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Seamlessly integrating stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) in a low-loss and mature photonic integration platform remains a complicated task. Virtually all current approaches fall short in simultaneously achieving strong SBS, low losses, and technological scalability. In this work we incorporate stong SBS into a standard silicon nitride platform by a simple deposition of a tellurium oxide layer, a commonly used material for acousto-optic modulators. In these heterogeneously integrated waveguides, we harness novel SBS interactions actuated by surface acoustic waves (SAWs) leading to more than two orders of magnitude gain enhancement. Three novel applications are demonstrated in this platform: (i) a silicon nitride Brillouin amplifier with 5 dB net optical gain, (ii) a compact intermodal stimulated Brillouin laser (SBL) capable of high purity radio frequency (RF) signal generation with 7 Hz intrinsic linewidth, and (iii) a widely tunable microwave photonic notch filter with ultra-narrow linewidth of 2.2 MHz enabled by Brillouin induced opacity. These advancements can unlock an array of new RF and optical technologies to be directly integrated in silicon nitride.

We report electrical conductivity measurements of Polymethyl-methacrylate filled by onion-like carbon particles with primary particle size of $\approx 5$ nm. We shown that the conductivity $\sigma$ is exceptionally high even at very low loadings, and that its low-temperature dependence follows a Coulomb gap regime at atmospheric pressure and an activated behavior at a pressure of $2$ GPa. We interpret this finding in terms of the enhancement under the applied pressure of the effective dielectric permittivity within the aggregates of onion-like carbons, which improves the screening of the Coulomb interaction and reduces the optimal hopping distance of the electrons., Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, 1 page of supplementary material

Recent matrix completion based methods have not been able to properly model the Haplotype Assembly Problem (HAP) for noisy observations. To cope with such a case, in this letter we propose a new Minimum Error Correction (MEC) based matrix completion optimization problem over the manifold of rank-one matrices. The convergence of a specific iterative algorithm for solving this problem is proved. Simulation results illustrate that the proposed method not only outperforms some well-known matrix completion based methods, but also presents a more accurate result compared to a most recent MEC based algorithm for haplotype estimation.

A new optimization design is proposed for matrix completion by weighting the measurements and deriving the corresponding error bound. Accordingly, the Haplotype reconstruction using nuclear norm minimization with Weighted Constraint (HapWeC) is devised for haplotype estimation. Computer simulations show the outperformance of the HapWeC compared to some recent algorithms in terms of the normalized reconstruction error and reconstruction rate., Comment: 6 Pages, 4 Figures

The single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) is the most widely studied type of genetic variation. A haplotype is defined as the sequence of alleles at SNP sites on each haploid chromosome. Haplotype information is essential in unravelling the genome-phenotype association. Haplotype assembly is a well-known approach for reconstructing haplotypes, exploiting reads generated by DNA sequencing devices. The Minimum Error Correction (MEC) metric is often used for reconstruction of haplotypes from reads. However, problems with the MEC metric have been reported. Here, we investigate the MEC approach to demonstrate that it may result in incorrectly reconstructed haplotypes for devices that produce error-prone long reads. Specifically, we evaluate this approach for devices developed by Illumina, Pacific BioSciences and Oxford Nanopore Technologies. We show that imprecise haplotypes may be reconstructed with a lower MEC than that of the exact haplotype. The performance of MEC is explored for different coverage levels and error rates of data. Our simulation results reveal that in order to avoid incorrect MEC-based haplotypes, a coverage of 25 is needed for reads generated by Pacific BioSciences RS systems., Comment: 17 pages, 6 figures

We apply matrix completion methods for haplotype assembly from NGS reads to develop the new HapSVT, HapNuc, and HapOPT algorithms. This is performed by applying a mathematical model to convert the reads to an incomplete matrix and estimating unknown components. This process is followed by quantizing and decoding the completed matrix in order to estimate haplotypes. These algorithms are compared to the state-of-the-art algorithms using simulated data as well as the real fosmid data. It is shown that the SNP missing rate and the haplotype block length of the proposed HapOPT are better than those of HapCUT2 with comparable accuracy in terms of reconstruction rate and switch error rate. A program implementing the proposed algorithms in MATLAB is freely available at https://github.com/smajidian/HapMC.

Carbon nanotubes (CTNs) with large aspect-ratios are extensively used to establish electrical connectedness in polymer melts at very low CNT loadings. However, the CNT size polydispersity and the quality of the dispersion are still not fully understood factors that can substantially alter the desired characteristics of CNT nanocomposites. Here we demonstrate that the electrical conductivity of polydisperse CNT-epoxy composites with purposely-tailored distributions of the nanotube length L is a quasiuniversal function of the first moment of L. This finding challenges the current understanding that the conductivity depends upon higher moments of the CNT length. We explain the observed quasiuniversality by a combined effect between the particle size polydispersity and clustering. This mechanism can be exploited to achieve controlled tuning of the electrical transport in general CNT nanocomposites., Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures

Filon-Clenshaw-Curtis rules are among rapid and accurate quadrature rules for computing highly oscillatory integrals. In the implementation of the Filon-Clenshaw-Curtis rules in the case when the oscillator function is not linear, its inverse should be evaluated at some points. In this paper, we solve this problem by introducing an approach based on the interpolation, which leads to a class of modifications of the original Filon-Clenshaw-Curtis rules. In the absence of stationary points, two kinds of modified Filon-Clenshaw-Curtis rules are introduced. For each kind, an error estimate is given theoretically, and then illustrated by some numerical experiments. Also, some numerical experiments are carried out for a comparison of the accuracy and the efficiency of the two rules. In the presence of stationary points, the idea is applied to the composite Filon-Clenshaw-Curtis rules on graded meshes. An error estimate is given theoretically, and then illustrated by some numerical experiments.

It is shown that the orthogonal polynomials, corresponding to the oscillatory weight $e^{\im\omega x}$, exists if $\omega$ is a transcendental number and $\tan\omega/\omega\in\Q$. Also, it is proved that such orthogonal polynomials exist for almost every $\omega>0$, and the roots are all simple if $\omega>0$ is either small enough or large enough., Comment: 7 pages, 1 figure

We consider the eigenvalue problem of certain kind of non-compact linear operators given as the sum of a multiplication and a kernel operator. A degenerate kernel method is used to approximate isolated eigenvalues. It is shown that entries of the corresponding matrix of this method can be evaluated exactly. The convergence of the method is proved; it is proved that the convergence rate is $O(h)$. By some numerical examples, we confirm the results., Comment: 8 pages