Searcharxiv⌕ Search

arXiv subjects

Hongbin Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Hongbin Zhang.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2026

Pressure-driven structural phase transition unlocks multifunctionality in KMgX (X = P, As, Sb, and Bi) compounds: A first-principles study

The search for materials with multifunctional properties has attracted significant attention due to their potential applications in various energy-related devices. Pressure-induced phase transitions provide an effective strategy for accessing different structural phases of a material without altering its chemical composition, thereby enabling the tuning of its physical properties and expanding its functional applications. In this work, we investigate the previously unexplored orthorhombic (Pnma) phase of the KMgX (X = P, As, Sb, and Bi) family using first-principles calculations and identify a pressure-induced structural transition from a tetragonal to orthorhombic phase. Stability of the pressure-accessible orthorhombic structure is rigorously confirmed by equation of state analysis together with phonon, elastic, and formation-enthalpy calculations, establishing its viability for further investigation. Optical properties calculated within the $G_0W_0$-Bethe-Salpeter equation (BSE) framework, incorporating quasiparticle corrections and excitonic effects, exhibit direct dipole-allowed transitions at the $\Gamma$ point and strong visible-light absorption with coefficients approaching $10^5~\text{cm}^{-1}$. Consequently, KMgAs and KMgSb achieve spectroscopic limited maximum efficiencies (SLME) of $27.12\%$ and $26.40\%$, respectively, at a thin-film thickness of $0.6~\mu\text{m}$. Furthermore, thermoelectric transport calculations predict (zT) values of 0.65 and 0.58 at $900~\text{K}$ for p-type and n-type KMgSb, respectively, demonstrating its potential for both legs of thermoelectric devices. These values are likely conservative, as the Slack model tends to overestimate thermal conductivity. Overall, the pressure-accessible orthorhombic phase of the KMgX family emerges as a stable multifunctional semiconductor with coupled photovoltaic and thermoelectric energy-conversion capabilities.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗
arXiv2026

DualAnchor: Preserving Language Priors and Improving Lexical Fidelity in Gloss-Free Sign Language Translation

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have led sign language translation (SLT), the task of converting sign-language videos into spoken-language text, to increasingly adopt LLMs as textual backbones. However, despite their strong language modeling capabilities, existing LLM-based SLT methods often undermine rather than exploit this language prior, producing disfluent translations, a failure we term language-prior degradation. Meanwhile, existing methods typically align videos and text at the sentence level, which does not ensure accurate lexical details and creates a lexical fidelity gap. To address both issues, we propose DualAnchor, a gloss-free LLM-based SLT training framework that couples two complementary anchors for linguistically fluent and visually faithful generation. Token-level Prior Anchoring (TPA) preserves the LLM's language prior by regularizing the multimodal decoder at each decoding step toward the next-token distribution of a frozen LLM conditioned on the same autoregressive prefix. Optimal Transport Alignment (OTA) improves lexical fidelity by formulating visual-textual matching as entropy-regularized partial optimal transport, with Sinkhorn optimization inducing a soft alignment between visual tokens and textual content tokens under a cosine cost. DualAnchor achieves strong overall performance on both PHOENIX-2014T and CSL-Daily. Targeted analyses attribute these gains to the complementary effects of the two anchors: TPA improves fluency, whereas OTA reduces fine-grained lexical errors.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

Strain-Tunable Shift Current and Magneto-Optical Kerr Effect in Multiferroic Altermagnet Fe2Mo3O8

Altermagnetism has recently emerged as a compelling frontier in spintronics, seamlessly merging the agile tunability of ferromagnets with the hallmark merits of antiferromagnets. As a prototypical polar multiferroic featuring distinctive altermagnetism, Fe2Mo3O8 hosts an ideal playground for exploring the intricate interplay among ferroelectric polarization, altermagnetic order, and spin-dependent responses. Here, employing first-principles calculations, we systematically investigate the coupling among polarization, spin splitting, shift current, and magneto-optical responses in Fe2Mo3O8. Our findings reveal that switching the ferroelectric polarization not only inverts the sign of the shift current but also comprehensively reshapes the momentum-space spin-splitting texture. Furthermore, the shift current and magneto-optical spectrum exhibits strong tunability under mechanical strain. Remarkably, the application of a-axis uniaxial strain breaks the crystalline symmetry, thereby activating a finite magneto-optical Kerr effect that is otherwise forbidden in the pristine phase.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗
arXiv2026

