242 research outputs found
Measuring Electric Fields From Surface Contaminants with Neutral Atoms
In this paper we demonstrate a technique of utilizing magnetically trapped
neutral Rb-87 atoms to measure the magnitude and direction of stray electric
fields emanating from surface contaminants. We apply an alternating external
electric field that adds to (or subtracts from) the stray field in such a way
as to resonantly drive the trapped atoms into a mechanical dipole oscillation.
The growth rate of the oscillation's amplitude provides information about the
magnitude and sign of the stray field gradient. Using this measurement
technique, we are able to reconstruct the vector electric field produced by
surface contaminants. In addition, we can accurately measure the electric
fields generated from adsorbed atoms purposely placed onto the surface and
account for their systematic effects, which can plague a precision
surface-force measurement. We show that baking the substrate can reduce the
electric fields emanating from adsorbate, and that the mechanism for reduction
is likely surface diffusion, not desorption.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figures, published in Physical Review
Thermally Induced Losses in Ultra-Cold Atoms Magnetically Trapped Near Room-Temperature Surfaces
We have measured magnetic trap lifetimes of ultra-cold Rb87 atoms at
distances of 5-1000 microns from surfaces of conducting metals with varying
resistivity. Good agreement is found with a theoretical model for losses
arising from near-field magnetic thermal noise, confirming the complications
associated with holding trapped atoms close to conducting surfaces. A
dielectric surface (silicon) was found in contrast to be so benign that we are
able to evaporatively cool atoms to a Bose-Einstein condensate by using the
surface to selectively adsorb higher energy atoms.Comment: Improved theory curve eliminates discrepancy. JLTP in pres
Measurement of the Temperature Dependence of the Casimir-Polder Force
We report on the first measurement of a temperature dependence of the
Casimir-Polder force. This measurement was obtained by positioning a nearly
pure 87-Rb Bose-Einstein condensate a few microns from a dielectric substrate
and exciting its dipole oscillation. Changes in the collective oscillation
frequency of the magnetically trapped atoms result from spatial variations in
the surface-atom force. In our experiment, the dielectric substrate is heated
up to 605 K, while the surrounding environment is kept near room temperature
(310 K). The effect of the Casimir-Polder force is measured to be nearly 3
times larger for a 605 K substrate than for a room-temperature substrate,
showing a clear temperature dependence in agreement with theory.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, published in Physical Review Letter
Alkali Adsorbate Polarization on Conducting and Insulating Surfaces Probed with Bose-Einstein Condensates
A magnetically trapped 87Rb Bose-Einstein condensate is used as a sensitive probe of short-range electrical forces. In particular, the electric polarization of, and the subsequent electric field generated by, 87Rb adsorbates on conducting and insulating surfaces is measured by characterizing perturbations to the magnetic trapping potential using high quality factor condensate excitations. The nature of the alterations to the electrical properties of Rb adsorbates is studied on titanium (metal) and silicon (semiconductor) surfaces, which exhibit nearly identical properties, and on glass (insulator), which displays a smaller transitory electrical effect. The limits of this technique in detecting electrical fields and ramifications for measurements of short-range forces near surfaces are discussed
Automatic threshold determination for a local approach of change detection in long-term signal recordings
CUSUM (cumulative sum) is a well-known method that can be used to detect changes in a signal when the parameters of this signal are known. This paper presents an adaptation of the CUSUM-based change detection algorithms to long-term signal recordings where the various hypotheses contained in the signal are unknown. The starting point of the work was the dynamic cumulative sum (DCS) algorithm, previously developed for application to long-term electromyography (EMG) recordings. DCS has been improved in two ways. The first was a new procedure to estimate the distribution parameters to ensure the respect of the detectability property. The second was the definition of two separate, automatically determined thresholds. One of them (lower threshold) acted to stop the estimation process, the other one (upper threshold) was applied to the detection function. The automatic determination of the thresholds was based on the Kullback-Leibler distance which gives information about the distance between the detected segments (events). Tests on simulated data demonstrated the efficiency of these improvements of the DCS algorithm
Recent progress in the discovery of macrocyclic compounds as potential anti-infective therapeutics
