Breaking the Responsivity-Bandwidth Trade-Off Limit in GaN Photoelectrodes for High-Response and Fast-Speed Optical Communication Application

Underwater optical communication (UOC) has attracted considerable interest in the continuous expansion of human activities in marine/ocean environments. The water-durable and self-powered photoelectrodes that act as a battery-free light receiver in UOC are particularly crucial, as they may directly face complex underwater conditions. Emerging photoelectrochemical (PEC)-type photodetectors are appealing owing to their intrinsic aqueous operation characteristics with versatile tunability of photoresponses. Herein, a self-powered PEC photodetector employing n-type gallium nitride (GaN) nanowires as a photoelectrode, which is decorated with an iridium oxide (IrO_x) layer to optimize charge transfer dynamics at the GaN/electrolyte interface, is reported. Strikingly, the constructed n-GaN/IrO_x photoelectrode breaks the responsivity-bandwidth trade-off limit by simultaneously improving the response speed and responsivity, delivering an ultrafast response speed with response/recovery times of only 2 µs/4 µs while achieving a high responsivity of 110.1 mA W⁻¹. Importantly, the device exhibits a large bandwidth with 3 dB cutoff frequency exceeding 100 kHz in UOC tests, which is one of the highest values among self-powered photodetectors employed in optical communication system.     

Voltage Decay of Li-Rich Layered Oxides: Mechanism,Modification Strategies,and Perspectives

Li-rich layered oxides (LLOs) have been considered as the most promising cathode materials for achieving high energy density Li-ion batteries. However, they suffer from continuous voltage decay during cycling, which seriously shortens the lifespan of the battery in practical applications. This review comprehensively elaborates and summarizes the state-of-the-art of the research in this field. It is started from the proposed mechanism of voltage decay that refers to the phase transition, microscopic defects, and oxygen redox or release. Furthermore, several strategies to mitigate the voltage decay of LLOs from different scales, such as surface modification, elemental doping, regulation of components, control of defect, and morphology design are summarized. Finally, a systematic outlook on the real root of voltage decay is provided, and more importantly, a potential solution to voltage recovery from electrochemistry. Based on this progress, some effective strategies with multiple scales will be feasible to create the conditions for their commercialization in the future.     

Photo-Driven Hydrogen Production from Methanol and Water using Plasmonic Cu Nanoparticles Derived from Layered Double Hydroxides

Methanol steam reforming (MSR) is viewed as an important technology in the growth of a future hydrogen economy, with methanol serving as an easily transportable and storable liquid hydrogen carrier. However, the thermocatalytic MSR reaction is energy intensive as it requires high temperatures. Herein, a novel L-Cu catalyst is successfully fabricated for photo-driven MSR through reduction of CuAl layered double hydroxide (CuAl-LDH) nanosheets. L-Cu offers outstanding activity for the photothermal conversion of methanol and water to hydrogen (160.5 µmol g_cat⁻¹ s⁻¹) under ultraviolet-visible irradiation, with this rate being much higher than that achieved for L-Cu at the same temperature in the dark. Characterization studies using X-ray diffraction, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, X-ray absorption spectroscopy, and high-resolution transmission electron microscopy determine that L-Cu catalyst comprise Cu nanoparticles on an amorphous alumina support. Computational calculations reveale that Cu localized surface plasmon resonance effects promote the activation of H₂O, thereby underpinning the remarkable hydrogen production rates achieved during photo-driven MSR. This study introduces a novel photothermal strategy for hydrogen generation from methanol, demonstrating the enormous potential of photothermal catalysis in the chemical and energy sectors.     

Spring-Like Ammonium Salt Assisting Stress Release for Low-Temperature Deposited FAPbI3 Films Toward Flexible Photovoltaic Application

The substrates of conventional flexible perovskite solar cells (FPSCs) are thermoplastic polymer material polyethylene naphthalate (PEN), which will deform during high temperature annealing process. In addition, lead iodide (PbI₂) permanently formed and the substrate undergoes reversible deformation from 20 °C to 200 °C and back to 20 °C. Therefore, to balance the substrate supporting capacity and the crystalline quality of narrow band gap α-phase formamidinium lead iodide (α-FAPbI₃), an annealing process of 120 °C for 30 minutes is determined. Additionally, there will also be a large number of gaps and lattice strain at the perovskite grain boundaries during the annealing process as the FAPbI₃ phase transition is accompanied by much lattice shrinkage. As a result, 1,6-hexanediammonium diiodide (HADI) is chosen to passivate the defects and release the stress of perovskite film. Therefore, a recorded 1.4% extended stretch rate of the flexible film is attained. Finally, the champion PCE of 21.14% under AM 1.5G and 31.52% under 1062 lux is achieved after HADI treatment, accompanied by a better long-term and mechanical stability. This study provides annealing process optimization and stress relief strategies for the further development of narrow band gap FPSCs.     

