Electronic transport in a two-dimensional superlattice engineered via self-assembled nanostructures

Nanoscience offers a unique opportunity to design modern materials from the bottom up, via low-cost, solution processed assembly of nanoscale building blocks. These systems promise electronic band structure engineering using not only the nanoscale structural modulation, but also the mesoscale spatial patterning, although experimental realization of the latter has been challenging. Here we design and fabricate a new type of artificial solid by stacking graphene on a self-assembled, nearly periodic array of nanospheres, and experimentally observe superlattice miniband effects. We find conductance dips at commensurate fillings of charge carriers per superlattice unit cell, which are key features of minibands that are induced by the quasi-periodic deformation of the graphene lattice. These dips become stronger when the lattice strain is larger. Using a tight-binding model, we simulate the effect of lattice deformation as a parameter affecting the inter-atomic hopping integral, and confirm the superlattice transport behavior. This 2D material-nanoparticle heterostructure enables facile band structure engineering via self-assembly, promising for large area electronics and optoelectronics applications

MDNet: A Semantically and Visually Interpretable Medical Image Diagnosis Network

The inability to interpret the model prediction in semantically and visually meaningful ways is a well-known shortcoming of most existing computer-aided diagnosis methods. In this paper, we propose MDNet to establish a direct multimodal mapping between medical images and diagnostic reports that can read images, generate diagnostic reports, retrieve images by symptom descriptions, and visualize attention, to provide justifications of the network diagnosis process. MDNet includes an image model and a language model. The image model is proposed to enhance multi-scale feature ensembles and utilization efficiency. The language model, integrated with our improved attention mechanism, aims to read and explore discriminative image feature descriptions from reports to learn a direct mapping from sentence words to image pixels. The overall network is trained end-to-end by using our developed optimization strategy. Based on a pathology bladder cancer images and its diagnostic reports (BCIDR) dataset, we conduct sufficient experiments to demonstrate that MDNet outperforms comparative baselines. The proposed image model obtains state-of-the-art performance on two CIFAR datasets as well.Comment: CVPR2017 Ora

Developmental Regulation of Mossy Fiber Afferent Interactions with Target Granule Cells

AbstractIn anin vitromodel system based on purified target cerebellar granule neurons and explants of afferents, pontine mossy fiber afferents stop growing through contact-mediated mechanisms when they encounter granule neurons. Here we studied the developmental regulation of the stop signal posed by granule cells and the response of mossy fibers to the stop signal in two culture systems. Granule neurons presented in slices or as dissociated cells from postnatal day (P) 4 and P7 cerebellum were more potent in the arrest of P0 pontine neurites than younger (P0-P2) or older (up to P14) granule neurons. In contrast, pontine neurites at embryonic day (E) 18, during their period of normal growth toward the cerebellum, grew extensively on both cerebellar slices of all ages from P0 to P10 and dissociated P4 granule neurons. When E18 explants were maintained for 2 days before plating in medium conditioned by neonatal cerebellar cells, E18 pontine explants were rendered more responsive to the stop signal from P4 granule cells. These results indicate that the stop signal, and the response of afferents to it, are developmentally regulated. Moreover, factors within the target region may initiate these interactions

Microstructural Study of the Interfacial Transition Zone in Concrete using Optical Microscopy

This paper presents an overview on the optical microstructural features in concrete. Microstructure is the small scale structure of a material, defined as the structure of a prepared surface of material as revealed by a microscope. The concrete specimens with the manipulation of water/cement ratio 0.3-0.7 (increment of 0.1) in the concrete mix design were used to study the optical microstructural features in concrete and to validate the existence of an interfacial transition zone (ITZ) in concrete. USB Digital Microscope is used to analyse the formation mechanism of microstructure in concrete where the optical microstructural images is analyse via respective curing periods of 1, 7, 28 and 56 days. The microstructure features are discussed with respect to their influence on the strength development of concrete

Three-color Sagnac source of polarization-entangled photon pairs

We demonstrate a compact and stable source of polarization-entangled pairs of photons, one at 810 nm wavelength for high detection efficiency and the other at 1550 nm for long-distance fiber communication networks. Due to a novel Sagnac-based design of the interferometer no active stabilization is needed. Using only one 30 mm ppKTP bulk crystal the source produces photons with a spectral brightness of 1.13x10^6 pairs/s/mW/THz with an entanglement fidelity of 98.2%. Both photons are single-mode fiber coupled and ready to be used in quantum key distribution (QKD) or transmission of photonic quantum states over large distances.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figure

The Sunyaev Zel'dovich effect: simulation and observation

The Sunyaev Zel'dovich effect (SZ effect) is a complete probe of ionized baryons, the majority of which are likely hiding in the intergalactic medium. We ran a $512^3$ $\Lambda$CDM simulation using a moving mesh hydro code to compute the statistics of the thermal and kinetic SZ effect such as the power spectra and measures of non-Gaussianity. The thermal SZ power spectrum has a very broad peak at multipole $l\sim 2000-10^4$ with temperature fluctuations $\Delta T \sim 15\mu$K. The power spectrum is consistent with available observations and suggests a high $\sigma_8\simeq 1.0$ and a possible role of non-gravitational heating. The non-Gaussianity is significant and increases the cosmic variance of the power spectrum by a factor of $\sim 5$ for $l<6000$. We explore optimal driftscan survey strategies for the AMIBA CMB interferometer and their dependence on cosmology. For SZ power spectrum estimation, we find that the optimal sky coverage for a 1000 hours of integration time is several hundred square degrees. One achieves an accuracy better than 40% in the SZ measurement of power spectrum and an accuracy better than 20% in the cross correlation with Sloan galaxies for $2000<l<5000$. For cluster searches, the optimal scan rate is around 280 hours per square degree with a cluster detection rate 1 every 7 hours, allowing for a false positive rate of 20% and better than 30% accuracy in the cluster SZ distribution function measurement.Comment: 34 pages, 20 figures. Submitted to ApJ. Simulation maps have been replaced by high resolution images. For higher resolution color images, please download from http://www.cita.utoronto.ca/~zhangpj/research/SZ/ We corrected a bug in our analysis. the SZ power spectrum decreases 50% and y parameter decrease 25

Development of a technology adoption and usage prediction tool for assistive technology for people with dementia

This article is available open access through the publisher’s website at the link below. Copyright @ The Authors 2013.In the current work, data gleaned from an assistive technology (reminding technology), which has been evaluated with people with Dementia over a period of several years was retrospectively studied to extract the factors that contributed to successful adoption. The aim was to develop a prediction model with the capability of prospectively assessing whether the assistive technology would be suitable for persons with Dementia (and their carer), based on user characteristics, needs and perceptions. Such a prediction tool has the ability to empower a formal carer to assess, through a very limited amount of questions, whether the technology will be adopted and used.EPSR

Quantifying solar superactive regions with vector magnetic field observations

The vector magnetic field characteristics of superactive regions (SARs) hold the key for understanding why SARs are extremely active and provide the guidance in space weather prediction. We aim to quantify the characteristics of SARs using the vector magnetograms taken by the Solar Magnetic Field Telescope at Huairou Solar Observatory Station. The vector magnetic field characteristics of 14 SARs in solar cycles 22 and 23 were analyzed using the following four parameters: 1) the magnetic flux imbalance between opposite polarities, 2) the total photospheric free magnetic energy, 3) the length of the magnetic neutral line with its steep horizontal magnetic gradient, and 4) the area with strong magnetic shear. Furthermore, we selected another eight large and inactive active regions (ARs), which are called fallow ARs (FARs), to compare them with the SARs. We found that most of the SARs have a net magnetic flux higher than 7.0\times10^21 Mx, a total photospheric free magnetic energy higher than 1.0\times10^24 erg/cm, a magnetic neutral line with a steep horizontal magnetic gradient (\geq 300 G/Mm) longer than 30 Mm, and an area with strong magnetic shear (shear angle \geq 80\degree) greater than 100 Mm^2. In contrast, the values of these parameters for the FARs are mostly very low. The Pearson \c{hi}2 test was used to examine the significance of the difference between the SARs and FARs, and the results indicate that these two types of ARs can be fairly distinguished by each of these parameters. The significance levels are 99.55%, 99.98%, 99.98%, and 99.96%, respectively. However, no single parameter can distinguish them perfectly. Therefore we propose a composite index based on these parameters, and find that the distinction between the two types of ARs is also significant with a significance level of 99.96%. These results are useful for a better physical understanding of the SAR and FARComment: 9 pages, 3 figures, 2 table