submitted to ApJ

The nearby radio pulsar B0950$+$08 with full duty cycle is targeted by the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST, 110 minutes allocated), via adopting polarization calibration on two ways of baseline determination, in order to understand its magnetospheric radiation geometry as well as the polar cap sparking. % The radiation of the main pulse could not be informative of magnetic field line planes due to its low linear polarization ($<10 \%$) and the position angle jumps, and the polarization position angle in the pulse longitudes whose linear fractions are larger than $ \sim 30 \%$ is thus fitted in the classical rotating vector model (RVM). % The best RVM fit indicates that the inclination angle, $\alpha$, and the impact angle, $\beta$, of this pulsar are $100.5^{\circ}$ and $-33.2^{\circ}$, respectively, suggesting that the radio emission comes from two poles. % Polar cap sparking in the vacuum gap model, either the annular gap or the core gap, is therefore investigated in this RVM geometry, resulting in a high-altitude magnetospheric emission at heights from $\sim 0.25R_{\rm LC}$ to $\sim 0.56R_{\rm LC}$, with $R_{\rm LC}$ the light cylinder radius. % It is evident that both sparking points of the main and inter pulses are located mainly away from the magnetic pole, that is meaningful in the physics of pulsar surface and is even relevant to pulsar's inner structure., Comment: 13 pages, 9 figures, submitted

The megajansky radio burst, FRB 20200428, and other bright radio bursts detected from the Galactic source SGR J1935+2154 suggest that magnetars can make fast radio bursts (FRBs), but the emission site and mechanism of FRB-like bursts are still unidentified. Here we report the emergence of a radio pulsar phase of the magnetar five months after FRB 20200428. 795 pulses were detected in 16.5 hours over 13 days by the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio telescope, with luminosities about eight decades fainter than FRB 20200428. The pulses were emitted in a narrow phase window anti-aligned with the X-ray pulsation profile observed by the X-ray telescopes. The bursts, conversely, appear in random phases. This dichotomy suggests that radio pulses originate from a fixed region within the magnetosphere, but bursts occur in random locations and are possibly associated with explosive events in a dynamically evolving magnetosphere. This picture reconciles the lack of periodicity in cosmological repeating FRBs within the magnetar engine model., Comment: published on Science Advances, the authors' version

Pulsars are the "lighthouses" in the universe. Periodic pulses with the duty-cycle ~10% are detected when the radio beam of the rotating pulsar sweeps across the telescope. In this report, the 160 min-data of a nearby pulsar, PSR B0950+08, observed with the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) is analysed. Thanks to the extremely high sensitivity of FAST, it is found that the radiation of PSR B0950+08 could be detected over the entire pulse period. To investigate the radiative characteristics of the pulsar' "bridge emission", a function, $\Theta$(n), is defined to reveal the weak radiation there. It is suggested that the narrow peaks of both the main and the inter pulses could be radiated at low altitude, while other weak emission (e.g., the "bridges") from upper magnetosphere though its radiative mechanism is still a matter of debate. The measured mean pulse behaviors are consistent with previous results in the phase of strong emission of this pulsar, and both the frequency-independent separation between the inter-pulse and main pulse and the narrow pulse width may support a double-pole model. In order to understand the magnetospheric geometry of this pulsar, further polarization calibrated observation with FAST and a proper determination of the baseline emission, especially during the weak emission phase, are surely required., Comment: Submitted to MNRAS, revised version

The key of the post-disaster humanitarian logistics (PD-HL) is to build a good facility location and capacity planning (FLCP) model for delivering relief supplies to affected areas in time. To fully exploit the historical PD data, this paper adopts the data-driven distributionally robust (DR) approach and proposes a novel multi-period FLCP model under the $\infty$-Wasserstein joint chance constraints (MFLCP-W). Specifically, we sequentially decide locations from a candidate set to build facilities with supply capacities, which are expanded if more economical, and use a finite number of historical demand samples in chance constraints to ensure a high probability of on-time delivery. To solve the MFLCP-W model, we equivalently reformulate it as a mixed integer second-order cone program and then solve it by designing an effective outer approximation algorithm with two tailored valid cuts. Finally, a case study under hurricane threats shows that MFLCP-W outperforms its counterparts in the terms of the cost and service quality, and that our algorithm converges significantly faster than the commercial solver CPLEX 12.8 with a better optimality gap.

Choice decisions made by users of online applications can suffer from biases due to the users' level of engagement. For instance, low engagement users may make random choices with no concern for the quality of items offered. This biased choice data can corrupt estimates of user preferences for items. However, one can correct for these biases if additional behavioral data is utilized. To do this we construct a new choice engagement time model which captures the impact of user engagement on choice decisions and response times associated with these choice decisions. Response times are the behavioral data we choose because they are easily measured by online applications and reveal information about user engagement. To test our model we conduct online polls with subject populations that have different levels of engagement and measure their choice decisions and response times. We have two main empirical findings. First, choice decisions and response times are correlated, with strong preferences having faster response times than weak preferences. Second, low user engagement is manifested through more random choice data and faster response times. Both of these phenomena are captured by our choice engagement time model and we find that this model fits the data better than traditional choice models. Our work has direct implications for online applications. It lets these applications remove the bias of low engagement users when estimating preferences for items. It also allows for the segmentation of users according to their level of engagement, which can be useful for targeted advertising or marketing campaigns., Comment: 37 pages, 13 figures

This paper addresses the equal circle packing problem, and proposes an efficient Quasi-physical Quasi-human (QPQH) algorithm. QPQH is based on a modified Broyden-Fletcher-Goldfarb-Shanno (BFGS) algorithm which we call the local BFGS and a new basin hopping strategy based on a Chinese idiom: alternate tension with relaxation. Starting from a random initial layout, we apply the local BFGS algorithm to reach a local minimum layout. The local BFGS algorithm fully utilizes the neighborhood information of each circle to considerably speed up the running time of the gradient descent process, and the efficiency is very apparent for large scale instances. When yielding a local minimum layout, the new basin-hopping strategy is to shrink the container size to different extent to generate several new layouts. Experimental results indicate that the new basin-hopping strategy is very efficient, especially for a type of layout with comparatively dense packing in the center and comparatively sparse packing around the boundary of the container. We test QPQH on the instances of n = 1,2,...,320, and obtain 66 new layouts which have smaller container sizes than the current best-known results reported in literature., Comment: 19 pages, 16 figures, 2 tables