Chinese Science Bulletin

The cone photoreceptors in our eyes selectively transduce the natural light into spiking representations, which endows the brain with high energy-efficiency color vision. However, the cone-like device with color-selectivity and spike-encoding capability remains challenging. Here, we propose a metal oxide-based vertically integrated spiking cone photoreceptor array, which can directly transduce persistent lights into spike trains at a certain rate according to the input wavelengths. Such spiking cone photoreceptors have an ultralow power consumption of less than 400 picowatts per spike in vi

Thermal comfort is of critical importance to people during hot weather or harsh working conditions to reduce heat stress. Therefore, personal cooling garments (PCGs) is a promising technology that provides a sustainable solution to provide direct thermal regulation on the human body, while at the same time, effectively reduces energy consumption on whole-building cooling. This paper summarizes the current status of PCGs, and depending on the requirement of electric power supply, we divide the PCGs into two categories with systematic instruction on the cooling materials, working principles,

It is known that in the design of quieter mechanical systems, vibration and noise control play important roles. Recently, acoustic black holes have been effectively used for structural design in controlling vibration and noise. An acoustic black hole is a power-law tapered profile to reduce phase and group velocities of wave propagation to zero. Additionally, the vibration energy at the location of acoustic black hole increases due to the gradual reduction of its thickness. The vibration damping, sound reduction, and vibration energy harvesting are the major applications in structural desig

In this paper, the wave propagation in phononic crystal composed of auxetic star-shaped honeycomb matrix with negative Poisson’s ratio is presented. Two types of inclusions with circular and rectangular cross sections are considered and the band structures of the phononic crystals are also obtained by the finite element method. The band structure of the phononic crystal is affected significantly by the auxeticity of the star-shaped honeycomb. Some other interesting findings are also presented, such as the negative refraction and the self-collimation. The present study demonstrates the

This paper presents the design, simulation and experimental validation of a gradient-index (GRIN) metasurface lens operating at 8 GHz for microwave imaging applications. The unit cell of the metasurface consists of an electric-LC (ELC) resonator. The effective refractive index of the metasurface is controlled by varying the capacitive gap at the center of the unit cell. This allows the design of a gradient index surface. A one-dimensional gradient index lens is designed and tested at first to describe the operational principle of such lenses. The design methodology is extended to a 2D gradi