Space-Time Phononic Crystals with Anomalous Topological Edge States

It is well known that an interface created by two topologically distinct structures could host nontrivial edge states that are immune to defects. In this letter, we introduce a one-dimensional space-time phononic crystal and study the associated anomalous topological edge states. A space-decoupled time modulation is assumed. While preserving the key topological feature of the system, such a modulation also duplicates the edge state mode across the spectrum, both inside and outside the band gap. It is shown that, in contrast to conventional topological edge states which are excited by frequencies in the Bragg regime, the time-modulation-induced frequency conversion can be leveraged to access topological edge states at a deep subwavelength scale where the entire phononic crystal size is merely 1/5.1 of the wavelength. This remarkable feature could open a new route for designing miniature devices that are based on topological physics

IRRGN: An Implicit Relational Reasoning Graph Network for Multi-turn Response Selection

The task of response selection in multi-turn dialogue is to find the best option from all candidates. In order to improve the reasoning ability of the model, previous studies pay more attention to using explicit algorithms to model the dependencies between utterances, which are deterministic, limited and inflexible. In addition, few studies consider differences between the options before and after reasoning. In this paper, we propose an Implicit Relational Reasoning Graph Network to address these issues, which consists of the Utterance Relational Reasoner (URR) and the Option Dual Comparator (ODC). URR aims to implicitly extract dependencies between utterances, as well as utterances and options, and make reasoning with relational graph convolutional networks. ODC focuses on perceiving the difference between the options through dual comparison, which can eliminate the interference of the noise options. Experimental results on two multi-turn dialogue reasoning benchmark datasets MuTual and MuTual+ show that our method significantly improves the baseline of four pretrained language models and achieves state-of-the-art performance. The model surpasses human performance for the first time on the MuTual dataset.Comment: Accepted by EMNLP 202

The Immune Cell Landscape in Different Anatomical Structures of Knee in Osteoarthritis: A Gene Expression-Based Study

Background. Immunological mechanisms play a vital role in the pathogenesis of knee osteoarthritis (KOA). Moreover, the immune phenotype is a relevant prognostic factor in various immune-related diseases. In this study, we used CIBERSORT for deconvolution of global gene expression data to define the immune cell landscape of different structures of knee in osteoarthritis. Methods and Findings. By applying CIBERSORT, we assessed the relative proportions of immune cells in 76 samples of knee cartilage, 146 samples of knee synovial tissue, 40 samples of meniscus, and 50 samples of knee subchondral bone. Enumeration and activation status of 22 immune cell subtypes were provided by the obtained immune cell profiles. In synovial tissues, the differences in proportions of plasma cells, M1 macrophages, M2 macrophages, activated dendritic cells, resting mast cells, and eosinophils between normal tissues and osteoarthritic tissues were statistically significant (P<0.05). The area under the curve was relatively large in resting mast cells, dendritic cells, and M2 macrophages in receiver operating characteristic analyses. In subchondral bones, the differences in proportions of resting master cells and neutrophils between normal tissues and osteoarthritic tissues were statistically significant (P<0.05). In subchondral bones, the proportions of immune cells, from the principle component analyses, displayed distinct group-bias clustering. Resting mast cells and T cell CD8 were the major component of first component. Moreover, we revealed the potential interaction between immune cells. There was almost no infiltration of immune cells in the meniscus and cartilage of the knee joint. Conclusions. The immune cell composition in KOA differed substantially from that of healthy joint tissue, while it also differed in different anatomical structures of the knee. Meanwhile, activated mast cells were mainly associated with high immune cell infiltration in OA. Furthermore, we speculate M2 macrophages in synovium and mast cells in subchondral bone may play an important role in the pathogenesis of OA

Realization of a Z classified chiral-symmetric higher-order topological insulator in a coupling-inversion acoustic crystal

Higher-order topological band theory has transformed the landscape of topological phases in quantum and classical systems. Here, we experimentally demonstrate a two-dimensional (2D) higher-order topological phase (HOTP), referred to as the multiple chiral topological phase (MCTP), which is protected by a multipole chiral number (MCN). Our realization differs from previous HOTPs in that it possesses a larger-than-unity MCN, which arises when the nearest-neighbor couplings (NNCs) are weaker than long-range couplings (LRCs). Our phase has an MCN of 4, protecting the existence of 4 mid-gap topological corner modes (TCMs) at each corner. The multiple TCMs demonstrated here could lead to enhanced quantum-inspired devices for sensing and computing. Our study also highlights the rich and untapped potential of LRC manipulation for future research in topological phases