Deep-learning Hamiltonian reveals twist-tunable flat bands and nonlinear photocurrents in SrTiO3 moire bilayers

The extension of moire physics to complex oxides offers new ways to manipulate electronic states, but the large oxide moire supercells make systematic first-principles calculations demanding. Here, we combine density functional theory with the E(3)-equivariant deep-learning Hamiltonian framework DeepH-E3 to investigate the twist-angle-dependent electronic structure and optical responses of twisted bilayer SrTiO3. The model is trained on untwisted bilayers with different interlayer-sliding configurations and then applied to commensurate twisted bilayers with twist angles from 8.80 degrees to 53.13 degrees. Compared with the untwisted bilayer, decreasing twist angle systematically flattens the valence bands and leads to nearly dispersionless bands at the smallest angles studied. Based on the predicted Hamiltonians, we evaluate the dielectric response, second-harmonic generation (SHG), shift current, and spin Hall conductivity. The dielectric response and spin Hall conductivity remain close to those of the untwisted bilayer, whereas the nonlinear optical responses are more strongly affected by twisting. SHG is strongly enhanced relative to the weak untwisted response, and the shift current shows a clear twist-angle dependence within the response-calculation range (53.13 degrees-22.62 degrees). These results show that twist engineering can control electronic and optoelectronic responses in oxide moire systems.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗
arXiv2026

The influence of lunar tidal potential on clock frequencies at different positions on Earth

With the advancements in clock timing technology, increasingly smaller time differences can be distinguished. Therefore, it is critical to investigate the fractional frequency shift of clocks at different locations on Earth. In this paper, we study it systematically under the influence of a subtle lunar tidal potential based on a new method. Our calculations in the geocentric Fermi frame show that when two clocks are located at the same latitude, the longitude difference changes the fractional frequency shift between them. A similar phenomenon occurs when there is a difference in latitude between two clocks on the ground at the same longitude. Interestingly, when the Moon's longitude changes, the phase and amplitude of the lunar tidal fractional frequency shift between two clocks with the same longitude difference will change, while the change in the Moon's latitude only affects the amplitude of the fractional frequency shift of these two clocks. Our results provide useful information for the calibration and synchronization of clocks on Earth.

astro-ph.EP↗
arXiv2026

Redox behaviour of Fe impurities in BaTiO$_3$ based on many-body calculations

Based on detailed electronic structure and spectroscopy obtained using DFT-based many-body techniques, the redox behavior of Fe impurities in BaTiO$_3$ is investigated. It is observed that Fe impurities exhibit a mixed valence nature, comprising mostly Fe$^{2+}$ ($3d^6$) and Fe$^{3+}$ ($3d^5$) configurations, and such configurations can be tuned via oxygen vacancies which favor Fe$^{2+}$. The origin of such a redox behavior can be attributed to the charge transfer caused by shifting of the $d_{3z^2-r^2}$ orbitals. Furthermore, x-ray photoemission spectroscopy is evaluated by solving the Wannier function-derived local atomic Hamiltonian using the crystal field multiplet approach, with good agreements with recent experimental measurements.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗
arXiv2026

AlignedServe: Orchestrating Prefix-aware Batching to Build a High-throughput and Computing-efficient LLM Serving System

High-throughput inference serving is essential for applications built on large language models (LLMs). Existing serving frameworks reduce request-level and batch-level bubbles through batching and scheduling, but often overlook bubbles within each decode iteration. Tokens generated in the same iteration may incur different costs because they depend on KV caches of different lengths; tokens with long KV caches can become bottlenecks and delay the next iteration. We propose AlignedServe, an LLM serving framework built around prefix-aware batching. It groups requests with similar KV-cache lengths into the same batch to reduce iteration-level bubbles. To support this policy efficiently, AlignedServe uses large CPU memory to maintain sufficient in-flight requests for batching and applies a batch-level scheduling policy to reduce batch-level bubbles. It also introduces a GPU-Prefetch-For-GPU architecture, where one GPU prefetches KV cache for another to reduce CPU-to-GPU transfer latency. Experiments on synthetic and application workloads show that AlignedServe improves decoding throughput by up to 1.98 times and reduces latency by up to 7.4 times over state-of-the-art systems.

cs.DC↗
arXiv2026

Tailoring Teaching to Aptitude: Direction-Adaptive Self-Distillation for LLM Reasoning

