Hole burning in a nanomechanical resonator coupled to a Cooper pair box

We propose a scheme to create holes in the statistical distribution of excitations of a nanomechanical resonator. It employs a controllable coupling between this system and a Cooper pair box. The success probability and the fidelity are calculated and compared with those obtained in the atom-field system via distinct schemes. As an application we show how to use the hole-burning scheme to prepare (low excited) Fock states.Comment: 7 pages, 10 figure

Behavioural changes in relation to risk perception and prevention of avian and human influenza in the general population of Hong Kong, 2006 to 2010

Conference Theme: Translating Health Research into Policy and Practice for Health of the PopulationPoster Presentation: abstract no. P84-Ab0047BACKGROUND: The Hong Kong government has introduced a series of progressive measures on importation, farming and retail of live poultry to minimize risk of A/H5N1 transmission since 1997. Perceived risk of A/H5N1 and related preventions could decline as these macro-level policies minimizing human-chicken contact. This may paradoxically increase population risk of other influenza and respiratory infection due to reduced preventive behaviors. OBJECTIVES: A follow-up survey in 2010 was conducted to investigate change of live poultry exposure, risk perception and prevention of A/H5N1 among respondents who participated in the random household telephone survey in 2006. METHODS: Totally, of 1,760 respondents who completed the 2006 survey, 680 could be traced and ...published_or_final_versio

A molecular dynamics simulation on the oxidation of core-shell aluminum nanoparticles in oxygen and water environments

The oxidation mechanisms of core-shell aluminum nanoparticles (ANPs) in high-temperature steam and oxygen are investigated by ReaxFF molecular dynamics (MD) simulation. The details concerning reaction heat release, heat transfer, atomic diffusion process, and ANP structure evolution are studied by examining the temporal variations of temperature, energy, atoms concentration distributions and particle structure, respectively. The atomic-level heat and mass transfer processes reveal that for both ANP/H2O and ANP/O2 systems, at the initial stage of oxidation, the heat transfer between ANP and environmental oxidizer is dominant. Thereafter, the reaction plays an increasingly significant role. The heat transfer efficiency of ANP/H2O is higher than that of ANP/O2, while the reaction exotherm of ANP/H2O is lower than ANP/O2. The final particle temperature for ANP/O2 system is much higher than that of ANP/H2O. The diameter of the former is also larger. During the oxidation of ANP, the core Al atoms diffuse outward into the oxide shell, which pushes the shell Al atoms outward and results in the expansion of ANP. The shell O atoms diffuse inward and left a vacant lattice site, through which the ambient H and O atoms diffuse into the oxide shell

Size-derived reaction mechanism of core-shell aluminum nanoparticle

To prompt the application of aluminum nanoparticles (ANPs) in combustion as the fuel additive and in chemical synthesis as the catalyst, this study examines the reaction dynamics of core-shell ANPs under an oxygen atmosphere via Transient Non-Equilibrium Reactive Molecular Dynamics simulations. Two distinct oxidation modes determined by the competition between the oxide shell melting and core reaction have been identified. One is the fast oxidation mode with a high reaction heat release rate, where core Al and ambient O atoms diffuse into each other to form a homogeneous alumina particle. The other is the moderate oxidation with lower heat release, where only core Al atoms diffuse into the oxide shell to form a hollow spherical structure. By modeling the shell melting and Al core reaction, a size-derived oxidation model has been proposed to conveniently but accurately predict the ANP reaction dynamics. This work also provides fundamental insight into the synthesis of ANPs that serve as a high energy density fuel and high-performance catalyst

A comparison of the local spiral structure from Gaia DR2 and VLBI maser parallaxes

Context. The Gaia mission has released the second data set (Gaia DR2), which contains parallaxes and proper motions for a large number of massive, young stars. Aims. We investigate the spiral structure in the solar neighborhood revealed by Gaia DR2 and compare it with that depicted by VLBI maser parallaxes. Methods. We examined three samples with different constraints on parallax uncertainty and distance errors and stellar spectral types: (1) all OB stars with parallax errors of less than 10%; (2) only O-type stars with 0.1 mas errors imposed and with parallax distance errors of less than 0.2 kpc; and (3) only O-type stars with 0.05 mas errors imposed and with parallax distance errors of less than 0.3 kpc. Results. In spite of the significant distance uncertainties for stars in DR2 beyond 1.4 kpc, the spiral structure in the solar neighborhood demonstrated by Gaia agrees well with that illustrated by VLBI maser results. The O-type stars available from DR2 extend the spiral arm models determined from VLBI maser parallaxes into the fourth Galactic quadrant, and suggest the existence of a new spur between the Local and Sagittarius arms.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, 1 table, accepted for publication in A&

