arXiv subjects

Nian Liu

Publications and source records attributed to Nian Liu.

99 records · Page 6Linked to original sources

arXiv2018

Bright sub-20 nm cathodoluminescent nanoprobes for multicolor electron microscopy

Electron microscopy (EM) has been instrumental in our understanding of biological systems ranging from subcellular structures to complex organisms. Although EM reveals cellular morphology with nanoscale resolution, it does not provide information on the location of proteins within a cellular context. An EM-based bioimaging technology capable of localizing individual proteins and resolving protein-protein interactions with respect to cellular ultrastructure would provide important insights into the molecular biology of a cell. Here, we report on the development of luminescent nanoprobes potentially suitable for labeling biomolecules in a multicolor EM modality. In this approach, the labels are based on lanthanide-doped nanoparticles that emit light under electron excitation in a process known as cathodoluminescence (CL). Our results suggest that the optimization of nanoparticle composition, synthesis protocols and electron imaging conditions could enable high signal-to-noise localization of biomolecules with a sub-20-nm resolution, limited only by the nanoparticle size. In ensemble measurements, these luminescent labels exhibit narrow spectra of nine distinct colors that are characteristic of the corresponding rare-earth dopant type.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2018

Formation of the Abundance Boundaries of the Heavier Neutron-capture Elements in Metal-poor Stars

The abundance scatter of heavier r-process elements (Z > 56) relative to Fe ([r/Fe]) in metal-poor stars preserves excellent information of the star formation history and provides important insights into the various situations of the Galactic chemical enrichment. In this respect, the upper and lower boundaries of [r/Fe] could present useful clues for investigating the extreme situations of the star formation history and the early Galactic chemical evolution. In this paper, we investigate the formation of the upper and lower boundaries of [r/Fe] for the gas clouds. We find that, for a cloud from which metal-poor stars formed, the formation of the upper limits of [r/Fe] is mainly due to the pollution from a single main r-process event. For a cloud from which metal-poor stars formed, the formation of the lower limits of [r/Fe] is mainly due to the pollution from a single SN II event that ejects primary Fe.

astro-ph.SR↗

arXiv2018

PiCANet: Learning Pixel-wise Contextual Attention for Saliency Detection

Contexts play an important role in the saliency detection task. However, given a context region, not all contextual information is helpful for the final task. In this paper, we propose a novel pixel-wise contextual attention network, i.e., the PiCANet, to learn to selectively attend to informative context locations for each pixel. Specifically, for each pixel, it can generate an attention map in which each attention weight corresponds to the contextual relevance at each context location. An attended contextual feature can then be constructed by selectively aggregating the contextual information. We formulate the proposed PiCANet in both global and local forms to attend to global and local contexts, respectively. Both models are fully differentiable and can be embedded into CNNs for joint training. We also incorporate the proposed models with the U-Net architecture to detect salient objects. Extensive experiments show that the proposed PiCANets can consistently improve saliency detection performance. The global and local PiCANets facilitate learning global contrast and homogeneousness, respectively. As a result, our saliency model can detect salient objects more accurately and uniformly, thus performing favorably against the state-of-the-art methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2017

AE Ursae Majoris -- a $δ$ Scuti Star in the Hertzsprung Gap

We analyze the photometric data and spectroscopic data that collect on the $δ$ Scuti star AE UMa. The fundamental and the first overtone frequencies are confirmed as $f_{0} = 11.62560$\,c\,d$^{-1}$ and $f_{1} = 15.03124$\,c\,d$^{-1}$, respectively, from the frequency content by analyzing of the 40 nights light curve spanning from 2009 to 2012. Additionally, another 37 frequencies are identified as either the harmonics or the linear combinations of the fundamental and the first overtone frequencies, among which 25 are newly detected. The rate of period change of the fundamental mode is determined as $(1/P_{0})(dP_{0}/dt) = 5.4(\pm 1.9) \times 10^{-9}$\,yr$^{-1}$ as revealed from the $O-C$ diagram based on the 84 newly determined times of maximum light combined with those derived from the literature. The spectroscopic data suggests that AE UMa is a population\,I $δ$ Scuti star. With these physical properties, we perform theoretical explorations based on the stellar evolution code MESA on this target, considering that the variation of pulsation period is caused by secular evolutionary effects. We finally constraint the AE UMa with the physical parameters as: the mass of $1.805 \pm 0.055\ M_{\odot}$, the radius of $1.647 \pm 0.032 \times 10^{11}$\,cm, the luminosity of $1.381 \pm 0.048~(\log L/L_{\odot})$ and the age of $1.055 \pm 0.095 \times 10^{9}$\,yr. AE UMa can be the (Pop. I) $δ$ Scuti star that locates just after the second turn-off of its evolutional track leaving the main sequence, a star in the phase of the Hertzsprung Gap with a helium core and a hydrogen-burning shell.

astro-ph.SR↗

arXiv2016

A Deep Spatial Contextual Long-term Recurrent Convolutional Network for Saliency Detection

Traditional saliency models usually adopt hand-crafted image features and human-designed mechanisms to calculate local or global contrast. In this paper, we propose a novel computational saliency model, i.e., deep spatial contextual long-term recurrent convolutional network (DSCLRCN) to predict where people looks in natural scenes. DSCLRCN first automatically learns saliency related local features on each image location in parallel. Then, in contrast with most other deep network based saliency models which infer saliency in local contexts, DSCLRCN can mimic the cortical lateral inhibition mechanisms in human visual system to incorporate global contexts to assess the saliency of each image location by leveraging the deep spatial long short-term memory (DSLSTM) model. Moreover, we also integrate scene context modulation in DSLSTM for saliency inference, leading to a novel deep spatial contextual LSTM (DSCLSTM) model. The whole network can be trained end-to-end and works efficiently when testing. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets show that DSCLRCN can achieve state-of-the-art performance on saliency detection. Furthermore, the proposed DSCLSTM model can significantly boost the saliency detection performance by incorporating both global spatial interconnections and scene context modulation, which may uncover novel inspirations for studies on them in computational saliency models.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2016

