Studies of atmospheric refraction effects on laser data

The refraction effect from three perspectives was considered. An analysis of the axioms on which the accepted correction algorithms were based was the first priority. The integrity of the meteorological measurements on which the correction model is based was also considered and a large quantity of laser observations was processed in an effort to detect any serious anomalies in them. The effect of refraction errors on geodetic parameters estimated from laser data using the most recent analysis procedures was the focus of the third element of study. The results concentrate on refraction errors which were found to be critical in the eventual use of the data for measurements of crustal dynamics

A fast GPU Monte Carlo Radiative Heat Transfer Implementation for Coupling with Direct Numerical Simulation

We implemented a fast Reciprocal Monte Carlo algorithm, to accurately solve radiative heat transfer in turbulent flows of non-grey participating media that can be coupled to fully resolved turbulent flows, namely to Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS). The spectrally varying absorption coefficient is treated in a narrow-band fashion with a correlated-k distribution. The implementation is verified with analytical solutions and validated with results from literature and line-by-line Monte Carlo computations. The method is implemented on GPU with a thorough attention to memory transfer and computational efficiency. The bottlenecks that dominate the computational expenses are addressed and several techniques are proposed to optimize the GPU execution. By implementing the proposed algorithmic accelerations, a speed-up of up to 3 orders of magnitude can be achieved, while maintaining the same accuracy

Quantitative studies of nucleic acid in the cell by micro-spectrophotometry I. The critique and improvement of the microspectrophotometry

Some critical experiments have been carried out on the microspectrophotometry using the lymphocytes of a mouse, stained with Feulgen reaction, revealing that most reliable value can be attained by illuminating the material with a small spot-light and integrating the area surrounded by the extinction curve drawn by tracing along the diameter of the smeared and fixed cell.</p

Determining the Phase and Amplitude Distortion of a Wavefront using a Plenoptic Sensor

We have designed a plenoptic sensor to retrieve phase and amplitude changes resulting from a laser beam's propagation through atmospheric turbulence. Compared with the commonly restricted domain of (-pi, pi) in phase reconstruction by interferometers, the reconstructed phase obtained by the plenoptic sensors can be continuous up to a multiple of 2pi. When compared with conventional Shack-Hartmann sensors, ambiguities caused by interference or low intensity, such as branch points and branch cuts, are less likely to happen and can be adaptively avoided by our reconstruction algorithm. In the design of our plenoptic sensor, we modified the fundamental structure of a light field camera into a mini Keplerian telescope array by accurately cascading the back focal plane of its object lens with a microlens array's front focal plane and matching the numerical aperture of both components. Unlike light field cameras designed for incoherent imaging purposes, our plenoptic sensor operates on the complex amplitude of the incident beam and distributes it into a matrix of images that are simpler and less subject to interference than a global image of the beam. Then, with the proposed reconstruction algorithms, the plenoptic sensor is able to reconstruct the wavefront and a phase screen at an appropriate depth in the field that causes the equivalent distortion on the beam. The reconstructed results can be used to guide adaptive optics systems in directing beam propagation through atmospheric turbulence. In this paper we will show the theoretical analysis and experimental results obtained with the plenoptic sensor and its reconstruction algorithms.Comment: This article has been accepted by JOSA