arXiv subjects

Kai Liu

Publications and source records attributed to Kai Liu.

At least 343 records · Page 19Linked to original sources

arXiv2020

Symmetry guaranteed Dirac-line semimetals in two-dimensions against strong spin-orbit coupling

Several intriguing electronic phenomena and electric properties were discovered in three-dimensional Dirac nodal line semimetals (3D-DNLSM), which are, however, easy to be perturbed under strong spin-orbit coupling (SOC). While two-dimensional (2D) layers are an emerging material category with many advantages, 2D-DNLSM against SOC is yet to be uncovered. Here, we report a 2D-DNLSM in odd-atomic-layer Bi (the brick phase, another Bi allotrope), whose robustness against SOC is protected by the little co-group C_2v \times Z^T_2, the unique protecting symmetry we found in 2D.Specially, (4n+2) valence electrons fill the electronic bands in the brick phase, so that the Dirac nodal line with fourfold degeneracy locates across the Fermi level. There are almost no other low energy states close to the Fermi level; this allows to feasibly observe the neat DNLSM-induced phenomena in transport measurements without being affected by other bands. In contrast, Other VA-group elements also form the brick phases, but their DNL states are mixed with the extra states around the Fermi level. This unprecedented category of layered materials allows for exploring nearly isolated 2DDNL states in 2D.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2020

Topological properties of non-centrosymmetric superconductors $T$Ir$_{2}$B$_{2}$ ($T$=Nb, Ta)

A recent experiment reported two new non-centrosymmetric superconductors NbIr$_{2}$B$_{2}$ and TaIr$_{2}$B$_{2}$ with respective superconducting transition temperatures of 7.2 K and 5.2 K and further suggested their superconductivity to be unconventional [K. Górnicka \textit{et al}., Adv. Funct. Mater. 2007960 (2020)]. Here, based on first-principles calculations and symmetry analysis, we propose that $T$Ir$_{2}$B$_{2}$ ($T$=Nb, Ta) are topological Weyl metals in the normal state. In the absence of spin-orbit coupling (SOC), we find that NbIr$_{2}$B$_{2}$ has 12 Weyl points, and TaIr$_{2}$B$_{2}$ has 4 Weyl points, i.e. the minimum number under time-reversal symmetry; meanwhile, both of them have a nodal net composed of three nodal lines. In the presence of SOC, a nodal loop on the mirror plane evolves into two hourglass Weyl rings, along with the Weyl points, which are dictated by the nonsymmorphic glide mirror symmetry. Besides the rings, NbIr$_{2}$B$_{2}$ and TaIr$_{2}$B$_{2}$ have 16 and 20 pairs of Weyl points, respectively. The surface Fermi arcs are explicitly demonstrated. On the (110) surface of TaIr$_{2}$B$_{2}$, we find extremely long surface Fermi arcs ($\sim$0.6 ${\textÅ}^{-1}$) located 1.4 meV below the Fermi level, which should be readily probed in experiment. Combined with the intrinsic superconductivity and the nontrivial bulk Fermi surfaces, $T$Ir$_{2}$B$_{2}$ may thus provide a very promising platform to explore the three-dimensional topological superconductivity.

cond-mat.supr-con↗

arXiv2020

Reconstructing phase-resolved hysteresis loops from first-order reversal curves

The first order reversal curve (FORC) method is a magnetometry based technique used to capture nanoscale magnetic phase separation and interactions with macroscopic measurements using minor hysteresis loop analysis. This makes the FORC technique a powerful tool in the analysis of complex systems which cannot be effectively probed using localized techniques. However, recovering quantitative details about the identified phases which can be compared to traditionally measured metrics remains an enigmatic challenge. We demonstrate a technique to reconstruct phase-resolved magnetic hysteresis loops by selectively integrating the measured FORC distribution. From these minor loops, the traditional metrics - including the coercivity and saturation field, and the remanent and saturation magnetization - can be determined. In order to perform this analysis, special consideration must be paid to the accurate quantitative management of the so-called reversible features. This technique is demonstrated on three representative materials systems, high anisotropy FeCuPt thin-films, Fe nanodots, and SmCo/Fe exchange spring magnet films, and shows excellent agreement with the direct measured major loop, as well as the phase separated loops.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2020

