Classical Simulation of Relativistic Quantum Mechanics in Periodic Optical Structures

Spatial and/or temporal propagation of light waves in periodic optical structures offers a rather unique possibility to realize in a purely classical setting the optical analogues of a wide variety of quantum phenomena rooted in relativistic wave equations. In this work a brief overview of a few optical analogues of relativistic quantum phenomena, based on either spatial light transport in engineered photonic lattices or on temporal pulse propagation in Bragg grating structures, is presented. Examples include spatial and temporal photonic analogues of the Zitterbewegung of a relativistic electron, Klein tunneling, vacuum decay and pair-production, the Dirac oscillator, the relativistic Kronig-Penney model, and optical realizations of non-Hermitian extensions of relativistic wave equations.Comment: review article (invited), 14 pages, 7 figures, 105 reference

Forming and smoothing D{sub 2} and HD layers for ICF by infra-red heating

We describe a technique to form and smooth uniform solid D{sub 2}, HD or DT layers for inertial confinement fusion targets. Pumping the infrared (IR) collision induced vibration-rotation band generates a bulk heating of the solid. Shadowgraphs reveal that this bulk heat quickly redistributes the solid into a relatively uniform layer depending on the IR intensity profile. Measured redistribution time constants are used to determine the conversion efficiency of IR light into bulk heat. Phase shifting interferometry reveals that the surface roughness decreases with increasing IR heating

Status of cryogenic layering for NIF ignition targets

Recent advances in cryogenic layering include the development of a self-contained and self-filling hohlraum, application of phase contrast x-ray measurements for ice layer characterization, and an ice layer achieved with beta-layering which meets the NIF specification for surface roughness at 1.5 K below the triple point. In addition, recent results on target integration in a hohlraum show effective layer control using heaters on the hohlraum

Piperidine renin inhibitors: from leads to drug candidates

Non-peptidomimetic renin inhibitors of the pipersine type represent the a novel structural class of compounds free of the drawbacks seen with peptidomimetic compounds so far. Synthetic optimization in two structural series focusing on improvement of potency, as well as on physicochemical properties and metabolic stability, has led to the identificiation of two candidate compounds 14 and 23. Both display potent and long-lasting blood pressure lowering effects in conscious sodium-depleted marmmoset monkeys and double transgenic rats harboring both the human angiotensinogen and the human renin genes. In addition, 14 normalized albuminuria and kidney tissue damage in these rats when given over a period of 4 weeks. These data suggest that treatment of chronic renal failure patients with a renin inhibitor might result in a significant improvement of the disease status

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical science. © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press