On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) is an emerging LLM post-training paradigm in which the model serves as its own teacher: conditioned on privileged information such as a reference trace or hint, the same policy provides dense token-level supervision on its own rollouts. However, recent studies show that OPSD degrades complex reasoning by suppressing predictive uncertainty, which supports exploration and hypothesis revision. Our token-level analysis shows that this failure arises from applying a uniform direction of teacher supervision across tokens with different uncertainty levels: conformity to the privileged self-teacher suppresses exploration at high entropy, while deviation from the teacher degrades step accuracy at low entropy. Accordingly, we propose \textbf{Direction-Adaptive Self-Distillation} (\textbf{DASD}), which reframes privileged self-distillation from uniform teacher imitation into entropy-routed directional supervision: high-entropy tokens are pushed away from the privileged teacher to preserve exploration, while low-entropy tokens are pulled toward the teacher to stabilize step-level execution. Across six mathematical reasoning benchmarks, DASD achieves the best macro Avg@16 over strong RLVR and self-distillation baselines. Pass@$k$, reasoning-health, and generalization analyses show that these average gains come from preserving exploration without sacrificing step-level execution.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

PipeMax: Enhancing Offline LLM Inference on Commodity GPU Servers

Offline LLM inference seeks to maximize request processing under fixed budgets, making commodity GPU servers a promising choice. However, prior work typically considers offloading and parallelism in isolation, resulting in suboptimal performance. In this paper, we propose PipeMax, a high-throughput LLM inference system that integrates pipeline parallelism with offloading to overcome interconnect and memory constraints on GPU servers. Particularly, pipeline parallelism naturally incurs low communication overhead and keeps only one batch active on each GPU at a time, which enables offloading the KV cache of inactive batches. By coordinating computation with offloading data movement, PipeMax effectively expands GPU memory capacity and sustains large-batch execution. Experiments show that PipeMax achieves up to 2.51x higher throughput than vLLM, and up to 1.42x and 1.38x higher throughput than state-of-the-art high-throughput LLM systems, respectively, on an 8-GPU node.

cs.DC↗
arXiv2026

Revealing the origin of XMCD in an altermagnet via three-dimensional control of spins

Altermagnets are an emerging class of collinear antiferromagnets that exhibit unconventional spin-polarised electronic bands, potentially unlocking new functionalities that do not rely on spin-orbit coupling (SOC). Experimental signatures traditionally associated with spin polarisation, like X-ray magnetic circular dichroism (XMCD), are thus being used as a validation of altermagnetism. However, unlike altermagnetic spin-splitting, these responses require SOC and are not invariant under spin-space rotations. This brings into question the extent to which they can be considered direct signatures of altermagnetism. Here, we exploit the g-wave altermagnet $\alpha$-Fe$_{2}$O$_{3}$ to demonstrate that XMCD is governed precisely by the spin-direction-induced symmetry breaking that altermagnetic spin groups are designed to ignore. Strikingly, the XMCD is highly anisotropic and is decoupled from the weak magnetic canting. We show that this anomalous XMCD can be described by on-site Faraday tensors capturing the locally uncompensated spin-orbital anisotropies - a scenario that can be applied to other altermagnets. Leveraging this, we reconstruct complete vectorial maps of nanoscale textures in $\alpha$-Fe$_{2}$O$_{3}$ thin films, including domain walls and topological solitons, which are promising for building future spintronics and magnonics devices.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗
arXiv2026

Medium-Throughput Evaluation of Quantum Geometry-Driven Topological Transports in Altermagnets

Altermagnets provide a promising platform for a wide spectrum of applications integrating advantages of conventional ferromagnets and antiferromagnets. In this work, we implement a medium-throughput first-principles workflow and evaluate topological transport properties driven by quantum geometry for 135 altermagnets in the MAGNDATA database. Based on automated Wannier construction, both linear and nonlinear responses, including the anomalous Hall effect, magneto-optical Kerr effect, and bulk photovoltaic effect, are evaluated with further symmetry verifications. Detailed analysis is done on representative cases like metallic VNb3S6 with enhanced anomalous Hall conductivity, CaIrO3 with giant MOKE, and CuFeS2 with large shift current in non-centrosymmetric. These results establish a symmetry-guided computational route for identifying experimentally accessible fingerprints and functional transport properties in altermagnets.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗
arXiv2026

