BINA

We analyze theoretically and experimentally cases of asymmetric detection, stimulation and loss within a quantum nonlinear interferometer of entangled pairs. We show that the visibility of the SU(1,1) interference directly discerns between loss on the measured mode (signal), as opposed to the conjugated mode (idler). This asymmetry also affects the phase sensitivity of the interferometer, where coherent seeding is shown to mitigate losses that are suffered by the conjugated mode, therefore increasing the maximum threshold of loss that still allows for sub-shot-noise phase detection. Our findings can improve the performance of setups that rely on direct detection of entangled pairs, such as quantum interferometry and imaging with undetected photons.

Opto-mechanical interactions in guided wave media are drawing great interest in fundamental research and applications. Forward stimulated Brillouin scattering, in particular, is widely investigated in optical fibres and photonic integrated circuits. In this work, we report a comprehensive study of forward stimulated Brillouin scattering over standard, panda-type polarization maintaining fibres. We distinguish between intra-polarization scattering, in which two pump tones are co-polarized along one principal axis, and inter-polarization processes driven by orthogonally polarized pump waves. Both processes are quantified in analysis, calculations and experiment. Inter-modal scattering, in particular, introduces cross-polarization switching of probe waves that is non-reciprocal. Switching takes place in multiple wavelength windows. The results provide a first demonstration of opto-mechanical non-reciprocity of forward …

The constituent cores of multi-core fibers are coupled by acoustic modes, guided by the entire cladding cross-section. Acoustic coupling leads to inter core cross phase modulation. The effect is quantified in analysis and experiment.

In systems near phase transitions, macroscopic properties often follow algebraic scaling laws, determined by the dimensionality and the underlying symmetries of the system. The emergence of such universal scaling implies that microscopic details are irrelevant. Here, we locally investigate the scaling properties of the metal-insulator transition at the LaAlO 3/SrTiO 3 interface. We show that, by changing the dimensionality and the symmetries of the electronic system, coupling between structural and electronic properties prevents the universal behavior near the transition. By imaging the current flow in the system, we reveal that structural domain boundaries modify the filamentary flow close to the transition point, preventing a fractal with the expected universal dimension from forming.

Randomly repeated measurements during the evolution of a closed quantum system create a sequence of probabilities for the first detection of a certain quantum state. The related discrete monitored evolution for the return of the quantum system to its initial state is investigated. We found that the mean number of measurements until the first detection is an integer, namely the dimensionality of the accessible Hilbert space. Moreover, the mean first detected return time is equal to the average time step between successive measurements times the mean number of measurements. Thus, the mean first detected return time scales linearly with the dimensionality of the accessible Hilbert space. The main goal of this work is to explain the quantization of the mean return time in terms of a quantized Berry phase.

3D printing (additive manufacturing (AM)) has enormous potential for rapid tooling and mass production due to its design flexibility and significant reduction of the timeline from design to manufacturing. The current state‐of‐the‐art in 3D printing focuses on material manufacturability and engineering applications. However, there still exists the bottleneck of low printing resolution and processing rates, especially when nanomaterials need tailorable orders at different scales. An interesting phenomenon is the preferential alignment of nanoparticles that enhance material properties. Therefore, this review emphasizes the landscape of nanoparticle alignment in the context of 3D printing. Herein, a brief overview of 3D printing is provided, followed by a comprehensive summary of the 3D printing‐enabled nanoparticle alignment in well‐established and in‐house customized 3D printing mechanisms that can lead to selective …

Among the examined organic electrodes for aqueous mono and multivalent ions batteries, polyimide is considered a promising candidate because of its high capacity and good cyclability in different electrolyte solutions. While most of the studies so far were focused on the energetic performance of polyimide anodes, much less is known about their charge storage mechanism and particularly how such electrodes are affected by the solvation properties of the inserted cations. Using in situ EQCM-D, a direct assessment of the cationic fluxes and their hydration shells inserted/extracted to/from PI electrodes upon potential application was performed for a large variety of mono and multivalent cations. Our observations demonstrated a pronounced withdrawal of water molecules from the polymeric electrodes during insertion of chaotropic cations and significantly less water withdrawal upon insertion of kosmotropic cations …

