174 research outputs found
Probing New Physics with High-Redshift Quasars: Axions and Non-standard Cosmology
The Hubble diagram of quasars, as candidates to ``standardizable" candles,
has been used to measure the expansion history of the Universe at late times,
up to very high redshifts (). It has been shown that this history, as
inferred from the quasar dataset, deviates at level from the
concordance (CDM) cosmology model preferred by the cosmic microwave
background (CMB) and other datasets. In this article, we investigate whether
new physics beyond CDM (BCDM) or beyond the Standard Model
(BSM) could make the quasar data consistent with the concordance model. We
first show that an effective redshift-dependent relation between the quasar UV
and X-ray luminosities, complementing previous phenomenological work in the
literature, can potentially remedy the discrepancy. Such a redshift dependence
can be realized in a BSM model with axion-photon conversion in the
intergalactic medium (IGM), although the preferred parameter space could be in
mild tension with various other astrophysical constraints on axions, depending
on the specific assumptions made regarding the IGM magnetic field. We briefly
discuss a variation of the axion model that could evade these astrophysical
constraints. On the other hand, we show that models beyond CDM such as
one with a varying dark energy equation of state (CDM) or the
phenomenological cosmographic model with a polynomial expansion of the
luminosity distance, cannot alleviate the tension. The code for our analysis,
based on emcee and corner.py, is publicly available at
https://github.com/ChenSun-Phys/high_z_candles.Comment: 10+3 pages, 4 figures, 4 tables, 3 appendices; comments are welcom
Ultrasensitive protein detection in blood serum using gold nanoparticle probes by single molecule spectroscopy
Low Rank Directed Acyclic Graphs and Causal Structure Learning
Despite several important advances in recent years, learning causal
structures represented by directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) remains a challenging
task in high dimensional settings when the graphs to be learned are not sparse.
In particular, the recent formulation of structure learning as a continuous
optimization problem proved to have considerable advantages over the
traditional combinatorial formulation, but the performance of the resulting
algorithms is still wanting when the target graph is relatively large and
dense. In this paper we propose a novel approach to mitigate this problem, by
exploiting a low rank assumption regarding the (weighted) adjacency matrix of a
DAG causal model. We establish several useful results relating interpretable
graphical conditions to the low rank assumption, and show how to adapt existing
methods for causal structure learning to take advantage of this assumption. We
also provide empirical evidence for the utility of our low rank algorithms,
especially on graphs that are not sparse. Not only do they outperform
state-of-the-art algorithms when the low rank condition is satisfied, the
performance on randomly generated scale-free graphs is also very competitive
even though the true ranks may not be as low as is assumed
Ultra-fast self-assembly and stabilization of reactive nanoparticles in reduced graphene oxide films.
Nanoparticles hosted in conductive matrices are ubiquitous in electrochemical energy storage, catalysis and energetic devices. However, agglomeration and surface oxidation remain as two major challenges towards their ultimate utility, especially for highly reactive materials. Here we report uniformly distributed nanoparticles with diameters around 10 nm can be self-assembled within a reduced graphene oxide matrix in 10 ms. Microsized particles in reduced graphene oxide are Joule heated to high temperature (∼1,700 K) and rapidly quenched to preserve the resultant nano-architecture. A possible formation mechanism is that microsized particles melt under high temperature, are separated by defects in reduced graphene oxide and self-assemble into nanoparticles on cooling. The ultra-fast manufacturing approach can be applied to a wide range of materials, including aluminium, silicon, tin and so on. One unique application of this technique is the stabilization of aluminium nanoparticles in reduced graphene oxide film, which we demonstrate to have excellent performance as a switchable energetic material
Pathway to Future Symbiotic Creativity
This report presents a comprehensive view of our vision on the development
path of the human-machine symbiotic art creation. We propose a classification
of the creative system with a hierarchy of 5 classes, showing the pathway of
creativity evolving from a mimic-human artist (Turing Artists) to a Machine
artist in its own right. We begin with an overview of the limitations of the
Turing Artists then focus on the top two-level systems, Machine Artists,
emphasizing machine-human communication in art creation. In art creation, it is
necessary for machines to understand humans' mental states, including desires,
appreciation, and emotions, humans also need to understand machines' creative
capabilities and limitations. The rapid development of immersive environment
and further evolution into the new concept of metaverse enable symbiotic art
creation through unprecedented flexibility of bi-directional communication
between artists and art manifestation environments. By examining the latest
sensor and XR technologies, we illustrate the novel way for art data collection
to constitute the base of a new form of human-machine bidirectional
communication and understanding in art creation. Based on such communication
and understanding mechanisms, we propose a novel framework for building future
Machine artists, which comes with the philosophy that a human-compatible AI
system should be based on the "human-in-the-loop" principle rather than the
traditional "end-to-end" dogma. By proposing a new form of inverse
reinforcement learning model, we outline the platform design of machine
artists, demonstrate its functions and showcase some examples of technologies
we have developed. We also provide a systematic exposition of the ecosystem for
AI-based symbiotic art form and community with an economic model built on NFT
technology. Ethical issues for the development of machine artists are also
discussed
Reflective imaging improves spatiotemporal resolution and collection efficiency in light sheet microscopy
© The Author(s), 2017. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Nature Communications 8 (2017): 1452, doi:10.1038/s41467-017-01250-8.Light-sheet fluorescence microscopy (LSFM) enables high-speed, high-resolution, and gentle imaging of live specimens over extended periods. Here we describe a technique that improves the spatiotemporal resolution and collection efficiency of LSFM without modifying the underlying microscope. By imaging samples on reflective coverslips, we enable simultaneous collection of four complementary views in 250 ms, doubling speed and improving information content relative to symmetric dual-view LSFM. We also report a modified deconvolution algorithm that removes associated epifluorescence contamination and fuses all views for resolution recovery. Furthermore, we enhance spatial resolution (to <300 nm in all three dimensions) by applying our method to single-view LSFM, permitting simultaneous acquisition of two high-resolution views otherwise difficult to obtain due to steric constraints at high numerical aperture. We demonstrate the broad applicability of our method in a variety of samples, studying mitochondrial, membrane, Golgi, and microtubule dynamics in cells and calcium activity in nematode embryos.This work was supported by the Intramural Research Program of the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering at the National Institutes of Health. P.L. and H.S. acknowledge summer support from the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, through the Whitman- and Fellows- program. P.L. acknowledges support from NIH National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) under grant number R01EB017293. C.S. acknowledges funding from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of NIH under Award Number R25GM109439 (Project Title: University of Chicago Initiative for Maximizing Student Development [IMSD]) and NIBIB under grant number T32 EB002103. Partial funding for the computation in this work was provided by NIH grant numbers S10 RRO21039 and P30 CA14599. A.U. and I.R.-S. were supported by the NSF grant number 1607645
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