Yuanyang Xie, Alexey V. Krasavin, Anatoly V. Zayats
Chirality plays a crucial role in a broad range of processes including light-matter interactions in physics, chemistry and biology, which opens up new applications in nanophotonics, quantum technologies and photochemistry. Quantum tunnelling provides a promising mechanism for light generation at the nanoscale, however the realisation of chiral light emission has remained elusive. Here, by integrating tunnel junctions with chiral plasmonic nanohelicoids, we achieve nanoscale generation of chiral light at a single-particle level. The tunnelling-driven resonant excitation of chiral dipolar modes of the nanohelicoids results in emission of a vortex light beam possessing both spin angular momentum with handedness selectivity of over 0.8 and its orbital counterpart, equal in magnitude and opposite in sign. The developed approach offers a new means for sculpturing photon spin generation at the nanoscale, highlighting its potential for next-generation optical components in display and AR/VR applications, as well as quantum information processing and photochemistry.
Low-scattering, deep-penetration light transport in biological media remains a pivotal challenge for biophotonic technologies, including biomedical imaging, optical diagnostics, and photodynamic therapy. This review builds upon and extends our earlier studies of nonlinear optical self-trapping and optically induced waveguiding in biological suspensions, such as human erythrocytes and cyanobacteria, where light-matter coupling is governed by optical-force-mediated particle redistribution. Recent progress has revealed increasingly rich and complex regimes, including the propagation and nonlinear self-action of structured (vortex) beams in biological environments, as well as nonlinear responses dominated by thermally driven mechanisms in absorptive biomolecular solutions (e.g., heme and chlorophyll). We place particular emphasis on distinctive nonlinear phenomena observed in these systems, including spatial self-phase modulation, optical-force-induced sculpturing of effective energy landscapes, and quasi-waveguide formation in soft, heterogeneous biological media. We conclude by highlighting emerging opportunities to harness these nonlinear behaviors for deep-tissue imaging, label-free biosensing, and the realization of biocompatible photonic structures and devices assembled directly from living or hybrid biological matter.
Anca Dinu, Andreiana Mihail, Andra-Maria Florescu
et al.
This study explores artificial visual creativity, focusing on ChatGPT's ability to generate new images intentionally pastiching original artworks such as paintings, drawings, sculptures and installations. The process involved twelve artists from Romania, Bulgaria, France, Austria, and the United Kingdom, each invited to contribute with three of their artworks and to grade and comment on the AI-generated versions. The analysis combines human evaluation with computational methods aimed at detecting visual and stylistic similarities or divergences between the original works and their AI-produced renditions. The results point to a significant gap between color and texture-based similarity and compositional, conceptual, and perceptual one. Consequently, we advocate for the use of a "style transfer dashboard" of complementary metrics to evaluate the similarity between pastiches and originals, rather than using a single style metric. The artists' comments revealed limitations of ChatGPT's pastiches after contemporary artworks, which were perceived by the authors of the originals as lacking dimensionality, context, and intentional sense, and seeming more of a paraphrase or an approximate quotation rather than as a valuable, emotion-evoking artwork.
The creation and manipulation of photonic skyrmions provide a novel degree of freedom for light-matter interactions, optical communication and nanometrology. Since the localized vortex within skyrmions arises from the twist and curl of the phase structure, the orbital angular momentum of light is essential for their construction. While numerous skyrmionic textures have been proposed, they are formed within the spatial domain and induced by the longitudinal orbital angular momentum. Here we theoretically propose and experimentally observe spatiotemporal skyrmions within a picosecond pulse wavepacket, generated through vectorial sculpturing of spatiotemporal wavepackets. The skyrmionic textures emerge within the spatiotemporal distribution of a vector field encompass all possible polarization states. Constructed upon the transverse orbital angular momentum, spatiotemporal skyrmions, in contrast to spatial skyrmions, exhibit no helical twisting perpendicular to the skyrmion plane, demonstrating enhanced stability to deformations or perturbations. These results expand the skyrmion family and offer new insights into optical quasiparticles, potentially leading to advanced applications in optical metrology, sensing, and data storage.
