12,647 research outputs found
Radiative and flavor-violating transitions of leptons from interactions with color-octet particles
It has been recently proposed that neutrino mass could originate from Yukawa
interactions of leptons with new colored particles. This raises the interesting
possibility of testing mass generation through copious production of those
particles at hadron colliders. A realistic assessment of it however should take
into account how large those interactions could be from available precision
results. In this work we make a systematic analysis to the flavor structure in
Yukawa couplings, provide a convenient parametrization to it, and investigate
the rare radiative and pure leptonic decays of the muon and tau leptons. For
general values of parameters the muon decays set stringent constraints on the
couplings, and all rare tau decays are far below the current experimental
sensitivity. However, there is room in parameter space in which the muon decays
could be significantly suppressed by destructive interference between colored
particles without generically reducing the couplings themselves. This is also
the region of parameters that is relevant to collider physics. We show that for
this part of parameter space some tau decays can reach or are close to the
current level of precision.Comment: 20 pages, 7 figure
Constraints on Non-Commutative Physics Scale with Neutrino-Electron Scattering
Neutrino-electron scatterings () are purely leptonic processes with
robust Standard Model (SM) predictions. Their measurements can therefore
provide constraints to physics beyond SM. Non-commutative (NC) field theories
modify space-time commutation relations, and allow neutrino electromagnetic
couplings at the tree level. Their contribution to neutrino-electron scattering
cross-section was derived. Constraints were placed on the NC scale parameter
from experiments with reactor and accelerator
neutrinos. The most stringent limit of at 95%
confidence level improves over the direct bounds from collider experiments.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures, 2 tables, V2: minor revisions to match published
versio
Record Maximum Oscillation Frequency in C-face Epitaxial Graphene Transistors
The maximum oscillation frequency (fmax) quantifies the practical upper bound
for useful circuit operation. We report here an fmax of 70 GHz in transistors
using epitaxial graphene grown on the C-face of SiC. This is a significant
improvement over Si-face epitaxial graphene used in the prior high frequency
transistor studies, exemplifying the superior electronics potential of C-face
epitaxial graphene. Careful transistor design using a high {\kappa} dielectric
T-gate and self-aligned contacts, further contributed to the record-breaking
fmax
Controlling Excitations Inversion of a Cooper Pair Box Interacting with a Nanomechanical Resonator
We investigate the action of time dependent detunings upon the excitation
inversion of a Cooper pair box interacting with a nanomechanical resonator. The
method employs the Jaynes-Cummings model with damping, assuming different decay
rates of the Cooper pair box and various fixed and t-dependent detunings. It is
shown that while the presence of damping plus constant detunings destroy the
collapse/revival effects, convenient choices of time dependent detunings allow
one to reconstruct such events in a perfect way. It is also shown that the mean
excitation of the nanomechanical resonator is more robust against damping of
the Cooper pair box for convenient values of t-dependent detunings.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figure
Counterion adsorption on flexible polyelectrolytes: comparison of theories
Counterion adsorption on a flexible polyelectrolyte chain in a spherical
cavity is considered by taking a "permuted" charge distribution on the chain so
that the "adsorbed" counterions are allowed to move along the backbone. We
compute the degree of ionization by using self-consistent field theory (SCFT)
and compare with the previously developed variational theory. Analysis of
various contributions to the free energy in both theories reveals that the
equilibrium degree of ionization is attained mainly as an interplay of the
adsorption energy of counterions on the backbone, the translational entropy of
the small ions, and their correlated density fluctuations. Degree of ionization
computed from SCFT is significantly lower than that from the variational
formalism. The difference is entirely due to the density fluctuations of the
small ions in the system, which are accounted for in the variational procedure.
