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Biofouling represents a critical challenge in marine transportation, healthcare, and food manufacturing, among other industries, as it promotes contamination and increases maintenance costs. Zwitterionic polymers, known for their exceptional antifouling properties, offer a promising solution for biofouling deterrence. Despite the rapid development of zwitterionic polymers in recent years, the design rules, especially concerning the choice of cationic moieties to optimize biofouling deterrence, remain elusive. In this study, we leveraged a versatile all-dry synthesis scheme to achieve a selection of 9 zwitterionic polymers, 5 of which are unprecedented for this synthesis paradigm, thus systematically unraveling that molecular design rule. Notably, we developed a synthesis strategy to enable nanoscale compositional gradient along the coating cross-section, which ensures the robustness of the zwitterionic polymer coatings irrespective of the choice of cation-anion combinations. That robustness is enabled by an organosilicon-based layer at the coating-substrate interface, which simultaneously enhances coating adhesion and chemical stability while ensuring high concentration of zwitterionic moieties at the polymer-liquid interface to maximize biofouling deterrence. The antifouling efficacy was assessed using biofilms of Pseudomonas aeruginosa or Bacillus subtilis. All coatings demonstrated antifouling efficacy, with a novel zwitterionic polymer comprising a combination of imidazolium and carboxyl groups achieving the greatest antibiofilm effects, which we attributed to the strong hydration. This study highlights the coating architecture, i.e., one with nanoscale gradient and varying crosslinking densities, as a valid strategy to render zwitterionic polymers robust coatings and the imidazolium-based carboxybetaine as a promising next-generation antibiofouling chemistry.

Van der Waals (vdW) homo-/hetero-structures are ideal systems for studying interfacial tribological properties such as structural superlubricity. Previous studies concentrated on the mechanism of translational motion in vdW interfaces. However, detailed mechanisms and general properties of the rotational motion are barely explored. Here, we combine experiments and simulations to reveal the twisting dynamics of the MoS$_2$/graphite heterostructure. Unlike the translational friction falling into the superlubricity regime with no twist angle dependence, the dynamic rotational resistances highly depend on twist angles. Our results show that the periodic rotational resistance force originates from structural potential energy changes during the twisting. The structural potential energy of MoS$_2$/graphite heterostructure increases monotonically from0 to 30 degrees twist angles, and the estimated relative energy barrier is (1.43 +/- 0.36) x 10 J/m. The formation of Moir\'e superstructures in the graphene layer is the key to controlling the structural potential energy of the MoS$_2$/graphene heterostructure. Our results suggest that in twisting 2D heterostructures, even if the interface sliding friction is negligible, the evolving potential energy change results in a non-vanishing rotational resistance force. The structural change of the heterostructure can be an additional pathway for energy dissipation in the rotational motion, further enhancing the rotational friction force., Comment: Published in ACS Appl. Mater. Interfaces 2023, 15, 15, 19616-19623

Extreme-mass-ratio inspirals (EMRIs), consisting of a massive black hole and a stellar compact object, are one of the most important sources for space-borne gravitational wave detectors like TianQin. Their population study can be used to constrain astrophysical models that interpret the EMRI formation mechanisms. In this paper, as a first step, we employ a parametrization method to describe the EMRI population model in the loss cone formation channel. This approach, however, can be extended to other models such as the accretion disc driven formation channel. We present the phenomenological characteristic of the MBH mass, spin, and redshift distributions. Then, we investigate the posterior distribution of the hyper-parameters that describe this population model. Our results show that TianQin could recover almost all the posterior of the hyper-parameters within $1\sigma$ confidence interval. With one hundred detectable EMRI events, the hyper-parameters $\alpha_1, \alpha_2, b$, which describe the MBH mass distribution, could be measured with an accuracy of $37\%$, $24\%$, and $3\%$, respectively. The hyper-parameters $\mu_z$, and $\sigma_z$, which describe the redshift distribution, have $\mu_z$ above the detectable range of TianQin, and $\sigma_z$ measured with an accuracy of $14.5\%$. With this estimation accuracy, the EMRI population characteristics can be effectively demonstrated, potentially serving as evidence for EMRI formation in the future studies. Furthermore, with an increasing number of detectable events, the parameter estimation for the hyper-parameters will improve and the confidence intervals will be narrowed., Comment: 11 pages, 5 figures

