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Browse the failure-mode index

21,253 real negative results, null findings, and replication failures. Search the index →

WASTE indexes published research — it does not host or republish full papers. Each entry is a metadata record compiled from open scholarly databases; the abstract is shown in full only where the paper is openly licensed, otherwise a short excerpt under fair use. Classifications are automated and approximate.

Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

New Constraints on ALP Electron and Photon Couplings from ArgoNeuT and the MiniBooNE Beam Dump

Francesco Capozzi, Bhaskar Dutta, Gajendra Gurung et al. · 2023 · arXiv

Beam dumps and fixed-target experiments have been very sensitive probes of such particles and other physics beyond the Standard Model (BSM) by considering the production of new states from the primary interaction in the beam dump. In a proton beam dump, there are many secondary interactions taking place in electromagnetic showers which may be additional production channels for pseudoscalar bosons or axion-like particles (ALPs). The target-less configuration of the MiniBooNE experiment, which collected data from $1.86 \times 10^{20}$ protons impinging directly on the steel beam dump, is an exce

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPhysics

Ultra-soft sources as supernova type Ia progenitors

Kelly Lepo, Marten van Kerkwijk · 2011 · arXiv

Missing from the usual considerations of nuclear burning white dwarfs as Type Ia supernova progenitors are systems with very higher mass transfer rates, where more material than is needed for steady burning accretes on the white dwarf. This will move out the photosphere of the white dwarf, causing it to emit at longer wavelengths. Thus, we propose the name ultra-soft source (USS) for these objects. We present a VLT/FLAMES survey looking for USS in the SMC, selected to be bright in the far UV and with blue far UV-V colors. While we find some unusual objects, and recover known planetary nebula a

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPhysics

Search for Coincident Gravitational Wave and Long Gamma-Ray Bursts from 4-OGC and the Fermi-GBM/Swift-BAT Catalog

Yi-Fan Wang, Alexander H. Nitz, Collin D. Capano et al. · 2022 · arXiv

The recent discovery of a kilonova associated with an apparent long-duration gamma-ray burst has challenged the typical classification that long gamma-ray bursts originate from the core collapse of massive stars and short gamma-ray bursts are from compact binary coalescence. The kilonova indicates a neutron star merger origin and suggests the viability of gravitational-wave and long gamma-ray burst multimessenger astronomy. Gravitational waves play a crucial role by providing independent information for the source properties. This work revisits the archival 2015-2020 LIGO/Virgo gravitational-w

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Explanation of the ATLAS Z-peaked excess in the NMSSM

Junjie Cao, Liangliang Shang, Jin Min Yang et al. · 2015 · arXiv

Recently the ATLAS collaboration reported a $3σ$ excess in the leptonic-$Z+jets+E_{T}^{miss}$ channel. This may be interpreted in the Next-to-Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (NMSSM) by gluino pair production with the decay chain $\tilde{g} \to q \bar{q} \tildeχ_2^0 \to q \bar{q} Z \tildeχ_1^0$, where $\tildeχ_1^0$ and $\tildeχ_2^0$ denote the lightest and the next-to-lightest neutralinos with singlino and bino as their dominant components respectively. After exploring the relevant parameter space of the NMSSM by considering the constraints from the ATLAS searches for $jets + E_{T}^{miss}

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Swimming in spacetime: the view from a Fermi observer

Raissa F. P. Mendes, Eric Poisson · 2017 · arXiv

An extended test body moving in a curved spacetime does not typically follow a geodesic, because of forces that arise from couplings between its multipole moments and the ambient curvature. An illustration of this fact was provided by Wisdom, who showed that the motion of a quasi-rigid body undergoing cyclic changes of shape in a curved spacetime deviates, in general, from a geodesic. Wisdom's analysis, however, was recently challenged on the grounds that the body's motion should be described by the Mathisson-Papapetrou-Dixon equations, and that these predict geodesic motion for the kind of bo

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPhysics

The Space Density of Post-Period Minimum Cataclysmic Variables

J. V. Hernandez Santisteban, C. Knigge, M. L. Pretorius et al. · 2017 · arXiv

Binary evolution theory predicts that accreting white dwarfs with sub-stellar companions dominate the Galactic population of cataclysmic variables (CVs). In order to test these predictions, it is necessary to identify these systems, which may be difficult if the signatures of accretion become too weak to be detected. The only chance to identify such "dead" CVs is by exploiting their close binary nature. We have therefore searched the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Stripe 82 area for apparently isolated white dwarfs that undergo eclipses by a dark companion. We found no such eclipses in either

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPhysics

The 320 EeV Fly's Eye event: a key messenger or a statistical oddity ?

