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Shuang Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Shuang Zhang.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

Time-varying Nonlinear Effects in Terahertz Generation

Time-varying effects have unveiled new possibilities for manipulating electromagnetic waves through the temporal dimension. In this study, we experimentally explore these effects in the nonlinear optical process of terahertz (THz) generation using optically pumped indium tin oxide (ITO) films. The ultrafast carrier dynamics in the ITO film endow the second-order nonlinear susceptibility (\c{hi}(2)) with sub-picosecond temporal evolution, establishing a temporal boundary for the generated THz waves. We observe significant amplitude and frequency modulations in the THz generation at various transients, attributed to the time-varying complex amplitude of the \c{hi}(2). Moreover, we also observed polarization modulations when further exploiting the tensor properties of \c{hi}(2). This work advances the exploration of time-varying effects into the nonlinear regime through frequency down-conversion, effectively transferring the strong time-varying material response from the near-infrared (NIR) band to the THz band. These findings open up new opportunities for realizing time-varying phenomena that specifically require single-cycle modulation.

physics.optics↗

Spectral-isolated photonic topological corner mode with a tunable mode area and stable frequency

Emergent collective modes in lattices give birth to many intriguing physical phenomena in condensed matter physics. Among these collective modes, large-area modes typically feature small-level spacings, while a mode with stable frequency tends to be spatially tightly confined. Here, we theoretically propose and experimentally demonstrate a spectral-isolated photonic topological corner mode with a tunable mode area and stable frequency in a two-dimensional photonic crystal. This mode emerges from hybridizing the large-area homogeneous mode and in-gap topological corner modes. Remarkably, this large-area homogeneous mode possesses unique chirality and has a tunable mode area under the change of the mass term of the inner topological non-trivial lattice. We experimentally observe such topological large-area corner modes(TLCM) in a 2D photonic system and demonstrate the robustness by introducing disorders in the structure. Our findings have propelled the forefront of higher-order topology research, transitioning it from single-lattice systems to multi-lattice systems. They may support promising potential applications, particularly in vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

Revealing spontaneous symmetry breaking in continuous time crystals

Spontaneous symmetry breaking plays a pivotal role in physics ranging from the emergence of elementary particles to the phase transitions of matter. The spontaneous breaking of continuous time translation symmetry leads to a novel state of matter named continuous time crystal (CTC). It exhibits periodic oscillation without the need for periodic driving, and the relative phases for repetitively realized oscillations are random. However, the mechanism behind the spontaneous symmetry breaking in CTCs, particularly the random phases, remains elusive. Here we propose and experimentally realize two types of CTCs based on distinct mechanisms: manifold topology and near-chaotic motion. We observe both types of CTCs in thermal atomic ensembles by artificially synthesizing spin-spin nonlinear interactions through a measurement-feedback scheme. Our work provides general recipes for the realization of CTCs, and paves the way for exploring CTCs in various systems.

quant-ph↗

Observation of Co-propagating Chiral Zero Modes in Magnetic Photonic Crystals

Topological singularities, such as Weyl points and Dirac points, can give rise to unidirectional propagation channels known as chiral zero modes (CZMs) when subject to a magnetic field. These CZMs are responsible for intriguing phenomena like the chiral anomaly in quantum systems. The propagation direction of each CZM is determined by both the applied magnetic field and the topological charge of the singularity point. While counter-propagating CZMs have been observed in 2D and 3D systems, the realization of co-propagating CZMs has remained elusive. Here we present the first experimental observation of co-propagating CZMs in magnetic photonic crystals hosting a single pair of ideal Weyl points WPs. By manipulating the crystal's structural configuration, we spatially alter the locations of the WPs, creating pseudo-magnetic fields in opposite directions between them. This arrangement results in a pair of CZMs that possess the same group velocity and co-propagate. Our work opens up new possibilities for topological manipulation of wave propagation and may lead to advancements in optical waveguides, switches, and various other applications.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

Tellegen responses in metamaterials

Tellegen medium has long been a topic of debate, with its existence being contested over several decades. It was first proposed by Tellegen in 1948 and is characterized by a real-valued cross coupling between electric and magnetic responses, distinguishing it from the well-known chiral medium that has imaginary coupling coefficients. Significantly, Tellegen responses are closely linked to axion dynamics, an extensively studied subject in condensed matter physics. Here, we report the realization of Tellegen metamaterials in the microwave region through a judicious combination of subwavelength metallic resonators, gyromagnetic materials, and permanent magnet discs. We observe the key signature of the Tellegen response, i.e. a Kerr rotation for reflected wave, while the polarization remains the same in the transmission direction. The retrieved effective Tellegen parameter is several orders of magnitude greater than that of natural materials. Our work opens door to a variety of nonreciprocal photonic devices and may provide a platform for studying axion physics.

