Ternary Bismuthide SrPtBi2: Computation and Experiment in Synergism to Explore Solid-State Materials

A combination of theoretical calculation and the experimental synthesis to explore the new ternary compound is demonstrated in the Sr-Pt-Bi system. Since Pt-Bi is considered as a new critical charge-transfer pair for superconductivity, it inspired us to investigate the Sr-Pt-Bi system. With a thorough calculation of all the known stable/metastable compounds in the Sr-Pt-Bi system and crystal structure predictions, the thermodynamic stability of hypothetical stoichiometry, SrPtBi2, is determined. Followed by the high-temperature synthesis and crystallographic analysis, the first ternary bismuthide in Sr-Pt-Bi, SrPtBi2 was prepared and the stoichiometry was confirmed experimentally. SrPtBi2 crystallizes in the space group Pnma (S.G. 62, Pearson Symbol oP48), which matches well with theoretical prediction using an adaptive genetic algorithm (AGA). Using first-principles calculations, we demonstrate that the orthorhombic structure has lower formation energies than other 112 structure types, such as tetragonal BaMnBi2 (CuSmP2) and LaAuBi2 (CuHfSi2) structure types. The bonding analysis indicates the Pt-Bi interactions play a critical role in structural stability. The physical properties measurements show the metallic properties with low electron-phonon interactions at the low temperature, which agrees with the electronic structure assessment.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figure

Multiple interactive memory representations underlie the induction of false memory.

Theoretical and computational models such as transfer-appropriate processing (TAP) and global matching models have emphasized the encoding-retrieval interaction of memory representations in generating false memories, but relevant neural mechanisms are still poorly understood. By manipulating the sensory modalities (visual and auditory) at different processing stages (learning and test) in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott task, we found that the auditory-learning visual-test (AV) group produced more false memories (59%) than the other three groups (42∼44%) [i.e., visual learning visual test (VV), auditory learning auditory test (AA), and visual learning auditory test (VA)]. Functional imaging results showed that the AV group's proneness to false memories was associated with (i) reduced representational match between the tested item and all studied items in the visual cortex, (ii) weakened prefrontal monitoring process due to the reliance on frontal memory signal for both targets and lures, and (iii) enhanced neural similarity for semantically related words in the temporal pole as a result of auditory learning. These results are consistent with the predictions based on the TAP and global matching models and highlight the complex interactions of representations during encoding and retrieval in distributed brain regions that contribute to false memories

UA(1)U_A(1) symmetry restoration at high baryon density

We study the relation between chiral and $U_A(1)$ symmetries in quark-meson model. While quarks and mesons are described in mean field approximation, the topological susceptibility characterizing the $U_A(1)$ breaking contains two components, the condensate controlled one and the meson fluctuation one. The $U_A(1)$ restoration is governed by their competition. In hot medium the condensates are melted but the fluctuation is enhanced, the $U_A(1)$ symmetry can therefore not be restored by temperature effect alone. The baryon density, however, reduces both the condensates and fluctuation, the $U_A(1)$ symmetry can only be restored in dense or dense and hot mediums. The strange condensate plays a weak role in the susceptibility, the chiral and $U_A(1)$ symmetry restoration happen at almost the same critical point.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures. Published versio

Nitrogen Release Characteristics of a Bag Controlled Release Fertilizer

Slow release fertilizers are designed to enhance crop yield and minimizing the loss of nitrogen (N) to environment. However, N release in leaching and loss in ammonia emission from bag controlled release fertilizers have not been previously evaluated under the standardized conditions in soil. Accordingly, a laboratory study was conducted to evaluate the characteristics of N release from a bag controlled fertilizer with 1, 3, 5 and 7 rows of hole (B-1, B-3, B-5, B-7) and a kraft bag without hole (B-W). The results showed that the amount of N leaching of B-1, B-3, B-5, B-7 and B-W were significantly lower than urea fertilizer without bag (U). The maximum N release from the fertilizers followed the order: U (83.16%) > B-7 (54.61%) > B-5 (54.02%) > B-W (51.51%) > B-3 (48.87%) > B-1 (38.60%) during the experimentation. Compared with U treatment, ammonia volatilization losses were significantly decreased by B-1, B-3, B-5, B-7 and B-W treatments. Based on N release and loss, a suitable bag with holes should be considered in practice when using the bag controlled fertilizer to meet an environment good objective. The evaluation method merits further study combined with field experiment

Object-aware Inversion and Reassembly for Image Editing

By comparing the original and target prompts in editing task, we can obtain numerous editing pairs, each comprising an object and its corresponding editing target. To allow editability while maintaining fidelity to the input image, existing editing methods typically involve a fixed number of inversion steps that project the whole input image to its noisier latent representation, followed by a denoising process guided by the target prompt. However, we find that the optimal number of inversion steps for achieving ideal editing results varies significantly among different editing pairs, owing to varying editing difficulties. Therefore, the current literature, which relies on a fixed number of inversion steps, produces sub-optimal generation quality, especially when handling multiple editing pairs in a natural image. To this end, we propose a new image editing paradigm, dubbed Object-aware Inversion and Reassembly (OIR), to enable object-level fine-grained editing. Specifically, we design a new search metric, which determines the optimal inversion steps for each editing pair, by jointly considering the editability of the target and the fidelity of the non-editing region. We use our search metric to find the optimal inversion step for each editing pair when editing an image. We then edit these editing pairs separately to avoid concept mismatch. Subsequently, we propose an additional reassembly step to seamlessly integrate the respective editing results and the non-editing region to obtain the final edited image. To systematically evaluate the effectiveness of our method, we collect two datasets for benchmarking single- and multi-object editing, respectively. Experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior performance in editing object shapes, colors, materials, categories, etc., especially in multi-object editing scenarios.Comment: Project Page: https://aim-uofa.github.io/OIR-Diffusion