Thomas Fitoussi, Gustavo Medina-Tanco, Juan-Carlos D'Olivo · 2019 · arXiv

Almost three decades ago, the Fly's Eye experiment recorded the most energetic cosmic-ray ever observed. With an energy of 320 EeV, this event is well beyond the suppression region of the ultra-high energy cosmic rays (UHECR) spectrum. Modern and larger observatories, with an exposure up to 60 times larger, have never observed an event with even remotely comparable energy. Thus, if the energy of the Fly's Eye event was indeed well measured, as strongly suggested by the data, then it remains a great mystery or an unbelievable stroke of luck. At such high energies, the Universe is very opaque to

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Search for excited tau leptons in the $ττγ$ final state in proton-proton collisions at $\sqrt{s}$ = 13 TeV

CMS Collaboration · 2024 · arXiv

Results are presented for a test of the compositeness of the heaviest charged lepton, $τ$, using data collected by the CMS experiment in proton-proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV at the CERN LHC. The data were collected in 2016-2018 and correspond to an integrated luminosity of 138 fb$^{-1}$. This analysis searches for tau lepton pair production in which one of the tau leptons is produced in an excited state and decays to a ground state tau lepton and a photon. The event selection consists of two isolated tau lepton decay candidates and a high-energy photon. The mass of the

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPhysics

A conclusive non-detection of magnetic field in the Am star o Peg with high-precision near-infrared spectroscopy

O. Kochukhov, A. M. Amarsi, A. Lavail et al. · 2024 · arXiv

The A-type metallic-line (Am) stars are typically considered to be non-magnetic or possessing very weak sub-G magnetic fields. This view has been repeatedly challenged in the literature, most commonly for the bright hot Am star o Peg. Several studies claimed to detect 1-2 kG field of unknown topology in this object, possibly indicating a new process of magnetic field generation in intermediate-mass stars. In this study, we revisit the evidence of a strong magnetic field in o Peg using new high-resolution spectropolarimetric observations and advanced spectral fitting techniques. The mean magnet

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPhysics

Backwards Gamma-Ray Bursts: Searching for Exploding Primordial Black Holes in Short-Duration GRB Catalogs

Stefano Profumo, Kally Wen · 2025 · arXiv

We present a systematic search for signatures of terminal black-hole evaporation in short gamma-ray burst (sGRB) catalogs. An exploding primordial black hole (PBH) undergoing final-stage Hawking radiation is predicted to produce a distinctive "backwards burst"-a very short, spectrally hard transient with monotonically increasing flux and little or no longer-wavelength afterglow. We develop a forward-modeling framework that directly compares theoretical PBH evaporation light curves, computed with full Standard Model particle content and detector response folding, against empirical GRB pulse tem

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPhysics

Search for an annual modulation of dark-matter signals with a germanium spectrometer at the Sierra Grande Laboratory

D. Abriola, F. T. Avignone, R. L. Brodzinski et al. · 1998 · arXiv

Data collected during three years with a germanium spectrometer at the Sierra Grande underground laboratory have been analyzed for distinctive features of annual modulation of the signal induced by WIMP dark matter candidates. The main motivation for this analysis was the recent suggestion by the DAMA/NaI Collaboration that a yearly modulation signal could not be rejected at the 90% confidence level when analyzing data obtained with a high-mass low-background scintillator detector. We performed two different analyses of the data: First, the statistical distribution of modulation-significance v

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Quark Loop Contributions to Neutron, Deuteron, and Mercury EDMs from Supersymmetry without R parity