physics.class-ph↗

Initial Burst of Disruptive Efforts Ensuring Scientific Career Viability

Despite persistent efforts to understand the dynamics of creativity of scientists over careers in terms of productivity, impact, and prize, little is known about the dynamics of scientists' disruptive efforts that affect individual academic careers and drive scientific advance. Drawing on millions of data over six decades and across nineteen disciplines, associating the publication records of individual scientists with the disruption index, we systematically quantify the temporal pattern of disruptive ideas over individual scientific careers, providing a detailed understanding of the macro phenomenon of scientific stagnation from the individual perspective. We start by checking the relationship between disruption-based and citation-based publication profiles. Next, we observe the finite inequality in the disruptive productivity of scientists, diminishing gradually as the level of disruption increases. We then identify the initial burst phenomenon in disruption dynamics. It is further revealed that while early engagement in high disruption frictions away initial productivity, compared to initial advantage in productivity or impact, initial high disruption ensures more subsequent academic viability evidenced by a longer career span and relatively final higher productivity, but does not necessarily guarantee academic success throughout careers. Further analysis shows that increasing disruptive work is uncorrelated to overall productivity but negatively correlated with the overall impact. However, increasing disruptive work in the early career is associated with higher overall productivity, yet lower overall productivity in the later career. Our research underscores the urgent need for a policy shift that encourages a balance between the pursuit of disruptive efforts and the achievement of impactful outcomes.

physics.soc-ph↗

A Cascade Dual-Decoder Model for Joint Entity and Relation Extraction

In knowledge graph construction, a challenging issue is how to extract complex (e.g., overlapping) entities and relationships from a small amount of unstructured historical data. The traditional pipeline methods are to divide the extraction into two separate subtasks, which misses the potential interaction between the two subtasks and may lead to error propagation. In this work, we propose an effective cascade dual-decoder method to extract overlapping relational triples, which includes a text-specific relation decoder and a relation-corresponded entity decoder. Our approach is straightforward and it includes a text-specific relation decoder and a relation-corresponded entity decoder. The text-specific relation decoder detects relations from a sentence at the text level. That is, it does this according to the semantic information of the whole sentence. For each extracted relation, which is with trainable embedding, the relation-corresponded entity decoder detects the corresponding head and tail entities using a span-based tagging scheme. In this way, the overlapping triple problem can be tackled naturally. We conducted experiments on a real-world open-pit mine dataset and two public datasets to verify the method's generalizability. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and competitiveness of our proposed method and achieve better F1 scores under strict evaluation metrics. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/prastunlp/DualDec.

cs.CL↗

Observation of oriented Landau levels in Berry dipole semimetals

Band crossing points, such as Weyl and Dirac points, play a crucial role in the topological classification of materials and guide the exploration of exotic topological phases. The Berry dipole, a three-dimensional band crossing point beyond the Chern class, hosts a dipolar Berry curvature field and gives rise to numerous nontrivial quantum geometric effects. It has been proposed that the Berry dipole exhibits oriented Landau levels, whose spectrum critically relies on the orientation of the applied magnetic field. However, experimental demonstration of this phenomenon has remained elusive. Here we experimentally demonstrate oriented Landau levels by carefully engineering an inhomogeneous acoustic lattice. We observe distinct Landau level spectra and different propagation properties when the orientation of the pseudomagnetic field is reversed. Notably, we discover a new type of helical zero modes whose existence critically depends on the magnetic field's orientation. Our work paves the way for studying band crossings beyond Chern-class crossing points, including Berry multipoles and even-dimensional monopoles. Furthermore, it offers new insight for exploring topological devices.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

Pure skin effect obeying power partition in directed graphs

Non-Hermitian physics has received great attention recently. In particular, band structures in non-Hermitian systems can be engineered to exhibit various topological effects. Among them, one of the most intriguing phenomena is the non-Hermitian skin effect (NHSE). Here, we investigate NHSE in systems featuring directed chains or directed graphs, where the arrows denote the directions of the non-reciprocal hopping between neighbouring nodes. We show that the systems exhibit pure skin modes with non-oscillatory wavefunctions, in contrast to previously studied NHSE. Interestingly, the sum of the decay constants along different directions for each skin mode obeys a power partition rule, i.e. their sum is a fixed value and the value of each constant only depends on the ratio between the non-reciprocal hopping parameters and is independent of detailed graph configurations. Such Pure Skin Effect (PSE) can be explained by using a generalized method for solving the Generalized Brillouin-zone with multiple bulk states.

quant-ph↗

Joint Beamforming Design for the STAR-RIS-Enabled ISAC Systems with Multiple Targets and Multiple Users

