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Many nonlocal models have adopted Euclidean balls as the nonlocal interaction neighborhoods. When solving them numerically, it is sometimes convenient to adopt polygonal approximations of such balls. A crucial question is, to what extent such approximations affect the nonlocal operators and the corresponding solutions. While recent works have analyzed this issue for a fixed horizon parameter, the question remains open in the case of a small or vanishing horizon parameter, which happens often in many practical applications and has significant impact on the reliability and robustness of nonlocal modeling and simulations. In this work, we are interested in addressing this issue and establishing the convergence of the nonlocal solutions associated with polygonally approximated interaction neighborhoods to the local limit of the original nonlocal solutions. Our finding reveals that the new nonlocal solution does not converge to the correct local limit when the number of sides of polygons is uniformly bounded. On the other hand, if the number of sides tends to infinity, the desired convergence can be established. These results may be used to guide future computational studies of nonlocal models.

Day-and-night radiative sky cooling has emerged as a potential alternative to conventional cooling technologies such as refrigeration-based air conditioning and evaporative wet cooling. Both radiative cooling and evaporative cooling can passively achieve sub-ambient cooling without consuming electricity. Although both cooling techniques are subject to impacts from various weather conditions, the extents of the impacts under the same conditions are not well understood. In this work, we experimentally and theoretically study the thermal performances of a passive radiative cooler and a passive evaporative cooler when exposed to a clear night sky. We show that evaporative cooling is better suited for high-temperature and low-humidity weather conditions, with the measured sub-ambient temperatures of the radiative and evaporative coolers being -13.5{\deg}C and -15.0{\deg}C, respectively, at a low relative humidity of 13% and a high ambient temperature of 26.0{\deg}C. On the other hand, radiative cooling is relatively more resilient than evaporative cooling under high-humidity and/or low-temperature weather conditions, with the measured sub-ambient temperatures of the coolers being -11.5{\deg}C and -10.5{\deg}C, respectively, at a slightly higher relative humidity of 32.0% and a slightly lower ambient temperature of 17.0{\deg}C. Depending on water availability and weather conditions, both evaporative cooling and radiative cooling can be adopted as mutually supplemental cooling technologies., Comment: 26 pages, 8 figures

The piecewise quadratic polynomial collocation is used to approximate the nonlocal model, which generally obtain the {\em nonsymmetric indefinite system} [Chen et al., IMA J. Numer. Anal., (2021)]. In this case, the discrete maximum principle is not satisfied, which might be trickier for the stability analysis of the high-order numerical schemes [D'Elia et al., Acta Numer., (2020); Leng et al., SIAM J. Numer. Anal., (2021)]. Here, we present the modified (shifted-symmetric) piecewise quadratic polynomial collocation for solving the linear nonlocal diffusion model, which has the {\em symmetric positive definite system} and satisfies the discrete maximum principle. Using Faulhaber's formula and Riemann zeta function, the perturbation error for symmetric positive definite system and nonsymmetric indefinite systems are given. Then the detailed proof of the convergence analysis for the nonlocal models with the general horizon parameter $\delta=\mathcal{O}\left(h^\beta\right)$, $\beta\geq0$ are provided. More concretely, the global error is $\mathcal{O}\left(h^{\min\left\{2,1+\beta\right\}}\right)$ if $\delta$ is not set as a grid point, but it shall recover $\mathcal{O}\left(h^{\max\left\{2,4-2\beta\right\}}\right)$ when $\delta$ is set as a grid point. We also prove that the shifted-symmetric scheme is asymptotically compatible, which has the global error $\mathcal{O}\left(h^{\min\left\{2,2\beta\right\}}\right)$ as $\delta,h\rightarrow 0$. The numerical experiments (including two-dimensional case) are performed to verify the convergence., Comment: 23 pages

Numerical solution of nonlocal constrained value problems with integrable kernels are considered. These nonlocal problems arise in nonlocal mechanics and nonlocal diffusion. The structure of the true solution to the problem is analyzed first. The analysis leads naturally to a new kind of discontinuous Galerkin method that efficiently solve the problem numerically. This method is shown to be asymptotically compatible. Moreover, it has optimal convergence rate for one dimensional case under very weak assumptions, and almost optimal convergence rate for two dimensional case under mild assumptions.

Following the emergence of many novel two-dimensional (2-D) materials beyond graphene, interest has grown in exploring implications for fundamental physics and practical applications, ranging from electronics, photonics, phononics, to thermal management and energy storage. In this Colloquium, we first summarize and compare the phonon properties, such as phonon dispersion and relaxation time, of pristine 2-D materials with single layer graphene to understand the role of crystal structure and dimension on thermal conductivity. We then compare the phonon properties, contrasting idealized 2-D crystals, realistic 2-D crystals, and 3-D crystals, and synthesizing this to develop a physical picture of how the sample size of 2-D materials affects their thermal conductivity. The effects of geometry, such as number of layers, and nanoribbon width, together with the presence of defects, mechanical strain, and substrate interactions, on the thermal properties of 2-D materials are discussed. Intercalation affects both the group velocities and phonon relaxation times of layered crystals and thus tunes the thermal conductivity along both the through-plane and basal-plane directions. We conclude with a discussion of the challenges in theoretical and experimental studies of thermal transport in 2-D materials. The rich and special phonon physics in 2-D materials make them promising candidates for exploring novel phenomena such as topological phonon effects and applications such as phononic quantum devices., Comment: This article has been accepted by Reviews of Modern Physics

Detecting coherent phonons pose different challenges compared to coherent photons due to the much stronger interaction between phonons and matter. This is especially true for high frequency heat carrying phonons, which are intrinsic lattice vibrations experiencing many decoherence events with the environment, and are thus generally assumed to be incoherent. Two photon interference techniques, especially coherent population trapping (CPT) and electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT), have led to extremely sensitive detection, spectroscopy and metrology. Here, we propose the use of two photon interference in a three level system to sense coherent phonons. Unlike prior works which have treated phonon coupling as damping, we account for coherent phonon coupling using a full quantum-mechanical treatment. We observe strong asymmetry in absorption spectrum in CPT and negative dispersion in EIT susceptibility in the presence of coherent phonon coupling which cannot be accounted for if only pure phonon damping is considered. Our proposal has application in sensing heat carrying coherent phonons effects and understanding coherent bosonic multi-pathway interference effects in three coupled oscillator systems.

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

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