14,706 research outputs found
Parallelized X-Ray Tracing with GPU Ray-Tracing Engine
X-ray diffraction tomography (XDT) is used to probe material composition of objects, providing improved contrast between materials compared to conventional transmission based computed tomography (CT). In this work, a small angle approximation to Bragg\u27s Equation of diffraction is coupled with parallelized computing using Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) to accelerate XDT simulations. The approximation gives rise to a simple yet useful proportionality between momentum transfer, radial distance of diffracted signal with respect to incoming beam\u27s location, and depth of material, so that ray tracing may be parallelized. NVIDIA\u27s OptiX ray-tracing engine, a parallelized pipeline for GPUs, is employed to perform XDT by tracing rays in a virtual space, (x,y,zv), where zv is a virtual distance proportional to momentum transfer. The advantage gained in this approach is that ray tracing in this domain requires only 3D surface meshes, yielding calculations without the need of voxels. The simulated XDT projections demonstrate high consistency with voxel models, with a normalized mean square difference less than 0.66%, and ray-tracing times two orders of magnitude less than previously reported voxel-based GPU ray tracing results. Due to an accelerated simulation time, XDT projections of objects with three spatial dimensions (4D tensor) have also been reported, demonstrating the feasibility for largescale high-dimensional tensor tomography simulations
High-contrast imager for Complex Aperture Telescopes (HiCAT): 1. Testbed design
Searching for nearby habitable worlds with direct imaging and spectroscopy
will require a telescope large enough to provide angular resolution and
sensitivity to planets around a significant sample of stars. Segmented
telescopes are a compelling option to obtain such large apertures. However,
these telescope designs have a complex geometry (central obstruction, support
structures, segmentation) that makes high-contrast imaging more challenging. We
are developing a new high-contrast imaging testbed at STScI to provide an
integrated solution for wavefront control and starlight suppression on complex
aperture geometries. We present our approach for the testbed optical design,
which defines the surface requirements for each mirror to minimize the
amplitude-induced errors from the propagation of out-of-pupil surfaces. Our
approach guarantees that the testbed will not be limited by these Fresnel
propagation effects, but only by the aperture geometry. This approach involves
iterations between classical ray-tracing optical design optimization, and
end-to-end Fresnel propagation with wavefront control (e.g. Electric Field
Conjugation / Stroke Minimization). The construction of the testbed is planned
to start in late Fall 2013.Comment: Proc. of the SPIE 8864, 10 pages, 3 figures, Techniques and
Instrumentation for Detection of Exoplanets V
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Atomic electron tomography in three and four dimensions
Atomic electron tomography (AET) has become a powerful tool for atomic-scale structural characterization in three and four dimensions. It provides the ability to correlate structures and properties of materials at the single-atom level. With recent advances in data acquisition methods, iterative three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction algorithms, and post-processing methods, AET can now determine 3D atomic coordinates and chemical species with sub-Angstrom precision, and reveal their atomic-scale time evolution during dynamical processes. Here, we review the recent experimental and algorithmic developments of AET and highlight several groundbreaking experiments, which include pinpointing the 3D atom positions and chemical order/disorder in technologically relevant materials and capturing how atoms rearrange during early nucleation at four-dimensional atomic resolution
ASCA Temperature Maps of Three Clusters of Galaxies Abell 1060, AWM7, and the Centaurus Cluster
We present two-dimensional temperature maps of three bright clusters of
galaxies Abell 1060, AWM7, and the Centaurus cluster, based on multi-pointing
observations with the ASCA GIS. The temperatures are derived from hardness
ratios by taking into account the XRT response. For the Centaurus cluster, we
subtracted the central cool component using the previous ASCA and ROSAT
results, and the metallicity gradients observed in AWM7 and the Centaurus
cluster were included in deriving the temperatures. The intracluster medium in
Abell 1060 and AWM7 is almost isothermal from the center to outer regions with
a temperature of 3.3 and 3.9 keV, respectively. The Centaurus cluster exhibits
remarkable hot regions within about 30' from the cluster center showing a
temperature increase of +0.8 keV from the surrounding level of 3.5 keV, and
outer cool regions with lower temperatures by -1.3 keV. These results imply
that a strong merger has occurred in the Centaurus in the recent 2-3 Gyr, and
the central cool component has survived it. In contrast, the gas in Abell 1060
was well-mixed in an early period, which probably has prevented the development
of the central cool component. In AWM7, mixing of the gas should have occurred
in a period earlier than the epoch of metal enrichment.Comment: 18 pages, 8 figures (including color), Latex(PASJadd.sty,
PASJ95.sty), accepted for publication in PASJ. Postscript is also available
at http://www-x.phys.metro-u.ac.jp/~furusho/papers.htm
Importance driven environment map sampling
In this paper we present an automatic and efficient method for supporting Image Based Lighting (IBL) for bidirectional methods which improves both the sampling of the environment, and the detection and sampling of important regions of the scene, such as windows and doors. These often have a small area proportional to that of the entire scene, so paths which pass through them are generated with a low probability. The method proposed in this paper improves this by taking into account view importance, and modifies the lighting distribution to use light transport information. This also automatically constructs a sampling distribution in locations which are relevant to the camera position, thereby improving sampling. Results are presented when our method is applied to bidirectional rendering techniques, in particular we show results for Bidirectional Path Tracing, Metropolis Light Transport and Progressive Photon Mapping. Efficiency results demonstrate speed up of orders of magnitude (depending on the rendering method used), when compared to other methods
The Iray Light Transport Simulation and Rendering System
While ray tracing has become increasingly common and path tracing is well
understood by now, a major challenge lies in crafting an easy-to-use and
efficient system implementing these technologies. Following a purely
physically-based paradigm while still allowing for artistic workflows, the Iray
light transport simulation and rendering system allows for rendering complex
scenes by the push of a button and thus makes accurate light transport
simulation widely available. In this document we discuss the challenges and
implementation choices that follow from our primary design decisions,
demonstrating that such a rendering system can be made a practical, scalable,
and efficient real-world application that has been adopted by various companies
across many fields and is in use by many industry professionals today
Crossover from a square to a hexagonal pattern in Faraday surface waves
We report on surface wave pattern formation in a Faraday experiment operated
at a very shallow filling level, where modes with a subharmonic and harmonic
time dependence interact. Associated with this distinct temporal behavior are
different pattern selection mechanisms, favoring squares or hexagons,
respectively. In a series of bifurcations running through a pair of
superlattices the surface wave pattern transforms between the two incompatible
symmetries. The close analogy to 2D and 3D crystallography is pointed out.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure
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