Chan-Chi Chiou, Otto C. W. Kong, Rishikesh D. Vaidya · 2007 · arXiv

We present a detailed analysis of the neutron, deuteron and mercury electric dipole moment from supersymmetry without R parity, focusing on the quark-scalar loop contributions. Being proportional to top Yukawa and top mass, such contributions are often large. Analytical expressions illustrating the explicit role of the R-parity violating parameters are given following perturbative diagonalization of mass-squared matrices for the scalars. Dominant contributions come from the combinations $B_i λ^{\prime}_{ij1}$ for which we obtain robust bounds. It turns out that neutron and deuteron EDMs receiv

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPhysics

Testing quasilinear modified Newtonian dynamics in the Solar System

Pasquale Galianni, Martin Feix, Hongsheng Zhao et al. · 2011 · arXiv

A unique signature of the modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND) paradigm is its peculiar behavior in the vicinity of the points where the total Newtonian acceleration exactly cancels. In the Solar System, these are the saddle points of the gravitational potential near the planets. Typically, such points are embedded into low-acceleration bubbles where modified gravity theories a` la MOND predict significant deviations from Newton's laws. As has been pointed out recently, the Earth-Sun bubble may be visited by the LISA Pathfinder spacecraft in the near future, providing a unique occasion to put th

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPhysics

The hunt for sub-solar primordial black holes in low mass ratio binaries is open

Khun Sang Phukon, Gregory Baltus, Sarah Caudill et al. · 2021 · arXiv

We perform a search for binary black hole mergers with one subsolar mass black hole and a primary component above $2 M_\odot$ in the second observing run of LIGO/Virgo. Our analysis therefore extends previous searches into a mass region motivated by the presence of a peak in any broad mass distribution of primordial black holes (PBHs) around $[2-3] M_\odot$ coming from the equation of state reduction at the QCD transition. Four candidate events are found passing a false alarm rate (FAR) threshold of 2 per year, although none are statistically significant enough for being clear detections. We f

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPhysics

No Significant Effect of Coulomb Stress on the Gutenberg-Richter Law after the Landers Earthquake

Víctor Navas-Portella, Abigail Jiménez, Álvaro Corral · 2018 · arXiv

Coulomb-stress theory has been used for years in seismology to understand how earthquakes trigger each other. Whenever an earthquake occurs, the stress field changes, and places with positive increases are brought closer to failure. Earthquake models that relate earthquake rates and Coulomb stress after a main event, such as the rate-and-state model, assume that the magnitude distribution of earthquakes is not affected by the change in the Coulomb stress. By using different slip models, we calculate the change in Coulomb stress in the fault plane for every aftershock after the Landers event (C

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPhysics

Dynamics of a ground-state cooled ion colliding with ultra-cold atoms

Ziv Meir, Tomas Sikorsky, Ruti Ben-shlomi et al. · 2016 · arXiv

Ultra-cold atom-ion mixtures are gaining increasing interest due to their potential applications in quantum chemistry, quantum computing and many-body physics. Here, we studied the dynamics of a single ground-state cooled ion during few, to many, Langevin (spiraling) collisions with ultra-cold atoms. We measured the ion's energy distribution and observed a clear deviation from Maxwell-Boltzmann to a Tsallis characterized by a power-law tail of high energies. Unlike previous experiments, the energy scale of atom-ion interactions is not determined by either the atomic cloud temperature or the io

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPhysics

Comparative study of Rare Gas-H$_2$ triatomic complexes

Paolo Barletta · 2008 · arXiv

This paper presents a comparative analysis of complexes made of one Rare Gas (Rg) atom and molecular hydrogen, for all five stable Rg atoms. In particular, the vibrational band origins have been calculated, as well as the structural properties of the associated wavefunctions. The study is extended to cold Rg-H$_2$ scattering. The molecular systems are studied variationally using a very simple, yet effective, trial wavefunction. A large number of Potential Energy Surfaces available from the literature is considered. A comparative analysis shows that differences of up to two orders of magnitude

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPhysics

Hydrogen adsorption and diffusion around Si(001)/Si(110) corners in nanostructures