A Phase Field Crystal Method for Multilayer Graphene Structure

Bilayer graphene has been a subject of intense study in recent years. We extend a structural phase field crystal method to include an external potential from adjacent layer(s), which is generated by the corresponding phase field and changes over time. Moreover, multiple layers can be added into the structure. Using the thickness of the boundaries between different stacking variants of the bilayer structure as the key parameter, we quantify the strength of the adjacent layer potential by comparing with atomistic simulation results. We then test the multiple graphene structures, including bilayers, triple layers, up to 6 layers. We find that besides the initial conditions, the way of new layers added into the structure will also affect the layout of the atomic configuration. We believe tour results can help understanding the mechanism of graphene structure consists of more than one layer.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2020

3D Nanomagnetism in Low Density Interconnected Nanowire Networks

Free-standing, interconnected metallic nanowire networks with density as low as 40 mg/cm^{3} have been achieved over cm-scale areas, using electrodeposition into polycarbonate membranes that have been ion-tracked at multiple angles. Networks of interconnected magnetic nanowires further provide an exciting platform to explore 3-dimensional nanomagnetism, where their structure, topology and frustration may be used as additional degrees of freedom to tailor the materials properties. New magnetization reversal mechanisms in cobalt networks are captured by the first-order reversal curve method, which demonstrate the evolution from strong demagnetizing dipolar interactions to intersections-mediated domain wall pinning and propagation, and eventually to shape-anisotropy dominated magnetization reversal. These findings open up new possibilities for 3-dimensional integrated magnetic devices for memory, complex computation, and neuromorphics.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2020

RRCN: A Reinforced Random Convolutional Network based Reciprocal Recommendation Approach for Online Dating

Recently, the reciprocal recommendation, especially for online dating applications, has attracted more and more research attention. Different from conventional recommendation problems, the reciprocal recommendation aims to simultaneously best match users' mutual preferences. Intuitively, the mutual preferences might be affected by a few key attributes that users like or dislike. Meanwhile, the interactions between users' attributes and their key attributes are also important for key attributes selection. Motivated by these observations, in this paper we propose a novel reinforced random convolutional network (RRCN) approach for the reciprocal recommendation task. In particular, we technically propose a novel random CNN component that can randomly convolute non-adjacent features to capture their interaction information and learn feature embeddings of key attributes to make the final recommendation. Moreover, we design a reinforcement learning based strategy to integrate with the random CNN component to select salient attributes to form the candidate set of key attributes. We evaluate the proposed RRCN against a number of both baselines and the state-of-the-art approaches on two real-world datasets, and the promising results have demonstrated the superiority of RRCN against the compared approaches in terms of a number of evaluation criteria.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2020

Multi-band MelGAN: Faster Waveform Generation for High-Quality Text-to-Speech

In this paper, we propose multi-band MelGAN, a much faster waveform generation model targeting to high-quality text-to-speech. Specifically, we improve the original MelGAN by the following aspects. First, we increase the receptive field of the generator, which is proven to be beneficial to speech generation. Second, we substitute the feature matching loss with the multi-resolution STFT loss to better measure the difference between fake and real speech. Together with pre-training, this improvement leads to both better quality and better training stability. More importantly, we extend MelGAN with multi-band processing: the generator takes mel-spectrograms as input and produces sub-band signals which are subsequently summed back to full-band signals as discriminator input. The proposed multi-band MelGAN has achieved high MOS of 4.34 and 4.22 in waveform generation and TTS, respectively. With only 1.91M parameters, our model effectively reduces the total computational complexity of the original MelGAN from 5.85 to 0.95 GFLOPS. Our Pytorch implementation, which will be open-resourced shortly, can achieve a real-time factor of 0.03 on CPU without hardware specific optimization.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2020

