Novel Non-equilibrium Phase Transition Caused by Non-linear Hadronic-quark Phase Structure

We consider how the occurrence of first-order phase transitions in non-constant pressure differs from those at constant pressure. The former has shown the non-linear phase structure of mixed matter, which implies a particle number dependence of the binding energies of the two species. If the mixed matter is mixed hadron-quark phase, nucleon outgoing from hadronic phase and ingoing to quark phase probably reduces the system to a non-equilibrium state, in other words, there exists the imbalance of the two phases when deconfinement takes place. This novel non-equilibrium process is very analogous to the nuclear reactions that nuclei emit neutrons and absorb them under appropriate conditions. We present self-consistent thermodynamics in description for the processes and identify the microphysics responsible for the processes. The microphysics is an inevitable consequence of non-linear phase structure instead of the effect of an additional dissipation force. When applying our findings to the neutron star containing mixed hadron-quark matter, it is found that the newly discovered energy release might strongly change the thermal evolution behavior of the star.Comment: 18pages,3figures;to be accepted for publication in Physics Letters

Physicochemical, Nutritional, and Functional Characteristics of Seeds, Peel and Pulp of Grewia tenax (Forssk) Fiori Fruits

Purpose: To determine the physicochemical, nutritional, and functional characteristics of the seeds, peel, and pulp of Grewia tenax (Forssk.) Fiori fruits.Methods: The whole fruit was flooded with ionized water for 6 h, and the seeds manually separated from the peel and pulp. The mineral content was determined by atomic absorption spectroscopy while the amino acids were separated and quantified by injecting 50 μL into an amino acid analyzer (Hitachi 835-50). Gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC/MS) was used to separate and determine the volatile compounds, whereas color was measured with a digital colorimeter.Results: Protein, fat and ash contents were higher in the seeds than in the peel and pulp. Carbohydrate content was higher in the pulp (87.09 %) than in the seeds and peel (59.56 and 70.74 %), respectively. The peel, seeds, and pulp had Na concentration of 19.3, 5.8 and 11.5 mg/100 g, respectively; and for potassium (K), 502.5, 400 and 300 mg/100 g, respectively. The pulp contained the following essential amino acids: histidine, thereonine, valine, isoleucine and lysine at levels of 4.3, 6.4, 9.7, 9.5, and 6.4 g/100 g, respectively. The pulp had the highest water absorption capacity (WAC, 3.3 ml/g), whereas oil absorption capacity was 3.6 ml/g in the peel. Foaming capacity (FC) was 8.6 % in the seed. The bulk density (BD) of seeds, peel, and pulp were 0.5, 0.6, and 0.9 g/mL, respectively. The concentration of the volatile components of seeds, peel, and pulp of the fruits was 42.1, 97.9, and 71.4 %, respectively.Conclusion: Grewia tenax fruits are a good source of nutritional components and essential nutrients, including minerals and amino acids, and have functional properties, which, if properly utilized, can improve human nutrition and health.Keywords: Grewia tenax, Physicochemical, Amino acids, Nutrition, Functional properties, Minerals, Volatile compound

Exploiting Contextual Information for Prosodic Event Detection Using Auto-Context

Prosody and prosodic boundaries carry significant information regarding linguistics and paralinguistics and are important aspects of speech. In the field of prosodic event detection, many local acoustic features have been investigated; however, contextual information has not yet been thoroughly exploited. The most difficult aspect of this lies in learning the long-distance contextual dependencies effectively and efficiently. To address this problem, we introduce the use of an algorithm called auto-context. In this algorithm, a classifier is first trained based on a set of local acoustic features, after which the generated probabilities are used along with the local features as contextual information to train new classifiers. By iteratively using updated probabilities as the contextual information, the algorithm can accurately model contextual dependencies and improve classification ability. The advantages of this method include its flexible structure and the ability of capturing contextual relationships. When using the auto-context algorithm based on support vector machine, we can improve the detection accuracy by about 3% and F-score by more than 7% on both two-way and four-way pitch accent detections in combination with the acoustic context. For boundary detection, the accuracy improvement is about 1% and the F-score improvement reaches 12%. The new algorithm outperforms conditional random fields, especially on boundary detection in terms of F-score. It also outperforms an n-gram language model on the task of pitch accent detection

