arXiv subjects

Xin Zhao

Publications and source records attributed to Xin Zhao.

At least 199 records · Page 11Linked to original sources

arXiv2017

Tests of Cold Atom Clock in Orbit

Since the atomic clock was invented, its performance has been improved for one digit every decade until 90s of last century when the traditional atomic clock almost reached its limit. With laser cooled atoms, the performance can be further improved, and nowadays the cold atom based clocks are widely used as primary frequency standards. Such a kind of cold atom clocks has great applications in space. This paper presents the design and tests of a cold atom clock (CAC) operating in space. In microgravity, the atoms are cooled, trapped, launched and finally detected after being interrogated by microwave field with Ramsey method. The results of laser cooling of atoms in microgravity in orbit are presented and compared with that on ground for the first time. That the full width at half maximum (FWHM) of obtained central Ramsey fringes varies linearly with launching velocity of cold atoms shows the effects of microgravity. With appropriate parameters, a closed-loop locking of the CAC is realized in orbit and the estimated short term frequency stability of $3.0\times 10 ^{-13}/\sqrt{τ}$ has been reached.

physics.atom-ph↗

arXiv2017

Quantum interference in coherent tunnelling through branched molecular junctions containing ferrocene centers

In our theoretical study where we combine a nonequilibrium Green's function (NEGF) approach with density functional theory (DFT) we investigate branched compounds containing ferrocene moieties in both branches which due to their metal centers are designed to allow for asymmetry induced by local charging. In these compounds the ferrocene moieties are connected to pyridyl anchor groups either directly or via acetylenic spacers in a meta-connection where we also compare our results with those obtained for the respective single-branched molecules with both meta- and para-connections between the metal center and the anchors. We find a destructive quantum interference (DQI) feature in the transmission function slightly below the lowest unoccupied molecular orbital (LUMO) which dominates the conductance even for the uncharged branched compound with spacer groups inserted. In an analysis based on mapping the structural characteristics of the range of molecules in our article onto tight-binding models, we identify the structural source of the DQI minimum as the through-space coupling between the pyridyl anchor groups. We also find that local charging on one of the branches only changes the conductance by about one order of magnitude which we explain in terms of the spatial distributions of the relevant molecular orbitals for the branched compounds.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2017

Structures, phase transitions, and magnetic properties of Co3Si from first-principles calculations

Co3Si was recently reported to exhibit remarkable magnetic properties in the nanoparticle form [Appl. Phys. Lett. 108, 152406 (2016)], yet better understanding of this material is to be promoted. Here we report a study on the crystal structures of Co3Si using adaptive genetic algorithm, and discuss its electronic and magnetic properties from first-principles calculations. Several competing phases of Co3Si have been revealed from our calculations. We show that the hexagonal Co3Si structure reported in experiments has lower energy in non-magnetic state than ferromagnetic state at zero temperature. The ferromagnetic state of the hexagonal structure is dynamically unstable with imaginary phonon modes and transforms to a new orthorhombic structure, which is confirmed by our structure searches to have the lowest energy for both Co3Si and Co3Ge. Magnetic properties of the experimental hexagonal structure and the lowest-energy structures obtained from our structure searches are investigated in detail.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2016

Destructive quantum interference in electron transport: A reconciliation of the molecular orbital and the atomic orbital perspective

Destructive quantum interference (DQI) in single molecule electronics is a purely quantum mechanical effect and entirely defined by inherent properties of the molecule in the junction such as its structure and symmetry. This definition of DQI by molecular properties alone suggests its relation to other more general concepts in chemistry as well as the possibility of deriving simple models for its understanding and molecular device design. Recently, two such models have gained wide spread attention, where one was a graphical scheme based on visually inspecting the connectivity of carbon sites in conjugated pi systems in an atomic orbital (AO) basis and the other one put the emphasis on the amplitudes and signs of the frontier molecular orbitals (MOs). There have been discussions on the range of applicability for these schemes, but ultimately conclusions from topological molecular Hamiltonians should not depend on whether they are drawn from an AO or a MO representation, as long as all the orbitals are taken into account. In this article we clarify the relation between both models in terms of the zeroth order Green's function and compare their predictions for a variety of systems. From this comparison we conclude that for a correct description of DQI from a MO perspective it is necessary to include the contributions from all MOs rather than just those from the frontier orbitals. The cases where DQI effects can be successfully predicted within a frontier orbital approximation we show to be limited to alternant even-membered hydrocarbons, as a a direct consequence of the Coulson-Rushbrooke pairing theorem in quantum chemistry.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2016

