Giant Coulomb broadening and Raman lasing on ionic transitions

CW generation of anti-Stokes Raman laser on a number of blue-green argon-ion lines (4p-4s, 4p-3d) has been demonstrated with optical pumping from metastable levels 3d'^2G, 3d^4F. It is found, that the population transfer rate is increased by a factor of 3-5 (and hence, the output power of such Raman laser) owing to Coulomb diffusion in the velocity space. Measured are the excitation and relaxation rates for the metastable level. The Bennett hole on the metastable level has been recorded using the probe field technique. It has been shown that the Coulomb diffusion changes shape of the contour to exponential cusp profile while its width becomes 100 times the Lorentzian one and reaches values close to the Doppler width. Such a giant broadening is also confirmed by the shape of the absorption saturation curve.Comment: RevTex 18 pages, 5 figure

Classification of the Nuclear Multifragmentation Phase Transition

Using a recently proposed classification scheme for phase transitions in finite systems [Phys.Rev.Lett.{\bf 84},3511 (2000)] we show that within the statistical standard model of nuclear multifragmentation the predicted phase transition is of first order.Comment: 5 pages, 4 eps figures, accepted for publication in Phys.Rev.C (in press

Lexical olfaction recruits olfactory orbitofrontal cortex in metaphorical and literal contexts

The investigation of specific lexical categories has substantially contributed to advancing our knowledge on how meaning is neurally represented. One sensory domain that has received particularly little attention is olfaction. This study aims to investigate the neural representation of lexical olfaction. In an fMRI experiment, participants read olfactory metaphors, their literal paraphrases, and literal olfactory sentences. Regions of interest were defined by a functional localizer run of odor processing. We observed activation in secondary olfactory areas during metaphorical and literal olfactory processing, thus extending previous findings to the novel source domain of olfaction. Previously reported enhanced activation in emotion-related areas due to metaphoricity could not be replicated. Finally, no primary olfactory cortex was found active during lexical olfaction processing. We suggest that this absence is due to olfactory hedonicity being crucial to understand the meaning of the current olfactory expressions. Consequently, the processing of olfactory hedonicity recruits secondary olfactory areas

Checking and bootstrapping lexical norms by means of word similarity indexes

In psychology, lexical norms related to the se- mantic properties of words, such as concreteness and va- lence, are important research resources. Collecting such norms by asking judges to rate the words is very time consuming, which strongly limits the number of words that compose them. In the present article, we present a technique for estimating lexical norms based on the latent semantic analysis of a corpus. The analyses conducted emphasize the technique’s effectiveness for several semantic dimensions. In addition to the extension of norms, this technique can be used to check human ratings to identify words for which the rating is very different from the corpus-based estimate