Blue Phosphorene Oxide: Strain-tunable Quantum Phase Transitions and Novel 2D Emergent Fermions

Tunable quantum phase transitions and novel emergent fermions in solid state materials are fascinating subjects of research. Here, we propose a new stable two-dimensional (2D) material, the blue phosphorene oxide (BPO), which exhibits both. Based on first-principles calculations, we show that its equilibrium state is a narrow-bandgap semiconductor with three bands at low energy. Remarkably, a moderate strain can drive a semiconductor-to-semimetal quantum phase transition in BPO. At the critical transition point, the three bands cross at a single point at Fermi level, around which the quasiparticles are a novel type of 2D pseudospin-1 fermions. Going beyond the transition, the system becomes a symmetry-protected semimetal, for which the conduction and valence bands touch quadratically at a single Fermi point that is protected by symmetry, and the low-energy quasiparticles become another novel type of 2D double Weyl fermions. We construct effective models characterizing the phase transition and these novel emergent fermions, and we point out several exotic effects, including super Klein tunneling, supercollimation, and universal optical absorbance. Our result reveals BPO as an intriguing platform for the exploration of fundamental properties of quantum phase transitions and novel emergent fermions, and also suggests its great potential in nanoscale device applications.Comment: 23 pages, 5 figure

Copula-based Multimodal Data Fusion for Inference with Dependent Observations

Fusing heterogeneous data from multiple modalities for inference problems has been an attractive and important topic in recent years. There are several challenges in multi-modal fusion, such as data heterogeneity and data correlation. In this dissertation, we investigate inference problems with heterogeneous modalities by taking into account nonlinear cross-modal dependence. We apply copula based methodology to characterize this dependence. In distributed detection, the goal often is to minimize the probability of detection error at the fusion center (FC) based on a fixed number of observations collected by the sensors. We design optimal detection algorithms at the FC using a regular vine copula based fusion rule. Regular vine copula is an extremely flexible and powerful graphical model used to characterize complex dependence among multiple modalities. The proposed approaches are theoretically justified and are computationally efficient for sensor networks with a large number of sensors. With heterogeneous streaming data, the fusion methods applied for processing data streams should be fast enough to keep up with the high arrival rates of incoming data, and meanwhile provide solutions for inference problems (detection, classification, or estimation) with high accuracy. We propose a novel parallel platform, C-Storm (Copula-based Storm), by marrying copula-based dependence modeling for highly accurate inference and a highly-regarded parallel computing platform Storm for fast stream data processing. The efficacy of C-Storm is demonstrated. In this thesis, we consider not only decision level fusion but also fusion with heterogeneous high-level features. We investigate a supervised classification problem by fusing dependent high-level features extracted from multiple deep neural network (DNN) classifiers. We employ regular vine copula to fuse these high-level features. The efficacy of the combination of model-based method and deep learning is demonstrated. Besides fixed-sample-size (FSS) based inference problems, we study a distributed sequential detection problem with random-sample-size. The aim of the distributed sequential detection problem in a non-Bayesian framework is to minimize the average detection time while satisfying the pre-specified constraints on probabilities of false alarm and miss detection. We design local memory-less truncated sequential tests and propose a copula based sequential test at the FC. We show that by suitably designing the local thresholds and the truncation window, the local probabilities of false alarm and miss detection of the proposed local decision rules satisfy the pre-specified error probabilities. Also, we show the asymptotic optimality and time efficiency of the proposed distributed sequential scheme. In large scale sensors networks, we consider a collaborative distributed estimation problem with statistically dependent sensor observations, where there is no FC. To achieve greater sensor transmission and estimation efficiencies, we propose a two-step cluster-based collaborative distributed estimation scheme. In the first step, sensors form dependence driven clusters such that sensors in the same cluster are dependent while sensors from different clusters are independent, and perform copula-based maximum a posteriori probability (MAP) estimation via intra-cluster collaboration. In the second step, the estimates generated in the first step are shared via inter-cluster collaboration to reach an average consensus. The efficacy of the proposed scheme is justified

A Map to Locate COLD HEART of Chinese and English

The “physical heart” of people around the world is very similar, and this would result in the universality of metaphorical thinking, but the conceptualization of a “mental heart” can differ cross-culturally. This study contributes to the issue of universality vs. intercultural variability of conceptualizations regarding abstract concepts within the framework of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT). Cold heart-related metaphors were analyzed via qualitative and quantitative analysis of data collected from two authoritative corpora—Center for Chinese Linguistics (CCL) and Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). Results reveal that the universal bodily experience accounts for the shared source domain for a cold heart metaphor. However, the shared metaphor heart is temperature displays variations in detail. To construe cold heart-related metaphors in Chinese, we should mainly take a “patient view” to investigate the response from others which indicates the passiveness and less pronounced ego-centrality, while an “agent view” is generally adopted to study “cold heart” in English that focuses on the apathy to others which means that a human’s own initiated mind or attitude is the locus. These findings suggest that cultural variance in individualism vs. collectivism motivates different conceptualizations of cold heart