Maintaining technical excellence requires a national plan

To meet the challenge of technical excellence, AIA established a rocket propulsion committee to develop the National Rocket Propulsion Strategic Plan. Developing such a plan required a broad spectrum of experience and disciplines. The Strategic Plan team needed the participation of industry, government, and academia. The plan provides, if followed, a means for the U.S. to maintain technical excellence and world leadership in rocket propulsion. To implement the National Rocket Propulsion Strategic Plan is to invest in the social, economic, and technological futures of America. The plan lays the basis for upgrading existing propulsion systems and a firm base for future full scale development, production, and operation of rocket propulsion systems for space, defense, and commercial applications

Holographic Shell Model: Stack Data Structure inside Black Holes

We suggest that bits of information inhabit, universally and holographically, the entire black hole interior, a bit per a light sheet unit interval of order Planck area difference. The number of distinguishable (tagged by a binary code) configurations, counted within the context of a discrete holographic shell model, is given by the Catalan series. The area entropy formula is recovered, including the universal logarithmic correction, and the equipartition of mass per degree of freedom is proven. The black hole information storage resembles a stack data structure.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure

PHOTOS Interface in C++; Technical and Physics Documentation

For five years now, PHOTOS Monte Carlo for bremsstrahlung in the decay of particles and resonances has been available with an interface to the C++ HepMC event record. The main purpose of the present paper is to document the technical aspects of the PHOTOS Monte Carlo installation and present version use. A multitude of test results and examples are distributed together with the program code. The PHOTOS C++ physics precision is better than its FORTRAN predecessor and more convenient steering options are also available. An algorithm for the event record interface necessary for process dependent photon emission kernel is implemented. It is used in Z and W decays for kernels of complete first order matrix elements of the decays. Additional emission of final state lepton pairs is also available. Physics assumptions used in the program and properties of the solution are reviewed. In particular, it is explained how the second order matrix elements were used in design and validation of the program iteration procedure. Also, it is explained that the phase space parametrization used in the program is exact.Comment: Updated version; for the program as of April 201

A Framework for Designing MIMO systems with Decision Feedback Equalization or Tomlinson-Harashima Precoding

We consider joint transceiver design for general Multiple-Input Multiple-Output communication systems that implement interference (pre-)subtraction, such as those based on Decision Feedback Equalization (DFE) or Tomlinson-Harashima precoding (THP). We develop a unified framework for joint transceiver design by considering design criteria that are expressed as functions of the Mean Square Error (MSE) of the individual data streams. By deriving two inequalities that involve the logarithms of the individual MSEs, we obtain optimal designs for two classes of communication objectives, namely those that are Schur-convex and Schur-concave functions of these logarithms. For Schur-convex objectives, the optimal design results in data streams with equal MSEs. This design simultaneously minimizes the total MSE and maximizes the mutual information for the DFE-based model. For Schur-concave objectives, the optimal DFE design results in linear equalization and the optimal THP design results in linear precoding. The proposed framework embraces a wide range of design objectives and can be regarded as a counterpart of the existing framework of linear transceiver design.Comment: To appear in ICASSP 200

Suppression of Dephasing of Optically Trapped Atoms

Ultra-cold atoms trapped in an optical dipole trap and prepared in a coherent superposition of their hyperfine ground states, decohere as they interact with their environment. We demonstrate than the loss in coherence in an "echo" experiment, which is caused by mechanisms such as Rayleigh scattering, can be suppressed by the use of a new pulse sequence. We also show that the coherence time is then limited by mixing to other vibrational levels in the trap and by the finite lifetime of the internal quantum states of the atoms