subject

physics.app-ph

physics.app-ph: explore 11 source-linked works published from 2026 to 2026, with original documents and citations.

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Includes records with this source-supplied label or an explicit phrase match in their metadata. Matches indicate a mention, not proof that a paper uses a method or tests a material. Source versions are consolidated by DOI.

Sources: arxiv. Collection updated 2026-09-15. Counts describe this index, not the complete source archives.

arXiv2026

Vision-Based Tactile Sensing for the Perception of the Object's Compliance and Hardness

Object compliance perception enables the identification of soft materials, supporting tasks such as fruit detection and assisted medical palpation. Compliance perception requires sensing an object's deformation and contact forces. Existing vision-based tactile sensing for compliance perception usually depends only on force or deformation. However, deformation-based approaches cannot reliably quantify object compliance, while force-based methods are overly sensitive to geometric variations. To address these limitations, this paper presents a framework that fuses temporal force sequences and deformation field information. Specifically, time-varying contact forces are inferred from tactile image sequences via a neural network, while deformation characteristics are encoded using depth maps. Crucially, the temporal force sequence is used as a dynamic force-response feature for compliance recognition. In standard experiments, the force prediction error reaches 0.06 N within a measurement range of 12 N. The proposed method achieves a 98.0% Shore-hardness classification accuracy for samples ranging from 10 HA to 80 HA. In practical scenarios, including abnormal fruit detection and soft matter, the overall accuracy exceeds 98.5%. This method improves the compliance perception ability of artificial tactile systems and facilitates their deployment in embodied perception applications.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

Coordinate-Residual Physics-Driven Neural Network for Inverse Scattering Imaging

Electromagnetic inverse scattering is a nonlinear and ill-posed computational imaging problem, where accurate reconstruction is challenging due to measurement limitations, noise, and high computational costs, especially for 3-D imaging. Although physics-driven neural networks (PDNNs) reduce the dependence on labeled training data, existing accelerated PDNN frameworks often rely on preliminary reconstruction-based region selection, which may introduce instability when the selected region is inaccurate. In this paper, a coordinate-residual physics-driven neural network (CRPDNN) is proposed for 3-D electromagnetic inverse scattering. CRPDNN represents the unknown complex contrast distribution using normalized spatial coordinates and a residual convolutional network, whose parameters are optimized by enforcing consistency between the measured and model-predicted scattered fields. Unlike existing subregion-accelerated PDNN approaches, CRPDNN does not require a preliminary reconstruction, thereby avoiding dependence on its accuracy. For the reported noise-free 3-D synthetic cases, CRPDNN achieves an average relative error of 2.10\%, compared with 7.97\% for CSI and 3.99\% for $L_{2/3}$-FBE-WCIE, while providing approximately 5.5- and 12.1-fold speedups over the two baselines, respectively. Additional 2-D comparisons further demonstrate its stability and computational efficiency relative to existing PDNN frameworks. CRPDNN also maintains reliable reconstruction performance under noisy measurements, and the 3-D Fresnel experiments further indicate its potential for practical imaging applications.

physics.comp-ph↗

arXiv2026

Physics-Guided Concentration Inference from Resistance Transients in a Mixed-Phase SnO-SnO$_2$ Carbon Monoxide Sensor with p-n Switching

This work presents a physics-guided machine-learning framework for carbon monoxide concentration inference from experimentally measured resistance transients of a mixed-phase SnO-SnO$_2$ material gas sensor exhibiting temperature-dependent p-n switching behavior. Cycle-level transient responses are represented through physically interpretable descriptors and complemented by compact fast Fourier transform (FFT) and discrete wavelet transform (DWT)-based summaries. Using leakage-aware grouped cross-validation, we study both multi-class concentration classification and continuous concentration regression for the p-type and n-type sensing regimes separately. Across both regimes, fused features provide the strongest overall performance, while the physics-guided descriptor block remains highly competitive, indicating that the dominant concentration information is already encoded in physically meaningful transient dynamics. The p-type branch shows the best concentration-class discrimination, with the fused Random Forest classifier reaching approximately $96.5\%$ accuracy, whereas the n-type branch yields the best quantitative concentration estimation, with the fused Random Forest regressor achieving an MAE$\approx 1.48$ ppm and an R$^2$ $\approx 0.992$. These results reveal a clear dual-regime behavior: p-type sensing is particularly favorable for classification, whereas n-type sensing is more favorable for high-fidelity regression. More broadly, the study demonstrates that leakage-aware, cycle-level, physics-guided machine learning can extend conventional gas-sensing analysis beyond single-response metrics while preserving physical interpretability

physics.chem-ph↗

arXiv2026

Arctic Dispersion Interruption Phenomenon and Sound Source Depth Estimation

The sound speed profile in the deep Arctic Ocean causes the surface layer to form a normal mode waveguide. When the depth of the sound source or receiver is near a node of the eigenfunction, the source cannot excite the mode, or the receiver cannot detect it, resulting in the modal amplitude at the receiver being approximately zero. This manifests as a dispersion interruption in the dispersion structure, which can be observed through time-frequency analysis of the received acoustic signal. Based on the interruption frequency identified from the received signal, combined with the relationship between node depth and modal frequency calculated from the ocean sound speed profile, the source depth can be estimated if the receiver depth is known. The phenomenon of dispersion interruption and the method of estimating source depth have been validated through simulations and experiments.

