arXiv subjects

Liang Chen

Publications and source records attributed to Liang Chen.

At least 469 records · Page 26Linked to original sources

arXiv2017

NaCl crystal from salt solution with far below saturated concentration under ambient condition

Under ambient conditions, we directly observed NaCl crystals experimentally in the rGO membranes soaked in the salt solution with concentration below and far below the saturated concentration. Moreover, in most probability, the NaCl crystals show stoichiometries behavior. We attribute this unexpected crystallization to the cation-π interactions between the ions and the aromatic rings of the rGO.

physics.chem-ph↗

arXiv2017

On the origin of the hard X-Ray excess of high-synchrotron-peaked BL Lac object Mrk 421

For the first time, Kataoka \& Stawarz reported a clear detection of a hard X-ray excess, above $\gtrsim$20 keV, in the high-synchrotron-peaked BL Lac object Mrk 421. We find that this feature may not be produced by the low-energy part of the same electron population that produced the Fermi/LAT $γ$-ray. Because of that it is required that the power-law electron energy go down to $γ_{\rm min}\approx19$, which predicts a very strong radio emission (radio flux larger than the observed) even considering the synchrotron self-absorption effect. We investigate the possibility of this excess being produced from the spine/layer jet structure, which has been clearly detected in Mrk 421. We find that (1) similar to one-zone modeling, the spine emissions provide good modeling of the broadband spectral energy distribution, except for the hard X-ray excess; and (2) the hard X-ray excess can be well represented by the synchrotron photons (from the layer) being inverse Compton scattered by the spine electrons.

astro-ph.HE↗

arXiv2017

Thermodynamics of Two-impurity Anderson Model with Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya Interaction

In this work, we use the numerical renormalization group (NRG) theory to study the thermodynamics of the two-impurity Anderson model. Two different methods are used to estimate the effect of the Dzyaloshiskii-Moriya (DM) interaction on the variation of the Kondo temperature. When the Ruderman-Kittel-Kasuya-Yosida (RKKY) interaction is vanishing, the two different estimations give different tendency. If we use the peak of the specific heat to identify the variation of the Kondo temperature versus the Dzyaloshiskii-Moriya interaction, we get an almost linear function. However, if we use the low temperature universal curve of the impurity entropy, we get a quadratic function. These results indicate that the previous debates about the influence of the spin-orbit coupling on the Kondo temperature may come from the different definitions of the Kondo temperature. When the RKKY interaction is ferromagnetic, there are two stages of the Kondo screening. Both the two estimations demonstrate that the second stage of the Kondo temperature is exponentially dependent on the DM interaction. There results are dramatically different from those calculated via perturbation theory.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2017

MDA in Capillary for Whole Genome Amplification

Whole genome amplification (WGA) plays an important role in sample preparation of low-input templates for high-throughput sequencing. Multiple displacement amplification (MDA), a popular isothermal WGA method, suffers a major hurdle of highly uneven amplification. Optimizations have been made in the past by separating the reagents into numbers of tiny chambers or droplets in microfluidic devices, which significantly improves the amplification uniformity of MDA. However, skill barrier still exists for biological researchers to handle chip fabrication and droplet manipulation. Here, we present a novel MDA protocol, in-capillary MDA (icMDA), which significantly simplifies the manipulation and improves the uniformity of amplification by dispersing reagents in a long quasi-1D capillary tubing. We demonstrated that icMDA is able to accurately detect SNVs with higher efficiency and sensitivity. Moreover, this straightforward method employs neither customized instruments nor complicated operations, making it a ready-to-use approach for most laboratories.

q-bio.GN↗

arXiv2016

Boost Picking: A Universal Method on Converting Supervised Classification to Semi-supervised Classification

This paper proposes a universal method, Boost Picking, to train supervised classification models mainly by un-labeled data. Boost Picking only adopts two weak classifiers to estimate and correct the error. It is theoretically proved that Boost Picking could train a supervised model mainly by un-labeled data as effectively as the same model trained by 100% labeled data, only if recalls of the two weak classifiers are all greater than zero and the sum of precisions is greater than one. Based on Boost Picking, we present "Test along with Training (TawT)" to improve the generalization of supervised models. Both Boost Picking and TawT are successfully tested in varied little data sets.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2016

Highly Efficient Ion Rejection by Graphene Oxide Membranes via Ion-controlling Interlayer Spacing

