Circulator based on spoof surface plasmon polaritons

Circulators based on spoof surface plasmon polaritons are designed and analyzed. In the letter, we use blade structure to realize the propagation of SSPPs wave and a matching transition is used to feed energy from coplanar waveguide to the SSPPs. And the circulator shows good nonreciprocal transmission characteristics. The simulation results indicate that in the frequency band from 5 to 6.6 GHz, the isolation degree and return loss basically reaches 15dB and the insertion loss is less than 0.5dB. Moreover, the use of confinement electromagnetic waves can decrease the size of the ferrite and show a broadband characteristic.Comment: 3 pages, 6 figures, submitted to IEEE antennas and wireless propagation letters on 27-Mar-201

Electromagnetic interaction of arbitrary radial-dependent anisotropic spheres and improved invisibility for nonlinear-transformation-based cloaks

An analytical method of electromagnetic wave interactions with a general radially anisotropic cloak is established. It is able to deal with arbitrary parameters ($\epsilon_r(r)$, $\mu_r(r)$, $\epsilon_t(r)$ and $\mu_t(r)$) of a radially anisotropic inhomogeneous shell. The general cloaking condition is proposed from the wave relations for the first time. We derive the parameters of a novel class of spherical nonlinear cloaks and examine its invisibility performance by the proposed method at various nonlinear situations. Spherical metamaterial cloaks with improved invisibility performance is achieved with optimal nonlinearity in transformation and core-shell ratio.Comment: 19 pages, 9 figure

Benchmarking Chinese Text Recognition: Datasets, Baselines, and an Empirical Study

The flourishing blossom of deep learning has witnessed the rapid development of text recognition in recent years. However, the existing text recognition methods are mainly proposed for English texts. As another widely-spoken language, Chinese text recognition (CTR) in all ways has extensive application markets. Based on our observations, we attribute the scarce attention on CTR to the lack of reasonable dataset construction standards, unified evaluation protocols, and results of the existing baselines. To fill this gap, we manually collect CTR datasets from publicly available competitions, projects, and papers. According to application scenarios, we divide the collected datasets into four categories including scene, web, document, and handwriting datasets. Besides, we standardize the evaluation protocols in CTR. With unified evaluation protocols, we evaluate a series of representative text recognition methods on the collected datasets to provide baselines. The experimental results indicate that the performance of baselines on CTR datasets is not as good as that on English datasets due to the characteristics of Chinese texts that are quite different from the Latin alphabet. Moreover, we observe that by introducing radical-level supervision as an auxiliary task, the performance of baselines can be further boosted. The code and datasets are made publicly available at https://github.com/FudanVI/benchmarking-chinese-text-recognitionComment: Code is available at https://github.com/FudanVI/benchmarking-chinese-text-recognitio

Design and analysis of miniaturized low profile and second-order multi-band polarization selective surface for multipath communication application

In this paper, a novel frequency selective surface (FSS) is designed; it has the characteristics of the low profile, second-order, multi-band, and the remarkable polarization selection properties. In the following, such an FSS having polarization selection characteristics will be referred to simply as a polarization selection surface (PSS). In a specific frequency band, the proposed PSS has a second-order selective transmission characteristic for TE and TM waves. Based on the coupling resonance filtering mechanism, the proposed PSS is composed of three metallic layers separated by two layers of dielectric substrates, which serves as the spatial form of the second-order microwave filter. The proposed PSS uses a sub-wavelength periodic structure array consisting of a non-resonant unit, and the unit size and the period within the range of 0.08λ 1 -0.15λ 1 , where the λ 1 =40.76 mm is the first passband wavelength of free space, so the PSS miniaturization characteristic is remarkable. The theoretical analysis and measure results show that the proposed bandpass PSS has good second-order polarization selection characteristics, out-of-band suppression level, and the flat transmission band, compared with the first-order bandpass PSS. In the range of incident angle of 0°-60°, it has a stable frequency response. It provides a reference for the design of a polarization wave generator and a polarization separation structure in a multipath communication system. © 2019 IEEE

Recent developments of metamaterials/metasurfaces for RCS reduction

In this paper, recent developments of metamaterials and metasurfaces for RCS reduction are reviewed, including basic theory, working principle, design formula, and experimental verification. Super-thin cloaks mediated by metasurfaces can cloak objects with minor impacts on the original electromagnetic field distribution. RCS reduction can be achieved by reconfiguring scattering patterns using coding metasurfaces. Novel radar absorbing materials can be devised based on field enhancements of metamaterials. When combined with conventional radar absorbing materials, metamaterials can expand the bandwidth, enlarge the angular range, or reduce the weight. Future tendency and major challenges are also summarized

Direct field-to-pattern monolithic design of holographic metasurface via residual encoder-decoder convolutional neural network