Richard Smith, Veronika Brazdova, David R. Bowler · 2014 · arXiv

While the diffusion of hydrogen on silicon surfaces has been relatively well characterised both experimentally and theoretically, the diffusion around corners between surfaces, as will be found on nanowires and nanostructures, has not been studied. Motivated by nanostructure fabrication by Patterned Atomic Layer Epitaxy (PALE), we present a density functional theory (DFT) study of the diffusion of hydrogen around the edge formed by the orthogonal (001) and (110) surfaces in silicon. We find that the barrier from (001) to (110) is approximately 0.3 eV lower than from (110) to (001), and that it

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPhysics

Magnetic ordering, electronic structure and magnetic anisotropy energy in the high-spin Mn$_{10}$ single molecule magnet

Jens Kortus, Tunna Baruah, N. Bernstein et al. · 2002 · arXiv

We report the electronic structure and magnetic ordering of the single molecule magnet [Mn$_{10}$O$_{4}$(2,2'-biphenoxide)$_{4}$Br$_{12}$]$^{4-}$ based on first-principles all-electron density-functional calculations. We find that two of the ten core Mn atoms are coupled antiferromagnetically to the remaining eight, resulting in a ferrimagnetic ground state with total spin S=13. The calculated magnetic anisotropy barrier is found to be 9 K in good agreement with experiment. The presence of the Br anions impact the electronic structure and therefore the magnetic properties of the 10 Mn atoms. H

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Neural Network Plasticity and Loss Sharpness

Max Koster, Jude Kukla · 2024 · arXiv

In recent years, continual learning, a prediction setting in which the problem environment may evolve over time, has become an increasingly popular research field due to the framework's gearing towards complex, non-stationary objectives. Learning such objectives requires plasticity, or the ability of a neural network to adapt its predictions to a different task. Recent findings indicate that plasticity loss on new tasks is highly related to loss landscape sharpness in non-stationary RL frameworks. We explore the usage of sharpness regularization techniques, which seek out smooth minima and hav

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPhysics

The significant effects of stellar mass estimation on galaxy pair fractions

Philip J. Grylls, F. Shankar, C. Conselice · 2020 · arXiv

There exist discrepancies in measurements of the number and evolution of galaxy pairs. The pair fraction appears to be sensitive to both the criteria used to select pair fraction and the methods used to analyze survey data. This paper explores the connection between stellar mass estimation and the pair fraction of galaxies making use of STEEL, the Statistical sEmi-Emprical modeL. Previous results have found the pair fraction is sensitive to choices made when selecting what qualifies as a pair, for example luminosity or stellar mass selections. We find that different estimations of stellar mass

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPhysics

Radiation Reaction Effects on Radiation Pressure Acceleration

M. Tamburini, F. Pegoraro, A. Di Piazza et al. · 2010 · arXiv

Radiation reaction (RR) effects on the acceleration of a thin plasma foil by a superintense laser pulse in the radiation pressure dominated regime are investigated theoretically. A simple suitable approximation of the Landau-Lifshitz equation for the RR force and a novel leapfrog pusher for its inclusion in particle-in-cell simulations are provided. Simulations for both linear and circular polarization of the laser pulse are performed and compared. It is found that at intensities exceeding $10^{23} \Wcm$ the radiation reaction force strongly affects the dynamics for a linearly polarized laser

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Politeness Counts: Perceptions of Peacekeeping Robots

Ohad Inbar, Joachim Meyer · 2022 · arXiv

The 'intuitive' trust people feel when encountering robots in public spaces is a key determinant of their willingness to cooperate with these robots. We conducted four experiments to study this topic in the context of peacekeeping robots. Participants viewed scenarios, presented as static images or animations, involving a robot or a human guard performing an access-control task. The guards interacted more or less politely with younger and older male and female people. Our results show strong effects of the guard's politeness. Age and sex of the people interacting with the guard had no signific

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPhysics

Homogeneous Vapor Nucleation Using Isothermal Multibody Dissipative Particle Dynamics

