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We present a self-trainable method, Mask2Hand, which learns to solve the challenging task of predicting 3D hand pose and shape from a 2D binary mask of hand silhouette/shadow without additional manually-annotated data. Given the intrinsic camera parameters and the parametric hand model in the camera space, we adopt the differentiable rendering technique to project 3D estimations onto the 2D binary silhouette space. By applying a tailored combination of losses between the rendered silhouette and the input binary mask, we are able to integrate the self-guidance mechanism into our end-to-end optimization process for constraining global mesh registration and hand pose estimation. The experiments show that our method, which takes a single binary mask as the input, can achieve comparable prediction accuracy on both unaligned and aligned settings as state-of-the-art methods that require RGB or depth inputs. Our code is available at https://github.com/lijenchang/Mask2Hand.

We study formation and long-term evolution of a circumstellar disk in a collapsing molecular cloud core using a resistive magnetohydrodynamic simulation. While the formed circumstellar disk is initially small, it grows as accretion continues and its radius becomes as large as 200 AUs toward the end of the Class-I phase. A pair of grand-design spiral arms form due to gravitational instability in the disk, and they transfer angular momentum in the highly resistive disk. Although the spiral arms disappear in a few rotations as expected in a classical theory, new spiral arms form recurrently as the disk soon becomes unstable again by gas accretion. Such recurrent spiral arms persist throughout the Class-0 and I phase. We then perform synthetic observations and compare our model with a recent high-resolution observation of a young stellar object Elias 2-27, whose circumstellar disk has grand design spiral arms. We find good agreement between our theoretical model and the observation. Our model suggests that the grand design spiral arms around Elias 2-27 are consistent with material arms formed by gravitational instability. If such spiral arms commonly exist in young circumstellar disks, it implies that young circumstellar disks are considerably massive and gravitational instability is the key process of angular momentum transport., Comment: Accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. 8 pages, 5 figures. Supplemental movie: http://vega.ess.sci.osaka-u.ac.jp/~tomida/resources/tomida2016movie.avi

We investigate an unusual symmetry of Fe-based superconductors (FeSCs) and find novel superconducting pairing structures. FeSCs have a minimal translational unit cell composed of two Fe atoms due to the staggered positions of anions with respect to the Fe plane. We study the physical consequences of the additional glide symmetry that further reduces the unit cell to have only one Fe atoms. In the regular momentum space, it not only leads to a particular orbital parity separated spectral function but also dictates orbital parity distinct pairing structures. Furthermore, it produces accompanying Cooper pairs of $(\pi,\pi,0)$ momentum, which have a characteristic \textit{odd} form factor and break time reversal symmetry. Such novel pairing structures explain the unusual angular modulations of the superconducting gaps on the hole pockets in recent ARPES and STS experiments., Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures

The Fermi surface topology of $cI$16 Li at high pressures is studied using a recently developed first-principles unfolding method. We find the occurrence of a Lifshitz transition at $\sim$43 GPa, which explains the experimentally observed anomalous onset of the superconductivity enhancement toward lowered pressure. Furthermore we identify, in comparison with previous reports, additional nesting vectors that contribute to the $cI$16 structural stability. Our study highlights the importance of three-dimensional unfolding analyses for first-principles studies of Fermi surface topologies and instabilities in general., Comment: 5 pages and 4 figures

Realization of conically linear dispersion, termed as Dirac cones, has recently opened up exciting opportunities for high-performance devices that make use of the peculiar transport properties of the massless carriers. A good example of current fashion is the heavily studied graphene, a single atomic layered graphite. It not only offers a prototype of Dirac physics in the field of condensed matter and materials science, but also provides a playground of various exotic phenomena. In the meantime, numerous routes have been attempted to search for the next "graphene". Despite these efforts, to date there is still no simple guideline to predict and engineer such massless particles in materials. Here, we propose a theoretical recipe to create Dirac cones into anyone's favorite materials. The method allows to tailor the properties, such as anisotropy and quantity, in any effective one-band two-dimensional lattice. We demonstrate the validity of our theory with two examples on the square lattice, an "unlikely" candidate hosting Dirac cones, and show that a graphene-like low-energy electronic structure can be realized. The proposed recipe can be applied in real materials via introduction of vacancy, substitution or intercalation, and also extended to photonic crystal, molecular array, and cold atoms systems.

We report a first-principles Wannier function study of the electronic structure of PdTe. Its electronic structure is found to be a broad three-dimensional Fermi surface with highly reduced correlations effects. In addition, the higher filling of the Pd $d$-shell, its stronger covalency resulting from the closer energy of the Pd-$d$ and Te-$p$ shells, and the larger crystal field effects of the Pd ion due to its near octahedral coordination all serve to weaken significantly electronic correlations in the particle-hole (spin, charge, and orbital) channel. In comparison to the Fe Chalcogenide e.g., FeSe, we highlight the essential features (quasi-two-dimensionality, proximity to half-filling, weaker covalency, and higher orbital degeneracy) of Fe-based high-temperature superconductors., Comment: 5 Pages, 3 Figures

