176,785 research outputs found
Magnetic bearings-state of the art
Magnetic bearings have existed for many years, at least in theory. Earnshaw's theorem, formulated in 1842, concerns stability of magnetic suspensions, and states that not all axes of a bearing can be stable without some means of active control. In Beam's widely referenced experiments, a tiny (1/64 in diameter) rotor was rotated to the astonishing speed of 800,000 rps while it was suspended in a magnetic field. Despite a long history, magnetic bearings have only begun to see practical application since about 1980. The development that finally made magnetic bearings practical was solid state electronics, enabling power supplies and controls to be reduced in size to where they are now comparable in volume to the bearings themselves. An attempt is made to document the current (1991) state of the art of magnetic bearings. The referenced papers are large drawn from two conferences publications published in 1988 and 1990 respectively
Beating the PNS attack in practical quantum cryptography
In practical quantum key distribution, weak coherent state is often used and
the channel transmittance can be very small therefore the protocol could be
totally insecure under the photon-number-splitting attack. We propose an
efficient method to verify the upper bound of the fraction of counts caused by
multi-photon pluses transmitted from Alice to Bob, given whatever type of Eve's
action. The protocol simply uses two coherent states for the signal pulses and
vacuum for decoy pulse. Our verified upper bound is sufficiently tight for QKD
with very lossy channel, in both asymptotic case and non-asymptotic case. The
coherent states with mean photon number from 0.2 to 0.5 can be used in
practical quantum cryptography. We show that so far our protocol is the
decoy-state protocol that really works for currently existing set-ups.Comment: So far this is the unique decoy-state protocol which really works
efficiently in practice. Prior art results are commented in both main context
and the Appendi
Ultra-Efficient Cooling of Resonators: Beating Sideband Cooling with Quantum Control
The present state-of-the-art in cooling mechanical resonators is a version of
"sideband" cooling. Here we present a method that uses the same configuration
as sideband cooling --- coupling the resonator to be cooled to a second
microwave (or optical) auxiliary resonator --- but will cool significantly
colder. This is achieved by varying the strength of the coupling between the
two resonators over a time on the order of the period of the mechanical
resonator. As part of our analysis, we also obtain a method for fast,
high-fidelity quantum information-transfer between resonators.Comment: 4 pages, revtex4-1, 2 png figure
Phytochemical Compounds and Protection from Cardiovascular Diseasesa. A State of the Art
Cardiovascular diseases represent a worldwide relevant socioeconomical problem. Cardiovascular disease prevention relies also on lifestyle changes, including dietary habits. The cardioprotective effects of several foods and dietary supplements in both animal models and in humans have been explored. It was found that beneficial effects are mainly dependent on antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties, also involving modulation of mitochondrial function. Resveratrol is one of the most studied phytochemical compounds and it is provided with several benefits in cardiovascular diseases as well as in other pathological conditions (such as cancer). Other relevant compounds are Brassica oleracea, curcumin, and berberine, and they all exert beneficial effects in several diseases. In the attempt to provide a comprehensive reference tool for both researchers and clinicians, we summarized in the present paper the existing literature on both preclinical and clinical cardioprotective effects of each mentioned phytochemical. We structured the discussion of each compound by analyzing, first, its cellular molecular targets of action, subsequently focusing on results from applications in both ex vivo and in vivo models, finally discussing the relevance of the compound in the context of human diseases
Accessing the Microscopic World
The Exploratorium in San Francisco offers museum visitors the opportunity to use and manipulate state-of-the-art microscopes to visualize an array of living specimen
Recombinator Networks: Learning Coarse-to-Fine Feature Aggregation
Deep neural networks with alternating convolutional, max-pooling and
decimation layers are widely used in state of the art architectures for
computer vision. Max-pooling purposefully discards precise spatial information
in order to create features that are more robust, and typically organized as
lower resolution spatial feature maps. On some tasks, such as whole-image
classification, max-pooling derived features are well suited; however, for
tasks requiring precise localization, such as pixel level prediction and
segmentation, max-pooling destroys exactly the information required to perform
well. Precise localization may be preserved by shallow convnets without pooling
but at the expense of robustness. Can we have our max-pooled multi-layered cake
and eat it too? Several papers have proposed summation and concatenation based
methods for combining upsampled coarse, abstract features with finer features
to produce robust pixel level predictions. Here we introduce another model ---
dubbed Recombinator Networks --- where coarse features inform finer features
early in their formation such that finer features can make use of several
layers of computation in deciding how to use coarse features. The model is
trained once, end-to-end and performs better than summation-based
architectures, reducing the error from the previous state of the art on two
facial keypoint datasets, AFW and AFLW, by 30\% and beating the current
state-of-the-art on 300W without using extra data. We improve performance even
further by adding a denoising prediction model based on a novel convnet
formulation.Comment: accepted in CVPR 201
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