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Quantum spin Hall effect is characterized by topologically protected helical edge states. Here we study the thermal dissipation of helical edge states by considering two types of dissipation sources. The results show that the helical edge states are dissipationless for normal dissipation sources with or without Rashba spin-orbit coupling in the system, but they are dissipative for spin dissipation sources. Further studies on the energy distribution show that electrons with spin-up and spin-down are both in their own equilibrium without dissipation sources. Spin dissipation sources can couple the two subsystems together to induce voltage drop and nonequilibrium distribution, leading to thermal dissipation, while normal dissipation sources cannot. With the increase of thermal dissipation, the subsystems of electrons with spin-up and spin-down evolve from non-equilibrium finally to mutual equilibrium. In addition, the effects of disorder on thermal dissipation are also discussed. Our work provides clues to reduce thermal dissipation in the quantum spin Hall systems, Comment: 18 pages, 7 figures

Nonuniform strain in graphene can induce a pseudo-magnetic field (PMF) preserving time-reversal symmetry, generating pseudo-Landau levels under zero real magnetic field (MF). The different natures between PMF and real MF lead to the counterpropagating valley-polarized edge states under the PMF and unidirectionally chiral edge states under the real MF. In this work, we find, due to the valley mixing on the armchair edges, the quantum valley Hall edge states only exist at the zigzag edges but not at armchair edges in a uniaxial strained graphene, very different from the case that chiral quantum Hall edge states exist at all edges in pristine graphene under a real MF. We theoretically demonstrate it through the wave function distributions, multi-terminal transport measurements and the electron local occupations, respectively. The interface state in a p-n junction under PMF is further proposed to transport electrons between the conductive zigzag boundaries, which could be used as a valley-polarized single pole double throw switch., Comment: 13 pages, 7 figures

The wavefront dislocation is an important and ubiquitous phenomenon in wave fields. It is closely related to the phase singularity in a wave function. Some recent studies have verified that the wavefront dislocations in the local density of states (LDOS) map can well manifest the intrinsic topological characteristics in graphene and some topological systems. Different from these previous schemes, we raise a transport method to measure such wavefront dislocations in monolayer and Bernal-stacked bilayer graphene. Combining analytical analysis and numerical calculation, we find phase singularities naturally appear in the transmission coefficients between different sublattices, due to the intervalley interference on the electron propagating paths. These phase singularities could contribute wavefront dislocations in the conductance map. Additionally, in bilayer graphene, the wavefront dislocations are found to remain robust even though the tip is coupled to multiple sublattices. Biased bilayer graphene is also explored. Our scheme provides a new transport routine to explore valley-related topological properties of materials., Comment: 15 pages, 9 figures

The quantum Hall (QH) effect, the quantum spin Hall (QSH) effect and the quantum valley Hall (QVH) effect are three peculiar topological insulating phases in graphene. They are characterized by three different types of edge states. These three effects are caused by the external magnetic field, the intrinsic spin-orbit coupling (SOC) and the strain-induced pseudomagnetic field, respectively. Here we theoretically study phase diagrams when these effects coexist and analyze how the edge states evolve between the three. We find the real magnetic field and the pseudomagnetic field will compete above the SOC energy gap while the QSH effect is almost unaffected within the SOC energy gap. The edge states transition from the QH effect or the QVH effect to the QSH effect directly relies on the arrangement of the zeroth Landau levels. Using edge states transitions, we raise a device similar to a spin field effect transistor (spin-FET) and also design a spintronics multiple-way switch., Comment: 16 pages, 10 figures

In this paper, we show that for a non-trivial quasi-symmetric $2$-design $\mathcal{D}$ with two block intersection numbers $x=0$ and $2\leq y\leq10$, if $G\leq \mathrm{Aut}(\mathcal{D})$ is flag-transitive and point-primitive, then $G$ is either of affine type or almost simple type. Moreover, we prove that the socle of $G$ cannot be an alternating group. If the socle of $G$ is a sporadic group, then $\mathcal{D}$ and $G$ must be one of the following: $\mathcal{D}$ is a $2$-$(12,6,5)$ design with block intersection numbers $0,3$ and $G=\mathrm{M}_{11}$, or $\mathcal{D}$ is a $2$-$(22,6,5)$ design with block intersection numbers $0,2$ and $G=\mathrm{M}_{22}$ or $\mathrm{M}_{22}:2$.

The rapid expansion of Internet of Things (IoT) devices demands robust and resource-efficient security solutions. Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs), which generate unique cryptographic keys from inherent hardware variations, offer a promising approach. However, traditional PUFs like Arbiter PUFs (APUFs) and XOR Arbiter PUFs (XOR-PUFs) are susceptible to machine learning (ML) and reliability-based attacks. In this study, we investigate Component-Differentially Challenged XOR-PUFs (CDC-XPUFs), a less explored variant, to address these vulnerabilities. We propose an optimized CDC-XPUF design that incorporates a pre-selection strategy to enhance reliability and introduces a novel lightweight architecture to reduce hardware overhead. Rigorous testing demonstrates that our design significantly lowers resource consumption, maintains strong resistance to ML attacks, and improves reliability, effectively mitigating reliability-based attacks. These results highlight the potential of CDC-XPUFs as a secure and efficient candidate for widespread deployment in resource-constrained IoT systems.

Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) are emerging as promising security primitives for IoT devices, providing device fingerprints based on physical characteristics. Despite their strengths, PUFs are vulnerable to machine learning (ML) attacks, including conventional and reliability-based attacks. Conventional ML attacks have been effective in revealing vulnerabilities of many PUFs, and reliability-based ML attacks are more powerful tools that have detected vulnerabilities of some PUFs that are resistant to conventional ML attacks. Since reliability-based ML attacks leverage information of PUFs' unreliability, we were tempted to examine the feasibility of building defense using reliability enhancing techniques, and have discovered that majority voting with reasonably high repeats provides effective defense against existing reliability-based ML attack methods. It is known that majority voting reduces but does not eliminate unreliability, we are motivated to investigate if new attack methods exist that can capture the low unreliability of highly but not-perfectly reliable PUFs, which led to the development of a new reliability representation and the new representation-enabled attack method that has experimentally cracked PUFs enhanced with majority voting of high repetitions.

Lightweight authentication is essential for resource-constrained Internet-of-Things (IoT). Implementable with low resource and operable with low power, Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) have the potential as hardware primitives for implementing lightweight authentication protocols. The arbiter PUF (APUF) is probably the most lightweight strong PUF capable of generating exponentially many challenge-response pairs (CRPs), a desirable property for authentication protocols, but APUF is severely weak against modeling attacks. Efforts on PUF design have led to many PUFs of higher resistance to modeling attacks and also higher area overhead. There are also substantial efforts on protocol development, some leverage PUFs' strength in fighting modeling attacks, and some others employ carefully designed protocol techniques to obfuscate either the challenges or the responses with modest increase of area overhead for some or increased operations for some others. To attain both low resource footprint and high modeling attack resistance, in this paper we propose a co-design of PUF and protocol, where the PUF consists of an APUF and a zero-transistor interface that obfuscates the true challenge bits fed to the PUF. The obfuscated PUF possesses rigorously proven potential and experimentally supported performance against modeling attacks when a condition is met, and the protocol provides the condition required by the PUF and leverages the PUF's modeling resistance to arrive at low resource overhead and high operational simplicity, enabling lightweight authentications while resisting modeling attacks.

Phase singularities are phase-indeterminate points where wave amplitudes are zero, which manifest as phase vertices or wavefront dislocations. In the realm of optical and electron beams, the phase singularity has been extensively explored, demonstrating a profound connection to orbital angular momentum. Direct local imaging of the impact of orbital angular momentum on phase singularities at the nanoscale, however, remains a challenge and has yet to be achieved. Here, we study the role of orbital angular momentum in phase singularities in graphene, particularly at the atomic level, through scanning tunneling microscopy and spectroscopy. Our experiments demonstrate that the scatterings between different orbital angular momentum states, which are induced by local rotational symmetry-breaking potentials, can generate additional phase singularity, and result in robust single wavefront dislocation in real space. Our results pave the way for exploring the effects of orbital degree of freedom on quantum phases in quasiparticle interference processes., Comment: 28 pages, 3 figures, 10 extended figures

In a molecule formed by two atoms, energy difference between bonding and antibonding orbitals should depend on distance of the two atoms. However, exploring molecular orbitals of two natural atoms with tunable distance has remained an outstanding experimental challenge. Graphene quantum dots (GQDs) can be viewed as relativistic artificial atoms, therefore, offering a unique platform to study molecular physics. Here, through scanning tunneling microscope (STM), we create and directly visualize the formation process of relativistic artificial molecules based on two coupled GQDs with tunable distance. Our study indicates that energy difference between the bonding and antibonding orbitals of the lowest quasibound state increases linearly with inverse distance of the two GQDs due to the relativistic nature of the artificial molecule. For quasibound states with higher orbital momenta, the coupling between these states leads to half-energy spacing of the confined states because the length of the molecular-like orbit is about twice that of the atomic-like orbit. Evolution from ring-like whispering-gallery modes in the artificial atoms to figure-eight orbitals in the artificial molecules is directly imaged. The ability to resolve the coupling and orbitals of the relativistic artificial molecule at the nanoscale level yields insights into the behavior of quantum-relativistic matter.

