Damian Sowinski

University of Rochester | UR · Physics & Astronomy

Spatially-bound objects across diverse length and energy scales are characterized by a binding energy. We propose that their spatial structure is mathematically encoded as information in their momentum modes and described by a measure known as configurational entropy (CE). Investigating solitonic Q-balls and stars with a polytropic equation of stat...

Oscillons are long-lived, spherically-symmetric, attractor scalar field configurations that emerge as certain field configurations evolve in time. It has been known for many years that there is a direct correlation between the initial configuration's shape and the resulting oscillon lifetime: a shape memory. In this paper we use an information entr...

We extend the use of configurational information measures (CIMs) to instantons and vacuum decay in arbitrary spatial dimensions. We find that both the complexity and the information content in the shape of instanton solutions have distinct regions of behavior in parameter space, discriminating between qualitative thin- and thick-wall profiles. For...

In this study, we describe numerical implementation of a heterogenous, nearly incompressible, transverse isotropic (NITI) finite element (FE) model with key advantages for use in MR elastography of fibrous soft tissue. MR elastography (MRE) estimates heterogenous property distributions from MR-measured harmonic motion fields based on assumed mechan...

Magnetic Resonance Elastography allows noninvasive visualization of tissue mechanical properties by measuring the displacements resulting from applied stresses, and fitting a mechanical model. Poroelasticity naturally lends itself to describing tissue -- a biphasic medium, consisting of both solid and fluid components. This article reviews the theo...

Despite extensive study of early vision, new and unexpected mechanisms continue to be identified. We introduce a novel formal treatment of the psychophysics of image similarity, derived directly from straightforward connectivity patterns in early visual pathways. The resulting differential geometry formulation is shown to provide accurate and expla...

Agents interacting with their environments, machine or otherwise, arrive at decisions based on their incomplete access to data and their particular cognitive architecture, including data sampling frequency and memory storage limitations. In particular, the same data streams, sampled and stored differently, may cause agents to arrive at different co...

The white matter tracts of brain tissue consist of highly-aligned, myelinated fibers; white matter is structurally anisotropic and is expected to exhibit anisotropic mechanical behavior. In vivo mechanical properties of tissue can be imaged using magnetic resonance elastography (MRE). MRE can detect and monitor natural and disease processes that af...

Easily computable quality metrics for measured medical data at point-of-care are important for imaging technologies involving offline reconstruction. Accordingly, we developed a new data quality metric for in vivo transversely-isotropic (TI) magnetic resonance elastography (MRE) based on a generalization of the widely accepted octahedral shear-stra...

We introduce an epistemic information measure between two data streams, that we term $influence$. Closely related to transfer entropy, the measure must be estimated by epistemic agents with finite memory resources via sampling accessible data streams. We show that even under ideal conditions, epistemic agents using slightly different sampling strat...

Purpose: Magnetic resonance elastography (MRE) uses phase-contrast MRI to generate mechanical property maps of the in vivo brain through imaging of tissue deformation from induced mechanical vibration. The mechanical property estimation process in MRE can be susceptible to noise from physiological and mechanical sources encoded in the phase, which...

Magnetic Resonance Elastography allows noninvasive visualization of tissue mechanical properties by measuring the displacements resulting from applied stresses, and fitting a mechanical model. Poroelasticity naturally lends itself to describing tissue - a biphasic medium, consisting of both solid and fluid components. This article reviews the theor...

Although perceptual (dis)similarity between sensory stimuli seems akin to distance, measuring the Euclidean distance between vector representations of auditory stimuli is a poor estimator of subjective dissimilarity. In hearing, nonlinear response patterns, interactions between stimulus components, temporal effects, and top-down modulation transfor...

Some biological mechanisms of early vision are comparatively well understood, but they have yet to be evaluated for their ability to accurately predict and explain human judgments of image similarity. From well-studied simple connectivity patterns in early vision, we derive a novel formalization of the psychophysics of similarity, showing the diffe...

We extend the use of Configurational Information Measures (CIMSs) to instantons and vacuum decay in arbitrary spatial dimensions. We find that both the complexity and the information content in the shape of instanton solutions have distinct regions of behavior in parameter space, discriminating between qualitative thin and thick wall profiles. For...

Science is a constructed narrative of the natural world based on information gathering and its subsequent analysis. In this essay, we develop a novel approach to the epistemic foundations of the scientific narrative, as based on our experiential interactions with the natural world. We first review some of the basic aspects of both Bayesian statisti...

Science is a constructed narrative of the natural world based on information gathering and its subsequent analysis. In this essay, we develop a novel approach to the epistemic foundations of the scientific narrative, as based on our experiential interactions with the natural world. We first review some of the basic aspects of both Bayesian statisti...

We propose a new way of investigating phase transitions in the context of information theory. We use an information-entropic measure of spatial complexity known as configurational entropy (CE) to quantify both the storage and exchange of information in a lattice simulation of a Ginzburg-Landau model with a scalar order parameter coupled to a heat b...

We investigate the critical behavior of continuous phase transitions in the context of Ginzburg Landau models with a double well effective potential. In particular, we show that the recently proposed configurational entropy, a measure of spatial complexity of the order parameter based on its Fourier mode decomposition, can be used to identify the c...

The canonical way of building theories in physics relies heavily on Hamilton's principle of least action. The resulting classical solution to a given theory is one whose energy is minimized; any perturbation to the solution results in an increase in its energy. The question is whether there are other quantities that are extremized by the variationa...

One of the major assumptions that goes into modern day cosmology is that of isotropy. It is assumed that the Universe, on the largest of scales, is the same in every direction. Observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background, the relic radiation for the epoch of recombination, can help us test this assumption. Isotropy is equivalent to saying that...