arXiv subjects

Xiaokang Li

Publications and source records attributed to Xiaokang Li.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Thermal Hall effect in elemental niobium, a two-gap superconductor

Niobium holds a pivotal place in superconductivity history: it is not only the elemental superconductor with the highest critical temperature, but also a long-standing candidate for multiband pairing whose evidence has remained controversial. A two-gap scenario was proposed as early as 1959, yet experimental proof stayed elusive. Here, through thermal Hall effect measurements, we unambiguously demonstrate a crossover in transverse thermal transport below $T_{\rm c}$, where the dominant carrier switches from hole-like to electron-like upon cooling. This crossover is a clear hallmark of two distinct superconducting condensates. Fitting our data to a two-gap Bardeen-Rickayzen-Tewordt (BRT) model yields a second energy gap of approximately 0.22 $k_{\rm B}T_{\rm c}$, only 11\% of the dominant gap. This small gap size accounts for the difficulty in resolving the two-gap structure in earlier experiments. Crucially, the temperature at which the electron-like contribution to longitudinal thermal conductivity begins to dominate coincides with the onset of the sign reversal in the thermal Hall coefficient, confirming consistency between the two methods, and providing crucial information on the assignment of the superconducting gaps to their respective hole- or electron-like Fermi surface sheets. These findings not only resolve a longstanding controversy, but also establish that multigap superconductivity is far more common than previously assumed, and demonstrate the thermal Hall effect as a powerful probe for resolving gap multiplicities in superconductors.

cond-mat.supr-con↗

arXiv2026

Electron-phonon coupled hydrodynamics in semimetal TaAs_2

Hydrodynamic corrections to diffusive transport can arise when momentum-conserving collisions between quasiparticles become prominent, and they have been documented for both electrons and phonons. An emerging frontier topic is coupled electron-phonon (e-ph) hydrodynamics. Here, through electrical and thermal transport measurements on TaAs2 crystals with different impurity levels, we document the emergence of an e-ph bifluid in the temperature window of 5 to 15 K. Within this range, the lattice thermal conductivity exhibits a faster-than-T^3 temperature dependence, as a consequence of non-monotonic and purity-dependent phonon mean free paths, a signature of phonon Poiseuille flow. However, strong e-ph coupling impedes the emergence of a ballistic regime. This is corroborated by the observation of quantum oscillations in the lattice thermal conductivity. Prominent phonon-mediated momentum exchange between electrons amplifies the violation of the Wiedemann-Franz law and yields a two-order-of-magnitude discrepancy between quantum and transport lifetimes, a signature of electron hydrodynamics in semimetals. Our results imply that in semimetals with optimized e-ph coupling, thanks to matching between the cryogenic phonon wave?length and the Fermi wavelength, momentum and energy flow between the electron and phonon reservoirs as frequently as within each reservoir.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2026

Kinetic simulation of magnetic-field-tuned hydrodynamic electron transport in graphene corbino disk

Hydrodynamic electron transport, in which electrical transport in solids resembles fluid hydrodynamics when momentum-conserving electron-electron scattering dominates, has attracted much attention over the past decade. However, its thermal aspects have received considerably less attention. In this paper, electron transport in a graphene Corbino disk is systematically simulated by solving the stationary Boltzmann transport equation with a dual-relaxation-time Callaway model, where momentum-conserving and momentum-relaxing scatterings are explicitly distinguished. By varying the magnetic field intensity and the scattering rates, the electric charge and heat flux responses are compared across the diffusive-to-hydrodynamic crossover under electric-field or temperature-gradient drives. It is shown that magnetic-field-induced deflection of both fluxes is strongly enhanced in the hydrodynamic regime but nearly suppressed in the diffusive regime. Under electric-field driving, a pronounced temperature rise is observed in the hydrodynamic regime due to reduced dissipation, while the diffusive regime remains nearly isothermal. Under temperature-gradient driving, the deflection is reversed relative to the electric-field case. These findings establish that thermal behaviors could provide a sensitive and independent diagnostic of electron hydrodynamics, with the magnetic field being identified as an effective discriminator between collective and dissipative conduction.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2026

Density-wave order enhances the phonon thermal Hall effect in a trilayer nickelate

