A novel approach to modelling and simulating the contact behaviour between a human hand model and a deformable object

A deeper understanding of biomechanical behaviour of human hands becomes fundamental for any human hand-operated Q2 activities. The integration of biomechanical knowledge of human hands into product design process starts to play an increasingly important role in developing an ergonomic product-to-user interface for products and systems requiring high level of comfortable and responsive interactions. Generation of such precise and dynamic models can provide scientific evaluation tools to support product and system development through simulation. This type of support is urgently required in many applications such as hand skill training for surgical operations, ergonomic study of a product or system developed and so forth. The aim of this work is to study the contact behaviour between the operators’ hand and a hand-held tool or other similar contacts, by developing a novel and precise nonlinear 3D finite element model of the hand and by investigating the contact behaviour through simulation. The contact behaviour is externalised by solving the problem using the bi-potential method. The human body’s biomechanical characteristics, such as hand deformity and structural behaviour, have been fully modelled by implementing anisotropic hyperelastic laws. A case study is given to illustrate the effectiveness of the approac

Exploration of nonlocalities in ensembles consisting of bipartite quantum states

It is revealed that ensembles consisting of multipartite quantum states can exhibit different kinds of nonlocalities. An operational measure is introduced to quantify nonlocalities in ensembles consisting of bipartite quantum states. Various upper and lower bounds for the measure are estimated and the exact values for ensembles consisting of mutually orthogonal maximally entangled bipartite states are evaluated.Comment: The title and some contents changed, 4 pages, no figure

Theory of Interfacial Plasmon-Phonon Scattering in Supported Graphene

One of the factors limiting electron mobility in supported graphene is remote phonon scattering. We formulate the theory of the coupling between graphene plasmon and substrate surface polar phonon (SPP) modes, and find that it leads to the formation of interfacial plasmon-phonon (IPP) modes, from which the phenomena of dynamic anti-screening and screening of remote phonons emerge. The remote phonon-limited mobilities for SiO$_{2}$, HfO$_{2}$, h-BN and Al$_{2}$O$_{3}$ substrates are computed using our theory. We find that h-BN yields the highest peak mobility, but in the practically useful high-density range the mobility in HfO$_{2}$-supported graphene is high, despite the fact that HfO$_{2}$ is a high-$\kappa$ dielectric with low-frequency modes. Our theory predicts that the strong temperature dependence of the total mobility effectively vanishes at very high carrier concentrations. The effects of polycrystallinity on IPP scattering are also discussed.Comment: 33 pages, 7 figure

Global and quadratic convergence of Newton hard-thresholding pursuit

Algorithms based on the hard thresholding principle have been well studied with sounding theoretical guarantees in the compressed sensing and more general sparsity-constrained optimization. It is widely observed in existing empirical studies that when a restricted Newton step was used (as the debiasing step), the hard-thresholding algorithms tend to meet halting conditions in a significantly low number of iterations and are very efficient. Hence, the thus obtained Newton hard-thresholding algorithms call for stronger theoretical guarantees than for their simple hard-thresholding counterparts. This paper provides a theoretical justification for the use of the restricted Newton step. We build our theory and algorithm, Newton Hard-Thresholding Pursuit (NHTP), for the sparsity-constrained optimization. Our main result shows that NHTP is quadratically convergent under the standard assumption of restricted strong convexity and smoothness. We also establish its global convergence to a stationary point under a weaker assumption. In the special case of the compressive sensing, NHTP effectively reduces to some of the existing hard-thresholding algorithms with a Newton step. Consequently, our fast convergence result justifies why those algorithms perform better than without the Newton step. The efficiency of NHTP was demonstrated on both synthetic and real data in compressed sensing and sparse logistic regression

A Dimension-Adaptive Multi-Index Monte Carlo Method Applied to a Model of a Heat Exchanger

