arXiv subjects

Yan Duan

Publications and source records attributed to Yan Duan.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2022

The JCMT BISTRO-2 Survey: Magnetic Fields of the Massive DR21 Filament

We present 850 $μ$m dust polarization observations of the massive DR21 filament from the B-fields In STar-forming Region Observations (BISTRO) survey, using the POL-2 polarimeter and the SCUBA-2 camera on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope. We detect ordered magnetic fields perpendicular to the parsec-scale ridge of the DR21 main filament. In the sub-filaments, the magnetic fields are mainly parallel to the filamentary structures and smoothly connect to the magnetic fields of the main filament. We compare the POL-2 and Planck dust polarization observations to study the magnetic field structures of the DR21 filament on 0.1--10 pc scales. The magnetic fields revealed in the Planck data are well aligned with those of the POL-2 data, indicating a smooth variation of magnetic fields from large to small scales. The plane-of-sky magnetic field strengths derived from angular dispersion functions of dust polarization are 0.6--1.0 mG in the DR21 filament and $\sim$ 0.1 mG in the surrounding ambient gas. The mass-to-flux ratios are found to be magnetically supercritical in the filament and slightly subcritical to nearly critical in the ambient gas. The alignment between column density structures and magnetic fields changes from random alignment in the low-density ambient gas probed by Planck to mostly perpendicular in the high-density main filament probed by JCMT. The magnetic field structures of the DR21 filament are in agreement with MHD simulations of a strongly magnetized medium, suggesting that magnetic fields play an important role in shaping the DR21 main filament and sub-filaments.

astro-ph.GA↗

arXiv2022

Demonstration of electron-nuclear decoupling at a spin clock transition

The ability to design quantum systems that decouple from environmental noise sources is highly desirable for development of quantum technologies with optimal coherence. The chemical tunability of electronic states in magnetic molecules combined with advanced electron spin resonance techniques provides excellent opportunities to address this problem. Indeed, so-called clock transitions (CTs) have been shown to protect molecular spin qubits from magnetic noise, giving rise to significantly enhanced coherence. Here we conduct a spectroscopic and computational investigation of this physics, focusing on the role of the nuclear bath. Away from the CT, linear coupling to the nuclear degrees of freedom causes a modulation and decay of electronic coherence, as quantified via electron spin echo signals generated experimentally and $\textit{in silico}$. Meanwhile, the effective hyperfine interaction vanishes at the CT, resulting in electron-nuclear decoupling and an absence of quantum information leakage to the nuclear bath, providing opportunities to characterize other decoherence sources.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2022

Data mining, dashboard and statistical analysis: a powerful framework for the chemical design of molecular nanomagnets

Three decades of research in molecular nanomagnets have raised their magnetic memories from liquid helium to liquid nitrogen temperature thanks to a wise choice of the magnetic ion and coordination environment. Still, serendipity and chemical intuition played a main role. In order to establish a powerful framework for statistically driven chemical design, we collected chemical and physical data for lanthanide-based nanomagnets, catalogued over 1400 published experiments, developed an interactive dashboard (SIMDAVIS) to visualise the dataset, and applied inferential statistical analysis. Our analysis showed that the Arrhenius energy barrier correlates unexpectedly well with the magnetic memory, as both Orbach and Raman processes can be controlled by vibronic coupling. Indeed, only bis-phthalocyaninato sandwiches and metallocenes, with rigid ligands, consistently present magnetic memory up to high temperature. Analysing magnetostructural correlations, we offer promising strategies for improvement, in particular for the preparation of pentagonal bipyramids, where even "softer" complexes are protected against molecular vibrations.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2022

B-fields in Star-Forming Region Observations (BISTRO): Magnetic Fields in the Filamentary Structures of Serpens Main

