Electron-phonon interactions and high-temperature thermodynamics of vanadium and its alloys

Inelastic neutron scattering was used to measure the phonon densities of states (DOSs) for pure V and solid solutions of V with 6 to 7at% of Co, Nb, and Pt, at temperatures from 10 K to 1323 K. Ancillary measurements of heat capacity and thermal expansion are reported on V and V-7at%Co and used to help identify the different sources of entropy. Pure V exhibits an anomalous anharmonic stiffening of phonons with increasing temperature. This anharmonicity is suppressed by Co and Pt, but not by isoelectronic Nb solutes. The changes in phonon frequency with alloying and with temperature both correlate to the decrease in electron density of states (DOS) at the Fermi level as calculated using density functional theory. The effects of both temperature and alloying can be understood in terms of an adiabatic electron-phonon interaction (EPI), which broadens sharp features in the electron DOS. These results show that the adiabatic EPI can influence the phonon thermodynamics at temperatures exceeding 1000 K, and that thermal trends of phonons may help assess the strength of the EPI

Phase transitions in exactly solvable decorated model of localized Ising spins and itinerant electrons

A hybrid lattice-statistical model of doubly decorated two-dimensional lattices, which have localized Ising spins at its nodal sites and itinerant electrons delocalized over decorating sites, is exactly solved with the help of a generalized decoration-iteration transformation. Under the assumption of a quarter filling of each couple of the decorating sites, the ground state constitutes either spontaneously long-range ordered ferromagnetic or ferrimagnetic phase in dependence on whether the ferromagnetic or antiferromagnetic interaction between the localized Ising spins and itinerant electrons is considered. The critical temperature of the spontaneously long-range ordered phases monotonically increases upon strengthening the ratio between the kinetic term and the Ising-type exchange interaction.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, presented at International Conference on Magnetism 2009 to be held on July 26-31 in Karlsruhe, Germany. submitted to J. Phys.: Conf. Se

A sharp stability criterion for the Vlasov-Maxwell system

We consider the linear stability problem for a 3D cylindrically symmetric equilibrium of the relativistic Vlasov-Maxwell system that describes a collisionless plasma. For an equilibrium whose distribution function decreases monotonically with the particle energy, we obtained a linear stability criterion in our previous paper. Here we prove that this criterion is sharp; that is, there would otherwise be an exponentially growing solution to the linearized system. Therefore for the class of symmetric Vlasov-Maxwell equilibria, we establish an energy principle for linear stability. We also treat the considerably simpler periodic 1.5D case. The new formulation introduced here is applicable as well to the nonrelativistic case, to other symmetries, and to general equilibria

Graphene microwave transistors on sapphire substrates

We have developed metal-oxide graphene field-effect transistors (MOGFETs) on sapphire substrates working at microwave frequencies. For monolayers, we obtain a transit frequency up to ~ 80 GHz for a gate length of 200 nm, and a power gain maximum frequency of about ~ 3 GHz for this specific sample. Given the strongly reduced charge noise for nanostructures on sapphire, the high stability and high performance of this material at low temperature, our MOGFETs on sapphire are well suited for a cryogenic broadband low-noise amplifier

TimeMachine: Timeline Generation for Knowledge-Base Entities

We present a method called TIMEMACHINE to generate a timeline of events and relations for entities in a knowledge base. For example for an actor, such a timeline should show the most important professional and personal milestones and relationships such as works, awards, collaborations, and family relationships. We develop three orthogonal timeline quality criteria that an ideal timeline should satisfy: (1) it shows events that are relevant to the entity; (2) it shows events that are temporally diverse, so they distribute along the time axis, avoiding visual crowding and allowing for easy user interaction, such as zooming in and out; and (3) it shows events that are content diverse, so they contain many different types of events (e.g., for an actor, it should show movies and marriages and awards, not just movies). We present an algorithm to generate such timelines for a given time period and screen size, based on submodular optimization and web-co-occurrence statistics with provable performance guarantees. A series of user studies using Mechanical Turk shows that all three quality criteria are crucial to produce quality timelines and that our algorithm significantly outperforms various baseline and state-of-the-art methods.Comment: To appear at ACM SIGKDD KDD'15. 12pp, 7 fig. With appendix. Demo and other info available at http://cs.stanford.edu/~althoff/timemachine

Computing the lower and upper bounds of Laplace eigenvalue problem: by combining conforming and nonconforming finite element methods

This article is devoted to computing the lower and upper bounds of the Laplace eigenvalue problem. By using the special nonconforming finite elements, i.e., enriched Crouzeix-Raviart element and extension $Q_1^{\rm rot}$, we get the lower bound of the eigenvalue. Additionally, we also use conforming finite elements to do the postprocessing to get the upper bound of the eigenvalue. The postprocessing method need only to solve the corresponding source problems and a small eigenvalue problem if higher order postprocessing method is implemented. Thus, we can obtain the lower and upper bounds of the eigenvalues simultaneously by solving eigenvalue problem only once. Some numerical results are also presented to validate our theoretical analysis.Comment: 19 pages, 4 figure

On Using Active Learning and Self-Training when Mining Performance Discussions on Stack Overflow

Abundant data is the key to successful machine learning. However, supervised learning requires annotated data that are often hard to obtain. In a classification task with limited resources, Active Learning (AL) promises to guide annotators to examples that bring the most value for a classifier. AL can be successfully combined with self-training, i.e., extending a training set with the unlabelled examples for which a classifier is the most certain. We report our experiences on using AL in a systematic manner to train an SVM classifier for Stack Overflow posts discussing performance of software components. We show that the training examples deemed as the most valuable to the classifier are also the most difficult for humans to annotate. Despite carefully evolved annotation criteria, we report low inter-rater agreement, but we also propose mitigation strategies. Finally, based on one annotator's work, we show that self-training can improve the classification accuracy. We conclude the paper by discussing implication for future text miners aspiring to use AL and self-training.Comment: Preprint of paper accepted for the Proc. of the 21st International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering, 201

Effect of annealing on electron dephasing in three-dimensional polycrystalline metals

We have studied the effect of thermal annealing on electron dephasing times $\tau_\phi$ in three-dimensional polycrystalline metals. Measurements are performed on as-sputtered and annealed AuPd and Sb thick films, using weak-localization method. In all samples, we find that $\tau_\phi$ possesses an extremely weak temperature dependence as $T \to 0$. Our results show that the effect of annealing is non-universal, and it depends strongly on the amount of disorder quenched in the microstructures during deposition. The observed "saturation" behavior of $\tau_\phi$ cannot be easily explained by magnetic scattering. We suggest that the issue of saturation can be better addressed in three-dimensional, rather than lower-dimensional, structures