We present an adaptive version of the Multi-Index Monte Carlo method, introduced by Haji-Ali, Nobile and Tempone (2016), for simulating PDEs with coefficients that are random fields. A classical technique for sampling from these random fields is the Karhunen-Lo\`eve expansion. Our adaptive algorithm is based on the adaptive algorithm used in sparse grid cubature as introduced by Gerstner and Griebel (2003), and automatically chooses the number of terms needed in this expansion, as well as the required spatial discretizations of the PDE model. We apply the method to a simplified model of a heat exchanger with random insulator material, where the stochastic characteristics are modeled as a lognormal random field, and we show consistent computational savings

Supplementation of iron alone and combined with vitamins improves haematological status, erythrocyte membrane fluidity and oxidative stress in anaemic pregnant women

Pregnancy is a condition exhibiting increased susceptibility to oxidative stress, and Fe plays a central role in generating harmful oxygen species. The objective of the present study is to investigate the changes in haematological status, oxidative stress and erythrocyte membrane fluidity in anaemic pregnant women after Fe supplementation with and without combined vitamins. The study was a 2 months double-blind, randomised trial. Pregnant women (n 164) were allocated to four groups: group C was the placebo control group; group I was supplemented daily with 60 mg Fe (ferrous sulphate) daily; group IF was supplemented daily with Fe plus 400 µg folic acid; group IM was supplemented daily with Fe plus 2 mg retinol and 1 mg riboflavin, respectively. After the 2-month trial, Hb significantly increased by 15·8, 17·3 and 21·8 g/l, and ferritin by 2·8, 3·6 and 11·0 µg/l, in the I, IF and IM groups compared with placebo. Polarisation (¿) and microviscosity (¿) decreased significantly in other groups compared with placebo, indicating an increase in membrane fluidity. Significant decreases of ¿ and ¿ values compared with group C were 0·033 and 0·959 for group I, 0·037 and 1·074 for group IF and 0·064 and 1·865 for group IM, respectively. In addition, significant increases of glutathione peroxidase activities and decreases of malondialdehyde were shown in all treated groups, as well as increases of plasma retinol and urine riboflavin in group IM. The findings show that supplementation with Fe and particularly in combination with vitamins could improve the haematological status as well as oxidative stress and erythrocyte membrane fluidit

Hyperon polarization in semi-inclusive deeply inelastic lepton-nucleon scattering at high energy

We calculate the polarizations for different octet hyperons produced in the current fragmentation regions of the deeply inelastic lepton-nucleon scatterings $\mu^-N \to \mu^- HX$ and $\nu_{\mu} N \to \mu^- HX$ at high energy using different models for spin transfer in fragmentation processes. The results show that measurements of those hyperon polarizations should provide useful information to distinguish between different models in particular the SU(6) and the DIS pictures used frequently in the literature. We found, in particular, that measuring the polarization of $\Sigma^+$ produced in these processes can give a better test to the validity of the different spin transfer models.Comment: 30 pages, 13 figure

Scanning Tunnelling Spectroscopic Studies of Dirac Fermions in Graphene and Topological Insulators

We report novel properties derived from scanning tunnelling spectroscopic (STS) studies of Dirac fermions in graphene and the surface state (SS) of a strong topological insulator (STI), Bi_2Se_3. For mono-layer graphene grown on Cu by chemical vapour deposition (CVD), strain-induced scalar and gauge potentials are manifested by the charging effects and the tunnelling conductance peaks at quantized energies, respectively. Additionally, spontaneous time-reversal symmetry breaking is evidenced by the alternating anti-localization and localization spectra associated with the zero-mode of two sublattices while global time-reversal symmetry is preserved under the presence of pseudo-magnetic fields. For Bi_2Se_3 epitaxial films grown on Si(111) by molecular beam epitaxy (MBE), spatially localized unitary impurity resonances with sensitive dependence on the energy difference between the Fermi level and the Dirac point are observed for samples thicker than 6 quintuple layers (QL). These findings are characteristic of the SS of a STI and are direct manifestation of strong topological protection against impurities. For samples thinner than 6-QL, STS studies reveal the openup of an energy gap in the SS due to overlaps of wave functions between the surface and interface layers. Additionally, spin-preserving quasiparticle interference wave-vectors are observed, which are consistent with the Rashba-like spin-orbit splitting