14,724 research outputs found
Incomplete Protection of the Surface Weyl Cones of the Kondo Insulator SmB: Spin Exciton Scattering
The compound SmB is a Kondo Insulator, where the lowest-energy bulk
electronic excitations are spin excitons. It also has surface states that are
subjected to strong spin-orbit coupling. It has been suggested that SmB is
also a topological insulator. Here we show that, despite the absence of
time-reversal symmetry breaking and the presence of strong spin-orbit coupling,
the chiral spin texture of the Weyl cone is not completely protected. In
particular, we show that the spin-exciton mediated scattering produces features
in the surface electronic spectrum at energies separated from the surface Fermi
energy by the spin-exciton energy. Despite the features being far removed from
the surface Fermi energy, they are extremely temperature dependent. The
temperature variation occurs over a characteristic scale determined by the
dispersion of the spin exciton. The structures may be observed by electron
spectroscopy at low temperatures.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figure
Epitaxial growth of (111)-oriented LaAlO/LaNiO ultra-thin superlattices
The epitaxial stabilization of a single layer or superlattice structures
composed of complex oxide materials on polar (111) surfaces is severely
burdened by reconstructions at the interface, that commonly arise to neutralize
the polarity. We report on the synthesis of high quality LaNiO/mLaAlO
pseudo cubic (111) superlattices on polar (111)-oriented LaAlO, the
proposed complex oxide candidate for a topological insulating behavior.
Comprehensive X-Ray diffraction measurements, RHEED, and element specific
resonant X-ray absorption spectroscopy affirm their high structural and
chemical quality. The study offers an opportunity to fabricate interesting
interface and topology controlled (111) oriented superlattices based on
ortho-nickelates
Evaluating the Usability of Automatically Generated Captions for People who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing
The accuracy of Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) technology has improved,
but it is still imperfect in many settings. Researchers who evaluate ASR
performance often focus on improving the Word Error Rate (WER) metric, but WER
has been found to have little correlation with human-subject performance on
many applications. We propose a new captioning-focused evaluation metric that
better predicts the impact of ASR recognition errors on the usability of
automatically generated captions for people who are Deaf or Hard of Hearing
(DHH). Through a user study with 30 DHH users, we compared our new metric with
the traditional WER metric on a caption usability evaluation task. In a
side-by-side comparison of pairs of ASR text output (with identical WER), the
texts preferred by our new metric were preferred by DHH participants. Further,
our metric had significantly higher correlation with DHH participants'
subjective scores on the usability of a caption, as compared to the correlation
between WER metric and participant subjective scores. This new metric could be
used to select ASR systems for captioning applications, and it may be a better
metric for ASR researchers to consider when optimizing ASR systems.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures, published in ACM SIGACCESS Conference on
Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS '17
Control spiral wave dynamics using feedback signals from line detectors
We numerically study trajectories of spiral-wave-cores in excitable systems
modulated proportionally to the integral of the activity on the straight line,
several or dozens of equi-spaced measuring points on the straight line, the
double-line and the contour-line. We show the single-line feedback results in
the drift of core center along a straight line being parallel to the detector.
An interesting finding is that the drift location in is a piecewise
linear-increasing function of both the feedback line location and time delay.
Similar trajectory occurs when replacing the feedback line with several or
dozens of equi-spaced measuring points on the straight line. This allows to
move the spiral core to the desired location along a chosen direction by
measuring several or dozens of points. Under the double-line feedback, the
shape of the tip trajectory representing the competition between the first and
second feedback lines is determined by the distance of two lines. Various drift
attractors in spiral wave controlled by square-shaped contour-line feedback are
also investigated. A brief explanation is presented.Comment: 6 pages and 7 figures; Accepted for publication in EPL; Figs.5 and 6
are in JPG forma
Equation of State for Parallel Rigid Spherocylinders
The pair distribution function of monodisperse rigid spherocylinders is
calculated by Shinomoto's method, which was originally proposed for hard
spheres. The equation of state is derived by two different routes: Shinomoto's
original route, in which a hard wall is introduced to estimate the pressure
exerted on it, and the virial route. The pressure from Shinomoto's original
route is valid only when the length-to-width ratio is less than or equal to
0.25 (i.e., when the spherocylinders are nearly spherical). The virial equation
of state is shown to agree very well with the results of numerical simulations
of spherocylinders with length-to-width ratio greater than or equal to 2
Classification-driven search for effective sm partitioning in multitasking GPUs
Graphics processing units (GPUs) feature an increasing number of streaming multiprocessors (SMs) with each successive generation. At the same time, GPUs are increasingly widely adopted in cloud services and data centers to accelerate general-purpose workloads. Running multiple applications on a GPU in such environments requires effective multitasking support. Spatial multitasking in which independent applications co-execute on different sets of SMs is a promising solution to share GPU resources. Unfortunately, how to effectively partition SMs is an open problem.
