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Electron-photon temporal correlations in electron energy loss (EELS) and cathodoluminescence (CL) spectroscopies have recently been used to measure the relative quantum efficiency of materials. This combined spectroscopy, named Cathodoluminescence excitation spectroscopy (CLE), allows the identification of excitation and decay channels which are hidden in average measurements. Here, we demonstrate that CLE can also be used to measure excitation's decay time. In addition, the decay time as a function of the excitation energy is accessed, as the energy for each electron-photon pair is probed. We used two well-known insulating materials to characterize this technique, nanodiamonds with \textit{NV$^0$} defect emission and h-BN with a \textit{4.1 eV} defect emission. Both also exhibit marked transition radiations, whose extremely short decay times can be used to characterize the instrumental response function. It is found to be typically 2 ns, in agreement with the expected limit of the EELS detector temporal resolution. The measured lifetimes of \textit{NV$^0$} centers in diamond nanoparticles (20 to 40 ns) and \textit{4.1 eV} defect in h-BN flakes ($<$ 2 ns) matches those reported for those materials previously.

The use of attributed quotes is the most direct and least filtered pathway of information propagation in news. Consequently, quotes play a central role in the conception, reception, and analysis of news stories. Since quotes provide a more direct window into a speaker's mind than regular reporting, they are a valuable resource for journalists and researchers alike. While substantial research efforts have been devoted to methods for the automated extraction of quotes from news and their attribution to speakers, few comprehensive corpora of attributed quotes from contemporary sources are available to the public. Here, we present an adaptive web interface for searching Quotebank, a massive collection of quotes from the news, which we make available at https://quotebank.dlab.tools., Comment: SIGIR 2022 (Demo), 5 pages, 2 figures

Fixing a diamond containing a high density of Nitrogen-Vacancy (NV) center ensembles on the apex of a multimode optical fiber (MMF) extends the applications of NV-based endoscope sensors. Replacing the normal MMF with a tapered MMF (MMF-taper) has enhanced the fluorescence (FL) collection efficiency from the diamond and achieved a high spatial resolution NV-based endoscope. The MMF-taper's high FL collection efficiency is the direct result of multiple internal reflections in the tapered region caused by silica, which has a higher refractive index (RI) than the surrounding air. However, for applications involving fluidic environments whose RI is close to or higher than that of the silica, the MMF-taper loses its FL collection significantly. Here, to overcome this challenge, we replaced the MMF-taper with an ultra-high numerical aperture (NA) microstructured optical fiber (MOF) which is tapered and sealed its air capillaries at the tapered end. Since the end-sealed air capillaries along the tapered MOF (MOF-taper) have isolated the MOF core from the surrounding medium, the core retains its high FL collection and NV excitation efficiency in liquids regardless of their RI values. Such a versatile NV-based endoscope could potentially find broad applications in fluidic environments where many biological processes and chemical reactions occur., Comment: 4 pages, 5 figures

Two-dimensional superconductors have attracted growing interest because of their scientific novelty, structural tunability, and useful properties. Studies of their magnetic responses, however, are often hampered by difficulties to grow large-size samples of high quality and uniformity. We report here an imaging method that employed NV- centers in diamond as sensor capable of mapping out the microwave magnetic field distribution on an ultrathin superconducting film of micron size. Measurements on a 33nm-thick film and a 125nm-thick bulk-like film of $Bi_2Sr_2CaCu_2O_{8+\delta}$ revealed that the ac Meissner effect (or repulsion of ac magnetic field) set in at 78K and 91K, respectively; the latter was the superconducting transition temperature (Tc) of both films. The unusual ac magnetic response of the thin film presumably was due to thermally excited vortex-antivortex diffusive motion in the film. Spatial resolution of our ac magnetometer was limited by optical diffraction and the noise level was at 14 ${\mu}T/Hz^{1/2}$. The technique could be extended with better detection sensitivity to extract local ac conductivity/susceptibility of ultrathin or monolayer superconducting samples as well as ac magnetic responses of other two-dimensional exotic thin films of limited lateral size., Comment: 21 pages, 4 figures

Efficiently excite nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond and collect their fluorescence significantly benefit the fiber-optic-based NV sensors. Here, using a tapered optical fiber (TOF) tip, we significantly improve the efficiency of the laser excitation and fluorescence collection of the NV, thus enhance the sensitivity of the fiber-optic based micron-sized diamond magnetic sensor. Numerical calculation shows that the TOF tip delivers a high numerical aperture (NA) and has a high fluorescence excitation and collection efficiency. Experiments demonstrate that using such TOF tip can obtain up to over 7-fold the fluorescence excitation efficiency and over15-fold the fluorescence collection efficiency of a flat-ended (non-TOF) fiber. Such fluorescence collection enhances the sensitivity of the optical fiber-based diamond NV magnetometer, thus extending its potential application region., Comment: 11 pages, 13 figures

Reading comprehension by machine has been widely studied, but machine comprehension of spoken content is still a less investigated problem. In this paper, we release Open-Domain Spoken Question Answering Dataset (ODSQA) with more than three thousand questions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the largest real SQA dataset. On this dataset, we found that ASR errors have catastrophic impact on SQA. To mitigate the effect of ASR errors, subword units are involved, which brings consistent improvements over all the models. We further found that data augmentation on text-based QA training examples can improve SQA.

