Development of high-efficient tin selenide-based thermoelectric materials

Thermoelectric materials can realize direct energy conversion from heat to electricity based on thermoelectric effects, thus have been considered as a green and sustainable solution to the global energy dilemma by harvesting electricity from waste heat or sunlight. The conversion efficiency can be expressed as ZT=S2σT/κ, where S is the Seebeck coefficient, σ is electrical conductivity, T is the absolute temperature, and κ is the thermal conductivity. To date, two major strategies for achieving high ZT are optimizing the power factor S2σ and reducing lattice thermal conductivity κl by band and structural engineering, respectively. However, the current commercial thermoelectric materials such as bismuth telluride (Bi2Te3) have their ZT values limited t

Social interdependence theory in sport

This thesis investigates examining the effects of certain types of interdependence on motor performance in competition. In the first experiment, participants undertook a ball carrying and running task under varying levels of between-team resource interdependent condition in the individual competition. The number of balls that carried to the container decreased when between-team resource interdependence exists. In the second experiment, participants completed a basketball shooting and rebounding task under varying levels of between-team resource interdependent condition in a two-on-two team competition. Results indicated that the number of baskets made, the number of baskets attempted and the shooting accuracy was higher in resource independent competition. In the third experiment, participants undertook the same basketball shooting and rebounding task as the second experiment under varying levels of between-team resource interdependent condition and within-team reward interdependent condition. Results indicated effort-based performance was greater under resource independent condition and its interaction with low reward interdependent condition. In the final experiment, participants undertook a handgrip task in a four-on-four team competition. Compared to the no reward condition, performance was better under both high reward interdependent condition and low reward interdependent condition. Mediation analyses revealed that positive emotions, self-reported effort and pressure mediated the change of performance

CharFormer: A Glyph Fusion based Attentive Framework for High-precision Character Image Denoising

Degraded images commonly exist in the general sources of character images, leading to unsatisfactory character recognition results. Existing methods have dedicated efforts to restoring degraded character images. However, the denoising results obtained by these methods do not appear to improve character recognition performance. This is mainly because current methods only focus on pixel-level information and ignore critical features of a character, such as its glyph, resulting in character-glyph damage during the denoising process. In this paper, we introduce a novel generic framework based on glyph fusion and attention mechanisms, i.e., CharFormer, for precisely recovering character images without changing their inherent glyphs. Unlike existing frameworks, CharFormer introduces a parallel target task for capturing additional information and injecting it into the image denoising backbone, which will maintain the consistency of character glyphs during character image denoising. Moreover, we utilize attention-based networks for global-local feature interaction, which will help to deal with blind denoising and enhance denoising performance. We compare CharFormer with state-of-the-art methods on multiple datasets. The experimental results show the superiority of CharFormer quantitatively and qualitatively.Comment: Accepted by ACM MM 202

RCRN: Real-world Character Image Restoration Network via Skeleton Extraction

Constructing high-quality character image datasets is challenging because real-world images are often affected by image degradation. There are limitations when applying current image restoration methods to such real-world character images, since (i) the categories of noise in character images are different from those in general images; (ii) real-world character images usually contain more complex image degradation, e.g., mixed noise at different noise levels. To address these problems, we propose a real-world character restoration network (RCRN) to effectively restore degraded character images, where character skeleton information and scale-ensemble feature extraction are utilized to obtain better restoration performance. The proposed method consists of a skeleton extractor (SENet) and a character image restorer (CiRNet). SENet aims to preserve the structural consistency of the character and normalize complex noise. Then, CiRNet reconstructs clean images from degraded character images and their skeletons. Due to the lack of benchmarks for real-world character image restoration, we constructed a dataset containing 1,606 character images with real-world degradation to evaluate the validity of the proposed method. The experimental results demonstrate that RCRN outperforms state-of-the-art methods quantitatively and qualitatively.Comment: Accepted to ACM MM 202

An 852 nm Faraday laser with 8 kHz linewidth based on corner-cube retroreflector

A single-mode Cs atom 852 nm Faraday laser based on the corner-cube reflector feedback is first demonstrated to our best knowledge. Using the corner-cube reflector as external cavity feedback in Faraday laser, the robustness can be greatly improved. This Faraday laser can always achieve laser oscillation unless the angle between incident light and the optical axis of corner-cube retroreflector is beyond the plus or minus 3{\deg} range. Furthermore, the Faraday laser achieves single-mode operation within the current range of 100 mA , and its output wavelength is automatically limited to the vicinity of the Cs atomic transition lines. The wavelength fluctuation range is limited to plus or minus 1.2 pm within 9 hours under +3{\deg} rotation angle. Moreover, the most probable linewidth is 7.97 kHz measured by heterodyne beating. The Faraday laser with high robustness as well as narrow linewidth can be widely used in quantum precision measurement fields including quantum optics, atomic clocks, atomic magnetometers, cold atoms, and atomic gravimeters, etc