Ultrathin topological insulator membranes are building blocks of exotic quantum matter. However, traditional epitaxy of these materials does not facilitate stacking in arbitrary orders, while mechanical exfoliation from bulk crystals is also challenging due to the non-negligible interlayer coupling therein. Here we liberate millimeter-scale films of the topological insulator Bi2Se3, grown by molecular beam epitaxy, down to 3 quintuple layers. We characterize the preservation of the topological surface states and quantum well states in transferred Bi2Se3 films using angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy. Leveraging the photon-energy-dependent surface sensitivity, the photoemission spectra taken with 6 and 21.2 eV photons reveal a transfer-induced migration of the topological surface states from the top to the inner layers. By establishing clear electronic structures of the transferred films and unveiling the wave function relocation of the topological surface states, our work lays the physics foundation crucial for the future fabrication of artificially stacked topological materials with single-layer precision.
Little is known about the chemical and biological profiles of Dicranopteris linearis and Psychotria adenophylla. No previous studies have investigated alpha-glucosidase inhibition using extracts from D. linearis and P. adenophylla. In this paper, bioactive-guided isolation procedures were applied to the plants D. linearis and P. adenophylla based on alpha-glucosidase inhibition. From the most active fractions, 20 compounds (DL1-DL13 and PA1-PA7) were isolated. The chemical structures were elucidated using spectroscopic data and compared with those available in the literature. These compounds were evaluated for alpha-glucosidase inhibition, while a molecular docking study was performed to elucidate the mechanisms involved. Consequently, D. linearis and P. adenophylla might serve as a good potential for developing new antidiabetic preparations.
A new carvotacetone sphaeranthone A and four known compounds 3-angeloyloxy-5-[2â³,3â³-epoxy-2â³-methylbutanoyloxy]-7-hydroxycarvotacetone (2), 3-angeloyloxy-5-[3â³-chloro-2â³-hydroxy-2â³-methylbutanoyloxy]-7-hydroxycarvotacetone (3), chrysosplenol D (4), and 3-O-methylquercetin (5) were isolated from leaves of Sphaeranthus africanus growing in Vietnam. Their chemical structures were elucidated by extensive 1D and 2D NMR analysis and high-resolution mass spectroscopy as well as comparisons in literature. Compounds 1-3 were evaluated for the alpha-glucosidase inhibition. They showed moderate activity with IC50 values of 103 ± 1.7, 146.8 ± 2.5, 49 ± 0.8 µg/mL, respectively.
This paper pushes the envelope on decomposing camouflaged regions in an image into meaningful components, namely, camouflaged instances. To promote the new task of camouflaged instance segmentation of in-the-wild images, we introduce a dataset, dubbed CAMO++, that extends our preliminary CAMO dataset (camouflaged object segmentation) in terms of quantity and diversity. The new dataset substantially increases the number of images with hierarchical pixel-wise ground truths. We also provide a benchmark suite for the task of camouflaged instance segmentation. In particular, we present an extensive evaluation of state-of-the-art instance segmentation methods on our newly constructed CAMO++ dataset in various scenarios. We also present a camouflage fusion learning (CFL) framework for camouflaged instance segmentation to further improve the performance of state-of-the-art methods. The dataset, model, evaluation suite, and benchmark will be made publicly available on our project page.
