The studies of topological phases of matter have been extended from condensed matter physics to photonic systems, resulting in fascinating designs of robust photonic devices. Recently, higher-order topological insulators (HOTIs) have been investigated as a novel topological phase of matter beyond the conventional bulk-boundary correspondence. Previous studies of HOTIs have been mainly focused on the topological multipole systems with negative coupling between lattice sites. Here we experimentally demonstrate that second-order topological insulating phases without negative coupling can be realized in two-dimensional dielectric photonic crystals (PCs). We visualize both one-dimensional topological edge states and zero-dimensional topological corner states by using nearfield scanning technique. To characterize the topological properties of PCs, we define a topological invariant based on the bulk polarizations. Our findings open new research frontiers for searching HOTIs in dielectric PCs and provide a new mechanism for light-manipulating in a hierarchical way.Introduction.-One of the most enchanting developments of condensed matter physics over the past few decades has been the discovery of topological phases of matter primarily found in electronic systems [1,2] and recently extended to bosonic systems such as photonics [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14] and phononics [16][17][18][19][20][21]. A key feature of the topological insulators is the backscattering-immune edge states which are robust against perturbations and provide potential designs of various topological devices [3-6, 18, 20]. Typically, n-dimensional (nD) topological insulators (TIs) have (n − 1)D edge states which is defined as the bulk-boundary correspondence (BBC) [15]. However, a new kind of TIs defined as the higher-order topological insulators (HOTIs), have been recently proposed in tight-binding models in electronic systems which go beyond the traditional BBC description [22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36]. Concretely, the mth-order TIs have nD gapped bulk states and (n − 1)D, (n − 2)D, ..., (n − m − 1)D gapped edge states while having (n − m)D gapless edge states. The arising of these lower-dimensional topological edge states can either stem from the quantization of quadrupole moments such as the topological quadrupole insulators [22] which have been realized in mechanics [23], microwave systems [24] and topolectrical circuits [25], or stem from the quantization of the dipole moments [22] such as the HOTIs in 2D breathing kagome lattice [29] which have been realized in sonic crystals [33-35] and a waveguide array [32].

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In this paper, we present a novel broadband bandpass filter based on spoof surface plasmon polaritons (SSPPs) in the microwave frequency band. The proposed bandpass filter includes three parts: (1) coplanar waveguide (CPW); (2) matching transition; and (3) coupled structure that is an asymmetric coupled filter constructed by five grooved strips. The proposed bandpass filter realizes excellent low loss performance from 7 to 10 GHz, in which its insertion loss is around 1.5 dB in the same frequency band. Meanwhile, this filter has a good band stop characteristic from 3 to 7 GHz. A simple but accurate transmission line model was proposed to evaluate the proposed broadband SSPPs filter. The measured data, simulated results and the results obtained from the transmission line model have shown a very good agreement. The proposed planar broadband filter plays an important role for filtering surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) waves in plasmonic circuits and systems.

As a highly endangered species, the giant panda (panda) has attracted significant attention in the past decades. Considerable efforts have been put on panda conservation and reproduction, offering the promising outcome of maintaining the population size of pandas. To evaluate the effectiveness of conservation and management strategies, recognizing individual pandas is critical. However, it remains a challenging task because the existing methods, such as traditional tracking method, discrimination method based on footprint identification, and molecular biology method, are invasive, inaccurate, expensive, or challenging to perform. The advances of imaging technologies have led to the wide applications of digital images and videos in panda conservation and management, which makes it possible for individual panda recognition in a noninvasive manner by using image‐based panda face recognition method. In recent years, deep learning has achieved great success in the field of computer vision and pattern recognition. For panda face recognition, a fully automatic deep learning algorithm which consists of a sequence of deep neural networks (DNNs) used for panda face detection, segmentation, alignment, and identity prediction is developed in this study. To develop and evaluate the algorithm, the largest panda image dataset containing 6,441 images from 218 different pandas, which is 39.78% of captive pandas in the world, is established. The algorithm achieved 96.27% accuracy in panda recognition and 100% accuracy in detection. This study shows that panda faces can be used for panda recognition. It enables the use of the cameras installed in their habitat for monitoring their population and behavior. This noninvasive approach is much more cost‐effective than the approaches used in the previous panda surveys.

Tuning the Fermi level (EF) in Bi2Te3 topological-insulator (TI) films is demonstrated on controlling the temperature of growth with molecular-beam epitaxy (MBE).