arXiv subjects

Liang Dai

Publications and source records attributed to Liang Dai.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Population statistics of nanohertz gravitational wave sources

The recent detection of a nanohertz gravitational wave (GW) background by pulsar timing arrays (PTA) has sparked extensive discussions regarding its origin-whether it arises from astrophysical supermassive black hole binaries (SMBHBs) or from primordial GWs generated by various early universe processes. Previous studies suggest that a key discriminant between these two origins is the non-Gaussianity of the GW background prior to the detection of any individual source. In this Letter, we introduce a hierarchical Bayesian inference framework for inferring population properties of GW sources. This approach enables not only the measurement of evidence for different GW origins using PTA data but also the inference of population properties of astrophysical SMBHBs, by optimally leveraging non-Gaussian information in individual bright sources and in power spectrum fluctuations of the GW background.

astro-ph.HE↗

arXiv2026

How to augment cosmic shear measurements with radio polarimetry of galaxies?

The integral polarization of spiral galaxies in the radio band has been proposed as a new tracer of the intrinsic galaxy shape that augments lensing shear measurements. We revisit the method of shear estimation in this context. We introduce a new statistical model in which galaxy shape and polarization are Gaussian random variables with their covariance characterizing the quality of polarization-shape alignment. Applying the principle of likelihood maximization, we then analytically derive unbiased, minimal-variance estimators, which allow to simultaneously estimate gravitational shear, intrinsic shape alignment and line-of-sight polarization rotation, all at once and accurate to first order in these three effects. New to the literature, our estimators have the merits of being free of biases, robust in situations of few galaxies or poor polarization-shape alignment, allowing analytic reconstruction noise covariance, and minimizing uncertainties in power spectrum estimation, thus resolving conceptual issues of the existing estimation methods. This new analytic framework is generally applicable to future research that exploits the polarization-shape alignment effect of galaxies.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2026

First Statistical Study of Over 100 Magnified Stellar Events at Redshift $z \approx 0.725$ with JWST

Highly magnified stars at cosmological distances ($z \gtrsim 0.7$) become detectable thanks to microlensing by intracluster stars near the critical curves of galaxy clusters. Multi-epoch photometric campaigns targeting caustic crossing galaxies magnified by massive galaxy clusters enable the detection of these objects as transient events. Such stars provide unique opportunities to study stellar populations at early cosmic times, probe the nature of dark matter, reveal small-scale structure in the cluster, and improve lens models. To date, only a few dozen high-redshift stars have been reported, with a single lensed galaxy, the Dragon, holding the current record of 44 detections. These numbers, however, remain insufficient to exploit their full potential. In this paper, owing to the inclusion of new observations, we report the identification of more than 100 magnified stellar events in the Dragon, behind the massive galaxy cluster Abell 370. The relatively low redshift of the Dragon ($z\approx0.725$) facilitates the detection of its most massive stars. Using imaging data from three different cycles (2022--2024) with the James Webb Space Telescope, we apply a time-domain technique to identify flux variations associated with caustic-crossing events. From the spatial distribution of stellar events we constrain the high-end slope of the stellar luminosity function, finding $\beta=2.18^{+0.20}_{-0.30}$. Alternatively, assuming a fixed slope, we constrain the microlens surface mass density. In addition, we examine the parity asymmetry of the detected caustic-crossing events, a proposed probe of wave dark matter, and find that it remains present. We also use the events to trace the regions of highest magnification, offering an alternative way to map the system critical curves.

astro-ph.GA↗

arXiv2025

Little red dot variability over a century reveals black hole envelope via a giant Einstein cross

"Little red dots" (LRDs) represent a new population of astronomical objects uncovered by JWST whose nature remains debated. Although many LRDs are suspected as active galactic nuclei (AGN), they show little variability on days-years timescales. We report the discovery of two gravitationally lensed LRDs at redshift $\sim$4.3 behind the cluster RXCJ2211-0350, one of which (RX1) is quadruply imaged with time delays spanning $\sim$130 years. RX1 exhibits intrinsic color and brightness variations of up to 0.7 magnitude among its images. These changes are consistent with blackbody-temperature variations of a photosphere, indicating long-term variability analogous to Cepheid-like pulsations but in a far more extended ($R \sim 2000$ AU) and massive ($M \gtrsim 10^6 \, M_{\odot}$) systems. These results suggest LRDs as a distinct class of AGN with stellar-like envelopes.