When these fluctuations are deliberately suppressed in the truncated
variational procedure, there emerges a remarkable quantitative agreement in the
various contributing factors to the equilibrium degree of ionization, in spite
of the fundamental differences in the approximations and computational
procedures used in these two schemes. Nevertheless, since the significant
effects from density fluctuations of small ions are not captured by the SCFT,
and due to the close agreement between SCFT and the other contributing factors
in the more transparent variational procedure, the latter is a better
computational tool for obtaining the degree of ionization
Promoting influenza prevention for elderly people in Hong Kong using health action process approach: Study protocol
Background: People 65 years or older are at greater risk of serious complications from the seasonal influenza compared with young. To promote elderly people's behavioral compliance toward influenza prevention, the aim of the current project is to develop, implement, and evaluate a theory-based low-administration-cost intervention building on a leading psychological theory, the Health Action Process Approach (HAPA). Methods: The target group is Hong Kong Chinese elderly people aged 65 or older who rarely or never adopt any preventive actions. This project will be conducted in three phases over 24 months. In phase 1, intervention program will be developed building on the HAPA theoretical framework which comprises both the initiation and maintenance of influenza prevention behaviors. In phase 2, intervention will be implemented and evaluated using a randomized controlled trial, including: (a) behavior initiation only, (b) behavior initiation + behavior maintenance, and (c) control group. Both the initiation and maintenance components will comprise weekly-delivered telephone-based individual intervention sessions in 3 months. In phase 3, outcome evaluation of behavioral and psychological variables and process evaluation will be conducted. The effectiveness of the intervention will be analyzed using a series of linear mixed models on each behavioral and psychological outcome variable. Structural equation modelling will be used to test the hypothesized theoretical sequence in the HAPA model. Discussion: The proposed project is expected to design theory-based intervention materials to promote the influenza prevention behaviors in Hong Kong elderly people and provide information on its effectiveness and the potential changing mechanism of behavior initiation and maintenance. Trial registration: This randomized controlled trial was funded by the Health and Medical Research Fund (HMRF), Food and Health Bureau of the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (Ref: 16151222) and was registered on 13/10/2017 at CCRB Clinical Trials Registry of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, a Partner Registry of a WHO Primary Registry (Ref: CUHK-CCRB00567)
Group Fisher Pruning for Practical Network Compression
Network compression has been widely studied since it is able to reduce the memory and computation cost during inference. However, previous methods seldom deal with complicated structures like residual connections, group/depth-wise convolution and feature pyramid network, where channels of multiple layers are coupled and need to be pruned simultaneously. In this paper, we present a general channel pruning approach that can be applied to various complicated structures. Particularly, we propose a layer grouping algorithm to find coupled channels automatically. Then we derive a unified metric based on Fisher information to evaluate the importance of a single channel and coupled channels. Moreover, we find that inference speedup on GPUs is more correlated with the reduction of memory rather than FLOPs, and thus we employ the memory reduction of each channel to normalize the importance. Our method can be used to prune any structures including those with coupled channels. We conduct extensive experiments on various backbones, including the classic ResNet and ResNeXt, mobile-friendly MobileNetV2, and the NAS-based RegNet, both on image classification and object detection which is under-explored. Experimental results validate that our method can effectively prune sophisticated networks, boosting inference speed without sacrificing accuracy
Temperature Dependence of Photoelectrical Properties of Single Selenium Nanowires
Influence of temperature on photoconductivity of single Se nanowires has been studied. Time response of photocurrent at both room temperature and low temperature suggests that the trap states play an important role in the photoelectrical process. Further investigations about light intensity dependence on photocurrent at different temperatures reveal that the trap states significantly affect the carrier generation and recombination. This work may be valuable for improving the device optoelectronic performances by understanding the photoelectrical properties
Effective electro-optical modulation with high extinction ratio by a graphene-silicon microring resonator
Graphene opens up for novel optoelectronic applications thanks to its high
carrier mobility, ultra-large absorption bandwidth, and extremely fast material
response. In particular, the opportunity to control optoelectronic properties
through tuning of Fermi level enables electro-optical modulation,
optical-optical switching, and other optoelectronics applications. However,
achieving a high modulation depth remains a challenge because of the modest
graphene-light interaction in the graphene-silicon devices, typically,
utilizing only a monolayer or few layers of graphene. Here, we comprehensively
study the interaction between graphene and a microring resonator, and its
influence on the optical modulation depth. We demonstrate graphene-silicon
microring devices showing a high modulation depth of 12.5 dB with a relatively
low bias voltage of 8.8 V. On-off electro-optical switching with an extinction
ratio of 3.8 dB is successfully demonstrated by applying a square-waveform with
a 4 V peak-to-peak voltage.Comment: 12 pages, including 7 figure
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