Slidephononics: Tailoring Thermal Transport Properties by van der Waals Sliding

By interlayer sliding in van der Waals (vdW) materials, the switching electric polarization of ultrathin ferroelectric materials leads to the widely studied slidetronics. In this work, we report that such sliding can further tailor anharmonic effects and hence thermal transport properties due to the changed intrinsic coupling between atomic layers. And we propose an unprecedented concept dubbed as slidephononics, where the phonons and associated physical properties can be controlled by varying the intrinsic stacking configurations of slidetronic vdW materials. Based on the state-of-the-art first-principles calculations, it is demonstrated that the thermal conductivity of boron nitride (BN) bilayers can be significantly modulated (by up to four times) along the sliding pathways. Detailed analysis reveals that the variation of thermal conductivities can be attributed to the tunable (de-)coupling of the out-of-plane acoustic phonon branches with the other phonon modes, which is induced by the interlayer charge transfer. Such strongly modulated thermal conductivity via interlayer sliding in vdW materials paves the way to engineer thermal management materials in emerging vdW electronic devices, which would shed light on future studies of slidephononics

Total knee arthroplasty and physical therapy for arthropathy in alkaptonuria: A 4-year follow-up case report

IntroductionAlkaptonuria is a rare autosomal recessive metabolic disorder which leads to accumulation of homogentisic acid in the body.Case PresentationWe report a rare case of an alkaptonuria-related knee arthritis who underwent left total knee arthroplasty and received postoperative systematic physical therapy in a 57-year-old male patient. The patient has suffered from bilateral knee pain for over 4 years. The patient developed melanin pigmentation on the skin of the whole body, especially on the face and auricle. He self-reported that fresh urine was normal color but after standing overnight, the color deepened to black or soy color. He underwent routine urine examination for many times, but no obvious abnormality was found. The patient has suffered from low back pain for more than 20 years. He had been considered for lumbar disc herniation and ankylosing spondylitis after many in-hospital visits. After symptomatic medication, there was no obvious relief. We followed the patient for 4 years after surgery.ResultThe patient presented with pain relief and enhanced range of motion at the 4-year follow-up. The improvements of daily living and the pain relief suggest that the surgery is appropriate for this rare disease.ConclusionIt is rare that the knee pain is diagnosed as alkaptonuria. After total knee arthroplasty and physical therapy, the patient had a good outcome. This case provides experience for the diagnosis and treatment of alkaptonuria-related knee arthritis

Coordinated Reasoning for Cross-Lingual Knowledge Graph Alignment

Existing entity alignment methods mainly vary on the choices of encoding the knowledge graph, but they typically use the same decoding method, which independently chooses the local optimal match for each source entity. This decoding method may not only cause the "many-to-one" problem but also neglect the coordinated nature of this task, that is, each alignment decision may highly correlate to the other decisions. In this paper, we introduce two coordinated reasoning methods, i.e., the Easy-to-Hard decoding strategy and joint entity alignment algorithm. Specifically, the Easy-to-Hard strategy first retrieves the model-confident alignments from the predicted results and then incorporates them as additional knowledge to resolve the remaining model-uncertain alignments. To achieve this, we further propose an enhanced alignment model that is built on the current state-of-the-art baseline. In addition, to address the many-to-one problem, we propose to jointly predict entity alignments so that the one-to-one constraint can be naturally incorporated into the alignment prediction. Experimental results show that our model achieves the state-of-the-art performance and our reasoning methods can also significantly improve existing baselines.Comment: in AAAI 202

Flat electronic band structure and anisotropic optical, mechanical, and thermoelectric properties of two-dimensional fullerene networks

Nanoclusters like fullerenes as the unit to build intriguing two-dimensional topological structures is of great challenge. Here we propose three bridged fullerene monolayers and comprehensively investigate the novel fullerene monolayer as synthesized experimentally Zheng et al.,[Nature 606, 507-510 (2022)] by state of the art first principles calculations. Our results show that alpha-C60-2D has a direct bandgap of 1.49 eV owing to a flat conduction band bottom close to the experimental value, the optical linear dichroism with strong absorption in long-wave ultraviolet region, a small anisotropic Youngs modulus, the large hole mobility, and the ultrahigh Seebeck coefficient at middle low temperatures. Moreover, Li ions are found to migrate easily along the X path in alpha-C60-2D. It is unveiled that the anisotropic optical, mechanical, electrical, and thermoelectric properties of alpha-C60-2D originate from the asymmetric bridging arrangements between C60 clusters. Our study promises potential applications of monolayer fullerene networks in diverse fields

Local Geometric Distortions Resilient Watermarking Scheme Based on Symmetry

As an efficient watermark attack method, geometric distortions destroy the synchronization between watermark encoder and decoder. And the local geometric distortion is a famous challenge in the watermark field. Although a lot of geometric distortions resilient watermarking schemes have been proposed, few of them perform well against local geometric distortion like random bending attack (RBA). To address this problem, this paper proposes a novel watermark synchronization process and the corresponding watermarking scheme. In our scheme, the watermark bits are represented by random patterns. The message is encoded to get a watermark unit, and the watermark unit is flipped to generate a symmetrical watermark. Then the symmetrical watermark is embedded into the spatial domain of the host image in an additive way. In watermark extraction, we first get the theoretically mean-square error minimized estimation of the watermark. Then the auto-convolution function is applied to this estimation to detect the symmetry and get a watermark units map. According to this map, the watermark can be accurately synchronized, and then the extraction can be done. Experimental results demonstrate the excellent robustness of the proposed watermarking scheme to local geometric distortions, global geometric distortions, common image processing operations, and some kinds of combined attacks