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Published work

151 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Semia: Auditing Agent Skills via Constraint-Guided Representation Synthesis

An agent skill is a configuration package that equips an LLM-driven agent with a concrete capability, such as reading email, executing shell commands, or signing blockchain transactions. Each skill is a hybrid artifact-a structured half declares executable interfaces, while a prose half dictates when and how those interfaces fire-and the prose is reinterpreted probabilistically on every invocation. Conventional static analyzers parse the structured half but ignore the prose; LLM-based tools read the prose but cannot reproducibly prove that a tainted input reaches a high-impact sink. We present Semia, a static auditor for agent skills. Semia lifts each skill into the Skill Description Language (SDL), a Datalog fact base that captures LLM-triggered actions, prose-defined conditions, and human-in-the-loop checkpoints. Synthesizing a fact base that is both structurally sound and semantically faithful to the original prose is the central challenge; we address it with Constraint-Guided Representation Synthesis (CGRS), a propose-verify-evaluate loop that refines LLM candidates until convergence. Security properties (e.g., indirect injection, secret leakage, confused deputies, unguarded sinks, etc.) over an agent skill can then be reduced to Datalog reachability queries. We evaluate Semia on 13,728 real-world skills from public marketplaces. Semia renders all of them auditable and finds that more than half carry at least one critical semantic risk. On a stratified sample of 541 expert-labeled skills, Semia achieves 97.7% recall and an F1 of 90.6%, substantially outperforming signature-based scanners and LLM baselines.

preprint2024arXiv

Reconfigurable Three-Dimensional Thermal Dome

Thermal metamaterial represents a groundbreaking approach to control heat conduction, and, as a crucial component, thermal invisibility is of utmost importance for heat management. Despite the flourishing development of thermal invisibility schemes, they still face two limitations in practical applications. First, objects are typically completely enclosed in traditional cloaks, making them difficult to use and unsuitable for objects with heat sources. Second, although some theoretical proposals have been put forth to change the thermal conductivity of materials to achieve dynamic invisibility, their designs are complex and rigid, making them unsuitable for large-scale use in real three-dimensional spaces. Here, we propose a concept of a thermal dome to achieve three-dimensional invisibility. Our scheme includes an open functional area, greatly enhancing its usability and applicability. It features a reconfigurable structure, constructed with simple isotropic natural materials, making it suitable for dynamic requirements. The performance of our reconfigurable thermal dome has been confirmed through simulations and experiments, consistent with the theory. The introduction of this concept can greatly advance the development of thermal invisibility technology from theory to engineering and provide inspiration for other physical domains, such as direct current electric fields and magnetic fields.

preprint2023arXiv

Error-Mitigated Quantum Simulation of Interacting Fermions with Trapped Ions

Quantum error mitigation has been extensively explored to increase the accuracy of the quantum circuits in noisy-intermediate-scale-quantum (NISQ) computation, where quantum error correction requiring additional quantum resources is not adopted. Among various error-mitigation schemes, probabilistic error cancellation (PEC) has been proposed as a general and systematic protocol that can be applied to numerous hardware platforms and quantum algorithms. However, PEC has only been tested in two-qubit systems and a superconducting multi-qubit system by learning a sparse error model. Here, we benchmark PEC using up to four trapped-ion qubits. For the benchmark, we simulate the dynamics of interacting fermions with or without spins by applying multiple Trotter steps. By tomographically reconstructing the error model and incorporating other mitigation methods such as positive probability and symmetry constraints, we are able to increase the fidelity of simulation and faithfully observe the dynamics of the Fermi-Hubbard model, including the different behavior of charge and spin of fermions. Our demonstrations can be an essential step for further extending systematic error-mitigation schemes toward practical quantum advantages.

preprint2023arXiv

Missing data imputation for a multivariate outcome of mixed variable types

Data collected in clinical trials are often composed of multiple types of variables. For example, laboratory measurements and vital signs are longitudinal data of continuous or categorical variables, adverse events may be recurrent events, and death is a time-to-event variable. Missing data due to patients' discontinuation from the study or as a result of handling intercurrent events using a hypothetical strategy almost always occur during any clinical trial. Imputing these data with mixed types of variables simultaneously is a challenge that has not been studied extensively. In this article, we propose using an approximate fully conditional specification to impute the missing data. Simulation shows the proposed method provides satisfactory results under the assumption of missing at random. Finally, real data from a clinical trial evaluating treatments for diabetes are analyzed to illustrate the potential benefit of the proposed method.

preprint2022arXiv

Accelerated quantum Monte Carlo with mitigated error on noisy quantum computer

Quantum Monte Carlo and quantum simulation are both important tools for understanding quantum many-body systems. As a classical algorithm, quantum Monte Carlo suffers from the sign problem, preventing its application to most fermion systems and real time dynamics. In this paper, we introduce a novel non-variational algorithm using quantum simulation as a subroutine to accelerate quantum Monte Carlo by easing the sign problem. The quantum subroutine can be implemented with shallow circuits and, by incorporating error mitigation, can reduce the Monte Carlo variance by several orders of magnitude even when the circuit noise is significant. As such, the proposed quantum algorithm is applicable to near-term noisy quantum hardware.

preprint2022arXiv

Analytics and Machine Learning Powered Wireless Network Optimization and Planning

It is important that the wireless network is well optimized and planned, using the limited wireless spectrum resources, to serve the explosively growing traffic and diverse applications needs of end users. Considering the challenges of dynamics and complexity of the wireless systems, and the scale of the networks, it is desirable to have solutions to automatically monitor, analyze, optimize, and plan the network. This article discusses approaches and solutions of data analytics and machine learning powered optimization and planning. The approaches include analyzing some important metrics of performances and experiences, at the lower layers and upper layers of open systems interconnection (OSI) model, as well as deriving a metric of the end user perceived network congestion indicator. The approaches include monitoring and diagnosis such as anomaly detection of the metrics, root cause analysis for poor performances and experiences. The approaches include enabling network optimization with tuning recommendations, directly targeting to optimize the end users experiences, via sensitivity modeling and analysis of the upper layer metrics of the end users experiences v.s. the improvement of the lower layers metrics due to tuning the hardware configurations. The approaches also include deriving predictive metrics for network planning, traffic demand distributions and trends, detection and prediction of the suppressed traffic demand, and the incentives of traffic gains if the network is upgraded. These approaches of optimization and planning are for accurate detection of optimization and upgrading opportunities at a large scale, enabling more effective optimization and planning such as tuning cells configurations, upgrading cells capacity with more advanced technologies or new hardware, adding more cells, etc., improving the network performances and providing better experiences to end users.

preprint2022arXiv

Asymmetric Heat Transfer with Linear Conductive Metamaterials

Asymmetric heat transfer systems, often referred to as thermal diodes or thermal rectifiers, have garnered increasing interest due to their wide range of application possibilities. Most of those previous macroscopic thermal diodes either resort to nonlinear thermal conductivities with strong temperature dependence that may be quite limited by or fixed in natural materials or rely on active modulation that necessitated auxiliary energy payloads. Here, we establish a straightforward strategy of passively realizing asymmetric heat transfer with linear conductive materials. The strategy also introduces a new interrogative perspective on the design of asymmetric heat transfer utilizing nonlinear thermal conductivity, correcting the misconception that thermal rectification is impossible with separable nonlinear thermal conductivity. The nonlinear perturbation mode can be versatilely engineered to produce an effective and wide-ranging perturbation in the heat conduction, which imitates and bypasses intrinsic thermal nonlinearity constraints set by naturally occurring counterparts. Independent experimental characterizations of surface thermal radiation and thermal convection verified that the heat exchange between a graded linear thermal metamaterial and the ambient can be tailored to achieve macroscopic asymmetric heat transfer. Our work is envisaged to inspire conceptual models for heat transfer control, serving as a robust and convenient platform for advanced thermal management, thermal computation, and heat transport.

preprint2022arXiv

Capacity Optimal Coded Generalized MU-MIMO

With the complication of future communication scenarios, most conventional signal processing technologies of multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) become unreliable, which are designed based on ideal assumptions, such as Gaussian signaling and independent identically distributed (IID) channel matrices. As a result, this paper considers a generalized MU-MIMO (GMU-MIMO) system with more general assumptions, i.e., arbitrarily fixed input distributions, and general unitarily-invariant channel matrices. However, there is still no accurate capacity analysis and capacity optimal transceiver with practical complexity for GMU-MIMO under the constraint of coding. To address these issues, inspired by the replica method, the constrained sum capacity of coded GMU-MIMO with fixed input distribution is calculated by using the celebrated mutual information and minimum mean-square error (MMSE) lemma and the MMSE optimality of orthogonal/vector approximate message passing (OAMP/VAMP). Then, a capacity optimal multiuser OAMP/VAMP receiver is proposed, whose achievable rate is proved to be equal to the constrained sum capacity. Moreover, a design principle of multi-user codes is presented for the multiuser OAMP/VAMP, based on which a kind of practical multi-user low-density parity-check (MU-LDPC) code is designed. Numerical results show that finite-length performances of the proposed MU-LDPC codes with multi-user OAMP/VAMP are about 2 dB away from the constrained sum capacity and outperform those of the existing state-of-art methods.

preprint2022arXiv

Charmless Quasi-two-body $B$ Decays in Perturbative QCD Approach: Taking $B\to K({\cal R}\to) K^+K^-$ As Examples

Three-body $B$ decays not only significantly broaden the study of $B$ meson decay mechanisms, but also provide information of resonant particles. Because of complicate dynamics, it is very hard for us to study the whole phase space in a specific approach. In this review, we take $B\to K({\cal R}\to) K^+K^-$ decays as examples and show the application of the perturbative QCD (PQCD) approach in studying the quasi-two-body $B$ decays, where two particles move collinearly with large energy and the bachelor one recoils back. To describe the dynamics of two collinear particles, the ($S$, $P$ and $D$)-wave functions of kaon-pair with different waves are introduced. By keeping the transverse momenta, all possible diagrams including the hard spectator diagrams and annihilation ones can be calculated in PQCD approach. Most results are well consistent with the current measurements from BaBar, Belle and LHCb experiments. Moreover, under the narrow-width approximation we can extract the branching fractions of the two-body decays involving the resonant states, and also predict the branching fractions of the corresponding quasi-two-body decays $B\to K(\cal{R}\to )π^+π^-$. All prediction are expected to be tested in the ongoing LHCb and Belle-II experiments.

preprint2022arXiv

Correlating Gravitational Waves with $W$-boson Mass, FIMP Dark Matter, and Majorana Seesaw Mechanism

We study a minimal extension of the Standard Model by introducing three right-handed neutrinos and a new scotogenic scalar doublet, in which the mass splittings between neutral and charged components are responsible for the $W$-boson mass newly measured by the CDF collaboration. This model can not only generate non-vanishing Majorana neutrino masses via the interaction of right-handed neutrinos and scotogenic scalars, but also explain the Universe's missing matter in the form of FIMP dark matter. We also study the influence of the mass splitting on the first order electroweak phase transition, and find that it can further enhance the transition strength and thus induce gravitational waves during the phase transition, which may be detected in the forthcoming detectors such as U-DECIGO.

preprint2022arXiv

Decoupled Multi-task Learning with Cyclical Self-Regulation for Face Parsing

This paper probes intrinsic factors behind typical failure cases (e.g. spatial inconsistency and boundary confusion) produced by the existing state-of-the-art method in face parsing. To tackle these problems, we propose a novel Decoupled Multi-task Learning with Cyclical Self-Regulation (DML-CSR) for face parsing. Specifically, DML-CSR designs a multi-task model which comprises face parsing, binary edge, and category edge detection. These tasks only share low-level encoder weights without high-level interactions between each other, enabling to decouple auxiliary modules from the whole network at the inference stage. To address spatial inconsistency, we develop a dynamic dual graph convolutional network to capture global contextual information without using any extra pooling operation. To handle boundary confusion in both single and multiple face scenarios, we exploit binary and category edge detection to jointly obtain generic geometric structure and fine-grained semantic clues of human faces. Besides, to prevent noisy labels from degrading model generalization during training, cyclical self-regulation is proposed to self-ensemble several model instances to get a new model and the resulting model then is used to self-distill subsequent models, through alternating iterations. Experiments show that our method achieves the new state-of-the-art performance on the Helen, CelebAMask-HQ, and Lapa datasets. The source code is available at https://github.com/deepinsight/insightface/tree/master/parsing/dml_csr.

preprint2022arXiv

Effects from Hadronic Structure of Photon on $B\toϕγ$ and $B_s\to(ρ^0,ω)γ$ Decays

Using the perturbative QCD approach, we studied the effects from hadronic structure of photon on the pure annihilation rediative decays $B\toϕγ$ and $B_s\to(ρ^0,ω)γ$. These decays have small branching fractions due to the power suppression by the $Λ/m_B$, which make them very sensitive to the next-leading power corrections. The quark components and the related two-particle distribution amplitudes of a final state photon are introduced. The branching fractions can be enhanced remarkably by the factorizable and nonfactorizable emission diagrams. The branching fraction of $B\to ϕγ$ even increases by about 40 times, and those of $B_s \to ρ^0γ$ and $B_s \to ωγ$ are at the order of ${\cal O}(10^{-10})$. We also note that the ratio of branching fractions of $B_s \to ρ^0γ$ and $B_s \to ωγ$ is very sensitive to the effects from hadronic structure of photon. All above results could be tested in future.

preprint2022arXiv

Electronic and magnetic properties of the RuX$_3$ (X=Cl, Br, I) family: Two siblings -- and a cousin?

Motivated by recent reports of metallic behavior in the recently synthesized RuI$_3$, in contrast to the Mott-insulating nature of the actively discussed $α$-RuCl$_3$, as well as RuBr$_3$, we present a detailed comparative analysis of the electronic and magnetic properties of this family of trihalides. Using a combination of first-principles calculations and effective-model considerations, we conclude that RuI$_3$, similarly to the other two members, is most probably on the verge of a Mott insulator, but with much smaller magnetic moments and a strong magnetic frustration. We predict the ideal pristine crystal of RuI$_3$ to have a nearly vanishing conventional nearest-neighbor Heisenberg interaction and to be a quantum spin liquid candidate of possibly different kind than the Kitaev spin liquid. In order to understand the apparent contradiction to the reported resistivity $ρ$, we analyze the experimental evidence for all three compounds and propose a scenario for the observed metallicity in existing samples of RuI$_3$. Furthermore, for the Mott insulator RuBr$_3$ we obtain a magnetic Hamiltonian of a similar form to that in the much discussed $α$-RuCl$_3$ and show that this Hamiltonian is in agreement with experimental evidence in RuBr$_3$.

preprint2022arXiv

Multi-Center Magnon Excitations Open the Entire Brillouin Zone to Terahertz Magnetometry of Quantum Magnets

Due to the small photon momentum, optical spectroscopy commonly probes magnetic excitations only at the center of the Brillouin zone; however, there are ways to override this restriction. In the case of the distorted kagome quantum magnet Y-kapellasite, Y$_3$Cu$_9$(OH)$_{19}$Cl$_8$, under scrutiny here, the magnon density of states can be accessed over the entire Brillouin zone through three-center magnon excitations. This mechanism is aided by the three different magnetic sublattices and strong short-range correlations in the distorted kagome lattice. The results of THz time-domain experiments agree remarkably well with linear spin-wave theory. Relaxing the conventional zone-center constraint of photons gives a new aspect to probe magnetism in matter.

preprint2022arXiv

Quantifying Community Evolution in Developer Social Networks: Proof of Indices' Properties

The document provides the proof to properties of community evolution indices including community split and shrink in paper: Liang Wang, Ying Li, Jierui Zhang, and Xianping Tao. 2022. Quantifying Community Evolution in Developer Social Networks. In Proceedings of the30th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposiumon the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE 22), November 14 - 18, 2022, Singapore, Singapore. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 12 pages. Proof to properties of community merge and expand is similar.

preprint2022arXiv

Quantitative Analysis of Community Evolution in Developer Social Networks Around Open Source Software Projects

Understanding the evolution of communities in developer social networks (DSNs) around open source software (OSS) projects can provide valuable insights about the socio-technical process of OSS development. Existing studies show the evolutionary behaviors of social communities can effectively be described using patterns including split, shrink, merge, expand, emerge, and extinct. However, existing pattern-based approaches are limited in supporting quantitative analysis, and are potentially problematic for using the patterns in a mutually exclusive manner when describing community evolution. In this work, we propose that different patterns can occur simultaneously between every pair of communities during the evolution, just in different degrees. Four entropy-based indices are devised to measure the degree of community split, shrink, merge, and expand, respectively, which can provide a comprehensive and quantitative measure of community evolution in DSNs. The indices have properties desirable to quantify community evolution including monotonicity, and bounded maximum and minimum values that correspond to meaningful cases. They can also be combined to describe more patterns such as community emerge and extinct. We conduct experiments with real-world OSS projects to evaluate the validity of the proposed indices. The results suggest the proposed indices can effectively capture community evolution, and are consistent with existing approaches in detecting evolution patterns in DSNs with an accuracy of 94.1\%. The results also show that the indices are useful in predicting OSS team productivity with an accuracy of 0.718. In summary, the proposed approach is among the first to quantify the degree of community evolution with respect to different patterns, which is promising in supporting future research and applications about DSNs and OSS development.

preprint2022arXiv

Role of disorder in the electronic and magnetic properties of Ag$_3$LiIr$_2$O$_6$

The nature of magnetism in the intercalated honeycomb iridate Ag$_3$LiIr$_2$O$_6$ has been a subject of recent intensive debate, where the absence or presence of antiferromagnetic order has been reported to be related to possible structural disorder effects and, an enhanced Ir-O hybridization and itinerancy with respect to the parent Li$_2$IrO$_3$ has been suggested as the origin of distinct x-ray spectroscopy features. In the present work we investigate the microscopic nature of the electronic and magnetic properties of Ag$_3$LiIr$_2$O$_6$ via a combination of density functional theory combined with exact diagonalization of ab initio-derived models for various experimental and theoretical structures. We evaluate two possible scenarios, the itinerant quasimolecular framework (QMO) on the one hand, and the localized relativistic $j_{\rm eff} = 1/2$ and $j_{\rm eff} = 3/2$ picture on the other hand, and find that the latter description is still viable for this system. We further calculate resonant inelastic x-ray scattering spectra and show that agreement with experimental observations can be obtained if the presence of Ag vacancies leading to changes in Ir filling and structural disorder is assumed. Finally, we show that the experimentally observed antiferromagnetic spiral magnetic order is reproduced by our ab-initio derived magnetic models.