Measurement of the cross-section and charge asymmetry of WW bosons produced in proton-proton collisions at s=8\sqrt{s}=8 TeV with the ATLAS detector

This paper presents measurements of the $W^+ \rightarrow \mu^+\nu$ and $W^- \rightarrow \mu^-\nu$ cross-sections and the associated charge asymmetry as a function of the absolute pseudorapidity of the decay muon. The data were collected in proton--proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 8 TeV with the ATLAS experiment at the LHC and correspond to a total integrated luminosity of 20.2~\mbox{fb^{-1}}. The precision of the cross-section measurements varies between 0.8% to 1.5% as a function of the pseudorapidity, excluding the 1.9% uncertainty on the integrated luminosity. The charge asymmetry is measured with an uncertainty between 0.002 and 0.003. The results are compared with predictions based on next-to-next-to-leading-order calculations with various parton distribution functions and have the sensitivity to discriminate between them.Comment: 38 pages in total, author list starting page 22, 5 figures, 4 tables, submitted to EPJC. All figures including auxiliary figures are available at https://atlas.web.cern.ch/Atlas/GROUPS/PHYSICS/PAPERS/STDM-2017-13

1, 25-Dihydroxyvitamin D3 suppresses cell cycle progression and thus growth of prostate cancer cells by inducing expression of limb bud and heart development (LBH)

Purpose: To investigate the function of limb bud and heart development (LBH) in 1α, 25-dihydroxyvitamin D3 (1,25D)-mediated inhibitory effect on proliferation of prostate cancer cells.Methods: The inhibitory effect of 1,25D on growth and cell cycle progression of lymph node carcinoma of the prostate (LNCaP) cells was determined using cell counting kit-8 (CCK-8) assay, 5-ethynyl-2'-deoxyuridine (EdU) assay and flow cytometry, while the expression levels of LBH in response to treatment with 1,25D were determined by quantitative reverse-transcription PCR (qRT-PCR) and western blottingting. The expression levels of LBH in cells were down/up regulated by transfection with siRNA or overexpression plasmids, and then cell growth and cell cycles were measured using the CCK-8 assay, EdU assay, and flow cytometry. Finally, the growth inhibitory effect of 1,25D on LBH knockdown cells were determined using CCK-8 and EdU assays.Results: Treatment with 1,25D arrested LNCaP cells in G0/G1 phase of cell cycle, suppressed the growth of the cells and induced the expression of LBH. Overexpression/knockdown of LBH in LNCaP cells suppressed/promoted cell growth and accumulated/decreased cells in the G0/G1 phase. Moreover, knockdown of LBH reversed the inhibitory effect of 1,25D on cell proliferation of LNCaP cells.Conclusion: Inhibitory effect of 1,25D on cell cycle progression and cell proliferation might be via LBH.Keywords: Cell proliferation, Limb bud and heart development, Prostate cancer, 1α, 25-Dihydroxyvitamin D

Online placement algorithm of service function chain based on knowledge graph

The emergence of new network services such as immersive cloud XR and holographic communication puts forward higher requirements for network service quality.To ensure the availability of network services, the network service delay and reliability must be controlled within a certain quality of service according to the attributes and dependencies of network functions.However, the traditional network representation forms, such as bitmap and matrix, cannot cover these key network information, resulting in the information loss in the input stage of the algorithm, which leads to the deviation of the calculation results.Therefore, in order to accurately extract user needs and reflect the dynamic changes of network resources, knowledge graph was adopted to represent the network and its services, an online placement algorithm of service function chain based on knowledge graph was proposed.Based on this, a relationship alignment method based on editing distance was designed to guide the online placement of service function chains under complex dependency relationships.Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can improve the placement accuracy of service function chain by 10%~15% and reduce the average network energy consumption by about 13%.The proposed algorithm has low complexity and high timeliness

FDTD Modelling of Silver Nanoparticles Embedded in Phase Separation Interface of H-PDLC

We report localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR) of silver nanoparticles (NPs) embedded in interface of phase separation of holographic polymer-dispersed liquid crystal (H-PDLC) gratings using Finite-Difference Time Domain method. We show that silver NPs exhibit double resonance peak at the interface, and these peaks are influenced by the angle of incident light. We observe a blue shift of the wavelength of resonance peak as the incident angle increases. However, the location of silver NPs at the interface has nearly no effect on the wavelength of resonance peak. Also we show near-field and far-field properties surrounding silver NPs and find that field distribution can be controlled through rotation of incident angle. Therefore, LSPR properties of silver NPs within H-PDLC gratings can be excited by appropriate wavelength and angle of the incident light