In-Orbit Modelling and Calibration of the Sun Sensors on UoSAT-12 and Tsinghua-1 Satellites

The modelling relations and calibration techniques of the miniature analogue sun sensors, developed at Surrey Satellite Technology Limited (SSTL), are discussed in this paper. Two model equations, an algebraic model based on a multi-variable polynomial algebraic curve-fitting procedure and a physical model based on analytical geometry relations, were developed. Parameter sensitivity analyses were conducted for the physical model, and an in-orbit calibration approach is proposed and was implemented with the sun sensors on-board UoSAT-12 and Tsinghua-1. A sequential batch filter algorithm was developed, based on the principle of the least-square estimation for regression models, to handle the large amount of in-orbit data in a sequential way. Satisfactory performance improvements have been achieved through the in-orbit calibration analyses for both satellites

Abelian and Non-Abelian Quantum Geometric Tensor

We propose a generalized quantum geometric tenor to understand topological quantum phase transitions, which can be defined on the parameter space with the adiabatic evolution of a quantum many-body system. The generalized quantum geometric tenor contains two different local measurements, the non-Abelian Riemannian metric and the non-Abelian Berry curvature, which are recognized as two natural geometric characterizations for the change of the ground-state properties when the parameter of the Hamiltonian varies. Our results show the symmetry-breaking and topological quantum phase transitions can be understood as the singular behavior of the local and topological properties of the quantum geometric tenor in the thermodynamic limit.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figure

High-definition vertically aligned liquid crystal microdisplays using a circularly polarized light

A high-definition vertically aligned liquid crystal (LC) microdisplay exhibits a excellent contrast ratio, but its fringing field effect splits the bright state unevenly and leads to a very slow response time. By utilizing a circularly polarized light instead of conventional linearly polarized light, we have overcome the long-standing problems of poor sharpness, low brightness, and slow response time. Confirming computer simulations agree with the experimental results well. This approach can be applied to both reflective and transmissive LC microdisplays

Discovery of six high-redshift quasars with the Lijiang 2.4m telescope and the Multiple Mirror Telescope

Quasars with redshifts greater than 4 are rare, and can be used to probe the structure and evolution of the early universe. Here we report the discovery of six new quasars with $i$-band magnitudes brighter than 19.5 and redshifts between 2.4 and 4.6 from the YFOSC spectroscopy of the Lijiang 2.4m telescope in February, 2012. These quasars are in the list of $z>3.6$ quasar candidates selected by using our proposed $J-K/i-Y$ criterion and the photometric redshift estimations from the SDSS optical and UKIDSS near-IR photometric data. Nine candidates were observed by YFOSC, and five among six new quasars were identified as $z>3.6$ quasars. One of the other three objects was identified as a star and the other two were unidentified due to the lower signal-to-noise ratio of their spectra. This is the first time that $z>4$ quasars have been discovered using a telescope in China. Thanks to the Chinese Telescope Access Program (TAP), the redshift of 4.6 for one of these quasars was confirmed by the Multiple Mirror Telescope (MMT) Red Channel spectroscopy. The continuum and emission line properties of these six quasars, as well as their central black hole masses and Eddington ratios, were obtained.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures, published in Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics (RAA) as a lette

Does Hawking effect always degrade fidelity of quantum teleportation in Schwarzschild spacetime?

Previous studies have shown that the Hawking effect always destroys quantum correlations and the fidelity of quantum teleportation in the Schwarzschild black hole. Here, we investigate the fidelity of quantum teleportation of Dirac fields between users in Schwarzschild spacetime. We find that, with the increase of the Hawking temperature, the fidelity of quantum teleportation can monotonically increase, monotonically decrease, or non-monotonically increase, depending on the choice of the initial state, which means that the Hawking effect can create net fidelity of quantum teleportation. This striking result banishes the extended belief that the Hawking effect of the black hole can only destroy the fidelity of quantum teleportation. We also find that quantum steering cannot fully guarantee the fidelity of quantum teleportation in Schwarzschild spacetime. This new unexpected source may provide a new idea for the experimental evidence of the Hawking effect.Comment: 21 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication in JHE