Buffer zones are essential for the protection of the Outstanding Universal Value (OUV) of World Heritage properties. In China, to address the limitations of the prevailing “two-line” delineation system for architectural heritage protection, this study introduces the concept of buffer zone as a new perspective on heritage management. Focusing on the Cao Family Compound—a representative residence of Shanxi Merchants—this research situates the site within a broader cultural network to fully articulate its historical and social values. The methodology unfolds in three phases: (1) comprehensive identification of 47 spatial elements contributing to the compound’s significance, through field investigation, literature review, analysis of historical imagery and architectural drawing, and oral history interview; (2) systematic evaluation of each element’s value contribution to the compound based on six criteria across two dimensions, employing the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Weighted Sum Method (WSM); (3) spatial visualization and hierarchical buffer zone delineation conducted via ArcGIS-based data modeling and the Natural Breaks classification method. This integrated approach establishes a holistic and structured framework that bridges architectural heritage with its setting, providing practical guidance for policymakers and conservation practitioners.
This paper examines the Epipaleolithic occupation of Gedikkaya Cave in northwestern Türkiye, which also served as a settlement during the Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods. The Epipaleolithic marks a period of increased human mobility, likely influenced by climatic events following the Last Glacial Maximum. During this time, the cave functioned as a shelter or refuge for local hunter-gatherers and transient populations. Artifacts suggest connections between European Upper Paleolithic cultures and the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A cultures of Anatolia and the Levant.The study focuses on the extraordinary symbolic and ritual manifestations found in a layer dated to 13,166–11,200 Cal BC, including artifacts, niches, and a special area featuring a stalagmite structure. These findings suggest the presence of welldeveloped and complex symbolic structures.
Probing spatially confined quantum states from afar - a long-sought goal to minimize external interference - has been proposed to be achievable in condensed matter systems via coherent projection. The latter can be tailored by sculpturing the eigenstates of the electron sea that surrounds the quantum state using atom-by-atom built cages, so-called quantum corrals. However, assuring the coherent nature of the projection, and manipulating its quantum composition, has remained an elusive goal. Here, we experimentally realize the coherent projection of a magnetic impurity-induced, Yu-Shiba-Rusinov quantum state using the eigenmodes of corrals on the surface of a superconductor, which enables us to manipulate the particle-hole composition of the projected state by tuning corral eigenmodes through the Fermi energy. Our results demonstrate a controlled non-local method for the detection of magnet superconductor hybrid quantum states.
Malte Prinzler, Egor Zakharov, Vanessa Sklyarova
et al.
We introduce Joker, a new method for the conditional synthesis of 3D human heads with extreme expressions. Given a single reference image of a person, we synthesize a volumetric human head with the reference identity and a new expression. We offer control over the expression via a 3D morphable model (3DMM) and textual inputs. This multi-modal conditioning signal is essential since 3DMMs alone fail to define subtle emotional changes and extreme expressions, including those involving the mouth cavity and tongue articulation. Our method is built upon a 2D diffusion-based prior that generalizes well to out-of-domain samples, such as sculptures, heavy makeup, and paintings while achieving high levels of expressiveness. To improve view consistency, we propose a new 3D distillation technique that converts predictions of our 2D prior into a neural radiance field (NeRF). Both the 2D prior and our distillation technique produce state-of-the-art results, which are confirmed by our extensive evaluations. Also, to the best of our knowledge, our method is the first to achieve view-consistent extreme tongue articulation.