2D Ferroelectric Ruddlesden-Popper Perovskites: an Emerging Fully Electronically Controllable Shift Current and Persistent Spin Helix

Two-dimensional (2D) hybrid organic--inorganic perovskites (HOIPs) are promising candidates for next-generation optoelectronic and spintronic applications. This work systematically investigates the relationship between structural distortions and functional responses in three $C_{2v}$-symmetric Ruddlesden--Popper (RP) ferroelectric perovskites, $(4,4\text{-DFPD})_{2}\mathrm{PbI}_{4}$, $(\mathrm{DFCHA})_{2}\mathrm{PbI}_{4}$, and PEPI, using first-principles calculations combined with irreducible representation decomposition and wave-vector point-group symmetry (WPGS) analysis. The results reveal that the lead--iodide framework yields shift-current (SC) magnitudes comparable to, and in specific cases even an order of magnitude larger than, those of traditional ferroelectric oxides, with PEPI reaching a maximum of $69.16\ \mu\mathrm{A}/\mathrm{V}^{2}$. The SC magnitude correlates positively with the octahedral distortion index ($D_i$), while a competition mechanism is identified between covalent bond strength and structural asymmetry, where increased average bond lengths can offset the enhancement induced by $D_i$. Regarding spintronics, $C_{2v}$ symmetry-protected persistent spin textures (PST) are identified. A transition to $C_2$-protected quasi-PST occurs in monoclinic $(4,4\text{-DFHHA})_{2}\mathrm{PbI}_{4}$, leading to a persistent spin helix (PSH) with long-distance spin transport. The synergy among ferroelectricity, SC, and PST enables nonvolatile electrical control of both photocurrent direction and spin configurations. This work provides evaluation criteria and practical guidance for designing high-performance integrated spintronic--photovoltaic devices.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗
arXiv2026

Physics-informed automated surface reconstructing via low-energy electron diffraction based on Bayesian optimization

Low-energy electron diffraction (LEED) is a cornerstone technique for determining surface atomic structures[heldStructureDeterminationLowenergy2025], yet the quantitative analysis of electron diffraction intensity as a function of incident electron energy -- that is, LEED-\textit{I(V)} analysis -- remains a complex inverse problem. In this work, we tackle quantitative LEED-\textit{I(V)} analysis based on physics-informed Bayesian optimization (BO). By embedding multiple scattering LEED forward models directly into a trust-region BO loop, our approach simultaneously optimizes both structural and experimental parameters, adaptively adjusting trust regions for efficient exploration of complex non-convex parameter spaces without manual intervention. The robustness and scalability of the approach are demonstrated using the Ag(100)-(1$\time$1) and Fe\textsubscript{2}O\textsubscript{3}(1$\overline{1}$02)-(1$\time$1) surfaces as examples. Our work establishes a general framework for solving inverse problems in various characterization techniques, unlocking a physics-informed efficient, reproducible, and autonomous paradigm.

physics.comp-ph↗
arXiv2026

Origin of the tetragonal-to-hexagonal phase transitions in Fe-doped BaTiO$_3$

Based on detailed first-principles calculations, we investigate the tetragonal-to-hexagonal phase transition in Fe-doped BaTiO$_3$. Free energy calculations confirm a crossover from the tetragonal to hexagonal phases at 2.7--6\% Fe on cooling from the sintering temperature, in agreement with experimental observations, where comparative calculations show that neither CaTiO$_3$ nor SrTiO$_3$ exhibits similar behavior under equivalent substitution. Furthermore, three possible mechanisms are quantified: oxygen vacancies shift the crossover concentration from 2.7--6\% to 1.1--4.7\%, Jahn-Teller distortions are confined to the tetragonal phase, both favoring tetragonal-to-hexagonal phase transitions; whereas the tolerance factor is reduced in comparison with that of pristine BaTiO$_3$ for reasonable Fe valence states, disfavoring the occurrence of the hexagonal phases. Detailed analysis on the electronic structure reveals that the charge redistribution induced by oxygen vacancy is strongly orbital dependent, the added charge entering the $d_{z^2}$ orbital.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗
arXiv2026

Physics-informed Bayesian Optimization for Quantitative High-Resolution Transmission Electron Microscopy