Ruddlesden--Popper nickelates have emerged as a promising platform for high-temperature superconductivity, yet the role of lattice degrees of freedom in their correlated normal state remains largely unexplored. Here, we report the observation of a finite phonon thermal Hall effect in the trilayer nickelate La$_4$Ni$_3$O$_{10}$ at ambient pressure. Remarkably, the thermal Hall response is strongly enhanced below the density-wave transition at $T^*\approx140$ K, exhibiting two distinct plateaus in the thermal Hall resistivity. The characteristic energy scale extracted from the thermal Hall response ($\sim4.1$ meV) closely matches the magnon--phonon crossing span energy ($\sim3.2$ meV), pointing to magnon--phonon hybridization as the primary mechanism enhancing the thermal Hall effect. These results provide new insight into the interplay between lattice and spin excitations in nickelates, with implications for understanding both their superconductivity and the multiple possible origins of insulating thermal Hall signals.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2026

Multiband transport hierarchy and large Nernst effect in EuAuBi: Establishing a Nernst scaling for asymmetric multiband systems

In correlated materials, coexisting pockets of vastly different carrier densities raise two fundamental questions: which pocket governs the various transport coefficients, and does the conventional Nernst scaling $ν/T \propto μ/E_F$, originally derived for single-band systems, still hold? We address both questions in the polar semimetal EuAuBi, where a dilute electron pocket ($n_e \sim 10^{16}~\mathrm{cm}^{-3}$) coexists with a dense hole pocket ($n_h \sim 10^{21}~\mathrm{cm}^{-3}$). We find a clear hierarchy: the hole pocket dominates the longitudinal resistivity; the Hall effect crosses from electron- to hole-dominance with increasing field; the Seebeck coefficient is dominated by the electron pocket at low temperature and by both pockets at high temperature. Remarkably, the Nernst effect is governed entirely by the ultrahigh-mobility electron pocket, yielding a large low-field signal of $\sim 5~μ\mathrm{V/K}$ near 1~T at 202~K, comparable to anomalous Nernst signals in magnetic Weyl semimetals. By analyzing the two-band thermoelectric conductivity, we show that the Nernst coefficient follows a scaling $ν/T \propto μ_e/{E_{F, tot}}$. This scaling originates from a compensation between the electron-to-hole conductivity ratio and the Fermi-energy ratio, establishing that the large Nernst effect is a semiclassical multiband phenomenon rather than a topological Berry-curvature contribution. This understanding advances the thermoelectric transport physics of multiband electronic systems and offers a guiding principle for low-field transverse thermoelectric design.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2026

Probing Quantum Entanglement in $τ^+τ^-$ Pairs via the $ππ$ Channel at STCF

Quantum entanglement and Bell-inequality violation in $τ^+τ^-$ pairs provide a sensitive probe of quantum correlations in high-energy interactions. We present a feasibility study of $e^+e^- \to τ^+τ^-$ at the proposed Super Tau-Charm Facility based on full Monte Carlo simulation at $\sqrt{s} = 7$ GeV, focusing on the $ππ$ channel ($τ^\pm \to π^\pmν$), which offers the maximal spin-analyzing power $|κ| = 1$ and the simplest final-state topology for validating the quantum-tomography framework. We establish a consistency chain from the tree-level QED prediction through truth-level and detector-level reconstruction, yielding a reconstructed concurrence of $0.279 \pm 0.007$ with the good-solution approach. A complementary full-simulation study of the $ρρ$ channel is also briefly reported. These results demonstrate that the STCF can provide a competitive platform for precision studies of quantum correlations in $τ$-lepton pairs.

hep-ex↗

arXiv2026

Pulsed thermal annealing enables switching of chiral antiferromagnetic order with a sub-millitesla field in Mn$_3$Sn

The manipulation of antiferromagnetic (AFM) order is a central theme in modern spintronics. In this work, we achieve reliable switching of the chiral AFM state in the Weyl antiferromagnet Mn$_3$Sn using a heat pulse combined with a very small magnetic field as small as 0.1 mT. By systematically measuring the anomalous Hall effect (AHE) in high-quality single crystals, we show that the field needed for switching decreases as the temperature approaches the Néel temperature $T_N$, and vanishes at $T_N$. Pulsed thermal annealing above $T_N$ followed by cooling in a tiny external field enables full and reproducible switching of the magnetic octupole order. Our results show that thermal softening (heating above $T_N$ to temporarily remove the magnetic anisotropy) is a key step that lowers the energy barrier to nearly zero. This allows an extremely weak directional field (like the effective field from spin-orbit torque in thin-film devices) to set the final magnetic state during cooling. We also provide a simple model to estimate the temperature rise in nanoscale devices under current pulses, giving practical guidance for device design. This work highlights that thermal effects are not a side issue but an important partner to spin torques, and suggests that future work should take both into account.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2026

