Soft self-assembly of Weyl materials for light and sound

Soft materials can self-assemble into highly structured phases which replicate at the mesoscopic scale the symmetry of atomic crystals. As such, they offer an unparalleled platform to design mesostructured materials for light and sound. Here, we present a bottom-up approach based on self-assembly to engineer three-dimensional photonic and phononic crystals with topologically protected Weyl points. In addition to angular and frequency selectivity of their bulk optical response, Weyl materials are endowed with topological surface states, which allows for the existence of one-way channels even in the presence of time-reversal invariance. Using a combination of group-theoretical methods and numerical simulations, we identify the general symmetry constraints that a self-assembled structure has to satisfy in order to host Weyl points, and describe how to achieve such constraints using a symmetry-driven pipeline for self-assembled material design and discovery. We illustrate our general approach using block copolymer self-assembly as a model system.Comment: published version, SI are available as ancillary files, code and data are available on Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1182581, PNAS (2018

The Light and Period Variations of the Eclipsing Binary BX Draconis

New CCD photometric observations of BX Dra were obtained for 26 nights from 2009 April to 2010 June. The long-term photometric behaviors of the system are presented from detailed studies of the period and light variations, based on the historical data and our new observations. All available light curves display total eclipses at secondary minima and inverse O'Connell effects with Max I fainter than Max II, which are satisfactorily modeled by adding the slightly time-varying hot spot on the primary star. A total of 87 times of minimum light spanning over about 74 yrs, including our 22 timing measurements, were used for ephemeris computations. Detailed analysis of the O-C diagram showed that the orbital period has changed in combinations with an upward parabola and a sinusoidal variation. The continuous period increase with a rate of +5.65 \times 10^-7 d yr^-1 is consistent with that calculated from the Wilson-Devinney synthesis code. It can be interpreted as a mass transfer from the secondary to the primary star at a rate of 2.74 \times 10^-7 M\odot yr^-1, which is one of the largest rates for contact systems. The most likely explanation of the sinusoidal variation with a period of 30.2 yrs and a semi-amplitude of 0.0062 d is a light-traveltime effect due to the existence of a circumbinary object. We suggest that BX Dra is probably a triple system, consisting of a primary star with a spectral type of F0, its secondary component of spectral type F1-2, and an unseen circumbinary object with a minimum mass of M3 = 0.23 M\odot.Comment: 24 pages, including 5 figures and 9 tables, accepted for publication in PAS

Electrical Investigation of the Oblique Hanle Effect in Ferromagnet/Oxide/Semiconductor Contacts

We have investigated the electrical Hanle effect with magnetic fields applied at an oblique angle ({\theta}) to the spin direction (the oblique Hanle effect, OHE) in CoFe/MgO/semiconductor (SC) contacts by employing a three-terminal measurement scheme. The electrical oblique Hanle signals obtained in CoFe/MgO/Si and CoFe/MgO/Ge contacts show clearly different line shapes depending on the spin lifetime of the host SC. Notably, at moderate magnetic fields, the asymptotic values of the oblique Hanle signals (in both contacts) are consistently reduced by a factor of cos^2({\theta}) irrespective of the bias current and temperature. These results are in good agreement with predictions of the spin precession and relaxation model for the electrical oblique Hanle effect. At high magnetic fields where the magnetization of CoFe is significantly tilted from the film plane to the magnetic field direction, we find that the observed angular dependence of voltage signals in the CoFe/MgO/Si and CoFe/MgO/Ge contacts are well explained by the OHE, considering the misalignment angle between the external magnetic field and the magnetization of CoFe.Comment: 19 pages, 8 figure

Follow the Footprints: Self-supervised Traversability Estimation for Off-road Vehicle Navigation based on Geometric and Visual Cues

In this study, we address the off-road traversability estimation problem, that predicts areas where a robot can navigate in off-road environments. An off-road environment is an unstructured environment comprising a combination of traversable and non-traversable spaces, which presents a challenge for estimating traversability. This study highlights three primary factors that affect a robot's traversability in an off-road environment: surface slope, semantic information, and robot platform. We present two strategies for estimating traversability, using a guide filter network (GFN) and footprint supervision module (FSM). The first strategy involves building a novel GFN using a newly designed guide filter layer. The GFN interprets the surface and semantic information from the input data and integrates them to extract features optimized for traversability estimation. The second strategy involves developing an FSM, which is a self-supervision module that utilizes the path traversed by the robot in pre-driving, also known as a footprint. This enables the prediction of traversability that reflects the characteristics of the robot platform. Based on these two strategies, the proposed method overcomes the limitations of existing methods, which require laborious human supervision and lack scalability. Extensive experiments in diverse conditions, including automobiles and unmanned ground vehicles, herbfields, woodlands, and farmlands, demonstrate that the proposed method is compatible for various robot platforms and adaptable to a range of terrains. Code is available at https://github.com/yurimjeon1892/FtFoot.Comment: Accepted to IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 202