PCPro a Novel Technology for Rapid Prototyping and Rapid Manufacturing

PCPro stands for Precise Cast Prototyping, which is a combination of casting technologies and milling. This method was developed at Fraunhofer IWS in Dresden, Germany. It is patented in Germany [1] and is applied in the USA under US 10/794,936. The main goal for this development was to shorten the process chain for making plastic prototypes accompanied by higher quality. The casting technology was integrated in a machining center in order to enable a high degree of automation and to avoid an external casting system. This means that Rapid Manufacturing can be easily implemented using such an automated combination of casting and machining. This article describes the PCPro method by means of the fabrication of sample parts. The advantages and the limitations in comparison to common Rapid Prototyping and Rapid Manufacturing process chains will be discussed. In addition, the manufacturing of a prototype machine is presented.Mechanical Engineerin

The JKind Model Checker

JKind is an open-source industrial model checker developed by Rockwell Collins and the University of Minnesota. JKind uses multiple parallel engines to prove or falsify safety properties of infinite state models. It is portable, easy to install, performance competitive with other state-of-the-art model checkers, and has features designed to improve the results presented to users: inductive validity cores for proofs and counterexample smoothing for test-case generation. It serves as the back-end for various industrial applications.Comment: CAV 201

Pressure-dependent optical investigations of α\alpha-(BEDT-TTF)2_2I3_3: tuning charge order and narrow gap towards a Dirac semimetal

Infrared optical investigations of $\alpha$-(BEDT-TTF)$_2$I$_3$ have been performed in the spectral range from 80 to 8000~cm$^{-1}$ down to temperatures as low as 10~K by applying hydrostatic pressure. In the metallic state, $T > 135$~K, we observe a 50\% increase in the Drude contribution as well as the mid-infrared band due to the growing intermolecular orbital overlap with pressure up to 11~kbar. In the ordered state, $T<T_{\rm CO}$, we extract how the electronic charge per molecule varies with temperature and pressure: Transport and optical studies demonstrate that charge order and metal-insulator transition coincide and consistently yield a linear decrease of the transition temperature $T_{\rm CO}$ by $8-9$~K/kbar. The charge disproportionation $\Delta\rho$ diminishes by $0.017~e$/kbar and the optical gap $\Delta$ between the bands decreases with pressure by -47~cm$^{-1}$/kbar. In our high-pressure and low-temperature experiments, we do observe contributions from the massive charge carriers as well as from massless Dirac electrons to the low-frequency optical conductivity, however, without being able to disentangle them unambiguously.Comment: 13 pages, 17 figures, submitted to Phys. Rev.

Investigating the Physical Origin of Unconventional Low-Energy Excitations and Pseudogap Phenomena in Cuprate Superconductors

We investigate the physical origin of unconventional low-energy excitations in cuprate superconductors by considering the effect of coexisting competing orders (CO) and superconductivity (SC) and of quantum fluctuations and other bosonic modes on the low-energy charge excitation spectra. By incorporating both SC and CO in the bare Green's function and quantum phase fluctuations in the self-energy, we can consistently account for various empirical findings in both the hole- and electron-type cuprates, including the excess subgap quasiparticle density of states, ``dichotomy'' in the fluctuation-renormalized quasiparticle spectral density in momentum space, and the occurrence and magnitude of a low-energy pseudogap being dependent on the relative gap strength of CO and SC. Comparing these calculated results with experiments of ours and others, we suggest that there are two energy scales associated with the pseudogap phenomena, with the high-energy pseudogap probably of magnetic origin and the low-energy pseudogap associated with competing orders.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures. Invited paper for the 2006 Taiwan International Conference on Superconductivity. Correspondence author: Nai-Chang Yeh (e-mail: [email protected]

Experimental investigation of the asymmetric spectroscopic characteristics of electron- and hole-doped cuprates

Quasiparticle tunneling spectroscopic studies of electron- (n-type) and hole-doped (p-type) cuprates reveal that the pairing symmetry, pseudogap phenomenon and spatial homogeneity of the superconducting order parameter are all non-universal. We compare our studies of p-type YBa2Cu3O7-delta and n-type infinite-layer Sr(0.9)Ln(0.1)CuO(2) (Ln = La, Gd) systems with results from p-type Bi2Sr2CaCu2Ox and n-type one-layer Nd1.85Ce0.15CuO4 cuprates, and attribute various non-universal behavior to different competing orders in p-type and n-type cuprates

Dynamics of few-body states in a medium

Strongly interacting matter such as nuclear or quark matter leads to few-body bound states and correlations of the constituents. As a consequence quantum chromodynamics has a rich phase structure with spontaneous symmetry breaking, superconductivity, condensates of different kinds. All this appears in many astrophysical scenarios. Among them is the formation of hadrns during the early stage of the Universe, the structure of a neutron star, the formation of nuclei during a supernova explosion. Some of these extreme conditions can be simulated in heavy ion colliders. To treat such a hot and dense system we use the Green function formalism of many-body theory. It turns out that a systematic Dyson expansion of the Green functions leads to modified few-body equations that are capable to describe phase transitions, condensates, cluster formation and more. These equations include self energy corrections and Pauli blocking. We apply this method to nonrelativistic and relativistic matter. The latter one is treated on the light front. Because of the medium and the inevitable truncation of space, the few-body dynamics and states depend on the thermodynamic parameters of the medium.Comment: 3 pages, 2 figures, talk presented at the 19th European Conference on Few-Body System

Violations of Lorentz Covariance in Light Front Quark Models

Electromagnetic form factors of the nucleon from relativistic quark models are analyzed: results from null-plane projection of the Feynman triangle diagram are compared with a Bakamjian-Thomas model. The magnetic form factors of the models differ by about 15% at spacelike momentum transfer 0.5 GeV^2, while the charge form factors are much closer. Spurious contributions to electromagnetic form factors due to violations of rotational symmetry are eliminated from both models. One method changes magnetic form factors by about 10%, whereas the charge form factors stay nearly the same. Another one changes the charge form factor of the Bakamjian-Thomas model by more than 50%.Comment: 19 pages, 9 figures, Late

Doppler-tuned Bragg Spectroscopy of Excited Levels in He-Like Uranium: a discussion of the uncertainty contributions

We present the uncertainty discussion of a recent experiment performed at the GSI storage ring ESR for the accurate energy measurement of the He-like uranium 1s2p3P2- 1s2s3S1 intra-shell transition. For this propose we used a Johann-type Bragg spectrometer that enables to obtain a relative energy measurement between the He-like uranium transition, about 4.51 keV, and a calibration x-ray source. As reference, we used the Ka fluorescence lines of zinc and the Li-like uranium 1s22p2P3/2 - 1 s22s 2S1/2 intra-shell transition from fast ions stored in the ESR. A comparison of the two different references, i.e., stationary and moving x-ray source, and a discussion of the experimental uncertainties is presented

Doppler-tuned Bragg Spectroscopy of Excited Levels in He-Like Uranium: a discussion of the uncertainty contributions

We present the uncertainty discussion of a recent experiment performed at the GSI storage ring ESR for the accurate energy measurement of the He-like uranium 1s2p3P2- 1s2s3S1 intra-shell transition. For this propose we used a Johann-type Bragg spectrometer that enables to obtain a relative energy measurement between the He-like uranium transition, about 4.51 keV, and a calibration x-ray source. As reference, we used the Ka fluorescence lines of zinc and the Li-like uranium 1s22p2P3/2 - 1 s22s 2S1/2 intra-shell transition from fast ions stored in the ESR. A comparison of the two different references, i.e., stationary and moving x-ray source, and a discussion of the experimental uncertainties is presented