We present 850 $μ$m polarimetric observations toward the Serpens Main molecular cloud obtained using the POL-2 polarimeter on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) as part of the B-fields In STar-forming Region Observations (BISTRO) survey. These observations probe the magnetic field morphology of the Serpens Main molecular cloud on about 6000 au scales, which consists of cores and six filaments with different physical properties such as density and star formation activity. Using the histogram of relative orientation (HRO) technique, we find that magnetic fields are parallel to filaments in less dense filamentary structures where $N_{H_2} < 0.93\times 10^{22}$ cm$^{-2}$ (magnetic fields perpendicular to density gradients), while being perpendicular to filaments (magnetic fields parallel to density gradients) in dense filamentary structures with star formation activity. Moreover, applying the HRO technique to denser core regions, we find that magnetic field orientations change to become perpendicular to density gradients again at $N_{H_2} \approx 4.6 \times 10^{22}$ cm$^{-2}$. This can be interpreted as a signature of core formation. At $N_{H_2} \approx 16 \times 10^{22}$ cm$^{-2}$ magnetic fields change back to being parallel to density gradients once again, which can be understood to be due to magnetic fields being dragged in by infalling material. In addition, we estimate the magnetic field strengths of the filaments ($B_{POS} = 60-300~μ$G)) using the Davis-Chandrasekhar-Fermi method and discuss whether the filaments are gravitationally unstable based on magnetic field and turbulence energy densities.

astro-ph.GA↗

arXiv2021

The JCMT BISTRO Survey: An 850/450$μ$m Polarization Study of NGC 2071IR in OrionB

We present the results of simultaneous 450 $μ$m and 850 $μ$m polarization observations toward the massive star forming region NGC 2071IR, a target of the BISTRO (B-fields in Star-Forming Region Observations) Survey, using the POL-2 polarimeter and SCUBA-2 camera mounted on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope. We find a pinched magnetic field morphology in the central dense core region, which could be due to a rotating toroidal disk-like structure and a bipolar outflow originating from the central young stellar object, IRS 3. Using the modified Davis-Chandrasekhar-Fermi method, we obtain a plane-of-sky magnetic field strength of 563$\pm$421 $μ$G in the central $\sim$0.12 pc region from 850 $μ$m polarization data. The corresponding magnetic energy density of 2.04$\times$10$^{-8}$ erg cm$^{-3}$ is comparable to the turbulent and gravitational energy densities in the region. We find that the magnetic field direction is very well aligned with the whole of the IRS 3 bipolar outflow structure. We find that the median value of polarization fractions, 3.0 \%, at 450 $μ$m in the central 3 arcminute region, which is larger than the median value of 1.2 \% at 850 $μ$m. The trend could be due to the better alignment of warmer dust in the strong radiation environment. We also find that polarization fractions decrease with intensity at both wavelengths, with slopes, determined by fitting a Rician noise model, of $0.59 \pm 0.03$ at 450 $μ$m and $0.36 \pm 0.04$ at 850 $μ$m, respectively. We think that the shallow slope at 850 $μ$m is due to grain alignment at the center being assisted by strong radiation from the central young stellar objects.

astro-ph.GA↗

arXiv2021

Quantum coherent spin-electric control in a molecular nanomagnet at clock transitions

Electrical control of spins at the nanoscale offers significant architectural advantages in spintronics, because electric fields can be confined over shorter length scales than magnetic fields. Thus, recent demonstrations of electric-field (E-field) sensitivities in molecular spin materials are tantalising, raising the viability of the quantum analogues of macroscopic magneto-electric devices.However, the E-field sensitivities reported so far are rather weak, prompting the question of how to design molecules with stronger spin-electric couplings. Here we show that one path is to identify an energy scale in the spin spectrum that is associated with a structural degree of freedom with a significant electrical polarisability. We study an example of a molecular nanomagnet in which a small structural distortion establishes clock transitions (i.e. transitions whose energy is to first order independent of magnetic field) in the spin spectrum; the fact that this distortion is associated with an electric dipole allows us to control the clock transition energy to an unprecedented degree. We demonstrate coherent electrical control of the quantum spin state and exploit it to manipulate independently the two magnetically-identical but inversion-related molecules in the unit cell of the crystal. Our findings pave the way for the use of molecular spins in quantum technologies and spintronics.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2021