Composition Optimization and Experimental Characterization of a Novel Steel Based on CALPHAD

A new steel with high Cr and low W, Mo contents for forged cold work roll was designed based on the composition system of traditional high speed steel (HSS) roll. The Fe-C isopleths of the steel and the mass fraction of equilibrium phases versus temperature were calculated by Thermo–Calc, and the effects of different alloying elements (W, Mo, Cr, V) on austenite, ferrite and carbides (MC, M6C, M7C3, M23C6) were also established to optimize the composition and structure. The designed and optimized specimens were both quenched at 1100℃and then tempered twice at 560℃. The hardness and wear resistance of the samples were measured. The microstructures of quenched tempered and forged specimens were studied. The results show that ferrite crystallization, peritectic reaction, austenite crystallization and the precipitation of MC, M6C, M7C3, M23C6occur during equilibrium solidification process. The alloying elements W, Mo mainly affect the precipitation of M6C, while Cr affects the precipitated region and mass fraction of M7C3. High V content widens the high temperature region of the peritectic reaction and results in a large amount of MC precipitates. The optimized composition (wt%) for cold work roll steel is 1.30-1.35%C, 9-10%Cr, 2.5-3.0%Mo, 0.5-1.0%W, 2.5-3.0%V, 0.5-0.6%Mn, 0.5-0.6%Si. The hardness of the steel after quenching and tempering is 60.8HRC and weight loss after 120min is 6.2mg. This meets the requirement of hardness and wear resistance requirements for cold work roll. The ledeburite in the optimized steel disappears after forging and the carbide network break into a large amount of tiny blocky ones dispersed in the matrix without cracks, which shows a good forgeability of the steel and rationality of the optimized composition

Substrate Integrated Waveguide Cross-Coupling Filter with Multilayer Hexagonal Cavity

Hexagonal cavities and their applications to multilayer substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) filters are presented. The hexagonal SIW cavity which can combine flexibility of rectangular one and performance of circular one is convenient for bandpass filter’s design. Three types of experimental configuration with the same central frequency of 10 GHz and bandwidth of 6%, including three-order and four-order cross-coupling topologies, are constructed and fabricated based on low temperature cofired ceramic (LTCC) technology. Both theoretical and experimental results are presented

Controlling Excitations Inversion of a Cooper Pair Box Interacting with a Nanomechanical Resonator

We investigate the action of time dependent detunings upon the excitation inversion of a Cooper pair box interacting with a nanomechanical resonator. The method employs the Jaynes-Cummings model with damping, assuming different decay rates of the Cooper pair box and various fixed and t-dependent detunings. It is shown that while the presence of damping plus constant detunings destroy the collapse/revival effects, convenient choices of time dependent detunings allow one to reconstruct such events in a perfect way. It is also shown that the mean excitation of the nanomechanical resonator is more robust against damping of the Cooper pair box for convenient values of t-dependent detunings.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figure

Constraints on Non-Commutative Physics Scale with Neutrino-Electron Scattering

Neutrino-electron scatterings ($\nu - e$) are purely leptonic processes with robust Standard Model (SM) predictions. Their measurements can therefore provide constraints to physics beyond SM. Non-commutative (NC) field theories modify space-time commutation relations, and allow neutrino electromagnetic couplings at the tree level. Their contribution to neutrino-electron scattering cross-section was derived. Constraints were placed on the NC scale parameter $\Lambda_{NC}$ from $\nu - e$ experiments with reactor and accelerator neutrinos. The most stringent limit of $\Lambda_{NC} > 3.3 TeV$ at 95% confidence level improves over the direct bounds from collider experiments.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures, 2 tables, V2: minor revisions to match published versio

GenDet: Meta Learning to Generate Detectors From Few Shots

Object detection has made enormous progress and has been widely used in many applications. However, it performs poorly when only limited training data is available for novel classes that the model has never seen before. Most existing approaches solve few-shot detection tasks implicitly without directly modeling the detectors for novel classes. In this article, we propose GenDet, a new meta-learning-based framework that can effectively generate object detectors for novel classes from few shots and, thus, conducts few-shot detection tasks explicitly. The detector generator is trained by numerous few-shot detection tasks sampled from base classes each with sufficient samples, and thus, it is expected to generalize well on novel classes. An adaptive pooling module is further introduced to suppress distracting samples and aggregate the detectors generated from multiple shots. Moreover, we propose to train a reference detector for each base class in the conventional way, with which to guide the training of the detector generator. The reference detectors and the detector generator can be trained simultaneously. Finally, the generated detectors of different classes are encouraged to be orthogonal to each other for better generalization. The proposed approach is extensively evaluated on the ImageNet, VOC, and COCO data sets under various few-shot detection settings, and it achieves new state-of-the-art results