Footprints of the weak s-process in the carbon-enhanced metal-poor star ET0097

Historically, the weak s-process contribution to metal-poor stars is thought to be extremely small, due to the effect of the secondary-like nature of the neutron source 22Ne(a;n)25Mg in massive stars, which means that metal-poor weak s-process stars could not be found. ET0097 is the first observed carbon-enhanced metal-poor (CEMP) star in the Sculptor dwarf spheroidal galaxy. Because C is enriched and the elements heavier than Ba are not overabundant, ET0097 can be classified as a CEMP-no star. However, this star shows overabundances of lighter n-capture elements (i.e., Sr, Y and Zr). In this work, having adopted the abundance decomposition approach, we investigate the astrophysical origins of the elements in ET0097. We find that the light elements and iron-peak elements (from O to Zn) of the star mainly originate from the primary process of massive stars and the heavier n-capture elements (heavier than Ba) mainly come from the main r-process. However, the lighter n-capture elements such as Sr, Y and Zr should mainly come from the primary weak s-process. The contributed fractions of the primary weak s-process to the Sr, Y and Zr abundances of ET0097 are about 82%, 84% and 58% respectively, suggesting that the CEMP star ET0097 should have the footprints of the weak s-process. The derived result should be a significant evidence that the weak s-process elements can be produced in metal-poor massive stars.

astro-ph.SR↗

arXiv2016

Efficiency at maximum power of thermochemical engines with near-independent particles

Two-reservoir thermochemical engines are established in by using near-independent particles (including Maxwell-Boltzmann, Fermi-Dirac, and Bose-Einstein particles) as the working substance. Particle and heat fluxes can be formed based on the temperature and chemical potential gradients between two different reservoirs. A rectangular-type energy filter with width $Γ$ is introduced for each engine to weaken the coupling between the particle and heat fluxes. The efficiency at maximum power of each particle system decreases monotonously from an upper bound $η^+$ to a lower bound $η^-$ when $Γ$ increases from 0 to $\infty$. It is found that the $η^+$ values for all three systems are bounded by $η_{\mathrm{C}}/2 \leq η^+ \leq η_{\mathrm{C}}/(2-η_{\mathrm{C}})$ due to strong coupling, where $η_{\mathrm{C}}$ is the Carnot efficiency. For the Bose-Einstein system, it is found that the upper bound is approximated by the Curzon-Ahlborn efficiency: $η_{\mathrm{CA}}=1-\sqrt{1-η_{\mathrm{C}}}$. When $Γ\rightarrow\infty$, the intrinsic maximum powers are proportional to the square of the temperature difference of two reservoirs for all three systems, and the corresponding lower bounds of efficiency at maximum power can be simplified in the same form of $η^{-}=η_{\mathrm{C}}/[1+a_0(2-η_{\mathrm{C}})]$.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗

arXiv2014

A theoretical study on the performances of thermoelectric heat engine and refrigerator with two-dimensional electron reservoirs

Theoretical thermoelectric nanophysics models of low-dimensional electronic heat engine and refrigerator devices, comprising two-dimensional hot and cold reservoirs and an interconnecting filtered electron transport mechanism have been established. The models were used to numerically simulate and evaluate the thermoelectric performance and energy conversion efficiencies of these low-dimensional devices, based on three different types of electron transport momentum-dependent filters, referred to herein as: kx, ky and kr filters. Assuming the Fermi-Dirac distribution of electrons, expressions for key thermoelectric performance parameters were derived for the resonant transport processes, in which the transmission of electrons has been approximated as a Lorentzian resonance function. Optimizations were carried out and the corresponding optimized design parameters have been determined, including but not limited to the universal theoretical upper bound of the efficiency at maximum power for heat engines, and the maximum coefficient of performance for refrigerators. From the results, it was determined that kr filter delivers the best thermoelectric performance, followed by the kx filter, and then the ky filter. For refrigerators with any one of three filters, an optimum range for the full width at half maximum of the transport resonance was found to be <2kT .

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2012

The site conditions of the Guo Shou Jing Telescope

The weather at Xinglong Observing Station, where the Guo Shou Jing Telescope (GSJT) is located, is strongly affected by the monsoon climate in north-east China. The LAMOST survey strategy is constrained by these weather patterns. In this paper, we present a statistics on observing hours from 2004 to 2007, and the sky brightness, seeing, and sky transparency from 1995 to 2011 at the site. We investigate effects of the site conditions on the survey plan. Operable hours each month shows strong correlation with season: on average there are 8 operable hours per night available in December, but only 1-2 hours in July and August. The seeing and the sky transparency also vary with seasons. Although the seeing is worse in windy winters, and the atmospheric extinction is worse in the spring and summer, the site is adequate for the proposed scientific program of LAMOST survey. With a Monte Carlo simulation using historical data on the site condition, we find that the available observation hours constrain the survey footprint from 22h to 16h in right ascension; the sky brightness allows LAMOST to obtain the limit magnitude of V = 19.5mag with S/N = 10.

astro-ph.IM↗