RSAVS superconductors: materials with a superconducting state that is robust against large volume shrinkage

TThe transition temperature (TC) between normal and superconducting states usually exhibits a dramatic increase or decrease with increasing applied pressure. Here we present, in contrast, a new kind of superconductor that exhibits the exotic feature that TC is robust against large volume shrinkages induced by applied pressure (here naming them as "RSAVS superconductors"). Extraordinarily, the TC in these materials stays almost constant over a large pressure range, e.g. over 136 GPa in the (TaNb)0.67(HfZrTi)0.33 high entropy alloy and 141 GPa in the NbTi commercial alloy. We show that the RSAVS behavior also exists in another high entropy alloy (ScZrNbTa)0.6(RhPd)0.4, and in superconducting elemental Ta and Nb, indicating that this behavior, which has never previously been identified or predicted by theory, occurs universally in some conventional superconductors. Our electronic structure calculations indicate that although the electronic density of state (DOS) at the Fermi level in the RSAVS state is dominated by the electrons from the degenerate dxy, dxz and dyz orbitals, these electrons decrease in influence with increasing pressure. In contrast, however, the contribution of the degenerate dx2-y2 and dz2 orbital electrons remains almost unchanged at the Fermi level, suggesting that these are the electrons that may play a crucial role in stabilizing the TC in the RSAVS state.

cond-mat.supr-con↗

arXiv2020

In-plane Néel wall chirality and orientation of interfacial Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya vector in magnetic films

The interfacial Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction (DMI) is of great interest as it can stabilize chiral spin structures in thin films. Experiments verifying the orientation of the interfacial DMI vector remain rare, in part due to the difficulty of separating vector components of DMI. In this study, Fe/Ni bilayers and Co/Ni multilayers were deposited epitaxially onto Cu(001) and Pt(111) substrates, respectively. By tailoring the effective anisotropy, spin reorientation transitions (SRTs) are employed to probe the orientation of the DMI vector by measuring the spin structure of domain walls on both sides of the SRTs. The interfacial DMI is found to be sufficiently strong to stabilize chiral Néel walls in the out-of-plane magnetized regimes, while achiral Néel walls are observed in the in-plane magnetized regimes. These findings experimentally confirm that the out-of-plane component of the DMI vector is insignificant in these fcc(001) and fcc(111) oriented interfaces, even in the presence of atomic steps.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2020

Vehicular Fog Computing Enabled Real-time Collision Warning via Trajectory Calibration

Vehicular fog computing (VFC) has been envisioned as a promising paradigm for enabling a variety of emerging intelligent transportation systems (ITS). However, due to inevitable as well as non-negligible issues in wireless communication, including transmission latency and packet loss, it is still challenging in implementing safety-critical applications, such as real-time collision warning in vehicular networks. In this paper, we present a vehicular fog computing architecture, aiming at supporting effective and real-time collision warning by offloading computation and communication overheads to distributed fog nodes. With the system architecture, we further propose a trajectory calibration based collision warning (TCCW) algorithm along with tailored communication protocols. Specifically, an application-layer vehicular-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication delay is fitted by the Stable distribution with real-world field testing data. Then, a packet loss detection mechanism is designed. Finally, TCCW calibrates real-time vehicle trajectories based on received vehicle status including GPS coordinates, velocity, acceleration, heading direction, as well as the estimation of communication delay and the detection of packet loss. For performance evaluation, we build the simulation model and implement conventional solutions including cloud-based warning and fog-based warning without calibration for comparison. Real-vehicle trajectories are extracted as the input, and the simulation results demonstrate that the effectiveness of TCCW in terms of the highest precision and recall in a wide range of scenarios.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2020