Studying Infall in Infrared Dark Clouds with Multiple HCO+ Transitions

We investigate the infall properties in a sample of 11 infrared dark clouds (IRDCs) showing blue-asymmetry signatures in HCO$^{+}$ J=1--0 line profiles. We used JCMT to conduct mapping observations in HCO$^{+}$ J=4--3 as well as single-pointing observations in HCO$^{+}$ J =3--2, towards 23 clumps in these IRDCs. We applied the HILL model to fit these observations and derived infall velocities in the range of 0.5-2.7 km s$^{-1}$, with a median value of 1.0 km s$^{-1}$, and obtained mass accretion rates of 0.5-14$\times$10$^{-3}$ Msun yr$^{-1}$. These values are comparable to those found in massive star forming clumps in later evolutionary stages. These IRDC clumps are more likely to form star clusters. HCO$^{+}$ J =3--2 and HCO$^{+}$ J =1--0 were shown to trace infall signatures well in these IRDCs with comparable inferred properties. HCO$^{+}$ J=4--3, on the other hand, exhibits infall signatures only in a few very massive clumps, due to smaller opacties. No obvious correlation for these clumps was found between infall velocity and the NH3/CCS ratio.

astro-ph.GA↗

arXiv2021

The TMRT K Band Observations towards 26 Infrared Dark Clouds: NH$_{3}$, CCS, and HC$_{3}$N

We present one of the first Shanghai Tian Ma Radio Telescope (TMRT) K Band observations towards a sample of 26 infrared dark clouds (IRDCs). We observed the (1,1), (2,2), (3,3), and (4,4) transitions of NH$_{3}$ together with CCS (2$_{1}$-1$_{0}$) and HC$_{3}$N $J\,$=2-1, simultaneously. The survey dramatically increases the existing CCS-detected IRDC sample from 8 to 23, enabling a better statistical study of the ratios of carbon-chain molecules (CCM) to N-bearing molecules in IRDCs. With the newly developed hyperfine group ratio (HFGR) method of fitting NH$_{3}$ inversion lines, we found the gas temperature to be between 10 and 18 K. The column density ratios of CCS to NH$_{3}$ for most of the IRDCs are less than 10$^{-2}$, distinguishing IRDCs from low-mass star-forming regions. We carried out chemical evolution simulations based on a three-phase chemical model NAUTILUS. Our measurements of the column density ratios between CCM and NH$_{3}$ are consistent with chemical evolutionary ages of $\lesssim$10$^{5}$ yr in the models. Comparisons of the data and chemical models suggest that CCS, HC$_{3}$N, and NH$_{3}$ are sensitive to the chemical evolutionary stages of the sources.

astro-ph.GA↗

arXiv2021

Revealing the diverse magnetic field morphologies in Taurus dense cores with sensitive sub-millimeter polarimetry

We have obtained sensitive dust continuum polarization observations at 850 $μ$m in the B213 region of Taurus using POL-2 on SCUBA-2 at the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT), as part of the BISTRO (B-fields in STar-forming Region Observations) survey. These observations allow us to probe magnetic field (B-field) at high spatial resolution ($\sim$2000 au or $\sim$0.01 pc at 140 pc) in two protostellar cores (K04166 and K04169) and one prestellar core (Miz-8b) that lie within the B213 filament. Using the Davis-Chandrasekhar-Fermi method, we estimate the B-field strengths in K04166, K04169, and Miz-8b to be 38$\pm$14 $μ$G, 44$\pm$16 $μ$G, and 12$\pm$5 $μ$G, respectively. These cores show distinct mean B-field orientations. B-field in K04166 is well ordered and aligned parallel to the orientations of the core minor axis, outflows, core rotation axis, and large-scale uniform B-field, in accordance with magnetically regulated star formation via ambipolar diffusion taking place in K04166. B-field in K04169 is found to be ordered but oriented nearly perpendicular to the core minor axis and large-scale B-field, and not well-correlated with other axes. In contrast, Miz-8b exhibits disordered B-field which show no preferred alignment with the core minor axis or large-scale field. We found that only one core, K04166, retains a memory of the large-scale uniform B-field. The other two cores, K04169 and Miz-8b, are decoupled from the large-scale field. Such a complex B-field configuration could be caused by gas inflow onto the filament, even in the presence of a substantial magnetic flux.

astro-ph.GA↗

arXiv2021

Spectroscopic analysis of vibronic relaxation pathways in molecular spin qubit $[$Ho(W$_5$O$_{18}$)$_2]^{9-}$: sparse spectra are key