preprint2022arXiv

Swin-Pose: Swin Transformer Based Human Pose Estimation

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been widely utilized in many computer vision tasks. However, CNNs have a fixed reception field and lack the ability of long-range perception, which is crucial to human pose estimation. Due to its capability to capture long-range dependencies between pixels, transformer architecture has been adopted to computer vision applications recently and is proven to be a highly effective architecture. We are interested in exploring its capability in human pose estimation, and thus propose a novel model based on transformer architecture, enhanced with a feature pyramid fusion structure. More specifically, we use pre-trained Swin Transformer as our backbone and extract features from input images, we leverage a feature pyramid structure to extract feature maps from different stages. By fusing the features together, our model predicts the keypoint heatmap. The experiment results of our study have demonstrated that the proposed transformer-based model can achieve better performance compared to the state-of-the-art CNN-based models.

preprint2022arXiv

Systematic assessment of the effects of space averaging and time averaging on weather forecast skill

Intuitively, one would expect a more skillful forecast if predicting weather averaged over one week instead of the weather averaged over one day, and similarly for different spatial averaging areas. However, there are few systematic studies of averaging and forecast skill with modern forecasts, and it is therefore not clear how much improvement in forecast performance is produced via averaging. Here we present a direct investigation of averaging effects, based on data from operational numerical weather forecasts. Data is analyzed for precipitation and surface temperature, for lead times of roughly 1 to 7 days, and for time- and space-averaging diameters of 1 to 7 days and 100 to 4500 km, respectively. For different geographic locations, the effects of time- or space-averaging can be different, and while no clear geographical pattern is seen for precipitation, a clear spatial pattern is seen for temperature. For temperature, in general, time averaging is most effective near coastlines, also effective over land, and least effective over oceans. Based on all locations globally, time averaging was less effective than one might expect. To help understand why time averaging may sometimes be minimally effective, a stochastic model is analyzed as a synthetic weather time series, and analytical formulas are presented for the decorrelation time. In effect, while time averaging creates a time series that is visually smoother, it does not necessarily cause a substantial increase in the predictability of the time series.

preprint2022arXiv

The Existence of Graph whose Vertex Set Can be Partitioned into a Fixed Number of Domination Strong Critical Vertex-sets

Let $γ(G)$ denote the domination number of a graph $G$. A vertex $v\in V(G)$ is called a \emph{critical vertex} of $G$ if $γ(G-v)=γ(G)-1$. A graph is called \emph{vertex-critical} if every vertex of it is critical. In this paper, we correspondingly introduce two such definitions: (i) a set $S\subseteq V(G)$ is called a \emph{strong critical vertex-set} of $G$ if $γ(G-S)=γ(G)-|S|$; (ii) a graph $G$ is called \emph{strong $l$-vertex-sets-critical} if $V(G)$ can be partitioned into $l$ strong critical vertex-sets of $G$. Whereafter, we give some properties of strong $l$-vertex-sets-critical graphs by extending the previous results of vertex-critical graphs. As the core work, we study on the existence of this class of graphs and obtain that there exists a strong $l$-vertex-sets-critical connected graph if and only if $l\notin\{2,3,5\}$.

preprint2022arXiv

Understanding the Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Transportation-related Behaviors with Human Mobility Data

The constrained outbreak of COVID-19 in Mainland China has recently been regarded as a successful example of fighting this highly contagious virus. Both the short period (in about three months) of transmission and the sub-exponential increase of confirmed cases in Mainland China have proved that the Chinese authorities took effective epidemic prevention measures, such as case isolation, travel restrictions, closing recreational venues, and banning public gatherings. These measures can, of course, effectively control the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. Meanwhile, they may dramatically change the human mobility patterns, such as the daily transportation-related behaviors of the public. To better understand the impact of COVID-19 on transportation-related behaviors and to provide more targeted anti-epidemic measures, we use the huge amount of human mobility data collected from Baidu Maps, a widely-used Web mapping service in China, to look into the detail reaction of the people there during the pandemic. To be specific, we conduct data-driven analysis on transportation-related behaviors during the pandemic from the perspectives of 1) means of transportation, 2) type of visited venues, 3) check-in time of venues, 4) preference on "origin-destination" distance, and 5) "origin-transportation-destination" patterns. For each topic, we also give our specific insights and policy-making suggestions. Given that the COVID-19 pandemic is still spreading in more than 200 countries and territories worldwide, infecting millions of people, the insights and suggestions provided here may help fight COVID-19.

preprint2021arXiv

3D-ANAS: 3D Asymmetric Neural Architecture Search for Fast Hyperspectral Image Classification

Hyperspectral images involve abundant spectral and spatial information, playing an irreplaceable role in land-cover classification. Recently, based on deep learning technologies, an increasing number of HSI classification approaches have been proposed, which demonstrate promising performance. However, previous studies suffer from two major drawbacks: 1) the architecture of most deep learning models is manually designed, relies on specialized knowledge, and is relatively tedious. Moreover, in HSI classifications, datasets captured by different sensors have different physical properties. Correspondingly, different models need to be designed for different datasets, which further increases the workload of designing architectures; 2) the mainstream framework is a patch-to-pixel framework. The overlap regions of patches of adjacent pixels are calculated repeatedly, which increases computational cost and time cost. Besides, the classification accuracy is sensitive to the patch size, which is artificially set based on extensive investigation experiments. To overcome the issues mentioned above, we firstly propose a 3D asymmetric neural network search algorithm and leverage it to automatically search for efficient architectures for HSI classifications. By analysing the characteristics of HSIs, we specifically build a 3D asymmetric decomposition search space, where spectral and spatial information are processed with different decomposition convolutions. Furthermore, we propose a new fast classification framework, i,e., pixel-to-pixel classification framework, which has no repetitive operations and reduces the overall cost. Experiments on three public HSI datasets captured by different sensors demonstrate the networks designed by our 3D-ANAS achieve competitive performance compared to several state-of-the-art methods, while having a much faster inference speed.

preprint2021arXiv

A Histogram Thresholding Improvement to Mask R-CNN for Scalable Segmentation of New and Old Rural Buildings

Mapping new and old buildings are of great significance for understanding socio-economic development in rural areas. In recent years, deep neural networks have achieved remarkable building segmentation results in high-resolution remote sensing images. However, the scarce training data and the varying geographical environments have posed challenges for scalable building segmentation. This study proposes a novel framework based on Mask R-CNN, named HTMask R-CNN, to extract new and old rural buildings even when the label is scarce. The framework adopts the result of single-object instance segmentation from the orthodox Mask R-CNN. Further, it classifies the rural buildings into new and old ones based on a dynamic grayscale threshold inferred from the result of a two-object instance segmentation task where training data is scarce. We found that the framework can extract more buildings and achieve a much higher mean Average Precision (mAP) than the orthodox Mask R-CNN model. We tested the novel framework's performance with increasing training data and found that it converged even when the training samples were limited. This framework's main contribution is to allow scalable segmentation by using significantly fewer training samples than traditional machine learning practices. That makes mapping China's new and old rural buildings viable.

preprint2021arXiv

Charmless $B_s\to V S$ Decays in PQCD Approach

In this work, we investigate the $B_s\to V S$ decays in the perturbative QCD approach, where $V$ and $S$ denote the vector meson and scalar meson respectively. Based on the two-quark structure, considering two different scenarios for describing the scalar mesons, we calculate the branching fractions and the direct $CP$ asymmetries of all $B_s\to VS$ decays. Most branching fractions are predicted to be at $10^{-7}$ to $10^{-5}$, which could be measured in the LHCb and Belle-II experiments, especially for these color-allowed $B_s\to κ(800)(K_0^*(1430))K^*$ decays. It is found that the branching fractions of $B_s\to K_0^{*0}(1430)\bar{K}^{*0}$ and $B_s\to K_0^{*+}(1430)\bar{K}^{*-}$ are very sensitive to the scenarios, which can be used to determine whether $K_0^{*0}(1430)$ belongs to the ground state or the first excited state, if the data were available. We also note that some decays have large direct $CP$ asymmetries, some of which are also sensitive to the scenarios, such as the $B_s \to a_0^+(1450)K^{*-}$ and the $B_s\to f_0(1500) K^{*0}$ decays. Since the experimental measurements of $B_s\to VS$ decays are on the way, combined with the available data in the future, we expect the theoretical predictions will shed light on the structure of the scalar mesons.

preprint2021arXiv

Dual-state purification for practical quantum error mitigation

Quantum error mitigation is essential for computing on the noisy quantum computer with a limited number of qubits. In this paper, we propose a practical protocol of error mitigation by virtually purifying the quantum state without qubit overhead or requiring only one ancillary qubit. In dual-state purification, we effectively generate a purified state with increased fidelity using the erroneous state and its dual state, respectively, prepared with the noisy quantum circuit and the dual map of its inverse circuit. Combined with tomography purification, we can make sure that the final estimate of an observable is obtained from a pure state. The numerical result suggests that our protocol reduces the error by a rescaling factor decreasing with the qubit number and circuit depth, i.e. the performance of purification is better for larger circuits. On a cloud quantum computer, we successfully demonstrate the reduced error with a quantum variational eigensolver circuit.

preprint2021arXiv

Is $f_X(1500)$ observed in the $B\to π(K)KK$ decays $ρ^0(1450)$?

We suggest that the uncertain state $f_X(1500)$ observed by Belle and BaBar more than a decade ago, which has been viewed as a single scalar or a combination of several even spin resonances, is the vector $ρ^0(1450)$ reported recently by LHCb. Adopting the perturbative QCD approach, we determine the di-kaon distribution amplitudes with the $ρ^0(1450)$ resonance from the LHCb data for the quasi-two-body decays $B^{\pm}\to π^{\pm}ρ^0(1450)\toπ^{\pm}K^+K^-$. It is then shown that the $B^+ \to K^+K^+K^-$ decay spectrum around the invariant mass $M(K^+K^-)\sim 1.5~\rm GeV$ measured by BaBar can be well described by the resonant contribution from $ρ^0(1450)$. The broad structure in the $B^{+}\to K^{+} K_SK_S$ spectrum around the invariant mass $1.5~\rm GeV$ of a $K_SK_S$ pair, which $ρ^0(1450)$ cannot decay into because of Bose-Einstein statistics, can be accounted for by a nonresonant $S$-wave contribution alone. The branching fractions and/or the direct $CP$ asymmetries of the $B^{\pm}\to π^{\pm}ρ^0(1450)\toπ^{\pm}K^+K^-$, $B^{+}\to K^{+}ρ^0(1450)\to K^+K^+K^-$ and $B^{0}\to K^{0}ρ^0(1450)\to K^0K^+K^-$ modes are predicted, which can be tested at the ongoing LHCb and Belle-II experiments. We encourage experimental colleagues to scrutinize our postulation by analyzing relevant data with higher precision.

preprint2021arXiv

Learning-based quantum error mitigation

If NISQ-era quantum computers are to perform useful tasks, they will need to employ powerful error mitigation techniques. Quasi-probability methods can permit perfect error compensation at the cost of additional circuit executions, provided that the nature of the error model is fully understood and sufficiently local both spatially and temporally. Unfortunately these conditions are challenging to satisfy. Here we present a method by which the proper compensation strategy can instead be learned ab initio. Our training process uses multiple variants of the primary circuit where all non-Clifford gates are substituted with gates that are efficient to simulate classically. The process yields a configuration that is near-optimal versus noise in the real system with its non-Clifford gate set. Having presented a range of learning strategies, we demonstrate the power of the technique both with real quantum hardware (IBM devices) and exactly-emulated imperfect quantum computers. The systems suffer a range of noise severities and types, including spatially and temporally correlated variants. In all cases the protocol successfully adapts to the noise and mitigates it to a high degree.

preprint2021arXiv

Plasmonic Waveguides to Enhance Quantum Electrodynamic Phenomena at the Nanoscale

The emerging field of plasmonics can lead to enhanced light matter interactions at extremely nanoscale regions. Plasmonic (metallic) devices promise to efficiently control both classical and quantum properties of light. Plasmonic waveguides are usually used to excite confined electromagnetic modes at the nanoscale that can strongly interact with matter. The analysis of these nanowaveguides exhibits similarities with their low frequency microwave counterparts. In this article, we review ways to study plasmonic nanostructures coupled to quantum optical emitters from a classical electromagnetic perspective. These quantum emitters are mainly used to generate single photon quantum light that can be employed as a quantum bit or qubit in the envisioned quantum information technologies. We demonstrate different ways to enhance a diverse range of quantum electrodynamic phenomena based on plasmonic configurations by using the classical dyadic tensor Green function formalism. More specifically, spontaneous emission and superradiance are analyzed by using the Green function based field quantization. The exciting new field of quantum plasmonics will lead to a plethora of novel optical devices for communications and computing applications operating in the quantum realm, such as efficient single-photon sources, quantum sensors, and compact on-chip nanophotonic circuits.

preprint2021arXiv

Quantum operation of fermionic systems and process tomography using Majorana fermion gates

Quantum tomography is an important tool for the characterisation of quantum operations. In this paper, we present a framework of quantum tomography in fermionic systems. Compared with qubit systems, fermions obey the superselection rule, which sets constraints on states, processes and measurements in a fermionic system. As a result, we can only partly reconstruct an operation that acts on a subset of fermion modes, and the full reconstruction always requires at least one ancillary fermion mode in addition to the subset. We also report a protocol for the full reconstruction based on gates in Majorana fermion quantum computer, including a set of circuits for realising the informationally-complete state preparation and measurement.

preprint2021arXiv

Reciprocity of thermal diffusion in time-modulated systems

The reciprocity principle governs the symmetry in transmission of electromagnetic and acoustic waves, as well as the diffusion of heat between two points in space, with important consequences for thermal management and energy harvesting. There has been significant recent interest in materials with time-modulated properties, which have been shown to efficiently break reciprocity for light, sound, and even charge diffusion. Quite surprisingly, here we show that, from a practical point of view, time modulation cannot generally be used to break reciprocity for thermal diffusion. We establish a theoretical framework to accurately describe the behavior of diffusive processes under time modulation, and prove that thermal reciprocity in dynamic materials is generally preserved by the continuity equation, unless some external bias or special material is considered. We then experimentally demonstrate reciprocal heat transfer in a time-modulated device. Our findings correct previous misconceptions regarding reciprocity breaking for thermal diffusion, revealing the generality of symmetry constraints in heat transfer, and clarifying its differences from other transport processes in what concerns the principles of reciprocity and microscopic reversibility.

preprint2021arXiv

Topological Luttinger semimetallic phase accompanied with surface states realized in silicon

By means of systematically first-principles calculations and model analysis, a complete phase diagram of the body-centered silicon(BC8-Si) via lattice constant a and internal atomic coordinate x is explored, which demonstrates that BC8-Si is a topological Luttinger semimetal(LSM) accompanied with topologically nontrivial surface states, and the electronic properties of BC8-Si can be further tuned to a normal insulator or topological Dirac semimetal by very tiny changing of a and x. These results successfully explain the contradictory transport reports of BC8-Si. More importantly, the topological surface states in the LSM phase fill in the gap between the topological matters and silicon, which provide an opportunity to integrate the topological quantum devices and silicon chips together.

preprint2020arXiv

A chip-scale oscillation-mode optomechanical inertial sensor near the thermodynamical limits

High-precision inertial sensing and gravity sensing are key in navigation, oil exploration, and earthquake prediction. In contrast to prior accelerometers using piezoelectric or electronic capacitance readout techniques, optical readout provides narrow-linewidth high-sensitivity laser detection along with low-noise resonant optomechanical transduction near the thermodynamical limits. Here an optomechanical inertial sensor with 8.2micro-g/Hz^1/2 velocity random walk (VRW) at acquisition rate of 100 Hz and 50.9 micro-g bias instability is demonstrated, suitable for consumer and industrial grade applications, e.g., inertial navigation, inclination sensing, platform stabilization, and/or wearable device motion detection. Driven into optomechanical sustained-oscillation, the slot photonic crystal cavity provides radio-frequency readout of the optically-driven transduction with enhanced 625 microg/Hz sensitivity. Measuring the optomechanically-stiffened oscillation shift, instead of the optical transmission shift, provides a 220x VRW enhancement over pre-oscillation mode detection due to the strong optomechanical transduction. Supported by theory, this inertial sensor operates 2.56x above the thermodynamical limit at small integration times, with 43-dB dynamic range, in a solid-state room-temperature readout architecture.

preprint2020arXiv

A novel random access scheme for M2M communication in crowded asynchronous massive MIMO systems

A new random access scheme is proposed to solve the intra-cell pilot collision for M2M communication in crowded asynchronous massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. The proposed scheme utilizes the proposed estimation of signal parameters via rotational invariance technique enhanced (ESPRIT-E) method to estimate the effective timing offsets, and then active UEs obtain their timing errors from the effective timing offsets for uplink message transmission. We analyze the mean squared error of the estimated effective timing offsets of UEs, and the uplink throughput. Simulation results show that, compared to the exiting random access scheme for the crowded asynchronous massive MIMO systems, the proposed scheme can improve the uplink throughput and estimate the effective timing offsets accurately at the same time.

preprint2020arXiv

An Immunology-Inspired Network Security Architecture

The coming 5G networks have been enabling the creation of a wide variety of new services and applications which demand a new network security architecture. Immunology is the study of the immune system in vertebrates (including humans) which protects us from infection through various lines of defence. By studying the resemblance between the immune system and network security system, we acquire some inspirations from immunology and distill some guidelines for the design of network security architecture. We present a philosophical design principle, that is maintaining the balance between security and availability. Then, we derive two methodological principles: 1) achieving situation-awareness and fast response through community cooperation among heterogeneous nodes, and 2) Enhancing defense capability through consistently contesting with invaders in a real environment and actively mutating/evolving attack strategies. We also present a reference architecture designed based on the principles.

preprint2020arXiv

Branching Fractions and CP Asymmetries of the Quasi-Two-Body Decays in $B_{s} \to K^0(\overline K^0)K^\pm π^\mp$ within PQCD Approach

Motivated by the first untagged decay-time-integrated amplitude analysis of $B_s \to K_SK^{\mp}π^{\pm}$ decays performed by LHCb collaboration, where the decay amplitudes are modeled to contain the resonant contributions from intermediate resonances $K^*(892)$, $K_0^*(1430)$ and $K_2^*(1430)$, we comprehensively investigate the quasi-two-body $B_{s} \to K^0/\overline{\kern -0.2em K}^0 K^{\pm}π^{\mp}$ decays, and calculate the branching fractions and the time-dependent $CP$ asymmetries within the perturbative QCD approach based on the $k_T$ factorization. In the quasi-two-body space region the calculated branching fractions with the considered intermediate resonances are in good agreement with the experimental results of LHCb by adopting proper $Kπ$ pair wave function, describing the interaction between the kaon and pion in the $Kπ$ pair. Furthermore,within the obtained branching fractions of the quasi-two-body decays, we also calculate the branching fractions of corresponding two-body decays, and the results consist with the LHCb measurements and the earlier studies with errors. For these considered decays, since the final states are not flavour-specific, the time-dependent $CP$ could be measured. We calculate six $CP$-violation observables, which can be tested in the ongoing LHCb experiment.

preprint2020arXiv

Can scaling analysis be used to interpret the anti-parity-time symmetry in heat transfer?

