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Laser damage to transparent solids is a major limiting factor output power of laser systems. For laser rangefinders, the most likely destruction cause of elements of the optical system (lenses, mirrors) actually, as a rule, somewhat dusty, is not an optical breakdown as a result of avalanche, but such a thermal effect on the dust speck deposited on an element of the optical system (EOS), which leads to its ignition. It is the ignition of a speck of dust that initiates the process of EOS damage.

The corresponding model of this process leading to the ignition of a speck of dust takes into account the nonlinear Stefan –Boltzmann law of thermal radiation and the infinite thermal effect of periodic radiation on the EOS and the speck of dust. This model is described by a nonlinear system of differential equations for two functions: the EOS temperature and the dust particle temperature. It is proved that due to the accumulating effect of periodic thermal action, the process of reaching the dust speck ignition temperature occurs almost at any a priori possible changes in this process of the thermophysical parameters of the EOS and the dust speck, as well as the heat exchange coefficients between them and the surrounding air. Averaging these parameters over the variables related to both the volume and the surfaces of the dust speck and the EOS is correct under the natural constraints specified in the paper. The entire really significant spectrum of thermophysical parameters is covered thanks to the use of dimensionless units in the problem (including numerical results).

A thorough mathematical study of the corresponding nonlinear system of differential equations made it possible for the first time for the general case of thermophysical parameters and characteristics of the thermal effect of periodic laser radiation to find a formula for the value of the permissible radiation intensity that does not lead to the destruction of the EOS as a result of the ignition of a speck of dust deposited on the EOS. The theoretical value of the permissible intensity found in the general case in the special case of the data from the Grasse laser ranging station (south of France) almost matches that experimentally observed in the observatory.

In parallel with the solution of the main problem, we derive a formula for the power absorption coefficient of laser radiation by an EOS expressed in terms of four dimensionless parameters: the relative intensity of laser radiation, the relative illumination of the EOS, the relative heat transfer coefficient from the EOS to the surrounding air, and the relative steady-state temperature of the EOS.

In this paper we propose high-order (tensor) methods for two types of saddle point problems. Firstly, we consider the classic min-max saddle point problem. Secondly, we consider the search for a stationary point of the saddle point problem objective by its gradient norm minimization. Obviously, the stationary point does not always coincide with the optimal point. However, if we have a linear optimization problem with linear constraints, the algorithm for gradient norm minimization becomes useful. In this case we can reconstruct the solution of the optimization problem of a primal function from the solution of gradient norm minimization of dual function. In this paper we consider both types of problems with no constraints. Additionally, we assume that the objective function is $\mu$-strongly convex by the first argument, $\mu$-strongly concave by the second argument, and that the $p$-th derivative of the objective is Lipschitz-continous.

For min-max problems we propose two algorithms. Since we consider strongly convex a strongly concave problem, the first algorithm uses the existing tensor method for regular convex concave saddle point problems and accelerates it with the restarts technique. The complexity of such an algorithm is linear. If we additionally assume that our objective is first and second order Lipschitz, we can improve its performance even more. To do this, we can switch to another existing algorithm in its area of quadratic convergence. Thus, we get the second algorithm, which has a global linear convergence rate and a local quadratic convergence rate.

Finally, in convex optimization there exists a special methodology to solve gradient norm minimization problems by tensor methods. Its main idea is to use existing (near-)optimal algorithms inside a special framework. I want to emphasize that inside this framework we do not necessarily need the assumptions of strong convexity, because we can regularize the convex objective in a special way to make it strongly convex. In our article we transfer this framework on convex-concave objective functions and use it with our aforementioned algorithm with a global linear convergence and a local quadratic convergence rate.

Since the saddle point problem is a particular case of the monotone variation inequality problem, the proposed methods will also work in solving strongly monotone variational inequality problems.

A simple non-linear model allowing to calculate daily and monthly GPP and NPP of forests using parameters characterizing the light-use efficiencies for GPP and NPP, and integral values of absorbed photosynthetically active radiation, obtained using field measurements and remotes sensing data was suggested. Daily and monthly GPP, NPP of the forest ecosystems were derived from the field measurements of the net ecosystem exchange of CO₂ in the spruce and tropical rain forests using a process-based Mixfor-SVAT model.

