Evolutionary structural testing is an approach to automatically generating test cases that achieve high structural code coverage. It typically uses genetic algorithms (GAs) to search for relevant test cases.In recent investigations particle swarm optimization (PSO), an alternative search technique, often outperformed GAs when applied to various problems. This raises the question of how PSO competes with GAs in the context of evolutionary structural testing.In order to contribute to an answer to this question, we performed experiments with 25 small artificial test objects and 13 more complex industrial test objects taken from various development projects. The results show that PSO outperforms GAs for most code elements to be covered in terms of effectiveness and efficiency.

Superfluid vortices in the color-flavor-locked (CFL) phase of dense quark matter are known to be energetically disfavored relative to well-separated triplets of "semi-superfluid" color flux tubes. However, the short-range interaction (metastable versus unstable) has not been established. In this paper we perform numerical calculations using the effective theory of the condensate field, mapping the regions in the parameter space of coupling constants where the vortices are metastable versus unstable. For the case of zero gauge coupling we analytically identify a candidate for the unstable mode, and show that it agrees well with the results of the numerical calculations. We find that in the region of the parameter space that seems likely to correspond to real-world CFL quark matter the vortices are unstable, indicating that if such matter exists in neutron star cores it is very likely to contain semi-superfluid color flux tubes rather than superfluid vortices.

Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) are employed for a numerical determination of the analytic structure of two-point correlation functions of Quantum Field Theories. These functions are represented through integrals in d-dimensional Euclidean momentum space. Such integrals can in general not be solved analytically, and therefore one has to rely on numerical procedures to extract their analytic structures if needed. After describing the general outline of the corresponding algorithm we demonstrate the procedure by providing a completely worked-out example in four dimensions for which an exact solution exists. We resolve the analytic structure by highly parallel evaluation of the correlation functions momentum space integral in the complex plane. The (logarithmically) divergent integral is regularized by applying a BPHZ-like Taylor subtraction to the integrand. We find perfect agreement with the exact solution. The fact that each point in the complex plane does not need any information from other points makes this a perfect candidate for GPU treatment. A significant gain in speed as compared to sequential execution is obtained. We also provide typical running times on several GPUs.

We study the analytic structure of the two-point function of the operator F 2 which is expected to describe a scalar glueball. The calculation of the involved integrals is complicated by nonanalytic structures in the integrands, which we take into account properly by identifying cuts generated by angular integrals and deforming the contours for the radial integration accordingly. The obtained locations of the branch points agree with Cutkosky's cut rules. As input we use different nonperturbative Landau gauge gluon propagators with different analytic properties as obtained from lattice and functional calculations. All of them violate positivity and describe thus gluons absent from the asymptotic physical space. The resulting spectral densities for the glueball candidate show a cut but no poles for lightlike momenta, which can be attributed to the employed Born approximation.

The coupled system of the quark-gluon vertex and quark propagator Dyson-Schwinger equations (DSEs) is investigated within Landau gauge QCD. The aim is to get a deeper insight into the mechanisms of quark confinement and dynamical chiral symmetry breaking and into a possible relation between these two phenomena. To this end an earlier study is extended by improving systematically on the truncations imposed on the quark-gluon vertex DSE. A clear infrared enhancement for all tensor structures of the quark-gluon vertex is obtained.Xth Quark Confinement and the Hadron Spectrum,