785 research outputs found
Multi-Tenant Provisioning for Quantum Key Distribution Networks with Heuristics and Reinforcement Learning: A Comparative Study
Quantum key distribution (QKD) networks are potential to be widely deployed in the immediate future to provide long-term security for data communications. Given the high price and complexity, multi-tenancy has become a cost-effective pattern for QKD network operations. In this work, we concentrate on addressing the online multi-tenant provisioning (On-MTP) problem for QKD networks, where multiple tenant requests (TRs) arrive dynamically. On-MTP involves scheduling multiple TRs and assigning non-reusable secret keys derived from a QKD network to multiple TRs, where each TR can be regarded as a high-security-demand organization with the dedicated secret-key demand. The quantum key pools (QKPs) are constructed over QKD network infrastructure to improve management efficiency for secret keys. We model the secret-key resources for QKPs and the secret-key demands of TRs using distinct images. To realize efficient On-MTP, we perform a comparative study of heuristics and reinforcement learning (RL) based On-MTP solutions, where three heuristics (i.e., random, fit, and best-fit based On-MTP algorithms) are presented and a RL framework is introduced to realize automatic training of an On-MTP algorithm. The comparative results indicate that with sufficient training iterations the RL-based On-MTP algorithm significantly outperforms the presented heuristics in terms of tenant-request blocking probability and secret-key resource utilization
Improving mobility of silicon metal-oxide-semiconductor devices for quantum dots by high vacuum activation annealing
To improve mobility of fabricated silicon metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS)
quantum devices, forming gas annealing is a common method used to mitigate the
effects of disorder at the Si/SiO2 interface. However, the importance of
activation annealing is usually ignored. Here, we show that a high vacuum
environment for implantation activation is beneficial for improving mobility
compared to nitrogen atmosphere. Low-temperature transport measurements of Hall
bars show that peak mobility can be improved by a factor of two, reaching 1.5
m^2/(Vs) using high vacuum annealing during implantation activation. Moreover,
the charge stability diagram of a single quantum dot is mapped, with no visible
disturbance caused by disorder, suggesting possibility of fabricating
high-quality quantum dots on commercial wafers. Our results may provide
valuable insights into device optimization in silicon-based quantum computing.Comment: 13 pages, 4 figure
Antibody dependent enhancement infection of Enterovirus 71 in vitro and in vivo
BACKGROUND: Human enterovirus 71 (EV71) has emerged as a significant cause of acute encephalitis and deaths in young children. The clinical manifestations caused by EV71 varied from mild hand, foot and mouth disease to severe neurological complications and deaths, but its pathogenesis remains elusive. Antibody dependent enhancement (ADE) infection has been reported in various viruses and has been shown to contribute to disease severity. RESULTS: In this study, the presence of sub-neutralizing antibody was demonstrated to enhance EV71 infection in THP-1 cells and increase the mortality of EV71 infection in a suckling mouse model. Further, a secondary infection model was established to characterize the correlation between ADE and disease severity, and primary asymptomatic EV71 infection was shown to increase the mortality of the secondary EV71 infection in suckling mice. CONCLUSIONS: Together, these in vitro and in vivo experiments strongly supported the hypothesis of ADE infection of EV71. The present findings indicate ADE might contribute to the pathogenesis of severe EV71 infection, and raise practical issues of vaccine development and antibody-based therapy
Melatonin Mediates Osteoblast Proliferation Through the STIM1/ORAI1 Pathway
Based on the positive correlation between bone mineral density and melatonin levels in blood, this study confirmed that melatonin supplementation prevents postmenopausal osteoporosis. We further confirmed that melatonin promotes an increase in intracellular calcium concentrations through the STIM1/ORAI1 pathway, thereby inducing the proliferation of osteoblasts.Introduction: Osteoporosis (OP) is a progressive, systemic bone disease that is one of the main causes of disability and death in elderly female patients. As an amine hormone produced by the human pineal gland, melatonin plays an important role in regulating bone metabolism. This study intends to investigate the relationship between melatonin levels in human blood and bone density and to suggest the efficacy of melatonin in treating osteoporosis by performing in vivo and in vitro experiments.Methods: We used liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry to determine the serum melatonin levels in postmenopausal women with osteoporosis and young women with a normal bone mass. The bone density, BV/TV, Tb.Th, Tb.Sp and other indicators of postmenopausal osteoporosis and mice with a normal bone mass were detected by measuring bone density and micro-CT. The intracellular calcium ion concentration was detected using fluorescence microscopy and a full-wavelength multifunctional microplate reader, and the expression of SOCE-related genes and STIM1/ORAI1 proteins was detected using PCR and WB.Results: This study confirmed that bone density positively correlates with the melatonin level in human blood. In the animal model, melatonin supplementation reverses postmenopausal osteoporosis. We explored the internal mechanism of melatonin treatment of osteoporosis. Melatonin promotes an increase in intracellular calcium ion concentrations through the STIM1/ORAI1 pathway to induce osteoblast proliferation.Conclusions: This study provides an important theoretical basis for the clinical application of melatonin in patients with osteoporosis and helps to optimize the diagnosis and treatment of postmenopausal osteoporosis
I2P-Rec: Recognizing Images on Large-scale Point Cloud Maps through Bird's Eye View Projections
Place recognition is an important technique for autonomous cars to achieve
full autonomy since it can provide an initial guess to online localization
algorithms. Although current methods based on images or point clouds have
achieved satisfactory performance, localizing the images on a large-scale point
cloud map remains a fairly unexplored problem. This cross-modal matching task
is challenging due to the difficulty in extracting consistent descriptors from
images and point clouds. In this paper, we propose the I2P-Rec method to solve
the problem by transforming the cross-modal data into the same modality.
Specifically, we leverage on the recent success of depth estimation networks to
recover point clouds from images. We then project the point clouds into Bird's
Eye View (BEV) images. Using the BEV image as an intermediate representation,
we extract global features with a Convolutional Neural Network followed by a
NetVLAD layer to perform matching. The experimental results evaluated on the
KITTI dataset show that, with only a small set of training data, I2P-Rec
achieves recall rates at Top-1\% over 80\% and 90\%, when localizing monocular
and stereo images on point cloud maps, respectively. We further evaluate
I2P-Rec on a 1 km trajectory dataset collected by an autonomous logistics car
and show that I2P-Rec can generalize well to previously unseen environments.Comment: Accepted by IROS 202
A Family of Lanthanide Noncentrosymmetric Superconductors La ( = Ru, Rh, Ir; = Al, In)
We report the discovery of superconductivity in a series of
noncentrosymmetric compounds La ( = Ru, Rh, Ir; = Al, In), which
have a cubic crystal structure with space group . LaRuAl,
LaRhAl, LaIrAl, LaRuIn and LaIrIn exhibit bulk superconducting
transitions with critical temperatures of 1.77 K, 3.05 K, 1.54 K, 0.58 K
and 0.93 K, respectively. The specific heat of the LaAl compounds are
consistent with an -wave model with a fully open superconducting gap. In all
cases, the upper critical fields are well described by the
Werthamer-Helfand-Hohenberg model, and the values are well below the Pauli
limit, indicating that orbital limiting is the dominant pair-breaking
mechanism. Density functional theory (DFT) calculations reveal that the degree
of band splitting by the antisymmetric spin-orbit coupling (ASOC) shows
considerable variation between the different compounds. This indicates that the
strength of the ASOC is highly tunable across this series of superconductors,
suggesting that these are good candidates for examining the relationship
between the ASOC and superconducting properties in noncentrosymmetric
superconductors.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figure
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