Refined entanglement concentration for electron-spin entangled cluster states with quantum-dot spins in optical microcavities

We present a refined entanglement concentration protocol (ECP) for an arbitrary unknown less-entangled four-electron-spin cluster state by exploring the optical selection rules derived from the quantum-dot spins in one-sided optical microcavities. In our ECP, the parties obtain not only the four-electron-spin systems in the partial entanglement with two unknown parameters, but also the less-entangled two-electron-spin systems in the first step. Utilizing the above preserved systems as the resource for the second step of our ECP, the parties can obtain a standard cluster state by keeping the robust odd-parity instances with two parity-check gates. Meanwhile, the systems in the rest three instances can be used as the resource in the next round of our ECP. The success probability of our ECP is largely increased by iteration of the ECP process. Moreover, all the coefficients of our ECP are unknown for the parties without assistance of extra single electron-spin, so our ECP maybe has good applications in quantum communication network in the future.     

Continuous-variable quantum homomorphic signature

Quantum cryptography is believed to be unconditionally secure because its security is ensured by physical laws rather than computational complexity. According to spectrum characteristic, quantum information can be classified into two categories, namely discrete variables and continuous variables. Continuous-variable quantum protocols have gained much attention for their ability to transmit more information with lower cost. To verify the identities of different data sources in a quantum network, we propose a continuous-variable quantum homomorphic signature scheme. It is based on continuous-variable entanglement swapping and provides additive and subtractive homomorphism. Security analysis shows the proposed scheme is secure against replay, forgery and repudiation. Even under nonideal conditions, it supports effective verification within a certain verification threshold.     

Integrated design technique for materials and structures of vehicle body under crash safety considerations

With the rapid development of the vehicle industry, crashworthiness has become a crucial aspect in vehicle body design. In fact, crashworthiness is a multivariable optimization design problem for a vehicle body, regardless of structure or material. However, when crashworthiness involves a large number of design variables, including both material and structure variables, it is more difficult to deal with. In this paper, an integrated design technique for materials and structures of vehicle body under crash safety consideration is suggested. First, a finite element model of the vehicle body is established according to relevant vehicle safety standards. Then, the material parameters of the vehicle body are set as analytical factors for factor screening. Next, significant factors are obtained using a three-level saturated design integrated with multi-index comprehensive balance analysis and the MaxUr ⁽³⁾ method, with an improved evaluation method. These screened material parameters along with the corresponding continuous variables of the structure, are considered as the design variables of the integrated design of the vehicle body. Both the weight and the crashworthiness properties are set as the design objectives. Optimal Latin hypercube sampling and radius basis functions are utilized to construct highly accurate surrogate models. Furthermore, the non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm II is implemented to seek the optimal solutions. Finally, two cases considering the roof module and the frontal module of a vehicle body are analyzed to verify the proposed method.     

Microstructural topology optimization of structural-acoustic coupled systems for minimizing sound pressure level

The aim of this paper is to present a microstructural topology optimization methodology for the structural-acoustic coupled system. In the structural-acoustic system, the structure is considered to be a thin composite plate composed of periodic uniform microstructures. The discrete design variables are used in the microstructural topology optimization, and the constitutive matrix is interpolated by the power-law scheme at the micro scale. The equivalent macro material properties of the microstructure are computed through the homogenization method. The design objective is to minimize the sound pressure level (SPL) in an interior acoustic medium. The sensitivities of the SPL with respect to design variables are derived. The bi-directional evolutionary structural optimization (BESO) method is extended to solve the structural-acoustic coupled optimization problem to find the optimal material distribution of the microstructure. Numerical examples of a hexahedral box and an automobile passenger compartment are given to demonstrate the efficiency of the presented microstructural topology optimization method.     

Promoting traits into model-driven development

Traits, as sets of behaviors, can provide a good mechanism for reusability. However, they are limited in important ways and are not present in widely used programming and modeling languages and hence are not readily available for use by mainstream developers. In this paper, we add UML associations and other modeling concepts to traits and apply them to Java and C++ through model-driven development. We also extend traits with required interfaces so dependencies at the semantics level become part of their usage, rather than simple syntactic capture. All this is accomplished in Umple, a textual modeling language based upon UML that allows adding programming constructs to the model. We applied the work to two case studies. The results show that we can promote traits to the modeling level along with the improvement in flexibility and reusability.     

An Efficient Scaling Algorithm for the Minimum Weight Bibranching Problem

Let G=(VG,AG) be a digraph and let S ⊔ T be a bipartition of VG. A bibranching is a subset B⊆AG such that for each node s∈S there exists a directed s–T path in B and, vice versa, for each node t∈T there exists a directed S–t path in B.     

A new neural network algorithm for planarization problems

To deal with the planarization problem widely used in many applications including routing very-large-scale integration （VLSI） circuits, this paper points out that only when its vertices are arranged in some specific order in a line can a planar graph be embedded on a line without any cross connections or cross edges. Energy function is proposed to meet the need of embedding a graph on a single line and route it correctly. A Hopfield network is designed according to the proposed energy function for such embedding and routing. The advantage of the proposed method is that it not only can detect if a graph is a planar one or not, but also can embed a planar graph or the maximal planar subgraph of a non-planar graph on a single line. In addition, simulated annealing is employed for helping the network to escape from local minima during the running of the Hopfield network. Experiments of the proposed method and its comparison with some existent conventional methods were performed and the results indicate that the proposed method is of great feasibility and effectiveness especially for the planarization problem of large graphs.     

Nanoparticle-based lift-off technique for ultra-thin nanoporous film preparation

Ultra-thin membrane with nanoscale through hole has great potential in biomedical applications, where precise controllability of porosity, pore size and film thickness is urgently required. The present work proposed a cost-effective way to prepare the ultra-thin nanoporous film with a promising controllability. Monodispersed nanoparticle, rather than photoresist, is used as the sacrificial material for this new lift-off process. By releasing the particles, holes can be achieved with predeter-mined characters. A 110 nm-thick nanoporous aluminum film with well-controlled pore＇s diameter was successfully fabricated to validate the technique. The technique has wider process window and better applicability than other nanofabrication methods.     

Primal or dual: which promises faster spatiotemporal search?

The existing predictive spatiotemporal indexes can be classified into two categories, depending on whether they are based on the primal or dual methodology. Although we have gained considerable empirical knowledge about various access methods, currently there is only limited understanding on the theoretical characteristics of the two methodologies. In fact, the experimental results in different papers even contradict each other, regarding the relative superiority of the primal and dual techniques. This paper presents a careful study on the query performance of general primal and dual indexes, and reveals important insight into the behavior of each technique. In particular, we mathematically establish the conditions that determine the superiority of each methodology, and provide rigorous justification for well-known observations that have not been properly explained in the literature. Our analytical findings also resolve the contradiction in the experiments of previous work.