Concept of the Solar Ring Mission: Overview

The concept of the Solar Ring mission was gradually formed from L5/L4 mission concept, and the proposal of its pre-phase study was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China in November 2018 and then by the Strategic Priority Program of Chinese Academy of Sciences in space sciences in May 2019. Solar Ring mission will be the first attempt to routinely monitor and study the Sun and inner heliosphere from a full 360-degree perspective in the ecliptic plane. The current preliminary design of the Solar Ring mission is to deploy six spacecraft, grouped in three pairs, on a sub-AU orbit around the Sun. The two spacecraft in each group are separated by about 30 degrees and every two groups by about 120 degrees. This configuration with necessary science payloads will allow us to establish three unprecedented capabilities: (1) determine the photospheric vector magnetic field with unambiguity, (2) provide 360-degree maps of the Sun and the inner heliosphere routinely, and (3) resolve the solar wind structures at multiple scales and multiple longitudes. With these capabilities, the Solar Ring mission aims to address the origin of solar cycle, the origin of solar eruptions, the origin of solar wind structures and the origin of severe space weather events. The successful accomplishment of the mission will advance our understanding of the star and the space environment that hold our life and enhance our capability of expanding the next new territory of human.

astro-ph.SR↗

arXiv2020

Synergistically creating sulfur vacancies in semimetal-supported amorphous MoS2 for efficient hydrogen evolution

The presence of elemental vacancies in materials is inevitable according to statistical thermodynamics, which will decide the chemical and physical properties of the investigated system. However, the controlled manipulation of vacancies for specific applications is a challenge. Here we report a facile method for creating large concentrations of S vacancies in the inert basal plane of MoS2 supported on semimetal CoMoP2. With a small applied potential, S atoms can be removed in the form of H2S due to the optimized free energy of formation. The existence of vacancies favors electron injection from the electrode to the active site by decreasing the contact resistance. As a consequence, the activity is increased by 221 % with the vacancy-rich MoS2 as electrocatalyst for hydrogen evolution reaction (HER). A small overpotential of 75 mV is needed to deliver a current density of 10 mA cm-2, which is considered among the best values achieved for MoS2. It is envisaged that this work may provide a new strategy for utilizing the semimetal phase for structuring MoS2 into a multi-functional material.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2020

Nitrogen magneto-ionics

So far, magneto-ionics, understood as voltage-driven ion transport in magnetic materials, has largely relied on controlled migration of oxygen ion/vacancy and, to a lesser extent, lithium and hydrogen. Here, we demonstrate efficient, room-temperature, voltage-driven nitrogen transport (i.e., nitrogen magneto-ionics) by electrolyte-gating of a single CoN film (without an ion-reservoir layer). Nitrogen magneto-ionics in CoN is compared to oxygen magneto-ionics in Co3O4, both layers showing a nanocrystalline face-centered-cubic structure and reversible voltage-driven ON-OFF ferromagnetism. In contrast to oxygen, nitrogen transport occurs uniformly creating a plane-wave-like migration front, without assistance of diffusion channels. Nitrogen magneto-ionics requires lower threshold voltages and exhibits enhanced rates and cyclability. This is due to the lower activation energy for ion diffusion and the lower electronegativity of nitrogen compared to oxygen. These results are appealing for the use of magneto-ionics in nitride semiconductor devices, in applications requiring endurance and moderate speeds of operation, such as brain-inspired computing.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2020

Extreme Ultraviolet Late Phase of Solar Flares

A second peak in extreme ultraviolet sometimes appears during the gradual phase of solar flares, which is known as EUV late phase (ELP). Stereotypically ELP is associated with two separated sets of flaring loops with distinct sizes, and it has been debated whether ELP is caused by additional heating or extended plasma cooling in the longer loop system. Here we carry out a survey of 55 M-and-above GOES-class flares with ELP during 2010--2014. Based on the flare-ribbon morphology, these flares are categorized as circular-ribbon (19 events), two-ribbon (23 events), and complex-ribbon (13 events) flares. Among them, 22 events (40%) are associated with coronal mass ejections, while the rest are confined. An extreme ELP, with the late-phase peak exceeding the main-phase peak, is found in 48% of two-ribbon flares, 37% of circular-ribbon flares, and 31% of complex-ribbon flares, suggesting that additional heating is more likely present during ELP in two-ribbon than in circular-ribbon flares. Overall, cooling may be the dominant factor causing the delay of the ELP peak relative to the main-phase peak, because the loop system responsible for the ELP emission is generally larger than, and well separated from, that responsible for the main-phase emission. All but one of the circular-ribbon flares can be well explained by a composite "dome-plate" quasi-separatrix layer (QSL). Only half of these show a magnetic null point, with its fan and spine embedded in the dome and plate, respectively. The dome-plate QSL, therefore, is a general and robust structure characterizing circular-ribbon flares.

