Slow Mass Transport and Statistical Evolution of An Atomic Gas Across the Superfluid-Mott Insulator Transition

We study transport dynamics of ultracold cesium atoms in a two-dimensional optical lattice across the superfluid-Mott insulator transition based on in situ imaging. Inducing the phase transition with a lattice ramping routine expected to be locally adiabatic, we observe a global mass redistribution which requires a very long time to equilibrate, more than 100 times longer than the microscopic time scales for on-site interaction and tunneling. When the sample enters the Mott insulator regime, mass transport significantly slows down. By employing fast recombination pulses to analyze the occupancy distribution, we observe similarly slow-evolving dynamics, and a lower effective temperature at the center of the sample

Improper Ferroelectric Polarisation in a Perovskite driven by Inter-site Charge Transfer and Ordering

It is of great interest to design and make materials in which ferroelectric polarisation is coupled to other order parameters such as lattice, magnetic and electronic instabilities. Such materials will be invaluable in next-generation data storage devices. Recently, remarkable progress has been made in understanding improper ferroelectric coupling mechanisms that arise from lattice and magnetic instabilities. However, although theoretically predicted, a compact lattice coupling between electronic and ferroelectric (polar) instabilities has yet to be realised. Here we report detailed crystallographic studies of a novel perovskite Hg$^{\textbf{A}}$Mn$^{\textbf{A'}}_{3}$Mn$^{\textbf{B}}_{4}$O$_{12}$ that is found to exhibit a polar ground state on account of such couplings that arise from charge and orbital ordering on both the A' and B-sites, which are themselves driven by a highly unusual Mn$^{A'}$-Mn$^B$ inter-site charge transfer. The inherent coupling of polar, charge, orbital and hence magnetic degrees of freedom, make this a system of great fundamental interest, and demonstrating ferroelectric switching in this and a host of recently reported hybrid improper ferroelectrics remains a substantial challenge.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figure

Out-Of-Band Management on UEFI System Firmware

The modern Redfish is a specification that utilize RESTful interface semantics to access data defined in model format to perform out-of-band (OOB) management through specific OOB software or hardware (such as Baseboard Management Controller, BMC). The OOB management allow users to configure system remotely when the system is in either power-off or power-on state. Industry can expect there are more and more pre-boot firmware drivers (like UEFI drivers) and system peripherals (such as PCI devices, PCI add-on-card and so on) support Redfish Schema/Configuration data model in the near future. This article describes the method to abstract the data communication/synchronization between UEFI drivers and OOB management on UEFI firmware environment. Furthermore, this article is not only restricted to single OOB management on system, the abstracts method described in this article is flexible and extensible to support multiple OOB management instances on one system simultaneously. Not only Redfish OOB management data model is supported, this article fulfills the requirements of any other data model of OOB managements such as OData XML/JSON data model, CIM-XML data model, 3rd party data model and etc

Exploring Universality of Few-Body Physics Based on Ultracold Atoms Near Feshbach Resonances

A universal characterization of interactions in few- and many-body quantum systems is often possible without detailed description of the interaction potential, and has become a defacto assumption for cold atom research. Universality in this context is defined as the validity to fully characterize the system in terms of two-body scattering length. We discuss universality in the following three contexts: closed-channel dominated Feshbach resonance, Efimov physics near Feshbach resonances, and corrections to the mean field energy of Bose-Einstein condensates with large scattering lengths. Novel experimental tools and strategies are discussed to study universality in ultracold atomic gases: dynamic control of interactions, run-away evaporative cooling in optical traps, and preparation of few-body systems in optical lattices.Comment: ICAP 2008 Proceedin

The Association between Virus Prevalence and Intercolonial Aggression Levels in the Yellow Crazy Ant, Anoplolepis Gracilipes (Jerdon).

The recent discovery of multiple viruses in ants, along with the widespread infection of their hosts across geographic ranges, provides an excellent opportunity to test whether viral prevalence in the field is associated with the complexity of social interactions in the ant population. In this study, we examined whether the association exists between the field prevalence of a virus and the intercolonial aggression of its ant host, using the yellow crazy ant (Anoplolepis gracilipes) and its natural viral pathogen (TR44839 virus) as a model system. We delimitated the colony boundary and composition of A. gracilipes in a total of 12 study sites in Japan (Okinawa), Taiwan, and Malaysia (Penang), through intercolonial aggression assay. The spatial distribution and prevalence level of the virus was then mapped for each site. The virus occurred at a high prevalence in the surveyed colonies of Okinawa and Taiwan (100% infection rate across all sites), whereas virus prevalence was variable (30%-100%) or none (0%) at the sites in Penang. Coincidentally, colonies in Okinawa and Taiwan displayed a weak intercolonial boundary, as aggression between colonies is generally low or moderate. Contrastingly, sites in Penang were found to harbor a high proportion of mutually aggressive colonies, a pattern potentially indicative of complex colony composition. Our statistical analyses further confirmed the observed correlation, implying that intercolonial interactions likely contribute as one of the effective facilitators of/barriers to virus prevalence in the field population of this ant species