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Top-k Nearest Neighbors (kNN) problem on road network has numerous applications on location-based services. As direct search using the Dijkstra's algorithm results in a large search space, a plethora of complex-index-based approaches have been proposed to speedup the query processing. However, even with the current state-of-the-art approach, long query processing delays persist, along with significant space overhead and prohibitively long indexing time. In this paper, we depart from the complex index designs prevalent in existing literature and propose a simple index named KNN-Index. With KNN-Index, we can answer a kNN query optimally and progressively with small and size-bounded index. To improve the index construction performance, we propose a bidirectional construction algorithm which can effectively share the common computation during the construction. Theoretical analysis and experimental results on real road networks demonstrate the superiority of KNN-Index over the state-of-the-art approach in query processing performance, index size, and index construction efficiency., Comment: 15 pages, 15 figures

Trans-activating transcriptional activator (TAT), a cell-penetrating peptide, has been extensively used for facilitating cellular uptake and nuclear targeting of drug delivery systems. However, the positively charged TAT peptide usually strongly interacts with serum components and undergoes substantial phagocytosis by the reticuloendothelial system, causing a short blood circulation in vivo. In this work, an acid-active tumor targeting nanoplatform DA-TAT-PECL was developed to effectively inhibit the nonspecific interactions of TAT in the bloodstream. 2,3-dimethylmaleic anhydride (DA) was first used to convert the TAT amines to carboxylic acid, the resulting DA-TAT was further conjugated to get DA-TAT-PECL. After self-assembly into polymeric micelles, they were capable of circulating in the physiological condition for a long time and promoting cell penetration upon accumulation at the tumor site and de-shielding the DA group. Moreover, camptothecin (CPT) was used as the anticancer drug and modified into a dimer (CPT)2-ss-Mal, in which two CPT molecules were connected by a reduction-labile maleimide thioether bond. The FRET signal between CPT and maleimide thioether bond was monitored to visualize the drug release process and effective targeted delivery of antitumor drugs was demonstrated. This pH/reduction dual-responsive micelle system provides a new platform for high fidelity cancer therapy.

Random quantum circuit sampling serves as a benchmark to demonstrate quantum computational advantage. Recent progress in classical algorithms, especially those based on tensor network methods, has significantly reduced the classical simulation time and challenged the claim of the first-generation quantum advantage experiments. However, in terms of generating uncorrelated samples, time-to-solution, and energy consumption, previous classical simulation experiments still underperform the \textit{Sycamore} processor. Here we report an energy-efficient classical simulation algorithm, using 1432 GPUs to simulate quantum random circuit sampling which generates uncorrelated samples with higher linear cross entropy score and is 7 times faster than \textit{Sycamore} 53 qubits experiment. We propose a post-processing algorithm to reduce the overall complexity, and integrated state-of-the-art high-performance general-purpose GPU to achieve two orders of lower energy consumption compared to previous works. Our work provides the first unambiguous experimental evidence to refute \textit{Sycamore}'s claim of quantum advantage, and redefines the boundary of quantum computational advantage using random circuit sampling., Comment: This work was completed on August 2023. A further 50x improvement has been achieved and will be posted on arXiv shortly

Fighting against noise is crucial for NISQ devices to demonstrate practical quantum applications. In this work, we give a new paradigm of quantum error mitigation based on the vectorization of density matrices. Different from the ideas of existing quantum error mitigation methods that try to distill noiseless information from noisy quantum states, our proposal directly changes the way of encoding information and maps the density matrices of noisy quantum states to noiseless pure states, which is realized by a novel and NISQ-friendly measurement protocol and a classical post-processing procedure. Our protocol requires no knowledge of the noise model, no ability to tune the noise strength, and no ancilla qubits for complicated controlled unitaries. Under our encoding, NISQ devices are always preparing pure quantum states which are highly desired resources for variational quantum algorithms to have good performance in many tasks. We show how this protocol can be well-fitted into variational quantum algorithms. We give several concrete ansatz constructions that are suitable for our proposal and do theoretical analysis on the sampling complexity, the expressibility, and the trainability. We also give a discussion on how this protocol is influenced by large noise and how it can be well combined with other quantum error mitigation protocols. The effectiveness of our proposal is demonstrated by various numerical experiments., Comment: 37 pages, 4+3 figures