physics.app-ph↗

arXiv2026

Diffusion-Based Inverse Design of Dielectric Resonator Metasurfaces for Shaping Smart Electromagnetic Environments

Future wireless systems are expected to transform the surrounding space from a passive propagation medium into a smart electromagnetic environment, where engineered surfaces control wave propagation, support wireless sensing, and create programmable electromagnetic fingerprints. A key challenge in realizing this vision is the inverse design of metasurfaces for tailored electromagnetic propagation. While forward analysis evaluates the response of a known geometry, the inverse task starts from a prescribed scattering signature and seeks a physically realizable structure that produces it. This inverse task is inherently nonlinear and often high-dimensional, while candidate solutions may be non-unique and provide no direct indication of practical realizability. Here, we introduce a conditional diffusion framework for inverse design of dielectric resonator metasurfaces from target angular scattering patterns. Trained on T-matrix simulated geometry-response pairs, the model learns a conditional distribution of geometries instead of a deterministic mapping, enabling multiple candidate designs for the ill-posed inverse problem. The best generated metasurface achieves a mean percentage error of 1.39%, outperforming CMA-ES optimization (4.1% after 10 h) while requiring only about one minute for after-training inference. The model also produces lower error distributions than deterministic neural baselines for out-of-distribution spectra, highlighting the potential of diffusion models for efficient metasurface design.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

A unified geometric design framework for kirigami structures

In recent years, kirigami metamaterials have been widely studied and applied in science and engineering. While various two- and three-dimensional kirigami design methods have been developed, most of them are only applicable to a limited class of kirigami structures. In this work, we develop a unified framework for kirigami design that encompasses a wide range of 2D-to-2D, 2D-to-3D, and 3D-to-3D shape-morphing effects, as well as additional geometric and physical properties such as compact reconfigurability and rigid deployability. In particular, by reformulating the design task as a length-based constrained optimization problem and solving it simultaneously for multiple target states of the kirigami structure, our unified design framework enables greater design flexibility and stronger theoretical support. Experimental results with a wide range of shape-morphing effects are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework. We further present a rigorous theoretical analysis of several key aspects of kirigami design, covering inertia transposition, aspect-ratio law, and angle defects, thereby elucidating important design rules and limitations. Altogether, our work paves a new way for the design of shape-morphing mechanical metamaterials.

cond-mat.soft↗

arXiv2026

Evaluating LLM-based AI agents integrated with materials synthesis tools: the case of atomic layer deposition

This work provides an overview of the different strategies that can be used to evaluate the performance of AI models and agents based on large language models (LLMs) for materials synthesis. After providing a brief overview of the key technologies behind the current generation of AI agents based on LLMs, we summarize the different approaches to evaluating these models in the context of materials science and in particular on materials synthesis, with a specific emphasis on scenarios in which the models are directly integrated with experimental tools. We discuss evaluation strategies spanning knowledge and reasoning benchmarks, tool-use benchmarks, and closed loop benchmarks involving the interaction with experimental systems or realistic virtual tools. We use atomic layer deposition (ALD) as a case study, emphasizing how existing approaches in the literature both build from general approaches used beyond materials science and can be generalized to other materials synthesis techniques. Finally, we provide a practical evaluation framework to evaluate LLMs in the context of materials synthesis

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2026

Beyond sensitivity: mechanism-resolved error budgets for designing quantum sensors

Quantum sensors are specified by a headline sensitivity, yet applications also demand accuracy and reliability. The dominant limiter of one metric is often known, but no method resolves how interacting mechanisms combine into a signed, per-mechanism budget for each metric. We introduce a framework that computes a sensor's sensitivity, accuracy, and robustness from one open-system simulation and attributes each to its limiting mechanism. For a nitrogen-vacancy diamond ensemble the attribution inverts across metrics: dephasing limits sensitivity, the thermal ground-state shift limits accuracy, and optical leakage limits robustness. At identical sensitivity the recovered-field bias spans $8$ to $1500$\,nT, so tuning to sensitivity alone can miss the accuracy target by two orders of magnitude. The same modeling transfers to a cesium optically pumped magnetometer recording a human magnetocardiogram. As a digital twin, it predicts the gain from addressing each limiter, so sensors can be designed to the required metrics.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2026

Physics-informed learning for the inverse problem in resonant ultrasound spectroscopy