We establish a framework to construct spherically symmetric and static solutions in $f(R)$ gravity coupled with nonlinear electromagnetic fields. We present two new specific solutions and discuss the energy conditions. We calculate some thermodynamic quantities of the obtained black holes like entropy and energy and investigate their thermodynamic topology., Comment: 11 pages, 3 figures

A conjecture posed by Chalmoukis in 2020 states that if $T_{g,a}:H^p\to H^q(0

We present a new Hubble parameterization method and employ observational data from Hubble, Pantheon, and Baryon Acoustic Oscillations to constrain model parameters. The proposed method is thoroughly validated against these datasets, demonstrating a robust fit to the observational data. The obtained best-fit values are $H_0 = 67.5^{+1.3}_{-1.6}$ $\text{km s}^{-1} \text{Mpc}^{-1}$, $\Omega_{\rm{m0}} = 0.2764\pm{0.0094}$, and $\alpha = 0.33\pm{0.22}$, consistent with the Planck 2018 results, highlighting the existence of Hubble tension., Comment: 11 pages, 5 figures

In this paper, the boundedness and compactness of generalized integration operators $T_g^{n,k}$ between different analytic tent spaces in the unit disc are completely characterized.

We probe deeply into the characteristics of thin accretion disk surrounding black hole within the brane world paradigm. We investigate how model parameters affect the physical properties of the disk. Our findings indicate that as the tidal charge parameter inherited from the higher dimension increases, the energy flux, the radiation temperature, the spectral cutoff frequency, the spectral luminosity, and the conversion efficiency of the disk all increase, but the radius of the innermost stable circular orbit decreases. Compared to cases of the Kerr and Schwarzschild black holes, the disk is hotter and more luminous for positive tidal charge parameter, while it is cooler and less luminous for negative tidal charge parameter, which suggests the potential for probing possible signatures of higher dimension., Comment: 16 pages, 16 figures, 1 table

Water oxidation of photosynthesis at the oxygen evolving complex (OEC) is driven by the polarization field induced by the photoelectric hole. By highlighting the role of the polarization field in reshaping the spin and orbit potentials, we reveal in this work the characteristics and underlying mechanism in the relatively simpler OEC evolutions within the states S0 - S2 prior to the water oxidation. The characteristic shifts of the density of states (DOS) of the electron donor Mn atom are observed in the vicinity of the Fermi surface to occur with the spin flips of Mn atoms and the change of the Mn oxidation states during the electron transfer. Notably, the spin flips of Mn atoms point to the resulting spin configuration of the next states. It is found that the electron transfer tend to stabilize the catalyst OEC itself, whereas the proton transfer pushes the evolution forward by preparing a new electron donor, demonstrating the proton-coupled electron transfer. Meanwhile, it shows that the Mn-O bonds around the candidate Mn atom of the electron donor undergo characteristic changes in the bond lengths during the electron transfer. These concomitant phenomena uncovered in first-principle calculations characterize the essential equilibrium of the OEC between the state evolution and stability that forms a ground of the dynamic OEC cycles. In particular, the characteristic undulation of the DOS around the Fermi level occurring at the proton-coupled electron transfer can be used to reveal crucial processes in a wide range of realistic systems.

We investigate the accretion process in a thin disk surrounding a supermassive black hole in Einstein-Maxwell-dilaton-axion (EMDA) gravity by using the Novikov-Thorne model. The results reveal that as the dilaton parameter $r_2$ increase, the energy flux, radiation temperature, spectra luminosity, and radiative efficiency of the disk all increases. By narrowing down the dilaton parameter range to $0\leqslant \frac{r_2}{M}\leqslant0.4$, we discover that in the high-frequency region, the Kerr-Sen black hole demonstrates higher energy output compared to the Kerr black hole. We also investigated the Kerr-Sen black hole shadow in a uniform plasma environment. For a fixed inclination angle of $\theta_0=90^\circ$, $\frac{r_2}{M} = \frac{a}{M} = 0.5$, the shadow increase as the homogeneous plasma parameter $k$ increase. Conversely, when $k = 0.1$ and $\frac{a}{M} = 0.5$, an increase in $r_2$ leads to a decrease in the shadow. Furthermore, by using observational data from M87* and Sgr A*, we compared the theoretical and observed shadow diameters to constrain the range of the model parameters., Comment: 28 pages,17 figures

