Bell-CHSH function approach to quantum phase transitions in matrix product systems

Recently, nonlocality and Bell inequalities have been used to investigate quantum phase transitions (QPTs) in low-dimensional quantum systems. Nonlocality can be detected by the Bell-CHSH function (BCF). In this work, we extend the study of BCF to the QPTs in matrix product systems (MPSs). In this kind of QPTs, the ground-state energy keeps analytical in the vicinity of the QPT points, and is usually called the MPS-QPTs. For several typical models, our results show that BCF can signal the MPS-QPTs very well. In addition, we find BCF can capture signal of QPTs in unentangled states and classical states, for which other measures of quantum correlation (quantum entanglement and quantum discord) fail. Furthermore, we find that in these MPSs, there exists some kind of quantum correlation which cannot be characterized by entanglement, or by nonlocality.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figure

PcP_c states and their open-charm decays with the complex scaling method

A partial width formula is proposed using the analytical extension of the wave function in momentum space. The distinction of the Riemann sheets is explained from the perspective of the Schrodinger equation. The analytical form in coordinate space and the partial width are derived subsequently. Then a coupled-channel analysis is performed to investigate the open-charm branching ratios of the $P_c$ states, involving the contact interactions and one-pion-exchange potential with the three-body effects. The low energy constants are fitted using the experimental masses and widths as input. The $P_c(4312)$ is found to decay mainly to $\Lambda_c\bar{D}^*$, while the branching ratios of the $P_c(4440)$ and $P_c(4457)$ in different channels are comparable. Under the reasonable assumption that the off-diagonal contact interactions are small, the $J^P$ quantum numbers of the $P_c(4440)$ and the $P_c(4457)$ prefer $\frac{1}{2}^-$ and $\frac{3}{2}^-$ respectively. Three additional $P_c$ states at 4380 MeV, 4504 MeV and 4516 MeV, together with their branching ratios, are predicted. A deduction of the revised one-pion-exchange potential involving the on-shell three-body intermediate states is performed.Comment: 16 pages, 5 figure

ZcsZ_{cs}, ZcZ_c and ZbZ_b states under the complex scaling method

We investigate the $Z_b$, $Z_c$ and $Z_{cs}$ states within the chiral effective field theory framework and the $S$-wave single channel molecule picture. With the complex scaling method, we accurately solve the Schr\"odinger equation in momentum space. Our analysis reveals that the $Z_b(10610)$, $Z_b(10650)$, $Z_c(3900)$ and $Z_c(4020)$ states are the resonances composed of the $S-$wave $(B\bar{B}^{*}+B^{*}\bar{B})/\sqrt{2}$, $B^{*}\bar{B}^*$, $(D\bar{D}^{*}+D^{*}\bar{D})/\sqrt{2}$ and $D^{*}\bar{D}^*$, respectively. Furthermore, although the $Z_{cs}(3985)$ and $Z_{cs}(4000)$ states exhibit a significant difference in width, these two resonances may originate from the same channel, the $S-$wave $(D_{s}\bar{D}^{*}+D_{s}^{*}\bar{D})/\sqrt{2}$. Additionally, we find two resonances in the $S-$wave $D_s^*\bar{D}^*$ channel, corresponding to the $Z_{cs}(4123)$ and $Z_{cs}(4220)$ states that await experimental confirmation.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, 4 table

Cucumber vs Ants: a Case Against the Myth of the Uses of Plant Extracts in Insect Pest Management

An accumulation of questionable scientific reports on the use of natural plant extracts to control household pest insects, using biologically irrelevant experimental designs and extremely high concentrations, has resulted in a publication bias: “promising” studies claiming readily available plants can repel various insects, including social insects, despite no usable data to judge cost-effectiveness or sustainability in a realistic situation. The Internet provides a further torrent of untested claims, generating a background noise of misinformation. An example is the belief that cucumbers are “natural” ant repellent, widely reported in such informal literature, despite no direct evidence for or against this claim. We tested this popular assertion using peel extracts of cucumber and the related bitter melon as olfactory and gustatory repellents against ants. Extracts of both fruit peels in water, methanol, or hexane were statistically significant but effectively weak gustatory repellents. Aqueous cucumber peel extract has a significant but mild olfactory repellent effect: about half of the ants were repelled relative to none in a control. While the myth may have a grain of truth to it, as cucumber does have a mild but detectable effect on ants in an artificial setup, its potential impact on keeping ants out of a treated perimeter would be extremely short-lived and not cost-effective. Superior ant management strategies are currently available. The promotion of “natural” products must be rooted in scientific evidence of a successful and cost-effective implementation prospect

Context Does Matter: End-to-end Panoptic Narrative Grounding with Deformable Attention Refined Matching Network

Panoramic Narrative Grounding (PNG) is an emerging visual grounding task that aims to segment visual objects in images based on dense narrative captions. The current state-of-the-art methods first refine the representation of phrase by aggregating the most similar $k$ image pixels, and then match the refined text representations with the pixels of the image feature map to generate segmentation results. However, simply aggregating sampled image features ignores the contextual information, which can lead to phrase-to-pixel mis-match. In this paper, we propose a novel learning framework called Deformable Attention Refined Matching Network (DRMN), whose main idea is to bring deformable attention in the iterative process of feature learning to incorporate essential context information of different scales of pixels. DRMN iteratively re-encodes pixels with the deformable attention network after updating the feature representation of the top-$k$ most similar pixels. As such, DRMN can lead to accurate yet discriminative pixel representations, purify the top-$k$ most similar pixels, and consequently alleviate the phrase-to-pixel mis-match substantially.Experimental results show that our novel design significantly improves the matching results between text phrases and image pixels. Concretely, DRMN achieves new state-of-the-art performance on the PNG benchmark with an average recall improvement 3.5%. The codes are available in: https://github.com/JaMesLiMers/DRMN.Comment: Accepted by ICDM 202