Abstract
The centre of the Galaxy harbours a supermassive black hole, Sgr A*, which is surrounded by a massive star cluster known as the S-cluster. The most extensively studied star in this cluster is the B-type main-sequence S2 star (also known as S0-2). These types of stars are commonly found in binary systems in the Galactic field, but observations do not seem to detect a companion to S2. This absence may be attributed to observational biases or to a dynamically hostile environment caused by phenomena such as tidal disruption or mergers. Using a N-body code with first-order post-Newtonian corrections, we investigate whether S2 can host a stellar or planetary companion. We perform 105 simulations adopting uniform distributions for the orbital elements of the companion. Our results show that companions may exist for orbital periods shorter than 100 days, eccentricities below 0.8, and across the full range of mutual inclinations. The number of surviving companions increases with shorter orbital periods, lower eccentricities, and nearly coplanar orbits. We also find that the disruption mechanisms include mergers driven by Lidov-Kozai cycles and breakups that occur when the companion surpasses the Hill radius of its orbit. Finally, we find that the presence of a companion would alter S2's astrometric signal by no more than 5 mu as. Current radial-velocity detection limits constrain viable stellar binary configurations to approximately 4.4% of the simulated cases. Including astrometric limits reduces to 4.3%. Imposing an additional constraint that any companion must have a mass less than or similar to 2 M-circle dot (otherwise it would be visible) narrows the fraction of undetectable stellar binaries to just 3.0%.

Abstract
Optical coherence tomography angiography (OCTA), known for its high-resolution and noninvasive imaging capability, has become a key modality for visualizing retinal vasculature. Accurate and automated segmentation of capillaries, arteries, veins, and foveal avascular zone in OCTA images is essential for quantitative analysis and disease assessment. In this paper, we propose a depth enhanced cascaded framework specifically designed for multi-class OCTA segmentation. Our method investigates the spatial distribution of vasculature in retinal images and integrates a novel self-supervised depth prediction module to learn implicit depth cues from volumetric data, thereby improving the discrimination of overlapping vascular layers. In addition, we design two topology-aware loss functions that explicitly encourage structural integrity and continuity of vessel segmentation, particularly at bifurcations and endpoints. Experiments on the OCTA-6 mm and OCTA-3 mm datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches, with mIoU gains of around 2% over prior method, IPNv2, thereby highlighting enhanced segmentation accuracy and vascular topology preservation.

Abstract
Existing noisy-label hyperspectral image classification (HSIC) methods usually address clean sample selection and representation regularization as separate problems, although the reliability of observed labels varies substantially across samples in hyperspectral data. This issue is amplified by mixed pixels, boundary ambiguity, spectral overlap, and limited labeled samples, which make hard clean samples difficult to distinguish from mislabeled ones. We therefore propose PDAM, a sample-reliability-guided training framework for noisy-label HSIC. The method first estimates feature-space class consistency by comparing each sample with the prototype of its observed class and converting this consistency into a reliability probability with a Gaussian mixture model. To reduce conservative false negatives, matched high-confidence selection is further used to recover hard but correctly labeled samples. The resulting reliability estimate then determines how strongly the observed label is trusted through target refinement and how strongly the input is perturbed through reliability-guided masking. Finally, masked reconstruction provides label-independent structural regularization so that uncertain samples can still contribute to spectral–spatial representation learning. Under the evaluated synthetic symmetric noise settings on the University of Pavia (UP), Salinas Valley (SV), and Kennedy Space Center (KSC) datasets, PDAM achieves the best OA and Kappa in most reported comparisons and improves robustness under both moderate and severe noise. At 30% noise, PDAM reaches 97.30% OA on UP, 98.13% OA on SV, and 95.37% OA on KSC. Ablation studies further support the necessity of reliability estimation, hard clean sample recovery, and reliability-guided supervision and regularization within this unified training mechanism.

Abstract

Abstract
Optical Wireless Communications (OWC) has recently emerged as a viable alternative to radio-frequency technology, especially for the Internet of Things (IoT) domain. However, current simulation tools primarily focus on physical layer modelling, ignoring network-level issues and energy-constrained environments. This paper presents an energy-aware OWC module for ns-3 that addresses these limitations. The module includes specific PHY and MAC layers and integrates an energy model, a mobility model, and models of monochromatic transceivers and photodetectors, supporting both visible light and infrared (IR) communications. Verification against MATLAB simulations confirms the accuracy of our implementation. Additionally, mobility tests demonstrate that an energy-restricted end device transmitting via IR can maintain a stable connection with a gateway at distances up to 2.5 m, provided the SNR is above 10 dB. These results confirm the capabilities of our module and its potential to facilitate the development of energy-efficient OWC-based IoT systems.

Abstract
This work studies the influence of an Erbium-Doped Fiber Amplifier (EDFA) on the phase variation of light in an optical fiber. To this end, the state of polarization (SOP) was measured as a function of optical power by adjusting the EDFA amplification, for two different laser output powers (2 dBm and 5 dBm). Results show that phase variation correlates with changes in optical power in both cases.