In a previous work (Li et al. Science 364, 170) [1], we proposed a heat transfer system that preserves the anti-parity-time (APT) symmetry, and observe the rest-to-motion phase transition during the symmetry breaking. Recently, it was suggested (Zhao et al. arXiv:1906.08431) [2] that the behaviours of the system can be understood using scaling analysis based on the Péclet and Nusselt numbers (Pe and Nu). It was further proposed that there exists a third regime in the phase diagram in addition to the symmetric and symmetry broken phases. Although we appreciate the proposal to characterize the contributions of coupling, diffusion, and advection with dimensionless numbers, here we show that they do not help to predict or interpret the behaviours of the APT system. The dimensionless numbers do not provide enough details about the system to conclude that there is a motionless phase, a phase transition, to find the critical point, or to give the correct phase diagram with only two regimes.

preprint2020arXiv

Deep Learning for LiDAR Point Clouds in Autonomous Driving: A Review

Recently, the advancement of deep learning in discriminative feature learning from 3D LiDAR data has led to rapid development in the field of autonomous driving. However, automated processing uneven, unstructured, noisy, and massive 3D point clouds is a challenging and tedious task. In this paper, we provide a systematic review of existing compelling deep learning architectures applied in LiDAR point clouds, detailing for specific tasks in autonomous driving such as segmentation, detection, and classification. Although several published research papers focus on specific topics in computer vision for autonomous vehicles, to date, no general survey on deep learning applied in LiDAR point clouds for autonomous vehicles exists. Thus, the goal of this paper is to narrow the gap in this topic. More than 140 key contributions in the recent five years are summarized in this survey, including the milestone 3D deep architectures, the remarkable deep learning applications in 3D semantic segmentation, object detection, and classification; specific datasets, evaluation metrics, and the state of the art performance. Finally, we conclude the remaining challenges and future researches.

preprint2020arXiv

Diffusive non-reciprocity and thermal diode

Wave propagation and diffusion in linear materials preserve local reciprocity in terms of a symmetric Green's function. For wave propagations, the relation between the fields entering and leaving a system is more relevant than the detailed information about the fields inside it. In such cases, the global reciprocity of the scattering off a system through several ports is more important, which is defined as the symmetric transmission between the scattering channels. When a two-port system supports non-reciprocal (electromagnetic, acoustic) wave propagation, it is a (optical, phonon) diode directly following the definition. However, to date no concrete definition or discussion has been made on the global reciprocity of diffusive processes through a multiple-port system. It thus remains unclear what are the differences and relations between the three concepts, namely local non-reciprocity, global non-reciprocity, and diode effect in diffusion. Here, we provide theoretical analysis on the frequency-domain Green's function and define the global reciprocity of heat diffusion through a two-port system, which has a different setup from that of a thermal diode. We further prove the equivalence between a heat transfer system with broken steady-state global reciprocity and a thermal diode, assuming no temperature-dependent heat generation. The validities of some typical mechanisms in breaking the diffusive reciprocity and making a thermal diode have been discussed. Our results set a general background for future studies on symmetric and asymmetric diffusive processes.

preprint2020arXiv

Epsilon-near-zero plasmonic waveguides to enhance nonlinear coherent light-matter interactions

We demonstrate a way to coherently control light at the nanoscale and achieve coherent perfect absorption (CPA) by using epsilon-near-zero (ENZ) plasmonic waveguides. The presented waveguides support an effective ENZ response at their cut-off frequency, combined with strong and homogeneous field enhancement along their nanochannels. The CPA conditions are perfectly satisfied at the ENZ frequency, surprisingly by a subwavelength plasmonic structure, resulting in strong CPA under the illumination of two counter-propagating plane waves with appropriate amplitudes and phases. In addition , we investigate the nonlinear response of the proposed ENZ plasmonic configuration as we increase the input intensity of the incident waves. We demonstrate that the CPA phenomenon can become both intensity- and phase-dependent in this case leading to new tunable all-optical switching and absorption devices.

preprint2020arXiv

Fault-tolerant fidelity based on few-qubit codes: Parity-check circuits for biased error channels

In the shallow sub-threshold regime, fault-tolerant quantum computation requires a tremendous amount of qubits. In this paper, we study the error correction in the deep sub-threshold regime. We estimate the physical error rate for achieving the logical error rates of $10^{-6} - 10^{-15}$ using few-qubit codes, i.e. short repetition codes, small surface codes and the Steane code. Error correction circuits that are efficient for biased error channels are identified. Using the Steane code, when error channels are biased with a ratio of $10^{-3}$, the logical error rate of $10^{-15}$ can be achieved with the physical error rate of $10^{-5}$, which is much higher than the physical error rate of $10^{-9}$ for depolarising errors.

preprint2020arXiv

FuSSI-Net: Fusion of Spatio-temporal Skeletons for Intention Prediction Network

Pedestrian intention recognition is very important to develop robust and safe autonomous driving (AD) and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) functionalities for urban driving. In this work, we develop an end-to-end pedestrian intention framework that performs well on day- and night- time scenarios. Our framework relies on objection detection bounding boxes combined with skeletal features of human pose. We study early, late, and combined (early and late) fusion mechanisms to exploit the skeletal features and reduce false positives as well to improve the intention prediction performance. The early fusion mechanism results in AP of 0.89 and precision/recall of 0.79/0.89 for pedestrian intention classification. Furthermore, we propose three new metrics to properly evaluate the pedestrian intention systems. Under these new evaluation metrics for the intention prediction, the proposed end-to-end network offers accurate pedestrian intention up to half a second ahead of the actual risky maneuver.

preprint2020arXiv

Hyperspectral Classification Based on 3D Asymmetric Inception Network with Data Fusion Transfer Learning

Hyperspectral image(HSI) classification has been improved with convolutional neural network(CNN) in very recent years. Being different from the RGB datasets, different HSI datasets are generally captured by various remote sensors and have different spectral configurations. Moreover, each HSI dataset only contains very limited training samples and thus it is prone to overfitting when using deep CNNs. In this paper, we first deliver a 3D asymmetric inception network, AINet, to overcome the overfitting problem. With the emphasis on spectral signatures over spatial contexts of HSI data, AINet can convey and classify the features effectively. In addition, the proposed data fusion transfer learning strategy is beneficial in boosting the classification performance. Extensive experiments show that the proposed approach beat all of the state-of-art methods on several HSI benchmarks, including Pavia University, Indian Pines and Kennedy Space Center(KSC). Code can be found at: https://github.com/UniLauX/AINet.

preprint2020arXiv

Hyperspectral Image Classification with Spatial Consistence Using Fully Convolutional Spatial Propagation Network

In recent years, deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have shown impressive ability to represent hyperspectral images (HSIs) and achieved encouraging results in HSI classification. However, the existing CNN-based models operate at the patch-level, in which pixel is separately classified into classes using a patch of images around it. This patch-level classification will lead to a large number of repeated calculations, and it is difficult to determine the appropriate patch size that is beneficial to classification accuracy. In addition, the conventional CNN models operate convolutions with local receptive fields, which cause failures in modeling contextual spatial information. To overcome the aforementioned limitations, we propose a novel end-to-end, pixels-to-pixels fully convolutional spatial propagation network (FCSPN) for HSI classification. Our FCSPN consists of a 3D fully convolution network (3D-FCN) and a convolutional spatial propagation network (CSPN). Specifically, the 3D-FCN is firstly introduced for reliable preliminary classification, in which a novel dual separable residual (DSR) unit is proposed to effectively capture spectral and spatial information simultaneously with fewer parameters. Moreover, the channel-wise attention mechanism is adapted in the 3D-FCN to grasp the most informative channels from redundant channel information. Finally, the CSPN is introduced to capture the spatial correlations of HSI via learning a local linear spatial propagation, which allows maintaining the HSI spatial consistency and further refining the classification results. Experimental results on three HSI benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed FCSPN achieves state-of-the-art performance on HSI classification.

preprint2020arXiv

Lattice dynamics in the spin-1/2 frustrated kagome compound herbertsmithite

We investigate the lattice dynamics in the spin-1/2 frustrated kagome compound herbertsmithite ZnCu$_3$(OH)$_6$Cl$_2$ by a combination of infrared spectroscopy measurements and ab initio density functional theory calculations, and provide an unambiguous assignment of infrared-active lattice vibrations involving in-plane and out-of-plane atom displacements in the kagome layers. Upon cooling, non-thermal red-shifts and broadening appear specifically for modes that deform the kagome layer or affect the Cu-O-Cu bond angles, thus creating pronounced modifications of the antiferromagnetic exchange coupling. Our results indicate the presence of a strong magnetoelastic coupling to the spin system. We discuss the effects of this coupling and its relation to recent experiments reporting a global symmetry reduction of the kagome lattice symmetry.

preprint2020arXiv

Locality-Aware Rotated Ship Detection in High-Resolution Remote Sensing Imagery Based on Multi-Scale Convolutional Network

Ship detection has been an active and vital topic in the field of remote sensing for a decade, but it is still a challenging problem due to the large scale variations, the high aspect ratios, the intensive arrangement, and the background clutter disturbance. In this letter, we propose a locality-aware rotated ship detection (LARSD) framework based on a multi-scale convolutional neural network (CNN) to tackle these issues. The proposed framework applies a UNet-like multi-scale CNN to generate multi-scale feature maps with high-level semantic information in high resolution. Then, a rotated anchor-based regression is applied for directly predicting the probability, the edge distances, and the angle of ships. Finally, a locality-aware score alignment is proposed to fix the mismatch between classification results and location results caused by the independence of each subnet. Furthermore, to enlarge the datasets of ship detection, we build a new high-resolution ship detection (HRSD) dataset, where 2499 images and 9269 instances were collected from Google Earth with different resolutions. Experiments based on public dataset HRSC2016 and our HRSD dataset demonstrate that our detection method achieves state-of-the-art performance.

preprint2020arXiv

Memory-Efficient Hierarchical Neural Architecture Search for Image Denoising

Recently, neural architecture search (NAS) methods have attracted much attention and outperformed manually designed architectures on a few high-level vision tasks. In this paper, we propose HiNAS (Hierarchical NAS), an effort towards employing NAS to automatically design effective neural network architectures for image denoising. HiNAS adopts gradient based search strategies and employs operations with adaptive receptive field to build an flexible hierarchical search space. During the search stage, HiNAS shares cells across different feature levels to save memory and employ an early stopping strategy to avoid the collapse issue in NAS, and considerably accelerate the search speed. The proposed HiNAS is both memory and computation efficient, which takes only about 4.5 hours for searching using a single GPU. We evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed HiNAS on two different datasets, namely an additive white Gaussian noise dataset BSD500, and a realistic noise dataset SIM1800. Experimental results show that the architecture found by HiNAS has fewer parameters and enjoys a faster inference speed, while achieving highly competitive performance compared with state-of-the-art methods. We also present analysis on the architectures found by NAS. HiNAS also shows good performance on experiments for image de-raining.

preprint2020arXiv

Modeling the IRIS Lines During a Flare. I. The Blue-Wing Enhancement in the Mg II k Line

The IRIS Mg II k line serves as a very good tool to diagnose the heating processes in solar flares. Recent studies have shown that apart from the usual red asymmetries which are interpreted as the result of condensation downflows, this line could also show a blue-wing enhancement. To investigate how such a blue asymmetry is formed, we perform a grid of radiative hydrodynamic simulations and calculate the corresponding line profiles. We find that such a spectral feature is likely to originate from the upward plasma motion in the upper chromosphere. However, the formation region that is responsible for the blue-wing enhancement could be located in an evaporation region, in an upward moving blob, and even an upward moving condensation region. We discuss how the electron beam parameters affect these different dynamics of the atmosphere.

preprint2020arXiv

Multispectral Pan-sharpening via Dual-Channel Convolutional Network with Convolutional LSTM Based Hierarchical Spatial-Spectral Feature Fusion

Multispectral pan-sharpening aims at producing a high resolution (HR) multispectral (MS) image in both spatial and spectral domains by fusing a panchromatic (PAN) image and a corresponding MS image. In this paper, we propose a novel dual-channel network (DCNet) framework for MS pan-sharpening. In our DCNet, the dual-channel backbone involves a spatial channel to capture spatial information with a 2D CNN, and a spectral channel to extract spectral information with a 3D CNN. This heterogeneous 2D/3D CNN architecture can minimize causing spectral information distortion, which typically happens in conventional 2D CNN models. In order to fully integrate the spatial and spectral features captured from different levels, we introduce a multi-level fusion strategy. Specifically, a spatial-spectral CLSTM (S$^2$-CLSTM) module is proposed for fusing the hierarchical spatial and spectral features, which can effectively capture correlations among multi-level features. The S$^2$-CLSTM module attaches two fusion ways: the intra-level fusion via bi-directional lateral connections and inter-level fusion via the cell state in the S$^2$-CLSTM. Finally, the ideal HR-MS image is recovered by a reconstruction module. Extensive experiments have been conducted at both simulated lower scale and the original scale of real-world datasets. Compared with the state-of-the-art methods, the proposed DCNet achieves superior or competitive performance.

preprint2020arXiv

Non-LTE Calculations of the Mg I 12.32 $μ$m Line in a Flaring Atmosphere

The infrared Mg I lines near 12 microns are a pair of emission lines which are magnetically sensitive and have been used to measure solar magnetic fields. Here we calculate the response of the Mg I 12.32 $μ$m line during a flare and find that in our modeling this line has a complicated behavior. At the beginning of the flare heating, this line shows an intensity dimming at the line center. The intensity then increases when heating continues, with increasing contributions from the heated layers in the chromosphere. The line formation height and the line width also increase as a result. As for the polarized line profiles, we find that flare heating tends to decrease the Zeeman splitting width and attenuates the Stokes $V$ lobe intensity. The wider features in the Stokes $V$ profiles are more pronounced during flare heating, which should be considered when performing magnetic field inversions.

preprint2020arXiv

Observations of a quasi-periodic pulsation in the coronal loop and microwave flux during a solar preflare phase

We report a quasi-periodic pulsation (QPP) event simultaneously detected from the spatial displacements of coronal loop at both EUV images and microwave emission during the preflare phase of a C1.1 flare on 2016 March 23. Using the motion magnification technique, a low-amplitude transverse oscillation with the growing period is discovered in a diffuse coronal loop in Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) image sequences at wavelength of 171 A, and the initial oscillation period is estimated to be ~397 s with a slow growth rate of 0.045. At the same time, a QPP with growing periods from roughly 300 s to nearly 500 s is discovered in the microwave flux in the same active region. Based on the imaging observations measured at EUV wavelengths by the AIA and at microwave 17 GHz by Nobeyama Radioheliograph, the diffuse coronal loop and the microwave radiation source are found to be connected through a hot loop seen in AIA images at wavelength of 94 A. The growing period of the QPP should be related to the modulation of LRC-circuit oscillating process in a current-carrying plasma loop. The existence of electric currents may imply the non-potentialities in the source region during the preflare phase.

preprint2020arXiv

Plasmonic random laser on an optical fiber tip

Random lasing occurs as the result of a coherent optical feedback from multiple scattering centers. Here, we demonstrate that plasmonic gold nanostars are efficient light scattering centers, exhibiting strong field enhancement at their nanotips, which assists a very narrow bandwidth and highly amplified coherent random lasing with a low lasing threshold. First, by embedding plasmonic gold nanostars in a rhodamine 6G dye gain medium, we observe a series of very narrow random lasing peaks with full-width at half-maximum ~ 0.8 nm. In contrast, free rhodamine 6G dye molecules exhibit only a single amplified spontaneous emission peak with a broader linewidth of 6 nm. The lasing threshold for the dye with gold nanostars is two times lower than that for a free dye. Furthermore, by coating the tip of a single-mode optical fiber with gold nanostars, we demonstrate a collection of random lasing signal through the fiber that can be easily guided and analyzed. Time-resolved measurements show a significant increase in the emission rate above the lasing threshold, indicating a stimulated emission process. Our study provides a method for generating random lasing in the nanoscale with low threshold values that can be easily collected and guided, which promise a range of potential applications in remote sensing, information processing, and on-chip coherent light sources.

preprint2020arXiv

Polestar: An Intelligent, Efficient and National-Wide Public Transportation Routing Engine

Public transportation plays a critical role in people's daily life. It has been proven that public transportation is more environmentally sustainable, efficient, and economical than any other forms of travel. However, due to the increasing expansion of transportation networks and more complex travel situations, people are having difficulties in efficiently finding the most preferred route from one place to another through public transportation systems. To this end, in this paper, we present Polestar, a data-driven engine for intelligent and efficient public transportation routing. Specifically, we first propose a novel Public Transportation Graph (PTG) to model public transportation system in terms of various travel costs, such as time or distance. Then, we introduce a general route search algorithm coupled with an efficient station binding method for efficient route candidate generation. After that, we propose a two-pass route candidate ranking module to capture user preferences under dynamic travel situations. Finally, experiments on two real-world data sets demonstrate the advantages of Polestar in terms of both efficiency and effectiveness. Indeed, in early 2019, Polestar has been deployed on Baidu Maps, one of the world's largest map services. To date, Polestar is servicing over 330 cities, answers over a hundred millions of queries each day, and achieves substantial improvement of user click ratio.

preprint2020arXiv

Quantifying the Economic Impact of COVID-19 in Mainland China Using Human Mobility Data