Molecular vibrations play a key role in magnetic relaxation processes of molecular spin qubits as they couple to spin states, leading to the loss of quantum information. Direct experimental determination of vibronic coupling is crucial to understand and control the spin dynamics of these nano-objects, which represent the limit of miniaturization for quantum devices. Herein, we measure the vibrational properties of the molecular spin qubit $[$Ho(W$_5$O$_{18}$)$_2]^{9-}$ by means of magneto-infrared spectroscopy. Our results allow us to unravel the vibrational decoherence pathways in combination with $ab$ $initio$ calculations including vibronic coupling. We observe field-induced spectral changes near 63 and 370 cm$^{-1}$ that are modeled in terms of $f$-manifold crystal field excitations activated by odd-symmetry vibrations. The overall extent of vibronic coupling in this system is limited by a transparency window in the phonon density of states that acts to keep the intramolecular vibrations and $M_J$ levels apart. These findings advance the understanding of vibronic coupling in molecular magnets, place significant constraints on the pattern of crystal field levels in these systems, and provide a strategy for designing molecular spin qubits with improved coherence lifetimes.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2020

Observations of magnetic fields surrounding LkH$α$ 101 taken by the BISTRO survey with JCMT-POL-2

We report the first high spatial resolution measurement of magnetic fields surrounding LkH$α$ 101, a part of the Auriga-California molecular cloud. The observations were taken with the POL-2 polarimeter on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope within the framework of the B-fields In Star-forming Region Observations (BISTRO) survey. Observed polarization of thermal dust emission at 850 $μ$m is found to be mostly associated with the red-shifted gas component of the cloud. The magnetic field displays a relatively complex morphology. Two variants of the Davis-Chandrasekhar-Fermi method, unsharp masking and structure function, are used to calculate the strength of magnetic fields in the plane of the sky, yielding a similar result of $B_{\rm POS}\sim 115$ $\mathrmμ$G. The mass-to-magnetic-flux ratio in critical value units, $λ\sim0.3$, is the smallest among the values obtained for other regions surveyed by POL-2. This implies that the LkH$α$ 101 region is sub-critical and the magnetic field is strong enough to prevent gravitational collapse. The inferred $δB/B_0\sim 0.3$ implies that the large scale component of the magnetic field dominates the turbulent one. The variation of the polarization fraction with total emission intensity can be fitted by a power-law with an index of $α=0.82\pm0.03$, which lies in the range previously reported for molecular clouds. We find that the polarization fraction decreases rapidly with proximity to the only early B star (LkH$α$ 101) in the region. The magnetic field tangling and the joint effect of grain alignment and rotational disruption by radiative torques are potential of explaining such a decreasing trend.

astro-ph.GA↗

arXiv2020

NeuroCard: One Cardinality Estimator for All Tables

Query optimizers rely on accurate cardinality estimates to produce good execution plans. Despite decades of research, existing cardinality estimators are inaccurate for complex queries, due to making lossy modeling assumptions and not capturing inter-table correlations. In this work, we show that it is possible to learn the correlations across all tables in a database without any independence assumptions. We present NeuroCard, a join cardinality estimator that builds a single neural density estimator over an entire database. Leveraging join sampling and modern deep autoregressive models, NeuroCard makes no inter-table or inter-column independence assumptions in its probabilistic modeling. NeuroCard achieves orders of magnitude higher accuracy than the best prior methods (a new state-of-the-art result of 8.5$\times$ maximum error on JOB-light), scales to dozens of tables, while being compact in space (several MBs) and efficient to construct or update (seconds to minutes).

cs.DB↗

arXiv2020

Variable Skipping for Autoregressive Range Density Estimation

Deep autoregressive models compute point likelihood estimates of individual data points. However, many applications (i.e., database cardinality estimation) require estimating range densities, a capability that is under-explored by current neural density estimation literature. In these applications, fast and accurate range density estimates over high-dimensional data directly impact user-perceived performance. In this paper, we explore a technique, variable skipping, for accelerating range density estimation over deep autoregressive models. This technique exploits the sparse structure of range density queries to avoid sampling unnecessary variables during approximate inference. We show that variable skipping provides 10-100$\times$ efficiency improvements when targeting challenging high-quantile error metrics, enables complex applications such as text pattern matching, and can be realized via a simple data augmentation procedure without changing the usual maximum likelihood objective.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2020

