Perfect Anomalous Reflection with a Binary Huygens' Metasurface

In this paper we propose a new metasurface that is able to reflect a known incoming electromagnetic wave into an arbitrary direction, with perfect power efficiency. This seemingly simple task, which we hereafter call perfect anomalous reflection, is actually highly non-trivial due to the differing wave impedances and complex interference between the incident and reflected waves. Heretofore, proposed metasurfaces which achieve perfect anomalous reflection require complicated, deeply subwavelength and/or multilayer element structures which allow them to couple to and from leaky and/or evanescent waves. In contrast, we demonstrate that using a Binary Huygens' Metasurface (BHM) --- a passive and lossless metasurface with only two cells per period --- perfect anomalous reflection can be achieved over a wide angular and frequency range. Through simulations and experiments at 24 GHz, we show that a properly designed BHM can anomalously reflect an incident electromagnetic wave from $\theta_i = 50^\circ$ to $\theta_r = -22.5^\circ$, with perfect power efficiency to within experimental precision

Perfect Anomalous Reflection with an Aggressively Discretized Huygens' Metasurface

This paper investigates the discretization of a periodic metasurface and demonstrates how such a surface can achieve perfect anomalous reflection. Whilst most contemporary theoretical works on metasurfaces deal with continuous current or impedance distributions, we examine how discretization affects a metasurface, and show that in some cases one can discretize a metasurface aggressively --- to the extent of having only two cells per spatial period. Such aggressive discretization can lead to great simplifications in metasurface design, and perhaps more surprisingly, a possible performance improvement from continuous metasurfaces. Using this aggressive discretization technique, we report the design of a binary Huygens' metasurface which reflects an incident plane wave at 50$^\circ$ into a reflected direction of -22.5$^\circ$. Full-wave electromagnetic simulation shows the achievement of anomalous reflection with a power efficiency of 99.1%, which dramatically surpasses the performance of a corresponding passive continuous metasurface, for which the power efficiency is fundamentally limited to 69.6%.Comment: 3 pages, 3 figure

Relativistic Modification of the Gamow Factor

In processes involving Coulomb-type initial- and final-state interactions, the Gamow factor has been traditionally used to take into account these additional interactions. The Gamow factor needs to be modified when the magnitude of the effective coupling constant increases or when the velocity increases. For the production of a pair of particles under their mutual Coulomb-type interaction, we obtain the modification of the Gamow factor in terms of the overlap of the Feynman amplitude with the relativistic wave function of the two particles. As a first example, we study the modification of the Gamow factor for the production of two bosons. The modification is substantial when the coupling constant is large.Comment: 13 pages, in LaTe

Elliptic Flow from a Transversally Thermalized Fireball

The agreement of elliptic flow data at RHIC at central rapidity with the hydrodynamic model has led to the conclusion of very rapid thermalization. This conclusion is based on the intuitive argument that hydrodynamics, which assumes instantaneous local thermalization, produces the largest possible elliptic flow values and that the data seem to saturate this limit. We here investigate the question whether incompletely thermalized viscous systems may actually produce more elliptic flow than ideal hydrodynamics. Motivated by the extremely fast primordial longitudinal expansion of the reaction zone, we investigate a toy model which exhibits thermalization only in the transverse directions but undergoes collisionless free-streaming expansion in the longitudinal direction. For collisions at RHIC energies, elliptic flow results from the model are compared with those from hydrodynamics. With the final particle yield and \kt-distribution fixed, the transversally thermalized model is shown not to be able to produce the measured amount of elliptic flow. This investigation provides further support for very rapid local kinetic equilibration at RHIC. It also yields interesting novel results for the elliptic flow of massless particles such as direct photons.Comment: revtex4, 15 pages + 10 embedded EPS figure

A spatially shifted beam approach to subwavelength focusing

Although negative-refractive-index metamaterials have successfully achieved subwavelength focusing, image resolution is limited by the presence of losses. In this Letter, a metal transmission screen with subwavelength spaced slots is proposed that focuses the near-field beyond the diffraction limit and furthermore, is easily scaled from microwave frequencies to the optical regime. An analytical model based on the superposition of shifted beam patterns is developed that agrees very well with full-wave simulations and is corroborated by experimental results at microwave frequencies.Comment: 5 pages, 7 figures. Content updated following reviewer comments to match final published pape

Is there a role for unstimulated thyroglobulin velocity in predicting recurrence in papillary thyroid carcinoma patients with detectable thyroglobulin after radioiodine ablation?

BACKGROUND: In the follow-up of papillary thyroid cancer (PTC) patients treated with curative thyroidectomy and radioiodine ablation, raised thyroglobulin (Tg) predicts recurrence with reasonable sensitivity and specificity. However, a proportion of patients present with raised Tg level but no other clinical evidence of disease. Only limited data on Tg kinetics have been reported to date. Here we aim to evaluate the prognostic and predictive significance of nonstimulated serum Tg velocity (TgV). METHODS: Consecutive PTC patients treated with curative thyroidectomy and radioiodine ablation between 2003 and 2010 were analyzed. Patients with at least one detectable Tg measurement (>0.2 ng/mL) were included. TgV was defined as the annualized rate of Tg change. Logistic regression analyses were performed to evaluate the role of TgV in the prediction of disease recurrence. The optimal TgV cutoff was assigned by receiver-operating characteristic curve analysis. Overall survival of patients above versus below the TgV cutoff were determined by the Kaplan-Meier method and compared. RESULTS: Of a total of 501 patients, 87 had at least one Tg value >0.2 ng/mL; in these latter patients, 29 (33.3 %) developed recurrence. TgV was an independent predictor of the recurrence. TgV >/=0.3 ng/mL per year predicted recurrence with a sensitivity of 83.3 % and specificity of 94.4 %. Patients with TgV below the cutoff had a significantly better overall survival (p = 0.038). CONCLUSIONS: TgV predicts recurrence with high sensitivity and specificity, and is a prognosticator of survival in postthyroidectomy and postablation PTC patients with raised Tg.published_or_final_versio