Large magnetic anisotropy predicted for rare-earth free Fe16-xCoxN2 alloys

Structures and magnetic properties of Fe16-xCoxN2 are studied using adaptive genetic algorithm and first-principles calculations. We show that substituting Fe by Co in Fe16N2 with Co/Fe ratio smaller than 1 can greatly improve the magnetic anisotropy of the material. The magnetocrystalline anisotropy energy from first-principles calculations reaches 3.18 MJ/m3 (245.6 μeV per metal atom) for Fe12Co4N2, much larger than that of Fe16N2 and is one of the largest among the reported rare-earth free magnets. From our systematic crystal structure searches, we show that there is a structure transition from tetragonal Fe16N2 to cubic Co16N2 in Fe16-xCoxN2 as the Co concentration increases, which can be well explained by electron counting analysis. Different magnetic properties between the Fe-rich (x < 8) and Co-rich (x > 8) Fe16-xCoxN2 is closely related to the structural transition.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2016

Three Magnetic Rotation Bands in 84^Rb

High-spin states in $^{84}$Rb are studied by using the $^{70}$Zn($^{18}$O, p3n)$^{84}$Rb reaction at beam energy of 75 MeV. Three high-lying negative-parity bands are established, whose level spacings are very regular, i.e., there don't exist signature splitting. The dipole character of the transitions of these three bands is assigned by the $γ$-$γ$ directional correlations of oriented states (DCO) intensity ratios and the multipolarity M1 is suggested by the analogy to multiparticle excitations in neighboring nuclei. The strong M1 and weak or no E2 transitions are observed. All these characteristic features show they are magnetic rotation bands.

nucl-ex↗

arXiv2016

Picometer-resolution dual-comb spectroscopy with a free-running fibre laser

Dual-comb spectroscopy utilizes two sets of comb lines with slightly different comb-tooth-spacings, and optical spectral information is acquired by measuring the radio-frequency beat notes between the sets of comb lines. It holds the promise as a real-time, high-resolution analytical spectroscopy tool for a range of applications. However, the stringent requirement on the coherence between comb lines from two separate lasers and the sophisticated control system to achieve that have confined the technology to the top metrology laboratories. By replacing control electronics with an all-optical dual-comb lasing scheme, a simplified dual-comb spectroscopy scheme is demonstrated using just one dual-wavelength, passively mode-locked fiber laser. Dual-comb pulses with a repetition-frequency difference determined by the intracavity dispersion are shown to be sufficiently stable against common-mode cavity drifts and noises. As sufficiently low relative linewidth is maintained between two sets of comb lines, capability to resolve RF beat notes between comb teeth and picometer-wide optical spectral features is demonstrated using a simple data acquisition and processing system in an all-fiber setup. Possibility to use energy-efficient, free-running fiber lasers with a small comb-tooth-spacing could enable the realization of low-cost dual-comb spectroscopy systems affordable to more applications.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2016

Unidirectional, dual-comb lasing under multiple pulse formation mechanisms in a passively mode-locked fiber ring laser

Dual-comb lasers from which asynchronous ultrashort pulses can be simultaneously generated have recently become an interesting research subject. They could be an intriguing alternative to the current dual-laser optical-frequency-comb source with highly sophisticated electronic control systems. If generated through a common light path traveled by all pulses, the common-mode noises between the spectral lines of different pulse trains could be significantly reduced. Therefore, coherent dual-comb generation from a completely common-path, unidirectional lasing cavity would be an interesting territory to explore. In this paper, we demonstrate such a dual-comb lasing scheme based on a nanomaterial saturable absorber with additional pulse narrowing and broadening mechanisms concurrently introduced into a mode-locked fiber laser. The interactions between multiple soliton formation mechanisms result in unusual bifurcation into two-pulse states with quite different characteristics. Simultaneous oscillation of pulses with four-fold difference in pulsewidths and tens of Hz repetition rate difference is observed. The coherence between these spectral-overlapped, picosecond and femtosecond pulses is further verified by the corresponding asynchronous cross-sampling and dual-comb spectroscopy measurements.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2015

Exploration of tetrahedral structures in silicate cathodes using a motif-network scheme