The structure of the gut tissue facilitates close and mutualistic interactions between the host and the gut microbiota. These cross-talks are crucial for maintaining local and systemic homeostasis; changes to gut microbiota composition (dysbiosis) associate with a wide array of human diseases. Methods for dissecting host-microbiota interactions encompass an inherent tradeoff among preservation of physiological tissue structure (when using in vivo animal models) and the level of control over the experiment factors (as in simple in vitro cell culture systems). To address this tradeoff, Yissachar et al. recently developed an intestinal organ culture system. The system preserves a naive colon tissue construction and cellular mechanisms and it also permits tight experimental control, facilitating experimentations that cannot be readily performed in vivo. It is optimal for dissecting short-term responses of various gut components (such as epithelial, immunological and neuronal elements) to luminal perturbations (including anaerobic or aerobic microbes, whole microbiota samples from mice or humans, drugs and metabolites). Here, we present a detailed description of an optimized protocol for organ culture of multiple gut fragments using a custom-made gut culture device. Host responses to luminal perturbations can be visualized by immunofluorescence staining of tissue sections or whole-mount tissue fragments, fluorescence in-situ hybridization (FISH), or time-lapse imaging. This system supports a wide array of readouts, including next-generation sequencing, flow cytometry, and various cellular and biochemical assays. Overall, this three-dimensional organ …

Electronic waste is the fastest growing waste stream and one of the most significant constituents is electronic plastics. In this study, the combustion kinetic of typical electronic plastic waste—television set (TV) plastic shell—was investigated using two basic kinetic methods. The reaction mechanism and kinetic compensation effect were probed as well. The thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) revealed that its degradation process can be divided into four stages, namely, reaction initiation stage (20–300 °C), major reaction stage (300–450 °C), minor reaction stage (450–600 °C), and reaction cessation stage (600–1,000 °C). The activation energy (E) were calculated and indicated that, the kinetic parameters from six model-free methods gradually decreased with α increasing from 0.1 to 0.35, and then slightly increased. The Flynn--Wall--Ozawa (FWO) method was more reliable and E values decreased from 155.0 to 147 …

We introduce a response theory for open quantum systems within nonequilibrium steady states subject to a Hamiltonian perturbation. Working in the weak system-bath coupling regime, our results are derived within the Lindblad-Gorini-Kossakowski-Sudarshan formalism. We find that the response of the system to a small perturbation is not simply related to a correlation function within the system, unlike traditional linear response theory in closed systems or expectations from the fluctuation-dissipation theorem. In limiting cases, when the perturbation is small relative to the coupling to the surroundings or when it does not lead to a change of the eigenstructure of the system, a perturbative expansion exists where the response function is related to a sum of a system correlation functions and additional forces induced by the surroundings. Away from these limiting regimes, however, the secular approximation results in a …

Lithium niobate (LN), an outstanding and versatile material, has influenced our daily life for decades—from enabling high-speed optical communications that form the backbone of the Internet to realizing radio-frequency filtering used in our cell phones. This half-century-old material is currently embracing a revolution in thin-film LN integrated photonics. The successes of manufacturing wafer-scale, high-quality thin films of LN-on-insulator (LNOI) and breakthroughs in nanofabrication techniques have made high-performance integrated nanophotonic components possible. With rapid development in the past few years, some of these thin-film LN devices, such as optical modulators and nonlinear wavelength converters, have already outperformed their legacy counterparts realized in bulk LN crystals. Furthermore, the nanophotonic integration has enabled ultra-low-loss resonators in LN, which has unlocked many …

We have studied the effect of doping on the temperature performance of a split-well (SW) direct-phonon (DP) terahertz (THz) quantum-cascade laser (QCL) scheme supporting a clean three-level system. Achieving a system that is as close as possible to a clean n-level system proved to be the strategy that led to the best temperature performance in THz-QCLs. We expected to obtain a similar improvement to that observed in resonant-phonon (RP) schemes after increasing the carrier concentration from 3× 10 10 cm− 2 to 6× 10 10 cm− 2. Our goal was to improve the temperature performance by increasing the doping, ideally the results should have improved. To our surprise, in the devices we checked, the results show the contrary. Although an increase in doping had previously shown a positive effect in RP schemes, our results indicated that this does not happen with SW–DP devices. However, we observed a significant increase in gain broadening and a reduction in the dephasing time as the doping and temperature increased. We attribute these effects to enhanced ionized-impurity scattering (IIS). The observation and study of effects related to dephasing included in our experimental work have previously only been possible via simulation. View Full-Text

The constituent cores of multi-core fibers are coupled by acoustic modes, guided by the entire cladding cross-section. Acoustic coupling leads to inter core cross phase modulation. The effect is quantified in analysis and experiment.

