The long-lasting optical afterglow plateau of short burst GRB 130912A

The short burst GRB 130912A was detected by Swift, Fermi satellites and several ground-based optical telescopes. Its X-ray light curve decayed with time normally. The optical emission, however, displayed a long term plateau, which is the longest one in current short GRB observations. In this work we examine the physical origin of the X-ray and optical emission of this peculiar event. We find that the canonical forward shock afterglow emission model can account for the X-ray and optical data self-consistently and the energy injection model that has been widely adopted to interpret the shallowly-decaying afterglow emission is not needed. We also find that the burst was born in a very-low density interstellar medium, consistent with the compact object merger model. Significant fractions of the energy of the forward shock have been given to accelerate the non-thermal electrons and amplify the magnetic fields (i.e., $\epsilon_{\rm e}\sim 0.37$ and $\epsilon_{\rm B}\sim 0.16$, respectively), which are much larger than those inferred in most short burst afterglow modeling and can explain why the long-lasting optical afterglow plateau is rare in short GRBs.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figure

Treating the Expansive Soil Subgrade on the Goaf of Middle-Shallow Layer by Dynamic Compaction With Geogrid Reinforcement

Middle-shallow layer goaf left after the excavation of small coal mines in expansive soil areas always brings much trouble to expressway construction, the section of K21 +400~K22 +550 of Nanning outer ring expressway under construction faces such a situation. Based on the grasp of geological condition of the goaf, related national technical specifications and existing technical research about treatment, the dynamic compaction with geogird reinforcement method is applied to settle the roadbed with a good result showed in the field testing. This paper introduces the geological condition and stability evaluation of the goaf, and emphatically presents the technical note, construction procedure, quality inspection of the dynamic compaction with geogird reinforcement and the filling method of the upper expansive soil subgrade, which can offer a reference for the similar treatment projects in other expansive soil areas

Nonlinear Hall Effects in Strained Twisted Bilayer WSe2_2

Recently, it has been pointed out that the twisting of bilayer WSe$_2$ would generate topologically non-trivial flat bands near the Fermi energy. In this work, we show that twisted bilayer WSe$_2$ (tWSe$_2$) with uniaxial strain exhibits a large nonlinear Hall (NLH) response due to the non-trivial Berry curvatures of the flat bands. Moreover, the NLH effect is greatly enhanced near the topological phase transition point which can be tuned by a vertical displacement field. Importantly, the nonlinear Hall signal changes sign across the topological phase transition point and provides a way to identify the topological phase transition and probe the topological properties of the flat bands. The strong enhancement and high tunability of the NLH effect near the topological phase transition point renders tWSe$_2$ and related moire materials new platforms for rectification and second harmonic generations.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures. Comments are welcom

Transmission resonance in a composite plasmonic structure

The design, fabrication, and optical properties of a composite plasmonic structure, a two-dimentional array of split-ring resonators inserted into periodic square holes of a metal film, have been reported. A new type of transmission resonance, which makes a significant difference from the conventional peaks, has been suggested both theoretically and experimentally. To understand this effect, a mechanism of ring- resonance induced dipole emission is proposed.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figure

Estimating the central charge from the R\'enyi entanglement entropy

We calculate the von Neumann and R\'enyi bipartite entanglement entropy of the $O(2)$ model with a chemical potential on a 1+1 dimensional Euclidean lattice with open and periodic boundary conditions. We show that the Calabrese-Cardy conformal field theory predictions for the leading logarithmic scaling with the spatial size of these entropies are consistent with a central charge $c=1$. This scaling survives the time continuum limit and truncations of the microscopic degrees of freedom, modifications which allow us to connect the Lagrangian formulation to quantum Hamiltonians. At half-filling, the forms of the subleading corrections imposed by conformal field theory allow the determination of the central charge with an accuracy better than two percent for moderately sized lattices. We briefly discuss the possibility of estimating the central charge using quantum simulators.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures, 3 table