Dyonic black holes with quasitopological electromagnetism exhibit an intriguing phase diagram with two separated first-order coexistence curves. In this paper, we aim to uncover its influence on the black hole thermodynamical topology. At first, we investigate the phase transition and phase diagram of the dyonic black holes. Comparing with previous study that there is no black hole phase transition region for a middle pressure, we find this region can narrow or disappear by fine tuning the coupling parameter. Instead, two first-order phase transitions can be observed. Importantly, we uncover that such novel phase diagram shall lead to a multiple defect curve phenomenon in black hole topology where each dyonic black hole is treated as one defect in the thermodynamical parameter space. By examining the topology, it is shown that there could be one, three, or five black hole states for given pressure and temperature. For each case, the topological number is calculated. Our results show that the topological number always takes value of +1, keeping unchanged even when the multiple defect curves appear. Therefore, our study provides an important ingredient on understanding the black hole thermodynamical topology., Comment: 15 pages and 12 figures

Recently, the ATLAS and CMS collaborations jointly announced the first evidence of the rare Higgs boson decay channel $H\to Z\gamma$, with a ratio of $2.2\pm 0.7$ times the leading order standard model (SM) prediction. In order to face this challenge, it is urgent to produce an even more accurate calculation within the SM. To this end, we calculate in this paper the next-to-leading order (NLO) electroweak (EW) corrections to the $H\to Z\gamma$ process, in which the NLO quantum chromodynamics (QCD) corrections were found tiny. Our calculation finds that the inclusion of NLO EW corrections greatly enhances the prediction reliability. To tame the theoretical uncertainty, we adopt five different renormalization schemes. Combining our result with previous NLO QCD corrections and the signal-background interference, we conclude that the excess in $H\to Z\gamma$ cannot be explained within the SM. In fact, the incompatibility between the SM prediction and the LHC measurement of the concerned process is exacerbated upon considering the higher order EW corrections, which implies that something beyond the SM could be involved., Comment: Accepted for publication as a Letter in Physical Review D

The $B_c$ meson pair, including pairs of pseudoscalar states and vector states, productions in proton-proton collisions are investigated at the next-to-leading order (NLO) accuracy in the nonrelativistic quantum chromodynamics factorization formalism. The corresponding cross sections at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) with $\sqrt{s}=14\; \text{TeV}$ are evaluated. Numerical results indicate that the NLO corrections are substantial, and even dominate over the leading order contributions. Considering the predicted cross sections are sizable, the $B_c$-pair production is expected to be observable at the High-Luminosity LHC experiment.

Arrays of neutral atoms have emerged as promising platforms for quantum computing. Realization of high-fidelity two-qubit gates with robustness is currently a significant important task for large-scale operations. In this paper, we present a convenient approach for implementing a two-qubit controlled-phase gate using Rydberg blockade. We achieve the noncyclic geometric control with a single modulated pulse. As compared with the control scheme by cyclic evolution that determined by dynamical parameters, the robustness of the proposal against systematic errors will be remarkably improved due to the geometric characteristic. Importantly, the noncyclic geometric control reduces the gate time for small rotation angles and will be more insensitive to the decoherence effect. We accelerate the adiabatic control with the aid of shortcuts to adiabaticity to further shorten the operation time. We apply our protocol to the algorithm of quantum Fourier transformation to show the actual acceleration. Therefore, the proposed scheme will provide an analytical waveforms for arbitrary two-qubit gates and may have important use in the experiments of atomic arrays., Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures

In this work, we give a quantum algorithm for solving the ground states of a class of Hamiltonians. The mechanism of the exponential speedup that appeared in our algorithm comes from dissipation in open quantum systems. To utilize the dissipation, the central idea is to treat $n$-qubit density matrices $\rho$ as $2n$-qubit pure states $|\rho\rangle$ by vectorization and normalization. By doing so, the Lindblad master equation (LME) becomes a Schr\"odinger equation with non-Hermitian Hamiltonian $L$. The steady-state $\rho_{ss}$ of the LME, therefore, corresponds to the ground states $|\rho_{ss}\rangle$ of Hamiltonians with the form $L^\dag L$. The runtime of the LME has no dependence on $\zeta$ the overlap between the initial state and the ground state compared with the Heisenberg scaling $\mathcal{O}(\zeta^{-1})$ in other algorithms. For the input part, given a Hamiltonian $H$, under plausible assumptions, we give a polynomial-time classical procedure to judge and solve whether there exists $L$ such that $H-E_0=L^\dag L$. For the output part, we define the mission as estimating expectation values of arbitrary operators with respect to the ground state $|\rho_{ss}\rangle$, which can be done surprisingly by an efficient measurement protocol on $\rho_{ss}$ with no need to prepare $|\rho_{ss}\rangle$. We give several pieces of evidence on the quantum hardness of really preparing $|\rho_{ss}\rangle$, which indicates a potential complexity separation between our algorithm and those projection-based quantum algorithms such as quantum phase estimation. Further, we show that the Hamiltonians that can be efficiently solved by our algorithms contain classically hard instances assuming $\text{P}\neq \text{BQP}$. Later, we discuss and analyze several important aspects of the algorithm including generalizing to other types of Hamiltonians and the "non-linear`` dynamics in the algorithm., Comment: 19 pages, 4 figures

