arXiv subjects

Zhihui Zhou

Publications and source records attributed to Zhihui Zhou.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Electronic excitation of ultrafast collective amorphous-amorphous transitions in glassy phase-change material

The intrinsic nature of glass states and glass transitions remain a fundamental open question in condensed-matter physics and materials science. The key to solving the glass transition problem lies in achieving a complete understanding of the physics governing the structural relaxation. Nonetheless, directly probing dynamic atomic-scale structural changes in order to identify the precise local structural motifs and establish quantitative structure-property relationships remains an outstanding challenge. By combining femtosecond electron diffraction with time-dependent density-functional theory molecular dynamics simulations, we directly capture ultrafast amorphous-amorphous transitions indicated by collective bond stretching (0.2 ps) and angle bending (0.5-2 ps) in glassy phase-change material GeTe. The ultrafast bond stretching is accompanied by localized oscillation modes with the frequency of 3.10 THz, unambiguously signaling the local Peierls-like bonding structure and the flexibility of these polarized bonds. These ultrafast collective atomic motions, captured across timescales ranging from femtoseconds to picoseconds, directly reveals the structural origin of the boson peak and provide compelling evidence for many-body interactions in amorphous materials. Furthermore, the ultrafast amorphous-amorphous transitions induce a drastic insulator-metal transition, directly revealing both the underlying switching mechanism and the fundamental speed limit of the ovonic threshold switch. These insights establish a fundamental framework for rationally engineering relaxation pathways and phase-change/threshold switch in amorphous materials. Femtosecond electron diffraction provides a powerful novel approach to deciphering the structural complexity and functional mechanisms of amorphous materials by resolving collective atomic motions from random diffusion dynamics in the time domain.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2026

Sub-angstrom many-body localization driven by phononic flat bands in real quantum materials

Defects, fluctuations, degenerate states and correlated interactions facilitate the emergence of exotic properties in condensed matter systems while also inducing atomic-scale local correlated structures that deviate from the average long-range order. Establishing the structure-property relationship from the perspective of these atomic-scale local correlated structures remains ambiguous and controversial due to the lack of direct methods for identifying such local correlated structures. In this work, based on the photoexcited ultrafast structural response, we propose a Bragg scattering phase breaking regime to identify sub-angstrom local correlated structures in quantum materials. With this regime, we unambiguously identify the many-body-interaction driven local correlated structures in the low temperature ground state of AgCrSe2, characterized by static off-center displacements of Ag atoms ranging from 0 to 0.5 angstrom. The competition between Ag-Ag Coulomb correlations and potential wells induced by CrSe2 layers, leading to phononic flat bands and driving the system into a many body localization (MBL) regime. As temperature rising, these static local correlated structures transform to a dynamic state where the thermal fluctuations overwhelm the multiple localized states. These distinctive local correlated structures constitute the first experimental observation of MBL with vortex-like topological characteristic in a real material system. Emergent vibrational modes arising from MBL have been confirmed and show excellent agreement with inelastic neutron scattering experiments. Our work not only offers a universal approach to characterize sub-angstrom local correlated structures across a wide range of quantum materials but also deepens our understanding of the fundamental mechanism behind exotic properties from the perspective of atomic-scale local correlated structures.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2023

Contrastive Collaborative Filtering for Cold-Start Item Recommendation

The cold-start problem is a long-standing challenge in recommender systems. As a promising solution, content-based generative models usually project a cold-start item's content onto a warm-start item embedding to capture collaborative signals from item content so that collaborative filtering can be applied. However, since the training of the cold-start recommendation models is conducted on warm datasets, the existent methods face the issue that the collaborative embeddings of items will be blurred, which significantly degenerates the performance of cold-start item recommendation. To address this issue, we propose a novel model called Contrastive Collaborative Filtering for Cold-start item Recommendation (CCFCRec), which capitalizes on the co-occurrence collaborative signals in warm training data to alleviate the issue of blurry collaborative embeddings for cold-start item recommendation. In particular, we devise a contrastive collaborative filtering (CF) framework, consisting of a content CF module and a co-occurrence CF module to generate the content-based collaborative embedding and the co-occurrence collaborative embedding for a training item, respectively. During the joint training of the two CF modules, we apply a contrastive learning between the two collaborative embeddings, by which the knowledge about the co-occurrence signals can be indirectly transferred to the content CF module, so that the blurry collaborative embeddings can be rectified implicitly by the memorized co-occurrence collaborative signals during the applying phase. Together with the sound theoretical analysis, the extensive experiments conducted on real datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed model. The codes and datasets are available on https://github.com/zzhin/CCFCRec.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2022

Generalized Hilbert Operator Acting on Bloch Type Spaces

Let $μ$ be a positive Borel measure on the interval [0,1). For $α>0$, the Hankel matrix $\mathcal{H}_{μ,α}=(μ_{n,k,α})_{n,k\geq 0}$ with entries $μ_{n,k,α}=\int_{[0,1)}\frac{Γ(n+α)}{n!Γ(α)}t^{n+k}dμ(t)$ formally induces the operator $$\mathcal{H}_{μ,α}(f)(z)=\sum_{n=0}^{\infty}\left(\sum_{k=0}^{\infty} μ_{n, k,α} a_{k}\right)z^{n} $$ on the space of all analytic functions $f(z)=\sum_{k=0}^{\infty}a_{k}z^{k}$ in the unit disc $\mathbb{D}$. In this paper, we characterize the measures $μ$ for which $\mathcal{H}_{μ,α}$ ($α\geq 2$) is a bounded (resp., compact) operator from the Bloch type space $\mathscr{B}_β$ ($0<β<\infty$) into $\mathscr{B}_{α-1}$. We also give a necessary condition for which $\mathcal{H}_{μ,α}$ is a bounded operator by acting on Bloch type spaces for general cases.

math.CV↗

arXiv2022

A Derivative-Hilbert operator Acting on Dirichlet spaces

Let $μ$ be a positive Borel measure on the interval $[0,1)$. The Hankel matrix $\mathcal{H}_μ=(μ_{n,k})_{n,k\geq 0}$ with entries $μ_{n,k}=μ_{n+k}$, where $μ_{n}=\int_{[0,1)}t^ndμ(t)$, induces formally the operator as $$\mathcal{DH}_μ(f)(z)=\sum_{n=0}^\infty\left(\sum_{k=0}^\infty μ_{n,k}a_k\right)(n+1)z^n , z\in \mathbb{D},$$ where $f(z)=\sum_{n=0}^{\infty}a_nz^n$ is an analytic function in $\mathbb{D}$. In this paper, we characterize those positive Borel measures on $[0, 1)$ for which $\mathcal{DH}_μ$ is bounded (resp. compact) from Dirichlet spaces $\mathcal{D}_α( 0<α\leq2 )$ into $\mathcal{D}_β( 2\leqβ<4 )$.

math.FA↗