astro-ph.GA↗

arXiv2025

Kinematic Mapping of Giant Arcs: A New Method to Locate Lensing Critical Curves

The vicinity of lensing critical curves features highly magnified portions of lensed galaxies. Accurate knowledge of the location and shape of the critical curve will be useful for understanding the nature of highly magnified stellar sources near critical curves and for revealing sub-galactic dark matter structures within the lens. In galaxy-cluster lenses, however, prediction of critical curves can be uncertain due to complexity in global mass modeling. We explore and validate a kinematics-based method for locating the critical curve. This method leverages the continuous line-of-sight velocity profile of the lensed galaxy mapped through integral field spectroscopy of emission lines, and combines an agnostic local lens model and a disk rotation model. Applying our method to a highly magnified region of the Dragon Arc in the Abell 370 cluster lensing field using archival VLT/MUSE IFU mapping of the H$\beta$ line, we constrain the critical curve to an uncertainty band with a half-width of 0.23" ($1\sigma$). This result reveals locations of recently detected extremely magnified stars biased toward the negative-parity side of the critical curve, as predicted for intracluster microlensing. With future JWST/NIRSpec IFU mapping of the H$\alpha$ line at SNR $\simeq$ 10 (20), uncertainty could improve to 0.12" (0.08"). A measurement of this type with sufficiently small uncertainty may reveal small-scale wiggles in the shape of the critical curve, which can arise from the lensing perturbation of sub-galactic dark matter substructure. Our approach is generally applicable to caustic-crossing giant arcs and can be incorporated into global lens modeling.

astro-ph.GA↗

arXiv2025

Dents in the Mirror: A Novel Probe of Dark Matter Substructure in Galaxy Clusters from the Astrometric Asymmetry of Lensed Arcs

Astrometric perturbations of lensed arcs behind galaxy clusters have been recently suggested as promising probes of small-scale ($\lesssim10^9 M_{\odot}$) dark matter substructure. Populations of cold dark matter (CDM) subhalos, predicted in hierarchical structure formation theory, can break the symmetry of arcs near the critical curve, leading to positional shifts in the observed images. We present a novel statistical method to constrain the average subhalo mass fraction ($f_{\rm sub}$) in clusters that takes advantage of this induced positional asymmetry. Focusing on CDM, we extend a recent semi-analytic model of subhalo tidal evolution to accurately simulate realistic subhalos within a cluster-scale host. We simulate the asymmetry of lensed arcs from these subhalo populations using Approximate Bayesian Computation. Using mock data, we demonstrate that our method can reliably recover the simulated $f_{\rm sub}$ to within 68\% CI in 73\% of cases, regardless of the lens model, astrometric precision, and image morphology. We show that the constraining power of our method is optimized for larger samples of well observed arcs, ideal for recent JWST observations of cluster lenses. As a preliminary test, we apply our method to the MACSJ0416 Warhol arc and AS1063 System 1. For Warhol we constrain the upper limit on $\log f_{\rm sub} < -3.48^{+1.00}_{-0.91}$, while for AS1063 System 1 we constrain $\log f_{\rm sub} = -2.44^{+0.61}_{-0.86}$ (both at 68\% CI), consistent with CDM predictions. We elaborate on our method's limitations and its future potential to place stringent constraints on dark matter properties in cluster environments.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2025

Very Massive Stars and High N/O: A Tale of the Nitrogen-enriched Super Star Cluster in the Sunburst Arc

The lensed Sunburst Arc ($z = 2.369$) hosts a young ($\sim2$--$4\,\rm Myr$), massive ($M_\star \sim 10^7\,M_\odot$), compact ($R_{\rm eff} \sim 8\,\rm pc$) Lyman-continuum (LyC) leaking super star cluster, which powers a compact ($< 10\,\rm pc$), high-pressure nebula at sub-solar metallicity $\sim0.2\,Z_\odot$ and with an anomalously elevated nitrogen-to-oxygen ratio $\log({\rm N/O}) \sim -0.2$. We present semi-analytic models and 3D magnetohydrodynamic simulations with radiative feedback in an attempt to reproduce this system. The results indicate that the progenitor giant molecular cloud (GMC) may have $M_{\rm cloud} \gtrsim 3 \times 10^7\,M_\odot$ and $R_{\rm cloud} \sim 70\,\rm pc$, corresponding to a surface density $\sim10^3$--$10^4\,M_\odot\,{\rm pc}^{-2}$. Incorporating feedback from individual Very Massive Stars (VMSs; $\ge 100\,M_\odot$) sampled from the Kroupa initial mass function, we find that their winds rapidly enrich $\sim 10^4\,M_\odot$ of nearby gas with nitrogen ($\sim 1\,$dex) and helium ($\sim 0.1$--$0.2\,$dex). In the first $1$--$3\,$Myr, some cold gas falls to the system center where a central cluster builds up from sub-cluster mergers. There, the gas is photoionized, pressurized, and chemically enriched by the newly formed VMSs, before being radiatively expelled in the next $\sim1\,\rm Myr$. We find that both VMS feedback and a high-surface-density progenitor GMC are necessary to reproduce the observed nebular properties, such as high N/O, high pressure, and stellar proximity. Low metallicity ($Z \le 0.004$) may be essential to avoid overproduction of carbon from WC stars. Such enrichment processes localized to compact starburst events may have caused strong nitrogen emission from dense ionized gas as observed in high-redshift galaxies such as GN-z11 and GS_3073.