Object-goal navigation is a challenging task that requires guiding an agent to specific objects based on first-person visual observations. The ability of agent to comprehend its surroundings plays a crucial role in achieving successful object finding. However, existing knowledge-graph-based navigators often rely on discrete categorical one-hot vectors and vote counting strategy to construct graph representation of the scenes, which results in misalignment with visual images. To provide more accurate and coherent scene descriptions and address this misalignment issue, we propose the Aligning Knowledge Graph with Visual Perception (AKGVP) method for object-goal navigation. Technically, our approach introduces continuous modeling of the hierarchical scene architecture and leverages visual-language pre-training to align natural language description with visual perception. The integration of a continuous knowledge graph architecture and multimodal feature alignment empowers the navigator with a remarkable zero-shot navigation capability. We extensively evaluate our method using the AI2-THOR simulator and conduct a series of experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our navigator. Code available: https://github.com/nuoxu/AKGVP., Comment: Accepted to ICRA 2024

We consider baryogenesis in quantum fluctuation modified gravity. We explore three forms (two are newly proposed here) of baryogenesis interaction and discuss the effect of these interaction terms on the baryon-to-entropy ratio during the radiation era of the expanding universe. We constrain the model parameters with the current observational data, implying that this modified gravity is capable to address the issue of baryon asymmetry in a successful manner., Comment: 11 pages, 6 figures

Ferroelectric materials with switchable electric polarization hold great promise for a plethora of emergent applications, such as post-Moore's law nanoelectronics, beyond-Boltzmann transistors, non-volatile memories, and above-bandgap photovoltaic devices. Recent advances have uncovered an exotic sliding ferroelectric mechanism, which endows to design atomically thin ferroelectrics from non-ferroelectric parent monolayers. Although notable progress has been witnessed in understanding its fundamental properties, functional devices based on sliding ferroelectrics, the key touchstone toward applications, remain elusive. Here, we demonstrate the rewritable, non-volatile memory devices at room-temperature utilizing a two-dimensional (2D) sliding ferroelectric semiconductor of rhombohedral-stacked bilayer molybdenum disulfide. The 2D sliding ferroelectric memories (SFeMs) show superior performances with a large memory window of >8V, a high conductance ratio of above 106, a long retention time of >10 years, and a programming endurance greater than 104 cycles. Remarkably, flexible SFeMs are achieved with state-of-the-art performances competitive to their rigid counterparts and maintain their performances post bending over 103 cycles. Furthermore, synapse-specific Hebbian forms of plasticity and image recognition with a high accuracy of 97.81% are demonstrated based on flexible SFeMs. Our work demonstrates the sliding ferroelectric memories and synaptic plasticity on both rigid and flexible substrates, highlighting the great potential of sliding ferroelectrics for emerging technological applications in brain-inspired in-memory computing, edge intelligence and energy-efficient wearable electronics., Comment: 16 pages, 4 figures

Considering accretion onto a charged dilaton black hole, the fundamental equations governing accretion, general analytic expressions for critical points, critical velocity, critical speed of sound, and ultimately the mass accretion rate are obtained. A new constraint on the dilation parameter coming from string theory is found and the case for polytropic gas is delved into a detailed discussion. It is found that the dialtion and the adiabatic index of accreted material have deep effects on the accretion process., Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures

With the method of the background field expansion, we investigate the one-loop quantization of the Euclidean nonlocal $f(R)$ model in the de-Sitter universe. We obtain the ghost-free condition (GFC) based on the transformation from the Jordan frame to the Einstein frame and the classical stability condition (CSC) satisfied $f^{(0)}_{RR}-\phi_0F^{(0)}_{RR}<0$. We present the on-shell and off-shell one-loop effective action and quantum stability condition (QSC) by utilizing the generalized zeta-function. We find that under the fulfillment of GFC, CSC and QSC are inconsistent., Comment: 26 pages,0 figure

