Design and Experimental Observation of Valley-Hall Edge States in Diatomic-Graphene-like Elastic Waveguides

We report on the design and experimental validation of a two-dimensional phononic elastic waveguide exhibiting topological Valley-Hall edge states. The lattice structure of the waveguide is inspired by the diatomic graphene and it is imprinted in an initially flat plate by means of geometric indentations. The indentations are distributed according to a hexagonal lattice structure which guarantees the existence of Dirac dispersion at the boundary of the Brillouin zone. Starting from this basic material, domain walls capable of supporting edge states can be obtained by contrasting waveguides having broken space inversion symmetry (SIS) achieved by using local resonant elements. Our theoretical study shows that such material maps into the acoustic analog of the quantum valley Hall effect (QVHE) while numerical and experimental results confirm the existence of protected edge states traveling along the walls of topologically distinct domains

SDO/AIA Observations of Secondary Waves Generated by Interaction of the 2011 June 7 Global EUV Wave With Solar Coronal Structures

We present SDO/AIA observations of the interaction of a global EUV wave on 2011 June 7 with active regions (ARs), coronal holes (CHs) and coronal bright structures. The primary global wave has a three-dimensional dome shape, with propagation speeds ranging from 430-780 km/s in different directions. The primary coronal wave runs in front of the expanding loops involved in the CME and its propagation speeds are approximately constant within 10-20 minutes. Upon arrival at an AR on its path, the primary EUV wave apparently disappears and a secondary wave rapidly reemerges 75 Mm within the AR boundary at a similar speed. When the EUV wave encounters a coronal bright structure, an additional wave front appears there and propagates in front of it at a velocity nearly a factor of 2 faster. Reflected waves from a polar CH and a coronal bright structure are observed and propagate fractionally slower than the primary waves. Some of these phenomena can be equally explained by either a wave or non-wave model alone. However, taken together, these observations provide new evidence for the multitudes of global EUV waves, in which a true MHD fast-mode wave or shock propagates in front of an expanding CME bubble.Comment: 17 pages, 6 figures, ApJ in pres

Neural Discrete Representation Learning

Learning useful representations without supervision remains a key challenge in machine learning. In this paper, we propose a simple yet powerful generative model that learns such discrete representations. Our model, the Vector Quantised-Variational AutoEncoder (VQ-VAE), differs from VAEs in two key ways: the encoder network outputs discrete, rather than continuous, codes; and the prior is learnt rather than static. In order to learn a discrete latent representation, we incorporate ideas from vector quantisation (VQ). Using the VQ method allows the model to circumvent issues of "posterior collapse" -- where the latents are ignored when they are paired with a powerful autoregressive decoder -- typically observed in the VAE framework. Pairing these representations with an autoregressive prior, the model can generate high quality images, videos, and speech as well as doing high quality speaker conversion and unsupervised learning of phonemes, providing further evidence of the utility of the learnt representations

Temperature-dependent permittivity of annealed and unannealed gold films

Due to local field enhancement and subwavelength confinements, nano-plasmonics provide numerous novel applications. Simultaneously, as an efficient nanoscale heat generator from inherent absorption, thermo-plasmonics is emerging as an important branch. However, although significant temperature increase is involved in applications, detailed characterization of metal permittivity at different temperatures and corresponding thermo-derivative are lacking. In this work, we extract the permittivity of gold from 300K to the annealing temperature of 570K. By comparing annealed and unannealed films, more than one-order difference in thermo-derivative of permittivity is revealed, resulting in unexpectedly large variation of plasmonic properties. Our result is valuable not only for characterizing extensively used unannealed nanoparticles, but also for designing future thermo-nano-plasmonic systems.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, revised and published on Optics Expres