Effect of Ordering on Spinodal Decomposition of Liquid-Crystal/Polymer Mixtures

Partially phase-separated liquid-crystal/polymer dispersions display highly fibrillar domain morphologies that are dramatically different from the typical structures found in isotropic mixtures. To explain this, we numerically explore the coupling between phase ordering and phase separation kinetics in model two-dimensional fluid mixtures phase separating into a nematic phase, rich in liquid crystal, coexisting with an isotropic phase, rich in polymer. We find that phase ordering can lead to fibrillar networks of the minority polymer-rich phase

On Time Domain Conformer Models for Monaural Speech Separation in Noisy Reverberant Acoustic Environments

Speech separation remains an important topic for multi-speaker technology researchers. Convolution augmented transformers (conformers) have performed well for many speech processing tasks but have been under-researched for speech separation. Most recent state-of-the-art (SOTA) separation models have been time-domain audio separation networks (TasNets). A number of successful models have made use of dual-path (DP) networks which sequentially process local and global information. Time domain conformers (TD-Conformers) are an analogue of the DP approach in that they also process local and global context sequentially but have a different time complexity function. It is shown that for realistic shorter signal lengths, conformers are more efficient when controlling for feature dimension. Subsampling layers are proposed to further improve computational efficiency. The best TD-Conformer achieves 14.6 dB and 21.2 dB SISDR improvement on the WHAMR and WSJ0-2Mix benchmarks, respectively.Comment: Accepted at ASRU Workshop 202