To contain the pandemic of coronavirus (COVID-19) in Mainland China, the authorities have put in place a series of measures, including quarantines, social distancing, and travel restrictions. While these strategies have effectively dealt with the critical situations of outbreaks, the combination of the pandemic and mobility controls has slowed China's economic growth, resulting in the first quarterly decline of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) since GDP began to be calculated, in 1992. To characterize the potential shrinkage of the domestic economy, from the perspective of mobility, we propose two new economic indicators: the New Venues Created (NVC) and the Volumes of Visits to Venue (V^3), as the complementary measures to domestic investments and consumption activities, using the data of Baidu Maps. The historical records of these two indicators demonstrated strong correlations with the past figures of Chinese GDP, while the status quo has dramatically changed this year, due to the pandemic. We hereby presented a quantitative analysis to project the impact of the pandemic on economies, using the recent trends of NVC and V^3. We found that the most affected sectors would be travel-dependent businesses, such as hotels, educational institutes, and public transportation, while the sectors that are mandatory to human life, such as workplaces, residential areas, restaurants, and shopping sites, have been recovering rapidly. Analysis at the provincial level showed that the self-sufficient and self-sustainable economic regions, with internal supplies, production, and consumption, have recovered faster than those regions relying on global supply chains.

preprint2020arXiv

Radiative Hydrodynamic Simulations of the Spectral Characteristics of Solar White-light Flares

As one of the most violent activities in the solar atmosphere, white-light flares (WLFs) are generally known for their enhanced white-light (or continuum) emission, which primarily originates in the solar lower atmosphere. However, we know little about how white-light emission is produced. In this study, we aim to investigate the response of the continua at 3600Å and 4250Å and also the H$α$ and Ly$α$ lines during WLFs modeled with radiative hydrodynamics simulations. We take non-thermal electron beams as the energy source for the WLFs in two different initial atmospheres and vary their parameters. Our results show that the model with non-thermal electron beam heating can clearly show enhancements in the continua at 3600Å and 4250Å as well as in the H$α$ and Ly$α$ lines. A larger electron beam flux, a smaller spectral index, or a penumbral initial atmosphere leads to a stronger emission increase at 3600Å, 4250Å and in the H$α$ line. For the Ly$α$ line, however, it is more preferably enhanced in a quiet-Sun initial atmosphere with a larger spectral index of the electron beam. It is also notable that the continua at 3600Å and 4250Å and the H$α$ line exhibit a dimming at the beginning of the heating and reach their peak emissions later than the peak time of the heating function, while the Ly$α$ line does not show such behaviors. These results can be served as a reference for analyzing future WLF observations.

preprint2020arXiv

Random NOMA With Cross-Slot Successive Interference Cancellation Packet Recovery

Conventional power-domain non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) relies on precise power control, which requires real-time channel state information at transmitters. This requirement severely limits its application to future wireless communication systems. To address this problem, we consider NOMA without power allocation, where we exploit the random channel fading and opportunistically perform successive interference cancellation (SIC) detection. To mitigate the multi-user interference, we propose a random NOMA where users randomly transmit their data packets with a certain probability. Then a cross-slot SIC packet recovery scheme is proposed to recover transmitted data packets. We model the cross-slot SIC packet recovery as a Markov process, and provide a throughput analysis, based on which the sum rate is maximized by jointly optimizing the transmission probability and the encoding rate of users.

preprint2020arXiv

Resonant Contributions to Three-body $B\to KKK$ Decays in Perturbative QCD Approach

In this work, we study the ($S$, $P$ and $D$)-wave $K^+K^-$ contributions to $B\to KKK$ decays in the perturbative QCD approach at leading order. Within the two-meson wave functions describing the nonperturbative dynamics in the kaon-pair for different waves, we calculate the branching fractions and the direct $CP$ asymmetries of these decay modes in the corresponding resonance regions. Most of our numerical results are well consistent with the current measurements. We note that the narrow-width approximation is invalid in the quasi-two-body decays $B\to Kf_0(980)\to KKK$. For other decays, under the narrow-width approximation we can extract the branching fractions of the corresponding two-body decays involving the intermediate resonant states, and the related branching fractions agree with the current experimental data well. Furthermore, we also predict the corresponding quasi-two-body decays $B\to Kπ^+π^-$, which are expected to be measured in the ongoing LHCb and Belle-II experiments.

preprint2020arXiv

Scalable evaluation of quantum-circuit error loss using Clifford sampling

A major challenge in developing quantum computing technologies is to accomplish high precision tasks by utilizing multiplex optimization approaches, on both the physical system and algorithm levels. Loss functions assessing the overall performance of quantum circuits can provide the foundation for many optimization techniques. In this paper, we use the quadratic error loss and the final-state fidelity loss to characterize quantum circuits. We find that the distribution of computation error is approximately Gaussian, which in turn justifies the quadratic error loss. It is shown that these loss functions can be efficiently evaluated in a scalable way by sampling from Clifford-dominated circuits. We demonstrate the results by numerically simulating ten-qubit noisy quantum circuits with various error models as well as executing four-qubit circuits with up to ten layers of two-qubit gates on a superconducting quantum processor. Our results pave the way towards the optimization-based quantum device and algorithm design in the intermediate-scale quantum regime.

preprint2020arXiv

Soft and anisotropic local moments in 4$d$ and 5$d$ mixed-valence M$_2$O$_9$ dimers

We investigate via exact diagonalization of finite clusters the electronic structure and magnetism of M$_2$O$_9$ dimers in the mixed-valence hexagonal perovskites A$_3$B'M$_2$O$_9$ for various different fillings of 4$d$ and 5$d$ transition-metal M ions. We find that the magnetic moments of such dimers are determined by a subtle interplay of spin-orbit coupling, Hund's coupling, and Coulomb repulsion, as well as the electron filling of the M ions. Most importantly, the magnetic moments are anisotropic and temperature-dependent. This behavior is a result of spin-orbit coupling, magnetic field effects, and the existence of several nearly-degenerate electronic configurations whose proximity allows occupation of excited states already at room temperature. This analysis is consistent with experimental susceptibility measurements for a variety of dimer-based materials. Furthermore, we perform a survey of A$_3$B'M$_2$O$_9$ materials and propose ground-state phase diagrams for the experimentally relevant M fillings of $d^{4.5}$, $d^{3.5}$ and $d^{2.5}$. Finally, our results show that the usually applied Curie-Weiss law with a constant magnetic moment cannot be used in these spin-orbit-coupled materials.

preprint2020arXiv

Study of Quasi-two-body $B_{(s)}\to ϕ(f_0(980)/f_2(1270)\to)ππ$ Decays in Perturbative QCD Approach

In 2017, LHCb collaboration reported their first observation of the rare decays $B_s \to ϕ(f_0(980)$ $/f_2(1270) \to ) π^+π^-$ and the evidence of $B^0 \to ϕ(f_0(980)/f_2(1270)\to)π^+π^-$. Motivated by this, we study these quasi-two-body decays in the perturbative QCD approach. The branching fractions, $CP$ asymmetries and the polarization fractions are calculated. We find that within the appropriate two-meson wave functions, the calculated branching fractions are in agreement with the measurements of LHCb. Based on the narrow-width approximation, We also calculate the branching fractions of the quasi-two-body $B_{d,s}\to ϕ(f_0(980)/f_2(1270)\to) π^0π^0$ and $B_{d,s}\to ϕ(f_2(1270)\to) K^+K^-$, and hope the predictions to be tested in the ongoing LHCb and Belle II experiments. Moreover, the processes $B_{d,s}\to ϕf_2(1270)$ are also analyzed under this approximation. We note that the $CP$ asymmetries of these decays are very small, because these decays are either penguin dominant or pure penguin processes.

preprint2020arXiv

User Activity Detection and Channel Estimation for Grant-Free Random Access in LEO Satellite-Enabled Internet-of-Things

With recent advances on the dense low-earth orbit (LEO) constellation, LEO satellite network has become one promising solution to providing global coverage for Internet-of-Things (IoT) services. Confronted with the sporadic transmission from randomly activated IoT devices, we consider the random access (RA) mechanism, and propose a grant-free RA (GF-RA) scheme to reduce the access delay to the mobile LEO satellites. A Bernoulli-Rician message passing with expectation maximization (BR-MP-EM) algorithm is proposed for this terrestrial-satellite GF-RA system to address the user activity detection (UAD) and channel estimation (CE) problem. This BR-MP-EM algorithm is divided into two stages. In the inner iterations, the Bernoulli messages and Rician messages are updated for the joint UAD and CE problem. Based on the output of the inner iterations, the expectation maximization (EM) method is employed in the outer iterations to update the hyper-parameters related to the channel impairments. Finally, simulation results show the UAD and CE accuracy of the proposed BR-MP-EM algorithm, as well as the robustness against the channel impairments.

preprint2020arXiv

Variational quantum simulation of general processes

Variational quantum algorithms have been proposed to solve static and dynamic problems of closed many-body quantum systems. Here we investigate variational quantum simulation of three general types of tasks---generalised time evolution with a non-Hermitian Hamiltonian, linear algebra problems, and open quantum system dynamics. The algorithm for generalised time evolution provides a unified framework for variational quantum simulation. In particular, we show its application in solving linear systems of equations and matrix-vector multiplications by converting these algebraic problems into generalised time evolution. Meanwhile, assuming a tensor product structure of the matrices, we also propose another variational approach for these two tasks by combining variational real and imaginary time evolution. Finally, we introduce variational quantum simulation for open system dynamics. We variationally implement the stochastic Schrödinger equation, which consists of dissipative evolution and stochastic jump processes. We numerically test the algorithm with a six-qubit 2D transverse field Ising model under dissipation.

preprint2019arXiv

Calculation of the $B\to K_{0,2}^*(1430)f_0(980)/σ$ decays in the Perturbative QCD Approach

Motivated by the observations of the decays $B^0 \to K_0^{*}(1430)^0 f_0(980)$ and $ B^0 \to K_2^{*}(1430)^0 f_0(980)$ from BaBar collaboration, we study the $B^{0(+)} \to K_{0,2}^{*}(1430)^{0(+)} f_0(980)/σ$ decays in the perturbative QCD approach for the first time. In the absence of reliable nonperturbative wave functions we only assume the scalar meson $f_0(980)$ and $σ$ are two-quark ground states. In our calculations, these decays are all dominated by the hard-scattering emission and annihilation diagrams, while the factorizable emission diagrams are forbidden or suppressed heavily by the vector decay constants. Furthermore, the branching fractions are sensitive to the mixing between $f_0(980)$ and $σ$. Comparing our results with the experimental data, a large mixing angle $θ$ is favored. Taking $θ=145^\circ$, the orders of branching fractions of $B \to K_0^{*}(1430)^0 σ$, $B \to K_{2}^{*}(1430)^0 σ$ and $B \to K_{0,2}^{*}(1430)^0 f_0(980)$ are predicted to be $10^{-4}$, $10^{-5}$ and $10^{-6}$, respectively, which can be measured in the current experiments such as LHCb and Belle-2. In addition, although these decays are penguin dominant, the mixing also leads to large direct $CP$ asymmetries in these decays. With the precise data in future, our results could shed light on the inner structure of the scalar mesons and can be used to determine the mixing angle of the $σ-f_0(980)$ system.

preprint2019arXiv

Error-Mitigated Quantum Gates Exceeding Physical Fidelities in a Trapped-Ion System

Various quantum applications can be reduced to estimating expectation values, which are inevitably deviated by operational and environmental errors. Although errors can be tackled by quantum error correction, the overheads are far from being affordable for near-term technologies. To alleviate the detrimental effects of errors, quantum error mitigation techniques have been proposed, which require no additional qubit resources. Here, we benchmark the performance of a quantum error mitigation technique based on probabilistic error cancellation in a trapped-ion system. Our results clearly show that effective gate fidelities exceed physical fidelities, i.e. we surpass the break-even point of eliminating gate errors, by programming quantum circuits. The error rates are effectively reduced from $(1.10\pm 0.12)\times10^{-3}$ to $(1.44\pm 5.28)\times10^{-5}$ and from $(0.99\pm 0.06)\times10^{-2}$ to $(0.96\pm 0.10)\times10^{-3}$ for single- and two-qubit gates, respectively. Our demonstration opens up the possibility of implementing high-fidelity computations on a near-term noisy quantum device.

preprint2019arXiv

Hardware-efficient quantum algorithm for the simulation of open-system dynamics and thermalisation

The quantum open-system simulation is an important category of quantum simulation. By simulating the thermalisation process at the zero temperature, we can solve the ground-state problem of quantum systems. To realise the open-system evolution on the quantum computer, we need to encode the environment using qubits. However, usually the environment is much larger than the system, i.e. numerous qubits are required if the environment is directly encoded. In this paper, we propose a way to simulate open-system dynamics by reproducing reservoir correlation functions using a minimised Hilbert space. In this way, we only need a small number of qubits to represent the environment. To simulate the $n$-th-order expansion of the time-convolutionless master equation by reproducing up to $n$-time correlation functions, the number of qubits representing the environment is $\sim \lfloor \frac{n}{2} \rfloor \log_2(N_ωN_β)$. Here, $N_ω$ is the number of frequencies in the discretised environment spectrum, and $N_β$ is the number of terms in the system-environment interaction. By reproducing two-time correlation functions, i.e. taking $n = 2$, we can simulate the Markovian quantum master equation. In our algorithm, the environment on the quantum computer could be even smaller than the system.

preprint2019arXiv

Separability discrimination and decomposition of $m$-partite quantum mixed states

The separability detecting problem of mixed states is one of the fundamental problems in quantum information theory. In the last 20 years, almost all methods are based on the sufficient or necessary conditions for entanglement. However, in this paper, we only need one algorithm to solve the problem. We propose a tensor optimization method to check whether an $m$-partite quantum mixed state is separable or not and give a decomposition for it if it is. We first convert the separability discrimination problem of mixed states to the positive Hermitian decomposition problem of Hermitian tensors. Then, employing the $E$-truncated $K$-moment method, we obtain an optimization model for discriminating separability. Moreover, applying semidefinite relaxation method, we get a hierarchy of semidefinite relaxation optimization models and propose an $E$-truncated $K$-moment and semidefinite relaxations (ETKM-SDR) algorithm for detecting the separability of mixed states. The algorithm can also be used for symmetric and non-symmetric decomposition of separable mixed states. By numerical examples, we find that not all symmetric separable states have symmetric decompositions. The algorithm can be used for studying properties of mixed states in the future.

preprint2019arXiv

Spectroscopic and Stereoscopic Observations of the Solar Jets

We present a comprehensive study of a series of recurrent jets that occurred at the periphery of the NOAA active region 12114 on 2014 July 7. These jets were found to share the same source region and exhibited rotational motions as they propagated outward. The multi-wavelength imaging observations made by the AIA and {\it IRIS} telescopes reveal that some of the jets contain cool plasma only, while some others contain not only cool but also hot plasma. The Doppler velocities calculated from the {\it IRIS} spectra show a continuous evolution from blue to red shifts as the jet motions change from upward to downward. Additionally, some jets exhibit opposite Doppler shifts on their both sides, indicative of rotating motions along their axes. The inclination angle and three-dimensional velocity of the largest jet were inferred from the imaging and spectroscopic observations, which show a high consistence with those derived from the stereoscopic analysis using dual-perspective observations by {\it SDO}/AIA and {\it STEREO}-B/EUVI. By relating the jets to the local UV/EUV and full-disk {\it GOES} X-ray emission enhancements, we found that the previous five small-scale jets were triggered by five bright points while the last/largest one was triggered by a C1.6 solar flare. Together with a number of type III radio bursts generated during the jet eruptions as well as a weak CME that was observed in association with the last jet, our observations provide evidences in support of multi-scale magnetic reconnection processes being responsible for the production of jet events.

preprint2016arXiv

A High Throughput Pilot Allocation for M2M Communication in Crowded Massive MIMO Systems

A new scheme to resolve the intra-cell pilot collision for M2M communication in crowded massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems is proposed. The proposed scheme permits those failed user equipments (UEs), judged by a strongest-user collision resolution (SUCR) protocol, to contend for the idle pilots, i.e., the pilots that are not selected by any UE in the initial step. This scheme is called as SUCR combined idle pilots access (SUCR-IPA). To analyze the performance of the SUCR-IPA scheme, we develop a simple method to compute the access success probability of the UEs in each random access slot (RAST). The simulation results coincide well with the analysis. It is also shown that, compared to the SUCR protocol, the proposed SUCR-IPA scheme increases the throughput of the system significantly, and thus decreases the number of access attempts dramatically.

preprint2016arXiv

Bidirectional outflows as evidence of magnetic reconnection leading to a solar microflare

Magnetic reconnection is a rapid energy release process that is believed to be responsible for flares on the Sun and stars. Nevertheless, such flare-related reconnection is mostly detected to occur in the corona, while there have been few studies concerning the reconnection in the chromosphere or photosphere. Here we present both spectroscopic and imaging observations of magnetic reconnection in the chromosphere leading to a microflare. During the flare peak time, chromospheric line profiles show significant blueshifted/redshifted components on the two sides of the flaring site, corresponding to upflows and downflows with velocities of $\pm$(70--80) km s$^{-1}$, comparable with the local Alfvén speed as expected by the reconnection in the chromosphere. The three-dimensional nonlinear force-free field configuration further discloses twisted field lines (a flux rope) at a low altitude, cospatial with the dark threads in He I 10830 Å images. The instability of the flux rope may initiate the flare-related reconnection. These observations provide clear evidence of magnetic reconnection in the chromosphere and show the similar mechanisms of a microflare to those of major flares.

preprint2016arXiv

Capacity-Achieving Iterative LMMSE Detection for MIMO-NOMA Systems

This paper considers a iterative Linear Minimum Mean Square Error (LMMSE) detection for the uplink Multiuser Multiple-Input and Multiple-Output (MU-MIMO) systems with Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA). The iterative LMMSE detection greatly reduces the system computational complexity by departing the overall processing into many low-complexity distributed calculations. However, it is generally considered to be sub-optimal and achieves relatively poor performance. In this paper, we firstly present the matching conditions and area theorems for the iterative detection of the MIMO-NOMA systems. Based on the proposed matching conditions and area theorems, the achievable rate region of the iterative LMMSE detection is analysed. We prove that by properly design the iterative LMMSE detection, it can achieve (i) the optimal sum capacity of MU-MIMO systems, (ii) all the maximal extreme points in the capacity region of MU-MIMO system, and (iii) the whole capacity region of two-user MIMO systems.

preprint2016arXiv

Challenges in Design of Kitaev Materials: Magnetic Interactions from Competing Energy Scales

In this study, we reanalyze the magnetic interactions in the Kitaev spin liquid candidate materials Na$_2$IrO$_3$, $α$-RuCl$_3$, and $α$-Li$_2$IrO$_3$ using nonperturbative exact diagonalization methods. These methods are more appropriate given the relatively itinerant nature of the systems suggested in previous works. We treat all interactions up to third neighbours on equal footing. The computed terms reveal significant long range coupling, bond-anisotropy, and/or off-diagonal couplings which we argue naturally explain the observed ordered phases in these systems. Given these observations, the potential for realizing the spin-liquid state in real materials is analyzed, and synthetic challenges are defined and explained.

