All-optical retrieval of the global phase for two-dimensional Fourier-transform spectroscopy

A combination of spatial interference patterns and spectral interferometry are used to find the global phase for non-collinear two-dimensional Fourier-transform (2DFT) spectra. Results are compared with those using the spectrally resolved transient absorption (STRA) method to find the global phase when excitation is with co-linear polarization. Additionally cross-linear polarized 2DFT spectra are correctly phased using the all-optical technique, where the SRTA is not applicable.Comment: 6 pages, 7 figures, journal publicatio

THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL EVIDENCE OF TREPANATION IN EARLY CHINA

Six clinically trepanned cranial specimens from five Chinese archaeological sites ranging from 5000 to 2000 BP are briefly described. They come from Neolithic, Bronze and Iron Ages sites in Shandong, Qinghai, Henan and Heilongjiang provinces. The successfully trepanned examples described in this paper reveal that this primitive surgical operation had remarkable therapeutic effects. The earliest example in this study is that of the Dawenkou individual from about 5000 BP. The meticulous treatment revealed by this operation is most impressive

Polarization dependence of semiconductor exciton and biexciton contributions to phase-resolved optical two-dimensional Fourier-transform spectra

We study the coherent light-matter interactions of GaAs quantum wells associated with excitons, biexcitons and many-body effects. For most polarization configurations, excitonic features dominate the phase-resolved two-dimensional Fourier-transform (2DFT) spectra and have dispersive lineshapes, indicating the presence of many-body interactions. For cross-linear excitation, excitonic features become weak and absorptive due to the strong suppression of many-body effects; a result that can not be directly determined in transient four-wave mixing experiments. The biexcitonic features do not weaken for cross-polarized excitation and thus are more important.Comment: 4 page, 3 figures, journal article - rapid communicatio

The Quadruplon in a Monolayer Semiconductor

Understanding the structure of matter or materials and interaction or correlations among the constituent elementary particles are the central tasks of all branches of science, from physics, chemistry, to biology. In physics, this ultimate goal has spurred a constant search for high-order correlated entities or composite particles for nearly all states and forms of matter, from elementary particles, nuclei, cold atoms, to condensed matter. So far, such composite particles involving two or three constituent particles have been experimentally identified, such as the Cooper pairs, excitons, and trions in condensed matter physics, or diquarks and mesons in quantum chromodynamics. Although the four-body irreducible entities have long been predicted theoretically in a variety of materials systems alternatively as quadruplons, quadrons, or quartets, the closely related experimental observation so far seems to be restricted to the field of elementary particles (e.g. the recent tetraquark at CERN) only. In this article, we present the first experimental evidence for the existence of a four-body irreducible entity, the quadruplon, involving two electrons and two holes in a monolayer of Molybdenum Ditelluride. Using the optical pump-probe technique, we discovered a series of new spectral features that are distinct from those of trions and bi-excitons. By solving the four-body Bethe-Salpeter equation in conjunction with the cluster expansion approach, we are able to explain these spectral features in terms of the four-body irreducible cluster or the quadruplons. In contrast to a bi-exciton which consists of two weakly bound excitons, a quadruplon consists of two electrons and two holes without the presence of an exciton

Two-dimensional double-quantum spectra reveal collective resonances in an atomic vapor

We report the observation of double-quantum coherence signals in a gas of potassium atoms at twice the frequency of the one-quantum coherences. Since a single atom does not have a state at the corresponding energy, this observation must be attributed to a collective resonance involving multiple atoms. These resonances are induced by weak inter-atomic dipole-dipole interactions, which means that the atoms cannot be treated in isolation, even at a low density of $10^{12}$ cm$^{-3}$

Battling with the low-resource condition for snore sound recognition: introducing a meta-learning strategy

Snoring affects 57 % of men, 40 % of women, and 27 % of children in the USA. Besides, snoring is highly correlated with obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA), which is characterised by loud and frequent snoring. OSA is also closely associated with various life-threatening diseases such as sudden cardiac arrest and is regarded as a grave medical ailment. Preliminary studies have shown that in the USA, OSA affects over 34 % of men and 14 % of women. In recent years, polysomnography has increasingly been used to diagnose OSA. However, due to its drawbacks such as being time-consuming and costly, intelligent audio analysis of snoring has emerged as an alternative method. Considering the higher demand for identifying the excitation location of snoring in clinical practice, we utilised the Munich-Passau Snore Sound Corpus (MPSSC) snoring database which classifies the snoring excitation location into four categories. Nonetheless, the problem of small samples remains in the MPSSC database due to factors such as privacy concerns and difficulties in accurate labelling. In fact, accurately labelled medical data that can be used for machine learning is often scarce, especially for rare diseases. In view of this, Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML), a small sample method based on meta-learning, is used to classify snore signals with less resources in this work. The experimental results indicate that even when using only the ESC-50 dataset (non-snoring sound signals) as the data for meta-training, we are able to achieve an unweighted average recall of 60.2 % on the test dataset after fine-tuning on just 36 instances of snoring from the development part of the MPSSC dataset. While our results only exceed the baseline by 4.4 %, they still demonstrate that even with fine-tuning on a few instances of snoring, our model can outperform the baseline. This implies that the MAML algorithm can effectively tackle the low-resource problem even with limited data resources