Inferring elastic constants from resonant ultrasound spectra is a nonlinear and typically overdetermined inverse problem based on finite spectral data. We formulate the Rayleigh-Ritz inverse problem as a constrained inverse-isospectral problem on the set of physically admissible elasticity tensors. This induces effective low-dimensional variables for the inverse map on the admissible elasticity manifold: length and elastic scales, aspect-ratio coordinates, scale-free spectral features, and stability-respecting elastic ratios. We use these variables to construct a physics-informed learning pipeline in which a regression model acts only on reduced spectral and geometric features, while scale recovery and final elastic-constant reconstruction are imposed analytically. For the full cubic benchmark, the reconstructed constants have MAE values of $20.37(35.15)$, $24.30(41.33)$, and $2.13(3.66)~\mathrm{GPa}$ for $C_{11}$, $C_{12}$, and $C_{44}$. In the fixed-geometry benchmark, the corresponding cubic MAPE values are $4.14(3.87)\%$, $8.31(8.50)\%$, and $2.44(2.86)\%$, while the isotropic values are $4.0(3.6)\%$ and $0.4(0.3)\%$ for the bulk and shear moduli. The inverse problem then becomes a constrained regression problem in variables adapted to the geometry, scaling, crystal symmetry, and thermodynamic stability of Hookean elasticity.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2026

Optimizing Train Driving to Minimize the Electricity Cost of an Entire Railway Traffic Mesh using Evolutionary Algorithms

This paper presents a procedure to optimize the way trains are driven, which pursues, in addition to fulfilling operational constraints such as admissible speeds or journey durations, the minimization of the cost related to supplying electrical energy to the trains, including the cost of the energy consumption and the cost of the power capacity utilization. This procedure combines: (i) a traffic model that merges the energy and power footprint of each rail service part of the traffic mesh, and (ii) an evolutionary computation framework that enables searching for the optimal way to drive the trains to achieve an optimal traffic mesh. This procedure is applied to a 450 km long section of the high-speed line from Madrid to Barcelona (Spain).

cs.NE↗

arXiv2026

Bubble2Heat: Optical to Thermal Inference in Pool Boiling Using Physics-encoded Generative AI

Phase change process plays a critical role in thermal management systems, yet quantitative characterization of multiphase heat transfer remains limited by the challenges of measuring temperature fields in chaotic, rapidly evolving flow regimes. While computational methods offer temperature data at a high spatiotemporal resolution in ideal cases, replicating complex experimental conditions remains prohibitively difficult. In this paper, we present a deep learning framework that can generate temperature field data at simulation resolution from segmented high-speed recordings and pointwise thermocouple readings which are typically available in a canonical pool boiling experimental configuration without requiring advanced techniques. This framework leverages a conditional generative adversarial network trained only on simulation data. To ensure direct applicability of the model to experimental data, our framework also introduces a preprocessing pipeline that aligns high resolution simulation data with experimental measurements through both conventional image processing and image segmentation with pretrained convolutional neural network. We further show that standard data augmentation strategies are effective in enhancing the physical plausibility of the inference when precise physical constraints are not applicable. Our results highlight the potential of deep generative models to bridge the gap between observable multiphase phenomena and underlying thermal transport, offering a powerful approach to augment and interpret experimental measurements in complex two-phase systems.

cs.LG↗

Compare source metadata on this page

Work	Published	Source identifier	Source
Vision-Based Tactile Sensing for the Perception of the Object's Compliance and Hardness	2026-09-03	2510.12528	arxiv
Coordinate-Residual Physics-Driven Neural Network for Inverse Scattering Imaging	2026-09-01	2608.09382	arxiv
Physics-Guided Concentration Inference from Resistance Transients in a Mixed-Phase SnO-SnO$_2$ Carbon Monoxide Sensor with p-n Switching	2026-08-31	2605.23971	arxiv
Arctic Dispersion Interruption Phenomenon and Sound Source Depth Estimation	2026-08-31	2608.30360	arxiv
Diffusion-Based Inverse Design of Dielectric Resonator Metasurfaces for Shaping Smart Electromagnetic Environments	2026-08-30	2608.29907	arxiv
A unified geometric design framework for kirigami structures	2026-08-30	2608.30032	arxiv
Evaluating LLM-based AI agents integrated with materials synthesis tools: the case of atomic layer deposition	2026-08-29	2608.29309	arxiv
Beyond sensitivity: mechanism-resolved error budgets for designing quantum sensors	2026-08-28	2608.28519	arxiv
Physics-informed learning for the inverse problem in resonant ultrasound spectroscopy	2026-08-27	2608.27590	arxiv
Optimizing Train Driving to Minimize the Electricity Cost of an Entire Railway Traffic Mesh using Evolutionary Algorithms	2026-08-26	2609.05493	arxiv
Bubble2Heat: Optical to Thermal Inference in Pool Boiling Using Physics-encoded Generative AI	2026-02-01	2505.00823	arxiv

These are bibliographic comparisons, not experimental rankings. Follow the original document for methods and conditions.