GRASS: Unified Generation Model for Speech Semantic Understanding

This paper explores the instruction fine-tuning technique for speech semantic understanding by introducing a unified end-to-end (E2E) framework that generates semantic labels conditioned on a task-related prompt for audio data. We pre-train the model using large and diverse data, where instruction-speech pairs are constructed via a text-to-speech (TTS) system. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) models after fine-tuning downstream tasks. Furthermore, the proposed model achieves competitive performance in zero-shot and few-shot scenarios. To facilitate future work on instruction fine-tuning for speech-to-semantic tasks, we release our instruction dataset and code

Review of the advances in solar-assisted air source heat pumps for the domestic sector

Solar assisted air source heat pump shows great potential as a promising energy-saving heating technology, which integrates solar collector and air source heat pump. It is widely considered for supplying hot water, space heating and/or space cooling in the domestic sector. The performance of solar assisted air source heat pumps can be evaluated in system level by parameters such as coefficient of performance, seasonal performance factor, energy consumption, solar fraction as well as initial and operating costs, and in component level by parameters such as efficiencies of solar collection and thermal energy storage. Their performances are affected by many factors such as system configuration, components size, working fluid, working conditions and weather conditions. This paper presents a comprehensive review on the recent advances in solar assisted air source heat pump for the domestic sector in terms of system configuration, solar collectors, thermal energy storage, defrosting method and the perspective areas of further investigations. The results of this review confirm that research is still required to improve the performance of such a combined system and reduce initial cost compared with existing heating systems based on hydrocarbon combustion. The information presented in this paper is beneficial to the researchers, small and medium-sized enterprises supplying renewable energy system technologies, heating engineers and service workers, energy policy and decision makers, environmental activists and communities

The characteristics of biomass production, lipid accumulation and chlorophyll biosynthesis of Chlorella vulgaris under mixotrophic cultivation

The main objective of this study was to investigate the behaviors of Chlorella vulgaris for biomass production, lipid accumulation and chlorophyll biosynthesis under mixotrophic cultivation. The obtained results show that mixotrophism might be a competitive pattern for the culture of C. vulgaris on a large scale based on the achieved maximum biomass and volumetric productivities of lipid and chlorophyll. Glucose was the optimal carbon source for mixotrophic cultivation of C. vulgaris and the effects of glucose content on the alga growth under mixotrophic conditions were considerable because lower glucose content (1 g/l) promoted the production of biomass and photosynthetic pigments; higher glucose contents (>5 g/l) increased the biomass and lipid accumulation but inhibited the chlorophyll biosynthesis. The microalga could not grow well without pH control when ammonium and organic nitrogen were the sole nitrogen sources in the mixotrophic cultures because of the remarkable drop in pH value, while the critical urea concentration was observed at 0.50 g/l. It was concluded that mixotrophic cultivation of C. vulgaris is a feasible approach for lipid accumulation and chlorophyll biosynthesis that are dependent on the enhancement of biomass content and volumetric  productivity.Key words: Chlorella vulgaris, mixotrophic cultivation, biomass production, lipid accumulation, chlorophyll biosynthesis

Vortex-Antivortex Lattices in a Holographic Superconductor

We employ the Einstein-Abelian-Higgs theory to investigate the structure of vortex-antivortex lattices within a superconductor driven by spatial periodic magnetic fields. By adjusting the parameters of the external magnetic field, including the period ($\mathcal{T}$) and the amplitude ($B_0$), various distinct vortex states emerge. These states encompass the Wigner crystallization state, the vortex cluster state, and the suppressed state. Additionally, we present a comprehensive phase diagram to demarcate the specific regions where these structures emerge, contributing to our understanding of superconductivity in complex magnetic environments

Giant vortex in a fast rotating holographic superfluid

In a holographic superfluid disk, when the rotational velocity is large enough, we find a giant vortex will form in the center of the system by merging several single charge vortices at some specific rotational velocity, with a phase stratification phenomenon for the order parameter. The formation of a giant vortex can be explained as there is not enough space for a standard vortex lattice. Keep increasing the rotational velocity the giant vortex will disappear and there will be an appearance of a superfluid ring. In the giant vortex region, the number of vortices measured from winding number and rotational velocity always satisfies the linear Feynman relation. However, when the superfluid ring starts to appear, the number of vortices in the disk will decrease though the rotational velocity is increasing, where most of the order parameter is suppressed