The results of determination of the risk of cardiovascular failure of young athletes and adolescents in stressful physical activity have been demonstrated. The method of screening diagnostics of the risk of developing heart failure has been described. The results of contactless measurement of the form of the pulse wave of the radial artery using semiconductor laser autodyne have been presented. In the measurements used laser diode type RLD-650 specifications: output power of 5 mW, emission wavelength 654 nm. The problem was solved by the reduced form of the reflector movement, which acts as the surface of the skin of the human artery, tested method of assessing the risk of cardiovascular disease during exercise and the analysis of the results of its application to assess the risk of cardiovascular failure reactions of young athletes. As analyzed parameters were selected the following indicators: the steepness of the rise in the systolic portion of the fast and slow phase, the rate of change in the pulse wave catacrota variability of cardio intervals as determined by the time intervals between the peaks of the pulse wave. It analyzed pulse wave form on its first and second derivative with respect to time. The zeros of the first derivative of the pulse wave allow to set aside time in systolic rise. A minimum of the second derivative corresponds to the end of the phase and the beginning of the slow pressure build-up in the systole. Using the first and second derivative of the pulse wave made it possible to separately analyze the pulse wave form phase of rapid and slow pressure increase phase during systolic expansion. It has been established that the presence of anomalies in the form of the pulse wave in combination with vagotonic nervous regulation of the cardiovascular system of a patient is a sign of danger collapse of circulation during physical exercise.

The Lipschitz continuous property has been used for a long time to solve the global optimization problem and continues to be used. Here we can mention the work of Piyavskii, Yevtushenko, Strongin, Shubert, Sergeyev, Kvasov and others. Most papers assume a priori knowledge of the Lipschitz constant, but the derivation of this constant is a separate problem. Further still, we must prove that an objective function is really Lipschitz, and it is a complicated problem too. In the case where the Lipschitz continuity is established, Strongin proposed an algorithm for global optimization of a satisfying Lipschitz condition on a compact interval function without any a priori knowledge of the Lipschitz estimate. The algorithm not only finds a global extremum, but it determines the Lipschitz estimate too. It is known that every function that satisfies the Lipchitz condition on a compact convex set is uniformly continuous, but the reverse is not always true. However, there exist models (Arutyunova, Dulliev, Zabotin) whose study requires a minimization of the continuous but definitely not Lipschitz function. One of the algorithms for solving such a problem was proposed by R. J. Vanderbei. In his work he introduced some generalization of the Lipchitz property named $\varepsilon$-Lipchitz and proved that a function defined on a compact convex set is uniformly continuous if and only if it satisfies the $\varepsilon$-Lipchitz condition. The above-mentioned property allowed him to extend Piyavskii’s method. However, Vanderbei assumed that for a given value of $\varepsilon$ it is possible to obtain an associate Lipschitz $\varepsilon$-constant, which is a very difficult problem. Thus, there is a need to construct, for a function continuous on a compact convex domain, a global optimization algorithm which works in some way like Strongin’s algorithm, i.e., without any a priori knowledge of the Lipschitz $\varepsilon$-constant. In this paper we propose an extension of Strongin’s global optimization algorithm to a function continuous on a compact interval using the $\varepsilon$-Lipchitz conception, prove its convergence and solve some numerical examples using the software that implements the developed method.

The paper deals with a prey-predator model, which describes the spatiotemporal dynamics of plankton community and the nutrients. The system is described by reaction-diffusion-advection equations in a onedimensional vertical column of water in the surface layer. Advective term of the predator equation represents the vertical movements of zooplankton with velocity, which is assumed to be proportional to the gradient of phytoplankton density. This study aimed to determine the conditions under which these movements (taxis) lead to the spatially heterogeneous structures generated by the system. Assuming diffusion coefficients of all model components to be equal the instability of the system in the vicinity of stationary homogeneous state with respect to small inhomogeneous perturbations is analyzed.

Necessary conditions for the flow-induced instability were obtained through linear stability analysis. Depending on the local kinetics parameters, increasing the taxis rate leads to Turing or wave instability. This fact is in good agreement with conditions for the emergence of spatial and spatiotemporal patterns in a minimal phytoplankton–zooplankton model after flow-induced instabilities derived by other authors. This mechanism of generating patchiness is more general than the Turing mechanism, which depends on strong conditions on the diffusion coefficients.

While the taxis exceeding a certain critical value, the wave number corresponding to the fastest growing mode remains unchanged. This value determines the type of spatial structure. In support of obtained results, the paper presents the spatiotemporal dynamics of the model components demonstrating Turing-type pattern and standing wave pattern.

