SearcharxivSearch

arXiv subjects

Xiaowei Wang

Publications and source records attributed to Xiaowei Wang.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Experimental Observation of Dynamical Phase Transitions in a Dephased Photonic Quantum Walk

Dynamical phase transitions in open quantum systems govern how non-equilibrium states relax toward a stationary state. We study these transitions experimentally using a discrete-time photonic quantum walk on a three-node graph. A tunable synthetic gauge flux and calibrated dephasing allow us to control time-reversal symmetry and the detailed balance properties of the effective Markovian dynamics. With detailed balance, we observe a first-order dynamical phase transition marked by a crossing of real Liouvillian eigenvalues. When detailed balance is broken, we observe a second-order dynamical phase transition at an exceptional point where eigenvalues and eigenvectors coalesce. By progressively reducing the dephasing strength, we track the crossover toward the quantum-coherent regime and determine that the transitions persist down to a finite threshold. Our results link Liouvillian spectral topology to relaxation criticality and demonstrate a controllable platform for engineered dissipative dynamics.

quant-ph

Online Electric Vehicle Charging Control with Battery Thermal Management in Cold Environments

Electric vehicle (EV) adoption in cold regions is hindered by degraded EV charging performance at low temperatures, which necessitates effective battery thermal management during charging. Given the coupling of battery charging and heating dynamics, this paper examines the benefits of online coordinated charging and heating control, rather than performing them separately. Specifically, we first build queue models for both battery charging and thermal dynamics. Then, we formulate an optimization problem to minimize the system cost of a charging station, which allows us to coordinate charging and heating through maintaining queue stability. To solve the problem, we develop our online coordinated charging and heating control algorithm within the theoretical framework of Lyapunov optimization. Note that our online method is prediction-free and independent of any assumed modeling of uncertainty. We also characterize both the feasibility and optimality of the proposed control approach. Numerical results based on real-world data demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our control method through comparisons.

math.OC

Photon-Atom Granularity Noise Thermometry

We propose granularity noise thermometry (GNT), a fluctuation-based optical thermometry scheme that exploits the intrinsic fluctuations of susceptibility arising from atomic discreteness. The power spectral density of transmitted light exhibits an excess noise above the shot-noise limit that scales linearly with the photon-to-atom ratio $\mathcal{R}$. Consequently, varying the incident power (hence $\mathcal{R}$) yields the slope $\mathcal{K}$ of this linear scaling, which directly encodes the temperature. Closed-form expressions for the polarizability moments are derived via the plasma dispersion function, which yield distinct temperature scalings: $\mathcal{K}\propto P_{\mathrm{v}}(T)/T^2$ for thermal vapors and $\mathcal{K}\propto T^{2}$ for cold atoms. While practical implementation requires careful control of technical noise and system parameters, the present framework provides a noise-based pathway for optical thermometry using atomic ensembles.

physics.atom-ph

Observation of Restored Adiabatic State Transfer in Time-Modulated Non-Hermitian Systems

Exceptional points (EPs) have attracted extensive research interest due to their intriguing properties. One of the hallmarks of EP physics is that dynamically encircling the EPs induces chiral mode switching, arising from the breakdown of adiabaticity due to the presence of a complex spectrum in the system's Hamiltonian. While such chiral mode behavior has been widely observed experimentally, achieving truly adiabatic, and thus symmetric, state transfer, regardless of the winding direction, in time-modulated non-Hermitian systems has remained elusive. In this work, we demonstrate that this long-sought adiabatic state dynamics can indeed be restored. By steering a two-mode photonic setup along specifically designed trajectories in parameter space, we realize conditions where the associated non-Hermitian evolution operator acquires a purely real spectrum. Moreover, our experimental platform enables controlled switching between symmetric (adiabatic) and chiral (non-adiabatic) state-transfer regimes for the same set of initial modes, thus effectively implementing a universal symmetric-asymmetric two-mode switch. Our results therefore open new avenues for harnessing unique topological spectral properties of non-Hermitian systems, paving the way for the practical design of versatile optical wave-manipulation devices and for advancing both classical and quantum information technologies.