Hydrodynamics of the viscous electron fluid in cadmium

Thanks to electron-electron ($e$-$e$) collisions conserving momentum, metallic electron fluids are viscous. Yet, this viscosity is rarely detectable in bulk transport. Here, we report on the canonical realization of the Gurzhi effect in an elemental three-dimensional metal: cadmium. Using focused ion beam microstructuring to tune the effective thickness, we detected a low-temperature size-dependent resistivity upturn in a finite window sandwiched between ballistic and diffusive regimes. Within this window, the electrical conductivity displays a simultaneous quadratic dependence on both sample size and temperature -- fingerprint of a hydrodynamic flow. This leads us to quantify the amplitude and the temperature dependence of kinematic and dynamic viscosity of the electron fluid. In cadmium, in contrast with graphene and $^3$He, the rate of momentum-conserving $e$-$e$ collisions is not set by the main Fermi energy, but by Lilliputian energy scales and inter-valley bottlenecks.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2026

Interaction driven transverse thermal resistivity in a phonon gas

The amplitude of the Hall response of electrons can be understood without invoking interactions. Most theories of the phonon thermal Hall effect have likewise opted for a non-interacting picture. Here, we challenge this approach. Our study of WS$_2$, a transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD) insulator, finds that longitudinal, $κ_{xx}$, and transverse, $κ_{xy}$, thermal conductivities peak at almost the same temperature. Their ratio obeys an upper bound, as in other insulators. We then compare transverse thermal transport in a phonon gas and in a molecular gas. In the latter, the Senftleben-Beenakker effect is driven by the competition between molecular collisions and applied magnetic field in setting the distribution of molecular angular momenta. An off-diagonal transport response arises thanks to interactions between non-spherical particles, which do not need to be chiral. By analogy, we argue that in a phonon gas, magnetic field will influence phonon-phonon interactions, and generates a transverse thermal \emph{resistivity}, whose order of magnitude can be accounted for by invoking a Berry force on the drift velocity of the nuclei in the presence of a finite heat. This simple picture gives a reasonable account of the experimentally measured transverse thermal resistivity of seven different crystalline insulators.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2026

Thermal Hall conductivity of semimetallic graphite dominated by ambipolar phonon drag

It is now known that in addition to electrons, other quasi-particles such as phonons and magnons can also generate a thermal Hall signal. Graphite is a semimetal with extremely mobile charge carriers of both signs and a large lattice thermal conductivity. We present a study of the thermal Hall effect in highly oriented pyrolytic graphite (HOPG) samples with electronic, phononic and phonon drag contributions to the thermal Hall signal. The measured thermal Hall conductivity ($κ_{xy}$) is two orders of magnitude higher than what is expected by electronic carriers according to the electrical Hall conductivity and the Wiedemann-Franz law, yielding a record Hall Lorenz number of $164.9\times10^{-8}V^2 K^{-2}$ ($\sim$67$L_0$) - the largest ever observed in a metal. The temperature dependence of the thermal Hall conductivity significantly differs from its longitudinal counterpart, ruling out a purely phononic origin of the non-electronic component. Based on the temperature dependence and the amplitudes of the Seebeck and Nernst responses, we demonstrate that ambipolar phonon drag dominates the thermal Hall response of graphite.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2025

Phonon Thermal Hall Effect: The Roles of Disorder, Annealing, and Metallic Contacts

