Vortex-state-mediated Josephson effect

The Josephson effect is a kind of macroscopic quantum phenomenon that supercurrent flows through a Josephson junction without any voltage applied. We predict a novel vortex-state-mediated Josephson effect in an SNS Josephson junction supporting vortices. The vortex-state-mediated supercurrent is enhanced or reduced significantly in magnitude depending on the junction length, and exhibits several steps with the number of effective propagating channels in current-phase evolution at zero temperature. At finite temperatures, these supercurrent steps persist in the short junction limit, and develop into sawtooth oscillations if the junction length becomes comparable to the coherence length $\xi=\hbar v_F/\Delta$ of the superconductor, and in later case a supercurrent reversal can be observed. These findings may provide a smoking-gun signature of vortex bound states in superconductors and promise possible applications in future Josephson devices.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figure

Top-N Recommender System via Matrix Completion

Top-N recommender systems have been investigated widely both in industry and academia. However, the recommendation quality is far from satisfactory. In this paper, we propose a simple yet promising algorithm. We fill the user-item matrix based on a low-rank assumption and simultaneously keep the original information. To do that, a nonconvex rank relaxation rather than the nuclear norm is adopted to provide a better rank approximation and an efficient optimization strategy is designed. A comprehensive set of experiments on real datasets demonstrates that our method pushes the accuracy of Top-N recommendation to a new level.Comment: AAAI 201

Twin Learning for Similarity and Clustering: A Unified Kernel Approach

Many similarity-based clustering methods work in two separate steps including similarity matrix computation and subsequent spectral clustering. However, similarity measurement is challenging because it is usually impacted by many factors, e.g., the choice of similarity metric, neighborhood size, scale of data, noise and outliers. Thus the learned similarity matrix is often not suitable, let alone optimal, for the subsequent clustering. In addition, nonlinear similarity often exists in many real world data which, however, has not been effectively considered by most existing methods. To tackle these two challenges, we propose a model to simultaneously learn cluster indicator matrix and similarity information in kernel spaces in a principled way. We show theoretical relationships to kernel k-means, k-means, and spectral clustering methods. Then, to address the practical issue of how to select the most suitable kernel for a particular clustering task, we further extend our model with a multiple kernel learning ability. With this joint model, we can automatically accomplish three subtasks of finding the best cluster indicator matrix, the most accurate similarity relations and the optimal combination of multiple kernels. By leveraging the interactions between these three subtasks in a joint framework, each subtask can be iteratively boosted by using the results of the others towards an overall optimal solution. Extensive experiments are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.Comment: Published in AAAI 201

Associated Production of Neutral Higgs Boson with Squark Pair in the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model with Explicit CP Violation at the CERN LHC

We investigate the associated production of neutral Higgs boson with squark pair in the minimal supersymmetric standard model with and without explicit CP violation, respectively. We show that the dominant productions in both cases are always ones of the lightest neutral Higgs boson associated with the lightest stop pair, which can reach a few pb, in the ranges of parameters allowed by constraints from the electric dipole moment experiments. In most of the parameter space, the total cross sections in the case with explicit CP violation are significantly enhanced, compared with ones without explicit CP violation. For some special parameters, several orders of magnitude enhancement can be obtained.Comment: 4 pages, 7 figures, version to appear in PR