arXiv subjects

Xiao Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Xiao Zhang.

At least 505 records · Page 28Linked to original sources

arXiv2018

Critical behaviors of half-metallic ferromagnet Co3Sn2S2

We have investigated the critical behavior of a shandite-type half-metal ferromagnet Co3Sn2S2. It exhibits a second-order paramagnetic-ferromagnetic phase transition with TC = 174 K. To investigate the nature of the magnetic phase transition, a detailed critical exponent study has been performed. The critical components beta, gamma, and delta determined using the modified Arrott plot, the Kouvel-Fisher method as well as the critical isotherm analysis are match reasonably well and follow the scaling equation, confirming that the exponents are unambiguous and intrinsic to the material. The determined exponents of Co3Sn2S2 deviates from theoretical estimated short-range universal models. Instead, Co3Sn2S2 exhibits long-range order in the nature of magnetic interaction with the spin decay as J(r) ~ 1/r^[-(d + sigma)] with sigma = 1.28.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2018

Disorder From the Bulk Ionic Liquid in Electric Double Layer Transistors

Ionic liquid gating has a number of advantages over solid-state gating, especially for flexible or transparent devices and for applications requiring high carrier densities. However, the large number of charged ions near the channel inevitably results in Coulomb scattering, which limits the carrier mobility in otherwise clean systems. We develop a model for this Coulomb scattering. We validate our model experimentally using ionic liquid gating of graphene across varying thicknesses of hexagonal boron nitride, demonstrating that disorder in the bulk ionic liquid often dominates the scattering.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2018

Theoretical prediction of magnetic and noncentrosymmetric Weyl fermion semimetal states in the R-Al-X family of compounds (R=rare earth, Al=aluminium, X=Si, Ge)

Weyl semimetals are novel topological conductors that host Weyl fermions as emergent quasiparticles. While the Weyl fermions in high-energy physics are strictly defined as the massless solution of the Dirac equation and uniquely fixed by Lorentz symmetry, there is no such constraint for a topological metal in general. Specifically, the Weyl quasiparticles can arise by breaking either the space-inversion ($\mathcal{I}$) or time-reversal ($\mathcal{T}$) symmetry. They can either respect Lorentz symmetry (type-I) or strongly violate it (type-II). To date, different types of Weyl fermions have been predicted to occur only in different classes of materials. In this paper, we present a significant materials breakthrough by identifying a large class of Weyl materials in the RAlX (R=Rare earth, Al, X=Ge, Si) family that can realize all different types of emergent Weyl fermions ($\mathcal{I}$-breaking, $\mathcal{T}$-breaking, type-I or type-II), depending on a suitable choice of the rare earth elements. Specifically, RAlX can be ferromagnetic, nonmagnetic or antiferromagnetic and the electronic band topology and topological nature of the Weyl fermions can be tuned. The unparalleled tunability and the large number of compounds make the RAlX family of compounds a unique Weyl semimetal class for exploring the wide-ranging topological phenomena associated with different types of emergent Weyl fermions in transport, spectroscopic and device-based experiments.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2018

An EDG Method for Distributed Optimal Control of Elliptic PDEs

We consider a distributed optimal control problem governed by an elliptic PDE, and propose an embedded discontinuous Galerkin (EDG) method to approximate the solution. We derive optimal a priori error estimates for the state, dual state, the optimal control, and suboptimal estimates for the fluxes. We present numerical experiments to confirm our theoretical results.

math.NA↗

arXiv2018

Robust Wirtinger Flow for Phase Retrieval with Arbitrary Corruption

We consider the robust phase retrieval problem of recovering the unknown signal from the magnitude-only measurements, where the measurements can be contaminated by both sparse arbitrary corruption and bounded random noise. We propose a new nonconvex algorithm for robust phase retrieval, namely Robust Wirtinger Flow to jointly estimate the unknown signal and the sparse corruption. We show that our proposed algorithm is guaranteed to converge linearly to the unknown true signal up to a minimax optimal statistical precision in such a challenging setting. Compared with existing robust phase retrieval methods, we achieve an optimal sample complexity of $O(n)$ in both noisy and noise-free settings. Thorough experiments on both synthetic and real datasets corroborate our theory.