The braiding operations of quantum states have attracted substantial attention due to their great potential for realizing topological quantum computations. In this paper, we show that a three-fold degenerate eigen subspace can be obtained in a four-level Hamiltonian which is the minimal physical system. Braiding operations are proposed to apply to dressed states in the subspace. The topology of the braiding diagram can be characterized through physical methods once that the sequential braiding pulses are adopted. We establish an equivalent relationship function between the permutation group and the output states where different output states correspond to different values of the function. The topological transition of the braiding happens when two operations overlap, which is detectable through the measurement of the function. Combined with the phase variation method, we can analyze the wringing pattern of the braiding. Therefore, the experimentally-feasible system provides a platform to investigate braiding dynamics, the SU(3) physics and the qutrit gates., Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures

Structural clustering is one of the most popular graph clustering methods, which has achieved great performance improvement by utilizing GPUs. Even though, the state-of-the-art GPU-based structural clustering algorithm, GPUSCAN, still suffers from efficiency issues since lots of extra costs are introduced for parallelization. Moreover, GPUSCAN assumes that the graph is resident in the GPU memory. However, the GPU memory capacity is limited currently while many real-world graphs are big and cannot fit in the GPU memory, which makes GPUSCAN unable to handle large graphs. Motivated by this, we present a new GPU-based structural clustering algorithm, GPUSCAN++, in this paper. To address the efficiency issue, we propose a new progressive clustering method tailored for GPUs that not only avoid high parallelization costs but also fully exploits the computing resources of GPUs. To address the GPU memory limitation issue, we propose a partition-based algorithm for structural clustering that can process large graphs with limited GPU memory. We conduct experiments on real graphs, and the experimental results demonstrate that our algorithm can achieve up to 168 times speedup compared with the state-of-the-art GPU-based algorithm when the graph can be resident in the GPU memory. Moreover, our algorithm is scalable to handle large graphs. As an example, our algorithm can finish the structural clustering on a graph with 1.8 billion edges using less than 2 GB GPU memory.

Hydride precipitation in zirconium cladding materials can damage their integrity and durability.Service temperature and material defects have a significant effect on the dynamic growth of hydrides. In this study, we have developed a phase field model based on the assumption of elastic behaviour within a specific temperature range (613-653K). This model allows us to study the influence of temperature and interfacial effects on the morphology, stress, and average growth rate of zirconium hydride. The results suggest that changes in temperature and interfacial energy influence the aspect ratio and average growth rate of the hydride morphology. The ultimate determinant of hydride orientation is the loss of interfacial coherence, primarily induced by interfacial dislocation defects and quantifiable by the mismatch degree $q$. An escalation in interfacial coherence loss leads to a transition of hydride growth from horizontal to vertical, accompanied by the onset of redirection behaviour. Interestingly, redirection occurs at a critical mismatch level, denoted $q_c$, and remains unaffected by variations in temperature and interfacial energy. However, this redirection leads to an increase in the maximum stress, which may influence the direction of hydride crack propagation. This research highlights the importance of interfacial coherence and provides valuable insights into the morphology and growth kinetics of hydrides in zirconium alloys., Comment: 13 pages (text), 8 figures (text), 1 table (text), 6 pages (SI), 2 figures (SI)

We extend the discussion on the difference between angular momentum and pseudo-angular momentum in field theory. We show that the often quoted expressions in [Phys.Rev.B 103, L100409 (2021)] only apply to a non-linear system, and derive the correct rotation symmetry and the corresponding angular momentum for a linear elastic system governed by Navier-Cauchy equation. By mapping the concepts and methods for the elastic wave into electromagnetic theory, we argue that the renowned canonical and Benlinfante angular momentum of light are actually pseudo-angular momentum. Then, we derive the ``Newtonian" momentum $\int \text{d}^3 x\boldsymbol{E}$ and angular momentum $\int \text{d}^3 x (\boldsymbol{r}\times\boldsymbol{E})$ for a free electromagnetic wave, which are conserved quantities during propagation in vacuum., Comment: 8 pages, no figures