astro-ph.GA↗

arXiv2025

Polarization-shape alignment of IllustrisTNG star-forming galaxies

In star-forming disk galaxies, the radio continuum emission ($1$-$10\,$GHz) powered by star formation has an integrated polarization direction imperfectly aligned with the apparent disk minor axis. This polarization-shape alignment effect was previously observed in a small sample of local spirals. If this is prevalent for disk galaxies out to cosmological redshifts, novel measurements of cosmic birefringence and cosmic shear will be enabled by leveraging radio continuum surveys synergized with galaxy shape measurements. We calculate the polarization-shape misalignment angle for star-forming galaxies in the \texttt{IllustrisTNG50} simulation at $0 < z < 2$, assuming that additional polarized radio emission from an AGN is negligible. The alignment found for $z=0$ is consistent with local spiral data, but significantly deteriorates as redshift increases. Moreover, it degrades toward lower frequencies due to internal Faraday depolarization. Thanks to cosmic redshifting, observing higher-$z$ galaxies at a fixed frequency greatly mitigates degradation due to reduced Faraday depolarization at the source-frame frequency. We present analytic fits to the non-Gaussian misalignment angle distribution, and evaluate Fisher information per galaxy for measuring cosmic birefringence. For observation at 4.8 GHz, the effective RMS misalignment angle $\sigma_{\alpha,{\rm eff}}$ is $18^\circ$, $23^\circ$ and $33^\circ$ at $z=0$, $1$ and $2$, respectively. Analyzing $N$ independent galaxies reduces the uncertainty on an isotropic cosmic birefringence signal to $\sigma_{\alpha,{\rm eff}}/\sqrt{N}$, providing competitive sensitivity once large samples are available. Our results motivate pilot observations to empirically characterize polarization-shape alignment, facilitate forecasts of cosmology and fundamental physics applications that exploit this effect.

astro-ph.GA↗

arXiv2025

Is Earendel a Star Cluster?: Metal Poor Globular Cluster Progenitors at $z\sim6$

The strongly-lensed $z\sim 6$ Sunrise galaxy offers an incredible opportunity to investigate star formation in the early universe on parsec or smaller scales. The highly magnified object Earendel within the Sunrise was previously identified as a candidate star or binary due to size constraints placed by the lensing magnification, however recent works have suggested this constraint may be relaxed to even the size of star clusters. Here, we explore the hypothesis that Earendel may actually be a star cluster, and simultaneously evaluate other star clusters within the host galaxy. Leveraging deep, archival James Webb Space Telescope NIRSpec PRISM spectroscopy, we determine a spectroscopic redshift for the Sunrise galaxy $z=5.926 \pm 0.013$, and we fit simple stellar population (SSP) models from three premier libraries to evaluate the physical parameters of Earendel and another distinct star cluster in the Sunrise dubbed `$1b$'. We find the rest-UV through optical continuum of Earendel to be well-described by an SSP, nearly equivalently to $1b$ which is confidently a star cluster. We infer they have intermediate ages $t_{\rm age}\sim 30$--$150\,$Myr, are metal poor ($Z_\star\lesssim10\%\,Z_\odot$), and are consistent with the formation age-metallicity trend seen in local globular clusters. Such intermediate age clusters are seldom probed spectroscopically in the high redshift universe, and we explore the extent to which these clusters can be characterized via the spectroscopic continuum.

astro-ph.GA↗

arXiv2025

Efficient Channel Estimation for Rotatable Antenna-Enabled Wireless Communication

Non-fixed flexible antenna architectures, such as fluid antenna system (FAS), movable antenna (MA), and pinching antenna, have garnered significant interest in recent years. Among them, rotatable antenna (RA) is a promising antenna architecture that exploits additional spatial degrees of freedom (DoFs) to enhance the communication performance. To fully obtain the performance gain provided by RAs, accurate channel state information (CSI) is essential for adjusting the orientation/boresight of each antenna. In this letter, we propose an efficient channel estimation scheme for RA communication systems, where the base station (BS) can sequentially and adaptively adjust the orientations of RAs to enrich the environmental observations from diverse angular perspectives, thereby enhancing the channel estimation accuracy. The proposed scheme includes two main procedures that are conducted alternately during each channel training period. Specifically, the first procedure is to estimate the CSI with given RAs' orientations, involving the angle-of-arrivals (AoAs) information and path gains. Then, based on the estimated CSI, the second procedure adjusts the RAs' orientations to maximize the effective channel gain. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed channel estimation method outperforms other benchmark schemes.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2025