stat.ML↗

arXiv2018

A New HDG Method for Dirichlet Boundary Control of Convection Diffusion PDEs II: Low Regularity

In the first part of this work, we analyzed a Dirichlet boundary control problem for an elliptic convection diffusion PDE and proposed a new hybridizable discontinuous Galerkin (HDG) method to approximate the solution. For the case of a 2D polygonal domain, we also proved an optimal superlinear convergence rate for the control under certain assumptions on the domain and on the target state. In this work, we revisit the convergence analysis without these assumptions; in this case, the solution can have low regularity and we use a different analysis approach. We again prove an optimal convergence rate for the control, and present numerical results to illustrate the convergence theory.

math.NA↗

arXiv2017

An Optimal EDG Method for Distributed Control of Convection Diffusion PDEs

We propose an embedded discontinuous Galerkin (EDG) method to approximate the solution of a distributed control problem governed by convection diffusion PDEs, and obtain optimal a priori error estimates for the state, dual state, their fluxes, and the control. Moreover, we prove the optimize-then-discretize (OD) and discrtize-then-optimize (DO) approaches coincide. Numerical results confirm our theoretical results.

math.NA↗

arXiv2017

Non-equilibrium BN-ZnO: Optical properties and excitonic effects from first principles

The non-equilibrium boron nitride (BN) phase of zinc oxide (ZnO) has been reported for thin films and nanostructures, however, its properties are not well understood due to a persistent controversy that prevents reconciling experimental and first-principles results for its atomic coordinates. We use first-principles theoretical spectroscopy to accurately compute electronic and optical properties, including single-quasiparticle and excitonic effects: Band structures and densities of states are computed using density functional theory, hybrid functionals, and the $GW$ approximation. Accurate optical absorption spectra and exciton binding energies are computed by solving the Bethe-Salpeter equation for the optical polarization function. Using this data we show that the band-gap difference between BN-ZnO and wurtzite (WZ) ZnO agrees very well with experiment when the theoretical lattice geometry is used, but significantly disagrees for the experimental atomic coordinates. We also show that the optical anisotropy of BN-ZnO differs significantly from that of WZ-ZnO, allowing to optically distinguish both polymorphs. By using the transfer-matrix method to solve Maxwell's equations for thin films composed of both polymorphs, we illustrate that this opens up a promising route for tuning optical properties.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2017

Non-factorizable 4D quantum Hall state from photonic crystal defects

In the recent years, there has been a drive towards the realization of topological phases beyond conventional electronic materials, including phases defined in more than three dimensions. We propose a way to realize 2nd Chern number topological phases with photonic crystals simply made up of defect resonators embedded within a regular lattice of resonators. In particular, through a novel quasiperiodic spatial modulations in the defect radii, a defect lattice possessing topologically nontrivial Chern bands with non-abelian berry curvature living in four-dimensional synthetic space is proposed. This system cannot be factorized by a direct product of two 1st Chern number models, distinguishing itself from the Hofstadter model. Such photonic systems can be easily experimentally realized with regular photonic crystals consisting of dielectric rods in air.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2017

A Study of Fermi-LAT GeV gamma-ray Emission towards the Magnetar-harboring Supernova Remnant Kesteven 73 and Its Molecular Environment

We report our independent GeV gamma-ray study of the young shell-type supernova remnant (SNR) Kes 73 which harbors a central magnetar, and CO-line millimeter observations toward the SNR. Using 7.6 years of Fermi-LAT observation data, we detected an extended gamma-ray source ("source A") with the centroid on the west of the SNR, with a significance of 21.6 sigma in 0.1-300 GeV and an error circle of 5.4 arcminute in angular radius. The gamma-ray spectrum cannot be reproduced by a pure leptonic emission or a pure emission from the magnetar, and thus a hadronic emission component is needed. The CO-line observations reveal a molecular cloud (MC) at V_LSR~90 km/s, which demonstrates morphological correspondence with the western boundary of the SNR brightened in multiwavelength. The 12CO (J=2-1)/12CO (J=1-0) ratio in the left (blue) wing 85-88 km/s is prominently elevated to ~1.1 along the northwestern boundary, providing kinematic evidence of the SNR-MC interaction. This SNR-MC association yields a kinematic distance 9 kpc to Kes 73. The MC is shown to be capable of accounting for the hadronic gamma-ray emission component. The gamma-ray spectrum can be interpreted with a pure hadronic emission or a magnetar+hadronic hybrid emission. In the case of pure hadronic emission, the spectral index of the protons is 2.4, very similar to that of the radio-emitting electrons, essentially consistent with the diffusive shock acceleration theory. In the case of magnetar+hadronic hybrid emission, a magnetic field decay rate >= 10^36 erg/s is needed to power the magnetar's curvature radiation.