preprint2016arXiv

Controlling collective spontaneous emission with plasmonic waveguides

We demonstrate a plasmonic route to control the collective spontaneous emission of two-level quantum emitters. Superradiance and subradiance effects are observed over distances comparable to the operating wavelength inside plasmonic nanochannels. These plasmonic waveguides can provide an effective epsilon-near-zero operation in their cut-off frequency and Fabry-Perot resonances at higher frequencies. The related plasmonic resonant modes are found to efficiently enhance the constructive (superradiance) or destructive (subradiance) interference between different quantum emitters located inside the waveguides. By increasing the number of emitters located in the elongated plasmonic channel, the superradiance effect is enhanced at the epsilon-near-zero operation, leading to a strong coherent increase in the collective spontaneous emission rate. In addition, the separation distance between neighboring emitters and their emission wavelengths can be changed to dynamically control the collective emission properties of the plasmonic system. It is envisioned that the dynamic modification between quantum superradiant and subradiant modes will find applications in quantum entanglement of qubits, low-threshold nanolasers and efficient sensors.

preprint2016arXiv

Convergence Analysis and Assurance for Gaussian Message Passing Iterative Detector in Massive MU-MIMO Systems

This paper considers a low-complexity Gaussian Message Passing Iterative Detection (GMPID) algorithm for massive Multiuser Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MU-MIMO) system, in which a base station with $M$ antennas serves $K$ Gaussian sources simultaneously. Both $K$ and $M$ are very large numbers, and we consider the cases that $K<M$. The GMPID is a low-complexity message passing algorithm based on a fully connected loopy graph, which is well understood to be not convergent in some cases. As it is hard to analyse the GMPID directly, the large-scale property of the massive MU-MIMO is used to simplify the analysis. Firstly, we prove that the variances of the GMPID definitely converge to the mean square error of Minimum Mean Square Error (MMSE) detection. Secondly, we propose two sufficient conditions that the means of the GMPID converge to those of the MMSE detection. However, the means of GMPID may not converge when $ K/M\geq (\sqrt{2}-1)^2$. Therefore, a new convergent GMPID called SA-GMPID (scale-and-add GMPID) , which converges to the MMSE detection in mean and variance for any $K<M$ and has a faster convergence speed than the GMPID, but has no higher complexity than the GMPID, is proposed. Finally, numerical results are provided to verify the validity and accuracy of the theoretical results.

preprint2016arXiv

Gaussian Message Passing Iterative Detection for MIMO-NOMA Systems with Massive Access

This paper considers a low-complexity Gaussian Message Passing Iterative Detection (GMPID) algorithm for Multiple-Input Multiple-Output systems with Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (MIMO-NOMA), in which a base station with $N_r$ antennas serves $N_u$ sources simultaneously. Both $N_u$ and $N_r$ are very large numbers and we consider the cases that $N_u>N_r$. The GMPID is based on a fully connected loopy graph, which is well understood to be not convergent in some cases. The large-scale property of the MIMO-NOMA is used to simplify the convergence analysis. Firstly, we prove that the variances of the GMPID definitely converge to that of Minimum Mean Square Error (MMSE) detection. Secondly, two sufficient conditions that the means of the GMPID converge to a higher MSE than that of the MMSE detection are proposed. However, the means of the GMPID may still not converge when $ N_u/N_r< (\sqrt{2}-1)^{-2}$. Therefore, a new convergent SA-GMPID is proposed, which converges to the MMSE detection for any $N_u> N_r$ with a faster convergence speed. Finally, numerical results are provided to verify the validity of the proposed theoretical results.

preprint2016arXiv

Interference-based molecular transistors

Molecular transistors have the potential for switching with lower gate voltages than conventional field-effect transistors. We have calculated the performance of a single-molecule device in which there is interference between electron transport through the highest occupied molecular orbital and the lowest unoccupied molecular orbital of a single molecule. Quantum interference results in a subthreshold slope that is independent of temperature. For realistic parameters the change in gate potential required for a change in source-drain current of two decades is 20 mV, which is a factor of six smaller than the theoretical limit for a metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor.

preprint2016arXiv

Methodology of Parameterization of Molecular Mechanics Force Field From Quantum Chemistry Calculations using Genetic Algorithm: A case study of methanol

In molecular dynamics (MD) simulation, force field determines the capability of an individual model in capturing physical and chemistry properties. The method for generating proper parameters of the force field form is the key component for computational research in chemistry, biochemistry, and condensed-phase physics. Our study showed that the feasibility to predict experimental condensed phase properties (i.e., density and heat of vaporization) of methanol through problem specific force field from only quantum chemistry information. To acquire the satisfying parameter sets of the force field, the genetic algorithm (GA) is the main optimization method. For electrostatic potential energy, we optimized both the electrostatic parameters of methanol using the GA method, which leads to low deviations of between the quantum mechanics (QM) calculations and the GA optimized parameters. We optimized the van der Waals (vdW) parameters both using GA and guided GA methods by calibrating interaction energy of various methanol homo-clusters, such as nonamers, undecamers, or tridecamers. Excellent agreement between the training dataset from QM calculations (i.e., MP2) and GA optimized parameters can be achieved. However, only the guided GA method, which eliminates the overestimation of interaction energy from MP2 calculations in the optimization process, provides proper vdW parameters for MD simulation to get the condensed phase properties (i.e., density and heat of vaporization) of methanol. Throughout the whole optimization process, the experimental value were not involved in the objective functions, but were only used for the purpose of justifying models (i.e., nonamers, undecamers, or tridecamers) and validating methods (i.e., GA or guided GA). Our method shows the possibility of developing descriptive polarizable force field using only QM calculations.

preprint2016arXiv

Noise threshold and resource cost of fault-tolerant quantum computing with Majorana fermions in hybrid systems

Fault-tolerant quantum computing in systems composed of both Majorana fermions and topologically unprotected quantum systems, e.g. superconducting circuits or quantum dots, is studied in this paper. Errors caused by topologically unprotected quantum systems need to be corrected with error correction schemes, for instance, the surface code. We find that the error-correction performance of such a hybrid topological quantum computer is not superior to a normal quantum computer unless the topological charge of Majorana fermions is insusceptible to noise. If errors changing the topological charge are rare, the fault-tolerance threshold is much higher than the threshold of a normal quantum computer, and a surface-code logical qubit could be encoded in only tens of topological qubits instead of about a thousand normal qubits.

preprint2016arXiv

Numerical analysis for the moments of Bessel functions and Bessel-trigonometric functions

The moments of Bessel functions and Bessel-trigonometric functions play a basic role in many practical problems and numerical analysis. This paper presents a complete analysis for these moments based on the recursive relations of Bessel functions. To evaluate the moments of Bessel functions numerically, a fast and efficient scheme is also proposed to approximate the integral of Bessel function of the first kind and of zero order. The moments of Bessel-trigonometric functions are proved to be expressed in a closed form. In the numerical results, the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed analysis for the moments of Bessel functions is validated first and then by comparing the existing methods, a better scheme for the moments of Bessel functions is presented.

preprint2016arXiv

Stabilisers as a design tool for new forms of Lechner-Hauke-Zoller Annealer

In a recent paper Lechner, Hauke and Zoller (LHZ) described a means to translate a Hamiltonian of $N$ spin-$\frac{1}{2}$ particles with 'all-to-all' interactions into a larger physical lattice with only on-site energies and local parity constraints. LHZ used this mapping to propose a novel form of quantum annealing. Here we provide a stabiliser-based formulation within which we can describe both this prior approach and a wide variety of variants. Examples include a triangular array supporting all-to-all connectivity, and moreover arrangements requiring only $2N$ or $N\log N$ spins but providing interesting bespoke connectivities. Further examples show that arbitrarily high order logical terms can be efficiently realised, even in a strictly 2D layout. Our stabilisers can correspond to either even-parity constraints, as in the LHZ proposal, or as odd-parity constraints. Considering the latter option applied to the original LHZ layout, we note it may simplify the physical realisation since the required ancillas are only spin-$\frac{1}{2}$ systems (i.e. qubits, rather than qutrits) and moreover the interactions are very simple. We make a preliminary assessment of the impact of this design choices by simulating small (few-qubit) systems; we find some indications that the new variant may maintain a larger minimum energy gap during the annealing process.

preprint2016arXiv

Vortex Laser at Exceptional Point

The optical vortices carrying orbital angular momentum (OAM) are commonly generated by modulating the available conventional light beam. This article shows that a micro-laser operates at the exceptional point (EP) of the non-Hermitian quantum system can directly emit vortex laser with well-defined OAM at will. Two gratings (the refractive index modulation and along azimuthal direction and the grating protruding from the micro-ring cavity) modulate the eigenmode of a micro-ring cavity to be a vortex laser mode. The phase-matching condition ensures that we can tune the OAM of the vortex beam to be arbitrary orders by changing the grating protruding from the micro-ring cavity while the system is kept at EP. The results are obtained by analytical analysis and confirmed by 3D full wave simulations.

preprint2015arXiv

A Low-Complexity Gaussian Message Passing Iterative Detector for Massive MU-MIMO Systems

This paper considers a low-complexity Gaussian Message Passing Iterative Detection (GMPID) method over a pairwise graph for a massive Multiuser Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MU-MIMO) system, in which a base station with M antennas serves K Gaussian sources simultaneously. Both K and M are large numbers and we consider the cases that K<M in this paper. The GMPID is a message passing algorithm based on a fully connected loopy graph, which is well known that it is not convergent in some cases. In this paper, we first analyse the convergence of GMPID. Two sufficient conditions that the GMPID converges to the Minimum Mean Square Error (MMSE) detection are proposed. However, the GMPID may still not converge when $K/M>(\sqrt{2}-1)^2$. Therefore, a new convergent GMPID with equally low complexity called SA-GMPID is proposed, which converges to the MMSE detection for any K< M with a faster convergence speed. Finally, numerical results are provided to verify the validity and accuracy of the proposed theoretical results.

preprint2015arXiv

Analysis of Two-body Charmed $B$ Meson Decays in Factorization-Assisted Topological-Amplitude Approach

Within the factorization-assisted topological-amplitude approach, we study the two-body charmed $B$ meson decays $B_{u,d,s} \to D^{(*)}M$, with $M$ denoting a light pseudoscalar (or vector) meson. The meson decay constants and transition form factors are factorized out from the hadronic matrix element of topological diagrams. Therefore the effect of SU(3) symmetry breaking is retained, which is different from the conventional topological diagram approach. The number of free nonperturbative parameters to be fitted from experimental data is also much less. Only four universal nonperturbative parameters $χ^C$, $ϕ^C$, $χ^E$ and $ϕ^E$ are introduced to describe the contribution of the color suppressed tree and $W$-exchanged diagrams for all the decay channels. With the fitted parameters from 31 decay modes induced by $b\to c$ transition, we then predict the branching fractions of 120 decay modes induced by both $b\to c$ and $b\to u$ transitions. Our results are well consistent with the measured data or to be tested in the LHCb and Belle-II experiments in the future. Besides, the SU(3) symmetry breaking, isospin violation and $CP$ asymmetry are also investigated.

preprint2015arXiv

Electronic structure and spin-orbit driven novel magnetism in d4.5 insulator Ba3YIr2O9

We have carried out a detailed first-principles study of a d$^{4.5}$ quaternary iridate Ba$_3$YIr$_2$O$_9$ both in its 6H-perovskite-type ambient pressure (AP) phase and also for the high pressure (HP) cubic phase. Our analysis reveals that the AP phase belongs to the intermediate spin-orbit coupling (SOC) regime. This is further supported by the identification of the spin moment as the primary order parameter (POP) obtained from a magnetic multipolar analysis. The large $t_{2g}$ band width renormalizes the strength of SOC and the Ir intersite exchange interaction dominates resulting in long range magnetic order in the AP phase. In addition to SOC and Hubbard $U$, strong intradimer coupling is found to be crucial for the realization of the insulating state. At high pressure (HP) the system undergoes a structural transformation to the disordered cubic phase. In sharp contrast to the AP phase, the calculated exchange interactions in the HP phase are found to be much weaker and SOC dominates leading to a quantum spin orbital liquid (SOL) state.

preprint2015arXiv

Hierarchical surface code for network quantum computing with modules of arbitrary size

The network paradigm for quantum computing involves interconnecting many modules to form a scalable machine. Typically it is assumed that the links between modules are prone to noise while operations within modules have significantly higher fidelity. To optimise fault tolerance in such architectures we introduce a hierarchical generalisation of the surface code: a small `patch' of the code exists within each module, and constitutes a single effective qubit of the logic-level surface code. Errors primarily occur in a two-dimensional subspace, i.e. patch perimeters extruded over time, and the resulting noise threshold for inter-module links can exceed ~ 10% even in the absence of purification. Increasing the number of qubits within each module decreases the number of qubits necessary for encoding a logical qubit. But this advantage is relatively modest, and broadly speaking a `fine grained' network of small modules containing only ~ 8 qubits is competitive in total qubit count versus a `course' network with modules containing many hundreds of qubits.

preprint2015arXiv

Impact of Family Non-universal $Z^\prime$ Boson on Pure Annihilation $B_s \to π^+ π^-$ and $B_d \to K^+ K^-$ Decays

We study the $B_s \to π^+ π^-$ and $B_d \to K^+ K^-$ decays in the standard model and the family non-universal $Z^\prime$ model. Since none of the quarks in final states is the same as the initial quark, these decay modes can occur only via power-suppressed annihilation diagrams. Despite the consistence of the standard model prediction with the available data, there is a surviving room for a light $Z^\prime$ boson. Taking into account the $Z^\prime$ contribution, we find theoretical results for branching fractions can better accommodate the data. With the relevant data, we also derive a constraint on the parameter space for the $Z^\prime$. Moreover, for the $B_d \to K^+ K^-$, both the direct and the mixing-induced $CP$ asymmetry are sensitive to the couplings between $Z^\prime$ and fermions in the parameter spaces constrained by data. The measurements at future experimental facilities, including the LHC-b, Belle-II and the proposed high energy $e^+e^-$ collider, will provide us useful hints for direct searching for the light $Z^\prime$ boson.

preprint2015arXiv

Improved Estimates of The $B_{(s)}\to V V$ Decays in Perturbative QCD Approach

We reexamine the branching ratios, $CP$-asymmetries, and other observables in a large number of $B_q\to VV(q=u,d,s)$ decays in the perturbative QCD (PQCD) approach, where $V$ denotes a light vector meson $(ρ, K^*, ω, ϕ)$. The essential difference between this work and the earlier similar works is of parametric origin and in the estimates of the power corrections related to the ratio $r_i^2=m_{V_i}^2/m_B^2(i=2,3)$ ($m_V$ and $m_B$ denote the masses of the vector and $B$ meson, respectively). In particular, we use up-to-date distribution amplitudes for the final state mesons and keep the terms proportional to the ratio $r_i^2$ in our calculations. Our updated calculations are in agreement with the experimental data, except for a limited number of decays which we discuss. We emphasize that the penguin annihilation and the hard-scattering emission contributions are essential to understand the polarization anomaly, such as in the $B\to ϕK^*$ and $B_s \to ϕϕ$ decay modes. We also compare our results with those obtained in the QCD factorization (QCDF) approach and comment on the similarities and differences, which can be used to discriminate between these approaches in future experiments.

preprint2015arXiv

Intelligent thermal cloak-concentrators

How to macroscopically control the flow of heat at will is up to now a challenge, which, however, is very important for human life since heat flow is a ubiquitous phenomenon in nature. Inspired by intelligent electronic components or intelligent materials, here we demonstrate, analytically and numerically, a unique class of intelligent bifunctional thermal metamaterials called thermal cloak-concentrators, which can automatically change from a cloak (concentrator) to a concentrator (cloak) when the applied temperature field decreases (increases). For future experimental realization, the behavior is also confirmed by assembling homogeneous isotropic materials according to the effective medium theory. The underlying mechanism originates from the effect of nonlinearity in thermal conduction. This work not only makes it possible to achieve a switchable Seebeck effect, but also offers guidance both for macroscopic manipulation of heat flow at will and for the design of similar intelligent multifunctional metamaterials in optics, electromagnetics, acoustics, or elastodynamics.

preprint2015arXiv

Pure Annihilation Type $B \to K_0^{*\pm}(1430)K^{(*)\mp}$ Decays in the Family Non-universal $Z^\prime$ Model

By assuming that the scalar meson $K_0^*(1430)$ belongs to the first excited states or the lowest lying ground states, we study the pure annihilation-type decays $B \to K_0^{*\pm}(1430)K^{(*)\mp}$ in the QCD factorization approach. Within the standard model, the branching fractions are at the order of $10^{-8}-10^{-7}$, which is possible to be measured in the ongoing LHCb experiment or forthcoming Belle-II experiment. We also study these decays in the family non-universal $Z^\prime$ model. The results show that if $m_{Z^\prime}\approx 600\mathrm{GeV}$ ($ζ=0.02$), both the branching fractions and $CP$ asymmetries of $\overline B^0\to K_0^{*+}(1430)K^-$ could be changed remarkably, which provides us a place for probing the effect of new physics. These results could be used to constrain the parameters of $Z^\prime$ model.

preprint2015arXiv

Pushing towards the Limit of Sampling Rate: Adaptive Chasing Sampling

Measurement samples are often taken in various monitoring applications. To reduce the sensing cost, it is desirable to achieve better sensing quality while using fewer samples. Compressive Sensing (CS) technique finds its role when the signal to be sampled meets certain sparsity requirements. In this paper we investigate the possibility and basic techniques that could further reduce the number of samples involved in conventional CS theory by exploiting learning-based non-uniform adaptive sampling. Based on a typical signal sensing application, we illustrate and evaluate the performance of two of our algorithms, Individual Chasing and Centroid Chasing, for signals of different distribution features. Our proposed learning-based adaptive sampling schemes complement existing efforts in CS fields and do not depend on any specific signal reconstruction technique. Compared to conventional sparse sampling methods, the simulation results demonstrate that our algorithms allow $46\%$ less number of samples for accurate signal reconstruction and achieve up to $57\%$ smaller signal reconstruction error under the same noise condition.