astro-ph.SR↗

arXiv2019

Incentivized Exploration for Multi-Armed Bandits under Reward Drift

We study incentivized exploration for the multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem where the players receive compensation for exploring arms other than the greedy choice and may provide biased feedback on reward. We seek to understand the impact of this drifted reward feedback by analyzing the performance of three instantiations of the incentivized MAB algorithm: UCB, $\varepsilon$-Greedy, and Thompson Sampling. Our results show that they all achieve $\mathcal{O}(\log T)$ regret and compensation under the drifted reward, and are therefore effective in incentivizing exploration. Numerical examples are provided to complement the theoretical analysis.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2019

Interfacial-Redox-Induced Tuning of Superconductivity in YBa$_{2}$Cu$_{3}$O$_{7-δ}$

Solid state ionic approaches for modifying ion distributions in getter/oxide heterostructures offer exciting potentials to control material properties. Here we report a simple, scalable approach allowing for total control of the superconducting transition in optimally doped YBa$_{2}$Cu$_{3}$O$_{7-δ}$ (YBCO) films via a chemically-driven ionic migration mechanism. Using a thin Gd capping layer of up to 20 nm deposited onto 100 nm thick epitaxial YBCO films, oxygen is found to leach from deep within the YBCO. Progressive reduction of the superconducting transition is observed, with complete suppression possible for a sufficiently thick Gd layer. These effects arise from the combined impact of redox-driven electron doping and modification of the YBCO microstructure due to oxygen migration and depletion. This work demonstrates an effective ionic control of superconductivity in oxides, an interface induced effect that goes well into the quasi-bulk regime, opening up possibilities for electric field manipulation.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2019

Quantum spin Hall effect in monolayer and bilayer TaIrTe$_{4}$

Generally, stacking two quantum spin Hall insulators gives rise to a trivial insulator. Here, based on first-principles electronic structure calculations, we confirm that monolayer TaIrTe$_{4}$ is a quantum spin Hall insulator and remarkably find that bilayer TaIrTe$_{4}$ is still a quantum spin Hall insulator. Theoretical analysis indicates that the covalent-like interlayer interaction in combination with the small bandgap at time-reversal invariant $Γ$ point results in new band inversion in bilayer TaIrTe$_{4}$, namely, the emergence of quantum spin Hall phase. Meanwhile, a topological phase transition can be observed by increasing the interlayer distance in bilayer TaIrTe$_{4}$. Considering that bulk TaIrTe$_{4}$ is a type-II Weyl semimetal, layered TaIrTe$_{4}$ thus provides an ideal platform to realize different topological phases at different dimensions.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2019

Uni-traveling-carrier photodetector with high-contrast grating focusing-reflection mirrors

A novel uni-traveling-carrier photodetector (UTC-PD) structure with an integrated focusing-reflection (FR) mirror realized by a non-periodic concentric circular high-contrast grating (NP-CC-HCG), referred to as FR-UTC-PD, is proposed to enhance responsivity in conventional UTC-PDs. The FR-UTC-PD allows improving the responsivity by 36.5% at a 1.55-um wavelength as compared to a UTC-PD without integrated an FR mirror with 84.59% reflectivity. For 40-um-diameter PDs, the obtained 3-dB bandwidths are unaltered with values of 18 GHz at -3.0 V bias voltage. The radio-frequency (RF) output power and photocurrent are -1.77 dBm and 17.56 mA, respectively, at 10 GHz and the -6.0 V bias voltage.

physics.ins-det↗