October 28, 2025 – Kavli Institute Pre-Print Publications

Trichome entanglement enhances damage tolerance in microstructured biocomposites

Posted by klaurent October 28, 2025Caltech

Kavli Affiliate: Chiara Daraio | Summary:Achieving damage tolerance in composite materials remains a central challenge in materials science. Conventional strategies often rely on filler incorporation or chemical modification, which can limit energy dissipation and constrain structural stability. Here, we leverage the unique morphology of Spirulina trichomes to investigate a reinforcement mechanism based on physical filament […]

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Trichome entanglement enhances damage tolerance in microstructured biocomposites

Posted by klaurent October 28, 2025Caltech

Kavli Affiliate: Chiara Daraio| First 5 Authors: Israel Kellersztein, Israel Kellersztein, , , | Summary:Achieving damage tolerance in composite materials remains a central challenge in materials science. Conventional strategies often rely on filler incorporation or chemical modification, which can limit energy dissipation and constrain structural stability. Here, we leverage the unique morphology of Spirulina trichomes […]

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Astronomical Optical Interferometry from the Lunar Surface

Posted by klaurent October 28, 2025Stanford

Kavli Affiliate: Laura Schaefer| First 5 Authors: Gerard van Belle, Gerard van Belle, , , | Summary:The lunar surface is a compelling location for large, distributed optical facilities, with significant advantages over orbital facilities for high spatial resolution astrophysics. The serious development of mission concepts is timely because of the confluence of multiple compelling factors. […]

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Longitudinal, simultaneous wide-field fluorescent Ca2+ imaging and fMRI in awake mice

Posted by dbos October 28, 2025November 10, 2025Yale

Kavli Affiliate: Stephen Strittmatter | Authors: Francesca Mandino, Taekyung Kang, Xilin Shen, Corey Horien, Xenophon Papademetris, Stephen M. Strittmatter and Evelyn MR Lake | Summary: Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) can be applied in mice and humans making it a key technology in translational neuroimaging research. Yet, most neuroimaging studies in rodents use anesthesia to […]

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The White Dwarf Initial-Final Mass Relation from Open Clusters in Gaia DR3

Posted by klaurent October 28, 2025Chicago

Kavli Affiliate: David W. Miller | Summary:The initial-final mass relation (IFMR) links a star’s birth mass to the mass of its white dwarf (WD) remnant, providing key constraints on stellar evolution. Open clusters offer the most straightforward way to empirically determine the IFMR, as their well-defined ages allow for direct progenitor lifetime estimates. We construct […]

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A Single-Loop First-Order Algorithm for Linearly Constrained Bilevel Optimization

Posted by klaurent October 28, 2025Cornell

Kavli Affiliate: Kyle Shen | First 5 Authors: Wei Shen, Wei Shen, , , | Summary: We study bilevel optimization problems where the lower-level problems are strongly convex and have coupled linear constraints. To overcome the potential non-smoothness of the hyper-objective and the computational challenges associated with the Hessian matrix, we utilize penalty and augmented […]

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Higgs Inflation: Particle Factory

Posted by klaurent October 28, 2025Chicago

Kavli Affiliate: Edward Kolb | Summary:We study cosmological gravitational particle production (CGPP) in Higgs inflation, wherein the inflaton is a scalar field with quartic self-coupling $λ$ and a nonminimal coupling to gravity $ξ$, and which may, but need not be, the Higgs boson of the Standard Model (SM). We find an explosive particle production peaked […]

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Higgs Inflation: Particle Factory

Posted by klaurent October 28, 2025Chicago

Kavli Affiliate: Edward W. Kolb | First 5 Authors: Tammi Chowdhury, Tammi Chowdhury, , , | Summary: We study cosmological gravitational particle production (CGPP) in Higgs inflation, wherein the inflaton is a scalar field with quartic self-coupling $lambda$ and a nonminimal coupling to gravity $xi$, and which may, but need not be, the Higgs boson […]

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Tomographic beta-gamma spectroscopy of nuclear beta decay

Posted by klaurent October 28, 2025Peking

Kavli Affiliate: Yingjie Peng| First 5 Authors: PandaX Collaboration, PandaX Collaboration, , , | Summary:Nuclear $β$ decay, a sensitive probe of nuclear structure and weak interactions, has become a precision test bed for physics beyond the Standard Model, driven by recent advances in spectrometric techniques. Here we introduce tomographic $β$-$γ$ spectroscopy (TBGS) of nuclear $β$ […]

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ReplicationBench: Can AI Agents Replicate Astrophysics Research Papers?

Posted by klaurent October 28, 2025Stanford

Kavli Affiliate: Risa Wechsler | Summary:Frontier AI agents show increasing promise as scientific research assistants, and may eventually be useful for extended, open-ended research workflows. However, in order to use agents for novel research, we must first assess the underlying faithfulness and correctness of their work. To evaluate agents as research assistants, we introduce ReplicationBench, […]

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