Complex-amplitude holographic metasurfaces (CAHMs) with the flexibility in modulating phase and amplitude profiles have been used to manipulate the propagation of wavefront with an unprecedented level, leading to higher image-reconstruction quality compared with their natural counterparts. However, prevailing design methods of CAHMs are based on Huygens-Fresnel theory, meta-atom optimization, numerical simulation and experimental verification, which results in a consumption of computing resources. Here, we applied residual encoder-decoder convolutional neural network to directly map the electric field distributions and input images for monolithic metasurface design. A pretrained network is firstly trained by the electric field distributions calculated by diffraction theory, which is subsequently migrated as transfer learning framework to map the simulated electric field distributions and input images. The training results show that the normalized mean pixel error is about 3% on dataset. As verification, the metasurface prototypes are fabricated, simulated and measured. The reconstructed electric field of reverse-engineered metasurface exhibits high similarity to the target electric field, which demonstrates the effectiveness of our design. Encouragingly, this work provides a monolithic field-to-pattern design method for CAHMs, which paves a new route for the direct reconstruction of metasurfaces

Wideband hybrid metamaterial absorber via compound design of multiple mechanisms

Broadband and high efficiency are the two core indexes of absorption research, which usually requires a balance between them. Therefore, how to take into account both and achieve broadband and efficient absorption is a hot topic in current research. In this paper, by the compound design of multiple mechanisms, a kind of wideband hybrid metamaterial absorber (HMA) is proposed. The overall structure consists of a layer of patterned resistive film and a layer of magnetic absorbing material (MAM) separated by the air. The resistive layer is designed as square ring type to regulate the local magnetic field, which results in significant magnetic field enhancement within the MAM layer, and this mechanism provides a prerequisite for wideband and high-efficiency absorption in the low frequency band. Furthermore, due to the electrical losses of the resistive film, another absorption band is additionally excited in the high frequency band. Thanks to the multiple mechanisms, the absorption efficiency above 90% in the 3.2–22.0 GHz frequency band can be realized, and the thickness of the overall structure is 7.0 mm that is 0.07 of the wavelengths at the lowest frequency point. To demonstrate this method, a prototype is designed, fabricated and measured. Both the simulation and experiment results verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. This work provides a new method to design wideband and high-efficiency electromagnetic absorption structures and may find potential applications in multi-functional planar or conformal structures

Human MIEF1 recruits Drp1 to mitochondrial outer membranes and promotes mitochondrial fusion rather than fission

Mitochondrial morphology depends on the balance between fission and fusion events. This study identifies a receptor for the fission factor Drp1 within the mitochondrial outer membrane, which inhibits Drp1-mediated fission and activates fusion

Robust estimation of bacterial cell count from optical density

Optical density (OD) is widely used to estimate the density of cells in liquid culture, but cannot be compared between instruments without a standardized calibration protocol and is challenging to relate to actual cell count. We address this with an interlaboratory study comparing three simple, low-cost, and highly accessible OD calibration protocols across 244 laboratories, applied to eight strains of constitutive GFP-expressing E. coli. Based on our results, we recommend calibrating OD to estimated cell count using serial dilution of silica microspheres, which produces highly precise calibration (95.5% of residuals <1.2-fold), is easily assessed for quality control, also assesses instrument effective linear range, and can be combined with fluorescence calibration to obtain units of Molecules of Equivalent Fluorescein (MEFL) per cell, allowing direct comparison and data fusion with flow cytometry measurements: in our study, fluorescence per cell measurements showed only a 1.07-fold mean difference between plate reader and flow cytometry data

Location Optimization of Wireless Sensor Network in Intelligent Workshop Based on the Three-Dimensional Adaptive Fruit Fly Optimization Algorithm

The production process of modern manufacturing industry is complex and changeable, manufacturing resources have extensive dynamic characteristics. For effectively managing and controlling manufacturing resources, realizing real-time location data collection of intelligent workshop, a manufacturing resource location sensing architecture based on the wireless sensor network is proposed. For en-suring real-time accuracy of manufacturing resource location data in the intelligent workshop, a three-dimensional adaptive fruit fly optimization algorithm is de-signed to estimate the location coordinates, the new algorithm introduced the adaptive inertial weight coefficient, retained the advantage of strong local search ability of fruit fly optimization algorithm, improved the ability of global optimiza-tion, effectively solved the problem of three-dimensional location in intelligent workshop. The simulation results show that, the algorithm in this paper is applied to the location calculation of triangulation, which has smaller location error and shorter operation time, it improves the accuracy of the location data and meets the real-time location requirements of manufacturing resources such as intelligent workshop staff, materials, logistics vehicles etc. facilitate resource sensing and scheduling management, thereby improving management standards and product quality