Bioinspired Multifunctional Anti-icing Hydrogel

The recent anti-icing strategies in the state of the art mainly focused on three aspects: inhibiting ice nucleation, preventing ice propagation, and decreasing ice adhesion strength. However, it is has proved difficult to prevent ice nucleation and propagation while decreasing adhesion simultaneously, due to their highly distinct, even contradictory design principles. In nature, anti-freeze proteins (AFPs) offer a prime example of multifunctional integrated anti-icing materials that excel in all three key aspects of the anti-icing process simultaneously by tuning the structures and dynamics of interfacial water. Here, inspired by biological AFPs, we successfully created a multifunctional anti-icing material based on polydimethylsiloxane-grafted polyelectrolyte hydrogel that can tackle all three aspects of the anti-icing process simultaneously. The simplicity, mechanical durability, and versatility of these smooth hydrogel surfaces make it a promising option for a wide range of anti-icing applications

Magnetic influence on the frequency of the soft-phonon mode in the incipient ferroelectric EuTiO3

The dielectric constant of the incipient ferroelectric EuTiO$_3$ exhibits a sharp decrease at about 5.5K, at which temperature antiferromagnetic ordering of the Eu spins simultaneously appears, indicating coupling between the magnetism and dielectric properties. This may be attributed to the modification of the soft-phonon mode, $T_{1\mu}$, which is the main contribution to the large dielectric constant, by the Eu spins(7$\mu_B$ per Eu). By adding the coupling term between the magnetic and electrical subsystems as $-g\sum\limits_l {\sum\limits_{< {i,j}} {q_l^2}} \overrightarrow {S_i} \cdot \overrightarrow {S_j}$ we show that the variation of the frequency of soft-phonon mode depends on the spin correlation between the nearest neighbors Eu spins and is substantially changed under a magnetic field.Comment: 13 pages, 4 figure

Strong decays of heavy baryons in Bethe-Salpeter formalism

In this paper we study the properties of diquarks (composed of $u$ and/or $d$ quarks) in the Bethe-Salpeter formalism under the covariant instantaneous approximation. We calculate their BS wave functions and study their effective interaction with the pion. Using the effective coupling constant among the diquarks and the pion, in the heavy quark limit $m_Q\to\infty$, we calculate the decay widths of $\Sigma_Q^{(*)}$ ($Q=c,b$) in the BS formalism under the covariant instantaneous approximation and then give predictions of the decay widths $\Gamma(\Sigma_b^{(*)}\to\Lambda_b+\pi)$.Comment: 41 pages, 1 figure, LaTex2e, typos correcte

Homopolar bond formation in ZnV2_2O4_4 close to a metal-insulator transition

Electronic structure calculations for spinel vanadate ZnV$_2$O$_4$ show that partial electronic delocalization in this system leads to structural instabilities. These are a consequence of the proximity to the itinerant-electron boundary, not being related to orbital ordering. We discuss how this mechanism naturally couples charge and lattice degrees of freedom in magnetic insulators close to such a crossover. For the case of ZnV$_2$O$_4$, this leads to the formation of V-V dimers along the [011] and [101] directions that readily accounts for the intriguing magnetic structure of ZnV$_2$O$_4$.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, 1 tabl

SaccadeNet: A Fast and Accurate Object Detector

Object detection is an essential step towards holistic scene understanding. Most existing object detection algorithms attend to certain object areas once and then predict the object locations. However, neuroscientists have revealed that humans do not look at the scene in fixed steadiness. Instead, human eyes move around, locating informative parts to understand the object location. This active perceiving movement process is called \textit{saccade}. %In this paper, Inspired by such mechanism, we propose a fast and accurate object detector called \textit{SaccadeNet}. It contains four main modules, the \cenam, the \coram, the \atm, and the \aggatt, which allows it to attend to different informative object keypoints, and predict object locations from coarse to fine. The \coram~is used only during training to extract more informative corner features which brings free-lunch performance boost. On the MS COCO dataset, we achieve the performance of 40.4\% mAP at 28 FPS and 30.5\% mAP at 118 FPS. Among all the real-time object detectors, %that can run faster than 25 FPS, our SaccadeNet achieves the best detection performance, which demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed detection mechanism