The need for improved batteries and supercapacitors, which are not based on lithium compounds, promotes significant research efforts to find suitable alternative systems based on various mono and multivalent cations capable of delivering high energy and power density with good long-term stability. The progress in aqueous Zn-ion batteries and supercapacitors obtained over the past years lead to the development of new structures and compounds that enable revisable hosting of Zn-ions while keeping good structural integrity. Yet, as aqueous electrolytes involve also the generation and co-insertion of protons it is necessary to carefully define what is the charge storage mechanism in these Zn insertion compounds. In this work, the use of Ti3C2Tx as an anode for the Zn-ion system was evaluated for the first time in different ZnCl2 concentrations. Remarkable changes in the charge storage mechanism and the …

Atomic deposition of a thin layer of alumina on amorphous carbon materials was recently established to improve their electrochemical properties as anodes in sodium-ion batteries. It is shown that the highest performance for these materials can be achieved by pre-sodiation of the electrode before coating it. The basis for the enhanced performance is illuminated by 13C and 23Na MAS NMR analysis showing that this specific procedure diminishes parasitic reactions and preserves reversible access to active sodiation sites.

Complementarity between one-particle visibility and two-particle visibility in discrete systems can be extended to bipartite quantum-entangled Gaussian states implemented with continuous-variable quantum optics. The meaning of the two-particle visibility originally defined by Jaeger, Horne, Shimony, and Vaidman with the use of an indirect method that first corrects the two-particle probability distribution by adding and subtracting other distributions with varying degree of entanglement, however, deserves further analysis. Furthermore, the origin of complementarity between one-particle visibility and two-particle visibility is somewhat elusive and it is not entirely clear what is the best way to associate particular two-particle quantum observables with the two-particle visibility. Here, we develop a direct method for quantifying the two-particle visibility based on measurement of a pair of two-particle observables that are …

We investigate second harmonic generation (SHG) from hexagonal periodic arrays of triangular nano-holes of aluminum using a self-consistent methodology based on the hydrodynamics-Maxwell–Bloch approach. It is shown that angular polarization patterns of the far-field second harmonic response abide to threefold symmetry constraints on tensors. When a molecular layer is added to the system and its parameters are adjusted to achieve the strong coupling regime between a localized plasmon mode and molecular excitons, Rabi splitting is observed from the occurrence of both single- and two-photon transition peaks within the SHG power spectrum. It is argued that the splitting observed for both transitions results from direct two-photon transitions between lower and upper polaritonic states of the strongly coupled system. This interpretation can be accounted by a tailored three-level quantum model, with results …

Electronic waste is the fastest growing waste stream and one of the most significant constituents is electronic plastics. In this study, the combustion kinetic of typical electronic plastic waste—television set (TV) plastic shell—was investigated using two basic kinetic methods. The reaction mechanism and kinetic compensation effect were probed as well. The thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) revealed that its degradation process can be divided into four stages, namely, reaction initiation stage (20–300 °C), major reaction stage (300–450 °C), minor reaction stage (450–600 °C), and reaction cessation stage (600–1,000 °C). The activation energy (E) were calculated and indicated that, the kinetic parameters from six model-free methods gradually decreased with α increasing from 0.1 to 0.35, and then slightly increased. The Flynn--Wall--Ozawa (FWO) method was more reliable and E values decreased from 155.0 to 147 …

We present barcoded oligonucleotides ligated on RNA amplified for multiplexed and parallel insitu analyses (BOLORAMIS), a reverse transcription-free method for spatially-resolved, targeted, in situ RNA identification of single or multiple targets. BOLORAMIS was demonstrated on a range of cell types and human cerebral organoids. Singleplex experiments to detect coding and non-coding RNAs in human iPSCs showed a stem-cell signature pattern. Specificity of BOLORAMIS was found to be 92% as illustrated by a clear distinction between human and mouse housekeeping genes in a co-culture system, as well as by recapitulation of subcellular localization of lncRNA MALAT1. Sensitivity of BOLORAMIS was quantified by comparing with single molecule FISH experiments and found to be 11%, 12% and 35% for GAPDH, TFRC and POLR2A, respectively. To demonstrate BOLORAMIS for multiplexed gene …