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Highlights: A flexible tribotronic artificial synapse with bioinspired neurosensory behaviour was demonstrated, which establishes an active interaction mechanism with the environment. The device can well exhibit tuneable synaptic behaviours by changing the mechanical input modes, including excitatory postsynaptic current, paired-pulse facilitation, and the hierarchical memorial process. The device has excellent mechanical flexibility that can exhibit stable synaptic functions even under strain conditions with a bending radius of 20 mm after 1000 bending cycles. As key components of artificial afferent nervous systems, synaptic devices can mimic the physiological synaptic behaviors, which have attracted extensive attentions. Here, a flexible tribotronic artificial synapse (TAS) with bioinspired neurosensory behavior is developed. The triboelectric potential generated by the external contact electrification is used as the ion-gel-gate voltage of the organic thin film transistor, which can tune the carriers transport through the migration/accumulation of ions. The TAS successfully demonstrates a series of synaptic behaviors by external stimuli, such as excitatory postsynaptic current, paired-pulse facilitation, and the hierarchical memory process from sensory memory to short-term memory and long-term memory. Moreover, the synaptic behaviors remained stable under the strain condition with a bending radius of 20 mm, and the TAS still exhibits excellent durability after 1000 bending cycles. Finally, Pavlovian conditioning has been successfully mimicked by applying force and vibration as food and bell, respectively. This work demonstrates a bioinspired flexible artificial synapse that will help to facilitate the development of artificial afferent nervous systems, which is great significance to the practical application of artificial limbs, robotics, and bionics in future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Self-trapped modes suffer critical collapse in two-dimensional cubic systems. To overcome such a collapse, linear periodic potentials or competing nonlinearities between self-focusing cubic and self-defocusing quintic nonlinear terms are often introduced. Here, we combine both schemes in the context of an unconventional and nonlinear fractional Schrödinger equation with attractive-repulsive cubic–quintic nonlinearity and an optical lattice. We report theoretical results for various two-dimensional trapped solitons, including fundamental gap and vortical solitons as well as the gap-type soliton clusters. The latter soliton family resembles the recently-found gap waves. We uncover that, unlike the conventional case, the fractional model exhibiting fractional diffraction order strongly influences the formation of higher band gaps. Hence, a new route for the study of self-trapped modes in these newly emergent higher band gaps is suggested. Regimes of stability and instability of all the soliton families are obtained with the help of linear-stability analysis and direct simulations. Stabilising localised solitons in higher dimensions is more challenging than their one dimensional counterpart due to the onset of critical collapse. Here, competing nonlinear terms are added to a linearly-modulated optical lattice to predict regimes of stability for different soliton families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]