Bi2Se3 topological insulator quantum wires

We study the effect of 3D topological insulator (TI) contributions to the band structure and wavefunctions of quasi-one-dimensional electron systems (Q1DES). Our model for this system consists of an effective Hamiltonian derived previously in the literature from the crystal symmetries of Bi2Se3. We find that in wires whose face lies in the plane formed by the y and z crystal directions and whose width is around 25 quintuple layers or more, the bands nearest to the gap are non-monotonic; we show that this has implications for the conductance of the wire. In addition, we observed increasing penetration depth of surface states with increasing wavenumber of the propagating mode. We believe these results have qualitative relevance to the family of 3D topological insulators whose crystal structure is characterised by the space group Equation 1, and that the work done here contributes to the wider field of the study of conductance in topological insulators

Where and Who? Automatic Semantic-Aware Person Composition

Image compositing is a method used to generate realistic yet fake imagery by inserting contents from one image to another. Previous work in compositing has focused on improving appearance compatibility of a user selected foreground segment and a background image (i.e. color and illumination consistency). In this work, we instead develop a fully automated compositing model that additionally learns to select and transform compatible foreground segments from a large collection given only an input image background. To simplify the task, we restrict our problem by focusing on human instance composition, because human segments exhibit strong correlations with their background and because of the availability of large annotated data. We develop a novel branching Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) that jointly predicts candidate person locations given a background image. We then use pre-trained deep feature representations to retrieve person instances from a large segment database. Experimental results show that our model can generate composite images that look visually convincing. We also develop a user interface to demonstrate the potential application of our method.Comment: 10 pages, 9 figure

Surface Acoustic Wave Single-Electron Interferometry

We propose an experiment to observe interference of a single electron as it is transported along two parallel quasi-one-dimensional channels trapped in a single minimum of a travelling periodic electric field. The experimental device is a modification of the surface acoustic wave (SAW) based quantum processor. Interference is achieved by creating a superposition of spatial wavefunctions between the two channels and inducing a relative phase shift via either a transverse electric field or a magnetic field. The interference can be used to estimate the decoherence time of an electron in this type of solid-state device

Charge qubits based on ultra-thin topological insulator films

We study how to use the surface states in a Bi$_{2}$Se$_{3}$ topological insulator ultra-thin film that are affected by finite size effects for the purpose of quantum computing. We demonstrate that: (i) surface states under the finite size effect can effectively form a two-level system where their energy levels lie in between the bulk energy gap and a logic qubit can be constructed, (ii) the qubit can be initialized and manipulated using electric pulses of simple forms, (iii) two-qubit entanglement is achieved through a $\sqrt{\text{SWAP}}$ operation when the two qubits are in a parallel setup, and (iv) alternatively, a Floquet state can be exploited to construct a qubit and two Floquet qubits can be entangled through a Controlled-NOT operation. The Floquet qubit offers robustness to background noise since there is always an oscillating electric field applied, and the single qubit operations are controlled by amplitude modulation of the oscillating field, which is convenient experimentally.Comment: 12 pages, 9 figures, submitted to the journal Frontiers of Physic