In this paper, we observe that compared to widely-used even partitioning, dynamic SM partitioning based on the characteristics of the co-executing applications can significantly improve performance and power efficiency. Unfortunately, finding an effective SM partition is challenging because the number of possible combinations increases exponentially with the number of SMs and co-executing applications. Through offline analysis, we find that first classifying workloads, and then searching an effective SM partition based on the workload characteristics can significantly reduce the search space, making dynamic SM partitioning tractable.
Based on these insights, we propose Classification-Driven search (CD-search) for low-overhead dynamic SM partitioning in multitasking GPUs. CD-search first classifies workloads using a novel off-SM bandwidth model, after which it enters the performance mode or power mode depending on the workload's characteristics. Both modes follow a specific search strategy to quickly determine the optimum SM partition. Our evaluation shows that CD-search improves system throughput by 10.4% on average (and up to 62.9%) over even partitioning for workloads that are classified for the performance mode. For workloads classified for the power mode, CD-search reduces power consumption by 25% on average (and up to 41.2%). CD-search incurs limited runtime overhead
Open Transactions on Shared Memory
Transactional memory has arisen as a good way for solving many of the issues
of lock-based programming. However, most implementations admit isolated
transactions only, which are not adequate when we have to coordinate
communicating processes. To this end, in this paper we present OCTM, an
Haskell-like language with open transactions over shared transactional memory:
processes can join transactions at runtime just by accessing to shared
variables. Thus a transaction can co-operate with the environment through
shared variables, but if it is rolled-back, also all its effects on the
environment are retracted. For proving the expressive power of TCCS we give an
implementation of TCCS, a CCS-like calculus with open transactions
Faraday Tomography of the North Polar Spur: Constraints on the distance to the Spur and on the Magnetic Field of the Galaxy
We present radio continuum and polarization images of the North Polar Spur
(NPS) from the Global Magneto-Ionic Medium Survey (GMIMS) conducted with the
Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory 26-m Telescope. We fit polarization
angle versus wavelength squared over 2048 frequency channels from 1280 to 1750
MHz to obtain a Faraday Rotation Measure (RM) map of the NPS. Combining this RM
map with a published Faraday depth map of the entire Galaxy in this direction,
we derive the Faraday depth introduced by the NPS and the Galactic interstellar
medium (ISM) in front of and behind the NPS. The Faraday depth contributed by
the NPS is close to zero, indicating that the NPS is an emitting only feature.
The Faraday depth caused by the ISM in front of the NPS is consistent with zero
at b>50 degree, implying that this part of the NPS is local at a distance of
approximately several hundred parsecs. The Faraday depth contributed by the ISM
behind the NPS gradually increases with Galactic latitude up to b=44 degree,
and decreases at higher Galactic latitudes. This implies that either the part
of the NPS at b<44 degree is distant or the NPS is local but there is a sign
change of the large-scale magnetic field. If the NPS is local, there is then no
evidence for a large-scale anti-symmetry pattern in the Faraday depth of the
Milky Way. The Faraday depth introduced by the ISM behind the NPS at latitudes
b>50 degree can be explained by including a coherent vertical magnetic field.Comment: 9 pages, 8 figures, accepted for publication in ApJ. Some figures
have been degraded to reduce sizes, for a high resolution version, see
http://physics.usyd.edu.au/~xhsun/ms_nps.pd
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