Time-frequency Imprints of Extreme Mass-Ratio Inspirals in Confusion Gravitational Wave Background

Detecting individual extreme-mass-ratio inspirals (EMRIs) is a major science goal of future space-based gravitational wave observatories such as Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) and TianQin. However, matched-filtering can be challenging as waveform templates are required to be accurate over tens of thousands of orbits. We introduce the time-frequency spectrum as an alternative observable that can be exploited to reveal the chirping of EMRIs at the population level. We analytically calculate this spectrum and its correlators for parameterized populations of slowly chirping sources on quasi-circular orbits, assuming a simplified model of the antenna response for a proof of concept. We then exploit this observable to distinguish between Galactic white dwarf binaries and a possible EMRI population, and quantify the precision at which EMRI population parameters can be determined through a Fisher analysis. We explore several scenarios of EMRI populations and find that this new method may allow us to determine EMRI population parameters at an accuracy level of several percent. Since white dwarf binaries have much longer chirping timescales than the EMRIs do, EMRI population properties can still be determined even if their stochastic gravitational wave background has a power spectrum two orders of magnitude weaker than that of the Galactic white dwarf binaries.

astro-ph.CO↗

arXiv2025

Surface mobility of a glass-forming polymer in an ionic liquid

The free surface of glassy polymers exhibits enhanced segmental dynamics compared to the bulk, forming a liquid-like layer that lowers the glass transition temperature (Tg) in nanometersized polymer samples. Recent studies have shown that immersing polymers in ionic liquids can suppress this enhanced surface dynamics. To investigate how ionic liquids influence polymer dynamics near the ionic-liquid-polymer interface, we measure the surface leveling of nanometersized stepped polystyrene films immersed in ionic liquids, and compared the results to the case of films in vacuum. Our results reveal that ionic liquids significantly slow the leveling process both above and below Tg. However, our results indicate that the liquid-like surface layer below Tg does exist in ionic liquids. Numerical solutions of the thin-film equation, incorporating appropriate boundary conditions, show that the surface mobility of PS films in ionic liquids can match that of PS films in vacuum. Thus, while ionic liquids alter the polymer flow process, they do not eliminate the dynamical heterogeneity inherent to glassy polymers.

cond-mat.soft↗

arXiv2025

Pangu Ultra MoE: How to Train Your Big MoE on Ascend NPUs

Sparse large language models (LLMs) with Mixture of Experts (MoE) and close to a trillion parameters are dominating the realm of most capable language models. However, the massive model scale poses significant challenges for the underlying software and hardware systems. In this paper, we aim to uncover a recipe to harness such scale on Ascend NPUs. The key goals are better usage of the computing resources under the dynamic sparse model structures and materializing the expected performance gain on the actual hardware. To select model configurations suitable for Ascend NPUs without repeatedly running the expensive experiments, we leverage simulation to compare the trade-off of various model hyperparameters. This study led to Pangu Ultra MoE, a sparse LLM with 718 billion parameters, and we conducted experiments on the model to verify the simulation results. On the system side, we dig into Expert Parallelism to optimize the communication between NPU devices to reduce the synchronization overhead. We also optimize the memory efficiency within the devices to further reduce the parameter and activation management overhead. In the end, we achieve an MFU of 30.0% when training Pangu Ultra MoE, with performance comparable to that of DeepSeek R1, on 6K Ascend NPUs, and demonstrate that the Ascend system is capable of harnessing all the training stages of the state-of-the-art language models. Extensive experiments indicate that our recipe can lead to efficient training of large-scale sparse language models with MoE. We also study the behaviors of such models for future reference.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Rotatable Antenna-Enabled Secure Wireless Communication

Rotatable antenna (RA) is a promising technology that exploits new spatial degree-of-freedom (DoF) to improve wireless communication and sensing performance. In this letter, we investigate an RA-enabled secure communication system where confidential information is transmitted from an RA-based access point (AP) to a single-antenna legitimate user in the presence of multiple eavesdroppers. We aim to maximize the secrecy rate by jointly optimizing the transmit beamforming and the deflection angles of all RAs at the AP. Accordingly, we propose an efficient alternating optimization (AO) algorithm to obtain a high-quality suboptimal solution in an iterative manner, where the generalized Rayleigh quotient-based beamforming is applied and the RAs' deflection angles are optimized by the successive convex approximation (SCA) technique. Our simulation results show that the proposed RA-enabled secure communication system achieves a significantly higher secrecy rate as compared to various benchmark schemes.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2025

