Towards Understanding Astrophysical Effects of Nuclear Symmetry Energy

Determining the Equation of State (EOS) of dense neutron-rich nuclear matter is a shared goal of both nuclear physics and astrophysics. Except possible phase transitions, the density dependence of nuclear symmetry \esym is the most uncertain part of the EOS of neutron-rich nucleonic matter especially at supra-saturation densities. Much progresses have been made in recent years in predicting the symmetry energy and understanding why it is still very uncertain using various microscopic nuclear many-body theories and phenomenological models. Simultaneously, significant progresses have also been made in probing the symmetry energy in both terrestrial nuclear laboratories and astrophysical observatories. In light of the GW170817 event as well as ongoing or planned nuclear experiments and astrophysical observations probing the EOS of dense neutron-rich matter, we review recent progresses and identify new challenges to the best knowledge we have on several selected topics critical for understanding astrophysical effects of the nuclear symmetry energy.Comment: 77 pages. Invited Review Article, EPJA (2019) in pres

On the Numerical Stationary Distribution of Overdamped Langevin Equation in Harmonic System

Efficient numerical algorithm for stochastic differential equation has been an important object in the research of statistical physics and mathematics for a long time. In this paper we study the highly accurate numerical algorithm of the overdamped Langevin equation. In particular, our interest is the behaviour of the numerical schemes for solving the overdamped Langevin equation in the harmonic system. Three algorithms are obtained for overdamped Langevin equation, from the large friction limit of the schemes for underdamped Langevin dynamics. We derive the explicit expression of the stationary distribution of each algorithm by analysing the discrete time trajectory, for both one-dimensional and multi-dimensional cases. The accuracy of the stationary distribution of each algorithm is illustrated by comparing to the exact Boltzmann distribution. Our results demonstrate that, the "BAOA-limit" algorithm generates the exact distribution for the harmonic system in the canonical ensemble, within the stable regime of the time interval. The other algorithms do not produce the exact distribution of the harmonic system.Comment: 19 page

Kondo hybridisation and the origin of metallic states at the (001) surface of SmB6

SmB6, a well-known Kondo insulator, has been proposed to be an ideal topological insulator with states of topological character located in a clean, bulk electronic gap, namely the Kondo hybridisation gap. Seeing as the Kondo gap arises from many body electronic correlations, this would place SmB6 at the head of a new material class: topological Kondo insulators. Here, for the first time, we show that the k-space characteristics of the Kondo hybridisation process is the key to unravelling the origin of the two types of metallic states observed directly by ARPES in the electronic band structure of SmB6(001). One group of these states is essentially of bulk origin, and cuts the Fermi level due to the position of the chemical potential 20 meV above the lowest lying 5d-4f hybridisation zone. The other metallic state is more enigmatic, being weak in intensity, but represents a good candidate for a topological surface state. However, before this claim can be substantiated by an unequivocal measurement of its massless dispersion relation, our data raises the bar in terms of the ARPES resolution required, as we show there to be a strong renormalisation of the hybridisation gaps by a factor 2-3 compared to theory, following from the knowledge of the true position of the chemical potential and a careful comparison with the predictions from recent LDA+Gutzwiler calculations. All in all, these key pieces of evidence act as triangulation markers, providing a detailed description of the electronic landscape in SmB6, pointing the way for future, ultrahigh resolution ARPES experiments to achieve a direct measurement of the Dirac cones in the first topological Kondo insulator.Comment: 9 pages, 4 Figures and supplementary material (including Movies and CORPES13 "best prize" poster

Current Reversals in a inhomogeneous system with asymmetric unbiased fluctuations

We present a study of transport of a Brownian particle moving in periodic symmetric potential in the presence of asymmetric unbiased fluctuations. The particle is considered to move in a medium with periodic space dependent friction. By tuning the parameters of the system, the direction of current exhibit reversals, both as a function of temperature as well as the amplitude of rocking force. We found that the mutual interplay between the opposite driving factors is the necessary term for current reversals.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figure