We experimentally demonstrate a simple and robust optical fibers based method to achieve simultaneously efficient excitation and fluorescence collection from Nitrogen-Vacancy (NV) defects containing micro-crystalline diamond. We fabricate a suitable micro-concave (MC) mirror that focuses scattered excitation laser light into the diamond located at the focal point of the mirror. At the same instance, the mirror also couples the fluorescence light exiting out of the diamond crystal in the opposite direction of the optical fiber back into the optical fiber within its light acceptance cone. This part of fluorescence would have been otherwise lost from reaching the detector. Our proof-of-principle demonstration achieves a 25 times improvement in fluorescence collection compared to the case of not using any mirrors. The increase in light collection favors getting high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) optically detected magnetic resonance (ODMR) signals hence offers a practical advantage in fiber-based NV quantum sensors. Additionally, we compacted the NV sensor system by replacing some bulky optical elements in the optical path with a 1x2 fiber optical coupler in our optical system. This reduces the complexity of the system and provides portability and robustness needed for applications like magnetic endoscopy and remote-magnetic sensing., Comment: 6 pages, 8 figures

We demonstrate that the fluorescent emitters can increase light emission from the plasmonic nanostructures in turn. With the help of atomic force microscopy, a hybrid system consisting of a fluorescent nanodiamond and a gold nanoparticle was assembled step-by-step for in situ optical measurements. We found that the emission from the nanoparticle increased compared with that before coupling. The interaction between plasmonic nanostructures and fluorescent emitter was understood as an entity based on the concept of a quantized optical cavity by considering the nanodiamond and the nanoparticle as a two-level energy system and a nanoresonator, respectively. The theoretical calculations reveal that both the plasmonic coupling effect and the dielectric nanoantenna effect contribute to the enhancement of light emission from the gold nanoparticles., Comment: 5 pages and 4 figures

Optical microcavities are a powerful tool to enhance spontaneous emission of individual quantum emitters. However, the broad emission spectra encountered in the solid state at room temperature limit the influence of a cavity, and call for ultra-small mode volume. We demonstrate Purcell-enhanced single photon emission from nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in nanodiamonds coupled to a tunable fiber-based microcavity with a mode volume down to $1.0\,\lambda^{3}$. We record cavity-enhanced fluorescence images and study several single emitters with one cavity. The Purcell effect is evidenced by enhanced fluorescence collection, as well as tunable fluorescence lifetime modification, and we infer an effective Purcell factor of up to 2.0. With numerical simulations, we furthermore show that a novel regime for light confinement can be achieved, where a Fabry-Perot mode is combined with additional mode confinement by the nanocrystal itself. In this regime, effective Purcell factors of up to 11 for NV centers and 63 for silicon vacancy centers are feasible, holding promise for bright single photon sources and efficient spin readout under ambient conditions.

This work explores the possibility of increasing the density of negatively charged nitrogen-vacancy centers [NV-] in nanodiamonds using nitrogen-rich type Ib diamond powders as the starting materials. The nanodiamonds (10 - 100 nm in diameters) were prepared by ball-milling of microdiamonds, in which the density of neutral and automatically dispersed nitrogen atoms [N0] was measured by diffuse reflectance infrared Fourier transform spectroscopy (DRIFT). A systematic measurement for the fluorescence intensities and lifetimes of the crushed monocrystalline diamonds as a function of [N0] indicated that the [NV-] increases nearly linearly with [N0] at 100 - 200 ppm. The trend, however, failed to continue for nanodiamonds with higher [N0] (up to 390 ppm) but poorer crystallinity. We attribute the result to a combined effect of fluorescence quenching as well as the lower conversion efficiency of vacancies to NV- due to the presence of more impurities and defects in these as-grown diamond crystallites. The principles and practice of fabricating brighter and smaller fluorescent nanodiamonds (FNDs) are discussed.

We employ a fiber-based optical microcavity with high finesse to study the enhancement of phonon sideband fluorescence of nitrogen-vacancy centers in nanodiamonds. Harnessing the full tunability and open access of the resonator, we explicitly demonstrate the scaling laws of the Purcell enhancement by varying both the mode volume and the quality factor over a large range. While changes in the emission lifetime remain small in the regime of a broadband emitter, we observe an increase of the emission spectral density by up to a factor of 300. This gives a direct measure of the Purcell factor that could be achieved with this resonator and an emitter whose linewidth is narrower than the cavity linewidth. Our results show a method for the realization of wavelength-tunable narrow-band single-photon sources and demonstrate a system that has the potential to reach the strong-coupling regime., Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures