Multimode laser cooling and ultra-high sensitivity force sensing with nanowires

Photo-induced forces can be used to manipulate and cool the mechanical motion of oscillators. When the oscillator is used as a force sensor, such as in atomic force microscopy, active feedback is an enticing route to enhancing measurement performance. Here, we show broadband multimode cooling of $-23$ dB down to a temperature of $8 \pm 1$~K in the stationary regime. Through the use of periodic quiescence feedback cooling, we show improved signal-to-noise ratios for the measurement of transient signals. We compare the performance of real feedback to numerical post-processing of data and show that both methods produce similar improvements to the signal-to-noise ratio of force measurements. We achieved a room temperature force measurement sensitivity of $< 2\times10^{-16}$ N with integration time of less than $0.1$ ms. The high precision and fast force microscopy results presented will potentially benefit applications in biosensing, molecular metrology, subsurface imaging and accelerometry.Comment: 16 pages and 3 figures for the main text, 14 pages and 5 figures for the supplementary informatio

Rehaussement du signal de parole par EMD et opérateur de Teager-Kaiser

The authors would like to thank Professor Mohamed Bahoura from Universite de Quebec a Rimouski for fruitful discussions on time adaptive thresholdingIn this paper a speech denoising strategy based on time adaptive thresholding of intrinsic modes functions (IMFs) of the signal, extracted by empirical mode decomposition (EMD), is introduced. The denoised signal is reconstructed by the superposition of its adaptive thresholded IMFs. Adaptive thresholds are estimated using the Teager–Kaiser energy operator (TKEO) of signal IMFs. More precisely, TKEO identifies the type of frame by expanding differences between speech and non-speech frames in each IMF. Based on the EMD, the proposed speech denoising scheme is a fully data-driven approach. The method is tested on speech signals with different noise levels and the results are compared to EMD-shrinkage and wavelet transform (WT) coupled with TKEO. Speech enhancement performance is evaluated using output signal to noise ratio (SNR) and perceptual evaluation of speech quality (PESQ) measure. Based on the analyzed speech signals, the proposed enhancement scheme performs better than WT-TKEO and EMD-shrinkage approaches in terms of output SNR and PESQ. The noise is greatly reduced using time-adaptive thresholding than universal thresholding. The study is limited to signals corrupted by additive white Gaussian noise

Kalman tracking of linear predictor and harmonic noise models for noisy speech enhancement

This paper presents a speech enhancement method based on the tracking and denoising of the formants of a linear prediction (LP) model of the spectral envelope of speech and the parameters of a harmonic noise model (HNM) of its excitation. The main advantages of tracking and denoising the prominent energy contours of speech are the efficient use of the spectral and temporal structures of successive speech frames and a mitigation of processing artefact known as the ‘musical noise’ or ‘musical tones’.The formant-tracking linear prediction (FTLP) model estimation consists of three stages: (a) speech pre-cleaning based on a spectral amplitude estimation, (b) formant-tracking across successive speech frames using the Viterbi method, and (c) Kalman filtering of the formant trajectories across successive speech frames.The HNM parameters for the excitation signal comprise; voiced/unvoiced decision, the fundamental frequency, the harmonics’ amplitudes and the variance of the noise component of excitation. A frequency-domain pitch extraction method is proposed that searches for the peak signal to noise ratios (SNRs) at the harmonics. For each speech frame several pitch candidates are calculated. An estimate of the pitch trajectory across successive frames is obtained using a Viterbi decoder. The trajectories of the noisy excitation harmonics across successive speech frames are modeled and denoised using Kalman filters.The proposed method is used to deconstruct noisy speech, de-noise its model parameters and then reconstitute speech from its cleaned parts. Experimental evaluations show the performance gains of the formant tracking, pitch extraction and noise reduction stages

Detection of a new, low-brightness supernova remnant possibly associated with EGRET sources

We report on the discovery of a shell-type supernova remnant in the southern sky. It is a large (8*8), low-brightness source with a nonthermal radio spectrum, which requires background filtering to isolate it from the diffuse background emission of the Galaxy. Three 3EG gamma-ray sources are spatially correlated with the radio structure. We have made 21-cm line observations of the region and found that two of these sources are coincident with HI clouds. We propose that the gamma-ray emission is the result of hadronic interactions between high-energy protons locally accelerated at the remnant shock front and atomic nuclei in the ambient clouds.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figure