Nuclear $\beta$ spectrum and the corresponding (anti-)neutrino spectrum play important roles in many aspects of nuclear astrophysics, particle physics, nuclear industry and nuclear data. In this work we propose a projected shell model (PSM) to calculate the level energies as well as the reduced one-body transition density (ROBTD) by the Pfaffian algorithm for nuclear $\beta$ decays. The calculated level energies and ROBTD are inputed to the Beta Spectrum Generator (BSG) code to study the high precision $\beta$ spectrum of allowed one-to-one transitions. When experimental level energies are adopted, the calculated $\beta$ spectrum by ROBTD of the PSM deviates from the one by the extreme simple particle evaluation of the BSG by up to $10\%$, reflecting the importance of nuclear many-body correlations. When calculated level energies are adopted, the calculated $\beta$ spectrum shows sensitive dependence on the reliability of calculated level energies. The developed method for ROBTD by the PSM will also be useful for study of the first-forbidden transitions, the isovector spin monopole resonance etc. in a straightforward way.

We propose a projected shell model (PSM) for description of stellar weak-interaction rates between even-even and odd-odd nuclei with extended configuration space where up to six-quasiparticle (qp) configurations are included, and the stellar weak-interaction rates for eight $rp$-process waiting-point (WP) nuclei, $^{64}$Ge, $^{68}$Se, $^{72}$Kr, $^{76}$Sr, $^{80}$Zr, $^{84}$Mo, $^{88}$Ru and $^{92}$Pd, are calculated and analyzed for the first time within the model. Higher-order qp configurations are found to affect the underlying Gamow-Teller strength distributions and the corresponding stellar weak-interaction rates. Under $rp$-process environments with high temperatures and densities, on one hand, thermal population of excited states of parent nuclei tends to decrease the stellar $\beta^+$ decay rates. On the other hand, the possibility of electron capture (EC) tends to provide increasing contribution to the rates with temperature and density. The effective half-lives of WP nuclei under the $rp$-process peak condition are predicted to be reduced as compared with the terrestrial case, especially for $^{64}$Ge and $^{68}$Se.

Simulating dynamics of open quantum systems is sometimes a significant challenge, despite the availability of various exact or approximate methods. Particularly when dealing with complex systems, the huge computational cost will largely limit the applicability of these methods. We investigate the usage of dynamic mode decomposition (DMD) to evaluate the rate kernels in quantum rate processes. DMD is a data-driven model reduction technique that characterizes the rate kernels using snapshots collected from a small time window, allowing us to predict the long-term behaviors with only a limited number of samples. Our investigations show that whether the external field is involved or not, the DMD can give accurate prediction of the result compared with the traditional propagations, and simultaneously reduce the required computational cost.

Elastic angular momentum is an emerging field, with some controversies on the correct field-theory expressions and the decomposition of longitudinal and transverse components. Motivated by the recent two papers [Phys.Rev.Lett. 128, 064301(2022), Phys.Rev.Lett. 129, 204303(2022)] on this issue, we systematically analyze by Noether's theorem the canonical and Belinfante energy-momentem and angular momentum, then explain why the two familiar expressions, together with other various conservered currents, are all correct for elastic wave. Remarkbly, to illustrate the usefullness of different expressions, we give an example on earthquake energy measurement with a new energy density expression which is more advantageous in practical measurement. Moreover, since the elastic wave is distinct from a quantum one, we suggest that the decomposition of longitudinal and transverse components, in fact, makes sense and can be clearly expressed by the observable displacement field. We hope that this paper would clarify the controversies, and finally we give prospect of future work on the Geometric Spin Hall Effect of elastic wave, where the various expressions of conserved currents would exhibit different applications., Comment: This paper has been submitted to Physical Review E

