1,176 research outputs found
Simple Phase Bias for Superconducting Circuits
A phase-bias tool, based on a trapped fluxoid in a ring, is proposed and
demonstrated. It can provide arbitrary phase values and is simple to fabricate.
The phase bias has been realized in two superconducting quantum interference
devices, where the critical current versus magnetic flux is shown to be shifted
by a \pi/2 and \pi.Comment: 5 pages, including 4 figures. Submitted to AP
Chirality and the origin of atmospheric humic-like substances
Aerosol water extracts and atmospheric humic-like substances (HULIS) obtained from PM2.5-fraction aerosol samples collected in a rural/continental background environment and in an urban environment in spring and summer, and at a tropical site that was heavily impacted by biomass burning were studied. HULIS was obtained as the water-soluble, methanol-elutable material isolated from a solid-phase extraction procedure. The mean organic matter-to-organic carbon mass conversion factor and the standard deviation of 2.04 +/- 0.06 were derived for HULIS from biomass burning. Mean atmospheric concentrations of HULIS for the rural and urban environments and for the biomass burning during daylight periods and nights, were 1.65, 2.2, 43, and 60 mu gm(-3), respectively. This and other abundances indicate that intense emission sources and/or formation mechanisms of HULIS operate in biomass burning. Mean contributions of C in HULIS (HULIS-C) to water-soluble organic carbon (WSOC) were 35, 48, 63, and 76%, respectively, for the sample set listed. HULIS-C is the major component of the WSOC in tropical biomass burning. The data also suggest that HULIS most likely do not share common origin in the three environments studied. Differentiation among the possible formation processes was attempted by investigating the optical activity of HULIS through their (electronic and vibrational) circular dichroism properties. The urban HULIS did not show optical activity, which is in line with the concept of their major airborne formation from anthropogenic aromatics. The rural HULIS revealed weak optical activity, which may be associated with one of their important formation pathways by photo-oxidation and oligomerisation, i.e., with the formation from chiral biogenic precursors with one of the enantiomers slightly enriched. The The biomass burning of HULIS exhibited a strong effect in the vibrational circular dichroism as a clear distinction from the other two types. This was related to the contribution of the thermal degradation products of lignins and cellulose. The biomass burning of HULIS resemble Suwannee River Fulvic Acid standard more closely in some aspects than the urban and rural types of HULIS, which may be related to their common origin from plant material
Resonant control of stochastic spatio-temporal dynamics in a tunnel diode by multiple time delayed feedback
We study the control of noise-induced spatio-temporal current density
patterns in a semiconductor nanostructure (double barrier resonant tunnelling
diode) by multiple time-delayed feedback. We find much more pronounced resonant
features of noise-induced oscillations compared to single time feedback,
rendering the system more sensitive to variations in the delay time . The
coherence of noise-induced oscillations measured by the correlation time
exhibits sharp resonances as a function of , and can be strongly
increased by optimal choices of . Similarly, the peaks in the power
spectral density are sharpened. We provide analytical insight into the control
mechanism by relating the correlation times and mean frequencies of
noise-induced breathing oscillations to the stability properties of the
deterministic stationary current density filaments under the influence of the
control loop. Moreover, we demonstrate that the use of multiple time delays
enlarges the regime in which the deterministic dynamical properties of the
system are not changed by delay-induced bifurcations
An Investigation of the Mechanical and Physical Characteristics of Cement Paste Incorporating Different Air Entraining Agents using X-ray Micro-Computed Tomography
Improving the thermal insulation properties of cement-based materials is the key to reducing energy loss and consumption in buildings. Lightweight cement-based composites can be used efficiently for this purpose, as a structural material with load bearing ability or as a non-structural one for thermal insulation. In this research, lightweight cement pastes containing fly ash and cement were prepared and tested. In these mixes, three different techniques for producing air voids inside the cement paste were used through the incorporation of aluminum powder (AL), air entraining agent (AA), and hollow microspheres (AS). Several experiments were carried out in order to examine the structural and physical characteristics of the cement composites, including dry density, compressive strength, porosity and absorption. A Hot Disk device was used to evaluate the thermal conductivity of different cement composites. In addition, X-ray micro-computed tomography (micro-CT) was adopted to investigate the microstructure of the air-entrained cement pastes and the spatial distribution of the voids inside pastes without destroying the specimens. The experimental results obtained showed that AS specimens with admixture of hollow microspheres can improve the compressive strength of cement composites compared to other air entraining admixtures at the same density level. It was also confirmed that the incorporation of aluminum powder creates large voids, which have a negative effect on specimens’ strength and absorption.EC/H2020/841592/EU/Ultra-Lightweight Concrete for 3D printing technologies/Ultra-LightCon-3
Geophysical Methods: an Overview
Geophysics is expected to have a major role in lunar resource assessment when manned systems return to the Moon. Geophysical measurements made from a lunar rover will contribute to a number of key studies: estimating regolith thickness, detection of possible large-diameter lava tubes within maria basalts, detection of possible subsurface ice in polar regions, detection of conductive minerals that formed directly from a melt (orthomagmatic sulfides of Cu, Ni, Co), and mapping lunar geology beneath the regolith. The techniques that can be used are dictated both by objectives and by our abilities to adapt current technology to lunar conditions. Instrument size, weight, power requirements, and freedom from orientation errors are factors we have considered. Among the geophysical methods we believe to be appropriate for a lunar resource assessment are magnetics, including gradiometry, time-domain magnetic induction, ground-penetrating radar, seismic reflection, and gravimetry
Quantum state transfer in arrays of flux qubits
In this work, we describe a possible experimental realization of Bose's idea
to use spin chains for short distance quantum communication [S. Bose, {\it
Phys. Rev. Lett.} {\bf 91} 207901]. Josephson arrays have been proposed and
analyzed as transmission channels for systems of superconducting charge qubits.