astro-ph.HE↗

arXiv2017

Massive fermions with low mobility in antiferromagnet orthorhombic CuMnAs single crystals

We report the physical properties of orthorhombic o-CuMnAs single crystal, which is predicted to be a topological Dirac semimetal with magnetic ground state and inversion symmetry broken. o-CuMnAs exhibits an antiferromagnetic transition with TN ~ 312 K. Further characterizations of magnetic properties suggest that the AFM order may be canted with the spin orientation in the bc plane. Small isotropic MR and linearly field-dependent Hall resistivity with positive slope indicate that single hole-type carries with high density and low mobility dominate the transport properties of o-CuMnAs. Furthermore, the result of low-temperature heat capacity shows that the effective mass of carriers is much larger than those in typical topological semimetals. These results imply that the carriers in o-CuMnAs exhibit remarkably different features from those of Dirac fermions predicted in theory.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2017

An Optimal Embedded Discontinuous Galerkin Method for Second-Order Elliptic Problems

The embedded discontinuous Galerkin (EDG) method by Cockburn et al. [SIAM J. Numer. Anal., 2009, 47(4), 2686-2707] is obtained from the hybridizable discontinuous Galerkin method by changing the space of the Lagrangian multiplier from discontinuous functions to continuous ones, and adopts piecewise polynomials of equal degrees on simplex meshes for all variables. In this paper, we analyze a new EDG method for second order elliptic problems on polygonal/polyhedral meshes. By using piecewise polynomials of degrees $k+1$, $k+1$, $k$ ($k\geq 0$) to approximate the potential, numerical trace and flux, respectively, the new method is shown to yield optimal convergence rates for both the potential and flux approximations. Numerical experiments are provided to confirm the theoretical results.

math.NA↗

arXiv2017

Mirror protected Dirac fermions on a Weyl semimetal NbP surface

The first Weyl semimetal was recently discovered in the NbP class of compounds. Although the topology of these novel materials has been identified, the surface properties are not yet fully understood. By means of scanning tunneling spectroscopy, we find that NbPs (001) surface hosts a pair of Dirac cones protected by mirror symmetry. Through our high resolution spectroscopic measurements, we resolve the quantum interference patterns arising from these novel Dirac fermions, and reveal their electronic structure, including the linear dispersions. Our data, in agreement with our theoretical calculations, uncover further interesting features of the Weyl semimetal NbPs already exotic surface. Moreover, we discuss the similarities and distinctions between the Dirac fermions here and those in topological crystalline insulators in terms of symmetry protection and topology.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2017

Topological dynamics of gyroscopic and Floquet lattices from Newton's laws

Despite intense interest in realizing topological phases across a variety of electronic, photonic and mechanical platforms, the detailed microscopic origin of topological behavior often remains elusive. To bridge this conceptual gap, we show how hallmarks of topological modes - boundary localization and chirality - emerge from Newton's laws in mechanical topological systems. We first construct a gyroscopic lattice with analytically solvable edge modes, and show how the Lorentz and spring restoring forces conspire to support very robust "dangling bond" boundary modes. The chirality and locality of these modes intuitively emerges from microscopic balancing of restoring forces and cyclotron tendencies. Next, we introduce the highlight of this work, a very experimentally realistic mechanical non-equilibrium (Floquet) Chern lattice driven by AC electromagnets. Through appropriate synchronization of the AC driving protocol, the Floquet lattice is "pushed around" by a rotating potential analogous to an object washed ashore by water waves. Besides hosting "dangling bond" chiral modes analogous to the gyroscopic boundary modes, our Floquet Chern lattice also supports peculiar half-period chiral modes with no static analog. With key parameters controlled electronically, our setup has the advantage of being dynamically tunable for applications involving arbitrary Floquet modulations. The physical intuition gleaned from our two prototypical topological systems are applicable not just to arbitrarily complicated mechanical systems, but also photonic and electrical topological setups.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2017