preprint2015arXiv

Quantum computation with noisy operations

In this paper, we show how to use low-fidelity operations to control the dynamics of quantum systems. Noisy operations usually drive a system to evolve into a mixed state and damage the coherence. Sometimes frequent noisy operations result in the coherent evolution of a subsystem, and the dynamics of the subsystem is controlled by tuning noisy operations. Based on this, we find that universal quantum computation can be carried out by low-fidelity (fidelity $<90\%$) operations.

preprint2015arXiv

Resource costs for fault-tolerant linear optical quantum computing

Linear optical quantum computing (LOQC) seems attractively simple: information is borne entirely by light and processed by components such as beam splitters, phase shifters and detectors. However this very simplicity leads to limitations, such as the lack of deterministic entangling operations, which are compensated for by using substantial hardware overheads. Here we quantify the resource costs for full scale LOQC by proposing a specific protocol based on the surface code. With the caveat that our protocol can be further optimised, we report that the required number of physical components is at least five orders of magnitude greater than in comparable matter-based systems. Moreover the resource requirements grow higher if the per-component photon loss rate is worse than one in a thousand, or the per-component noise rate is worse than $10^{-5}$. We identify the performance of switches in the network as the single most influential factor influencing resource scaling.

preprint2015arXiv

SEARS: Space Efficient And Reliable Storage System in the Cloud

Today's cloud storage services must offer storage reliability and fast data retrieval for large amount of data without sacrificing storage cost. We present SEARS, a cloud-based storage system which integrates erasure coding and data deduplication to support efficient and reliable data storage with fast user response time. With proper association of data to storage server clusters, SEARS provides flexible mixing of different configurations, suitable for real-time and archival applications. Our prototype implementation of SEARS over Amazon EC2 shows that it outperforms existing storage systems in storage efficiency and file retrieval time. For 3 MB files, SEARS delivers retrieval time of $2.5$ s compared to $7$ s with existing systems.

preprint2015arXiv

Study of $B \to K_0^*(1430)K^{(*)}$ decays in QCD Factorization Approach

Within the QCD factorization approach, we calculate the branching fractions and $CP$ asymmetry parameters of 12 $B \to K_0^*(1430)K^{(*)}$ decay modes under the assumption that the scalar meson $K_0^*(1430)$ is the first excited state or the lowest lying ground state in the quark model. We find that the decay modes with the scalar meson emitted, have large branching fractions due to the enhancement of large chiral factor $r_χ^{K_0^*}$. The branching fractions of decays with the vector meson emitted, become much smaller owing to the smaller factor $r_χ^{K^*}$. Moreover, the annihilation type diagram will induce large uncertainties because of the extra free parameter dealing with the endpoint singularity. For the pure annihilation type decays, our predictions are smaller than that from PQCD approach by 2-3 orders of magnitudes. These results will be tested by the ongoing LHCb experiment, forthcoming Belle-II experiment and the proposing circular electron-positron collider.

preprint2015arXiv

Temperature-dependent transformation thermotics: From switchable thermal cloaks to macroscopic thermal diodes

The macroscopic control of ubiquitous heat flow remains poorly explored due to the lack of a fundamental theoretical method. Here, by establishing temperature-dependent transformation thermotics for treating materials whose conductivity depends on temperature, we show analytical and simulation evidence for switchable thermal cloaking and a macroscopic thermal diode based on the cloaking. The latter allows heat flow in one direction but prohibits the flow in the opposite direction, which is also confirmed by our experiments. Our results suggest that the temperature-dependent transformation thermotics could be a fundamental theoretical method for achieving macroscopic heat rectification, and provide guidance both for macroscopic control of heat flow and for the design of the counterparts of switchable thermal cloaks or macroscopic thermal diodes in other fields like seismology, acoustics, electromagnetics, or matter waves.

preprint2015arXiv

The rare semi-leptonic $B_c$ decays involving orbitally excited final mesons

The rare processes $B_c\to D_{(s)J} ^{(*)}μ\barμ$, where $D_{(s)J}^{(*)}$ stands for the final meson $D_{s0}^*(2317)$, $D_{s1}(2460,2536)$,~$D_{s2}^*(2573)$, $D_0^*(2400)$, $D_{1}(2420,2430)$ or~$D_{2}^*(2460)$, are studied within the Standard Model. The hadronic matrix elements are evaluated in the Bethe-Salpeter approach and furthermore a discussion on the gauge-invariant condition of the annihilation hadronic currents is presented. Considering the penguin, box, annihilation, color-favored cascade and color-suppressed cascade contributions, the observables $\text{d}Br/\text{d}Q^2$, $A_{LPL}$, $A_{FB}$ and $P_L$ are calculated.

preprint2014arXiv

A magic state's fidelity can be superior to the operations that created it

The leading approach to fault tolerant quantum computing requires a continual supply of magic states. When a new magic state is first encoded, its initial fidelity will be too poor for use in the computation. This necessitates a resource-intensive distillation process that occupies the majority of the computer's hardware; creating magic states with a high initial fidelity minimises this cost and is therefore crucial for practical quantum computing. Here we present the surprising and encouraging result that raw magic states can have a fidelity significantly better than that of the two-qubit gate operations used to construct them. Our protocol exploits post-selection without significantly slowing the rate of generation and tolerates finite error rates in initialisations, measurements and single-qubit gates. This approach may dramatically reduce the size of the hardware needed for a given quantum computing task.

preprint2014arXiv

Analysis of the optical conductivity for A2IrO3 (A = Na, Li) from first principles

We present results for the optical conductivity of Na2IrO3 within density functional theory by including spin-orbit (SO) and correlation effects (U) as implemented in GGA+SO+U. We identify the various interband transitions and show that the underlying quasi-molecular-orbital nature of the electronic structure in Na2IrO3 translates into distinct features in the optical conductivity. Most importantly, the parity of the quasi-molecular orbitals appears to be the main factor in determining strong and weak optical transitions. We also present optical conductivity calculations for Li2IrO3 and discuss the similarities and differences with Na2IrO3.

preprint2014arXiv

Branching Fractions and Direct CP Asymmetries of $\bar B_s ^0 \to K^0 h^+h^{\prime -}(h^{(\prime)}=K,π)$ Decays

Motivated by the recent LHCb collaboration measurements of charmless three-body decays of $\bar B_s^0$ meson, we calculate the branching fractions of $\bar B_s ^0 \to K^0 π^+π^-$, $\bar B_s ^0 \to K^0 K^+K^-$, $\bar B_s ^0 \to K^0 π^+K^-$ and $\bar B_s ^0 \to \bar K^0 K^+π^-$ decay modes using the factorization approach. Both the resonant and nonresonant contributions are studied in detail. For the decays $\bar B_s ^0 \to K^0 π^+π^-$ and $\bar B_s ^0 \to K^0 K^+K^-$, our results agree well with experimental data, and the former is dominated by the $K^*$, while the latter one is dominated by the nonresonant contribution. Considering the flavor SU(3) symmetry violation, the sum of branching fractions of $\bar B_s ^0 \to K^0 π^+K^-$ and $\bar B_s ^0 \to \bar K^0 K^+π^-$ could accommodate the data well too. It should be noted that both branching fractions are sensitive to the scalar density $< Kπ| \bar s q|0>$. Furthermore, the resonant contributions are dominated by the scalar $K_0^*(1430)$. We hope that these branching fractions could be measured individually in the experiments so as to test the factorization approach and the flavor SU(3) asymmetry. Moreover, the direct CP asymmetries of these decays are also investigated, which could be measured in the running LHCb experiment and Super-b factory in the future.

preprint2014arXiv

BRVST: Efficient and Content-Expressive Information Matching Overlay in Wireless Networks

Efficient and flexible information matching over wireless networks has become increasingly important and challenging with the popularity of smart devices and the growth of social-network-based applications. Some existing approaches designed for wired networks are not applicable to wireless networks, due to their overwhelming control overheads. In this paper, we propose a reliable and scalable binary range vector summary tree (BRVST) infrastructure for flexible information expression support, effective content matching and timely information dissemination over the dynamic wireless network. A novel attribute range vector structure has been introduced for efficient and accurate content representation and a summary tree structure to facilitate information aggregation. For robust and scalable operations over dynamic wireless network, the proposed overlay system exploits a virtual hierarchical geographic management framework. Extensive simulations demonstrate that BRVST has a significantly faster event matching speed, while incurs very low storage and traffic overhead, as compared with peer schemes tested.

preprint2014arXiv

Classical noise assists the flow of quantum energy by `momentum rejuvenation'

An important challenge in quantum science is to fully understand the efficiency of energy flow in networks. Here we present a simple and intuitive explanation for the intriguing observation that optimally efficient networks are not purely quantum, but are assisted by some interaction with a `noisy' classical environment. By considering the system's dynamics in both the site-basis and the momentum-basis, we show that the effect of classical noise is to sustain a broad momentum distribution, countering the depletion of high mobility terms which occurs as energy exits from the network. This picture predicts that the optimal level of classical noise is reciprocally related to the linear dimension of the lattice; our numerical simulations verify this prediction to high accuracy for regular 1D and 2D networks over a range of sizes up to thousands of sites. This insight leads to the discovery that dramatic further improvements in performance occur when a driving field targets noise at the low mobility components.

preprint2014arXiv

Comprehensive Study of $\overline B^0\to K^0(\overline K^0) K^\mpπ^\pm$ Decays in the Factorization Approach

Using the factorization approach, we investigate the $\overline B^0 \to \overline K^0K^+π^-$ and $\overline B^0 \to K^0K^-π^+$ decays individually including the resonant and nonresonant contributions. Under the flavor SU(3) symmetry, we obtain the total branching fraction $BR [\overline B^0 \to (\overline K^0K^+π^-+K^0K^-π^+)]=(7.17^{+0.50+1.97+0.08}_{-0.53-1.42-0.07})\times 10^{-6}$, which is in agreement with the recent measurements of BaBar and LHCb within errors. For the decay $\overline B^0 \to \overline K^0K^+π^-$, the nonresonant background and $a_0^+(1450)$ pole in the current-induced process provide large contribution, the latter of which has not been included in previous studies. On the contrary,the decay $\overline B^0 \to K^0K^-π^+$ is dominated by the nonresonant background and the offshell $ρ^-$ pole. When the flavor SU(3) symmetry breaking and the final-state rescattering are considered under two different scenarios, the results can also accommodate the experimental data with large uncertainties. Moreover, the direct $CP$ asymmetry of $\overline B^0 \to \overline K^0K^+π^-$ is found to be sensitive to the matrix element of scalar density. These predictions could be further tested in the LHCb experiment or Super-b factory in future.

preprint2014arXiv

Electrically driven spin resonance in a bent disordered carbon nanotube

Resonant manipulation of carbon nanotube valley-spin qubits by an electric field is investigated theoretically. We develop a new analysis of electrically driven spin resonance exploiting fixed physical characteristics of the nanotube: a bend and inhomogeneous disorder. The spectrum is simulated for an electron valley-spin qubit coupled to a hole valley-spin qubit and an impurity electron spin, and features that coincide with a recent measurement are identified. We show that the same mechanism allows resonant control of the full four-dimensional spin-valley space.

preprint2014arXiv

Full Investigation on the Dynamics of Power-Law Kinetic Quintessence

We give a full investigation on the dynamics of power-law kinetic quintessence $L(X, ϕ)=V(ϕ)(-X+X^2)$ by considering the potential related parameter $Γ$($=\frac{V V''}{V'^2}$) as a function of another potential parameter $λ$($=\frac{V'}{κV^{3/2}}$), which correspondingly extends the analysis of the dynamical system of our universe from two-dimension to three-dimension. Beside the critical points found in previous papers, we find a new de-Sitter-like dominant attractor(\textit{cp$6$}) and give its stable condition using the center manifold theorem. For the dark energy dominant solution(\textit{cp$6$} and \textit{cp$7$}), it could be distinguished from canonical quintessence and tachyon models since the sound speed $c_s^2=0$ or $c_s^2\ll 1$. For the scaling solution (\textit{cp$8$}), it is very interesting that the sound speed $c_s^2=1/5$ while it behaves as ordinary matter. We therefore point out that the power-law kinetic quintessence should have different signatures on cold dark matter power spectrum and cosmic microwave background both at early time when this scalar field is an early dark energy with $Ω_ϕ$ being non-negligible at high redshift and at late time when it drives the accelerating expansion. We even do not know whether there are any degeneracies of the impacts between these two epoches. They are expected to be investigated in future.

preprint2014arXiv

Generation of cylindrical vector vortex beams by two cascaded metasurfaces

We present a simple and efficient method to generate any cylindrical vector vortex (CVV) beams based on two cascaded metasurfaces. The metasurface works as a space-variant Panchratnam-Berry phase element and can produce any desirable vortex phase and vector polarization. The first metasurface is used to switch the sign of topological charges associated with vortex, and the second metasurface is applied to manipulate the local polarization. This method allows us to simultaneously manipulate polarization and phase of the CVV beams.

preprint2014arXiv

Inverse Scattering Approach on Tomography Problem Using Multi-frequency Data

An inverse scattering problem is formulated for reconstructing optical properties of biological tissues. A recursive linearization algorithm is used to solve the inverse scattering problem. We employed the idea of finite element boundary integral method and added suitable boundary conditions on the surface of the domain. The initial guess is obtained by Born approximation based on the fact of weak scattering. The reconstruction is then improved each time by an increment on wave number. Finite element method is used for the interior domain containing inhomogeneity. Nyström method is used for setting up the boundary conditions and jump conditions. Two numerical examples are presented.

preprint2014arXiv

Mathematical Modeling on Open Limestone Channel

Acid mine drainage (AMD) is the outflow of acidic water from metal mines or coal mines. When exposed to air and water, metal sulfides from the deposits of the mines are oxidized and produce acid, metal ions and sulfate, which lower the pH value of the water. An open limestone channel (OLC) is a passive and low cost way to neutralize AMD. The dissolution of calcium into the water increases the pH value of the solution. A differential equation model is numerically solved to predict the variation of concentration of each species in the OLC solution. The diffusion of Calcium due to iron precipitates is modeled by a linear equation. The results give the variation of pH value and the concentration of Calcium.

preprint2014arXiv

Measurement-Based Quantum Computation on Two-Body Interacting Qubits with Adiabatic Evolution

A cluster state cannot be a unique ground state of a two-body interacting Hamiltonian. Here, we propose the creation of a cluster state of logical qubits encoded in spin-1/2 particles by adiabatically weakening two-body interactions. The proposal is valid for any spatial dimensional cluster states. Errors induced by thermal fluctuations and adiabatic evolution within finite time can be eliminated ensuring fault-tolerant quantum computing schemes.

preprint2014arXiv

Spectral observations of Ellerman bombs and fitting with a two-cloud model

We study the H$α$ and Ca II 8542 Å line spectra of four typical Ellerman bombs (EBs) in active region NOAA 11765 on 2013 June 6, observed with the Fast Imaging Solar Spectrograph installed at the 1.6 meter New Solar Telescope at Big Bear Solar Observatory. Considering that EBs may occur in a restricted region in the lower atmosphere, and that their spectral lines show particular features, we propose a two-cloud model to fit the observed line profiles. The lower cloud can account for the wing emission, and the upper cloud is mainly responsible for the absorption at line center. After choosing carefully the free parameters, we get satisfactory fitting results. As expected, the lower cloud shows an increase of the source function, corresponding to a temperature increase of 400--1000 K in EBs relative to the quiet Sun. This is consistent with previous results deduced from semi-empirical models and confirms that a local heating occurs in the lower atmosphere during the appearance of EBs. We also find that the optical depths can increase to some extent in both the lower and upper clouds, which may result from either a direct heating in the lower cloud, or illumination by an enhanced radiation on the upper cloud. The velocities derived from this method, however, are different from those obtained using the traditional bisector method, implying that one should be cautious when interpreting this parameter. The two-cloud model can thus be used as an efficient method to deduce the basic physical parameters of EBs.

preprint2014arXiv

Thesis: The Effects of Hypoxia, Metabolic Restriction and Magnetic Fields on Chromosome Instability and Karyotype Contraction in Cancer Cell Lines

Background: Biological effects of extra-low-frequency (ELF) magnetic fields (MFs) have lacked a credible mechanism of interaction between MFs and living material. Objectives: To examine the effect of ELF-MFs on cancer cells. Methods: Five cancer cell lines were exposed to ELF-MFs within the range of 0.025-5 microTesla, and the cells were examined for karyotype changes after 6 days. Results: All cancer cells lines lost chromosomes from MF exposure, with a mostly flat dose-response. Constant MF exposures for three weeks allow a rising return to the baseline, unperturbed karyotypes. From this point, small MF increases or decreases are again capable of inducing karyotype contractions (KCs). Our data suggest that the KCs are caused by MF interference with mitochondria's adenosine triphosphate synthase (ATPS), compensated by the action of adenosine monophosphate-activated protein kinase (AMPK). The effects of MFs are similar to those of the ATPS inhibitor, oligomycin. They are amplified by metformin, an AMPK stimulator, and attenuated by resistin, an AMPK inhibitor. Over environmental MFs, KCs of various cancer cell lines show exceptionally wide and flat dose-responses, except for those of erythroleukemia cells, which display a progressive rise from 0.025 to 0.4 microTesla. Conclusions: The biological effects of MFs are connected to an alteration in the structure of water that impedes the flux of protons in ATPS channels. These results may be environment ally important, in view of the central roles played in human physiology by ATPS and AMPK, particularly in their links to diabetes, cancer and longevity.

preprint2014arXiv

Training-Free Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring of Electric Vehicle Charging with Low Sampling Rate

Non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) is an important topic in smart-grid and smart-home. Many energy disaggregation algorithms have been proposed to detect various individual appliances from one aggregated signal observation. However, few works studied the energy disaggregation of plug-in electric vehicle (EV) charging in the residential environment since EVs charging at home has emerged only recently. Recent studies showed that EV charging has a large impact on smart-grid especially in summer. Therefore, EV charging monitoring has become a more important and urgent missing piece in energy disaggregation. In this paper, we present a novel method to disaggregate EV charging signals from aggregated real power signals. The proposed method can effectively mitigate interference coming from air-conditioner (AC), enabling accurate EV charging detection and energy estimation under the presence of AC power signals. Besides, the proposed algorithm requires no training, demands a light computational load, delivers high estimation accuracy, and works well for data recorded at the low sampling rate 1/60 Hz. When the algorithm is tested on real-world data recorded from 11 houses over about a whole year (total 125 months worth of data), the averaged error in estimating energy consumption of EV charging is 15.7 kwh/month (while the true averaged energy consumption of EV charging is 208.5 kwh/month), and the averaged normalized mean square error in disaggregating EV charging load signals is 0.19.