Quantitative high-resolution transmission electron microscopy (HRTEM) provides an indispensable means to understand the structure-property relationships of a material in atomic dimensions. Successful quantification requires reliable retrieval of essential atomic structural information despite artifacts arising from unwanted but practically unavoidable imaging imperfections. Experimental observation carried out in tandem with model-based iterative image simulation shows vast applications in quantitative structural and chemical determination of objects spanning zero to three dimensions [Prog. Mater. Sci. 133, 101037, 2023]. However, the large number of parameters involved in the simulations make the current multi-step, user-guided iterative approach highly time consuming, thereby restricting its application primarily to small sample areas and to experienced users. In this work, we implement and apply a physics-informed Bayesian optimization (BO) framework to advance HRTEM quantification towards full automation and large-field-of-view analysis. Unlike conventional optimization approaches, our method adopts a stepwise strategy that fully leverages the strength of BO in handling high-dimensional parameters, while its probabilistic engine rigorously and efficiently refines the parameter space to enable rapid quantification. Using a BaTiO3 single crystal that contains heavy, medium and light elements as a model system, we demonstrate that the three-dimensional crystal structure can be determined from a single HRTEM image with a three to four order-of-magnitude improvement in time efficiency. This approach thus opens new avenues for fast and automated image quantification over larger sample volumes and, potentially, in the time domain.

physics.comp-ph↗
arXiv2026

Quasiparticle properties below coherence onset in YbAl3 nanostructures

Mesoscopic transport measurements are underexplored as probes of quasiparticles and their properties in correlated metals. The mixed valence compound YbAl$_3$ exhibits a single-ion Kondo temperature of 670 K, while thermodynamic and transport properties (probed with specific heat, magnetic susceptibility, Hall effect, and resistivity) imply the onset of coherence of heavy fermion quasiparticles at T$* \approx$ 37 K. To characterize these quasiparticles, we utilize mesoscopic techniques familiar from weakly correlated conductors. In lithographically-defined nanowires etched from epitaxial films, we observe weak antilocalization magnetoresistance and universal conductance fluctuations, consistent with electronic coherence lengths of tens of nanometers. Additionally, analysis of Johnson-Nyquist noise measurements as a function of bias current reveal, within the context of a range of accepted models, a significant electron-phonon energy loss that increases with decreasing temperature, a finding that we contextualize within the broader properties of YbAl$_3$.

cond-mat.str-el↗
arXiv2026

Mitigating Translationese Bias in Multilingual LLM-as-a-Judge via Disentangled Information Bottleneck

Large language models (LLMs) have become a standard for multilingual evaluation, yet they exhibit a severe systematic translationese bias. In this paper, translationese bias is characterized as LLMs systematically favoring machine-translated text over human-authored references, particularly in low-resource languages. We attribute this bias to spurious correlations with (i) latent manifold alignment with English and (ii) cross-lingual predictability. To mitigate this bias, we propose DIBJudge, a robust fine-tuning framework that learns a minimally sufficient, judgment-critical representation via variational information compression, while explicitly isolating spurious factors into the dedicated bias branch. Furthermore, we incorporate a cross-covariance penalty that explicitly suppresses statistical dependence between robust and bias representations, thereby encouraging effective disentanglement. Extensive evaluations on multilingual reward modeling benchmarks and a dedicated translationese bias evaluation suite demonstrate that the proposed DIBJudge consistently outperforms strong baselines and substantially mitigates translationese bias.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

Weyl-Transition-Driven Giant Reversible Orbital Hall Conductivity

Orbital Hall conductivity (OHC) is a central ingredient of orbitronics, yet how to control it microscopically remains largely unexplored. Here we identify a general mechanism in which tilted Weyl crossings formed by orbitally distinct bands generate a strongly asymmetric orbital Berry curvature (OBC) distribution, whose imbalance survives Brillouin-zone integration and yields a sizable OHC already at zeroth order. Using first-principles calculations, we show that monolayer PtBi2 realizes this mechanism and hosts a giant OHC dominated by a type-II Weyl point. A small biaxial tensile strain drives a type-II $\rightarrow$ type-I $\rightarrow$ type-II Weyl transition, leading to a reversible sign change of the OHC through the evolution of the OBC imbalance. This process is governed by the chiral orbital texture of the crossing bands and is further assisted by a strain-induced first-order structural phase transition through bonding reconstruction and polarization change. Our results establish Weyl engineering of orbital quantum geometry as a powerful route to generating and reversibly controlling OHC in polar multi-orbital materials.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