An unexpected insensitivity of the Fermi surface to impurity scattering is found in Ru substituted BaFe$_2$As$_2$ from first-principles theory, offering a natural explanation of the unusual resilience of transport and superconductivity to a high level of disordered substitution in this material. This robustness is shown to originate from a coherent interference of correlated on-site and inter-site impurity scattering, similar in spirit to the microscopic mechanism of superdiffusion in one dimension. Our result also demonstrates a strong substitution dependence of the Fermi surface and carrier concentration, and provides a natural resolution to current discrepancies in recent photoelectron spectroscopy. These effects offer a natural explanation of the diminishing long-range magnetic, orbital and superconducting order with high substitution., Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, plus supplementary materials

In all iron pnictides, the positions of the ligand alternatively above and below the Fe plane create 2 inequivalent Fe sites. This results in 10 Fe 3d bands in the electronic structure. However, they do not all have the same status for an ARPES experiment. There are interference effects between the 2 Fe that modulate strongly the intensity of the bands and that can even switch their parity. We give a simple description of these effects, notably showing that ARPES polarization selection rules in these systems cannot be applied by reference to a single Fe ion. We show that ARPES data for the electron pockets in Ba(Fe0.92Co0.08)2As2 are in excellent agreement with this model. We observe both the total suppression of some bands and the parity switching of some other bands. Once these effects are properly taken into account, the structure of the electron pockets, as measured by ARPES, becomes very clear and simple. By combining ARPES measurements in different experimental configurations, we clearly isolate each band forming one of the electron pockets. We identify a deep electron band along one ellipse axis with the dxy orbital and a shallow electron band along the perpendicular axis with the dxz/dyz orbitals, in good agreement with band structure calculations. We show that the electron pockets are warped as a function of kz as expected theoretically, but that they are much smaller than predicted by the calculation.

We investigate the currently debated issue concerning whether transition metal substitutions dope carriers in iron based superconductors. From first-principles calculations of the configuration-averaged spectral function of BaFe$_2$As$_2$ with disordered Co/Zn substitutions of Fe, important doping effects are found beyond merely changing the carrier density. While the chemical potential shifts suggest doping of a large amount of carriers, a reduction of the coherent carrier density is found due to the loss of spectral weight. Therefore, none of the change in the Fermi surface, density of states, or charge distribution can be solely used for counting doped coherent carriers, let alone presenting the full effects of the disordered substitutions. Our study highlights the necessity of including disorder effects in the studies of doped materials in general.

We investigate the physical effects of translational symmetry breaking in Fe-based high-temperature superconductors due to alternating anion positions. In the representative parent compounds, including the newly discovered Fe-vacancy-ordered $\mathrm{K_{0.8}Fe_{1.6}Se_2}$, an unusual change of orbital character is found across the one-Fe Brillouin zone upon unfolding the first-principles band structure and Fermi surfaces, suggesting that covering a larger one-Fe Brillouin zone is necessary in experiments. Most significantly, the electron pockets (critical to the magnetism and superconductivity) are found only created with the broken symmetry, advocating strongly its full inclusion in future studies, particularly on the debated nodal structures of the superconducting order parameter., Comment: Accepted by Physical Review Letters. Updated in Figure 2 and supplementary information

We unveil the novel physical origin of the insulating block checkerboard antiferromagnetism in vacancy-ordered K2Fe4Se5. Our first-principles electronic structure analysis reveals its incompatibility with a simple Fermi-surface nesting or Mott insulator scenario, and suggests the picture of coexisting itinerant and localized electronic states. Consistently, we demonstrate that it can be unified with the metallic collinear or bicollinear antiferromagnetism of the vacancy-free parent compounds LaOFeAs, BaFe2As2, or FeTe in the spin-fermion model. These results indicate that the blocking effects of Hund's rule coupling and the resulting electron correlation are crucial to the electronic and magnetic structures of iron-based superconductors., Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures. WIEN2k versions 11.1 and 9.1 were used to correct quantitative errors in Figure 2 created by the bugs in WIEN2k version 10.1

We demonstrate a spin pump to generate pure spin current of tunable intensity and polarization in the absence of charge current. The pumping functionality is achieved by means of an ac gate voltage that modulates the Rashba constant dynamically in a local region of a quantum channel with both static Rashba and Dresselhaus spin-orbit interactions. Spin-resolved Floquet scattering matrix is calculated to analyze the whole scattering process. Pumped spin current can be divided into spin-preserved transmission and spin-flip reflection parts. These two terms have opposite polarization of spin current and are competing with each other. Our proposed spin-based device can be utilized for non-magnetic control of spin flow by tuning the ac gate voltage and the driving frequency., Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures

We revisit the non-collinear exchange coupling across the trilayer magnetic junction mediated by the diluted-magnetic-semiconductor thin film. By numerical approaches, we investigate the spiral angle between the ferromagnetic layers extensively in the parameter space. In contrast to previous study, we discovered the important role of spin relaxation, which tends to favor spiral exchange over the oscillatory Ruderman-Kittel-Kasuya-Yosida interaction. Finally, we discuss the physics origins of these two types of magnetic interactions., Comment: 3 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication in Applied Physics Letters