Mediating exchange bias by Verwey transition in CoO/Fe3O4 thin film

We report the tunability of the exchange bias effect by the first-order metal-insulator transition (known as the Verwey transition) of Fe3O4 in CoO (5 nm)/Fe3O4 (40 nm)/MgO (001) thin film. In the vicinity of the Verwey transition, the exchange bias field is substantially enhanced because of a sharp increase in magnetocrystalline anisotropy constant from high-temperature cubic to lowtemperature monoclinic structure. Moreover, with respect to the Fe3O4 (40 nm)/MgO (001) thin film, the coercivity field of the CoO (5 nm)/Fe3O4 (40 nm)/MgO (001) bilayer is greatly increased for all the temperature range, which would be due to the coupling between Co spins and Fe spins across the interface

Mass retention efficiencies of He accretion onto carbon-oxygen white dwarfs and type Ia supernovae

Type Ia supernovae (SNe Ia) play a crucial role in studying cosmology and galactic chemical evolution. They are thought to be thermonuclear explosions of carbon-oxygen white dwarfs (CO WDs) when their masses reach the Chandrasekar mass limit in binaries. Previous studies have suggested that He novae may be progenitor candidates of SNe Ia. However, the mass retention efficiencies during He nova outbursts are still uncertain. In this article, we aim to study the mass retention efficiencies of He nova outbursts and to investigate whether SNe Ia can be produced through He nova outbursts. Using the stellar evolution code Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics, we simulated a series of multicycle He-layer flashes, in which the initial WD masses range from 0.7 to 1.35 Msun with various accretion rates. We obtained the mass retention efficiencies of He nova outbursts for various initial WD masses, which can be used in the binary population synthesis studies. In our simulations, He nova outbursts can increase the mass of the WD to the Chandrasekar mass limit and the explosive carbon burning can be triggered in the center of the WD; this suggests that He nova outbursts can produce SNe Ia. Meanwhile, the mass retention efficiencies in the present work are lower than those of previous studies, which leads to a lower birthrates of SNe Ia through the WD + He star channel. Furthermore, we obtained the elemental abundances distribution at the moment of explosive carbon burning, which can be used as the initial input parameters in studying explosion models of SNe Ia.Comment: 8 pages, 12 figures, 2 tables, published in Astronomy & Astrophysics (A&A 604, A31, 2017

Asymptotic properties of eigenmatrices of a large sample covariance matrix

Let $S_n=\frac{1}{n}X_nX_n^*$ where $X_n=\{X_{ij}\}$ is a $p\times n$ matrix with i.i.d. complex standardized entries having finite fourth moments. Let $Y_n(\mathbf {t}_1,\mathbf {t}_2,\sigma)=\sqrt{p}({\mathbf {x}}_n(\mathbf {t}_1)^*(S_n+\sigma I)^{-1}{\mathbf {x}}_n(\mathbf {t}_2)-{\mathbf {x}}_n(\mathbf {t}_1)^*{\mathbf {x}}_n(\mathbf {t}_2)m_n(\sigma))$ in which $\sigma>0$ and $m_n(\sigma)=\int\frac{dF_{y_n}(x)}{x+\sigma}$ where $F_{y_n}(x)$ is the Mar\v{c}enko--Pastur law with parameter $y_n=p/n$; which converges to a positive constant as $n\to\infty$, and ${\mathbf {x}}_n(\mathbf {t}_1)$ and ${\mathbf {x}}_n(\mathbf {t}_2)$ are unit vectors in ${\Bbb{C}}^p$, having indices $\mathbf {t}_1$ and $\mathbf {t}_2$, ranging in a compact subset of a finite-dimensional Euclidean space. In this paper, we prove that the sequence $Y_n(\mathbf {t}_1,\mathbf {t}_2,\sigma)$ converges weakly to a $(2m+1)$-dimensional Gaussian process. This result provides further evidence in support of the conjecture that the distribution of the eigenmatrix of $S_n$ is asymptotically close to that of a Haar-distributed unitary matrix.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/10-AAP748 the Annals of Applied Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aap/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Effect of spin relaxations on the spin mixing conductances for a bilayer structure

The spin current can result in a spin-transfer torque in the normal-metal(NM)|ferromagnetic-insulator(FMI) or normal-metal(NM)|ferromagnetic-metal(FMM) bilayer. In the earlier study on this issue, the spin relaxations were ignored or introduced phenomenologically. In this paper, considering the FMM or FMI with spin relaxations described by a non-Hermitian Hamiltonian, we derive an effective spin-transfer torque and an effective spin mixing conductance in the non-Hermitian bilayer. The dependence of the effective spin mixing conductance on the system parameters (such as insulating gap, \textit{s-d} coupling, and layer thickness) as well as the relations between the real part and the imaginary part of the effective spin mixing conductance are given and discussed. We find that the effective spin mixing conductance can be enhanced in the non-Hermitian system. This provides us with the possibility to enhance the spin mixing conductance