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Graphene layers placed on SrTiO3 single-crystal substrates, i.e., templates for remote epitaxy of functional oxide membranes, were investigated using temperature-dependent confocal Raman spectroscopy. This approach successfully resolved distinct Raman modes of graphene that are often untraceable in conventional measurements with non-confocal optics due to the strong Raman scattering background of SrTiO3. Information on defects and strain states was obtained for a few graphene/SrTiO3 samples that were synthesized by different techniques. This confocal Raman spectroscopic approach can shed light on the investigation of not only this graphene/SrTiO3 system but also various two-dimensional layered materials whose Raman modes interfere with their substrates. 

As students read textbooks, they often highlight the material they deem to be most important. We analyze students’ highlights to predict their subsequent performance on quiz questions. Past research in this area has encoded highlights in terms of where the highlights appear in the stream of text—a positional representation. In this work, we construct a semantic representation based on a state-of-the-art deep-learning sentence embedding technique (SBERT) that captures the content-based similarity between quiz questions and highlighted (as well as non-highlighted) sentences in the text. We construct regression models that include latent variables for student skill level and question difficulty and augment the models with highlighting features. We find that highlighting features reliably boost model performance. We conduct experiments that validate models on held-out questions, students, and student-questions and find strong generalization for the latter two but not for held-out questions. Surprisingly, highlighting features improve models for questions at all levels of the Bloom taxonomy, from straightforward recall questions to inferential synthesis/evaluation/creation questions. 

We report measurements of production cross sections for ${\rho }^{+}$, ${\rho }^0$, $\omega$, $K^{*+}$, $K^{*0}$, $\varphi$, $\eta$, $K_S^0$, $f_0\left(980\right)$, $D^{+}$, $D^0$, $D_s^{+}$, $D^{*+}$, $D^{*0}$, and $D_s^{*+}$in $e^{+}{e}^{-}$collisions at a center-of-mass energy near 10.58 GeV. The data were recorded by the Belle experiment, consisting of $571{\mathrm{fb}}^{-1}$at 10.58 GeV and $74{\mathrm{fb}}^{-1}$at 10.52 GeV. Production cross sections are extracted as a function of the fractional hadron momentum $x_p$. The measurements are compared to Monte Carlo generator predictions with various fragmentation settings, including those that have increased fragmentation into vector mesons over pseudoscalar mesons. The cross sections measured for light hadrons are consistent with no additional increase of vector over pseudoscalar mesons. The charmed-meson cross sections are compared to earlier measurements—when available—including older Belle results, which they supersede. They are in agreement before application of an improved initial-state radiation correction procedure that causes slight changes in their $x_p$shapes. Published by the American Physical Society2025 

We investigate whether student comprehension and knowledge retention can be predicted from textbook annotations, specifically the material that students choose to highlight. Using a digital open-access textbook platform, Openstax, students enrolled in Biology, Physics, and Sociology courses read sections of their introductory text as part of required coursework, optionally highlighted the text to flag key material, and then took brief quizzes as the end of each section. We find that when students choose to highlight, the specific pattern of highlights can explain about 13% of the variance in observed quiz scores. We explore many different representations of the pattern of highlights and discover that a low-dimensional logistic principal component based vector is most effective as input to a ridge regression model. Considering the many sources of uncontrolled variability affecting student performance, we are encouraged by the strong signal that highlights provide as to a student’s knowledge state. 

In the bottomonium sector, the hindered magnetic dipole transitions between P-wave states $h_b\left(2P\right)\to {\chi }_{bJ}\left(1P\right)\gamma$, $J=0$, 1, 2, are expected to be severely suppressed according to the relativized quark model, due to the spin flip of the $b$quark. Nevertheless, a recent model following the coupled-channel approach predicts the corresponding branching fractions to be enhanced by orders of magnitude. In this Letter, we report the first search for such transitions. We find no significant signals and set upper limits at 90% confidence level on the corresponding branching fractions: $\mathcal{B}\left[h_b\right(2P)\to \gamma {\chi }_{b0}(1P\left)\right]<2.7\times {10}^{-1}$, $\mathcal{B}\left[h_b\right(2P)\to \gamma {\chi }_{b1}(1P\left)\right]<5.4\times {10}^{-3}$and $\mathcal{B}\left[h_b\right(2P)\to \gamma {\chi }_{b2}(1P\left)\right]<1.3\times {10}^{-2}$. These values help to constrain the parameters of the coupled-channel models. The results are obtained using a $121.4{\mathrm{fb}}^{-1}$data sample taken around $\sqrt{s}=10.860\mathrm{GeV}$with the Belle detector at the KEKB asymmetric-energy $e^{+}{e}^{-}$collider. Published by the American Physical Society2025 

We report the first evidence for the $h_b\left(2\mathrm{P}\right)\to \mathrm{\Upsilon }\left(1\mathrm{S}\right)\eta$transition with a significance of 3.5 standard deviations. The decay branching fraction is measured to be $\mathcal{B}\left[h_b\right(2\mathrm{P})\to \mathrm{\Upsilon }(1\mathrm{S}\left)\eta \right]=({7.1}_{-3.2}^{+3.7}\pm 0.8)\times {10}^{-3}$, which is noticeably smaller than expected. We also set upper limits on ${\pi }^0$transitions of $\mathcal{B}\left[h_b\right(2\mathrm{P})\to \mathrm{\Upsilon }(1\mathrm{S}\left){\pi }^0\right]<1.8\times {10}^{-3}$, and $\mathcal{B}\left[h_b\right(1\mathrm{P})\to \mathrm{\Upsilon }(1\mathrm{S}\left){\pi }^0\right]<1.8\times {10}^{-3}$, at the 90% confidence level. These results are obtained with a $131.4{\mathrm{fb}}^{-1}$data sample collected near the $\mathrm{\Upsilon }\left(5\mathrm{S}\right)$resonance with the Belle detector at the KEKB asymmetric-energy $e^{+}{e}^{-}$collider. Published by the American Physical Society2024 

