Proton-transfer Ferroelectricity / Multiferroicity in Rutile Oxyhydroxides

Oxyhydroxide minerals like FeOOH have been a research focus in geology for studying the Earth interior, and also in chemistry for studying oxygen electrocatalysis activity. In this paper we provide first-principles evidence of a new class of ferroelectrics or multiferroics among them:GaOOH,InOOH,CrOOH,FeOOH, which are earth-abundant minerals and have been experimentally verified to possess distorted rutile structures, are ferroelectric with considerable polarizations(up to 24 muC/cm2) and piezoelectric coefficients. Their atomic-thick layer may possess vertical polarization robust against depolarizing field due to the formation of O-H O bonds that can hardly be symmetrized. Moreover,CrOOH (guyanaite) is revealed to be a combination of high-Tc in-plane type-I multiferroics and vertical type-II multiferroics, which is strain-tunable and may render a desirable coupling between magnetism and ferroelectricity. Supported by experimental evidence on reversible conversion between metal oxyhydroxides and dioxides and their nice lattice match that renders convenient epitaxial growth, heterostructure composed of oxyhydroxides and prevalent metal dioxides (e.g. TiO2, SnO2 and CrO2) may be constructed for various applications like ferroelectric field-effect transistors and multiferroic tunneling junctions

Counterexample-Preserving Reduction for Symbolic Model Checking

The cost of LTL model checking is highly sensitive to the length of the formula under verification. We observe that, under some specific conditions, the input LTL formula can be reduced to an easier-to-handle one before model checking. In our reduction, these two formulae need not to be logically equivalent, but they share the same counterexample set w.r.t the model. In the case that the model is symbolically represented, the condition enabling such reduction can be detected with a lightweight effort (e.g., with SAT-solving). In this paper, we tentatively name such technique "Counterexample-Preserving Reduction" (CePRe for short), and finally the proposed technquie is experimentally evaluated by adapting NuSMV

Low-mass Active Galactic Nuclei on the Fundamental Plane of Black Hole Activity

It is widely known that in active galactic nuclei (AGNs) and black hole X-ray binaries (BHXBs), there is a tight correlation among their radio luminosity ($L_R$), X-ray luminosity ($L_X$) and BH mass (\mbh), the so-called `fundamental plane' (FP) of BH activity. Yet the supporting data are very limited in the \mbh regime between stellar mass (i.e., BHXBs) and 10$^{6.5}$\,\msun\ (namely, the lower bound of supermassive BHs in common AGNs). In this work, we developed a new method to measure the 1.4 GHz flux directly from the images of the VLA FIRST survey, and apply it to the type-1 low-mass AGNs in the \cite{2012ApJ...755..167D} sample. As a result, we obtained 19 new low-mass AGNs for FP research with both \mbh\ estimates (\mbh \approx 10^{5.5-6.5}\,\msun), reliable X-ray measurements, and (candidate) radio detections, tripling the number of such candidate sources in the literature.Most (if not all) of the low-mass AGNs follow the standard radio/X-ray correlation and the universal FP relation fitted with the combined dataset of BHXBs and supermassive AGNs by \citet{2009ApJ...706..404G}; the consistency in the radio/X-ray correlation slope among those accretion systems supports the picture that the accretion and ejection (jet) processes are quite similar in all accretion systems of different \mbh. In view of the FP relation, we speculate that the radio loudness $\mathcal{R}$ (i.e., the luminosity ratio of the jet to the accretion disk) of AGNs depends not only on Eddington ratio, but probably also on \mbh.Comment: ApJ accepte

Edge states in self-complementary checkerboard photonic crystals: Zak phase, surface impedance and experimental verification

Edge states of photonic crystals have attracted much attention for the potential applications such as high transmission waveguide bends, spin dependent splitters and one-way photonic circuits. Here, we theoretically discuss and experimentally observe the deterministic edge states in checkerboard photonic crystals. Due to the self-complementarity of checkerboard photonic crystals, a common band gap is structurally protected between two photonic crystals with different unit cells. Deterministic edge states are found inside the common band gap by exploiting the Zak phase analysis and surface impedance calculation. These edge states are also confirmed by a microwave experiment.Comment: 13 pages, 4 figure