Anuj Chaudhri, Jennifer R. Lukes · 2012 · arXiv

Homogeneous nucleation of a vapor bubble from a bulk metastable phase is studied here for the first time using the multibody dissipative particle dynamics model. The van der Waals equation of state is used to define a conservative force that describes the model fluid used in this study. Additional computational tools were developed to help visualize the vapor bubble formed in the system. Continuum thermodynamic ideas are used to help identify the bubble interface and separate particles that constitute the vapor bubble and bulk liquid regions respectively. Using this idea, the density variation

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessEngineering

Resource-Aware Control via Dynamic Pricing for Congestion Game with Finite-Time Guarantees

Ezra Tampubolon, Haris Ceribasic, Holger Boche · 2020 · arXiv

Congestion game is a widely used model for modern networked applications. A central issue in such applications is that the selfish behavior of the participants may result in resource overloading and negative externalities for the system participants. In this work, we propose a pricing mechanism that guarantees the sub-linear increase of the time-cumulative violation of the resource load constraints. The feature of our method is that it is resource-centric in the sense that it depends on the congestion state of the resources and not on specific characteristics of the system participants. This f

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessPhysics

Quasar Microlensing Models with Constraints on the Quasar Light Curves

S. S. Tie, C. S. Kochanek · 2017 · arXiv

Quasar microlensing analyses implicitly generate a model of the variability of the source quasar. The implied source variability may be unrealistic yet its likelihood is generally not evaluated. We used the damped random walk (DRW) model for quasar variability to evaluate the likelihood of the source variability and applied the revised algorithm to a microlensing analysis of the lensed quasar RX J1131-1231. We compared the estimates of the source quasar disk and average lens galaxy stellar mass with and without applying the DRW likelihoods for the source variability model and found no signific

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Search for anisotropic effects of hcp solid helium on optical lines of cesium impurities

Mathieu Melich, Jacques Dupont-Roc, Philippe Jacquier · 2007 · arXiv

The anisotropic effect of a hcp 4He solid matrix on cesium atoms has been proposed as a tool to reveal the parity violating anapole moment of its nucleus. It should also result in splitting the D2 optical excitation line in a way depending on the light polarization. An experimental investigation has been set up using oriented hcp helium crystals in which cesium metal grains are embedded. Atoms are created by laser sputtering from this grains. Optical absorption spectra of the D2 line have been recorded in the temperature range of 1.0 to 1.4 K at liquid/solid coexistence pressure by monitoring

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Understanding the Effects of the Baidu-ULTR Logging Policy on Two-Tower Models

Morris de Haan, Philipp Hager · 2024 · arXiv

Despite the popularity of the two-tower model for unbiased learning to rank (ULTR) tasks, recent work suggests that it suffers from a major limitation that could lead to its collapse in industry applications: the problem of logging policy confounding. Several potential solutions have even been proposed; however, the evaluation of these methods was mostly conducted using semi-synthetic simulation experiments. This paper bridges the gap between theory and practice by investigating the confounding problem on the largest real-world dataset, Baidu-ULTR. Our main contributions are threefold: 1) we s

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Automatic Reviewers Fail to Detect Faulty Reasoning in Research Papers: A New Counterfactual Evaluation Framework

Nils Dycke, Iryna Gurevych · 2025 · arXiv

Large Language Models (LLMs) have great potential to accelerate and support scholarly peer review and are increasingly used as fully automatic review generators (ARGs). However, potential biases and systematic errors may pose significant risks to scientific integrity; understanding the specific capabilities and limitations of state-of-the-art ARGs is essential. We focus on a core reviewing skill that underpins high-quality peer review: detecting faulty research logic. This involves evaluating the internal consistency between a paper's results, interpretations, and claims. We present a fully au

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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

A Practical Approach to using Supervised Machine Learning Models to Classify Aviation Safety Occurrences

Bryan Y. Siow · 2025 · arXiv

This paper describes a practical approach of using supervised machine learning (ML) models to assist safety investigators to classify aviation occurrences into either incident or serious incident categories. Our implementation currently deployed as a ML web application is trained on a labelled dataset derived from publicly available aviation investigation reports. A selection of five supervised learning models (Support Vector Machine, Logistic Regression, Random Forest Classifier, XGBoost and K-Nearest Neighbors) were evaluated. This paper showed the best performing ML algorithm was the Random

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