Dimerization-assisted energy transport in light-harvesting complexes

We study the role of the dimer structure of light-harvesting complex II (LH2) in excitation transfer from the LH2 (without a reaction center (RC)) to the LH1 (surrounding the RC), or from the LH2 to another LH2. The excited and un-excited states of a bacteriochlorophyll (BChl) are modeled by a quasi-spin. In the framework of quantum open system theory, we represent the excitation transfer as the total leakage of the LH2 system and then calculate the transfer efficiency and average transfer time. For different initial states with various quantum superposition properties, we study how the dimerization of the B850 BChl ring can enhance the transfer efficiency and shorten the average transfer time.Comment: 11 pages, 6 figure

Multipartite quantum correlation and entanglement in four-qubit pure states

Based on the quantitative complementarity relations, we analyze thoroughly the properties of multipartite quantum correlations and entanglement in four-qubit pure states. We find that, unlike the three-qubit case, the single residual correlation, the genuine three- and four-qubit correlations are not suited to quantify entanglement. More interestingly, from our qualitative and numerical analysis, it is conjectured that the sum of all the residual correlations may constitute a good measure for the total multipartite entanglement in the system.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figue

Training and recovery behaviours of exchange bias in FeNi/Cu/Co/FeMn spin valves at high field sweep rates

Training and recovery of exchange bias in FeNi/Cu/Co/FeMn spin valves have been studied by magnetoresistance curves with field sweep rates from 1000 to 4800 Oe/s. It is found that training and recovery of exchange field are proportional to the logarithm of the training cycles and recovery time, respectively. These behaviours are explained within the model based on thermal activation. For the field sweep rates of 1000, 2000 and 4000 Oe/s, the relaxation time of antiferromagnet spins are 61.4, 27.6, and 11.5 in the unit of $ms$ respectively, much shorter than the long relaxation time (~10^2 s) in conventional magnetometry measurements.Comment: 10pages, 3 figure

Effect of iron on the microstructure and mechanical property of Al-Mg-Si-Mn and Al-Mg-Si diecast alloys

This article is made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund. Copyright @ 2012 Elsevier B.V.This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.Al–Mg–Si based alloys can provide super ductility to satisfy the demands of thin wall castings in the application of automotive structure. In this work, the effect of iron on the microstructure and mechanical properties of the Al–Mg–Si diecast alloys with different Mn concentrations is investigated. The CALPHAD (acronym of Calculation of Phase Diagrams) modelling with the thermodynamic properties of the multi-component Al–Mg–Si–Mn–Fe and Al–Mg–Si–Fe systems is carried out to understand the role of alloying on the formation of different primary Fe-rich intermetallic compounds. The results showed that the Fe-rich intermetallic phases precipitate in two solidification stages in the high pressure die casting process: one is in the shot sleeve and the other is in the die cavity, resulting in the different morphologies and sizes. In the Al–Mg–Si–Mn alloys, the Fe-rich intermetallic phase formed in the shot sleeve exhibited coarse compact morphology and those formed in the die cavity were fine compact particles. Although with different morphologies, the compact intermetallics were identified as the same α-AlFeMnSi phase with typical composition of Al24(Fe,Mn)6Si2. With increased Fe content, β-AlFe was found in the microstructure with a long needle-shaped morphology, which was identified as Al13(Fe,Mn)4Si0.25. In the Al–Mg–Si alloy, the identified Fe-rich intermetallics included the compact α-AlFeSi phase with typical composition of Al8Fe2Si and the needle-shaped β-AlFe phase with typical composition of Al13Fe4. Generally, the existence of iron in the alloy slightly increases the yield strength, but significantly reduces the elongation. The ultimate tensile strength maintains at similar levels when Fe contents is less than 0.5 wt%, but decreases significantly with the further increased Fe concentration in the alloys. CALPHAD modelling shows that the addition of Mn enlarges the Fe tolerance for the formation of α-AlFeMnSi intermetallics and suppresses the formation of β-AlFe phase in the Al–Mg–Si alloys, and thus improves their mechanical properties.EPSRC and JL

Learning a Mixture of Deep Networks for Single Image Super-Resolution

Single image super-resolution (SR) is an ill-posed problem which aims to recover high-resolution (HR) images from their low-resolution (LR) observations. The crux of this problem lies in learning the complex mapping between low-resolution patches and the corresponding high-resolution patches. Prior arts have used either a mixture of simple regression models or a single non-linear neural network for this propose. This paper proposes the method of learning a mixture of SR inference modules in a unified framework to tackle this problem. Specifically, a number of SR inference modules specialized in different image local patterns are first independently applied on the LR image to obtain various HR estimates, and the resultant HR estimates are adaptively aggregated to form the final HR image. By selecting neural networks as the SR inference module, the whole procedure can be incorporated into a unified network and be optimized jointly. Extensive experiments are conducted to investigate the relation between restoration performance and different network architectures. Compared with other current image SR approaches, our proposed method achieves state-of-the-arts restoration results on a wide range of images consistently while allowing more flexible design choices. The source codes are available in http://www.ifp.illinois.edu/~dingliu2/accv2016

Model Wavefunctions for the Collective Modes and the Magneto-roton Theory of the Fractional Quantum Hall Effect

We construct model wavefunctions for the collective modes of fractional quantum Hall systems. The wavefunctions are expressed in terms of symmetric polynomials characterized by a root partition and a "squeezed" basis, and show excellent agreement with exact diagonalization results for finite systems. In the long wavelength limit, the model wavefunctions reduce to those predicted by the single-mode approximation, and remain accurate at energies above the continuum of roton pairs.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, minor changes for the final prl versio