Using a motif-network search scheme, we studied the tetrahedral structures of the dilithium/disodium transition metal orthosilicates A2MSiO4 with A = Li or Na and M = Mn, Fe or Co. In addition to finding all previously reported structures, we discovered many other different tetrahedral-network-based crystal structures which are highly degenerate in energy. These structures can be classified into structures with 1D, 2D and 3D M-Si-O frameworks. A clear trend of the structural preference in different systems was revealed and possible indicators that affect the structure stabilities were introduced. For the case of Na systems which have been much less investigated in the literature relative to the Li systems, we predicted their ground state structures and found evidence for the existence of new structural motifs.

physics.comp-ph↗

arXiv2015

Temporal Identification of Latent Communities on Twitter

User communities in social networks are usually identified by considering explicit structural social connections between users. While such communities can reveal important information about their members such as family or friendship ties and geographical proximity, they do not necessarily succeed at pulling like-minded users that share the same interests together. In this paper, we are interested in identifying communities of users that share similar topical interests over time, regardless of whether they are explicitly connected to each other on the social network. More specifically, we tackle the problem of identifying temporal topic-based communities from Twitter, i.e., communities of users who have similar temporal inclination towards the current emerging topics on Twitter. We model each topic as a collection of highly correlated semantic concepts observed in tweets and identify them by clustering the time-series based representation of each concept built based on each concept's observation frequency over time. Based on the identified emerging topics in a given time period, we utilize multivariate time series analysis to model the contributions of each user towards the identified topics, which allows us to detect latent user communities. Through our experiments on Twitter data, we demonstrate i) the effectiveness of our topic detection method to detect real world topics and ii) the effectiveness of our approach compared to well-established approaches for community detection.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2015

Structures and magnetic properties of Co-Zr-B magnets studied by first-principles calculations

The structures and magnetic properties of the Co-Zr-B alloys near the Co5Zr composition were studied using adaptive genetic algorithm and first-principles calculations to guide further experimental effort on optimizing their magnetic performances. Through extensive structural searches, we constructed the contour maps of the energetics and magnetic moments of the Co-Zr-B magnet alloys as a function of composition. We found that the Co-Zr-B system exhibits the same structural motif as the "Co11Zr2" polymorphs, which plays a key role in achieving high coercivity. Boron atoms can either substitute selective cobalt atoms or occupy the interstitial sites. First-principles calculation shows that the magnetocrystalline anisotropy energies can be significantly improved through proper boron doping.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2015

Electronic structure of Ce2RhIn8 2D heavy Fermion system studied by angle resolved photoemission spectroscopy

We use angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy to study heavy fermion superconductor Ce2RhIn8. The Fermi surface is rather complicated and consists of several hole and electron pock- ets. We do not observe kz dispersion of Fermi sheets, which is consistent with 2D character of the electronic structure. Comparison of the ARPES data and band structure calculations points to a localized picture of f electrons. Our findings pave the way for understanding the transport and thermodynamical properties of this material.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2013

Evolution of photo-excited carrier distribution from anisotropic to isotropic and isotropic photon absorption in graphene

Femtosecond time-resolved spectroscopy using 400 nm-pump and 800 nm-probe in CVD-grown multilayer graphene provides strong evidence for isotropic distribution of photoexcited carrier after initial relaxation. Indicative of such isotropic distribution is a pump polarization independence of differential reflectivity (\DeltaR/R) and transmittance (\DeltaT/T) from pump-probe measurements. Combined with results using 800 nm-pump in [arXiv. 1301.1743v3 (2013)], these pump polarization dependences of time-resolved spectroscopy corroborates the evolution of photo-excited carrier distribution from anisotropic to isotropic with carrier relaxation. And, the absorbance of graphene is identical for in-plane and out-of-plane optical fields. No matter the carrier distribution in momentum space, the influence of carrier on in-plane and out-of-plane optical fields from state filling effect is identical. The sign reversing of ps dynamics signal in graphene/graphite should not directly relate to carrier.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2013

Parallel Coordinates Guided High Dimensional Transfer Function Design

High-dimensional transfer function design is widely used to provide appropriate data classification for direct volume rendering of various datasets. However, its design is a complicated task. Parallel coordinate plot (PCP), as a powerful visualization tool, can efficiently display high-dimensional geometry and accurately analyze multivariate data. In this paper, we propose to combine parallel coordinates with dimensional reduction methods to guide high-dimensional transfer function design. Our pipeline has two major advantages: (1) combine and display extracted high-dimensional features in parameter space; and (2) select appropriate high-dimensional parameters, with the help of dimensional reduction methods, to obtain sophisticated data classification as transfer function for volume rendering. In order to efficiently design high-dimensional transfer functions, the combination of both parallel coordinate components and dimension reduction results is necessary to generate final visualization results. We demonstrate the capability of our method for direct volume rendering using various CT and MRI datasets.