Here, we consider a chain of persistent current qubits, that is appropriate for
state transfer with high fidelity in systems containing flux qubits. We
calculate the fidelity of state transfer for this system. In general, the
Hamiltonian of this system is not of XXZ-type, and we analyze the magnitude and
the effect of the terms that don't conserve the z-component of the total spin.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figure
Correlation of internal representations in feed-forward neural networks
Feed-forward multilayer neural networks implementing random input-output
mappings develop characteristic correlations between the activity of their
hidden nodes which are important for the understanding of the storage and
generalization performance of the network. It is shown how these correlations
can be calculated from the joint probability distribution of the aligning
fields at the hidden units for arbitrary decoder function between hidden layer
and output. Explicit results are given for the parity-, and-, and
committee-machines with arbitrary number of hidden nodes near saturation.Comment: 6 pages, latex, 1 figur
Reconstruction of the two-dimensional gravitational potential of galaxy clusters from X-ray and Sunyaev-Zel'dovich measurements
The mass of galaxy clusters is not a direct observable, nonetheless it is
commonly used to probe cosmological models. Based on the combination of all
main cluster observables, that is, the X-ray emission, the thermal
Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) signal, the velocity dispersion of the cluster
galaxies, and gravitational lensing, the gravitational potential of galaxy
clusters can be jointly reconstructed. We derive the two main ingredients
required for this joint reconstruction: the potentials individually
reconstructed from the observables and their covariance matrices, which act as
a weight in the joint reconstruction. We show here the method to derive these
quantities. The result of the joint reconstruction applied to a real cluster
will be discussed in a forthcoming paper. We apply the Richardson-Lucy
deprojection algorithm to data on a two-dimensional (2D) grid. We first test
the 2D deprojection algorithm on a -profile. Assuming hydrostatic
equilibrium, we further reconstruct the gravitational potential of a simulated
galaxy cluster based on synthetic SZ and X-ray data. We then reconstruct the
projected gravitational potential of the massive and dynamically active cluster
Abell 2142, based on the X-ray observations collected with XMM-Newton and the
SZ observations from the Planck satellite. Finally, we compute the covariance
matrix of the projected reconstructed potential of the cluster Abell 2142 based
on the X-ray measurements collected with XMM-Newton. The gravitational
potentials of the simulated cluster recovered from synthetic X-ray and SZ data
are consistent, even though the potential reconstructed from X-rays shows
larger deviations from the true potential. Regarding Abell 2142, the projected
gravitational cluster potentials recovered from SZ and X-ray data reproduce
well the projected potential inferred from gravitational-lensing observations.
(abridged)Comment: accepted for publication in the journal A&
Strong magnetic coupling of an ultracold gas to a superconducting waveguide cavity
Placing an ensemble of ultracold atoms in the near field of a
superconducting coplanar waveguide resonator (CPWR) with one can
achieve strong coupling between a single microwave photon in the CPWR and a
collective hyperfine qubit state in the ensemble with kHz larger than the cavity line width of
kHz. Integrated on an atomchip such a system constitutes a hybrid quantum
device, which also can be used to interconnect solid-state and atomic qubits,
to study and control atomic motion via the microwave field, observe microwave
super-radiance, build an integrated micro maser or even cool the resonator
field via the atoms
Spectroscopy on two coupled flux qubits
We have performed spectroscopy measurements on two coupled flux qubits. The
qubits are coupled inductively, which results in a
interaction. By applying microwave radiation, we observe resonances due to
transitions from the ground state to the first two excited states. From the
position of these resonances as a function of the magnetic field applied we
observe the coupling of the qubits. The coupling strength agrees well with
calculations of the mutual inductance
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