physics.optics

The Interstellar Scintillation of the Radio-Loud Magnetar XTE J1810-197

We present a comprehensive interstellar scintillation (ISS) study of the radio-loud magnetar XTE~J1810$-$197, based on six years of multi-frequency monitoring (2018$-$2024) with the Shanghai Tian Ma Radio Telescope (TMRT) at 7.0, 8.6, and 14.0~GHz. The scintillation parameters--decorrelation bandwidth $Δν_{\rm d}$, decorrelation time $Δτ_{\rm d}$, and drift rate $dt/dν$--are fully characterized. Our measured $Δτ_{\rm d}$ implies $Δτ_{\rm d} < 4$~s at 575-725~MHz under a Kolmogorov spectrum, which is shorter than the magnetar's 5.54~s spin period. This result naturally explains the previously reported absence of pulse-to-pulse coherence at these frequencies. Kinematic modeling locates the dominant scattering screen at $1.6\pm0.1$~kpc away from the Earth, within the Sagittarius Arm. The screen coincides with the HII region JCMTSE~J180921.2$-$201932 and is unrelated to the magnetar's 2018 outburst suggested by earlier studies. A scintillation arc detected at 14.0~GHz represents the highest-frequency arc observed to date. The asymmetry of arcs is linearly correlated with a dispersion-measure gradient across the screen ($r = 0.959$, $p < 10^{-8}$). We also measure its refractive scintillation timescale, which is only $1.21\pm0.19$~d. Clear DISS at 14~GHz effectively resolves the debate over a possible strong-to-weak scattering transition at this frequency. These results extend the ISS characterization of magnetars to previously unexplored frequencies and provide a precise probe of the ionized interstellar medium in the Sagittarius Arm.

astro-ph.HE

Twisted scalar curvature as a moment map

We develop the moment map theory of the twisted scalar curvature of a Kähler metric. Primarily, we introduce a coupled system of equations on a holomorphic submersion intertwining the twisted scalar curvature of a Kähler metric on the base and the fibrewise scalar curvature of a relatively Kähler metric on the total space. This resulting system can be viewed as producing the natural coupled metric geometry of holomorphic submersions, and we show that this system appears canonically as a moment map. The approach generalises to foliations, where we prove similar results.

math.DG

Does the radio-active phase of XTE~J1810$-$197 recur following the same evolutionary pattern?

Magnetars are the most strongly magnetized compact objects known in the Universe and are regarded as one of the primary engines powering a variety of enigmatic, high-energy transients. However, our understanding of magnetars remains highly limited, constrained by observational sample size and radiative variability. XTE~J1810$-$197, which re-entered a radio-active phase in 2018, is one of only six known radio-pulsating magnetars. Leveraging the distinctive capability for simultaneous dual-frequency observations, we utilized the Shanghai Tianma Radio Telescope (TMRT) to monitor this magnetar continuously at both 2.25 and 8.60~GHz, capturing its entire evolution from radio activation to quenching. This enabled precise characterization of the evolution in its integrated profile, spin frequency, flux density, and spectral index ($α$, defined by $S \propto f^α$). The first time derivative of its spin frequency $\dotν$ passed through four distinct phases -- rapid decrease, violent oscillation, steady decline, and stable recovery -- before returning to its pre-outburst value concomitant with the cessation of radio emission. Remarkably, both the amplitudes and the characteristic time-scales of these $\dotν$ variations match those observed during the previous outburst that began in 2003, providing the first demonstration that post-outburst rotational evolution and radiative behavior in a magnetar are repeatable. A twisted-magnetosphere model can qualitatively account for this repeatability as well as for the progressive narrowing and abrupt disappearance of the radio pulse radiation, thereby receiving strong observational support.

astro-ph.HE

Transformer Reconstructed with Dynamic Value Attention

Since transformer was firstly published in 2017, several works have been proposed to optimize it. However, the major structure of transformer remains unchanged, ignoring one of its main intrinsic limitations, which is the same static value is used for every query in a head. Transformer itself tries to solve this problem by implementing multi-head attentions, yet the number of heads is limited by complexity. I propose a method to decide a value for each query dynamically, which could cut down all the redundant heads, keeping only one. Consequently, the following feed forward network could be cut down entirely, as each revised embedding has already fetched enough useful values far beyond the context. As a result, a single-head Dynamic Value Attention (DVA) is all you need in a transformer. According to the experiment, DVA may save 37.6% training time than the original transformer meanwhile increasing the learning capability.

cs.LG

Robust Drone-View Geo-Localization via Content-Viewpoint Disentanglement

Drone-view geo-localization (DVGL) aims to match images of the same geographic location captured from drone and satellite perspectives. Despite recent advances, DVGL remains challenging due to significant appearance changes and spatial distortions caused by viewpoint variations. Existing methods typically assume that drone and satellite images can be directly aligned in a shared feature space via contrastive learning. Nonetheless, this assumption overlooks the inherent conflicts induced by viewpoint discrepancies, resulting in extracted features containing inconsistent information that hinders precise localization. In this study, we take a manifold learning perspective and model $\textit{the feature space of cross-view images as a composite manifold jointly governed by content and viewpoint}$. Building upon this insight, we propose $\textbf{CVD}$, a new DVGL framework that explicitly disentangles $\textit{content}$ and $\textit{viewpoint}$ factors. To promote effective disentanglement, we introduce two constraints: $\textit{(i)}$ an intra-view independence constraint that encourages statistical independence between the two factors by minimizing their mutual information; and $\textit{(ii)}$ an inter-view reconstruction constraint that reconstructs each view by cross-combining $\textit{content}$ and $\textit{viewpoint}$ from paired images, ensuring factor-specific semantics are preserved. As a plug-and-play module, CVD integrates seamlessly into existing DVGL pipelines and reduces inference latency. Extensive experiments on University-1652 and SUES-200 show that CVD exhibits strong robustness and generalization across various scenarios, viewpoints and altitudes, with further evaluations on CVUSA and CVACT confirming consistent improvements.

cs.CV

Enhancing Cross-View Geo-Localization Generalization via Global-Local Consistency and Geometric Equivariance

Cross-view geo-localization (CVGL) aims to match images of the same location captured from drastically different viewpoints. Despite recent progress, existing methods still face two key challenges: (1) achieving robustness under severe appearance variations induced by diverse UAV orientations and fields of view, which hinders cross-domain generalization, and (2) establishing reliable correspondences that capture both global scene-level semantics and fine-grained local details. In this paper, we propose EGS, a novel CVGL framework designed to enhance cross-domain generalization. Specifically, we introduce an E(2)-Steerable CNN encoder to extract stable and reliable features under rotation and viewpoint shifts. Furthermore, we construct a graph with a virtual super-node that connects to all local nodes, enabling global semantics to be aggregated and redistributed to local regions, thereby enforcing global-local consistency. Extensive experiments on the University-1652 and SUES-200 benchmarks demonstrate that EGS consistently achieves substantial performance gains and establishes a new state of the art in cross-domain CVGL.

cs.CV

Carbon-Aware Quantification of Real-Time Aggregate Power Flexibility of Electric Vehicles

Electric vehicles (EVs) can be aggregated to offer flexibility to power systems. However, the rapid growth in EV adoption leads to increased grid-level carbon emissions due to higher EV charging demand, challenging grid decarbonization efforts. Quantifying and managing the EV flexibility while controlling carbon emissions is crucial. This paper introduces a methodology for carbon-aware quantification of real-time aggregate EV power flexibility based on the Lyapunov optimization technique. We construct a novel queue system including EV charging queues, delay-aware virtual queues, and carbon-aware virtual queues. Based on the evolution of these queues, we define the Lyapunov drift and minimize the drift-plus-penalty term to get the real-time EV flexibility interval, which is reported to the system operator for flexibility provision. To enhance EV flexibility, we integrate dispatch signals from the system operator into the queue updates through a two-stage disaggregation process. The proposed approach is prediction-free and adaptable to various uncertainties, including EV arrivals and grid carbon intensity. Additionally, the maximum charging delay of EV charging tasks is theoretically bounded by a constant, and carbon emissions are effectively controlled. The numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed online method and highlight its advantages over several benchmarks through comparisons.

math.OC

Targeting Melanoma-Specific Tyrosinase: Cyclic Peptide Disrupts Actin Dynamics for Precision Apoptosis Induction

Melanoma is an aggressive and highly metastatic cancer that exhibits stubborn resistance to conventional therapies, highlighting the need for novel treatments. Existing therapeutic strategies often suffer from systemic toxicity, poor efficacy and fast-gained drug resistance. In this study, we designed a cyclic peptide system (c-RGDKYQ) that takes the advantage of the overexpression of tyrosinase in melanoma cells to trigger enzyme-mediated oxidation and self-assembly. The assembled peptide nanostructures can selectively disrupt the actin cytoskeleton, impairing cancer cellular functions, e.g., motility, adhesion, and proliferation, ultimately leading to apoptosis. This approach does not rely on external drug payloads or complex delivery mechanisms. c-RGDKYQ exhibits high selectivity for melanoma cells, strongly suppressing tumor growth in a murine model with minimal systemic toxicity. Our findings illuminate that, through targeting tyrosinase, c-RGDKYQ may be an enzyme-responsive alternative to conventional treatments for melanoma.

q-bio.BM

Hassett--Keel Program in genus four

The Hassett--Keel program seeks to give a modular interpretation to the steps of the log minimal model program of $\overline{\mathcal{M}}_g$. The goal of this paper is to complete the Hassett--Keel program in genus four, supplementing earlier results of Casalaina-Martin--Jensen--Laza and Alper--Fedorchuk--Smyth--van der Wyck. The main tools we use are wall crossing for moduli spaces of pairs in the sense of K-stability and KSBA stability, and the recently constructed moduli spaces of boundary polarized Calabi--Yau surface pairs. We also give a construction of the hyperelliptic flip using a stackified Chow quotient which is expected to generalize to higher genus.

math.AG

Electronic-vibrational dynamics and coherence in x-ray transient absorption of N2+ induced by strong-field ionization

Attosecond transient absorption spectroscopy (ATAS) is becoming an indispensable and powerful tool in the emerging field of attochemistry, while the interpretation of measurements often requires full considerations of the coupling among various freedoms of motion. Here we develop the ionization-coupling model to incorporate the transient absorption and explore the coupled electronic-vibrational dynamics of nitrogen ions induced by strong-field ionization (SFI), which has been investigated in the recent transient x-ray K-edge absorption experiment [PRL 129, 123002 (2022)]. It is found the coherent vibrational wave packet on the involved electronic state is created with broad distribution of vibrational levels which leads to the spectral overlap on the K-edge absorption. By identifying the contributions of each electronic state, the study provides a different interpretation revealing the significant role of the excited state $A^2Π_u$ arising from the electronic-vibrational coupling in strong laser fields. We uncover new features of absorption from forbidden transitions during the laser pulse and confirm the vibronic coherence induced modulations of absorbance after SFI. A new scheme is proposed to avoid the spectral overlap and determine the population among the states which is crucial to resolve the debate on nitrogen air lasing. The work lays down the framework to research the ionic coherence in ATAS and offers valuable insights into the intricate interplay between electronic and vibrational dynamics.

physics.optics

Is the Gum Nebula an Important Interstellar Scattering Disk of Background Pulsars?

The Gum Nebula is a faint supernova remnant extending about 40 degrees across the southern sky, potentially affecting tens of background pulsars. Though the view that the Gum Nebula acts as a potential scattering screen for background pulsars has been recurrently mentioned over the past five decades, it has not been directly confirmed. We chose the strong background pulsar PSR~B0740$-$28 as a probe and monitored its diffractive interstellar scintillation (DISS) at 2.25~$\&$~8.60~GHz simultaneously for about two years using the Shanghai Tian Ma Radio Telescope (TMRT). DISS was detected at both frequencies and quantified by two-dimensional autocorrelation analysis. We calculated their scattering spectral index $α$ and found that 9/21 of the observations followed the theoretical predictions, while 4/21 of them clearly showed $α< 4$. This finding provides strong support for anomalous scattering along the pulsar line of sight, due to the large frequency lever arm and the simultaneous features of our dual-frequency observations. In comparison to the 2.25~GHz observations, scintillation arcs were observed in 10/21 of the secondary spectrum plots for 8.60~GHz observations. Consequently, the highest frequency record for pulsar scintillation arc detection was updated to 8.60~GHz. Our fitting results were the most direct evidence for the view that the Gum Nebula acts as the scattering screen for background pulsars, because both the distance ($245^{+69}_{-72}$~pc) and transverse speed ($22.4^{+4.1}_{-4.2}$~km/s) of the scintillation screen are comparable with related parameters of the Gum Nebula. Our findings indicated that anisotropic scattering provides a superior explanation for the annual modulation of scintillation arcs than isotropic scattering. Additionally, the orientation of its long axis was also fitted.

astro-ph.HE

Pathfinding pulsar observations with the CVN incorporating the FAST

The importance of Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) for pulsar research is becoming increasingly prominent and receiving more and more attention. In this paper, we present pathfinding pulsar observation results with the Chinese VLBI Network (CVN) incorporating the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST). On MJD 60045 (April 11th, 2023), PSRs B0919+06 and B1133+16 were observed with the phase-referencing mode in the L-band using four radio telescopes (FAST, TianMa, Haoping and Nanshan) and correlated with the pulsar binning mode of the distributed FX-style software correlator in Shanghai. After further data processing with the NRAO Astronomical Image Processing System (AIPS), we detected these two pulsars and fitted their current positions with accuracy at the milliarcsecond level. By comparison, our results show significantly better agreement with predicted values based on historical VLBI observations than that with previous timing observations, as pulsar astrometry with the VLBI provides a more direct and model-independent method for accurately obtaining related parameters.

astro-ph.HE

Coherent XUV super continuum emission from atomic bound states

Coherent supercontinuum radiation in the extreme-ultraviolet (XUV) range is indispensable for synthesizing attosecond light pulses and for exploring transient atomic structures. Here, we report the striking observations of coherent XUV supercontinuum (XSC) extended from below to far above the ionization threshold, which exhibits completely different temporal and spatial properties comparing to the conventional rescattering induced high harmonic generation (HHG). We demonstrate that the strong-field created coherence among bound orbitals strongly distort the atomic transition energies during the pulse, leading to coherent emission spanning tens of electron-volts, in contrast to the line emission via free-induction decay occurring after the pulse. The supposed non-radiating bound dark states contribute as well by emitting dressed energy through dark-to-bright emission mechanism. All the processes modulated at sub-cycle time scale jointly form this new-type coherent XSC. This work achieves the strong-field attosecond control of the exotic atomic radiation dynamics and provides the means of simultaneous generation of separated attosecond sources, i.e., XSC and HHG, with potential advancing attosecond interferometry.

physics.atom-ph

Graph Contrastive Learning with Generative Adversarial Network

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have demonstrated promising results on exploiting node representations for many downstream tasks through supervised end-to-end training. To deal with the widespread label scarcity issue in real-world applications, Graph Contrastive Learning (GCL) is leveraged to train GNNs with limited or even no labels by maximizing the mutual information between nodes in its augmented views generated from the original graph. However, the distribution of graphs remains unconsidered in view generation, resulting in the ignorance of unseen edges in most existing literature, which is empirically shown to be able to improve GCL's performance in our experiments. To this end, we propose to incorporate graph generative adversarial networks (GANs) to learn the distribution of views for GCL, in order to i) automatically capture the characteristic of graphs for augmentations, and ii) jointly train the graph GAN model and the GCL model. Specifically, we present GACN, a novel Generative Adversarial Contrastive learning Network for graph representation learning. GACN develops a view generator and a view discriminator to generate augmented views automatically in an adversarial style. Then, GACN leverages these views to train a GNN encoder with two carefully designed self-supervised learning losses, including the graph contrastive loss and the Bayesian personalized ranking Loss. Furthermore, we design an optimization framework to train all GACN modules jointly. Extensive experiments on seven real-world datasets show that GACN is able to generate high-quality augmented views for GCL and is superior to twelve state-of-the-art baseline methods. Noticeably, our proposed GACN surprisingly discovers that the generated views in data augmentation finally conform to the well-known preferential attachment rule in online networks.

cs.LG