Melt conditioned direct chill casting (MC-DC) of wrought Al-alloys

Melt Conditioned Direct Chill (MC-DC) casting is a new development for producing high-quality billets and slabs. In the MC-DC process, liquid metal is continuously fed into a MCAST (melt conditioning by advanced shear technology) machine, where the liquid metal is subjected to high shear rate and high degree of turbulence provided by a twin screw mechanism at temperatures either above or below the alloy liquidus, and the conditioned liquid metal is then fed continuously into a Direct Chill (DC) caster to produce billets or slabs. The MC-DC process is applicable to both Aland Mg-alloys. In this paper we present our experimental investigations of the effects of processing parameters on the microstructural and compositional uniformity of 5xxx and 7xxx series Al-alloys. It has been confirmed by our experiments that the MC-DC process can produce billets and slabs with fine and uniform microstructure, uniform chemical compositions and much reduced cast defects, such as porosity and cracks

Morphology, structure, optical, and electrical properties of AgSbO₃

The morphology of defect pyrochlore-type, AgSbO₃ microparticle/nanoparticles obtained via solid state reaction evolve from irregular to Fullerene-like polyhedra before finally decomposing into metal-organic framework-5 like particles with increase in sintering temperature. The defect pyrochlore-type AgSbO₃ particles are slightly Ag deficient while the valence of the antimony ion is shown to be +5 giving rise to a probable stoichiometry of Ag₁ˍₓ SbVO₃ˍₓ/₂, with x∼0.01–0.04. A highly structured diffuse intensity distribution observed via electron diffraction is interpreted in terms of correlated displacements of one-dimensional (1D) silver ion chains along ⟨110⟩ directions. A redshifting in the absorption edges in UV-visible absorption spectra is observed for samples prepared at sintering temperatures higher than 1000 °C and attributed to the surface plasma resonance effect associated with small amounts of excess metallic Ag on the Ag₁ˍₓ SbVO₃ˍₓ/₂ particles. An electrical properties investigation of the silver antimonate samples via dielectric, conductivity, and electric modulus spectroscopy shows a prominent dielectric relaxation associated with grain boundaries. The silver ion conductivity is associated with correlated displacements of 1D silver ion chains along ⟨110⟩ directions.Z.G.Y., Y.L., and R.L.W. acknowledge financial support from the Australian Research Council ARC in the form of ARC Discovery Grants

Diquark effects in light baryon correlators from lattice QCD

We study the role of diquarks in light baryons through point to point baryon correlators. We contrast results from quenched simulations with ones with two flavors of dynamical overlap fermions. The scalar, pseudoscalar and axial vector diquarks are combined with light quarks to form color singlets. The quenched simulation shows large zero mode effects in correlators containing the scalar and pseudoscalar diquark. The two scalar diquarks created by gamma_5 and gamma_0gamma_5 lead to different behavior in baryon correlators, showing that the interaction of diquarks with the third light quark matters: we do not see an isolated diquark. In our quark mass range, the scalar diquark created by gamma_5 seems to play a greater role than the others.Comment: 12 pages, 11 figure

Learning a Mixture of Deep Networks for Single Image Super-Resolution

Single image super-resolution (SR) is an ill-posed problem which aims to recover high-resolution (HR) images from their low-resolution (LR) observations. The crux of this problem lies in learning the complex mapping between low-resolution patches and the corresponding high-resolution patches. Prior arts have used either a mixture of simple regression models or a single non-linear neural network for this propose. This paper proposes the method of learning a mixture of SR inference modules in a unified framework to tackle this problem. Specifically, a number of SR inference modules specialized in different image local patterns are first independently applied on the LR image to obtain various HR estimates, and the resultant HR estimates are adaptively aggregated to form the final HR image. By selecting neural networks as the SR inference module, the whole procedure can be incorporated into a unified network and be optimized jointly. Extensive experiments are conducted to investigate the relation between restoration performance and different network architectures. Compared with other current image SR approaches, our proposed method achieves state-of-the-arts restoration results on a wide range of images consistently while allowing more flexible design choices. The source codes are available in http://www.ifp.illinois.edu/~dingliu2/accv2016

Heavy Pentaquarks

We construct the spin-flavor wave functions of the possible heavy pentaquarks containing an anti-charm or anti-bottom quark using various clustered quark models. Then we estimate the masses and magnetic moments of the $J^P={1\over 2}^+$ or ${3\over 2}^+$ heavy pentaquarks. We emphasize the difference in the predictions of these models. Future experimental searches at BESIII, CLEOc, BELLE, and LEP may find these interesting states

Spin squeezing: transforming one-axis-twisting into two-axis-twisting

Squeezed spin states possess unique quantum correlation or entanglement that are of significant promises for advancing quantum information processing and quantum metrology. In recent back to back publications [C. Gross \textit{et al, Nature} \textbf{464}, 1165 (2010) and Max F. Riedel \textit{et al, Nature} \textbf{464}, 1170 (2010)], reduced spin fluctuations are observed leading to spin squeezing at -8.2dB and -2.5dB respectively in two-component atomic condensates exhibiting one-axis-twisting interactions (OAT). The noise reduction limit for the OAT interaction scales as $\propto 1/{N^{2/3}}$, which for a condensate with $N\sim 10^3$ atoms, is about 100 times below standard quantum limit. We present a scheme using repeated Rabi pulses capable of transforming the OAT spin squeezing into the two-axis-twisting type, leading to Heisenberg limited noise reduction $\propto 1/N$, or an extra 10-fold improvement for $N\sim 10^3$.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure