47 research outputs found
High-energy Neutrino Productions from AGN Disk Transients Impacted by Circum-disk Medium
Various supernovae (SN), compact object coalescences, and tidal disruption
events are widely believed to occur embedded in active galactic nuclei (AGN)
accretion disks and generate detectable electromagnetic (EM) signals. We
collectively refer to them as \emph{AGN disk transients}. The inelastic
hadronuclear () interactions between shock-accelerated cosmic rays and AGN
disk materials shortly after the ejecta shock breaks out of the disk can
produce high-energy neutrinos. However, the expected efficiency of neutrino
production would decay rapidly by adopting a pure Gaussian density atmosphere
profile applicable for stable gas-dominated disks. On the other hand, AGN
outflows and disk winds are commonly found around AGN accretion disks. In this
paper, we present that the circum-disk medium would further consume the shock
kinetic energy to more efficiently produce high-energy neutrinos, especially
for \,TeVPeV neutrinos that IceCube is interested in. Thanks to the
existence of the circum-disk medium, we find that the neutrino production will
be enhanced significantly and make a much higher contribution to the diffuse
neutrino background. Optimistically, diffuse neutrino background can
be contributed from AGN disk transients.Comment: 10 Pages, 3 figurs and 2 tables; Submitted to ApJ
Interrelated Thermalization and Quantum Criticality in a Lattice Gauge Simulator
Gauge theory and thermalization are both foundations of physics and nowadays
are both topics of essential importance for modern quantum science and
technology. Simulating lattice gauge theories (LGTs) realized recently with
ultracold atoms provides a unique opportunity for carrying out a correlated
study of gauge theory and thermalization in the same setting. Theoretical
studies have shown that an Ising quantum phase transition exists in this
implemented LGT, and quantum thermalization can also signal this phase
transition. Nevertheless, it remains an experimental challenge to accurately
determine the critical point and controllably explore the thermalization
dynamics in the quantum critical regime due to the lack of techniques for
locally manipulating and detecting matter and gauge fields. Here, we report an
experimental investigation of the quantum criticality in the LGT from both
equilibrium and non-equilibrium thermalization perspectives by equipping the
single-site addressing and atom-number-resolved detection into our LGT
simulator. We accurately determine the quantum critical point agreed with the
predicted value. We prepare a state deterministically and study
its thermalization dynamics across the critical point, leading to the
observation that this state thermalizes only in the critical
regime. This result manifests the interplay between quantum many-body scars,
quantum criticality, and symmetry breaking.Comment: 6+4 pages, 4+7 figure
An ultra-sensitive and easy-to-use assay for sensing human UGT1A1 activities in biological systems
The human UDP-glucuronosyltransferase 1A1 (UGT1A1), one of the most essential conjugative enzymes, is responsible for the metabolism and detoxification of bilirubin and other endogenous substances, as well as many different xenobiotic compounds. Deciphering UGT1A1 relevance to human diseases and characterizing the effects of small molecules on the activities of UGT1A1 requires reliable tools for probing the function of this key enzyme in complex biological matrices. Herein, an easy-to-use assay for highly-selective and sensitive monitoring of UGT1A1 activities in various biological matrices, using liquid chromatography with fluorescence detection (LC-FD), has been developed and validated. The newly developed LC-FD based assay has been confirmed in terms of sensitivity, specificity, precision, quantitative linear range and stability. One of its main advantages is lowering the limits of detection and quantification by about 100-fold in comparison to the previous assay that used the same probe substrate, enabling reliable quantification of lower amounts of active enzyme than any other method. The precision test demonstrated that both intra- and inter-day variations for this assay were less than 5.5%. Furthermore, the newly developed assay has also been successfully used to screen and characterize the regulatory effects of small molecules on the expression level of UGT1A1 in living cells. Overall, an easy-to-use LC-FD based assay has been developed for ultra-sensitive UGT1A1 activities measurements in various biological systems, providing an inexpensive and practical approach for exploring the role of UGT1A1 in human diseases, interactions with xenobiotics, and characterization modulatory effects of small molecules on this conjugative enzyme. (c) 2020 Xi'an Jiaotong University. Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).Peer reviewe
Cyclic threshold shear strain for pore water pressure generation and stiffness degradation in marine clays at Yangtze estuary
Cyclic threshold shear strain is a fundamental property of saturated soils under cyclic loading. To investigate the cyclic threshold shear strain for pore water pressure generation (Ī³tp) and stiffness degradation (Ī³td), a series of strain-controlled multistage undrained cyclic triaxial tests were carried out on in-situ saturated marine clay in the Yangtze estuary with different plasticity index Ip. The test results show that both Ī³tp and Ī³td increase with increasing Ip, and Ī³tp is larger than Ī³td for the same marine clay tested under the same conditions, with Ī³tp = 0.017 ~ 0.019%, Ī³td = 0.008 ~ 0.012% for Ip of 17, Ī³tp = 0.033 ~ 0.039%, Ī³td = 0.020 ~ 0.025% for Ip of 32, and Ī³tp = 0.040 ~ 0.048%, Ī³td = 0.031 ~ 0.036% for Ip of 40. Moreover, the development of stiffness degradation may not necessarily require the generation of pore water pressure but can be aggravated by it. Furthermore, the Ī³tp and Ī³td of marine clay are compared with terrestrial soils and marine clays cited from the published literature, the results indicate that the special marine sedimentary environment and the combined action of flow and tidal wave system cause the Ī³tp and Ī³td of marine clay in the Yangtze estuary to be smaller than that of the terrestrial clays and marine clays in other sea areas
Functional building blocks for scalable multipartite entanglement in optical lattices
Featuring excellent coherence and operated parallelly, ultracold atoms in
optical lattices form a competitive candidate for quantum computation. For
this, a massive number of parallel entangled atom pairs have been realized in
superlattices. However, the more formidable challenge is to scale-up and detect
multipartite entanglement due to the lack of manipulations over local atomic
spins in retro-reflected bichromatic superlattices. Here we developed a new
architecture based on a cross-angle spin-dependent superlattice for
implementing layers of quantum gates over moderately-separated atoms
incorporated with a quantum gas microscope for single-atom manipulation. We
created and verified functional building blocks for scalable multipartite
entanglement by connecting Bell pairs to one-dimensional 10-atom chains and
two-dimensional plaquettes of atoms. This offers a new platform
towards scalable quantum computation and simulation
CodeFuse-13B: A Pretrained Multi-lingual Code Large Language Model
Code Large Language Models (Code LLMs) have gained significant attention in
the industry due to their wide applications in the full lifecycle of software
engineering. However, the effectiveness of existing models in understanding
non-English inputs for multi-lingual code-related tasks is still far from well
studied. This paper introduces CodeFuse-13B, an open-sourced pre-trained code
LLM. It is specifically designed for code-related tasks with both English and
Chinese prompts and supports over 40 programming languages. CodeFuse achieves
its effectiveness by utilizing a high quality pre-training dataset that is
carefully filtered by program analyzers and optimized during the training
process. Extensive experiments are conducted using real-world usage scenarios,
the industry-standard benchmark HumanEval-x, and the specially designed
CodeFuseEval for Chinese prompts. To assess the effectiveness of CodeFuse, we
actively collected valuable human feedback from the AntGroup's software
development process where CodeFuse has been successfully deployed. The results
demonstrate that CodeFuse-13B achieves a HumanEval pass@1 score of 37.10%,
positioning it as one of the top multi-lingual code LLMs with similar parameter
sizes. In practical scenarios, such as code generation, code translation, code
comments, and testcase generation, CodeFuse performs better than other models
when confronted with Chinese prompts.Comment: 10 pages with 2 pages for reference
High Diversity of Tick-associated Microbiota from Five Tick Species in Yunnan, China
Ticks are obligate blood-sucking vectors for multiple zoonotic diseases. In this study, tick samples were collected from Yunnan Province, China, which is well-known as the āGlobal Biodiversity Hotspotā in the world. This study aimed to clarify the microbial populations, including pathogens, associated with ticks and to identify the diversity of tick-borne microbiota in this region. The 16S rRNA full-length sequencing from pooled tick DNA samples and PCR amplification of pathogenic genera from individual samples were performed to understand tick-associated microbiota in this region. A total of 191 adult ticks of 5 tick species were included and revealed 11 phyla and 126 genera bacteria, including pathogenic Anaplasma , Ehrlichia , Candidatus Neoehrlichia, Rickettsia , Borrelia , and Babesia . Further identification suggested that Rickettsia sp. YN01 was a variant strain of Rickettsia spp. IG-1, but Rickettsia sp. YN02 and Rickettsia sp. YN03, were potentially two new SFGR species. This study revealed the complexity of ecological interactions between host and microbe and provided insight for the biological control of ticks. A high microbial diversity in ticks from Yunnan was identified, and more investigation should be undertaken to elucidate the pathogenicity in the area
High-energy Neutrino Production from AGN Disk Transients Impacted by the Circum-disk Medium
Various supernovae, compact object coalescences, and tidal disruption events are widely believed to occur embedded in active galactic nucleus (AGN) accretion disks and generate detectable electromagnetic signals. We collectively refer to them as AGN disk transients. The inelastic hadronuclear ( pp ) interactions between shock-accelerated cosmic rays and AGN disk materials shortly after the ejecta shock breaks out of the disk can produce high-energy neutrinos. However, the expected efficiency of neutrino production would decay rapidly by adopting a pure Gaussian density atmosphere profile applicable for stable gas-dominated disks. On the other hand, AGN outflows and disk winds are commonly found around AGN accretion disks. In this paper, we show that the circum-disk medium would further consume the shock kinetic energy to more efficiently produce high-energy neutrinos, especially for ā¼ TeVāPeV neutrinos that IceCube detects. Thanks to the existence of the circum-disk medium, we find that the neutrino production will be enhanced significantly and make a much higher contribution to the diffuse neutrino background. Optimistically, ā¼20% of the diffuse neutrino background can be contributed by AGN disk transients