In this paper, the sensing beam pattern gain under simultaneously transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (STAR-RIS)-enabled integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) systems is investigated, in which multiple targets and multiple users exist. However, multiple targets detection introduces new challenges, since the STAR-RIS cannot directly send sensing beams and detect targets, the dual-functional base station (DFBS) is required to analyze the echoes of the targets. While the echoes reflected by different targets through STAR-RIS come from the same direction for the DFBS, making it impossible to distinguish them. To address the issue, we first introduce the signature sequence (SS) modulation scheme to the ISAC system, and thus, the DFBS can detect different targets by the SS-modulated sensing beams. Next, via the joint beamforming design of DFBS and STAR-RIS, we develop a maxmin sensing beam pattern gain problem, and meanwhile, considering the communication quality requirements, the interference limitations of other targets and users, the passive nature constraint of STAR-RIS, and the total transmit power limitation. Then, to tackle the complex non-convex problem, we propose an alternating optimization method to divide it into two quadratic semidefinite program subproblems and decouple the coupled variables. Drawing on mathematical transformation, semidefinite programming, as well as semidefinite relaxation techniques, these two subproblems are iteratively sloved until convergence, and the ultimate solutions are obtained. Finally, simulation results are conducted to validate the benefits and efficiency of our proposed scheme.

cs.IT↗

Magnetically Controllable Multimode Interference in Topological Photonic Crystals

Topological photonic insulators show promise for applications in compact integrated photonic circuits due to their ability to transport light robustly through sharp bendings. The number of topological edge states relies on the difference between the bulk Chern numbers across the boundary, as dictated by the bulk edge correspondence. The interference among multiple topological edge modes in topological photonics systems may allow for controllable functionalities that are particularly desirable for constructing reconfigurable photonic devices. In this work, we demonstrate magnetically controllable multimode interference based on gyromagnetic topological photonic insulators that support two unidirectional edge modes with different dispersions. We successfully achieve controllable power splitting in experiments by engineering multimode interference with the magnetic field intensity or the frequency of wave. Our work demonstrates that manipulating the interference among multiple chiral edge modes can facilitate the advancement of highly efficient and adaptable photonic devices.

physics.app-ph↗

Science as Exploration in a Knowledge Landscape: Tracing Hotspots or Seeking Opportunity?

The selection of research topics by scientists can be viewed as an exploration process conducted by individuals with cognitive limitations traversing a complex cognitive landscape influenced by both individual and social factors. While existing theoretical investigations have provided valuable insights, the intricate and multifaceted nature of modern science hinders the implementation of empirical experiments. This study leverages advancements in deep learning techniques to investigate the patterns and dynamic mechanisms of topic-transition among scientists. By constructing the knowledge space across 6 large-scale disciplines, we depict the trajectories of scientists' topic transitions within this space, measuring the flow and distance of research regions across different sub-spaces. Our findings reveal a predominantly conservative pattern of topic transition at the individual level, with scientists primarily exploring local knowledge spaces. Furthermore, simulation modeling analysis identifies research intensity, driven by the concentration of scientists within a specific region, as the key facilitator of topic transition. Conversely, the knowledge distance between fields serves as a significant barrier to exploration. Notably, despite potential opportunities for breakthrough discoveries at the intersection of subfields, empirical evidence suggests that these opportunities do not exert a strong pull on scientists, leading them to favor familiar research areas. Our study provides valuable insights into the exploration dynamics of scientific knowledge production, highlighting the influence of individual cognition, social factors, and the intrinsic structure of the knowledge landscape itself. These findings offer a framework for understanding and potentially shaping the course of scientific progress.

physics.soc-ph↗

AI-driven emergence of frequency information non-uniform distribution via THz metasurface spectrum prediction

Recently, artificial intelligence has been extensively deployed across various scientific disciplines, optimizing and guiding the progression of experiments through the integration of abundant datasets, whilst continuously probing the vast theoretical space encapsulated within the data. Particularly, deep learning models, due to their end-to-end adaptive learning capabilities, are capable of autonomously learning intrinsic data features, thereby transcending the limitations of traditional experience to a certain extent. Here, we unveil previously unreported information characteristics pertaining to different frequencies emerged during our work on predicting the terahertz spectral modulation effects of metasurfaces based on AI-prediction. Moreover, we have substantiated that our proposed methodology of simply adding supplementary multi-frequency inputs to the existing dataset during the target spectral prediction process can significantly enhance the predictive accuracy of the network. This approach effectively optimizes the utilization of existing datasets and paves the way for interdisciplinary research and applications in artificial intelligence, chemistry, composite material design, biomedicine, and other fields.

cs.LG↗

MLatom 3: Platform for machine learning-enhanced computational chemistry simulations and workflows