cs.GR↗

arXiv2013

Pattern Recognition and Revealing using Parallel Coordinates Plot

Parallel coordinates plot (PCP) is an excellent tool for multivariate visualization and analysis, but it may fail to reveal inherent structures for datasets with a large number of items. In this paper, we propose a suite of novel clustering, dimension ordering and visualization techniques based on PCP, to reveal and highlight hidden structures. First, we propose a continuous spline based polycurves design to extract and classify different cluster aspects of the data. Then, we provide an efficient and optimal correlation based sorting technique to reorder coordinates, as a helpful visualization tool for data analysis. Various results generated by our framework visually represent much structure, trend and correlation information to guide the user, and improve the efficacy of analysis, especially for complex and noisy datasets.

cs.GR↗

arXiv2013

4-Dimensional Geometry Lens: A Novel Volumetric Magnification Approach

We present a novel methodology that utilizes 4-Dimensional (4D) space deformation to simulate a magnification lens on versatile volume datasets and textured solid models. Compared with other magnification methods (e.g., geometric optics, mesh editing), 4D differential geometry theory and its practices are much more flexible and powerful for preserving shape features (i.e., minimizing angle distortion), and easier to adapt to versatile solid models. The primary advantage of 4D space lies at the following fact: we can now easily magnify the volume of regions of interest (ROIs) from the additional dimension, while keeping the rest region unchanged. To achieve this primary goal, we first embed a 3D volumetric input into 4D space and magnify ROIs in the 4th dimension. Then we flatten the 4D shape back into 3D space to accommodate other typical applications in the real 3D world. In order to enforce distortion minimization, in both steps we devise the high dimensional geometry techniques based on rigorous 4D geometry theory for 3D/4D mapping back and forth to amend the distortion. Our system can preserve not only focus region, but also context region and global shape. We demonstrate the effectiveness, robustness, and efficacy of our framework with a variety of models ranging from tetrahedral meshes to volume datasets.

cs.GR↗

arXiv2013

Anatomical Feature-guided Volumeric Registration of Multimodal Prostate MRI

Radiological imaging of prostate is becoming more popular among researchers and clinicians in searching for diseases, primarily cancer. Scans might be acquired at different times, with patient movement between scans, or with different equipment, resulting in multiple datasets that need to be registered. For this issue, we introduce a registration method using anatomical feature-guided mutual information. Prostate scans of the same patient taken in three different orientations are first aligned for the accurate detection of anatomical features in 3D. Then, our pipeline allows for multiple modalities registration through the use of anatomical features, such as the interior urethra of prostate and gland utricle, in a bijective way. The novelty of this approach is the application of anatomical features as the pre-specified corresponding landmarks for prostate registration. We evaluate the registration results through both artificial and clinical datasets. Registration accuracy is evaluated by performing statistical analysis of local intensity differences or spatial differences of anatomical landmarks between various MR datasets. Evaluation results demonstrate that our method statistics-significantly improves the quality of registration. Although this strategy is tested for MRI-guided brachytherapy, the preliminary results from these experiments suggest that it can be also applied to other settings such as transrectal ultrasound-guided or CT-guided therapy, where the integration of preoperative MRI may have a significant impact upon treatment planning and guidance.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2013

A New 3D Geometric Approach to Focus and Context Lens Effect Simulation

We present a novel methodology based on geometric approach to simulate magnification lens effects. Our aim is to promote new applications of powerful geometric modeling techniques in visual computing. Conventional image processing/visualization methods are computed in two dimensional space (2D). We examine this conventional 2D manipulation from a completely innovative perspective of 3D geometric processing. Compared with conventional optical lens design, 3D geometric method are much more capable of preserving shape features and minimizing distortion. We magnify an area of interest to better visualize the interior details, while keeping the rest of area without perceivable distortion. We flatten the mesh back into 2D space for viewing, and further applications in the screen space. In both steps, we devise an iterative deformation scheme to minimize distortion around both focus and context region, while avoiding the noncontinuous transition region between the focus and context areas. Particularly, our method allows the user to flexibly modify the ROI shapes to accommodate complex feature. The user can also easily specify a spectrum of metrics for different visual effects. Various experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness, robustness, and efficiency of our framework.

cs.GR↗