Double White Dwarf Tides with Multi-messenger Measurements

Short-period Galactic double white dwarf (DWD) systems will be observable both in visible light through photometric monitoring and in mHz-range gravitational waves (GWs) with forthcoming space-based laser interferometry such as LISA. When only photometric variability is used to measure DWD intrinsic properties, there is a degeneracy between the chirp mass and binary tidal interaction, as orbital frequency time derivative is set by both GW radiation and tides. Without expensive radial velocity data from spectroscopic monitoring, this degeneracy may be lifted in principle by directly measuring the second time derivative of the orbital frequency through photometric monitoring over an ultra-long time baseline. Alternatively, the degeneracy can be removed by exploiting information in both photometric variability and the coherent GW waveform. Investigating both approaches, we find that direct measurement of the second time derivative is likely infeasible for most DWDs, while the multi-messenger method will disentangle measurements of the chirp mass and the binary moments of inertia, for a large sample of tidally locked systems. The latter information will enable empirical tests of WD structure models with finite temperature effects.

astro-ph.SR↗

arXiv2025

Rotatable Antenna Enabled Wireless Communication System with Visual Recognition: A Prototype Implementation

Rotatable antenna (RA) is an emerging technology that has great potential to exploit additional spatial degrees of freedom (DoFs) by flexibly altering the three-dimensional (3D) orientation/boresight of each antenna. In this demonstration, we present a prototype of the RA-enabled wireless communication system with a visual recognition module to evaluate the performance gains provided by the RA in practical environments. In particular, a mechanically-driven RA is developed by integrating a digital servo motor, a directional antenna, and a microcontroller, which enables the dynamic adjustment of the RA orientation. Moreover, the orientation adjustment of the RA is guided by the user's direction information provided by the visual recognition module, thereby significantly enhancing system response speed and self-orientation accuracy. The experimental results demonstrate that the RA-enabled communication system achieves significant improvement in communication coverage performance compared to the conventional fixed antenna system.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2025

A Unified Knowledge-Distillation and Semi-Supervised Learning Framework to Improve Industrial Ads Delivery Systems

Industrial ads ranking systems conventionally rely on labeled impression data, which leads to challenges such as overfitting, slower incremental gain from model scaling, and biases due to discrepancies between training and serving data. To overcome these issues, we propose a Unified framework for Knowledge-Distillation and Semi-supervised Learning (UKDSL) for ads ranking, empowering the training of models on a significantly larger and more diverse datasets, thereby reducing overfitting and mitigating training-serving data discrepancies. We provide detailed formal analysis and numerical simulations on the inherent miscalibration and prediction bias of multi-stage ranking systems, and show empirical evidence of the proposed framework's capability to mitigate those. Compared to prior work, UKDSL can enable models to learn from a much larger set of unlabeled data, hence, improving the performance while being computationally efficient. Finally, we report the successful deployment of UKDSL in an industrial setting across various ranking models, serving users at multi-billion scale, across various surfaces, geological locations, clients, and optimize for various events, which to the best of our knowledge is the first of its kind in terms of the scale and efficiency at which it operates.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Recognizing and generating knotted molecular structures by machine learning

Knotted molecules occur naturally and are designed by scientists to gain special biological and material properties. Understanding and utilizing knotting require efficient methods to recognize and generate knotted structures, which are unsolved problems in mathematics and physics. Here, we solve these two problems using machine learning. First, our Transformer-based neural network (NN) can recognize the knot types of given chain conformations with an accuracy of $>99\%$. We can use a single NN model to recognize knots with different chain lengths, and our computational speed is about 4500 times faster than the most popular mathematical method for knot recognition: the Alexander polynomials. Second, we for the first time design a diffusion-based NN model to generate conformations for given knot types. The generated conformations satisfy not only the desired knot types, but also the correct physical distributions of the radii of gyration and knot sizes. The results have several implications. First, the Transformer is suitable for handling knotting tasks, probably because of its strength in processing sequence information, a key component in knotting. Second, our NN can replace mathematical methods of knot recognition for faster speed on many occasions. Third, our models can facilitate the design of knotted protein structures. Lastly, analyzing how NN recognizes knot types can provide insight into the principle behind knots, an unsolved problem in mathematics. We provide an online website (http://144.214.24.236) for using our models.

physics.comp-ph↗