When humans create sculptures, we are able to reason about how geometrically we need to alter the clay state to reach our target goal. We are not computing point-wise similarity metrics, or reasoning about low-level positioning of our tools, but instead determining the higher-level changes that need to be made. In this work, we propose LLM-Craft, a novel pipeline that leverages large language models (LLMs) to iteratively reason about and generate deformation-based crafting action sequences. We simplify and couple the state and action representations to further encourage shape-based reasoning. To the best of our knowledge, LLM-Craft is the first system successfully leveraging LLMs for complex deformable object interactions. Through our experiments, we demonstrate that with the LLM-Craft framework, LLMs are able to successfully create a set of simple letter shapes. We explore a variety of rollout strategies, and compare performances of LLM-Craft variants with and without an explicit goal shape images. For videos and prompting details, please visit our project website: https://sites.google.com/andrew.cmu.edu/llmcraft/home
This work presents HeadArtist for 3D head generation from text descriptions. With a landmark-guided ControlNet serving as the generative prior, we come up with an efficient pipeline that optimizes a parameterized 3D head model under the supervision of the prior distillation itself. We call such a process self score distillation (SSD). In detail, given a sampled camera pose, we first render an image and its corresponding landmarks from the head model, and add some particular level of noise onto the image. The noisy image, landmarks, and text condition are then fed into the frozen ControlNet twice for noise prediction. Two different classifier-free guidance (CFG) weights are applied during these two predictions, and the prediction difference offers a direction on how the rendered image can better match the text of interest. Experimental results suggest that our approach delivers high-quality 3D head sculptures with adequate geometry and photorealistic appearance, significantly outperforming state-ofthe-art methods. We also show that the same pipeline well supports editing the generated heads, including both geometry deformation and appearance change.
Amira Ibrahim Mohamed, Rasha Muhammad Ali Hassan, Emad Shafiq
et al.
The technological progress is the breakthrough that helps some architects to utilize the capabilities presented in this age in order to achieve their dreams in reaching future architecture expressing their needs and adding modern aspects to architecture that never exist before. This also will enhance the approaching towards a virtual new world throughwhich various images can be seen from one place via playing with time and place as well as moving the environment around him to be a kinetic dynamic architecture characterized by transformation and impermanence of one vision over time. The kinetic is considered as the main form of nature starting from the kinetic of galaxies and planets to the kinetic of electronics inside the atoms and each has an impact on nature. This is considered as an integrated part of the modern architecture as it is the method that is used in expressing the architectural ideas. During the previous century, art witnessed an essential transformations in terms of its concept, approaches and subjects. Moreover, this was the result behind the technological development that contributes in developing many domains such as art in all of its forms such as photographing, sculpture and architecture. In addition, this results in creating modern artistic approaches,
By using quantum electrodynamics in a dispersive medium, we describe scattering of plane-wave and twisted photons by a slab made of a helical medium, the helix axis being normal to the slab plane and the medium being not translation invariant in this plane, in general. In the particular cases, the permittivity tensor of a helical medium corresponds to cholesteric liquid crystals, $C^*$-smectics, biaxial chiral nematics and smectics, $q$-plates, chiral sculptured thin films, and helical dislocations. Both perturbative and nonperturbative approaches are considered. The explicit expressions for scattering amplitudes, probabilities, and Stokes parameters of photons are found taking into account the form of the photon wave packet. The selection rules are established showing that the helical medium transfers the momentum and the angular momentum to scattered photons. This property can be employed for production of twisted photons with large projection of the total angular momentum. We describe the device for shifting the projection of the total angular momentum of a photon and the principal scheme for signal coding in terms of twisted photons.
Organic photoswitchable molecules have struggled in solid state form to fulfill their remarkable potential, in terms of photoswitching performance and long-term stability when compared to their inorganic counterparts. We report the concept of non-electron deficient host's surface with optimal porosity and hydrophobicity, as a priori strategy to design photoefficient organic solid-state photochromic materials with outstanding mechanical robustness. When exposed to a light stimulus including natural sunlight, the photoswitchable nanocomposite changes color promptly and reversibly, in a matter of seconds along with excellent photo-fatigue resistance, which are on a par with inorganic photochromes. Exemplars of commercially viable prototypes that are optically clear, comprising smart windows, complex photochromic sculptures, and self-erasing rewritable devices, were engineered by direct blending with resilient polymers; particularly, the use of high-stiffness polymer (> 2 GPa) is no longer an insurmountable challenge. Finally, photochromic films with anticounterfeiting features could be manufactured through precision inkjet printing of nanocrystals.