Novel therapeutic strategies are urgently needed for the treatment of serious diseases caused by viral, bacterial and parasitic infections, because currently used drugs are facing the problem of rapidly emerging resistance. There is also an urgent need for agents that act on novel pathogen-specific targets, in order to expand the repertoire of possible therapies. The high throughput screening of diverse small molecule compound libraries has provided only a limited number of new lead series, and the number of compounds acting on novel targets is even smaller. Natural product screening has traditionally been very successful in the anti-infective area. Several successful drugs on the market as well as other compounds in clinical development are derived from natural products. Amongst these, many are macrocyclic compounds in the 1-2 kDa size range. This review will describe recent advances and novel drug discovery approaches in the anti-infective area, focusing on synthetic and natural macrocyclic compounds for which in vivo proof of concept has been established. The review will also highlight the Protein Epitope Mimetics (PEM) technology as a novel tool in the drug discovery process. Here the structures of naturally occurring antimicrobial and antiviral peptides and proteins are used as starting points to generate novel macrocyclic mimetics, which can be produced and optimized efficiently by combinatorial synthetic methods. Several recent examples highlight the great potential of the PEM approach in the discovery of new anti-infective agents
Diffuse reflection of a Bose-Einstein condensate from a rough evanescent wave mirror
We present experimental results showing the diffuse reflection of a
Bose-Einstein condensate from a rough mirror, consisting of a dielectric
substrate supporting a blue-detuned evanescent wave. The scattering is
anisotropic, more pronounced in the direction of the surface propagation of the
evanescent wave. These results agree very well with theoretical predictions.Comment: submitted to J Phys B, 10 pages, 6 figure
Towards surface quantum optics with Bose-Einstein condensates in evanescent waves
We present a surface trap which allows for studying the coherent interaction
of ultracold atoms with evanescent waves. The trap combines a magnetic Joffe
trap with a repulsive evanescent dipole potential. The position of the magnetic
trap can be controlled with high precision which makes it possible to move
ultracold atoms to the surface of a glass prism in a controlled way. The
optical potential of the evanescent wave compensates for the strong attractive
van der Waals forces and generates a potential barrier at only a few hundred
nanometers from the surface. The trap is tested with Rb Bose-Einstein
condensates (BEC), which are stably positioned at distances from the surfaces
below one micrometer
Observation of the thermal Casimir force
Quantum theory predicts the existence of the Casimir force between
macroscopic bodies, due to the zero-point energy of electromagnetic field modes
around them. This quantum fluctuation-induced force has been experimentally
observed for metallic and semiconducting bodies, although the measurements to
date have been unable to clearly settle the question of the correct
low-frequency form of the dielectric constant dispersion (the Drude model or
the plasma model) to be used for calculating the Casimir forces. At finite
temperature a thermal Casimir force, due to thermal, rather than quantum,
fluctuations of the electromagnetic field, has been theoretically predicted
long ago. Here we report the experimental observation of the thermal Casimir
force between two gold plates. We measured the attractive force between a flat
and a spherical plate for separations between 0.7 m and 7 m. An
electrostatic force caused by potential patches on the plates' surfaces is
included in the analysis. The experimental results are in excellent agreement
(reduced of 1.04) with the Casimir force calculated using the Drude
model, including the T=300 K thermal force, which dominates over the quantum
fluctuation-induced force at separations greater than 3 m. The plasma
model result is excluded in the measured separation range.Comment: 6 page
Hierarchical Hidden Markov Model in Detecting Activities of Daily Living in Wearable Videos for Studies of Dementia
International audienceThis paper presents a method for indexing activities of daily living in videos obtained from wearable cameras. In the context of dementia diagnosis by doctors, the videos are recorded at patients' houses and later visualized by the medical practitioners. The videos may last up to two hours, therefore a tool for an efficient navigation in terms of activities of interest is crucial for the doctors. The specific recording mode provides video data which are really difficult, being a single sequence shot where strong motion and sharp lighting changes often appear. Our work introduces an automatic motion based segmentation of the video and a video structuring approach in terms of activities by a hierarchical two-level Hidden Markov Model. We define our description space over motion and visual characteristics of video and audio channels. Experiments on real data obtained from the recording at home of several patients show the difficulty of the task and the promising results of our approach
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