Local rectification of heat flux

We present a chain-of-atoms model where heat is rectified, with different fluxes from the hot to the cold baths located at the chain boundaries when the temperature bias is reversed. The chain is homogeneous except for boundary effects and a local modification of the interactions at one site, the "impurity". The rectification mechanism is due here to the localized impurity, the only asymmetrical element of the structure, apart from the externally imposed temperature bias, and does not rely on putting in contact different materials or other known mechanisms such as grading or long-range interactions. The effect survives if all interaction forces are linear except the ones for the impurity.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figure

Learning-based Network Path Planning for Traffic Engineering

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Elsevier via the DOI in this recordRecent advances in traffic engineering offer a series of techniques to address the network problems due to the explosive growth of Internet traffic. In traffic engineering, dynamic path planning is essential for prevalent applications, e.g., load balancing, traffic monitoring and firewall. Application-specific methods can indeed improve the network performance but can hardly be extended to general scenarios. Meanwhile, massive data generated in the current Internet has not been fully exploited, which may convey much valuable knowledge and information to facilitate traffic engineering. In this paper, we propose a learning-based network path planning method under forwarding constraints for finer-grained and effective traffic engineering. We form the path planning problem as the problem of inferring a sequence of nodes in a network path and adapt a sequence-to-sequence model to learn implicit forwarding paths based on empirical network traffic data. To boost the model performance, attention mechanism and beam search are adapted to capture the essential sequential features of the nodes in a path and guarantee the path connectivity. To validate the effectiveness of the derived model, we implement it in Mininet emulator environment and leverage the traffic data generated by both a real-world GEANT network topology and a grid network topology to train and evaluate the model. Experiment results exhibit a high testing accuracy and imply the superiority of our proposal.This work is partially supported by the UK EPSRC project (Grant No.:EP/R030863/1

Litter decomposition in a subtropical plantation in Qianyanzhou, China

A long-term (20 months) bulk litter decomposition experiment was conducted in a subtropical plantation in southern China in order to test the hypothesis that stable isotope discrimination occurs during litter decomposition and that litter decomposition increases concentrations of nutrients and organic matter in soil. This was achieved by a litter bag technique. Carbon (C), nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) concentrations in the remaining litter as well as delta(13)C and delta(15)N during the experimental period were measured. Meanwhile, organic C, alkali-soluble N and available P concentrations were determined in the soils beneath litter bags and in the soils at the control plots. The dry mass remaining (as % of the initial mass) during litter decomposition exponentially declined (y = 0.9362 e(-0.0365x) , R (2) = 0.93, P < 0.0001), but total C in the remaining litter did not decrease significantly with decomposition process during a 20-month period. By comparison, total N in the remaining litter significantly increased from 5.8 +/- A 1.7 g kg(-1) dw litter in the first month to 10.1 +/- A 1.4 g kg(-1) dw litter in the 20th month. During the decomposition, delta(13)C values of the remaining litter showed an insignificant enrichment, while delta(15)N signatures exhibited a different pattern. It significantly depleted (15)N (y = -0.66x + 0.82, R (2) = 0.57, P < 0.0001) during the initial 7 months while showing (15)N enrichments in the remaining 13 months (y = 0.10x - 4.23, R (2) = 0.32, P < 0.0001). Statistically, litter decomposition has little impact on concentrations of soil organic C and alkali-soluble N and available P in the top soil. This indicates that nutrient return to the topsoil through litter decomposition is limited and that C cycling decoupled from N cycling during decomposition in this subtropical plantation in southern China

Possible discovery of the r-process characteristics in the abundances of metal-rich barium stars

We study the abundance distributions of a sample of metal-rich barium stars provided by Pereira et al. (2011) to investigate the s- and r-process nucleosynthesis in the metal-rich environment. We compared the theoretical results predicted by a parametric model with the observed abundances of the metal-rich barium stars. We found that six barium stars have a significant r-process characteristic, and we divided the barium stars into two groups: the r-rich barium stars ($C_r>5.0$, [La/Nd]\,$<0$) and normal barium stars. The behavior of the r-rich barium stars seems more like that of the metal-poor r-rich and CEMP-r/s stars. We suggest that the most possible formation mechanism for these stars is the s-process pollution, although their abundance patterns can be fitted very well when the pre-enrichment hypothesis is included. The fact that we can not explain them well using the s-process nucleosynthesis alone may be due to our incomplete knowledge on the production of Nd, Eu, and other relevant elements by the s-process in metal-rich and super metal-rich environments (see details in Pereira et al. 2011).Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures, accepted for publication in A&

Microstructure evolution and characteristics of laser-clad lightweight refractory NbxMo0.5_{0.5}Ti1.5_{1.5}Ta0.2_{0.2}Cr high-entropy alloy

Lightweight refractory high-entropy alloy coatings (RHEAcs) of NbxMo$_{0.5}$Ti$_{1.5}$Ta$_{0.2}$Cr (where $x=$ 1, 1.3, 1.5, and 2) were fabricated on the surface of 316L stainless steel using laser cladding (LC) technology. A comprehensive study was conducted to elucidate the effect of Nb content on the microstructure, microhardness and wear resistance of NbxMo$_{0.5}$Ti$_{1.5}$Ta$_{0.2}$Cr RHEAcs before and after annealing at 900 for 10 h. The results show that the grains are gradually refined with the increase of Nb content. The coating consists mainly of a body-centered cubic (BCC) solid solution, C15-Laves phase, and a small amount of hexagonal close-packed (HCP) solid solution containing Ti. The microhardness of RHEAcs is significantly higher compared to the base material. Notably, at Nb1.3, due to the influence of lattice dislocations, the microhardness reaches a peak of 1066.5 HV, which is about 7.11 times higher than that of the base material. On the contrary, at Nb$_2$, the microhardness is at its lowest point, averaging 709.31 HV, but 4.72 times that of the base material. After annealing, an increase in microhardness is observed at all Nb concentrations, up to 31.2% at Nb$_2$. Before annealing, the wear resistance of RHEAcs was slightly better than that of 316L stainless steel at different Nb contents. However, after annealing, the coefficient of friction (COF) and wear rate of the coatings are lower than those of annealed 316L stainless steel, highlighting their excellent wear resistance. It is noteworthy that the loss of wear properties after annealing at Nb1 is at a minimum, obtaining the most balanced wear resistance before and after annealing. The enhanced wear resistance after annealing can be attributed to the presence of ultra-fine grain oxide friction layers, mainly composed of TiO2 and Ta2O5 . The main mode of wear is oxidative wear, with a small amount of wear from abrasive wear

Half-metallicity and efficient spin injection in AlN/GaN:Cr (0001) heterostructure

First-principles investigations of the structural, electronic and magnetic properties of Cr-doped AlN/GaN (0001) heterostructures reveal that Cr segregates into the GaN region, that these interfaces retain their important half-metallic character and thus yield efficient (100 %) spin polarized injection from a ferromagnetic GaN:Cr electrode through an AlN tunnel barrier - whose height and width can be controlled by adjusting the Al concentration in the graded bandgap engineered Al(1-x)Ga(x)N (0001) layers.Comment: submitted for publicatio