Spontaneous surface magnetization and chiral Majorana modes

Majorana fermions are often proposed to be realized by first singling out a single non-degenerate Fermi surface in spin-orbit coupled systems, and then imposing boundaries or defects. In this work, we take a different route starting with two degenerate Fermi surfaces without spin-orbit coupling, and show that by the method of "kink on boundary", the dispersive chiral Majorana fermions can be realized in superconducting systems with $p\pm is$ pairings. The surfaces of these systems develop spontaneous magnetizations whose directions are determined by the boundary orientations and the phase difference between the $p$ and $s$-component gap functions. Along the magnetic domain walls on the surface, there exist chiral Majorana fermions propagating unidirectionally, which can be conveniently dragged and controlled by external magnetic fields. Furthermore, the surface magnetization is shown to be a magnetoelectric effect based on a Ginzburg-Landau free energy analysis. We also discuss how to use the proximity effects to realize chiral Majorana fermions by performing the "kink on boundary" method

Low-rank SIFT: An Affine Invariant Feature for Place Recognition

In this paper, we present a novel affine-invariant feature based on SIFT, leveraging the regular appearance of man-made objects. The feature achieves full affine invariance without needing to simulate over affine parameter space. Low-rank SIFT, as we name the feature, is based on our observation that local tilt, which are caused by changes of camera axis orientation, could be normalized by converting local patches to standard low-rank forms. Rotation, translation and scaling invariance could be achieved in ways similar to SIFT. As an extension of SIFT, our method seeks to add prior to solve the ill-posed affine parameter estimation problem and normalizes them directly, and is applicable to objects with regular structures. Furthermore, owing to recent breakthrough in convex optimization, such parameter could be computed efficiently. We will demonstrate its effectiveness in place recognition as our major application. As extra contributions, we also describe our pipeline of constructing geotagged building database from the ground up, as well as an efficient scheme for automatic feature selection

Localized direct CP violation in B±→ρ0(ω)π±→π+π−π±B^\pm\rightarrow \rho^0 (\omega)\pi^\pm\rightarrow \pi^+ \pi^-\pi^\pm

We study the localized direct CP violation in the hadronic decays $B^\pm\rightarrow \rho^0 (\omega)\pi^\pm\rightarrow\pi^+ \pi^-\pi^\pm$, including the effect caused by an interesting mechanism involving the charge symmetry violating mixing between $\rho^0$ and $\omega$. We calculate the localized integrated direct CP violation when the low invariant mass of $\pi^+\pi^-$ [$m(\pi^+\pi^-)_{low}$] is near $\rho^0(770)$. For five models of form factors investigated, we find that the localized integrated direct CP violation varies from -0.0170 to -0.0860 in the ranges of parameters in our model when $0.750<m(\pi^+\pi^-)_{low}<0.800$\,GeV. This result, especially the sign, agrees with the experimental data and is independent of form factor models. The new experimental data shows that the signs of the localized integrated CP asymmetries in the regions $0.470<m(\pi^+\pi^-)_{low}<0.770$\,GeV and $0.770<m(\pi^+\pi^-)_{low}<0.920$\,GeV are positive and negative, respectively. We find that $\rho$-$\omega$ mixing makes the localized integrated CP asymmetry move towards the negative direction, and therefore contributes to the sign change in those two regions. This behavior is also model independent. We also calculate the localized integrated direct CP violating asymmetries in the regions $0.470<m(\pi^+\pi^-)_{low}<0.770$\,GeV and $0.770<m(\pi^+\pi^-)_{low}<0.920$\,GeV and find that they agree with the experimental data in some models of form factors.Comment: 22 pages, 2 figures. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:hep-ph/0602043, arXiv:hep-ph/0302156 by other author