Low-cost and highly efficient production of bacterial cellulose from sweet potato residues: Optimization, characterization, and application.

Bacterial cellulose (BC) is an emerging biological material with unique properties and structure, which has attracted more and more attention. In this study, Gluconacetobacter xylinus was used to convert sweet potato residues (SPR) hydrolysate to BC. SPR was directly used without pretreatment, and almost no inhibitors were generated, which was beneficial to subsequent glucan conversion and SPR-BC synthesis. SPR-BC production was 11.35 g/L under the optimized condition. The comprehensive structural characterization and mechanical analysis demonstrated that the crystallinity, maximum thermal degradation temperature, and tensile strength of SPR-BC were 87.39%, 263 °C, and 6.87 MPa, respectively, which were superior to those of BC produced with the synthetic medium. SPR-BC was added to rice straw pulp to enhance the bonding force between fibers and the indices of tensile, burst, and tear of rice straw paper. The indices were increased by 83.18%, 301.27%, and 169.58%, respectively. This research not only expanded the carbon source of BC synthesis, reduced BC production cost, but also improved the quality of rice straw paper.

Experimental violation of Mermin steering inequality by three-photon entangled states with nontrivial GHZ-fidelity.

Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen steering is an intermediate relationship between entanglement and Bell nonlocality in the hierarchical structure of quantum nonlocality. To certify the steerability of the entangled state, Mermin steering inequality is supposed to be violated by exceeding the inequality bound of 2. We present an experimental generation of post-selected three-photon entangled states and witness a maximal violation of the inequality up to 3.50±0.05. In the context of observing the maximal violation of Mermin steering inequality which requires measuring on the GHZ state, we derive a tight lower bound on the GHZ-fidelity that can be certified from the Mermin steering inequality violation. From this bound, it follows that the violation of Mermin steering inequality by 3.5 certifies the GHZ-fidelity of 78.66% at least. On the other hand, the above maximal violation of Mermin steering inequality observed in our experimental setup is produced by a post-selected entangled state having the GHZ-fidelity of 87.25 ± 0.34% through quantum tomography.