Nonreciprocal Phase Gradient Metasurface: Principle and Transistor Implementation

We introduce the concept of nonreciprocal nongyrotropic phase gradient metasurfaces. Such metasurfaces are based on bianisotropic phase shifting unit cells, with the required nonreciprocal and nongyrotropic characteristics. Moreover, we present a transistor-based implementation of a nonreciprocal phase shifting subwavelength unit cell. Finally, we demonstrate the concept with a simulation of a 6-port spatial circulator application

Angle-Independent Nongyrotropic Metasurfaces

We derive a general condition for angle-independent bianisotropic nongyrotropic metasurfaces and present two applications corresponding to particular cases: an angle-independent absorber/amplifier and an angle-independent spatial gyrator

Adapting to Unknown Smoothness by Aggregation of Thresholded Wavelet Estimators

We study the performances of an adaptive procedure based on a convex combination, with data-driven weights, of term-by-term thresholded wavelet estimators. For the bounded regression model, with random uniform design, and the nonparametric density model, we show that the resulting estimator is optimal in the minimax sense over all Besov balls under the $L^2$ risk, without any logarithm factor

Diversity in the outcome of dust radial drift in protoplanetary discs

The growth of dust particles into planet embryos needs to circumvent the radial-drift barrier, i.e. the accretion of dust particles onto the central star by radial migration. The outcome of the dust radial migration is governed by simple criteria between the dust-to-gas ratio and the exponents p and q of the surface density and temperature power laws. The transfer of radiation provides an additional constraint between these quantities because the disc thermal structure is fixed by the dust spatial distribution. To assess which discs are primarily affected by the radial-drift barrier, we used the radiative transfer code MCFOST to compute the temperature structure of a wide range of disc models, stressing the particular effects of grain size distributions and vertical settling. We find that the outcome of the dust migration process is very sensitive to the physical conditions within the disc. For high dust-to-gas ratios (> 0.01) or flattened disc structures (H/R < 0.05), growing dust grains can efficiently decouple from the gas, leading to a high concentration of grains at a critical radius of a few AU. Decoupling of grains can occur at a large fraction (> 0.1) of the initial radius, for a dust-to-gas ratio greater than ~ 0.05. The exact value of the required dust-to-gas ratio for dust to stop its migration is strongly dependent on the disc temperature structure. Non growing dust grains are accreted for discs with flat surface density profiles (p<0.7) while they always remain in the disc if the surface density is steep enough (p>1.2). Both the presence of large grains and vertical settling tend to favour the accretion of non growing dust grains onto the central object, but it slows down the migration of growing dust grains. All the disc configurations are found to have favourable temperature profiles over most of the disc to retain their planetesimals.Comment: 9 pages, 8 figures, accepted for publications in A&A, corrected typo

Transmissive Suppressed-Order Diffraction Grating (SODG)

We present a novel type of Suppressed-Order Diffraction Grating(SODG). An SODG is a diffraction grating whose diffraction orders have all been suppressed except one that is selected to provide electromagnetic deflection. The proposed SODG is a transmissive grating that exhibits high-efficiency refraction-like deflection for all angles, including large angles that are generally challenging to achieve, while featuring a deeply subwavelength thickness, as required in the microwave regime. We first present the design rationale and guidelines, and next demonstrate such a 10.5 GHz SODG that reaches an efficiency of 90% at 70 degrees

Study of the Angular Spectrum of a Bianisotropic Refractive Metasurface at a Dielectric Interface

We present an initial study of the angular spectrum of a bianisotropic refractive metasurface at an interface between two dielectric media. In this study, we report on the existence of three distinct angular regions: a)~a rotated transmission cone, b)~a modified total internal reflection region, and c)~a new total retro-reflection region

Partial Sums Generation Architecture for Successive Cancellation Decoding of Polar Codes

Polar codes are a new family of error correction codes for which efficient hardware architectures have to be defined for the encoder and the decoder. Polar codes are decoded using the successive cancellation decoding algorithm that includes partial sums computations. We take advantage of the recursive structure of polar codes to introduce an efficient partial sums computation unit that can also implements the encoder. The proposed architecture is synthesized for several codelengths in 65nm ASIC technology. The area of the resulting design is reduced up to 26% and the maximum working frequency is improved by ~25%.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Workshop on Signal Processing Systems (SiPS)(26 April 2012). Accepted (28 June 2013