preprint2014arXiv

Transitions in the quantum computational power

We construct two spin models on lattices (both two and three-dimensional) to study the capability of quantum computational power as a function of temperature and the system parameter. There exists a finite region in the phase diagram such that the thermal equilibrium states are capable of providing a universal fault-tolerant resource for measurement-based quantum computation. Moreover, in such a region the thermal resource states on the 3D lattices can enable topological protection for quantum computation. The two models behave similarly in terms of quantum computational power. However, they have different properties in terms of the usual phase transitions. The first model has a first-order phase transition only at zero temperature whereas there is no transition at all in the second model. Interestingly, the transition in the quantum computational power does not coincide with the phase transition in the first model.

preprint2013arXiv

A Survey of Protocols for Intermittently Connected Delay-Tolerant Wireless Sensor Networks

Intermittently Connected Delay-Tolerant Wireless Sensor Networks (ICDT-WSNs), a branch of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), have features of WSNs and the intermittent connectivity of Delay-Tolerant Networks (DTNs). The applications of ICDT-WSNs are increasing in recent years, however, the communication protocols suitable for this category of networks often fall short. Most of the existing communication protocols are designed for either WSNs or DTNs and tend to be inadequate for direct use in ICDT-WSNs. This survey summarizes characteristics of ICDT-WSNs and their communication protocol requirements, and examines the communication protocols designed for WSNs and DTNs in recent years from the perspective of ICDT-WSNs. Opportunities for future research in ICDT-WSNs are also outlined.

preprint2013arXiv

Feedback and harmonic locking of slot-type optomechanical oscillators to external low-noise reference clocks

We demonstrate feedback and harmonic locking of chip-scale slot-type optomechanical oscillators to external low-noise reference clocks, with suppressed timing jitter by three orders of magnitude. The feedback and compensation techniques significantly reduce the close-to-carrier phase noise, especially within the locking bandwidth for the integral root-mean-square timing jitter. Harmonic locking via high-order carrier signals is also demonstrated with similar phase noise and integrated root-mean-square timing jitter reduction. The chip-scale optomechanical oscillators are tunable over an 80-kHz range by tracking the reference clock, with potential applications in tunable radio-frequency photonics platforms.

preprint2013arXiv

Fundamentals of Heterogeneous Cellular Networks with Energy Harvesting

We develop a new tractable model for K-tier heterogeneous cellular networks (HetNets), where each base station (BS) is powered solely by a self-contained energy harvesting module. The BSs across tiers differ in terms of the energy harvesting rate, energy storage capacity, transmit power and deployment density. Since a BS may not always have enough energy, it may need to be kept OFF and allowed to recharge while nearby users are served by neighboring BSs that are ON. We show that the fraction of time a k^{th} tier BS can be kept ON, termed availability ρ_k, is a fundamental metric of interest. Using tools from random walk theory, fixed point analysis and stochastic geometry, we characterize the set of K-tuples (ρ_1, ρ_2, ... ρ_K), termed the availability region, that is achievable by general uncoordinated operational strategies, where the decision to toggle the current ON/OFF state of a BS is taken independently of the other BSs. If the availability vector corresponding to the optimal system performance, e.g., in terms of rate, lies in this availability region, there is no performance loss due to the presence of unreliable energy sources. As a part of our analysis, we model the temporal dynamics of the energy level at each BS as a birth-death process, derive the energy utilization rate, and use hitting/stopping time analysis to prove that there exists a fundamental limit on ρ_k that cannot be surpassed by any uncoordinated strategy.

preprint2013arXiv

Investigating the Effect of Family Non-universal $Z^\prime$ Boson in $B \to ϕϕ$ Decay

Within the perturbative QCD approach, we re-calculate the branching ratio and polarization fractions of the pure annihilation decay $B \to ϕϕ$ in both the standard model (SM) and the family non-universal $Z^\prime$ model. We find that this decay is dominated by the longitudinal part, while the transverse parts are negligibly due to the absence of the $(S-P)(S+P)$-type operator. In SM, the branching ratio is predicted as $(4.4^{+0.8+0.3}_{-0.6-0.5}) \times 10^{-8}$, which is larger than the previous predictions. With an additional $Z^\prime$ boson, the branching ratio can be enhanced by a factor of 2, or reduced one half in the allowed parameters space. These results will be tested by the ongoing LHCb experiment and forthcoming Super-B experiments. Moreover, if the $Z^\prime$ boson could be directly detected at hadron collider, this decay can be used to constrain its mass and the couplings in turn.

preprint2013arXiv

On the Jordan decomposition for a class of non-symmetric Ornstein-Uhlenbeck operators

In this paper, we calculate the Jordan decomposition (or say, the Jordan canonical form) for a class of non-symmetric Ornstein-Uhlenbeck operators with the drift coefficient matrix being a Jordan block and the diffusion coefficient matrix being identity multiplying a constant. For the 2-dimensional case, we present all the general eigenfunctions by the induction. For the 3-dimensional case, we divide the calculating of the Jordan decomposition into several steps (the key step is to do the canonical projection onto the homogeneous Hermite polynomials, next we use the theory of systems of linear equations). As a by-pass product, we get the geometric multiplicity of the eigenvalue of the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck operator.

preprint2013arXiv

Operator Quantum Zeno Effect: Protecting Quantum Information with Noisy Two-Qubit Interactions

The time evolution of some quantum states can be slowed down or even stopped under frequent measurements. This is the usual quantum Zeno effect. Here, we report an operator quantum Zeno effect, in which the evolution of some physical observables is slowed down through measurements even though the quantum state changes randomly with time. Based on the operator quantum Zeno effect, we show how we can protect quantum information from decoherence with two-qubit measurements, realizable with noisy two-qubit interactions.

preprint2013arXiv

Quantum Zeno Effect of General Quantum Operations

In this paper, we show that the quantum Zeno effect occurs for any frequent quantum measurements or operations. As a result of the Zeno effect, for non-selective measurements (or trace preserving completely positive maps), the evolution of a measurement invariant state is governed by an effective Hamiltonian defined by the measurements and the free-evolution Hamiltonian. For selective measurements, the state may change randomly with time according to measurement outcomes, while some physical quantities (operators) still evolve as the effective dynamics.

preprint2013arXiv

Quasiparticle Localisation via Frequent Measurements

Topological quantum memories in two dimensions are not thermally stable, since once a quasiparticle excitation is created, it will delocalise at no energy cost. This places an upper bound on the lifetime of quantum information stored in them. We address this issue for a topological subsystem code introduced in [Bravyi S. et al., Quant.Inf.Comp.13(11):0963]. By frequently measuring the gauge operators of the code, a technique known as Operator Quantum Zeno Effect [Li Y. et al, preprint arXiv:1305.2464], the dynamics responsible for quasiparticle motion is suppressed, and can eventually be "frozen" in the large frequency limit. A feature of this method is that the density operator of the code does not commute with the measurement operators, so the density matrix will be randomised after a few measurements. However the logical operators commute with the measurement operators and are thus protected.

preprint2013arXiv

Topological quantum computing with a very noisy network and local error rates approaching one percent

A scalable quantum computer could be built by networking together many simple processor cells, thus avoiding the need to create a single complex structure. The difficulty is that realistic quantum links are very error prone. A solution is for cells to repeatedly communicate with each other and so 'purify' any imperfections; however prior studies suggest that the cells themselves must then have prohibitively low internal error rates. Here we describe a method by which even error-prone cells can perform purification: groups of cells generate shared resource states, which then enable stabilization of topologically encoded data. Given a realistically noisy network (>=10% error rate) we find that our protocol can succeed provided that intra-cell error rates for initialisation, state manipulation and measurement are below 0.82%. This level of fidelity is already achievable in several laboratory systems.

preprint2012arXiv

Branching Fractions and CP Asymmetries of B --> K_0*(1430) rho and B --> K_0^*(1430) phi Decays in the Family Nonuniversal Z' Model

In this work, within the QCD factorization approach, we investigate the branching fractions and CP asymmetries of decays $B \to K_0^*(1430)ρ$ and $B \to K_0^*(1430)ϕ$ under two different scenarios both in the standard model and the family nonuniversal $Z^\prime$ model. We find that the annihilation terms play crucial roles in these decays and lead to the main uncertainties. For decays $B^- \to \bar K_0^{*-} (1430)ρ^0 (ω)$, the new $Z^\prime$ boson could change branching fractions remarkably. However, for other decays, its contribution might be clouded by large uncertainties from annihilations. Unfortunately, neither the standard model nor $Z^\prime$ model can reproduce all experimental data under one certain scenario. We also noted that the CP asymmetries of $B^-\to \bar K_0^{*-}(1430) ρ^0 (ω)$ could be used to identify the$K_0^*(1430)$ meson and search for the new physics contribution.

preprint2012arXiv

Direct comparison of a Ca+ single ion clock against a Sr optical lattice clock

Optical frequency comparison of the 40Ca+ clock transition ν_{Ca} (2S1/2-2D5/2, 729nm) against the 87Sr optical lattice clock transition ν_{Sr}(1S0-3P0, 698nm) has resulted in a frequency ratio ν_{Ca} / ν_{Sr} = 0.957 631 202 358 049 9(2 3). The rapid nature of optical comparison allowed the statistical uncertainty of frequency ratio ν_{Ca} / ν_{Sr} to reach 1x10-15 in only 1000s and yielded a value consistent with that calculated from separate absolute frequency measurements of ν_{Ca} using the International Atomic Time (TAI) link. The total uncertainty of the frequency ratio using optical comparison (free from microwave link uncertainties) is smaller than that obtained using absolute frequency measurement, demonstrating the advantage of optical frequency evaluation. We report the absolute frequency of ^{40}Ca+ with a systematic uncertainty 14 times smaller than our previous measurement [1].

preprint2012arXiv

Dispersive coupling and optimization of femtogram L3-nanobeam optomechanical cavities

We present the design of a femtogram L3-nanobeam photonic crystal cavity for optomechanical studies. Two symmetric nanobeams are created by placing three air slots in a silicon photonic crystal slab where three holes are removed. The optical quality factor (Q) is optimized up to 52,000. The nanobeams' mechanical frequencies are higher than 600 MHz due to their femtogram effective modal masses. The optical and mechanical modes are dispersively coupled with a vacuum optomechanical coupling rate g0/2pi exceeding 200 kHz. The anchor-loss-limited mechanical Q of the differential beam mode is evaluated to be greater than 10,000 for structures with ideally symmetric beams. The influence of variations on the air slot width and position is also investigated. The devices can be used as ultrasensitive sensors of mass, force, and displacement.

preprint2012arXiv

Extra-Low-Frequency Magnetic Fields alter Cancer Cells through Metabolic Restriction

Background: Biological effects of extra-low-frequency (ELF) magnetic fields (MF) have lacked a credible mechanism of interaction between MFs and living material. Objectives: Examine the effect of ELF-MFs on cancer cells. Methods: Five cancer cell lines were exposed to ELF-MFs within the range of 0.025 to 5 microT, and the cells were examined for karyotype changes after 6 days. Results: All cancer cells lines lost chromosomes from MF exposure, with a mostly flat dose-response. Constant MF exposures for three weeks allow a rising return to the baseline, unperturbed karyotypes. From this point, small MF increases or decreases are again capable of inducing karyotype contractions. Our data suggests that the karyotype contractions are caused by MF interference with mitochondria's ATP synthase (ATPS), compensated by the action of AMP-activated Protein Kinase (AMPK). The effects of MFs are similar to those of the ATPS inhibitor oligomycin. They are amplified by metformin, an AMPK stimulator, and attenuated by resistin, an AMPK inhibitor. Over environmental MFs, karyotype contractions of various cancer cell lines show exceptionally wide and flat dose-responses, except for those of erythro-leukemia cells, which display a progressive rise from 0.025 to 0.4 microT. Conclusions: The biological effects of MFs are connected to an alteration in the structure of water that impedes the flux of protons in ATPS channels. These results may be environmentally important, in view of the central roles played in human physiology by ATPS and AMPK, particularly in their links to diabetes, cancer and longevity.

preprint2012arXiv

High threshold distributed quantum computing with three-qubit nodes

In the distributed quantum computing paradigm, well-controlled few-qubit `nodes' are networked together by connections which are relatively noisy and failure prone. A practical scheme must offer high tolerance to errors while requiring only simple (i.e. few-qubit) nodes. Here we show that relatively modest, three-qubit nodes can support advanced purification techniques and so offer robust scalability: the infidelity in the entanglement channel may be permitted to approach 10% if the infidelity in local operations is of order 0.1%. Our tolerance of network noise is therefore a order of magnitude beyond prior schemes, and our architecture remains robust even in the presence of considerable decoherence rates (memory errors). We compare the performance with that of schemes involving nodes of lower and higher complexity. Ion traps, and NV- centres in diamond, are two highly relevant emerging technologies.

preprint2012arXiv

Long range failure-tolerant entanglement distribution

We introduce a protocol to distribute entanglement between remote parties. Our protocol is based on a chain of repeater stations, and exploits topological encoding to tolerate very high levels of defects and errors. The repeater stations may employ probabilistic entanglement operations which usually fail; ours is the first protocol to explicitly allow for technologies of this kind. Given an error rate between stations in excess of 10%, arbitrarily long range high fidelity entanglement distribution is possible even if the heralded failure rate within the stations is as high as 99%, providing that unheralded errors are low (order 0.01%).

preprint2012arXiv

Parametric Optomechanical Oscillations in Two-Dimensional Slot-Type High-Q Photonic Crystal Cavities

We experimentally demonstrate an optomechanical cavity based on an air-slot photonic crystal cavity with optical quality factor Qo=4.2\times10^4 and a small modal volume of 0.05 cubic wavelengths. The optical mode is coupled with the in-plane mechanical modes with frequencies up to hundreds of MHz. The fundamental mechanical mode shows a frequency of 65 MHz and a mechanical quality factor of 376. The optical spring effect, optical damping and amplification are observed with a large experimental optomechanical coupling rate gom/2pi of 154 GHz/nm, corresponding to a vacuum optomechanical coupling rate g*/2pi of 707 kHz. With sub-mW or less input power levels, the cavity exhibits strong parametric oscillations. The phase noise of the photonic crystal optomechanical oscillator is also measured.

preprint2012arXiv

Phase resetting reveals network dynamics underlying a bacterial cell cycle

Genomic and proteomic methods yield networks of biological regulatory interactions but do not provide direct insight into how those interactions are organized into functional modules, or how information flows from one module to another. In this work we introduce an approach that provides this complementary information and apply it to the bacterium Caulobacter crescentus, a paradigm for cell-cycle control. Operationally, we use an inducible promoter to express the essential transcriptional regulatory gene ctrA in a periodic, pulsed fashion. This chemical perturbation causes the population of cells to divide synchronously, and we use the resulting advance or delay of the division times of single cells to construct a phase resetting curve. We find that delay is strongly favored over advance. This finding is surprising since it does not follow from the temporal expression profile of CtrA and, in turn, simulations of existing network models. We propose a phenomenological model that suggests that the cell-cycle network comprises two distinct functional modules that oscillate autonomously and couple in a highly asymmetric fashion. These features collectively provide a new mechanism for tight temporal control of the cell cycle in C. crescentus. We discuss how the procedure can serve as the basis for a general approach for probing network dynamics, which we term chemical perturbation spectroscopy (CPS).

preprint2012arXiv

Robust-fidelity atom-photon entangling gates in the weak-coupling regime

We describe a simple entangling principle based on the scattering of photons off single emitters in one-dimensional waveguides (or extremely-lossy cavities). The scheme can be applied to photonic qubits encoded in polarization or time-bin, and features a filtering mechanism that works effectively as a built-in error-correction directive. This automatically maps imperfections from weak couplings, atomic decay into undesired modes, frequency mismatches, or finite bandwidths of the incident photonic pulses, into heralded losses instead of infidelities. The scheme is thus adequate for high-fidelity maximally entangling gates even in the weak-coupling regime. These, in turn, can be directly applied to store and retrieve photonic-qubit states, thereby completing an atom-photon interface toolbox, or to sequential measurement-based quantum computations with atomic memories.

preprint2011arXiv

Angular momentum transfer torques in spin valves with perpendicular magnetization

Spin valves incorporating perpendicularly magnetized materials are promising structures for memory elements and high-frequency generators. We report the angular dependence of the spin-transfer torque in spin valves with perpendicular equilibrium magnetization computed by first-principles circuit theory and compare results with experiments by W.H. Rippard c.s. [Phys. Rev. B 81, 014426 (2010)] on the CoFe|Cu|CoNi system. Furthermore, we predict a non-monotonous ("wavy") spin-transfer torque when the Cu spacer is replaced by a Ru layer.

preprint2011arXiv

B -> K1 l^+l^- Decays in a Family Non-universal Z' Model

The implications of the family non-universal $Z^\prime$ model in the $B\to K_{1}(1270,1400)\ell^{+}\ell^{-}(\ell=e\,,μ\,,τ)$ decays are explored, where the mass eigenstates $K_{1}(1270,1400)$ are the mixtures of $^{1}{P}_{1}$ and $^{3}{P}_{1}$ states with the mixing angle $θ$. In this work, considering the $Z^\prime$ boson and setting the mixing angle $θ=(-34\pm13)^{\circ}$, we analyze the branching ratio, the dilepton invariant mass spectrum, the normalized forward-backward asymmetry and lepton polarization asymmetries of each decay mode. We find that all observables of $B\to K_{1}(1270)μ^{+}μ^{-}$ are sensitive to the $Z^{\prime}$ contribution. Moreover, the observables of $B\to K_{1}(1400)μ^{+}μ^{-}$ are relatively strong $θ$-dependence; thus, the $Z^{\prime}$ contribution will be buried by the uncertainty of the mixing angle $θ$. Furthermore, the zero crossing position in the FBA spectrum of $B\to K_{1}(1270)μ^{+}μ^{-}$ at low dilepton mass will move to the positive direction with $Z^\prime$ contribution. For the tau modes, the effects of $Z^\prime$ are not remarkable due to the small phase space. These results could be tested in the running LHC-b experiment and Super-B factory.

preprint2011arXiv

Direct Comparison of Distant Optical Lattice Clocks at the $10^{-16}$ Uncertainty