Because they may provide ultrathin, high-flux, and energy-efficient membranes for precise ionic and molecular sieving in aqueous solution, GO membranes (partially oxidized, stacked sheets of graphene) have shown great potential in water desalination and purification, gas and ion separation, biosensors, proton conductors, lithium-based batteries and super-capacitors. Unlike carbon nanotube (CNT) membranes, in which the nanotube pores have fixed sizes, the pores of GO membranes - the interlayer spacing between GO sheets - are of variable size. This presents a challenge for using GO membranes for filtration. Despite the great efforts to tune and fix the interlayer spacing, it remains difficult both to reduce the interlayer spacing sufficiently to exclude small ions while keeping this separation constant against the tendency of GO membranes to swell when immersed in aqueous solution, which greatly affects the applications of GO membranes. Here, we demonstrate experimentally that highly efficient and selective ion rejection by GO membranes can be readily achieved by controlling the interlayer spacing of GO membranes using cations (K+, Na+, Ca2+, Li+ and Mg2+) themselves. The interspacing can be controlled with precision as small as 1 A, and GO membranes controlled by one kind of cation can exclude other cations with a larger hydrated volume, which can only be accommodated with a larger interlayer spacing. First-principles calculations reveal that the strong noncovalent cation-pi interactions between hydrated cations in solution and aromatic ring structures in GO are the cause of this unexpected behavior. These findings open up new avenues for using GO membranes for water desalination and purification, lithium-based batteries and super-capacitors, molecular sieves for separating ions or molecules, and many other applications.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2016

Discovery of $γ$-ray emission from the radio-intermediate quasar III Zw 2: violent jet activity with intraday $γ$-ray variability

III Zw 2 is the prototype of radio-intermediate quasars. Although there is the evidence of possessing strong jet, significant $γ$-ray emission has not been reported before. In this work, we carry out a detailed analysis of the latest {\it Fermi}-LAT {\it Pass} 8 data. No significant $γ$-ray signal has been detected in the time-averaged 7-year {\it Fermi}-LAT data of III Zw 2, we however have identified two distinct $γ$-ray flares with isotropic luminosities of $\sim 10^{45}$ erg $\rm s^{-1}$. Multiwavelength data analysis (including also the optical photometric observations from Yunnan Observatories) are presented and the main finding is the simultaneous optical and $γ$-ray flares of III Zw 2 appearing in Nov. 2009. Violent $γ$-ray variability with doubling timescale of 2.5 hours was detected in another $γ$-ray flare in May 2010, for which the 3-hour $γ$-ray peak flux is $\sim 250$ times of the average flux in 7 years. Rather similar behaviors are observed in blazars and the blazar model can reasonably reproduce the spectral energy distribution of III Zw 2 in a wide energy range, strongly suggesting that its central engine resembles that of blazars. In view of its core which shares radio similarities with young radio sources together with the weak extended radio lobe emission, we suggest that III Zw 2 harbors a recurrent activity core and serves as a valuable target for investigating the fuelling and triggering of the activity in radio loud AGNs.

astro-ph.HE↗

arXiv2016

On the origin of the soft photons of the high synchrotron peaked blazar : PKS 1424+240

PKS 1424+240 is a distant very high energy gamma-ray BL Lac object with redshift $z=0.601$. It was found that pure synchrotron self-Compton (SSC) process normally need extreme input parameters (e.g., very low magnetic field intensity and extraordinarily large Doppler factor) to explain its multi-wavelength spectral energy distributions (SEDs). To avoid the extreme model parameters, different models have been proposed (e.g., two-zone SSC model or lepto-hadronic model). In this work, we employ the traditional one-zone leptonic model after including a weak external Compton component to re-explore the simultaneous multi-wavelength SEDs of PKS 1424+240 in both high (2009) and low (2013) states. We find that the input parameters of magnetic field and Doppler factor are roughly consistent with those of other BL Lacs if a weak external photon field from either broad line region (BLR) or the dust torus. However, the required energy density of seed photons from BLR or torus is about 3 orders of magnitude less than that constrained in luminous quasars (e.g., flat-spectrum radio quasars, FSRQs). This result suggests that the BLR/torus in BL Lacs is much weaker than that of luminous FSRQs (but not fully disappear), and the inverse-Compton of external photons from BLR/torus may still play a role even in high synchrotron peaked blazars.

astro-ph.HE↗

arXiv2016

High Performance WSe2 Field-Effect Transistors via Controlled Formation of In-Plane Heterojunctions

