Explore the vast range of titles available.

This paper presents the development of the world’s first high-gain, all-photopolymer Bragg horn antennas explicitly designed for the WR-3.4 band (220–325 GHz), marking a groundbreaking advancement in terahertz (THz) antenna technology. Unlike conventional metallic horn antennas, which suffer from conductor losses and manufacturing complexity, this innovative design utilizes eco-friendly photopolymer materials and additive manufacturing, achieving a fractional bandwidth of 38.5% that fully covers the WR-3.4 band. The proposed antenna achieves a measured peak gain of 28.98 dBi at 300 GHz, with a return loss better than − 20dB across the band and a consistent half-power beamwidth (HPBW) of ~ 5°, ensuring precise directivity and minimal sidelobe interference. By employing a novel horn-type adapter for seamless mode conversion from TE 10 to the fundamental HE 11 mode, the design significantly enhances coupling efficiency and reduces signal loss. Additionally, fabrication costs can be reduced by over 50% compared to traditional metallic designs, while maintaining repeatability and enabling rapid prototyping. As the first demonstration of photopolymer-based antennas achieving such high gains in the 220–325 GHz THz spectrum, this work establishes a new benchmark in THz antenna technology, providing an eco-friendly, cost-effective, and high-performance solution for high-speed communication, medical diagnostics, security imaging, and spectroscopy applications.

In this paper, a terahertz circulator based on a magneto photonic crystal slab is envisaged. The triangular lattice photonic crystals with a line defect waveguide were constructed on an Al2O3 ceramic slab. Two cylindrical ferrites and two copper-clad plates in the junction of the Y-shaped wave-guide worked as a magneto-optical cavity resonator to approve the nonreciprocal function. In the working frequency range, 0.212–0.238 THz, the isolation of the circulator was better than 20 dB, and the insertion loss was better than 1 dB. The designed circulator based on the magneto photonic crystal slab experienced low loss and a wide bandwidth that satisfied its use in the THz application.

Although high-throughput sequencing and associated bioinformatics technologies have enabled the in-depth, sequence-based characterization of human immune repertoires, only a few studies on a relatively small number of sequences explored the characteristics of antibody repertoires in neonates, with contradictory conclusions. To gain a more comprehensive understanding of the human IgM antibody repertoire, we performed Illumina sequencing and IMGT/HighV-QUEST analysis of IgM heavy chain repertoire of the B lymphocytes from the cord blood (CB) of neonates, as well as the repertoire from peripheral blood of healthy human adults (HH). The comparative study revealed unexpectedly high levels of similarity between the neonatal and adult repertoires. In both repertoires, the VDJ gene usage showed no significant difference, and the most frequently used VDJ gene was IGHV4-59, IGHD3-10, and IGHJ3. The average amino acid (aa) length of CDR1 (CB: 8.5, HH: 8.4) and CDR2 (CB: 7.6, HH: 7.5), as well as the aa composition and the average hydrophobicity of the CDR3 demonstrated no significant difference between the two repertories. However, the average aa length of CDR3 was longer in the HH repertoire than the CB repertoire (CB: 14.5, HH: 15.5). Besides, the frequencies of aa mutations in CDR1 (CB: 19.33%, HH: 25.84%) and CDR2 (CB: 9.26%, HH: 17.82%) were higher in the HH repertoire compared to the CB repertoire. Interestingly, the most prominent difference between the two repertoires was the occurrence of N2 addition (CB: 64.87%, HH: 85.69%), a process that occurs during V-D-J recombination for introducing random nucleotide additions between D- and J-gene segments. The antibody repertoire of healthy adults was more diverse than that of neonates largely due to the higher occurrence of N2 addition. These findings may lead to a better understanding of antibody development and evolution pathways and may have potential practical value for facilitating the generation of more effective antibody therapeutics and vaccines.

The shortest path problem (SPP) is a classic problem and appears in a wide range of applications. Although a variety of algorithms already exist, new advances are still being made, mainly tuned for particular scenarios to have better performances. As a result, they become more and more technically complex and sophisticated. In this paper, we developed an intuitive and nature-inspired algorithm to compute all possible shortest paths between two nodes in a graph: Resonance Algorithm (RA). It can handle any undirected, directed, or mixed graphs, irrespective of loops, unweighted or positively weighted edges, and can be implemented in a fully decentralized manner. Although the original motivation for RA is not the speed per se, in certain scenarios (when sophisticated matrix operations can be employed, and when the map is very large and all possible shortest paths are demanded), it out-competes Dijkstra’s algorithm, which suggests that in those scenarios, RA could also be practically useful.

The Zika virus (ZIKV), a flavivirus transmitted by Aedes mosquitoes, has emerged as a global public health concern. Pre-existing cross-reactive antibodies against other flaviviruses could modulate immune responses to ZIKV infection by antibody-dependent enhancement, highlighting the importance of understanding the immunogenicity of the ZIKV envelope protein. In this study, we identified a panel of human monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) that target domain III (DIII) of the ZIKV envelope protein from a very large phage-display naive antibody library. These germline-like antibodies, sharing 98%-100% hoLogy with their corresponding germline IGHV genes, bound ZIKV DIII specifically with high affinities. One mAb, m301, broadly neutralized the currently circulating ZIKV strains and showed a synergistic effect with another mAb, m302, in neutralizing ZIKV in vitro and in a mouse model of ZIKV infection. Interestingly, epitope mapping and competitive binding studies suggest that m301 and m302 bind adjacent regions of the DIII C-C′ loop, which represents a recently identified cryptic epitope that is intermittently exposed in an uncharacterized virus conformation. This study extended our understanding of antigenic epitopes of ZIKV antibodies and has direct implications for the design of ZIKV vaccines. Emerging Microbes & Infections (2017) 6, e89; doi: 10.1038/emi.2017.79 ; published online 11 October 2017

