NLO Dispersion Laws for Slow-Moving Quarks in HTL QCD

We determine the next-to-leading order dispersion laws for slow-moving quarks in hard-thermal-loop perturbation of high-temperature QCD where weak coupling is assumed. Real-time formalism is used. The next-to-leading order quark self-energy is written in terms of three and four HTL-dressed vertex functions. The hard thermal loops contributing to these vertex functions are calculated ab initio and expressed using the Feynman parametrization which allows the calculation of the solid-angle integrals involved. We use a prototype of the resulting integrals to indicate how finite results are obtained in the limit of vanishing regularizer.Comment: 28 pages, 7 figures. Changes made to the text. References adde

Damping of very soft moving quarks in high-temperature QCD

We determine the analytic expression of the damping rates for very soft moving quarks in an expansion to second order in powers of their momentum in the context of QCD at high temperature. The calculation is performed using the hard-thermal-loop-summed perturbation scheme. We describe the range of validity of the expansion and make a comparison with other calculations, particularly those using a magnetic mass as a shield from infrared sensitivity. We discuss the possible occurrence of infrared divergences in our results and argue that they are due to magnetic sensitivity.Comment: 24 pages, REVTe

Predictability of just in time compilation

The productivity of embedded software development is limited by the high fragmentation of hardware platforms. To alleviate this problem, virtualization has become an important tool in computer science; and virtual machines are used in a number of subdisciplines ranging from operating systems to processor architecture. The processor virtualization can be used to address the portability problem. While the traditional compilation flow consists of compiling program source code into binary objects that can natively executed on a given processor, processor virtualization splits that flow in two parts: the first part consists of compiling the program source code into processor-independent bytecode representation; the second part provides an execution platform that can run this bytecode in a given processor. The second part is done by a virtual machine interpreting the bytecode or by just-in-time (JIT) compiling the bytecodes of a method at run-time in order to improve the execution performance. Many applications feature real-time system requirements. The success of real-time systems relies upon their capability of producing functionally correct results within dened timing constraints. To validate these constraints, most scheduling algorithms assume that the worstcase execution time (WCET) estimation of each task is already known. The WCET of a task is the longest time it takes when it is considered in isolation. Sophisticated techniques are used in static WCET estimation (e.g. to model caches) to achieve both safe and tight estimation. Our work aims at recombining the two domains, i.e. using the JIT compilation in realtime systems. This is an ambitious goal which requires introducing the deterministic in many non-deterministic features, e.g. bound the compilation time and the overhead caused by the dynamic management of the compiled code cache, etc. Due to the limited time of the internship, this report represents a rst attempt to such combination. To obtain the WCET of a program, we have to add the compilation time to the execution time because the two phases are now mixed. Therefore, one needs to know statically how many times in the worst case a function will be compiled. It may be seemed a simple job, but if we consider a resource constraint as the limited memory size and the advanced techniques used in JIT compilation, things will be nasty. We suppose that a function is compiled at the rst time it is used, and its compiled code is cached in limited size software cache. Our objective is to find an appropriate structure cache and replacement policy which reduce the overhead of compilation in the worst case

Ultrasound contrast agents: from imaging to therapy

International audienceContrast agents, consisting of tiny gas microbubbles are currently approved for ultrasound imaging in cardiology and in radiology. The microbubbles have a mean size of about 3 microns and are encapsulated by a thin biocompatible layer. Multiple clinical studies have established the utility of ultrasound contrast agents (UCA) in improving accuracy of echography for the diagnosis of many diseases and in reducing health care costs by eliminating the need for additional testing. Future clinical applications of UCA extend beyond imaging and diagnostic, offering to ultrasound technology a new therapeutic dimension. Since a few years, novel therapeutic strategies are explored using microbubbles and ultrasound. Our current data demonstrate that in the presence of microbubbles, ultrasound waves destabilize transiently the cell membrane allowing the incorporation of drugs, including genes into the cells. Moreover, the microbubbles might be used as a drug vehicle to achieve a spatially and temporally controlled local release. Besides, microbubbles are able to identify diseased targets through specific targeting

Ultrasound-induced Gas Release from Contrast Agent Microbubbles

We investigated gas release from two hard-shelled ultrasound contrast agents by subjecting them to high-mechanical index (MI) ultrasound and simultaneously capturing high-speed photographs. At an insonifying frequency of 1.7 MHz, a larger percentage of contrast bubbles is seen to crack than at 0.5 MHz. Most of the released gas bubbles have equilibrium diameters between 1.25 and 1.75 /spl mu/m. Their disappearance was observed optically. Free gas bubbles have equilibrium diameters smaller than the bubbles from which they have been released. Coalescence may account for the long dissolution times acoustically observed and published in previous studies. After sonic cracking, the cracked bubbles stay acoustically active

Bias voltage modulation methods and its optimization for nonlinear contrast imaging

Congrès sous l’égide de la Société Française de Génie Biologique et Médical (SFGBM).National audienceThe main difficulty in applying ultrasound contrast imaging techniques with cMUT probe comes from the intrinsic nonlinearity of the transducer itself. An approach has been developed in order to adapt the amplitude modulation techniques (AM) to cMUTs. Bias Voltage Modulation (BVM)[1] allows a complete cancellation of the echoes from linear reflectors and thus an enhancement of the contrast agent detection. The main limit is that it can only be applied with low bias voltage, far from the maximum of the probe sensitivity (i.e. at the collapse). Here is proposed an optimization of the BVM sequence allowing a good compensation of cMUT intrinsic nonlinearity even at high bias voltages

Optical observations of acoustical radiation force effects on individual air bubbles

Previous studies dealing with contrast agent microbubbles have demonstrated that ultrasound (US) can significantly influence the movement of microbubbles. In this paper, we investigated the influence of the acoustic radiation force on individual air bubbles using high-speed photography. We emphasize the effects of the US parameters (pulse length, acoustic pressure) on different bubble\ud patterns and their consequences on the translational motion of the bubbles. A stream of uniform air bubbles with diameter ranging from 35 um to 79 um was generated and insonified with a single US pulse emitted at a frequency of 130 kHz. The bubble sizes have been chosen to be above, below, and at resonance. The peak acoustic pressures used in these experiments ranged from 40 kPa to 120 kPa. The axial displacements of the bubbles produced by the action of the US pulse were optically recorded using a high-speed camera at 1 kHz frame rate. The experimental results were compared to a simplified force balance theoretical model, including the action of the primary radiation force and the fluid drag force. Although the model is quite simple and does not take into account phenomena like bubble shape oscillations and added mass, the experimental findings agree with the predictions. The measured axial displacement increases quasilinearly with the burst length and the transmitted acoustic pressure. The axial displacement varies with the size and the density of the air bubbles, reaching a maximum at the resonance size of 48 um. The predicted displacement values differ by 15% from the measured data, except for resonant bubbles for which the displacement was overestimated by about 40%. This study demonstrates that even a single US pulse produces radiation forces that are strong enough to affect the bubble position

Compatibility graphs in scheduling on batch processing machines

We consider the problem of minimizing the makespan on batch processing identical machines, subject to compatibility constraints, where two jobs are compatible if they can be processed simultaneously in a same batch. These constraints are modeled by an undirected graph $G$, in which compatible jobs are represented by adjacent vertices. We show that several subproblems are polynomial. We propose some exact polynomial algorithms to solve these subproblems. To solve the general case, we propose a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) formulation alongside with heuristic approaches. Furthermore, computational experiments are carried out to measure the performance of the proposed methods.Comment: 25 pages, 11 figure