Monolayer WSe2 is a two dimensional (2D) semiconductor with a direct bandgap, and it has been recently explored as a promising material for electronics and optoelectronics. Low field effect mobility is the main constraint preventing WSe2 from becoming one of the competing channel materials for field-effect transistors (FETs). Recent results have demonstrated that chemical treatments can modify the electrical properties of transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs) including MoS2 and WSe2. Here, we report that controlled heating in air significantly improves device performance of WSe2 FETs in terms of on-state currents and field-effect mobilities. Specifically, after heating at optimized conditions, chemical vapor deposition grown monolayer WSe2 FETs showed an average FET mobility of 31 cm2/Vs and on/off current ratios up to 5*108. For few-layer WSe2 FETs, after the same treatment applied, we achieved a high mobility up to 92 cm2/Vs. These values are significantly higher than FETs fabricated using as-grown WSe2 flakes without heating treatment, demonstrating the effectiveness of air heating on the performance improvements of WSe2 FETs. The underlying chemical processes involved during air heating and the formation of in-plane heterojunctions of WSe2 and WO3-x, which is believed to be the reason for the improved FET performance, were studied by spectroscopy and transmission electron microscopy. We further demonstrated that by combining air heating method developed in this work with supporting 2D materials on BN substrate, we achieved a noteworthy field effect mobility of 83 cm2/Vs for monolayer WSe2 FETs. This work is a step towards controlled modification of the properties of WSe2 and potentially other TMDCs, and may greatly improve device performance for future applications of 2D materials in electronics and optoelectronics.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2016

Object Recognition Based on Amounts of Unlabeled Data

This paper proposes a novel semi-supervised method on object recognition. First, based on Boost Picking, a universal algorithm, Boost Picking Teaching (BPT), is proposed to train an effective binary-classifier just using a few labeled data and amounts of unlabeled data. Then, an ensemble strategy is detailed to synthesize multiple BPT-trained binary-classifiers to be a high-performance multi-classifier. The rationality of the strategy is also analyzed in theory. Finally, the proposed method is tested on two databases, CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100. Using 2% labeled data and 98% unlabeled data, the accuracies of the proposed method on the two data sets are 78.39% and 50.77% respectively.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2016

An Efficient Inexact Symmetric Gauss-Seidel Based Majorized ADMM for High-Dimensional Convex Composite Conic Programming

In this paper, we propose an inexact multi-block ADMM-type first-order method for solving a class of high-dimensional convex composite conic optimization problems to moderate accuracy. The design of this method combines an inexact 2-block majorized semi-proximal ADMM and the recent advances in the inexact symmetric Gauss-Seidel (sGS) technique for solving a multi-block convex composite quadratic programming whose objective contains a nonsmooth term involving only the first block-variable. One distinctive feature of our proposed method (the sGS-imsPADMM) is that it only needs one cycle of an inexact sGS method, instead of an unknown number of cycles, to solve each of the subproblems involved.With some simple and implementable error tolerance criteria, the cost for solving the subproblems can be greatly reduced, and many steps in the forward sweep of each sGS cycle can often be skipped, which further contributes to the efficiency of the proposed method. Global convergence as well as the iteration complexity in the non-ergodic sense is established.Preliminary numerical experiments on some high-dimensional linear and convex quadratic SDP problems with a large number of linear equality and inequality constraints are also provided. The results show that for the vast majority of the tested problems, the sGS-imsPADMM is 2 to 3 times faster than the directly extended multi-block ADMM with the aggressive step-length of 1.618, which is currently the benchmark among first-order methods for solving multi-block linear and quadratic SDP problems though its convergence is not guaranteed.

math.OC↗

arXiv2016

A Note on the Convergence of ADMM for Linearly Constrained Convex Optimization Problems

This note serves two purposes. Firstly, we construct a counterexample to show that the statement on the convergence of the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) for solving linearly constrained convex optimization problems in a highly influential paper by Boyd et al. [Found. Trends Mach. Learn. 3(1) 1-122 (2011)] can be false if no prior condition on the existence of solutions to all the subproblems involved is assumed to hold. Secondly, we present fairly mild conditions to guarantee the existence of solutions to all the subproblems and provide a rigorous convergence analysis on the ADMM, under a more general and useful semi-proximal ADMM (sPADMM) setting considered by Fazel et al. [SIAM J. Matrix Anal. Appl. 34(3) 946-977 (2013)], with a computationally more attractive large step-length that can even exceed the practically much preferred golden ratio of $(1+\sqrt{5})/2$.

math.OC↗

arXiv2016

Feature-Area Optimization: A Novel SAR Image Registration Method

This letter proposes a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image registration method named Feature-Area Optimization (FAO). First, the traditional area-based optimization model is reconstructed and decomposed into three key but uncertain factors: initialization, slice set and regularization. Next, structural features are extracted by scale invariant feature transform (SIFT) in dual-resolution space (SIFT-DRS), a novel SIFT-Like method dedicated to FAO. Then, the three key factors are determined based on these features. Finally, solving the factor-determined optimization model can get the registration result. A series of experiments demonstrate that the proposed method can register multi-temporal SAR images accurately and efficiently.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2015