Machine learning (ML) is increasingly becoming a common tool in computational chemistry. At the same time, the rapid development of ML methods requires a flexible software framework for designing custom workflows. MLatom 3 is a program package designed to leverage the power of ML to enhance typical computational chemistry simulations and to create complex workflows. This open-source package provides plenty of choice to the users who can run simulations with the command line options, input files, or with scripts using MLatom as a Python package, both on their computers and on the online XACS cloud computing at XACScloud.com. Computational chemists can calculate energies and thermochemical properties, optimize geometries, run molecular and quantum dynamics, and simulate (ro)vibrational, one-photon UV/vis absorption, and two-photon absorption spectra with ML, quantum mechanical, and combined models. The users can choose from an extensive library of methods containing pre-trained ML models and quantum mechanical approximations such as AIQM1 approaching coupled-cluster accuracy. The developers can build their own models using various ML algorithms. The great flexibility of MLatom is largely due to the extensive use of the interfaces to many state-of-the-art software packages and libraries.

physics.chem-ph↗

Scientists' bounded mobility on the epistemic landscape

Despite persistent efforts in revealing the temporal patterns in scientific careers, little attention has been paid to the spatial patterns of scientific activities in the knowledge space. Here, drawing on millions of papers in six disciplines, we consider scientists' publication sequence as "walks" on the quantifiable epistemic landscape constructed from large-scale bibliometric corpora by combining embedding and manifold learning algorithms, aiming to reveal the individual research topic dynamics and association between research radius with academic performance, along their careers. Intuitively, the visualization shows the localized and bounded nature of mobile trajectories. We further find that the distributions of scientists' transition radius and transition pace are both left-skewed compared with the results of controlled experiments. Then, we observe the mixed exploration and exploitation pattern and the corresponding strategic trade-off in the research transition, where scientists both deepen their previous research with frequency bias and explore new research with knowledge proximity bias. We further develop a bounded exploration-exploitation (BEE) model to reproduce the observed patterns. Moreover, the association between scientists' research radius and academic performance shows that extensive exploration will not lead to a sustained increase in academic output but a decrease in impact. In addition, we also note that disruptive findings are more derived from an extensive transition, whereas there is a saturation in this association. Our study contributes to the comprehension of the mobility patterns of scientists in the knowledge space, thereby providing significant implications for the development of scientific policy-making.

physics.soc-ph↗

Recovering lossless propagation of polaritons with synthesized complex frequency excitation

Surface plasmon polaritons and phonon polaritons offer a means of surpassing the diffraction limit of conventional optics and facilitate efficient energy storage, local field enhancement, high sensitivities, benefitting from their subwavelength confinement of light. Unfortunately, losses severely limit the propagation decay length, thus restricting the practical use of polaritons. While optimizing the fabrication technique can help circumvent the scattering loss of imperfect structures, the intrinsic absorption channel leading to heat production cannot be eliminated. Here, we utilize synthetic optical excitation of complex frequency with virtual gain, synthesized by combining the measurements taken at multiple real frequencies, to restore the lossless propagations of phonon polaritons with significantly reduced intrinsic losses. The concept of synthetic complex frequency excitation represents a viable solution to compensate for loss and would benefit applications including photonic circuits, waveguiding and plasmonic/phononic structured illumination microscopy.

physics.optics↗

Unveiling Real Triple Degeneracies in Crystals: Exploring Link and Compound Structures

With their non-Abelian topological charges, real multi-bandgap systems challenge the conventional topological phase classifications. As the minimal sector of multi-bandgap systems, real triple degeneracies (RTPs), which serve as real 'Weyl points', lay the foundation for the research on real topological phases. However, experimental demonstration of physical systems with global band configurations consisting of multiple RTPs in crystals has not been reported. Here we present experimental evidence of RTPs in photonic meta-crystals, characterizing them using the Euler number, and establishing their connection with both Abelian and non-Abelian charges. By considering RTPs as the basic elements, we further propose the concept of a topological compound, akin to a chemical compound, where we find that certain phases are not topologically allowed. The topological classification of RTPs in crystals demonstrated in our work plays a similar role as the 'no-go' theorem in Weyl systems.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

Spectral lens enables a minimalist framework for hyperspectral imaging

Conventional lens-based imaging techniques have long been limited to capturing only the intensity distribution of objects, resulting in the loss of other crucial dimensions such as spectral data. Here, we report a spectral lens that captures both spatial and spectral information, and further demonstrate a minimalist framework wherein hyperspectral imaging can be readily achieved by replacing lenses in standard cameras with our spectral lens. As a paradigm, we capitalize on planar liquid crystal optics to implement the proposed framework. Our experiments with various targets show that the resulting hyperspectral camera exhibits excellent performance in both spectral and spatial domains. With merits such as ultra-compactness and strong compatibility, our framework paves a practical pathway for advancing hyperspectral imaging apparatus toward miniaturization, with great potential for portable applications.

physics.optics↗