Boosting the Durability of Triboelectric Nanogenerators: A Critical Review and Prospect

Triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs) have attracted great interests in the development of sustainable energies and intelligent society. However, a big challenge for TENGs in practical applications is the unavoidable external mechanical abrasion and/or contaminant adsorption on the triboelectric materials, which leads to the significant decrease of the durability of TENGs and is urgently needed to be addressed. There are already a series of interesting progresses on the topic of the TENGs’ durability. In this study, reviewing the durability of TENGs via both the advanced materials/structure designing and the novel surface/interface engineering is focused upon, which includes choosing basic TENG materials, improving composites performance, optimizing structures, and designing triboelectric surfaces and interfaces. To get a better understanding of the durability of TENGs in published studies, the quantifiable levels of service life are also summarized including operation cycles, time, friction coefficient, and wear loss of triboelectric materials, where the boosting mechanisms are also discussed and summarized. Finally, the challenges as well as key strategies toward high durable TENGs are presented.     

High-Efficiency Organic Solar Cells Enabled by Chalcogen Containing Branched Chain Engineering: Balancing Short-Circuit Current and Open-Circuit Voltage,Enhancing Fill Factor

The elaborate balance between the open-circuit voltage (V_OC) and the short-circuit current density (J_SC) is critical to ensure efficient organic solar cells (OSCs). Herein, the chalcogen containing branched chain engineering is employed to address this dilemma. Three novel nonfullerene acceptors (NFAs), named BTP-2O , BTP-O-S , and BTP-2S , featuring different peripheral chalcogen containing branched chains are synthesized. Compared with symmetric BTP-2O and BTP-2S grafting two alkoxy or alkylthio branched chains, the asymmetric BTP-O-S grafting one alkoxy and one alkylthio branched chains shows mediate absorption range, applicable miscibility, and favorable crystallinity. Benefiting from the enhanced π–π stacking and charge transport, an optimal power conversion efficiency (PCE) of 17.3% is obtained for the PM6: BTP-O-S -based devices, with a good balance between V_OC (0.912 V) and J_SC (24.5 mA cm⁻²), and a high fill factor (FF) of 0.775, which is much higher than those of BTP-2O (16.1%) and BTP-2S -based (16.4%) devices. Such a result represents one of the highest efficiencies among the binary OSCs with V_OC surpassing 0.9 V. Moreover, the BTP-O-S -based devices fabricated by using green solvent yield a satisfactory PCE of 17.1%. This work highlights the synergistic effect of alkoxy and alkylthio branched chains for high-performance OSCs by alleviating voltage loss and enhancing FF.     

Proximity-Induced Fully Ferromagnetic Order with Eightfold Magnetic Anisotropy in Heavy Transition Metal Oxide CaRuO3

Ferromagnetic materials with a strong spin-orbit coupling (SOC) have attracted much attention in recent years because of their exotic properties and potential applications in energy-efficient spintronics. However, such materials are scarce in nature. Here, a proximity-induced paramagnetic to ferromagnetic transition for the heavy transition metal oxide CaRuO₃ in (001)-(LaMnO₃/CaRuO₃) superlattices is reported. Anomalous Hall effect is observed in the temperature range up to 180 K. Maximal anomalous Hall conductivity and anomalous Hall angle are as large as ∼15 Ω⁻¹ cm⁻¹ and ∼0.93%, respectively, by one to two orders of magnitude larger than those of the typical 3d ferromagnetic oxides such as La_0.67Sr_0.33MnO₃. Density functional theory calculations indicate the existence of avoid band crossings in the electronic band structure of the ferromagnetic CRO layer, which enhances Berry curvature thus strong anomalous Hall effects. Further evidences from polarized neutron reflectometry show that the CaRuO₃ layers are in a fully ferromagnetic state (∼0.8 μ_B/Ru), in sharp contrast to the proximity-induced canted antiferromagnetic state in 5d oxides SrIrO₃ and CaIrO₃ (∼0.1 μ_B/Ir). More than that, the magnetic anisotropy of the (001)-(LaMnO₃/CaRuO₃) superlattices is eightfold symmetric, showing potential applications in the technology of multistate data storage.     