Single-crystalline lead halide perovskite nanowires are emerging as promising one-dimensional blocks for nanoscience and nanotechnology, and extensive studies of nano-lasers and nano-photodetectors have been reported. However, as perfect confined structures, their optical waveguide performances have not been widely paid attention to up to now. Here, we report on the such issue on single-crystalline CsPbBr 3 nanowires and quantify it by near-field optical response mappings. The waveguide is verified as total internal reflection mode at the visible band (532 nm), and its far-field end-facet coupling efficiency of 89.6% and propagation loss as low as 5.9 dB/mm are measured from the nanowire with cross-sectional geometry of ∼600 nm × 300 nm. No evident bending loss exists in naturally curved nanowires, while it usually emerges in artificial-bended ones due to the wrinkled surfaces. Naturally welded nanowire networks show significant advantages in integrated waveguides over the artificial assembled ones, due to the coupled photons at the space-confined end-facet segments. Roughened surface reasoned by lattice degradation is detrimental to propagation loss, but it provides leaked channels for waveguide coupling on nanowire surface. This work studies the optical waveguide performance of perovskite nanowires with different geometries and goes a step further for integrated nanophotonics.

This study employs the recently developed Ladderpath approach, within the broader category of Algorithmic Information Theory (AIT), which characterizes the hierarchical and nested relationships among repeating substructures, to explore the structure-function relationship in neural networks, multilayer perceptrons (MLP), in particular. The metric order-rate η, derived from the approach, is a measure of structural orderliness: when η is in the middle range (around 0.5), the structure exhibits the richest hierarchical relationships, corresponding to the highest complexity. We hypothesize that the highest structural complexity correlates with optimal functionality. Our experiments support this hypothesis in several ways: networks with η values in the middle range show superior performance, and the training processes tend to naturally adjust η towards this range; additionally, starting neural networks with η values in this middle range appears to boost performance. Intriguingly, these findings align with observations in other distinct systems, including chemical molecules and protein sequences, hinting at a hidden regularity encapsulated by this theoretical framework.

The rapidly growing global data usage has demanded more efficient ways to utilize the scarce electromagnetic spectrum resource. Recent research has focused on the development of efficient multiplexing techniques in the millimeter-wave band (1–10 mm, or 30–300 GHz) due to the promise of large available bandwidth for future wireless networks. Frequency-division multiplexing is still one of the most commonly-used techniques to maximize the transmission capacity of a wireless network. Based on the frequency-selective tunnelling effect of the low-loss epsilon-near-zero metamaterial waveguide, we numerically and experimentally demonstrate five-channel frequency-division multiplexing and demultiplexing in the millimeter-wave range. We show that this device architecture offers great flexibility to manipulate the filter Q -factors and the transmission spectra of different channels, by changing of the epsilon-near-zero metamaterial waveguide topology and by adding a standard waveguide between two epsilon-near-zero channels. This strategy of frequency-division multiplexing may pave a way for efficiently allocating the spectrum for future communication networks.

To investigate the characteristics of the immunoglobulin light-chain repertoires with chronic HBV infection, the high-throughput sequencing and IMGT/HighV-QUEST were adapted to analyze the κ (IgK) and λ (IgL) light-chain repertoires from the inactive HBV carriers (IHB) and the healthy adults (HH). The comparative analysis revealed high similarity between the κ light-chain repertoires of the HBV carriers and the healthy adults. Nevertheless, the proportion of IGLV genes with ≥90% identity as the germline genes was higher in the IgL light-chain repertoire of the IHB library compared with that of HH library (74.6% vs. 69.1%). Besides, the frequency of amino acid mutations in the CDR1 regions was significantly lower in the IgL light-chain repertoire of the IHB library than that of the HH library (65.52% vs. 56.0%). These results suggested the lower somatic mutation level in the IgL repertoire of IHB library, which might indicate the biased selection of IGLV genes in the IgL repertoire with chronic HBV infection. These findings might lead to a better understanding of the characteristics of the light-chain repertoires of HBV chronically infected individuals.

The rapidly growing global data usage has demanded more efficient ways to utilize the scarce electromagnetic spectrum resource. Recent research has focused on the development of efficient multiplexing techniques in the millimeter-wave band (110 mm, or 30-300 GHz) due to the promise of large available bandwidth for future wireless networks. Frequency-division multiplexing is still one of the most commonly-used techniques to maximize the transmission capacity of a wireless network. Based on the frequency-selective tunnelling effect of the low-loss epsilon-near-zero metamaterial waveguide, we numerically and experimentally demonstrate five-channel frequency-division multiplexing and demultiplexing in the millimeter-wave range. We show that this device architecture offers great flexibility to manipulate the filter g-factors and the transmission spectra of different channels, by changing of the epsilon-near-zero metamaterial waveguide topology and by adding a standard waveguide between two epsilon-near-zero channels. This strategy of frequency-division multiplexing may pave a way for efficiently allocating the spectrum for future communication networks. frequency-division multiplexing, artificial effective medium, epsilon-near-zero metamaterial, integrated photonics PACS number(s): 41.20.Jb, 42.25.Dd, 42.79.Sz, 84.40.A