Apparatus for production of ultrapure amorphous metals utilizing acoustic cooling

Amorphous metals are produced by forming a molten unit of metal and deploying the unit into a bidirectional acoustical levitating field or by dropping the unit through a spheroidizing zone, a slow quenching zone, and a fast quenching zone in which the sphere is rapidly cooled by a bidirectional jet stream created in the standing acoustic wave field produced between a half cylindrical acoustic driver and a focal reflector or a curved driver and a reflector. The cooling rate can be further augmented first by a cryogenic liquid collar and secondly by a cryogenic liquid jacket surrounding a drop tower. The molten unit is quenched to an amorphous solid which can survive impact in a unit collector or is retrieved by a vacuum chuck

Contactless pellet fabrication

A small object is coated by holding it in the pressure well of an acoustic standing wave pattern, and then applying a mist of liquid coating material at low velocity into the pressure well. The pressure gradient within the well forces the mist particles to be pushed against the object. A lower frequency acoustic wave also can be applied to the coated object, to vibrate it so as to evenly distribute the coated material. The same lower frequency vibrations can be applied to an object in the shape of a hollow sphere, to center the inner and outer surfaces of the sphere while it remains suspended

Acoustic suspension system

An acoustic levitation system is described, with single acoustic source and a small reflector to stably levitate a small object while the object is processed as by coating or heating it. The system includes a concave acoustic source which has locations on opposite sides of its axis that vibrate towards and away from a focal point to generate a converging acoustic field. A small reflector is located near the focal point, and preferably slightly beyond it, to create an intense acoustic field that stably supports a small object near the reflector. The reflector is located about one-half wavelength from the focal point and is concavely curved to a radius of curvature (L) of about one-half the wavelength, to stably support an object one-quarter wavelength (N) from the reflector

On image segmentation using information theoretic criteria

Image segmentation is a long-studied and important problem in image processing. Different solutions have been proposed, many of which follow the information theoretic paradigm. While these information theoretic segmentation methods often produce excellent empirical results, their theoretical properties are still largely unknown. The main goal of this paper is to conduct a rigorous theoretical study into the statistical consistency properties of such methods. To be more specific, this paper investigates if these methods can accurately recover the true number of segments together with their true boundaries in the image as the number of pixels tends to infinity. Our theoretical results show that both the Bayesian information criterion (BIC) and the minimum description length (MDL) principle can be applied to derive statistically consistent segmentation methods, while the same is not true for the Akaike information criterion (AIC). Numerical experiments were conducted to illustrate and support our theoretical findings.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/11-AOS925 the Annals of Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

An economical vent cover

Inexpensive formed-plastic vent cover has been developed that allows controlled purge of vent systems and also provides blowout protection. Cover can also be used in relief mode to allow normal system relief flows without disengaging from vent system. Cover consists of two parts made of plastics with varying densities to fit media used and desired pressures

Vibrating-chamber levitation systems

Systems are described for the acoustic levitation of objects, which enable the use of a sealed rigid chamber to avoid contamination of the levitated object. The apparatus includes a housing forming a substantially closed chamber, and means for vibrating the entire housing at a frequency that produces an acoustic standing wave pattern within the chamber

Optical selection rules of graphene nanoribbons

Optical selection rules for one-dimensional graphene nanoribbons are analytically studied and clarified based on the tight-binding model. A theoretical explanation, through analyzing the velocity matrix elements and the features of wavefunctions, can account for the selection rules, which depend on the edge structure of nanoribbon, namely armchair or zigzag edges. The selection rule of armchair nanoribbons is \Delta J=0, and the optical transitions occur from the conduction to valence subbands of the same index. Such a selection rule originates in the relationships between two sublattices and between conduction and valence subbands. On the other hand, zigzag nanoribbons exhibit the selection rule |\Delta J|=odd, which results from the alternatively changing symmetry property as the subband index increases. An efficiently theoretical prediction on transition energies is obtained with the application of selection rules. Furthermore, the energies of band edge states become experimentally attainable via optical measurements

Unified description of pairing, trionic and quarteting states for one-dimensional SU(4) attractive fermions

Paired states, trions and quarteting states in one-dimensional SU(4) attractive fermions are investigated via exact Bethe ansatz calculations. In particular, quantum phase transitions are identified and calculated from the quarteting phase into normal Fermi liquid, trionic states and spin-2 paired states which belong to the universality class of linear field-dependent magnetization in the vicinity of critical points. Moreover, unified exact results for the ground state energy, chemical potentials and complete phase diagrams for isospin $S=1/2, 1, 3/2$ attractive fermions with external fields are presented. Also identified are the magnetization plateaux of $m^z=M_s/3$ and $m^z=2M_s/3$, where $M_s$ is the magnetization saturation value. The universality of finite-size corrections and collective dispersion relations provides a further test ground for low energy effective field theory.Comment: 13 pages, 4 figure

OH(A-X) fluorescence from photodissociative excitation of HO2 at 157.5 nm

The OH(A-X) fluorescence from photodissociative excitation of HO2 by F2 laser photons (157.5 nm) was observed and compared with the OH fluorescence spectra of H2O2 and the O2+CH3OH mixture. The rotational population distributions of OH(A) were obtained from the fluorescence spectra. The most populated levels are J = 4 for photodissociative excitation of HO2, J = 20 for H2O2, and J = 21 for the O2+CH3OH mixture. The fluorescence from the gas mixture is attributed to the O + H recombination for which the atoms are produced from photodissociation of parent molecules