Three-dimensional linear modeling of tongue: articulatory data and models

Volume images of tongue were acquired by MRI from one subject uttering a corpus representative of French allophone articulations. Supplementary images of hard palate, jaw, and hyoid bone were acquired by CT. The three-dimensional tongue surface outline was represented, for each of the 46 articulations of the corpus, by a mesh obtained by fitting a generic mesh to the set of tongue contours traced from the MR images. Jaw and hyoid bone positions were also determined. The set of the 3D coordinates of all vertices of the tongue mesh constituted the variables on which linear component analysis was applied. Six linearly independent components were found to explain 87 % of the variance of the tongue data. The associated parameters that control the linear articulator tongue model are related to jaw and hyoid positions, and to the actions of tongue muscles such as the genioglossus, the hyoglossus or the styloglossus. In addition, it was shown that the full 3D tongue surface is predictable from its 2D midsagittal contour with a mere 13.6 % increase in the overall full 3D reconstruction RMS error, which confirms quantitatively previous results. Finally, the tongue volume was found to depart by at most ±5% from its mean over the corpus, which supports the hypothesis of tongue tissue incompressibility for speech

Comparison of energy consumption and costs of different HEVs and PHEVs in European and American context

This paper will analyse on the one hand the potential of Plug in Hybrid electric Vehicles to significantly reduce fuel consumption and displace it torward various primary energies thanks to the electricity sector. On the other hand the total cost of ownership of two different PHEV architectures will be compared to a conventional cehicle and a HEV without external charging

Electrophysical characteristics of Sub-THz diode with Schottky barrier

In the paper, the results of research of the electrophysical and frequency characteristics of semiconductor structure with a Schottky barrier based on n- GaAs are presented. Current-voltage characteristic and frequency characteristic at the range 115-257 GHz are given. The possibility of using such semiconductor structures as a detector of Sub-THz radiation is shown

Application of the Schottky diode as a detector of continuous terahertz radiation

The results of research of the electrophysical and frequency characteristics of the semiconductor structure of a Schottky diode based on gallium arsenide are presented. The diode structure was modelled in the Sentaurus TCAD software package. A comparison of the current-voltage characteristics obtained by mathematical modeling and by experiment are presented. The frequency response in the range of 115-257 GHz is shown. The use of a Schottky diode as a continuous terahertz radiation detector is shown

Multi-lepton Signatures of a Hidden Sector in Rare B Decays

We explore the sensitivity of flavour changing b -> s transitions to a (sub-)GeV hidden sector with generic couplings to the Standard Model through the Higgs, vector and axion portals. The underlying two-body decays of B mesons, B -> X_s S and B0 -> SS, where S denotes a generic new GeV-scale particle, may significantly enhance the yield of monochromatic lepton pairs in the final state via prompt decays of S to a dilepton pair. Existing measurements of the charged lepton spectrum in neutral-current semileptonic B decays provide bounds on the parameters of the light sector that are significantly more stringent than the requirements of naturalness. New search modes, such as B -> X_s + n(l+l-) and B0 -> n(l+l-) with n > 1 can provide additional sensitivity to scenarios in which both the Higgs and vector portals are active, and are accessible to (super-)B factories and hadron colliders.Comment: 12 pages, 2 figures; v2: reference added, minor correction

Measuring a Light Neutralino Mass at the ILC: Testing the MSSM Neutralino Cold Dark Matter Model

The LEP experiments give a lower bound on the neutralino mass of about 46 GeV which, however, relies on a supersymmetric grand unification relation. Dropping this assumption, the experimental lower bound on the neutralino mass vanishes completely. Recent analyses suggest, however, that in the minimal supersymmetric standard model (MSSM), a light neutralino dark matter candidate has a lower bound on its mass of about 7 GeV. In light of this, we investigate the mass sensitivity at the ILC for very light neutralinos. We study slepton pair production, followed by the decay of the sleptons to a lepton and the lightest neutralino. We find that the mass measurement accuracy for a few-GeV neutralino is around 2 GeV, or even less if the relevant slepton is sufficiently light. We thus conclude that the ILC can help verify or falsify the MSSM neutralino cold dark matter model even for very light neutralinos.Comment: 7 pages, 1 figure; references adde