We search for excited charmed baryons in the ${\mathrm{\Lambda }}_c^{+}\eta$system using a data sample corresponding to an integrated luminosity of $980{\mathrm{fb}}^{-1}$. The data were collected by the Belle detector at the KEKB $e^{+}{e}^{-}$asymmetric-energy collider. No significant signals are found in the ${\mathrm{\Lambda }}_c^{+}\eta$mass spectrum, including the known ${\mathrm{\Lambda }}_c(2880{)}^{+}$and ${\mathrm{\Lambda }}_c(2940{)}^{+}$. Clear ${\mathrm{\Lambda }}_c(2880{)}^{+}$and ${\mathrm{\Lambda }}_c(2940{)}^{+}$signals are observed in the $p{D}^0$mass spectrum. We set upper limits at 90% credibility level on ratios of branching fractions of ${\mathrm{\Lambda }}_c(2880{)}^{+}$and ${\mathrm{\Lambda }}_c(2940{)}^{+}$decaying to ${\mathrm{\Lambda }}_c^{+}\eta$relative to ${\mathrm{\Sigma }}_c\left(2455\right)\pi$of $<0.13$for the ${\mathrm{\Lambda }}_c(2880{)}^{+}$and $<1.11$for the ${\mathrm{\Lambda }}_c(2940{)}^{+}$. We measure ratios of branching fractions of ${\mathrm{\Lambda }}_c(2880{)}^{+}$and ${\mathrm{\Lambda }}_c(2940{)}^{+}$decaying to $p{D}^0$relative to ${\mathrm{\Sigma }}_c\left(2455\right)\pi$of $0.75\pm 0.03\left(\mathrm{stat}\right)\pm 0.07\left(\mathrm{syst}\right)$for the ${\mathrm{\Lambda }}_c(2880{)}^{+}$and $3.59\pm 0.21\left(\mathrm{stat}\right)\pm 0.56\left(\mathrm{syst}\right)$for the ${\mathrm{\Lambda }}_c(2940{)}^{+}$. Published by the American Physical Society2024 

We perform an angular analysis of the $B\to K^{*}{e}^{+}{e}^{-}$decay for the dielectron mass squared, $q^2$, range of $0.0008–1.1200{\mathrm{GeV}}^2/c^4$using the full Belle dataset in the $K^{*0}\to K^{+}{\pi }^{-}$and $K^{*+}\to K_S^0{\pi }^{+}$channels, incorporating new methods of electron identification to improve the statistical power of the dataset. This analysis is sensitive to contributions from right-handed currents from physics beyond the Standard Model by constraining the Wilson coefficients ${\mathcal{C}}_7^{(\prime )}$. We perform a fit to the $B\to K^{*}{e}^{+}{e}^{-}$differential decay rate and measure the imaginary component of the transversality amplitude to be $A_T^{\mathrm{Im}}=-1.27\pm 0.52\pm 0.12$, and the $K^{*}$transverse asymmetry to be $A_T^{\left(2\right)}=0.52\pm 0.53\pm 0.11$, with $F_L$and $A_T^{\mathrm{Re}}$fixed to the Standard Model values. The resulting constraints on the value of ${\mathcal{C}}_7^{\prime }$are consistent with the Standard Model within a $2\sigma$confidence interval. Published by the American Physical Society2024 

We report the results of the first search for Standard Model and baryon-number-violating two-body decays of the neutral $B$mesons to ${\mathrm{\Lambda }}^0$and ${\mathrm{\Omega }}_c^{(*)0}$using $711{\mathrm{fb}}^{-1}$of data collected at the $\mathrm{\Upsilon }\left(4S\right)$resonance with the Belle detector at the KEKB asymmetric-energy $e^{+}{e}^{-}$collider. We observe no evidence of signal from any such decays and set 95% confidence-level upper limits on the products of $B^0$and ${\overline{B}}^0$branching fractions for these two-body decays with $\mathcal{B}({\mathrm{\Omega }}_c^0\to {\pi }^{+}{\mathrm{\Omega }}^{-})$in the range between $9.5\times {10}^{-8}$and $31.2\times {10}^{-8}$. Published by the American Physical Society2024 

We measure the complete set of angular coefficients $J_i$for exclusive $\overline{B}\to D^{*}\ell {\overline{\nu }}_{\ell }$decays ( $\ell =e$, $\mu$). Our analysis uses the full $711{\mathrm{fb}}^{-1}$Belle dataset with hadronic tag-side reconstruction. The results allow us to extract the form factors describing the $\overline{B}\to D^{*}$transition and the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa matrix element $\left|V_{\mathrm{cb}}\right|$. Using recent lattice QCD calculations for the hadronic form factors, we find $\left|V_{\mathrm{cb}}\right|=(40.7\pm 0.7)\times {10}^{-3}$using the Boyd-Grinstein-Lebed parametrization, compatible with determinations from inclusive semileptonic decays. We search for lepton flavor universality violation as a function of the hadronic recoil parameter $w$and investigate the differences of the electron and muon angular distributions. We find no deviation from standard model expectations. Published by the American Physical Society2024