Testing General Relativity with Present and Future Astrophysical Observations

One century after its formulation, Einstein's general relativity has made remarkable predictions and turned out to be compatible with all experimental tests. Most of these tests probe the theory in the weak-field regime, and there are theoretical and experimental reasons to believe that general relativity should be modified when gravitational fields are strong and spacetime curvature is large. The best astrophysical laboratories to probe strong-field gravity are black holes and neutron stars, whether isolated or in binary systems. We review the motivations to consider extensions of general relativity. We present a (necessarily incomplete) catalog of modified theories of gravity for which strong-field predictions have been computed and contrasted to Einstein's theory, and we summarize our current understanding of the structure and dynamics of compact objects in these theories. We discuss current bounds on modified gravity from binary pulsar and cosmological observations, and we highlight the potential of future gravitational wave measurements to inform us on the behavior of gravity in the strong-field regime.

gr-qc↗

arXiv2015

Neutrino oscillation from the beam with Gaussian-like energy distribution

A recent neutrino experiment at Daya Bay gives superior data of the distribution of the prompt energy. In this paper, the energy distribution presented in the experiment is simulated by applying a Gaussian-like packet to the neutrino wave function received by the detector. We find that the wave packet of neutrinos is expanded during the propagation. As a result, the mixing angle $θ_{13}$ is more difficult to be measured than $θ_{12}$ and $θ_{23}$ in long baseline experiments. Some other propagation properties, such as the time evaluation of the survival probability, the neutrino oscillation and the $CP$ violation, are also studied with the employment of the coherent state method. When the Gaussian packet width increases, the amplitude of the neutrino oscillation decreases, whereas the oscillation period increases gradually.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2015

Discovery of gamma-ray emission from a strongly lobe-dominated quasar 3C 275.1

We systematically analyze the 6-year {\it Fermi}/LAT data of the lobe-dominated quasars (LDQs) in the complete LDQ sample from 3CRR survey and report the discovery of high-energy $γ$-ray emission from 3C 275.1. The $γ$-ray emission of 3C 207 is confirmed and significant variability of the lightcurve is identified. We do not find statistically significant $γ$-ray emission from other LDQs. 3C 275.1 is the known $γ$-ray quasar with the lowest core dominance parameter (i.e., $R=0.11$). We also show that both the northern radio hotspot and parsec jet models can reasonably reproduce the $γ$-ray data. The parsec jet model, however, is favored by the potential $γ$-ray variability at the timescale of months. We suggest that some dimmer $γ$-ray LDQs will be detected in the future and LDQs could contribute non-negligibly to the extragalactic $γ$-ray background.

astro-ph.HE↗

arXiv2015

Chemical Vapor Deposition Growth of Monolayer WSe2 with Tunable Device Characteristics and Growth Mechanism Study

Semiconducting transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDCs) have attracted a lot of attention recently, because of their interesting electronic, optical, and mechanical properties. Among large numbers of TMDCs, monolayer of tungsten diselenides (WSe2) is of particular interest since it possesses a direct band gap and tunable charge transport behaviors, which make it suitable for a variety of electronic and optoelectronic applications. Direct synthesis of large domains of monolayer WSe2 and their growth mechanism studies are important steps toward applications of WSe2. Here, we report systematical studies on ambient pressure chemical vapor deposition (CVD) growth of monolayer and few layer WSe2 flakes directly on silica substrates. The WSe2 flakes were characterized using optical microscopy, atomic force microscopy, Raman spectroscopy, and photoluminescence spectroscopy. We investigated how growth parameters, with emphases on growth temperatures and durations, affect the sizes, layer numbers, and shapes of as-grown WSe2 flakes. We also demonstrated that transport properties of CVD-grown monolayer WSe2, similar to mechanically-exfoliated samples, can be tuned into either p-type or ambipolar electrical behavior, depending on the types of metal contacts. These results deepen our understandings on the vapor phase growth mechanism of WSe2, and may benefit the uses of these CVD-grown monolayer materials in electronic and optoelectronics.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2015

The Kondo Temperature of a Two-dimensional Electron Gas with Rashba Spin-orbit Coupling

We use the Hirsch-Fye quantum Monte Carlo method to study the single magnetic impurity problem in a two-dimensional electron gas with Rashba spin-orbit coupling. We calculate the spin susceptibility for various values of spin-orbit coupling, Hubbard interaction, and chemical potential. The Kondo temperatures for different parameters are estimated by fitting the universal curves of spin susceptibility. We find that the Kondo temperature is almost a linear function of Rashba spin-orbit energy when the chemical potential is close to the edge of the conduction band. When the chemical potential is far away from the band edge, the Kondo temperature is independent of the spin-orbit coupling. These results demonstrate that, for single impurity problem in this system, the most important reason to change the Kondo temperature is the divergence of density of states near the band edge, and the divergence is induced by the Rashba spin-orbit coupling.

cond-mat.str-el↗