The Fundamental Performance of FAST with 19-beam Receiver at L Band

The Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) passed national acceptance and is taking pilot cycle of 'Shared-Risk' observations. The 19-beam receiver covering 1.05-1.45 GHz was used for most of these observations. The electronics gain fluctuation of the system is better than 1\% over 3.5 hours, enabling enough stability for observations. Pointing accuracy, aperture efficiency and system temperature are three key parameters of FAST. The measured standard deviation of pointing accuracy is 7.9$''$, which satisfies the initial design of FAST. When zenith angle is less than 26.4$^\circ$, the aperture efficiency and system temperature around 1.4 GHz are $\sim$ 0.63 and less than 24 K for central beam, respectively. The measured value of these two parameters are better than designed value of 0.6 and 25 K, respectively. The sensitivity and stability of the 19-beam backend are confirmed to satisfy expectation by spectral HI observations toward N672 and polarization observations toward 3C286. The performance allows FAST to take sensitive observations in various scientific goals, from studies of pulsar to galaxy evolution.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2019

Deep Unsupervised Cardinality Estimation

Cardinality estimation has long been grounded in statistical tools for density estimation. To capture the rich multivariate distributions of relational tables, we propose the use of a new type of high-capacity statistical model: deep autoregressive models. However, direct application of these models leads to a limited estimator that is prohibitively expensive to evaluate for range or wildcard predicates. To produce a truly usable estimator, we develop a Monte Carlo integration scheme on top of autoregressive models that can efficiently handle range queries with dozens of dimensions or more. Like classical synopses, our estimator summarizes the data without supervision. Unlike previous solutions, we approximate the joint data distribution without any independence assumptions. Evaluated on real-world datasets and compared against real systems and dominant families of techniques, our estimator achieves single-digit multiplicative error at tail, an up to 90$\times$ accuracy improvement over the second best method, and is space- and runtime-efficient.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2019

Evaluating Protein Transfer Learning with TAPE

Protein modeling is an increasingly popular area of machine learning research. Semi-supervised learning has emerged as an important paradigm in protein modeling due to the high cost of acquiring supervised protein labels, but the current literature is fragmented when it comes to datasets and standardized evaluation techniques. To facilitate progress in this field, we introduce the Tasks Assessing Protein Embeddings (TAPE), a set of five biologically relevant semi-supervised learning tasks spread across different domains of protein biology. We curate tasks into specific training, validation, and test splits to ensure that each task tests biologically relevant generalization that transfers to real-life scenarios. We benchmark a range of approaches to semi-supervised protein representation learning, which span recent work as well as canonical sequence learning techniques. We find that self-supervised pretraining is helpful for almost all models on all tasks, more than doubling performance in some cases. Despite this increase, in several cases features learned by self-supervised pretraining still lag behind features extracted by state-of-the-art non-neural techniques. This gap in performance suggests a huge opportunity for innovative architecture design and improved modeling paradigms that better capture the signal in biological sequences. TAPE will help the machine learning community focus effort on scientifically relevant problems. Toward this end, all data and code used to run these experiments are available at https://github.com/songlab-cal/tape.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2019

Flow++: Improving Flow-Based Generative Models with Variational Dequantization and Architecture Design

Flow-based generative models are powerful exact likelihood models with efficient sampling and inference. Despite their computational efficiency, flow-based models generally have much worse density modeling performance compared to state-of-the-art autoregressive models. In this paper, we investigate and improve upon three limiting design choices employed by flow-based models in prior work: the use of uniform noise for dequantization, the use of inexpressive affine flows, and the use of purely convolutional conditioning networks in coupling layers. Based on our findings, we propose Flow++, a new flow-based model that is now the state-of-the-art non-autoregressive model for unconditional density estimation on standard image benchmarks. Our work has begun to close the significant performance gap that has so far existed between autoregressive models and flow-based models. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/aravindsrinivas/flowpp

cs.LG↗

arXiv2019

Some Considerations on Learning to Explore via Meta-Reinforcement Learning

We consider the problem of exploration in meta reinforcement learning. Two new meta reinforcement learning algorithms are suggested: E-MAML and E-$\text{RL}^2$. Results are presented on a novel environment we call `Krazy World' and a set of maze environments. We show E-MAML and E-$\text{RL}^2$ deliver better performance on tasks where exploration is important.

cs.AI↗