Learning Unified Embedding for Apparel Recognition

In apparel recognition, specialized models (e.g. models trained for a particular vertical like dresses) can significantly outperform general models (i.e. models that cover a wide range of verticals). Therefore, deep neural network models are often trained separately for different verticals. However, using specialized models for different verticals is not scalable and expensive to deploy. This paper addresses the problem of learning one unified embedding model for multiple object verticals (e.g. all apparel classes) without sacrificing accuracy. The problem is tackled from two aspects: training data and training difficulty. On the training data aspect, we figure out that for a single model trained with triplet loss, there is an accuracy sweet spot in terms of how many verticals are trained together. To ease the training difficulty, a novel learning scheme is proposed by using the output from specialized models as learning targets so that L2 loss can be used instead of triplet loss. This new loss makes the training easier and make it possible for more efficient use of the feature space. The end result is a unified model which can achieve the same retrieval accuracy as a number of separate specialized models, while having the model complexity as one. The effectiveness of our approach is shown in experiments.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2017

Automatic Spatially-aware Fashion Concept Discovery

This paper proposes an automatic spatially-aware concept discovery approach using weakly labeled image-text data from shopping websites. We first fine-tune GoogleNet by jointly modeling clothing images and their corresponding descriptions in a visual-semantic embedding space. Then, for each attribute (word), we generate its spatially-aware representation by combining its semantic word vector representation with its spatial representation derived from the convolutional maps of the fine-tuned network. The resulting spatially-aware representations are further used to cluster attributes into multiple groups to form spatially-aware concepts (e.g., the neckline concept might consist of attributes like v-neck, round-neck, etc). Finally, we decompose the visual-semantic embedding space into multiple concept-specific subspaces, which facilitates structured browsing and attribute-feedback product retrieval by exploiting multimodal linguistic regularities. We conducted extensive experiments on our newly collected Fashion200K dataset, and results on clustering quality evaluation and attribute-feedback product retrieval task demonstrate the effectiveness of our automatically discovered spatially-aware concepts.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2017

Bound states in the continuum of fractional Schrödinger equation in the Earth's gravitational field and their effects in the presence of a minimal length: applications to distinguish ultralight particles

In this paper, the influence of the fractional dimensions of the Lévy path under the Earth's gravitational field is studied, and the phase transitions of energy and wave functions are obtained: the energy changes from discrete to continuous and wave functions change from non-degenerate to degenerate when dimension of Lévy path becomes from integer to non-integer. By analyzing the phase transitions, we solve two popular problems. First, we find an exotic way to produce the bound states in the continuum (BICs), our approach only needs a simple potential, and does not depend on interactions between particles. Second, we address the continuity of the energy will become strong when the mass of the particle becomes small. By deeply analyze, it can provide a way to distinguish ultralight particles from others types in the Earth's gravitational field, and five popular particles are discussed. In addition, we obtain analytical expressions for the wave functions and energy in the Earth's gravitational field in the circumstance of a fractional fractal dimensional Lévy path. Moreover, to consider the influence of the minimal length, we analyze the phase transitions and the BICs in the presence of the minimal length. We find the phenomenon energy shift do not exist, which is a common phenomenon in the presence of the minimal length, and hence such above phenomena can still be found. Finally, relations between our results and existing results are discussed.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2017

PT-symmetry in nonlinear twisted multi-core fibers

We address propagation of light in nonlinear twisted multi-core fibers with alternating amplifying and absorbing cores that are arranged into the PT - symmetric structure. In this structure, the coupling strength between neighboring cores and global energy transport can be controlled not only by the nonlinearity strength, but also by gain and losses and by the fiber twisting rate. The threshold level of gain/losses, at which PT -symmetry breaking occurs, is a non-monotonic function of the fiber twisting rate and it can be reduced nearly to zero or, instead, notably increased just by changing this rate. Nonlinearity usually leads to the monotonic reduction of the symmetry breaking threshold in such fibers.

physics.optics↗