We propose a universal spin superconducting diode effect (SDE) induced by spin-orbit coupling (SOC), where the critical spin supercurrents in opposite directions are unequal. By analysis from both the Ginzburg-Landau theory and energy band analysis, we show that the spin-$\uparrow \uparrow$ and spin-$\downarrow \downarrow$ Cooper pairs possess opposite phase gradients and opposite momenta from the SOC, which leads to the spin SDE. Two superconductors with SOC, a $p$-wave superconductor as a toy model and a practical superconducting nanowire, are numerically studied and they both exhibit spin SDE. In addition, our theory also provides a unified picture for both spin and charge SDEs. Besides, we propose spin-polarized detection and nonlocal spin transport, as mature experimental technologies, to confirm the spin SDE in superconducting nanowires., Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures (+ supplementary materials 4 pages, 1 figure)

Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) are promising security primitives for resource-constrained IoT devices. And the XOR Arbiter PUF (XOR-PUF) is one of the most studied PUFs, out of an effort to improve the resistance against machine learning attacks of probably the most lightweight delay-based PUFs - the Arbiter PUFs. However, recent attack studies reveal that even XOR-PUFs with large XOR sizes are still not safe against machine learning attacks. Increasing PUF stages or components and using different challenges for different components are two ways to improve the security of APUF-based PUFs, but more stages or components lead to more hardware cost and higher operation power, and different challenges for different components require the transmission of more bits during operations, which also leads to higher power consumption. In this paper, we present a strategy that combines the choice of XOR Arbiter PUF (XOR-PUF) architecture parameters with the way XOR-PUFs are used to achieve lightweights in hardware cost and energy consumption as well as security against machine learning attacks. Experimental evaluations show that with the proposed strategy, highly lightweight component-differentially challenged XOR-PUFs can withstand the most powerful machine learning attacks developed so far and maintain excellent intra-device and inter-device performance, rendering this strategy a potential blueprint for the fabrication and use of XOR-PUFs for resource-constrained IoT applications., Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2206.01314

In relativistic physics, both atomic collapse in heavy nucleus and Hawking radiation in black hole are predicted to occur through Klein tunneling process that couples particles and antiparticles. Recently, atomic collapse states (ACSs) were explicitly realized in graphene because of its relativistic Dirac excitation with large fine structure constant. However, essential role of the Klein tunneling on the ACSs remains elusive in experiment. Here we systematically study the quasibound states in elliptical graphene quantum dots (GQDs). Bonding and antibonding molecular collapse states formed by two coupled ACSs are observed in the elliptical GQDs. Our experiments, supported by theoretical calculations, indicate that the antibonding state of the ACSs will change into a Klein-tunneling-induced quasibound state, revealing deep connection between the ACSs and the Klein tunneling., Comment: 3 figures in main text

Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) are promising security primitives for resource-constrained network nodes. The XOR Arbiter PUF (XOR PUF or XPUF) is an intensively studied PUF invented to improve the security of the Arbiter PUF, probably the most lightweight delay-based PUF. Recently, highly powerful machine learning attack methods were discovered and were able to easily break large-sized XPUFs, which were highly secure against earlier machine learning attack methods. Component-differentially-challenged XPUFs (CDC-XPUFs) are XPUFs with different component PUFs receiving different challenges. Studies showed they were much more secure against machine learning attacks than the conventional XPUFs, whose component PUFs receive the same challenge. But these studies were all based on earlier machine learning attack methods, and hence it is not clear if CDC-XPUFs can remain secure under the recently discovered powerful attack methods. In this paper, the two current most powerful two machine learning methods for attacking XPUFs are adapted by fine-tuning the parameters of the two methods for CDC-XPUFs. Attack experiments using both simulated PUF data and silicon data generated from PUFs implemented on field-programmable gate array (FPGA) were carried out, and the experimental results showed that some previously secure CDC-XPUFs of certain circuit parameter values are no longer secure under the adapted new attack methods, while many more CDC-XPUFs of other circuit parameter values remain secure. Thus, our experimental attack study has re-defined the boundary between the secure region and the insecure region of the PUF circuit parameter space, providing PUF manufacturers and IoT security application developers with valuable information in choosing PUFs with secure parameter values.

Introducing quantum confinement has uncovered a rich set of interesting quantum phenomena and allows one to directly probe the physics of confined (quasi-)particles. In most experiments, however, electrostatic potential is the only available method to generate the quantum confinement in a continuous system. Here, we demonstrated experimentally that inhomogeneous pseudomagnetic fields in strained graphene can introduce exotic quantum confinement of massless Dirac fermions. The pseudomagnetic fields have opposite directions in the two distinct valleys of graphene. By tuning real magnetic field, the total effective magnetic fields in the two valleys are imbalanced. Then, we realized valley-contrasting spatial confinement, which lifts the valley degeneracy and results in field-tunable valley-polarized confined states in graphene. Our results provide a new avenue to manipulate the valley degree of freedom.

The relativistic massless charge carriers with a Fermi velocity of about c300 in graphene enable us to realize two distinct types of resonances (c, the speed of light in vacuum). One is electron whispering-gallery mode in graphene quantum dots arising from the Klein tunneling of the massless Dirac fermions. The other is atomic collapse state, which has never been observed in experiment with real atoms due to the difficulty of producing heavy nuclei with charge Z 170, however, can be realized near a Coulomb impurity in graphene with a charge Z 1 because of the small velocity of the Dirac excitations. Here, unexpectedly, we demonstrate that both the electron whispering-gallery modes and atomic collapse states coexist in grapheneWSe2 heterostructure quantum dots due to the Coulomb-like potential near their edges. By applying a perpendicular magnetic field, evolution from the atomic collapse states to unusual Landau levels in the collapse regime are explored for the first time.