Blue-and-White: Exploring Mixed Reality Technology for Representing and Facilitating Intercultural Dialogue in Museums

Since the 1980s, museums have been viewed as being able to promote conversations between communities in multicultural societies. The shift from the idea of a museum-going public to museum-going publics has contributed to efforts on the part of institutions to aid in addressing the diversity of experiences and interests that mark the postmodern world. The development of digital technology, mixed reality (MR), for example, has transformed the shared understanding of communication and the perception of information. This thesis presents an argument that MR can be effectively utilized to create a platform in which cross-cultural links between artefacts can be represented dynamically and interactively, to formulate a more diverse narrative about the history and material life, for museum audiences. By augmenting the narrative, the museum space can become a powerful platform to help audiences raise awareness of intercultural dialogue. A mobile-based augmented reality (AR) prototype that uses the story of what is commonly known as “Blue-and-White pottery” [青花; pinyin: qīng-huā or blue patterns and flowers] as a case study was developed to demonstrate the argument. This thesis concludes with a discussion of the potential for emerging technologies to solve contemporary problems in museums

Entanglement dynamics of a superconducting phase qubit coupled to a two-level system

We report the observation and quantitative characterization of driven and spontaneous oscillations of quantum entanglement, as measured by concurrence, in a bipartite system consisting of a macroscopic Josephson phase qubit coupled to a microscopic two-level system. The data clearly show the behavior of entanglement dynamics such as sudden death and revival, and the effect of decoherence and ac driving on entanglement.Comment: 6 pages,4 figure

Tunable Quantum Beam Splitters for Coherent Manipulation of a Solid-State Tripartite Qubit System

Coherent control of quantum states is at the heart of implementing solid-state quantum processors and testing quantum mechanics at the macroscopic level. Despite significant progress made in recent years in controlling single- and bi-partite quantum systems, coherent control of quantum wave function in multipartite systems involving artificial solid-state qubits has been hampered due to the relatively short decoherence time and lacking of precise control methods. Here we report the creation and coherent manipulation of quantum states in a tripartite quantum system, which is formed by a superconducting qubit coupled to two microscopic two-level systems (TLSs). The avoided crossings in the system's energy-level spectrum due to the qubit-TLS interaction act as tunable quantum beam splitters of wave functions. Our result shows that the Landau-Zener-St\"{u}ckelberg interference has great potential in the precise control of the quantum states in the tripartite system.Comment: 24 pages, 3 figure

Stacking tunable interlayer magnetism in bilayer CrI3

Diverse interlayer tunability of physical properties of two-dimensional layers mostly lies in the covalent-like quasi-bonding that is significant in electronic structures but rather weak for energetics. Such characteristics result in various stacking orders that are energetically comparable but may significantly differ in terms of electronic structures, e.g. magnetism. Inspired by several recent experiments showing interlayer anti-ferromagnetically coupled CrI3 bilayers, we carried out first-principles calculations for CrI3 bilayers. We found that the anti-ferromagnetic coupling results from a new stacking order with the C2/m space group symmetry, rather than the graphene-like one with R3 as previously believed. Moreover, we demonstrated that the intra- and inter-layer couplings in CrI3 bilayer are governed by two different mechanisms, namely ferromagnetic super-exchange and direct-exchange interactions, which are largely decoupled because of their significant difference in strength at the strong- and weak-interaction limits. This allows the much weaker interlayer magnetic coupling to be more feasibly tuned by stacking orders solely. Given the fact that interlayer magnetic properties can be altered by changing crystal structure with different stacking orders, our work opens a new paradigm for tuning interlayer magnetic properties with the freedom of stacking order in two dimensional layered materials

Detection of small single-cycle signals by stochastic resonance using a bistable superconducting quantum interference device

We propose and experimentally demonstrate detecting small single-cycle and few-cycle signals by using the symmetric double-well potential of a radio frequency superconducting quantum interference device (rf-SQUID). We show that the response of this bistable system to single- and few-cycle signals has a non-monotonic dependence on the noise strength. The response, measured by the probability of transition from initial potential well to the opposite one, becomes maximum when the noise-induced transition rate between the two stable states of the rf-SQUID is comparable to the signal frequency. Comparison to numerical simulations shows that the phenomenon is a manifestation of stochastic resonance.Comment: 5 pages 3 figure

Experimental demonstrations of high-Q superconducting coplanar waveguide resonators

We designed and successfully fabricated an absorption-type of superconducting coplanar waveguide (CPW) resonators. The resonators are made from a Niobium film (about 160 nm thick) on a high-resistance Si substrate, and each resonator is fabricated as a meandered quarter-wavelength transmission line (one end shorts to the ground and another end is capacitively coupled to a through feedline). With a vector network analyzer we measured the transmissions of the applied microwave through the resonators at ultra-low temperature (e.g., at 20 mK), and found that their loaded quality factors are significantly high, i.e., up to 10^6. With the temperature increases slowly from the base temperature (i.e., 20 mK), we observed the resonance frequencies of the resonators are blue shifted and the quality factors are lowered slightly. In principle, this type of CPW-device can integrate a series of resonators with a common feedline, making it a promising candidate of either the data bus for coupling the distant solid-state qubits or the sensitive detector of single photons.Comment: Accepted by Chinese Science Bulleti

Divergent Attitudes Regarding the Benefits of Face Masks in Aviation Colleges and Universities

Opinions and practices regarding face masks (FM) to attenuate COVID-19’s spread remains polarized across the United States. We examined whether these attitudes extend to the aviation collegiate community. A 14-question survey was sent to 90 aviation colleges and universities throughout the country. Responses were solicited from students, faculty, and staff. Of the 598 respondents, 77% were students, 13% were faculty, and 10% were staff. Pilots comprised 66% of the respondents. A Principal Component Analysis reduced the questions to two scales: Benefits and Inconvenience. Females, non-pilots, and older respondents reported greater benefits to wearing a FM and fewer inconveniences. A multiple regression showed aviation colleges and universities located in states which had FM mandates, higher likelihood of community compliance, lower rates of COVID-19 in their state, and reports of less inconvenience predicted attitudes of greater benefits of wearing a FM. Additional comments were provided by 28% of the respondents, showing strongly polarized attitudes about the benefits of FMs. Respondents who had negative attitudes about the benefits of wearing FMs, nevertheless reported compliance on college campus. As leaders in education, collegiate aviation has a responsibility to educate their students, faculty, and staff of the importance of public health measures, dispelling misinformation, and modelling behavior to increase compliance with wearing FMs

Quantum Dynamics of a Microwave Driven Superconducting Phase Qubit Coupled to a Two-Level System

We present an analytical and comprehensive description of the quantum dynamics of a microwave resonantly driven superconducting phase qubit coupled to a microscopic two-level system (TLS), covering a wide range of the external microwave field strength. Our model predicts several interesting phenomena in such an ac driven four-level bipartite system including anomalous Rabi oscillations, high-contrast beatings of Rabi oscillations, and extraordinary two-photon transitions. Our experimental results in a coupled qubit-TLS system agree quantitatively very well with the predictions of the theoretical model.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figure