The phonon thermal Hall effect (THE) is a ubiquitous yet poorly understood phenomenon in insulators. Its microscopic origin remains debated, partly due to significant sample-dependent variations that hint at uncontrolled experimental parameters. Using SrTiO$_3$ as a model system, we identify disorder and uncontrolled strain as suppressors of a thermal Hall signal. Crystals with high thermal conductivity exhibit a substantial thermal Hall angle $\nabla T_y / \nabla T_x$ (up to 0.3\% at 9 T), whereas the effect is virtually absent in disordered samples. Crucially, annealing (in air atmosphere) these disordered samples partially restores the THE (approximately 0.1\% at 9 T) with little effect on the longitudinal thermal conductivity. This decoupling reveals that the amplitude of THE is not simply set by the phonon mean free path. Furthermore, measurements performed with metallic and insulating contacts yield identical results on the same sample. This definitively rules out parasitic signals as the effect's origin. Our work, by establishing the phonon THE as an intrinsic property of the crystal lattice and extremely sensitive to disorder, sharply constrains theoretical scenarios.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2025

PoolingVQ: A VQVAE Variant for Reducing Audio Redundancy and Boosting Multi-Modal Fusion in Music Emotion Analysis

Multimodal music emotion analysis leverages both audio and MIDI modalities to enhance performance. While mainstream approaches focus on complex feature extraction networks, we propose that shortening the length of audio sequence features to mitigate redundancy, especially in contrast to MIDI's compact representation, may effectively boost task performance. To achieve this, we developed PoolingVQ by combining Vector Quantized Variational Autoencoder (VQVAE) with spatial pooling, which directly compresses audio feature sequences through codebook-guided local aggregation to reduce redundancy, then devised a two-stage co-attention approach to fuse audio and MIDI information. Experimental results on the public datasets EMOPIA and VGMIDI demonstrate that our multimodal framework achieves state-of-the-art performance, with PoolingVQ yielding effective improvement. Our proposed metho's code is available at Anonymous GitHub

cs.SD↗

arXiv2025

Comment on `High-resolution Measurements of Thermal Conductivity Matrix and Search for Thermal Hall Effect in La$_2$CuO$_4$'

Recently, Jiayi Hu and co-workers reported that they did not resolve any thermal Hall signal in La$_2$CuO$_4$ by `high resolution' measurements, setting an upper bound of $|κ_{xy}| <2\times 10^{-3}~$Wm$^{-1}$K$^{-1}$ at 20 K. Two points have apparently escaped their attention. First, thermal Hall signals with an amplitude well below this resolution bound have been detected in disordered perovskites. Second, the longitudinal thermal conductivity of their sample is significantly lower than the La$_2$CuO$_4$ sample displaying a thermal Hall signal. We find that a moderate reduction of $κ_{xx}$ in SrTiO$_3$ is concomitant with a drastic attenuation of $κ_{xy}$. A trend emerges across several families of insulators: the amplitude of $κ_{xy}$ anti-correlates with disorder.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2025

Emoanti: audio anti-deepfake with refined emotion-guided representations

Audio deepfake is so sophisticated that the lack of effective detection methods is fatal. While most detection systems primarily rely on low-level acoustic features or pretrained speech representations, they frequently neglect high-level emotional cues, which can offer complementary and potentially anti-deepfake information to enhance generalization. In this work, we propose a novel audio anti-deepfake system that utilizes emotional features (EmoAnti) by exploiting a pretrained Wav2Vec2 (W2V2) model fine-tuned on emotion recognition tasks, which derives emotion-guided representations, then designing a dedicated feature extractor based on convolutional layers with residual connections to effectively capture and refine emotional characteristics from the transformer layers outputs. Experimental results show that our proposed architecture achieves state-of-the-art performance on both the ASVspoof2019LA and ASVspoof2021LA benchmarks, and demonstrates strong generalization on the ASVspoof2021DF dataset. Our proposed approach's code is available at Anonymous GitHub1.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2025

Scalable Sondheimer oscillations driven by commensurability between two quantizations

The electrical conductivity of metallic crystals exhibits size effects when the electron mean free path exceeds the sample thickness. One such phenomenon, known as Sondheimer oscillations, was discovered decades ago. These oscillations, periodic in magnetic field, have been hitherto treated with no reference to Landau quantization. Here, we present a study of longitudinal and transverse conductivity in cadmium single crystals with thicknesses ranging from 12.6 to 475 $μ$m, and demonstrate that the amplitude of the first ten oscillations is determined by the quantum of conductance and a length scale that depends on the sample thickness, the magnetic length and the Fermi surface geometry. We argue that this scaling is unexpected in semiclassical scenarios and it arises from the degeneracy of the momentum derivative of the cross-sectional area $A$ along the orientation of the magnetic field $\frac{\partial A}{\partial k_z}$ in cadmium, which couples Landau quantization to the discretization of $k_z$ imposed by the finite sample thickness. We show that the oscillating component of the conductivity is uniquely governed by fundamental constants and the ratio of two degeneracies, which acts as an inverted filling factor. Our conjecture is supported by the absence of such scaling in thin copper crystals.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2025

