Mist

Mist is an abstract, animated graduate thesis film with a duration of five minutes. It is an extremely personal film, which is inspired by my childhood memories and Chinese culture. It is a reflection of my own life, which just like the fluid ink in the film, reacts with the environment naturally and leaves distinct marks on the paper of my life. This is a live action and 2D animation mixed film that was produced with After Effects and Premiere software. The primary plan was to produce this film in 3D. However, in order to achieve a more dynamic look, I eventually made changes in my medium. The majority of the footage in the film was shot in live action and edited in After Effects. This thesis paper is about the creation of Mist from my point of view. It involves the generation of the ideas, experiments and trials, production processes and the challenges I encountered

Expert Elicitation and Data Noise Learning for Material Flow Analysis using Bayesian Inference

Bayesian inference allows the transparent communication of uncertainty in material flow analyses (MFAs), and a systematic update of uncertainty as new data become available. However, the method is undermined by the difficultly of defining proper priors for the MFA parameters and quantifying the noise in the collected data. We start to address these issues by first deriving and implementing an expert elicitation procedure suitable for generating MFA parameter priors. Second, we propose to learn the data noise concurrent with the parametric uncertainty. These methods are demonstrated using a case study on the 2012 U.S. steel flow. Eight experts are interviewed to elicit distributions on steel flow uncertainty from raw materials to intermediate goods. The experts' distributions are combined and weighted according to the expertise demonstrated in response to seeding questions. These aggregated distributions form our model parameters' prior. A sensible, weakly-informative prior is also adopted for learning the data noise. Bayesian inference is then performed to update the parametric and data noise uncertainty given MFA data collected from the United States Geological Survey (USGS) and the World Steel Association (WSA). The results show a reduction in MFA parametric uncertainty when incorporating the collected data. Only a modest reduction in data noise uncertainty was observed; however, greater reductions were achieved when using data from multiple years in the inference. These methods generate transparent MFA and data noise uncertainties learned from data rather than pre-assumed data noise levels, providing a more robust basis for decision-making that affects the system.Comment: 23 pages of main paper and 10 pages of supporting informatio

IL-9 Inhibits Viral Replication in Coxsackievirus B3-Induced Myocarditis

Myocardial injuries in viral myocarditis (VMC) are caused by viral infection and related autoimmune disorders. Recent studies suggest that IL-9 mediated both antimicrobial immune and autoimmune responses in addition to allergic diseases. However, the role of IL-9 in viral infection and VMC remains controversial and uncertain. In this study, we infected Balb/c mice with Coxsackievirus B3 (CVB3), and found that IL-9 was enriched in the blood and hearts of VMC mice on days 5 and 7 after virus infection. Most of IL-9 was secreted by CD8+ T cells on day 5 and CD4+ T cells on day 7 in the myocardium. Further, IL-9 knockout exacerbated cardiac damage following CVB3 infection, along with a sharp increase in viral replication and IL-17a expression, as well as a decrease in TGF-β. In contrast, repletion of IL-9 in Balb/c mice with CVB infection induced the opposite effect. Studies in vitro further revealed that IL-9 directly inhibited viral replication in cardiomyocytes by reducing coxsackie and adenovirus receptor expression, which might be associated with up-regulation of TGF-β autocrine effect in these cells. However, IL-9 had no direct effect on apoptosis in cardiomyocytes. Our data indicated that IL-9 played a protective role in disease progression by inhibiting CVB3 replication in the early stages of VMC

Spatial-Temporal Imaging of Anisotropic Photocarrier Dynamics in Black Phosphorus

As an emerging single elemental layered material with a low symmetry in-plane crystal lattice, black phosphorus (BP) has attracted significant research interest owing to its unique electronic and optoelectronic properties, including its widely tunable bandgap, polarization dependent photoresponse and highly anisotropic in-plane charge transport. Despite extensive study of the steady-state charge transport in BP, there has not been direct characterization and visualization of the hot carriers dynamics in BP immediately after photoexcitation, which is crucial to understanding the performance of BP-based optoelectronic devices. Here we use the newly developed scanning ultrafast electron microscopy (SUEM) to directly visualize the motion of photo-excited hot carriers on the surface of BP in both space and time. We observe highly anisotropic in-plane diffusion of hot holes, with a 15-times higher diffusivity along the armchair (x-) direction than that along the zigzag (y-) direction. Our results provide direct evidence of anisotropic hot carrier transport in BP and demonstrate the capability of SUEM to resolve ultrafast hot carrier dynamics in layered two-dimensional materials.Comment: 21 pages, 6 figure

Quantum super-resolution for imaging two pointlike entangled photon sources

We investigate the resolution for imaging two pointlike entangled sources by using the method of the moments and the spatial-mode demultiplexing (SPADE), where the pointlike entangled sources can be generated by injecting single-mode sources with arbitrary quantum statistics distribution into an optical parametric amplifier (OPA). We demonstrate that the separation estimation sensitivity is mainly determined by the photon distribution in each detected modes and it can be enhanced by either increasing the squeezed parameter of the OPA or eliminating the relative phase difference of the entangle sources. Furthermore, in the limiting case of infinitely small source separation, the usage of entangled sources can have better resolution than those using incoherent and coherent sources. The results here can find important applications for the quantum super-resolution imaging and quantum metrology

First-principles mode-by-mode analysis for electron-phonon scattering channels and mean free path spectra in GaAs

We present a first-principles framework to investigate the electron scattering channels and transport properties for polar material by combining the exact solution of linearized electron-phonon (e-ph) Boltzmann transport equation in its integral-differential form associated with the e-ph coupling matrices obtained from polar Wannier interpolation scheme. No ad hoc parameter is required throughout this calculation, and GaAs, a well-studied polar material, is used as an example to demonstrate this method. In this work, the long-range and short-range contributions as well as the intravalley and intervalley transitions in the e-ph interactions (EPIs) have been quantitatively addressed. Promoted by such mode-by-mode analysis, we find that in GaAs, the piezoelectric scattering is comparable to deformation-potential scattering for electron scatterings by acoustic phonons in EPI even at room temperature and makes a significant contribution to mobility. Furthermore, we achieved good agreements with experimental data for the mobility, and identified that electrons with mean free paths between 130 and 210 nm contribute dominantly to the electron transport at 300 K. Such information provides deeper understandings on the electron transport in GaAs, and the presented framework can be readily applied to other polar materials

Quantum multiparameter estimation with multi-mode photon catalysis entangled squeezed state

We propose a method to generate the multi-mode entangled catalysis squeezed vacuum states (MECSVS) by embedding the cross-Kerr nonlinear medium into the Mach-Zehnder interferometer. This method realizes the exchange of quantum states between different modes based on Fredkin gate. In addition, we study the MECSVS as the probe state of multi-arm optical interferometer to realize multi-phase simultaneous estimation. The results show that the quantum Cramer-Rao bound (QCRB) of phase estimation can be improved by increasing the number of catalytic photons or decreasing the transmissivity of the optical beam splitter using for photon catalysis. In addition, we also show that even if there is photon loss, the QCRB of our photon catalysis scheme is lower than that of the ideal entangled squeezed vacuum states (ESVS), which shows that by performing the photon catalytic operation is more robust against photon loss than that without the catalytic operation. The results here can find important applications in quantum metrology for multiparatmeter estimation