Future Event Prediction Based on Temporal Knowledge Graph Embedding

Accurate prediction of future events brings great benefits and reduces losses for society in many domains, such as civil unrest, pandemics, and crimes. Knowledge graph is a general language for describing and modeling complex systems. Different types of events continually occur, which are often related to historical and concurrent events. In this paper, we formalize the future event prediction as a temporal knowledge graph reasoning problem. Most existing studies either conduct reasoning on static knowledge graphs or assume knowledges graphs of all timestamps are available during the training process. As a result, they cannot effectively reason over temporal knowledge graphs and predict events happening in the future. To address this problem, some recent works learn to infer future events based on historical event-based temporal knowledge graphs. However, these methods do not comprehensively consider the latent patterns and influences behind historical events and concurrent events simultaneously. This paper proposes a new graph representation learning model, namely Recurrent Event Graph ATtention Network (RE-GAT), based on a novel historical and concurrent events attention-aware mechanism by modeling the event knowledge graph sequence recurrently. More specifically, our RE-GAT uses an attention-based historical events embedding module to encode past events, and employs an attention-based concurrent events embedding module to model the associations of events at the same timestamp. A translation-based decoder module and a learning objective are developed to optimize the embeddings of entities and relations. We evaluate our proposed method on four benchmark datasets. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our RE-GAT model comparing to various baselines, which proves that our method can more accurately predict what events are going to happen.     

融合通道位置注意力机制和并行空洞卷积的人脸年龄合成

目的 人脸年龄合成旨在合成指定年龄人脸图像的同时保持高可信度的人脸,是计算机视觉领域的热门研究方向之一。然而目前主流人脸年龄合成模型过于关注纹理信息,忽视了与人脸相关的多尺度特征,此外网络存在对身份信息筛选不佳的问题。针对以上问题,提出一种融合通道位置注意力机制和并行空洞卷积的人脸年龄合成网络（generative adversarial network（GAN）composed of the parallel dilated convolution and channel-coordinate attention mechanism,PDA-GAN）。方法 PDA-GAN基于生成对抗网络提出了并行三通道空洞卷积残差块和通道—位置注意力机制。并行三通道空洞卷积残差块将3种膨胀系数空洞卷积提取的不同尺度人脸特征融合,提升了特征尺度上的多样性和总量上的丰富度;通道—位置注意力机制通过对人脸特征的长度、宽度和深度显著性计算,定位图像中与年龄高度相关的通道和空间位置区域,增强了网络对通道和空间位置上敏感特征的表达能力,解决了特征冗余问题。结果 实验在Flickr高清人脸数据集（Flickr-faces-high-quality,FFHQ）上训练,在名人人脸属性高清数据集（large-scale celebfaces attributes dataset-high quality,Celeba-HQ）上测试,将本文提出的PDA-GAN与最新的3种人脸年龄图像合成网络进行定性和定量比较,以验证本文方法的有效性。实验结果表明,PDA-GAN显著提升了人脸年龄合成的身份置信度和年龄估计准确度,具有良好的身份信息保留和年龄操控能力。结论 本文方法能够合成具有较高真实度和准确性的目标年龄人脸图像。     

Fully distributed consensus for fuzzy multiagent systems with jointly connected topology

This paper investigates the problem of fully distributed consensus for polynomial fuzzy multiagent systems (MASs) under jointly connected topologies. First, a polynomial fuzzy modeling method is presented to characterize the error dynamics that is constructed by one leader and multiple followers. Then, using the relative state information and the agents' dynamics, a distributed adaptive protocol is designed to guarantee that MASs under jointly connected topologies can achieve consensus in a fully distributed fashion. Utilizing the Lyapunov technique, a relaxed sufficient criterion is proposed to ensure consensus for fuzzy MASs under jointly connected topologies. Moreover, the adaptive coupling weights between neighboring agents can converge to certain values. The derived condition is transformed into a sum-of-squares form, which can be solved numerically. We provide an example to illustrate the proposed distributed adaptive consensus technique's validity.