Quantum Theory Approach for Neutron Single and Double-Slit Diffraction

We provide a quantum approach description of neutron single and double-slit diffraction, with specific attention to the cold neutron diffraction ($\lambda \approx 20$\AA) carried out by Zeilinger et al. in 1988. We find the theoretical results are good agreement with experimental data.Comment: 10 page

ScatterShot: Interactive In-context Example Curation for Text Transformation

The in-context learning capabilities of LLMs like GPT-3 allow annotators to customize an LLM to their specific tasks with a small number of examples. However, users tend to include only the most obvious patterns when crafting examples, resulting in underspecified in-context functions that fall short on unseen cases. Further, it is hard to know when "enough" examples have been included even for known patterns. In this work, we present ScatterShot, an interactive system for building high-quality demonstration sets for in-context learning. ScatterShot iteratively slices unlabeled data into task-specific patterns, samples informative inputs from underexplored or not-yet-saturated slices in an active learning manner, and helps users label more efficiently with the help of an LLM and the current example set. In simulation studies on two text perturbation scenarios, ScatterShot sampling improves the resulting few-shot functions by 4-5 percentage points over random sampling, with less variance as more examples are added. In a user study, ScatterShot greatly helps users in covering different patterns in the input space and labeling in-context examples more efficiently, resulting in better in-context learning and less user effort.Comment: IUI 2023: 28th International Conference on Intelligent User Interface

Hybrid noise protection of logical qubits for universal quantum computation

Quantum computers now show the promise of surpassing any possible classical machine. However, errors limit this ability and current machines do not have the ability to implement error correcting codes due to the limited number of qubits and limited control. Therefore, dynamical decoupling (DD) and encodings that limit noise with fewer qubits are more promising. For these reasons, we put forth a model of universal quantum computation that has many advantages over strategies that require a large overhead such as the standard quantum error correcting codes. First, we separate collective noise from individual noises on physical qubits and use a decoherence-free subspace (DFS) that uses just two qubits for its encoding to eliminate collective noise. Second, our bath model is very general as it uses a spin-boson type bath but without any Markovian assumption. Third, we are able to either use a steady global magnetic field or to devise a set of DD pulses that remove much of the remaining noise and commute with the logical operations on the encoded qubit. This allows removal of noise while implementing gate operations. Numerical support is given for this hybrid protection strategy which provides an efficient approach to deal with the decoherence problems in quantum computation and is experimentally viable for several current quantum computing systems. This is emphasized by a recent experiment on superconducting qubits which shows promise for increasing the number of gates that can be implemented reliably with some realistic parameter assumptions.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figure

HII region G46.5-0.2: the interplay between ionizing radiation, molecular gas and star formation

HII regions are particularly interesting because they can generate dense layers of gas and dust, elongated columns or pillars of gas pointing towards the ionizing sources, and cometary globules of dense gas, where triggered star formation can occur. Understanding the interplay between the ionizing radiation and the dense surrounding gas is very important to explain the origin of these peculiar structures, and hence to characterize triggered star formation. G46.5-0.2 (G46), a poorly studied galactic HII region located at about 4 kpc, is an excellent target to perform this kind of studies. Using public molecular data extracted from the Galactic Ring Survey (13CO J=1-0) and from the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope data archive (12CO, 13CO, C18O J=3-2, HCO+ and HCN J=4-3), and infrared data from the GLIMPSE and MIPSGAL surveys, we perform a complete study of G46, its molecular environment and the young stellar objects placed around it. We found that G46, probably excited by an O7V star, is located close to the edge of the GRSMC G046.34-00.21 molecular cloud. It presents a horse-shoe morphology opening in direction of the cloud. We observed a filamentary structure in the molecular gas likely related to G46 and not considerable molecular emission towards its open border. We found that about 10' towards the southwest of G46 there are some pillar-like features, shining at 8 um and pointing towards the HII region open border. We propose that the pillar-like features were carved and sculpted by the ionizing flux from G46. We found several young stellar objects likely embedded in the molecular cloud grouped in two main concentrations: one, closer to the G46 open border consisting of Class II type sources, and other one mostly composed by Class I type YSOs located just ahead the pillars-like features, strongly suggesting an age gradient in the YSOs distribution.Comment: Accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journal (April 14, 2015). Some figures were degraded to reduce file siz