The Final SDSS High-Redshift Quasar Sample of 52 Quasars at z>5.7

We present the discovery of nine quasars at $z\sim6$ identified in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) imaging data. This completes our survey of $z\sim6$ quasars in the SDSS footprint. Our final sample consists of 52 quasars at $5.7<z\le6.4$, including 29 quasars with $z_{\rm AB}\le20$ mag selected from 11,240 deg$^2$ of the SDSS single-epoch imaging survey (the main survey), 10 quasars with $20\le z_{\rm AB}\le20.5$ selected from 4223 deg$^2$ of the SDSS overlap regions (regions with two or more imaging scans), and 13 quasars down to $z_{\rm AB}\approx22$ mag from the 277 deg$^2$ in Stripe 82. They span a wide luminosity range of $-29.0\le M_{1450}\le-24.5$. This well-defined sample is used to derive the quasar luminosity function (QLF) at $z\sim6$. After combining our SDSS sample with two faint ($M_{1450}\ge-23$ mag) quasars from the literature, we obtain the parameters for a double power-law fit to the QLF. The bright-end slope $\beta$ of the QLF is well constrained to be $\beta=-2.8\pm0.2$. Due to the small number of low-luminosity quasars, the faint-end slope $\alpha$ and the characteristic magnitude $M_{1450}^{\ast}$ are less well constrained, with $\alpha=-1.90_{-0.44}^{+0.58}$ and $M^{\ast}=-25.2_{-3.8}^{+1.2}$ mag. The spatial density of luminous quasars, parametrized as $\rho(M_{1450}<-26,z)=\rho(z=6)\,10^{k(z-6)}$, drops rapidly from $z\sim5$ to 6, with $k=-0.72\pm0.11$. Based on our fitted QLF and assuming an IGM clumping factor of $C=3$, we find that the observed quasar population cannot provide enough photons to ionize the $z\sim6$ IGM at $\sim90$\% confidence. Quasars may still provide a significant fraction of the required photons, although much larger samples of faint quasars are needed for more stringent constraints on the quasar contribution to reionization.Comment: 20 pages, 12 figures, Accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journa

Revealing metabolite biomarkers for acupuncture treatment by linear programming based feature selection

BACKGROUND: Acupuncture has been practiced in China for thousands of years as part of the Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) and has gradually accepted in western countries as an alternative or complementary treatment. However, the underlying mechanism of acupuncture, especially whether there exists any difference between varies acupoints, remains largely unknown, which hinders its widespread use. RESULTS: In this study, we develop a novel Linear Programming based Feature Selection method (LPFS) to understand the mechanism of acupuncture effect, at molecular level, by revealing the metabolite biomarkers for acupuncture treatment. Specifically, we generate and investigate the high-throughput metabolic profiles of acupuncture treatment at several acupoints in human. To select the subsets of metabolites that best characterize the acupuncture effect for each meridian point, an optimization model is proposed to identify biomarkers from high-dimensional metabolic data from case and control samples. Importantly, we use nearest centroid as the prototype to simultaneously minimize the number of selected features and the leave-one-out cross validation error of classifier. We compared the performance of LPFS to several state-of-the-art methods, such as SVM recursive feature elimination (SVM-RFE) and sparse multinomial logistic regression approach (SMLR). We find that our LPFS method tends to reveal a small set of metabolites with small standard deviation and large shifts, which exactly serves our requirement for good biomarker. Biologically, several metabolite biomarkers for acupuncture treatment are revealed and serve as the candidates for further mechanism investigation. Also biomakers derived from five meridian points, Zusanli (ST36), Liangmen (ST21), Juliao (ST3), Yanglingquan (GB34), and Weizhong (BL40), are compared for their similarity and difference, which provide evidence for the specificity of acupoints. CONCLUSIONS: Our result demonstrates that metabolic profiling might be a promising method to investigate the molecular mechanism of acupuncture. Comparing with other existing methods, LPFS shows better performance to select a small set of key molecules. In addition, LPFS is a general methodology and can be applied to other high-dimensional data analysis, for example cancer genomics