Since the outbreak of the technological revolution and the scientific progress in the field of industry and producing tools and modern apparatus that equipped the artist with the cognitive capacity and plastic capacities through recognizing his ores in expressing his paintings executed with the method of relief sculpture inside his artistic workshop, so that equipments manual and electricity instruments can't be dispensed that increase the imaginative and creative artist capacities , which gave him creative visions making him interacts with the ore with modern methods and technologies, Hence we conclude that technology is " a set of skills and experiences that are necessary for producing any artistic work, consequently it is a method for the Sculptor that helps him in performance , entering into deepness and secrets of each ore that he will deal with and how to overcome it. Hence, technology is the core of the art work, and aesthetic values are the product of what was made and it is restricted also in performance methods in which the artist deals with in producing his work, and it isn't also natural values. Digital technology appeared in modern relief sculpture works keeping pace with technological industrial progress that equipped the artist with plastic capacities and provided him an opportunity to break in ores world that they were difficult to enter in its deepness and deal with it, and thanks to modern digital technology where the sculptor can produce very charm and accurate works whether these works serve the aesthetical aspect as producing art works with relief or basic sculpture or combine them with a very accuracy and with any ore. With the development of technology concept, there is a change in art methods, and as a result of this development, the plastic concepts developed. Technology was functioned in modern sculpture works aesthetically, discovers new expressive contents and copes with this technological caravan that has an obvious effect in the technical methods for several artists.
Open-dissipative systems obeying parity-time ($\mathcal{PT}$) symmetry are capable of demonstrating oscillatory dynamics akin to the conservative systems. In contrast to limit cycle solutions characteristic of nonlinear systems, the $\mathcal{PT}$-symmetric oscillations form a continuum of non-isolated orbits. However, precise sculpturing of the real potential and the gain-loss spatial profiles required for establishing of the $\mathcal{PT}$-symmetry is practically challenging. The optical devices, such as lasers, exhibit relaxation dynamics and do not operate as the $\mathcal{PT}$-symmetric systems. Here we demonstrate how these constraints can be overcome. We predict that a pair of optically trapped polariton condensates (a polariton dimer) can be excited and operated in the oscillating regime typical of the isolated systems. This regime can be realized in the presence of both dissipative and conservative coupling between the condensates and can be maintained at an arbitrary external pump intensity. Every orbit is characterised by a frequency comb appearing in the spectrum of a dimer in the presence of the conservative nonlinearity. Our results pave the way for the creation of the optical computing devices operating under the constant-wave external pumping.
The implementation of aberration-corrected electron beam lithography (AC-EBL) in a 200 keV scanning transmission electron microscope (STEM) is a novel technique that could be used for the fabrication of quantum devices based on 2D atomic crystals with single nanometer critical dimensions, allowing to observe more robust quantum effects. In this work we study electron beam sculpturing of nanostructures on suspended graphene field effect transistors using AC-EBL, focusing on the in situ characterization of the impact of electron beam exposure on device electronic transport quality. When AC-EBL is performed on a graphene channel (local exposure) or on the outside vicinity of a graphene channel (non-local exposure), the charge transport characteristics of graphene can be significantly affected due to charge doping and scattering. While the detrimental effect of non-local exposure can be largely removed by vigorous annealing, local-exposure induced damage is irreversible and cannot be fixed by annealing. We discuss the possible causes of the observed exposure effects. Our results provide guidance to the future development of high-energy electron beam lithography for nanomaterial device fabrication.
Os murais têm se vindo a destacar como a principal produção artística nas cidades observando-se o seu desenvolvimento e crescente valorização. Tamanha projeção veio despertar o interesse por parte de marcas na sua rentabilização como uma alternativa à fotografia publicitária, associando-se a sua grande visibilidade e potencial de comunicação. Os murais vieram alterar os signos da malha urbana, promovendo novas e diferentes formas de interação com a expressão física do contexto urbano. São analisados, através da semiótica social, murais de arte urbana assim como murais de cariz publicitário com recurso a meta-funções – ideacional, interpessoal e intertextual – tanto a nível a verbal como visual. É possível constatar que todos os murais são polissémicos, ricos em possíveis interpretações. Os murais associados às marcas encontram-se condicionados de forma mais consistente pela obrigatoriedade da presença de elementos associados à marca, não se traduzindo em menor carga simbólica. Aos murais de arte urbana, não comerciais, associa-se uma maior necessidade de decifração e interpretação metafórica, no entanto, nem é possível distinguir a nível estético aquilo que é um mural artístico de um comercial.