Formation and dissolution of microbubbles on highly-ordered plasmonic nanopillar arrays

Bubble formation from plasmonic heating of nanostructures is of great interest in many applications. In this work, we study experimentally the intrinsic effects of the number of three-dimensional plasmonic nanostructures on the dynamics of microbubbles, largely decoupled from the effects of dissolved air. The formation and dissolution of microbubbles is observed on exciting groups of 1, 4, and 9 nanopillars. Our results show that the power threshold for the bubble formation depends on the number density of the nanopillars in highly-ordered arrays. In the degassed water, both the growth rate and the maximal radius of the plasmonic microbubbles increase with an increase of the illuminated pillar number, due to the heat balance between the heat loss across the bubble and the collective heating generated from the nanopillars. Interestingly, our results show that the bubble dissolution is affected by the spatial arrangement of the underlying nanopillars, due to the pinning effect on the bubble boundary. The bubbles on nanopillar arrays dissolve in a jumping mode with step-wise features on the dissolution curves, prior to a smooth dissolution phase for the bubble pinned by a single pillar. The insight from this work may facilitate the design of nanostructures for efficient energy conversion

Exact Results for the Residual Entropy of Ice Hexagonal Monolayer

Since the problem of the residual entropy of square ice was exactly solved, exact solutions for two-dimensional realistic ice models have been of interest. In this paper, we study the exact residual entropy of ice hexagonal monolayer in two cases. In the case that the external electric field along the z-axis exists, we map the hydrogen configurations into the spin configurations of the Ising model on the Kagom\'e lattice. By taking the low temperature limit of the Ising model, we derive the exact residual entropy, which agrees with the result determined previously from the dimer model on the honeycomb lattice. In another case that the ice hexagonal monolayer is under the periodic boundary conditions in the cubic ice lattice, we employ the six-vertex model on the square lattice to represent the hydrogen configurations obeying the ice rules. The exact residual entropy in this case is obtained from the solution of the equivalent six-vertex model. Our work provides more examples of the exactly soluble two-dimensional models.Comment: 26 pages, 5 figure

Radiative transitions in charmonium from Nf=2N_f=2 twisted mass lattice QCD

We present a study for charmonium radiative transitions: $J/\psi\rightarrow\eta_c\gamma$, $\chi_{c0}\rightarrow J/\Psi\gamma$ and $h_c\rightarrow\eta_c\gamma$ using $N_f=2$ twisted mass lattice QCD gauge configurations. The single-quark vector form factors for $\eta_c$ and $\chi_{c0}$ are also determined. The simulation is performed at a lattice spacing of $a= 0.06666$ fm and the lattice size is $32^3\times 64$. After extrapolation of lattice data at nonzero $Q^2$ to 0, we compare our results with previous quenched lattice results and the available experimental values.Comment: typeset with revtex, 15 pages, 11 figures, 4 table

Smooth image-to-image translations with latent space interpolations

Multi-domain image-to-image (I2I) translations can transform a source image according to the style of a target domain. One important, desired characteristic of these transformations, is their graduality, which corresponds to a smooth change between the source and the target image when their respective latent-space representations are linearly interpolated. However, state-of-the-art methods usually perform poorly when evaluated using inter-domain interpolations, often producing abrupt changes in the appearance or non-realistic intermediate images. In this paper, we argue that one of the main reasons behind this problem is the lack of sufficient inter-domain training data and we propose two different regularization methods to alleviate this issue: a new shrinkage loss, which compacts the latent space, and a Mixup data-augmentation strategy, which flattens the style representations between domains. We also propose a new metric to quantitatively evaluate the degree of the interpolation smoothness, an aspect which is not sufficiently covered by the existing I2I translation metrics. Using both our proposed metric and standard evaluation protocols, we show that our regularization techniques can improve the state-of-the-art multi-domain I2I translations by a large margin. Our code will be made publicly available upon the acceptance of this article