A simplified implicit Euler method was analyzed as an alternative to the explicit Euler method, which is a commonly used method in numerical modeling in electrophysiology. The majority of electrophysiological models are quite stiff, since the dynamics they describe includes a wide spectrum of time scales: a fast depolarization, that lasts milliseconds, precedes a considerably slow repolarization, with both being the fractions of the action potential observed in excitable cells. In this work we estimate stiffness by a formula that does not require calculation of eigenvalues of the Jacobian matrix of the studied ODEs. The efficiency of the numerical methods was compared on the case of typical representatives of detailed and conceptual type models of excitable cells: Hodgkin–Huxley model of a neuron and Aliev–Panfilov model of a cardiomyocyte. The comparison of the efficiency of the numerical methods was carried out via norms that were widely used in biomedical applications. The stiffness ratio’s impact on the speedup of simplified implicit method was studied: a real gain in speed was obtained for the Hodgkin–Huxley model. The benefits of the usage of simple and high-order methods for electrophysiological models are discussed along with the discussion of one method’s stability issues. The reasons for using simplified instead of high-order methods during practical simulations were discussed in the corresponding section. We calculated higher order derivatives of the solutions of Hodgkin-Huxley model with various stiffness ratios; their maximum absolute values appeared to be quite large. A numerical method’s approximation constant’s formula contains the latter and hence ruins the effect of the other term (a small factor which depends on the order of approximation). This leads to the large value of global error. We committed a qualitative stability analysis of the explicit Euler method and were able to estimate the model’s parameters influence on the border of the region of absolute stability. The latter is used when setting the value of the timestep for simulations a priori.

In this article we consider min-min type of problems or minimization by two groups of variables. In some way it is similar to classic min-max saddle point problem. Although, saddle point problems are usually more difficult in some way. Min-min problems may occur in case if some groups of variables in convex optimization have different dimensions or if these groups have different domains. Such problem structure gives us an ability to split the main task to subproblems, and allows to tackle it with mixed oracles. However existing articles on this topic cover only zeroth and first order oracles, in our work we consider high-order tensor methods to solve inner problem and fast gradient method to solve outer problem.

We assume, that outer problem is constrained to some convex compact set, and for the inner problem we consider both unconstrained case and being constrained to some convex compact set. By definition, tensor methods use high-order derivatives, so the time per single iteration of the method depends a lot on the dimensionality of the problem it solves. Therefore, we suggest, that the dimension of the inner problem variable is not greater than 1000. Additionally, we need some specific assumptions to be able to use mixed oracles. Firstly, we assume, that the objective is convex in both groups of variables and its gradient by both variables is Lipschitz continuous. Secondly, we assume the inner problem is strongly convex and its gradient is Lipschitz continuous. Also, since we are going to use tensor methods for inner problem, we need it to be p-th order Lipschitz continuous ($p > 1$). Finally, we assume strong convexity of the outer problem to be able to use fast gradient method for strongly convex functions.

We need to emphasize, that we use superfast tensor method to tackle inner subproblem in unconstrained case. And when we solve inner problem on compact set, we use accelerated high-order composite proximal method.

Additionally, in the end of the article we compare the theoretical complexity of obtained methods with regular gradient method, which solves the mentioned problem as regular convex optimization problem and doesn’t take into account its structure (Remarks 1 and 2).

Road noise is one of the key issues in maintaining high environmental standards. At speeds between 50 and 120 km/h, tires are the main source of noise generated by a moving vehicle. It is well known that either the interaction between the tire tread and the road surface or some internal dynamic effects are responsible for tire noise and vibration. This paper discusses the application of a new method for modelling the generation and propagation of sound during tire motion, based on the application of the so-called acoustic-vortex decomposition. Currently, the application of the Lighthill equation and the aeroacoustics analogy are the main approaches used to model tire noise. The aeroacoustics analogy, in solving the problem of separating acoustic and vortex (pseudo-sound) modes of vibration, is not a mathematically rigorous formulation for deriving the source (righthand side) of the acoustic wave equation. In the development of the acoustic-vortex decomposition method, a mathematically rigorous transformation of the equations of motion of a compressible medium is performed to obtain an inhomogeneous wave equation with respect to static enthalpy pulsations with a source term that de-pends on the velocity field of the vortex mode. In this case, the near-field pressure fluctuations are the sum of acoustic fluctuations and pseudo-sound. Thus, the acoustic-vortex decomposition method allows to adequately modeling the acoustic field and the dynamic loads that generate tire vibration, providing a complete solution to the problem of modelling tire noise, which is the result of its turbulent flow with the generation of vortex sound, as well as the dynamic loads and noise emission due to tire vibration. The method is first implemented and test-ed in the FlowVision software package. The results obtained with FlowVision are compared with those obtained with the LMS Virtual.Lab Acoustics package and a number of differences in the acoustic field are highlighted.

In the first section of the paper a definition of presentation (perception) functions — components of individual’s subjective view of the world — are proposed. Using the basic psychophysical law formulated by S. Stevens, and relying on the hypotheses of socialization, rationality, individual choice, complexity of informational influences, dynamics of ideas and perceptions, and accessibility, formal dependence was derived allowing to calculate the function of presentation (perception) for probabilistic indicators (with known distribution function or subjective probability) and of interval type. In the second and third sections parameters of the presentation function according to surveys of the U.S. population related to the war in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq are estimated.