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1. Slab horizontal subduction and slab tearing beneath East Asia

   https://doi.org/doi.org:10.1029/2018GL081703  

   Ma. P., Liu (May 2019, Geophysical research letters)
2. The 2021 M _W 8.1 Kermadec Earthquake Sequence: Great Earthquake Rupture Along the Mantle/Slab Contact

   https://doi.org/10.1029/2024JB030926  

   Ye, Lingling; Hu, Yangming; Xia, Tao; Lay, Thorne; Sang, Yingquan; Chen, Xiaofei; Kanamori, Hiroo; Romano, Fabrizio; Lorito, Stefano; Gui, Zhou (April 2025, Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth)

   Abstract Most great earthquakes on subduction zone plate boundaries have large coseismic slip concentrated along the contact between the subducting slab and the upper plate crust. On 4 March 2021, a magnitude 7.4 foreshock struck 1 hr 47 min before a magnitude 8.1 earthquake along the northern Kermadec island arc. The mainshock is the largest well‐documented underthrusting event along the ∼2,500‐km long Tonga‐Kermadec subduction zone. Using teleseismic, geodetic, and tsunami data, we find that all substantial coseismic slip in the mainshock is located along the mantle/slab interface at depths from 20 to 55 km, with the large foreshock nucleating near the down‐dip edge. Smaller foreshocks and most aftershocks are located up‐dip of the mainshock, where substantial prior moderate thrust earthquake activity had occurred. The upper plate crust is ∼17 km thick in northern Kermadec with only moderate‐size events along the crust/slab interface. A 1976 sequence withM_Wvalues of 7.9, 7.8, 7.3, 7.0, and 7.0 that spanned the 2021 rupture zone also involved deep megathrust rupture along the mantle/slab contact, but distinct waveforms exclude repeating ruptures. Variable waveforms for eight deep M6.9+ thrusting earthquakes since 1990 suggest discrete slip patches distributed throughout the region. The ∼300‐km long plate boundary in northern Kermadec is the only documented subduction zone region where the largest modeled interplate earthquakes have ruptured along the mantle/slab interface, suggesting that local frictional properties of the putatively hydrated mantle wedge may involve a dense distribution of Antigorite‐rich patches with high slip rate velocity weakening behavior in this locale. 

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3. Photonic Crystal Slab Metalens

   https://doi.org/10.1109/IPC53466.2022.9975696  

   Liu, Zhonghe; Pan, Mingsen; Liu, Aaron; Kelly, George; Sampsell, Matthew; Liu, Jian; Zhou, Weidong (November 2022, IEEE)
4. Scalable Spike-and-Slab

   Biswas, Niloy; Mackey, Lester; Meng, Xiao-Li (July 2022, PMLR)

   Chaudhuri, Kamalika and (Ed.)

   Spike-and-slab priors are commonly used for Bayesian variable selection, due to their interpretability and favorable statistical properties. However, existing samplers for spike-and-slab posteriors incur prohibitive computational costs when the number of variables is large. In this article, we propose Scalable Spike-and-Slab (S^3), a scalable Gibbs sampling implementation for high-dimensional Bayesian regression with the continuous spike-and-slab prior of George & McCulloch (1993). For a dataset with n observations and p covariates, S^3 has order max{n^2 p_t, np} computational cost at iteration t where p_t never exceeds the number of covariates switching spike-and-slab states between iterations t and t-1 of the Markov chain. This improves upon the order n^2 p per-iteration cost of state-of-the-art implementations as, typically, p_t is substantially smaller than p. We apply S^3 on synthetic and real-world datasets, demonstrating orders of magnitude speed-ups over existing exact samplers and significant gains in inferential quality over approximate samplers with comparable cost. 

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5. Lesser Antilles slab reconstruction reveals lateral slab transport under the Caribbean since 50 Ma

   https://doi.org/10.1016/j.epsl.2023.118561  

   Chen, Yi-Wei; Wu, Jonny; Goes, Saskia (February 2024, Earth and Planetary Science Letters)

   H Thybo (Ed.)

   The link between surface tectonic plates and mantle slabs is fundamental for paleo-tectonic reconstructions and for our understanding of mantle dynamics. Many seismic tomography-based studies have assumed vertical slab sinking and projected mantle features to the surface to reconstruct paleo-trench locations or explain tectonic features. Here, we used a slab-unfolding approach that does not require assumptions about sinking paths or rates to re-interpret the seismic structure of the Lesser Antilles slab underneath the Caribbean. A recent study invoked mainly vertical slab sinking and a highly folded and deformed slab to explain seismic Caribbean mantle structures. However, our results show that the upper-mantle Lesser Antilles slab structure can be better explained by limited intra-slab deformation and up to ~900 km lateral slab transport towards the northwest after subduction. Our results indicate that such lateral slab transport can occur even with probable weaknesses in the slab that originate from a subducted fossil ridge-transform system. We ascribe the lateral slab transport in the mantle to a kinematic connection with the North American plate, which has migrated northwestward since the Eocene. 

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