科研成果 by Year: 2016

Perceptual learning is often orientation and location specific, which may indicate neuronal plasticity in early visual areas. However, learning specificity diminishes with additional exposure of the transfer orientation or location via irrelevant tasks, suggesting that the specificity is related to untrained conditions, likely because neurons representing untrained conditions are neither bottom-up stimulated nor top-down attended during training. To demonstrate these top-down and bottom-up contributions, we applied a "continuous flash suppression" technique to suppress the exposure stimulus into sub-consciousness, and with additional manipulations to achieve pure bottom-up stimulation or top-down attention with the transfer condition. We found that either bottom-up or top-down influences enabled significant transfer of orientation and Vernier discrimination learning. These results suggest that learning specificity may result from under-activations of untrained visual neurons due to insufficient bottom-up stimulation and/or top-down attention during training. High-level perceptual learning thus may not functionally connect to these neurons for learning transfer.

The production of GeV electron beam with narrow energy spread and high brightness is investigated using particle-in-cell simulations. A controlled electron injection scheme and a method for phase-space manipulation in a laser plasma accelerator are found to be essential. The injection is triggered by the evolution of two copropagating laser pulses near a sharp vacuum-plasma transition. The collection volume is well confined and the injected bunch is isolated in phase space. By tuning the parameters of the laser pulses, the parameters of the injected electron bunch, such as the bunch length, energy spread, emittance and charge, can be adjusted. Manipulating the phase-space rotation with the rephasing technique, the injected electron bunch can be accelerated to GeV level while keeping relative energy spread below 0.5% and transverse emittance below 1.0  μm. The results present a very promising way to drive coherent x-ray sources.

Time-dependent OFF-state leakage behavior of AlGaN/GaN MISHEMTs on silicon substrate is investigated and a novel degradation mechanism is proposed in this paper. Under constant high voltage OFF-state stress, drain leakage current gradually increases with stress time and the behavior is gate bias and temperature-dependent. Consecutive OFF-state breakdown measurement with drain injection technique indicates that the negative shift of threshold voltage (V-th) is responsible for the increase of drain leakage current during stress measurement. It is proposed that the negative shift of V-th is mainly induced by the ionization of uncompensated donor like deep levels near the channel, which are most likely to be located in the 300-nm-thick unintentionally doped GaN layer above the carbon doped buffer layer.

Carbonyl compounds play an important role in the formation of secondary aerosols and the cycling of free radicals in the atmosphere. We measured carbonyl compounds over urban Beijing, a megacity in the North China Plain, in summer and winter to investigate the relation of carbonyl compounds with haze and the interaction between carbonyl compounds and atmospheric radical cycling. We also determined carbonyl compounds in summer rainwater. Data of carbonyl compounds were analyzed in four cases, i.e., summer haze days (SHD), summer non-haze days (SND), winter haze days (WHD), and winter non-haze days (WND). Interestingly, the level of carbonyl compounds during WHD approached that of summer days. The results of the principal component analysis showed that there was no obvious source difference between SHD and SND. On WHD, however, more carbonyl compounds originated from the “diesel engine exhaust emission” than those on WND. We evaluated the effect of carbonyl compounds on the free radical cycling and the NO consumption potential for OH formation in the photochemical reactions using a novel ratio method. It was found that the production rate of ROx (the sum of OH, HO2 and RO2 radicals) was highest on SND, while the yield of ROx radicals from the reactions of carbonyl compounds was highest on WHD. Further, carbonyl compounds consumed more NO to produce OH radicals on WHD compared to the other three cases.

Being taller is associated with enhanced longevity, and higher education and earnings. We reanalysed 1472 population-based studies, with measurement of height on more than 18.6 million participants to estimate mean height for people born between 1896 and 1996 in 200 countries. The largest gain in adult height over the past century has occurred in South Korean women and Iranian men, who became 20.2 cm (95% credible interval 17.522.7) and 16.5 cm (13.319.7) taller, respectively. In contrast, there was little change in adult height in some sub-Saharan African countries and in South Asia over the century of analysis. The tallest people over these 100 years are men born in the Netherlands in the last quarter of 20th century, whose average heights surpassed 182.5 cm, and the shortest were women born in Guatemala in 1896 (140.3 cm; 135.8144.8). The height differential between the tallest and shortest populations was 19-20 cm a century ago, and has remained the same for women and increased for men a century later despite substantial changes in the ranking of countries.

A comprehensive measurement was conducted to investigate thecharacteristics of particulate matter (PM) pollution in winter and spring of Beijing. 24-hour particle samples were collected from December to May, 20092010, and the chemical compositions of PM2.5 were analyzed. The average PM2.5 massconcentrations were (84.97+or-68.98)mug/m3 and (65.25+or-45.76) mug/m3 in winter and spring, respectively. Secondary inorganic aerosols, i.e. sulfate, nitrate, andammonium (SNA), and secondary organic aerosols (SOA) were dominant theparticulate matter, with the total fraction (SNA+SOA) of 49% and 47% in winter and spring, respectively. Due to the largesource emissionand unfavorable meteorological conditions such as low temperature, low wind speed, and high relative humidity; the contributions of secondary inorganic aerosols (NH4+. NO3. SO42) were enhanced during thepolluted days, and the nitratewas more enhanced on polluted days. The SOA was always the most importantorganic aerosolcomponentcontributedto PM2.5 in winter and spring. The contribution ofprimary organicaerosolsalso increased due tothe stagnant meteorological condition on polluted days.