Mechanism of Polarization Fatigue in BiFeO3: the Role of Schottky Barrier

By using piezoelectric force microscopy and scanning Kelvin probe microscopy, we have investigated the domain evolution and space charge distribution in planar BiFeO3 capacitors with different electrodes. It is observed that charge injection at the film/electrode interface leads to domain pinning and polarization fatigue in BiFeO3. Furthermore, the Schottky barrier at the interface is crucial for the charge injection process. Lowering the Schottky barrier by using low work function metals as the electrodes can also improve the fatigue property of the device, similar to what oxide electrodes can achieve

NCGNN: Node-level Capsule Graph Neural Network

Message passing has evolved as an effective tool for designing Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). However, most existing works naively sum or average all the neighboring features to update node representations, which suffers from the following limitations: (1) lack of interpretability to identify crucial node features for GNN's prediction; (2) over-smoothing issue where repeated averaging aggregates excessive noise, making features of nodes in different classes over-mixed and thus indistinguishable. In this paper, we propose the Node-level Capsule Graph Neural Network (NCGNN) to address these issues with an improved message passing scheme. Specifically, NCGNN represents nodes as groups of capsules, in which each capsule extracts distinctive features of its corresponding node. For each node-level capsule, a novel dynamic routing procedure is developed to adaptively select appropriate capsules for aggregation from a subgraph identified by the designed graph filter. Consequently, as only the advantageous capsules are aggregated and harmful noise is restrained, over-mixing features of interacting nodes in different classes tends to be avoided to relieve the over-smoothing issue. Furthermore, since the graph filter and the dynamic routing identify a subgraph and a subset of node features that are most influential for the prediction of the model, NCGNN is inherently interpretable and exempt from complex post-hoc explanations. Extensive experiments on six node classification benchmarks demonstrate that NCGNN can well address the over-smoothing issue and outperforms the state of the arts by producing better node embeddings for classification

A new metric for rotating charged Gauss-Bonnet black holes in AdS spaces

This paper presents a new metric for slowly rotating charged Gauss-Bonnet black holes in higher dimensional anti-de Sitter spaces. Taking the angular momentum parameter $a$ up to second order, the slowly rotating charged black hole solutions are obtained by working directly in the action.Comment: 11 pages and accepted by Chin. Phys.

Thermodynamics of third order Lovelock anti-de Sitter black holes revisited

We compute the mass and the temperature of third order Lovelock black holes with negative Gauss-Bonnet coefficient $\alpha_2<0$ in anti-de Sitter space and perform the stability analysis of topological black holes. When $k=-1$, the third order Lovelock black holes are thermodynamically stable for the whole range $r_+$. When $k=1$, we found that the black hole has an intermediate unstable phase for $D=7$. In eight dimensional spacetimes, however, a new phase of thermodynamically unstable small black holes appears if the coefficient $\tilde{\alpha}$ is under a critical value. For $D\geq 9$, black holes have similar the distributions of thermodynamically stable regions to the case where the coefficient $\tilde{\alpha}$ is under a critical value for $D=8$. It is worth to mention that all the thermodynamic and conserved quantities of the black holes with flat horizon don't depend on the Lovelock coefficients and are the same as those of black holes in general gravity.Comment: 15 pages, 22 figure

Black holes in Einstein-dilaton-Massive gravity

In this paper, we focus on the Einstein-dilaton-Massive (EdM) gravity including the coupling of dilaton scalar field to massive graviton terms, and then derive static and spherically symmetric solutions of dilatonic black holes in four dimensional spacetime. We discover that the dilatonic black hole could possess two horizons (event and cosmological), extreme (Nariai) and naked singularity black holes for the suitably fixed parameters. Moreover, the dilatonic black hole solutions are neither asymptotic flat nor (A)dS in the appearance of coupling of the dilaton field. In addition, we investigate thermodynamic properties of these dilatonic black holes, and check the corresponding first law of black hole thermodynamics. Extending to the EdM gravity in high dimensions, we further obtain the dilatonic black hole solutions in ($d+1$) dimensional spacetime.Comment: 17 pages, 6 figure

Nuclear Factor Erythroid 2-Related Factor 2 Deficiency Results in Amplification of the Liver Fat-Lowering Effect of Estrogen

Transcription factor nuclear factor erythroid 2-related factor 2 (Nrf2) regulates multiple biologic processes, including hepatic lipid metabolism. Estrogen exerts actions affecting energy homeostasis, including a liver fat-lowering effect. Increasing evidence indicates the crosstalk between these two molecules. The aim of this study was to evaluate whether Nrf2 modulates estrogen signaling in hepatic lipid metabolism. Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) was induced in wild-type and Nrf2-null mice fed a high-fat diet and the liver fat-lowering effect of exogenous estrogen was subsequently assessed. We found that exogenous estrogen eliminated 49% and 90% of hepatic triglycerides in wild-type and Nrf2-null mice with NAFLD, respectively. This observation demonstrates that Nrf2 signaling is antagonistic to estrogen signaling in hepatic fat metabolism; thus, Nrf2 absence results in striking amplification of the liver fat-lowering effect of estrogen. In addition, we found the association of trefoil factor 3 and fatty acid binding protein 5 with the liver fat-lowering effect of estrogen. In summary, we identified Nrf2 as a novel and potent inhibitor of estrogen signaling in hepatic lipid metabolism. Our finding may provide a potential strategy to treat NAFLD by dually targeting Nrf2 and estrogen signaling

Interictal magnetoencephalographic findings related with surgical outcomes in lesional and nonlesional neocortical epilepsy

Purpose: To investigate whether interictal magnetoencephalography (MEG) concordant with other techniques can predict surgical outcome in patients with lesional and nonlesional refractory neocortical epilepsy (NE). Methods: 23 Patients with lesional NE and 20 patients with nonlesional NE were studied. MEG was recorded for all patients with a 275 channel whole-head system. Synthetic aperture magnetometry (SAM) with excess kurtosis (g2) and conventional Equivalent Current Dipole (ECD) were used for MEG data analysis. 27 Patients underwent long-term extraoperative intracranial video electroencephalography (iVEEG) monitoring. Surgical outcomes were assessed based on more than 1-year of post-surgical follow-up using Engel classification system. Results: As we expected, both favorable outcomes (Engel class I or II) and seizure freedom outcomes (Engel class IA) were higher for the concordance condition (MEG findings are concordant with MRI or iVEEG findings) versus the discordance condition. Also the seizure free rate was significantly higher (x2 = 5.24, P \u3c 0.05) for the patients with lesional NE than for the patients with nonlesional NE. In 30% of the patients with nonlesional NE, the MEG findings proved to be valuable for intracranial electrode implantation. Conclusions: This study demonstrates that a favorable post-surgical outcome can be obtained in most patients with concordant MEG and MRI results even without extraoperative iVEEG monitoring, which indicates that the concordance among different modalities could indicate a likelihood of better postsurgical outcomes. However, extraoperative iVEEG monitoring remains prerequisite to the patients with discordant MEG and MRI findings. For nonlesional cases, our results showed that MEG could provide critical information in the placement of intracranial electrodes