arXiv subjects

Yixiao Gao

Publications and source records attributed to Yixiao Gao.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

NFT Games: an Empirical Look into the Play-to-Earn Model

The past decade has witnessed the burgeoning and continuous development of blockchain and its applications. Besides various cryptocurrencies, an industry that has quickly embraced this trend is gaming. Thanks to the support of blockchain, games have started to incorporate non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that can enable a new gaming model, play-to-earn (P2E), which incentivizes users to participate and play. While recent studies looked at several NFT games qualitatively and individually, an in-depth understanding is still missing, particularly on how the P2E model has transformed traditional games. In this work, we set to conduct a measurement study of NFT games, aiming to gain a comprehensive understanding of the effectiveness of P2E in practice. For this purpose, we collect and analyze relevant NFT transaction data from the underlying blockchain (e.g., Ethereum) of 12 games, supplemented with various data scraped from their websites. Our study shows that (1) a few top wallets control unproportionally high percentage of NFTs, and the majority of wallets own only one or two NFTs and do not actively trade; (2) promotion events do boost the trade amount and the NFT price for some games, but their effect does not sustain; and (3) few players actually earned a profit, and players in 9 out of 12 games who traded NFTs have a negative profit on average. Motivated by these findings, we further investigate effective incentive mechanisms based on game theory to improve the trading profits that players can earn from these NFT games. Both modeling and simulation results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed incentive mechanism.

cs.CE↗

arXiv2026

Switchable high-Q light absorbers based on phase-change resonant metasurfaces

In this paper, we propose a switchable high-Q light absorber based on a reconfigurable metasurface enabled by a lowloss phase-change material (PCM). By leveraging the coupling between guided-mode resonance and Fabry-Perot modes, mediated by the phase-transition dynamics of the embedded PCM, the resonance Q factor can be actively tuned. This allows the system to switch from a perfect dark state, governed by the physics of bound states in the continuum, to a critically coupled resonance with a finite Q factor. Consequently, the metasurface exhibits perfect absorption in the amorphous state and a reflection-dominated response in the crystalline state. The proposed metasurface holds significant potential for diverse nanophotonic applications, including photodetection and thermal emission control.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2025

Compact polarization-independent non-volatile optical switches

Compact, non-volatile optical switches on silicon platforms are essential for reconfigurable photonics, but the strong anisotropy of silicon waveguides leads to polarization-dependent performance. In this paper, we propose a polarization-independent, non-volatile optical switch utilizing low-loss phase change material (PCM) Sb2S3. By incorporating Sb2S3 into a multimode slot waveguide, multimode interference can be efficiently tuned for both TE and TM polarizations, owing to enhanced light-PCM interaction. Polarization-independent switching is achieved through the optimal design of the multimode slot waveguide region. The proposed non-volatile switch demonstrates a crosstalk (CT) < -21.9 dB and insertion loss (IL) < 0.12 dB at 1550 nm with a multimode section length of 9.67 μm, which may find promising applications in reconfigurable photonic circuits for on-chip optical signal processing.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2024

Degenerate merging BICs in resonant metasurfaces

Resonant metasurfaces driven by bound states in the continuum (BIC) offer an intriguing approach to engineer high-Q resonances. Merging multiple BICs in the momentum space could further enhance the Q-factor as well as its robustness to fabrication imperfections. Here, we report doubly-degenerate guided mode resonances (GMR) in a resonant metasurface, whose radiation losses could be totally suppressed due to merging BICs. We show that the GMRs and their associated accidental BICs can be evolved into degenerate merging BICs by parametric tuning of the metasurface. Significantly, these two GMRs share the same critical parameter (i.e. lattice constants or thickness) that the merging BICs occur. Interestingly, thanks to the degenerate property of two GMRs, a larger (smaller) period will split one of merging BICs into eight accidental BICs at off-Γ point, but annihilate the other. Such exotic phenomenon can be well explained from the interaction of GMRs and background Fabry-Perot resonances. Our result provides new strategies to engineering high-Q resonances in resonant metasurfaces for light-matter interaction.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2022

Dark modes governed by translational-symmetry-protected bound states in the continuum in symmetric dimer lattices

Creating nonradiating dark modes is key to achieving high-Q resonance in dielectric open cavities. The concept of photonic bound states in the continuum (BIC) offers an efficient method to suppress radiative loss through symmetry engineering. Structural reflection symmetry (RS) has been widely utilized to construct BICs in asymmetric metasurfaces. In this paper, we show that the radiation channel of translational-symmetry (TS) protected BIC in 1D symmetric dimer lattice could be unlocked by dimer spacing perturbation. A semi-analytical coupled mode analysis reveals that the total radiation suppression of the TS-BIC is due to the elimination of the first Fourier harmonic component in the lattice parameters. TS-BIC mechanism could also be applied in a 2D symmetric dimer lattice, and BICs protected by TS are robust to RS breaking, and vice versa, providing a promising way to independently control the quality factor of two interacting BIC resonances. Our results suggest a new degree of freedom to engineer BICs as well as their interactions in dimer lattices tailored by different symmetries, and could provide new insight for realizing practical applications requiring high-Q resonances.

physics.optics↗