Angle-dependent planar thermal Hall effect by quasi-ballistic phonons in black phosphorus

The origin of the phonon thermal Hall effect in insulators is a matter of ongoing debate. The large amplitude of the signal in an elemental non-magnetic solid, such as black phosphorus (BP), calls for a minimal mechanism not invoking the spin degree of freedom. Here, we show that a longitudinal heat flow generates a transverse temperature gradient in BP even when the magnetic field, the heat current and the thermal gradient lie in the same plane. The phonon mean-free-path is close to the sample thickness. Therefore, it is unlikely that scattering by point-like symmetry-breaking defects play a major role. We show that the angular dependence of the signal can be mapped to the sum of two sinusoidal components each peaking when the magnetic field is parallel to a high symmetry. We propose that anharmonicity may play a major role and argue that the magnetic field can exert a torque on electric dipolar waves traveling with phonons.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2025

Discovery of a large magnetic nonlinear Hall effect in an altermagnet

Since Edwin Halls groundbreaking discovery of the Hall effect in 1879, magnetism, spin, and quantization have been expanding the scope of Hall effects, continuously driving transformative progress in science and technology. Among them, the latest nonlinear Hall effect (NLHE), where longitudinal electric field tunes quantum geometry to generate nonlinear Hall voltage, attracts wide attention as a sensitive probe of topological phases across a wide range of materials. Here, we report a new Hall effect member: the magnetic nonlinear Hall effect (MNLHE), characterized by a quadratic Hall conductivity dependence on magnetic field, rather than electric field as in NLHE. This finding relies on an altermagnet, Mn5Si3 thin film, whose alternating-sign Berry curvatures ensure higher-order MNLHE clearly distinguishable from the first-order anomalous Hall effect. The observed quadratic dependence originates from chiral next-nearest-neighbor hopping processes that acquire magnetic-exchange-driven Zeeman energies and Haldane-like chiral flux phases. Remarkably, this MNLHE is non-analytic, as reversing the magnetic field flips the alternating spin-splitting bands and reverses the hopping chirality, which is absent in traditional NLHE. Beyond offering a distinctive transport fingerprint for altermagnet Mn5Si3 thin film, this MNLHE is large and unsaturated up to 60 T, providing opportunities for pulsed high-field sensing technologies in both fundamental researches and engineering applications.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2024

SAM-MPA: Applying SAM to Few-shot Medical Image Segmentation using Mask Propagation and Auto-prompting

Medical image segmentation often faces the challenge of prohibitively expensive annotation costs. While few-shot learning offers a promising solution to alleviate this burden, conventional approaches still rely heavily on pre-training with large volumes of labeled data from known categories. To address this issue, we propose leveraging the Segment Anything Model (SAM), pre-trained on over 1 billion masks, thus circumventing the need for extensive domain-specific annotated data. In light of this, we developed SAM-MPA, an innovative SAM-based framework for few-shot medical image segmentation using Mask Propagation-based Auto-prompting. Initially, we employ k-centroid clustering to select the most representative examples for labelling to construct the support set. These annotated examples are registered to other images yielding deformation fields that facilitate the propagation of the mask knowledge to obtain coarse masks across the dataset. Subsequently, we automatically generate visual prompts based on the region and boundary expansion of the coarse mask, including points, box and a coarse mask. Finally, we can obtain the segmentation predictions by inputting these prompts into SAM and refine the results by post refinement module. We validate the performance of the proposed framework through extensive experiments conducted on two medical image datasets with different modalities. Our method achieves Dices of 74.53%, 94.36% on Breast US, Chest X-ray, respectively. Experimental results substantiate that SAM-MPA yields high-accuracy segmentations within 10 labeled examples, outperforming other state-of-the-art few-shot auto-segmentation methods. Our method enables the customization of SAM for any medical image dataset with a small number of labeled examples.

cs.CV↗