We report measurements of the surface Shubnikov de Haas oscillations (SdH) on crystals of the topological insulator Bi2Te2Se. In crystals with large bulk resistivity (∼4 Ωcm at 4 K), we observe ∼15 surface SdH oscillations (to the n = 1 Landau Level) in magnetic fields B up to 45 Tesla. Extrapolating to the limit 1/B → 0, we confirm the 1 2 -shift expected from a Dirac spectrum. The results are consistent with a very small surface Lande g-factor.

The curse of dimensionality is commonly encountered in numerical partial differential equations (PDE), especially when uncertainties have to be modelled into the equations as random coefficients. However, very often the variability of physical quantities derived from PDE can be captured by a few features on the space of the coefficient fields. Based on such observation, we propose using neural network to parameterise the physical quantity of interest as a function of input coefficients. The representability of such quantity using a neural network can be justified by viewing the neural network as performing time evolution to find the solutions to the PDE. We further demonstrate the simplicity and accuracy of the approach through notable examples of PDEs in engineering and physics.

In this note we propose a method based on artificial neural network to study the transition between states governed by stochastic processes. In particular, we aim for numerical schemes for the committor function, the central object of transition path theory, which satisfies a high-dimensional Fokker-Planck equation. By working with the variational formulation of such partial differential equation and parameterizing the committor function in terms of a neural network, approximations can be obtained via optimizing the neural network weights using stochastic algorithms. The numerical examples show that moderate accuracy can be achieved for high-dimensional problems.

Consider N points in R d and M local coordinate systems that are related through unknown rigid transforms. For each point we are given (possibly noisy) measurements of its local coordinates in some of the coordinate systems. Alternatively, for each coordinate system, we observe the coordinates of a subset of the points. The problem of estimating the global coordinates of the N points (up to a rigid transform) from such measurements comes up in distributed approaches to molecular conformation and sensor network localization, and also in computer vision and graphics.The least-squares formulation of this problem, though non-convex, has a well known closed-form solution when M = 2 (based on the singular value decomposition). However, no closed form solution is known for M ≥ 3.In this paper, we demonstrate how the least-squares formulation can be relaxed into a convex program, namely a semidefinite program (SDP). By setting up connections between the uniqueness of this SDP and results from rigidity theory, we prove conditions for exact and stable recovery for the SDP relaxation. In particular, we prove that the SDP relaxation can guarantee recovery under more adversarial conditions compared to earlier proposed spectral relaxations, and derive error bounds for the registration error incurred by the SDP relaxation.We also present results of numerical experiments on simulated data to confirm the theoretical findings. We empirically demonstrate that (a) unlike the spectral relaxation, the relaxation gap is mostly zero for the semidefinite program (i.e., we are able to solve the original non-convex least-squares problem) up to a certain noise threshold, and (b) the semidefinite program performs significantly better than spectral and manifold-optimization methods, particularly at large noise levels.

We propose a novel neural network architecture, SwitchNet, for solving the wave equation based inverse scattering problems via providing maps between the scatterers and the scattered field (and vice versa). The main difficulty of using a neural network for this problem is that a scatterer has a global impact on the scattered wave field, rendering typical convolutional neural network with local connections inapplicable. While it is possible to deal with such a problem using a fully connected network, the number of parameters grows quadratically with the size of the input and output data. By leveraging the inherent low-rank structure of the scattering problems and introducing a novel switching layer with sparse connections, the SwitchNet architecture uses much fewer parameters and facilitates the training process. Numerical experiments show promising accuracy in learning the forward and inverse maps between the scatterers and the scattered wave field.