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Generating and detection coherent high-frequency heat-carrying phonons has been a great topic of interest in recent years. While there have been successful attempts in generating and observing coherent phonons, rigorous techniques to characterize and detect these phonon coherence in a crystalline material have been lagging compared to what has been achieved for photons. One main challenge is a lack of detailed understanding of how detection signals for phonons can be related to coherence. The quantum theory of photoelectric detection has greatly advanced the ability to characterize photon coherence in the last century and a similar theory for phonon detection is necessary. Here, we re-examine the optical sideband fluorescence technique that has been used detect high frequency phonons in materials with optically active defects. We apply the quantum theory of photodetection to the sideband technique and propose signatures in sideband photon-counting statistics and second-order correlation measurement of sideband signals that indicates the degree of phonon coherence. Our theory can be implemented in recently performed experiments to bridge the gap of determining phonon coherence to be on par with that of photons., Comment: 3 Figures

The direct production of ethanol from dextran industrial waste water was investigated by using Zymomonas mobilis via batch and semi-continuous fermentation mode. In batch fermentation, pretreated waste water (unsterilized and sterilized), pH value (3.8 and 6.0), and Mg2+ (with and without) was compared with OD600, sugar and ethanol concentration. After 24 h fermentation, sugar in the dextran waste water was almost exhausted, and the amount of ethanol accumulated reached 24.33–29.92 g/l, which is nearly 99% of the theoretical yield of ethanol. Kinetic parameters of Z. mobilis in batch fermentation were also investigated. The raw dextran waste water was also used in semi-continuous fermentation. After 48 h fermentation, the production of ethanol was 28.65 g/l. These results indicated that dextran waste water may be used as a candidate substrate and Z. mobilis could convert the raw material into ethanol directly.

A successful start-up enables acceleration of anaerobic digestion (AD) into steady state. The microbial community influences the AD performance during the start-up. To investigate how microbial communities changed during the start-up, microbial dynamics was analyzed via high-throughput sequencing in this study. The results confirmed that the AD was started up within 25 d. Thermophilic methanogens and bacterial members functioning in hydrolysis, acidogenesis, and syntrophic oxidation became predominant during the start-up stage, reflecting a quick adaption of microorganisms to operating conditions. Such predominance also indicated the great contribution of these members to the fast start-up of AD. Redundancy analysis confirmed that the bacterial abundance significantly correlated with AD conditions. The stable ratio of hydrogenotrophic methanogens to aceticlastic methanogens is also important to maintain the stability of the AD process. This work will be helpful to understand the contribution of microbial community to the start-up of AD.

We propose a numerical strategy to generate the anisotropic meshes and select the appropriate stabilized parameters simultaneously for two dimensional convection-dominated convection-diffusion equations by stabilized continuous linear finite elements. Since the discretized error in a suitable norm can be bounded by the sum of interpolation error and its variants in different norms, we replace them by some terms which contain the Hessian matrix of the true solution, convective fields, and the geometric properties such as directed edges and the area of the triangle. Based on this observation, the shape, size and equidistribution requirements are used to derive the corresponding metric tensor and the stabilized parameters. It is easily found from our derivation that the optimal stabilized parameter is coupled with the optimal metric tensor on each element. Some numerical results are also provided to validate the stability and efficiency of the proposed numerical strategy., Comment: 24 pages, 4 figures

Heat flow control is essential for widespread applications of heating, cooling, energy conversion and utilization. Here we demonstrate the first observation of temperature-gated thermal rectification in vanadium dioxide beams, in which an environment temperature actively modulates asymmetric heat flow. In this three terminal device, there are two switchable states, which can be accessed by global heating: Rectifier state and Resistor state. In the Rectifier state, up to 28% thermal rectification is observed. In the Resistor state, the thermal rectification is significantly suppressed (below 4%). This temperature-gated rectifier can have substantial implications ranging from autonomous thermal management of micro/nanoscale devices to thermal energy conversion and storage.

A uniform strategy to derive metric tensors in two spatial dimension for interpolation errors and their gradients in $L^p$ norm is presented. It generates anisotropic adaptive meshes as quasi-uniform ones in corresponding metric space, with the metric tensor being computed based on a posteriori error estimates in different norms. Numerical results show that the corresponding convergence rates are always optimal., Comment: 19 pages, 24 figures

This is a reply to the comment from Patrick Bruno (arXiv:1211.4792) on our paper (Phys. Rev. Lett. 109, 163001 (2012)).