Hierarchical triple-star systems consists of three components organised into an inner binary ($M_{1}$,$M_{2}$) and a more distant outer tertiary ($M_{3}$) star. The LAMOST Medium-Resolution Spectroscopic Survey (LAMOST-MRS) has offered a great sample for the study of triple system populations. We used the Peak Amplitude Ratio (PAR) method to obtain the mass ratio ($q_\mathrm{{in}}$, $q_\mathrm{{out}}$) of a triple system from its normalised spectrum. By calculating Cross-Correlation Function (CCF), we determined the correlation between the mass ratio $q_\mathrm{{out}}$ ($M_{3}$/($M_{1}$+$M_{2}$)) and the amplitude ratio ($A_{3}$/($A_{1}$+$A_{2}$)). We derived $q_\mathrm{{in}}$ of $0.5-1.0$ and $q_\mathrm{{out}}$ between 0.2 and 0.8. By fitting a power-law function of the corrected $q_\mathrm{{in}}$ distribution, the $\gamma_\mathrm{{in}}$ are estimated to be $-0.654\pm2.915$, $4.304\pm1.125$ and $11.371\pm1.309$ for A, F and G type stars. The derived $\gamma_\mathrm{{in}}$-values increase as the mass decrease, indicating that less massive stars are more likely to have companion stars with similar masses. By fitting a power-law function of the corrected $q_\mathrm{{out}}$ distribution, the ${\gamma_\mathrm{{out}}}$ are estimated to be $-2.016\pm0.172$, $-1.962\pm0.853$ and $-1.238\pm0.141$ for G, F and A type stars, respectively. The ${\gamma_\mathrm{{out}}}$-values show a trend of growth toward lower primary star masses.

A van der Waals material, MoTe2 with a monoclinic 1T' crystal structure is a candidate for three-dimensional (3D) second-order topological insulators (SOTIs) hosting gapless hinge states and insulating surface states. However, due to the temperature-induced structural phase transition, the monoclinic 1T' structure of MoTe2 would be transformed into the orthorhombic Td structure as the temperature is lowered, which hinders the experimental verification and the electronic applications of the predicted SOTI state at low temperatures. Here, we present systematic Raman spectroscopy studies of the exfoliated MoTe2 thin flakes with variable thicknesses at different temperatures. As a spectroscopic signature of the orthorhombic Td structure of MoTe2, the out-of-plane vibration mode D at ~ 125 cm-1 is always visible below a certain temperature in the multilayer flakes thicker than ~ 27.7 nm, but vanishes in the temperature range from 80 K to 320 K when the flake thickness becomes lower than ~ 19.5 nm. The absence of the out-of-plane vibration mode D in the Raman spectra here demonstrates not only the disappearance of the monoclinic-to-orthorhombic phase transition but also the persistence of the monoclinic 1T' structure in the MoTe2 thin flakes thinner than ~ 19.5 nm at low temperatures down to 80 K, which may be caused by the high enough density of the holes introduced during the gold-enhanced exfoliation process and exposure to air. The MoTe2 thin flakes with the low-temperature monoclinic 1T' structure provide a material platform for realizing SOTI states in van der Waals materials at low temperatures, which paves the way for developing a new generation of electronic devices based on SOTIs., Comment: 20 pages, 5 figures

Water oxidation at the oxygen evolving complex (OEC) of the photosystem II is catalyzed by the core cluster CaMn$_4$O$_5$ which was projected to experience five intermediate states S$\rm_i$ in the Kok's cycle since 1970's. However, the detailed dynamics of state evolutions still remains unclear, albeit with the general fact that the process is initiated by the transfer of photoelectrons with the steady electron donors of the water molecules. Based on density functional simulations, we find that the spin flips of Manganese atoms between the consecutive states in the electric polarization field can be used as a marker to uncover the intricate dynamic evolutions and the underlying dynamics. The dynamic electron and proton transfers and water insertion and dissociation are traced to reveal the evolution pathways of S$_0$-S$_3$ with commensurate spin flips towards the exact spin configuration of the next state. In particular, the various water insertions and dissociations at coordination sites of the S$_2$ open and closed cubane isomers are predicted with constraints on the necessary spin flips. Our study paves a way to uncover the animated OEC evolutions with the spin flips that await for more experimental verifications and lays a solid ground for revealing the mechanism of dioxygen generation via the pending S$_4$ state., Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures

We consider a type of k-inflation under the Hamilton-Jacobi approach. We calculate various observables such as the scalar power spectrum, the tensor-to-scalar ratio, the scalar spectra index for the case where the Hubble parameter is a power-law function of k-field. The model's parameters are constrained with Planck data and the concrete form of the potential is presented. The results show that the model can be in good agreement with observations., Comment: 10 pages, 2 figures, 1 table