Fiber-based remote comparison of $^{87}$Sr lattice clocks in 24 km distant laboratories is demonstrated. The instability of the comparison reaches $5\times10^{-16}$ over an averaging time of 1000 s, which is two orders of magnitude shorter than that of conventional satellite links and is limited by the instabilities of the optical clocks. By correcting the systematic shifts that are predominated by the differential gravitational redshift, the residual fractional difference is found to be $(1.0\pm7.3)\times10^{-16}$, confirming the coincidence between the two clocks. The accurate and speedy comparison of distant optical clocks paves the way for a future optical redefinition of the second.

preprint2011arXiv

Implications of Family Nonuniversal $Z^\prime$ Model on B -->K_0^* pi Decays

Within the QCD factorization formalism, we study the possible impacts of the nonuniversal $Z^\prime$ model, which provides a flavor-changing neutral current at the tree level, on rare decays $B \to K_0^*π$. Under two different scenarios (S1 and S2) for identifying the scalar meson $K_0^*(1430)$, the branching ratios, CP asymmetries, and isospin asymmetries are calculated in both the standard model (SM) and the family nonuniversal $Z^\prime$ model. We find that the branching ratios and CP asymmetries are sensitive to weak annihilation. In the SM, with $ρ_A=1$ and $ϕ_A\in[-30^\circ, 30^\circ]$, the branching ratios of S1 (S2) are smaller (larger) than the experimental data. Adding the contribution of the $Z^\prime$ boson in two different cases (Case-I and Case-II), for S1, the branching ratios are still far away from experiment. For S2, in Case-II, the branching ratios become smaller and can accommodate the data; in Case-I, although the center values are enhanced, they can also explain the data with large uncertainties. Similar conclusions are also reached for CP asymmetries. Our results indicate that S2 is more favored than S1, even after considering new physics effects. Moreover, if there exists a nonuniversal $Z^\prime$ boson, Case-II is preferred. All results can be tested in the LHC-b experiment and forthcoming super-B factory.

preprint2011arXiv

Improving PPM Algorithm Using Dictionaries

We propose a method to improve traditional character-based PPM text compression algorithms. Consider a text file as a sequence of alternating words and non-words, the basic idea of our algorithm is to encode non-words and prefixes of words using character-based context models and encode suffixes of words using dictionary models. By using dictionary models, the algorithm can encode multiple characters as a whole, and thus enhance the compression efficiency. The advantages of the proposed algorithm are: 1) it does not require any text preprocessing; 2) it does not need any explicit codeword to identify switch between context and dictionary models; 3) it can be applied to any character-based PPM algorithms without incurring much additional computational cost. Test results show that significant improvements can be obtained over character-based PPM, especially in low order cases.

preprint2011arXiv

Photonic Multiqubit States from a Single Atom

We propose a protocol for the creation of photonic Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger and linear cluster states emitted from a single atom---or ion---coupled to an optical cavity field. The method is based on laser pulses with different polarizations and exploits the atomic transition amplitudes to state-selectively achieve the desired transitions. The scheme lies within reach of current technology.

preprint2011arXiv

Study of $\bar B^0 \to D^0 μ^+μ^-$ Decay in Perturbative QCD Approach

Within the perturbative QCD approach and ignoring the contributions of long distance and subleading penguin loops, we investigate $\bar B^0 \to D^0 μ^+μ^-$ decay in the large recoiling kinematic region in the Standard Model. At the tree level, $\bar B^0$ decays to $D^0$ by exchanging a $W$ boson accompanied by a virtual photon emission from the valence quarks of $\bar B^0$ and $D^0$ meson, then the virtual photon decays to the lepton pair. Numerically, we find that the branching ratio decreases rapidly as the $q^2$ increases, and the branching ratio of $ \bar B^0\to D^0μ^+μ^-$ is $(9.7_{-3.2}^{+4.2})\times 10^{-6}$ in the region $q^2 \in [1,5] \mathrm{GeV}^2$. The order of the branching ratio shows a possibility to study this interesting channel in the current $B$ factories and the Large Hadron Collider. The precise experimental data will help us to test the factorization approach and the QCD theory, in general.

preprint2011arXiv

Study of Bs-> ϕl^+ l^-$ Decay in a Single Universal Extra Dimension

Utilizing form factors calculated within the light-cone sum rules, we have evaluated the decay branching ratios of $B_s\to ϕγ$ and $B_s\to ϕ\ell^+\ell^-$ in a single universal extra dimension model (UED), which is viewed as one of the alternative theories beyond the standard model (SM). For the decay $B_s \to ϕ\ell^+\ell^-$, the dilepton invariant mass spectra, the forward-backward asymmetry, and double lepton polarization are also calculated. For each case, we compared the obtained results with predictions of the SM. In lower values of the compactification factor 1/R, the only parameter in this model, we see the considerable discrepancy between the UED and SM models. However, when 1/R increases, the results of UED tend to diminish and at $1/R = 1000 \mathrm{GeV}$, two models have approximately the same predictions. Compared with data from CDF of $B_s \to ϕμ^+ μ^-$, the 1/R tends to be larger than $350 \mathrm{GeV}$. We also note that the zero crossing point of the forward-backward asymmetry is become smaller, which will be an important plat to prob the contribution from the extra dimension model. The results obtained in this work will be very useful in searching new physics beyond SM. Moreover, the order of magnitude for branching ratios shows a possibility to study these channels at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), CDF and the future super-B factory.

preprint2011arXiv

Thermal States as Universal Resources for Quantum Computation with Always-on Interactions

Measurement-based quantum computation utilizes an initial entangled resource state and proceeds with subsequent single-qubit measurements. It is implicitly assumed that the interactions between qubits can be switched off so that the dynamics of the measured qubits do not affect the computation. By proposing a model spin Hamiltonian, we demonstrate that measurement-based quantum computation can be achieved on a thermal state with always-on interactions. Moreover, computational errors induced by thermal fluctuations can be corrected and thus the computation can be executed fault-tolerantly if the temperature is below a threshold value.

preprint2010arXiv

Annihilation-Type Charmless Radiative Decays of B Meson in Non-universal Z^\prime Model

We study charmless pure annihilation type radiative B decays within the QCD factorization approach. After adding the vertex corrections to the naive factorization approach, we find that the branching ratios of $\bar{B}^0_d\toϕγ$, $\bar{B}^0_s\toρ^0γ$ and $\bar{B}^0_s\toωγ$ within the standard model are at the order of $\mathcal{O}(10^{-12})$, $\mathcal{O}(10^{-10})$ and $\mathcal{O}(10^{-11})$, respectively. The smallness of these decays in the standard model makes them sensitive probes of flavor physics beyond the standard model. To explore their physics potential, we have estimated the contribution of $Z^\prime$ boson in the decays. Within the allowed parameter space, the branching ratios of these decay modes can be enhanced remarkably in the non-universal $Z^\prime$ model: The branching ratios can reach to $\mathcal{O}(10^{-8})$ for $\bar B_s^0 \to ρ^0(ω)γ$ and $\mathcal{O}(10^{-10})$ for the $\bar B_d^0 \to ϕγ$, which are large enough for LHC-b and/or Super B-factories to detect those channels in near future. Moreover, we also predict large CP asymmetries in suitable parameter space. The observation of these modes could in turn help us to constrain the $Z'$ mass within the model.

preprint2010arXiv

Comments on $\left|\frac{V_{ub}}{V_{cb}}\right|$ and $|V_{ub}|$ from Non-leptonic $B$ Decays within the Perturbative QCD Approach

We revisited the extracting $\left|V_{ub}/V_{cb}\right|$ and $|V_{ub}|$ through calculating the ratios ${\cal B}(B^0\to D_s^{(*)+}(π^-,ρ^-)/ {\cal B}(B^0\to D_s^{(*)+} D^{(*)-})$ in the perturbative QCD approach, which is regarded as an effective theory in dealing with non-leptonic charmed $B$ decays. Utilizing this approach, we could calculate the form factors effectively as well as non-factorizable and annihilation contributions. Within the updated distribution amplitudes and the latest experimental data, we get $\left|{V_{ub}}/{V_{cb}}\right|=0.083\pm0.007$, which favors a bit smaller $|V_{ub}|$ compared with the averaged PDG value, but agrees well the exclusively measured values. Furthermore, we predict the branching ratio of $\bar B^0 \to D_s^-ρ^+$ $\sim$ $(2.7\pm 1.2)\times 10^{-5}$, which could be measured in $B$ factories near future. In our calculation, the major uncertainty is due to our poor knowledge of heavy meson wave functions. We also comment that it is not trivial to generalize this approach to $B_s$ system, primarily because both $\bar B_s^0 $ and $B_s^0$ can decay into the same final states $D_s^+K^-$ and $D_s^+D_s^-$.

preprint2010arXiv

Design of dispersive optomechanical coupling and cooling in ultrahigh-Q/V slot-type photonic crystal cavities

We describe the strong optomechanical dynamical interactions in ultrahigh-Q/V slot-type photonic crystal cavities. The dispersive coupling is based on a mode-gap photonic crystal cavities with light localization in an air mode with 0.02(lambda/n)3 modal volumes while preserving optical cavity Q up to 5 x 106. The mechanical mode is modeled to have fundamental resonance omega_m/2pi of 460 MHz and a quality factor Qm estimated at 12,000. For this slot-type optomechanical cavity, the dispersive coupling gom is numerically computed at up to 940 GHz/nm (Lom of 202 nm) for the fundamental optomechanical mode. Dynamical parametric oscillations for both cooling and amplification, in the resolved and unresolved sideband limit, are examined numerically, along with the displacement spectral density and cooling rates for the various operating parameters.

preprint2010arXiv

Fully fault tolerant quantum computation with non-deterministic gates

In certain approaches to quantum computing the operations between qubits are non-deterministic and likely to fail. For example, a distributed quantum processor would achieve scalability by networking together many small components; operations between components should assumed to be failure prone. In the logical limit of this architecture each component contains only one qubit. Here we derive thresholds for fault tolerant quantum computation under such extreme paradigms. We find that computation is supported for remarkably high failure rates (exceeding 90%) providing that failures are heralded, meanwhile the rate of unknown errors should not exceed 2 in 10^4 operations.

preprint2010arXiv

Interference Avoidance Game in the Gaussian Interference Channel: Sub-Optimal and Optimal Schemes

This paper considers a distributed interference avoidance problem employing frequency assignment in the Gaussian interference channel (IC). We divide the common channel into several subchannels and each user chooses the subchannel with less amount of interference from other users as the transmit channel. This mechanism named interference avoidance in this paper can be modeled as a competitive game model. And a completely autonomous distributed iterative algorithm called Tdistributed interference avoidance algorithm (DIA) is adopted to achieve the Nash equilibriumT (NE) of the game. Due to the self-optimum, DIA is a sub-optimal algorithm. Therefore, through introducing an optimal compensation into the competitive game model, we successfully develop a compensation-based game model to approximate the optimal interference avoidance problem. Moreover, an optimal algorithm called iterative optimal interference avoidance algorithm (IOIA) is proposed to reach the optimality of the interference avoidance scheme. We analyze the implementation complexities of the two algorithms. We also give the proof on the convergence of the proposed algorithms. The performance upper bound and lower bound are also derived for the proposed algorithms. The simulation results show that IOIA does reach the optimality under condition of interference avoidance mechanism.

preprint2010arXiv

Testing the Non-universal Z^\prime Model in Bs -> ϕπ^0 Decay

The branching ratio and direct CP asymmetry of the decay mode $B_s \to ϕπ^0$ have been calculated within the QCD factorization approach in both the standard model (SM) and the non-universal $Z^\prime$ model. In the standard model, the CP averaged branching ratio is about $1.3\times 10^{-7}$. Considering the effect of $Z^\prime$ boson, we found the branching ratio can be enlarged three times or decreased to one third %by the effect of $Z^\prime$ boson within the allowed parameter spaces. Furthermore, the direct CP asymmetry could reach 55% with a light $Z^\prime$ boson and suitable CKM phase, compared to 25% predicted in the SM. The enhancement of both branching ratio and CP asymmetry cannot be realized at the same parameter spaces, thus, if this decay mode is measured in the upcoming LHC-b experiment and/or Super B-factories, the peculiar deviation from the SM may provide a signal of the non-universal $Z^\prime$ model, which can be used to constrain the mass of $Z^\prime$ boson in turn.

preprint2009arXiv

Buffer gas induced collision shift for the $^{88}$Sr $\bf{^1S_0-^3P_1}$ clock transition

Precision saturation spectroscopy of the $^{88}{\rm Sr} ^1S_0-^3P_1$ is performed in a vapor cell filled with various rare gas including He, Ne, Ar, and Xe. By continuously calibrating the absolute frequency of the probe laser, buffer gas induced collision shifts of $\sim $kHz are detected with gas pressure of 1-20 mTorr. Helium gave the largest fractional shift of $1.6 \times 10^{-9} {\rm Torr}^{-1}$. Comparing with a simple impact calculation and a Doppler-limited experiment of Holtgrave and Wolf [Phys. Rev. A {\bf 72}, 012711 (2005)], our results show larger broadening and smaller shifting coefficient, indicating effective atomic loss due to velocity changing collisions. The applicability of the result to the $^1S_0-^3P_0$ optical lattice clock transition is also discussed.

preprint2009arXiv

Study of Decay Modes B -->K_0^*(1430) phi

Within the framework of perturbative QCD approach based on $\mathbf{k_T}$ factorization, we investigate the charmless decay mode $B \to K_0^*(1430)ϕ$. Under two different scenarios (S1 and S2) for the description of scalar meson $K_0^*(1430)$, we explore the branching fractions and related CP asymmetries. Besides the dominant contributions from the factorizable emission diagrams, penguin operators in the annihilation diagrams could also provide considerable contributions. The central values of our predictions are larger than those from the QCD factorization in both scenarios. Compared with the experimental measurements of the BaBar collaboration, the result of neutral channel in the S1 agrees with experimental data, while the result of the charged one is a bit smaller than the data. In the S2 scenario, although the central value for the branching fractions of both channels are much larger than the data, the predictions could agree with the data due to the large uncertainties to the branching fractions from the hadronic input parameters. The CP asymmetry in the charged channel is small and not sensitive to CKM angle $γ$. With the accurate data in near future from the various $B$ factories, these predictions will be under stringent tests.

preprint2008arXiv

Rare Decays of Λ_b->Λ+ γand Λ_b ->Λ+ l^{+} l^{-} in the Light-cone Sum Rules

Within the Standard Model, we investigate the weak decays of $Λ_b \to Λ+ γ$ and $Λ_b \to Λ+ l^{+} l^{-}$ with the light-cone sum rules approach. The higher twist distribution amplitudes of $Λ$ baryon to the leading conformal spin are included in the sum rules for transition form factors. Our results indicate that the higher twist distribution amplitudes almost have no influences on the transition form factors retaining the heavy quark spin symmetry, while such corrections can result in significant impacts on the form factors breaking the heavy quark spin symmetry. Two phenomenological models (COZ and FZOZ) for the wave function of $Λ$ baryon are also employed in the sum rules for a comparison, which can give rise to the form factors approximately 5 times larger than that in terms of conformal expansion. Utilizing the form factors calculated in LCSR, we then perform a careful study on the decay rate, polarization asymmetry and forward-backward asymmetry, with respect to the decays of $Λ_b \to Λγ$, $Λl^{+}l^{-}$.

preprint2008arXiv

Study Pure Annihilation Decays $B_s^0(\bar B_s^0)\to D^{\pm}π^{\mp}$ in PQCD Approach

The rare decays $B_s^0\to D^\pm π^\mp$ and $\bar B_s^0\to D^\mp π^\pm$ can occur only via annihilation type diagrams in the standard model. In this paper, we calculate branching ratios of these decays in perturbative QCD approach ignoring soft final state interaction. From our calculation, we find that their branching ratios are at $\mathcal{O}(10^{-6})$ with large CP asymmetry, which may be measured in LHC-b experiment in future.

preprint2007arXiv

Study of Pure Annihilation Decays B_{d,s} \to D^{0} \bar D^{0}

With heavy quark limit and hierarchy approximation $λ_{QCD}\ll m_D\ll m_B$, we analyze the $B\to D^0\bar D^0$ and $B_s\to D^0\bar D^0$ decays, which occur purely via annihilation type diagrams. As a roughly estimation, we calculate their branching ratios and CP asymmetries in Perturbative QCD approach. The branching ratio of $B\to D^0\bar D^0$ is about $3.8\times10^{-5}$ that is just below the latest experimental upper limit. The branching ratio of $B_s\to D^0\bar D^0$ is about $6.8\times10^{-4}$, which could be measured in LHC-b. From the calculation, it could be found that this branching ratio is not sensitive to the weak phase angle $γ$. In these two decay modes, there exist CP asymmetries because of interference between weak and strong interaction. However, these asymmetries are too small to be measured easily.

preprint2006arXiv

Branching Ratio and Polarization of $B\toρ(ω)ρ(ω)$ Decays in Perturbative QCD Approach

In this work, we calculated the branching ratios, polarization fractions and CP asymmetry of decay modes $B\toρ(ω)ρ(ω)$ in the Perturbative QCD approach, which is based on $\mathbf{k}_T$ factorization. After calculation, we find the the branching ratios of $B^0 \to ρ^+ ρ^-$, $B^+ \to ρ^+ ρ^0$ and $B^+ \to ρ^+ ω$ are at the order of $10^{-5}$, and their longitudinal polarization fractions are more than 90%. The above results agree with BarBar's measurements. We also predict the branching ratios and polarizations of $B^0 \to ρ^0 ρ^0$, $B^0 \to ρ^0 ω$ and $B^0 \to ωω$, which will be measured in future. We predicted the CP asymmetry of $B^0 \to ρ^+ ρ^-$ and $B^+ \to ρ^+ ρ^0$, which will play important role in determining angle $α$.

preprint2005arXiv

Branching ratio and CP violation of $B_{s}\to πK$ decays in the perturbative QCD approach

In the framework of perturbative QCD approach, we calculate the branching ratio and CP asymmetry for $B_{s}^0(\bar{B}_{s}) \to π^{\pm} K^\mp$ and $B_{s}(\bar{B}_{s})\to π^{0}\bar{K}^{0}(K^{0})$ decays. Besides the usual factorizable diagrams, both non-factorizable and annihilation type contributions are taken into account. We find that (a) the branching ratio of $B_{s}^0(\bar{B}_{s}) \to π^{\pm} K^\mp$ is about $(6-10) \times 10^{-6}$; $Br(B_{s}(\bar{B}_{s})\to π^{0}\bar{K}^{0}(K^{0}))$ about $ (1-3) \times 10^{-7}$; and (b) there are large CP asymmetries in the two processes, which can be tested in the near future LHC-b experiments at CERN and BTeV experiments at Fermilab.