The Development of Polymer-coated Electrodes for Chemical Detection

This research focuses on the development of simple and cost effective approaches for making electrochemical sensors with a great sensitivity and selectivity. As an economic and abundant starting material, organic substrates were investigated to making conductive polymers that showed promising electrocatalytic activities. Firstly, a poly(4-bromoaniline) film was successfully synthesized on a gold electrode and the porous film which was made up of nano-ribbons on the Au electrode was used for the recognition of amino acids enantiomers. Secondly, different halogen ions were introduced to manifest the properties of the synthesized polymers. The results show that bromide ions have significantly inhibited the transition of leucoemeraldine to emeraldine, letting the PANI polymer to be in Pernigraniline form, which exhibited much improved performance in pH sensing. In addition, a simple way to controllably deposit copper nanoparticles inside poly-2,5-dimethoxyaniline matrix, which can be employed as a glucose sensor, was developed

SimPLE: Similar Pseudo Label Exploitation for Semi-Supervised Classification

A common classification task situation is where one has a large amount of data available for training, but only a small portion is annotated with class labels. The goal of semi-supervised training, in this context, is to improve classification accuracy by leverage information not only from labeled data but also from a large amount of unlabeled data. Recent works have developed significant improvements by exploring the consistency constrain between differently augmented labeled and unlabeled data. Following this path, we propose a novel unsupervised objective that focuses on the less studied relationship between the high confidence unlabeled data that are similar to each other. The new proposed Pair Loss minimizes the statistical distance between high confidence pseudo labels with similarity above a certain threshold. Combining the Pair Loss with the techniques developed by the MixMatch family, our proposed SimPLE algorithm shows significant performance gains over previous algorithms on CIFAR-100 and Mini-ImageNet, and is on par with the state-of-the-art methods on CIFAR-10 and SVHN. Furthermore, SimPLE also outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in the transfer learning setting, where models are initialized by the weights pre-trained on ImageNet or DomainNet-Real. The code is available at github.com/zijian-hu/SimPLE.Comment: Accepted to CVPR 2021. First two authors contributed equall

In vitro study of surface functionalization of titanium substrates for potential enhancement of osseointegration and reduction of bacterial infection

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Correlated flat bands in the paramagnetic phase of triangular antiferromagnets Na2_2BaX(PO4_4)2_2 (X = Mn, Co, Ni)

Flat band systems in condensed matter physics are intriguing because they can exhibit exotic phases and unconventional properties. In this work, we studied three correlated magnetic systems, Na$_2$BaX(PO$_4$)$_2$ (X = Mn, Co, Ni), and revealed their unusual electronic structure and magnetic properties. Despite their different effective angular momentum, our first-principles calculations showed a similar electronic structure among them. However, their different valence configurations led to different responses to electronic correlations in the high-temperature paramagnetic phase. Using the dynamical mean-field method, we found that all systems can be understood as a multi-band Hubbard model with Hund'ss coupling. Our calculations of spin susceptibility and the {\it ab-initio} estimation of magnetic exchange coupling indicated strong intra-plane antiferromagnetic coupling and weak inter-plane coupling in all systems. The ground states of these systems are largely degenerate. It is likely that none of these magnetic states would dominate over the others, leading to the possibility of quantum spin liquid states in these systems. Our work unifies the understanding of these three structurally similar systems and opens new avenues for exploring correlated flat bands with distinct electronic and magnetic responses.Comment: 11 pages and 4 figure

Construction of multi-mineral digital rocks for upscaling the numerical simulation of tight rock physical properties

Tight sandstone reservoirs are characterized by multi-scale pore space and high clay content, resulting in intricate rock physical responses. In this work, multi-scale imaging techniques, including computed tomography and stitched scanning electron microscopy, are applied to identify the large intergranular pores and micropores within major minerals. The pore structure of tight sandstones is quantitatively investigated using multi-scale images. Besides, multi-mineral digital rocks are constructed by performing registration and segmentation processing on the images obtained from microcomputed tomography and energy-dispersive scanning electron microscopy. These digital rocks are treated as composite materials consisting of different mineral types and micro-porosities, which enables the upscaling of the numerical simulation of rock physics properties. The results reveal that residual intergranular pores are interconnected through micropores within clay minerals, which significantly influences the electrical conductivities and permeabilities of tight sandstones. The proposed upscaling method can effectively couple the contribution of formation brine in multi-scale pores and clay minerals to bulk rock physics properties. This approach is suitable for the numerical simulation of diverse rock physical properties and can be applied to various tight reservoirs.Document Type: PerspectiveCited as: Hu, J., Xiao, Z., Ni, H., Liu, X. Construction of multi-mineral digital rocks for upscaling the numerical simulation of tight rock physical properties. Advances in Geo-Energy Research, 2023, 9(1): 68-70. https://doi.org/10.46690/ager.2023.07.0

Prospects of Searching for Type Ia Supernovae with 2.5-m Wide Field Survey Telescope

Type Ia Supernovae (SNe Ia) are the thermonuclear explosion of a carbon-oxygen white dwarf (WD) and are well-known as a distance indicator. However, it is still unclear how WDs increase their mass near the Chandrasekhar limit and how the thermonuclear runaway happens. The observational clues associated with these open questions, such as the photometric data within hours to days since the explosion, are scarce. Thus, an essential way is to discover SNe Ia at specific epochs with optimal surveys. The 2.5-m Wide Field Survey Telescope (WFST) is an upcoming survey facility deployed in western China. In this paper, we assess the detecability of SNe Ia with mock observations of WFST. Followed by the volumetric rate, we generate a spectral series of SNe Ia based on a data-based model and introduce the line-of-sight extinction to calculate the brightness from the observer. By comparing with the detection limit of WFST, which is affected by the observing conditions, we can count the number of SNe Ia discovered by mock WFST observations. We expect that WFST can find more than $3.0\times10^{4}$ pre-maximum SNe Ia within one-year running. In particular, WFST could discover about 45 bright SNe Ia, 99 early-phase SNe Ia, or $1.1\times10^{4}$ well-observed SNe Ia with the hypothesized Wide, Deep, or Medium mode, respectively, suggesting WFST will be an influential facility in time-domain astronomy.Comment: Accepted by Univers