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Dynamic homogenization theories are powerful tools for describing and understanding the behavior of heterogeneous media such as composites and metamaterials. However, a major challenge in the dynamic homogenization theory is determining Green's function of these media, which makes it difficult to predict their effective constitutive relations, particularly for the finite-size and/or non-periodic media in real-world applications. In this paper, we present a formulation for finding the elastodynamic effective constitutive relations for general heterogeneous media, including finite-size and non-periodic ones, by taking into account boundary terms in the Hashin-Shtrikman principle. Our proposed formulation relies on the infinite-body Green's function of a reference homogeneous medium, making it free from the difficulty of determining Green's function even for the homogenization of finite-size media. Additionally, we demonstrate the universal applicability of this formulation for both random and deterministic heterogeneous media. This work contributes to a better understanding of the homogenization theory and the design of next-generation metamaterials that require the accurate prediction of effective material characteristics for dynamic wave manipulation under desired operating environments.

Piezoelectric materials have wide sensing and energy transduction applications due to their inherent coupling of mechanical deformation and electric field. Recent discoveries have revealed that asymmetric or heterogeneous microstructures of piezoelectric composites can create an additional coupling of macroscopic momentum to an electric field termed electro-momentum coupling, introducing a new degree of design freedom. In this work, by employing the homogenization scheme, the physical origin of electro-momentum coupling is explored by a high throughput sweep over the microstructure design space of a piezoelectric composite system. This study shows how material constituent properties and geometrical arrangements can affect electro-momentum coupling and be smartly tailored for applications of interest., 10 pages, 3 figures

We present a source-to-source transformation framework, GOCC, that consumes lock-based pessimistic concurrency programs in the Go language and transforms them into optimistic concurrency programs that use Hardware Transactional Memory (HTM). The choice of the Go language is motivated by the fact that concurrency is a first-class citizen in Go, and it is widely used in Go programs. GOCC performs rich inter-procedural program analysis to detect and filter lock-protected regions and performs AST-level code transformation of the surrounding locks when profitable. Profitability is driven by both static analyses of critical sections and dynamic analysis via execution profiles. A custom HTM library, using perceptron, learns concurrency behavior and dynamically decides whether to use HTM in the rewritten lock/unlock points. Given the rich history of transactional memory research but its lack of adoption in any industrial setting, we believe this workflow, which ultimately produces source-code patches, is more apt for industry-scale adoption. Results on widely adopted Go libraries and applications demonstrate significant (up to 10x) and scalable performance gains resulting from our automated transformation while avoiding major performance regressions.

Conjugated, conductive polymers are a kind of important organic macromolecules, which has found applications in a variety of areas. The application of conjugated polymers in developing fluorescent biosensors represents the merge of polymer sciences and biological sciences. Conjugated polymers are very good light harvesters as well as fluorescent polymers, and they are also “molecular wires”. Through elaborate designs, these important features, i.e. efficient light harvesting and electron/energy transfer, can be used as signal amplification in fluorescent biosensors. This might significantly improve the sensitivity of conjugated polymer-based biosensors. In this article, we reviewed the application of conjugated polymers, via either electron transfer or energy transfer, to detections of gene targets, antibodies or enzymes. We also reviewed recent efforts in conjugated polymer-based solid-state sensor designs as well as chip-based multiple target detection. Possible directions in this conjugated polymer-based biosensor area are also discussed.