Hydrogen-induced multi-spot corrosion on the surface of polycrystalline rare metals is a complex process, which involves the interactions between phases (metal, hydride and oxide), grain orientations, grain boundaries, and corrosion spots. To accurately simulate this process and comprehend the underlying physics, a theoretical method is required that includes the following mechanisms: i) hydrogen diffusion, ii) phase transformation, iii) elastic interactions between phases, especially, the interactions between the oxide film and the hydride, iv) elastic interactions between grains, and v) interactions between hydrogen solutes and grain boundaries. In this study, we report a multiphase-field model that incorporates all these requirements, and conduct a comprehensive study of hydrogen-induced spot corrosion on the uranium metal surface, including the investigation of the oxide film, multi-spot corrosion, grain orientation, and grain boundary in the monocrystal, bicrystal, and polycrystal systems. The results indicate that the oxide film can inhibit the growth of hydrides and plays a crucial role in determining the correct morphology of the hydride at the triple junction of phases. The elastic interaction between multiple corrosion spots causes the merging of corrosion spots and promotes the growth of hydrides. The introduction of grain orientations and grain boundaries results in a variety of intriguing intracrystalline and intergranular hydride morphologies. The model presented here is generally applicable to the hydrogen-induced multi-spot corrosion on any rare metal surface., Comment: 22 pages (text), 16 figures (text), 2 tables (text), 9 pages (SI), 13 figures (SI)

Quantum metrology has emerged as a promising avenue for surpassing the limitations of classical mechanics in high-precision measurements. However, the practical implementation of quantum metrology is hindered by the challenges of manipulating exotic quantum states in large systems. Here, we propose and demonstrate a hardware-efficient approach to achieve Heisenberg-limited quantum metrology using large photon-number Fock states. We have developed a programmable photon number filter that efficiently generates Fock states with up to 100 photons in a high-quality superconducting microwave cavity. Using these highly nontrivial states in displacement and phase measurements, we demonstrate a precision scaling close to the Heisenberg limit and achieve a maximum metrological gain of up to 14.8 dB. Our hardware-efficient quantum metrology can be extended to mechanical and optical systems and provides a practical solution for high metrological gain in bosonic quantum systems, promising potential applications in radiometry and the search for new particles., Comment: Main text: 10 pages, 4 figures; Supplement: 16 pages, 9 figures, 1 table

The dissipaton equations of motion (DEOM) method is one of the most popular methods for simulating quantum impurity systems. In this article, we use DOEM theory to deal with the Kondo problem of the double quantum dots (DQDs) impurity system. We focus on the impurity spectral function and the total noise spectral function, this two function will be used to describe the Kondo effect of this system. The influence of the interaction, the hooping and the difference of the chemical potential between the two dots on the Kondo effect of the system is studied. We find that the interaction between the two dots can influence the Kondo effect of the system a lot.

Non-Abelian gauge field (NAGF) plays a central role in understanding the geometrical and topological phenomena in physics. Here we experimentally induce a NAGF in the degenerate eigen subspace of a double-$\Lambda$ four-level atomic system. The non-Abelian nature of the gauge field is detected through the measurement of the non-commutativity of two successive evolution loops. Then we theoretically propose and experimentally demonstrate a novel scheme to measure the NAGF through multi-loop evolution and robust holonomic quantum gates. The demonstrated scheme offers the advantage of detecting the NAGF with amplification through multi-loop evolution. Our results pave the way for an experimentally-feasible approach to achieving high-resolution and high-precision measurements of the gauge fields., Comment: 11 pages, 8 figures

In this paper, we present an extended dissipaton equation of motion for studying the dynamics of electronic impurity systems. Compared with the original theoretical formalism, the quadratic couplings are introduced into the Hamiltonian accounting for the interaction between the impurity and its surrounding environment. By exploiting the quadratic fermionic dissipaton algebra, the proposed extended dissipaton equation of motion offers a powerful tool for studying the dynamical behaviors of electronic impurity systems, particularly in situations where nonequilibrium and strongly correlated effects play significant roles. Numerical demonstrations are carried out to investigate the temperature dependence of the Kondo resonance in the Kondo impurity model., Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure

Raman spectroscopy provides spectral information related to the specific molecular structures of substances and has been well established as a powerful tool for studying biological tissues and diagnosing diseases. This article reviews recent advances in Raman spectroscopy and its applications in diagnosing various critical diseases, including cancers, infections, and neurodegenerative diseases, and in predicting surgical outcomes. These advances are explored through discussion of state-of-the-art forms of Raman spectroscopy, such as surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy, resonance Raman spectroscopy, and tip-enhanced Raman spectroscopy employed in biomedical sciences. We discuss biomedical applications, including various aspects and methods of ex vivo and in vivo medical diagnosis, sample collection, data processing, and achievements in realizing the correlation between Raman spectra and biochemical information in certain diseases. Finally, we present the limitations of the current study and provide perspectives for future research.