Fermion Determinants: Some Recent Analytic Results

The use of known analytic results for the continuum fermion determinants in QCD and QED as benchmarks for zero lattice spacing extrapolations of lattice fermion determinants is proposed. Specifically, they can be used as a check on the universality hypothesis relating the continuum limits of the na\"{\i}ve, staggered and Wilson fermion determinants.Comment: 8th Workshop on Non-Perturbative QCD, 7-11 June 2004, Pari

Flight measurements of hinged-plate wing-spoiler hinge moments

Hinge moment of hinged-plate wing spoilers were measured during flight of a twin turboprop airplane modified by the addition of upper and lower wing-surface spoilers. The spoiler-actuating hydraulic cylinders were instrumented to measure the forces required to extend the spoiler panels. Those measurements were converted to moment coefficient form, and are presented as a function of spoiler deployment angle. The hinge-moment data were collected at three flight conditions: with flaps extended at approach speed; with flaps retracted at a low speed; and with flaps retracted at a high speed (C sub L = 1.4, 1.0, and 0.5). In general, the magnitude of measured spoiler hinge moments were lower than predicted. Furthermore, for upper surface spoilers with flaps extended, the hinge moments increased in a discontinuous manner between spoiler deflection 10 and 10

Pulse contrast enhancement via non-collinear sum-frequency generation with the signal and idler of an optical parametric amplifier

We outline an approach for improving the temporal contrast of a high-intensity laser system by $>$8 orders of magnitude using non-collinear sum-frequency generation with the signal and idler of an optical parametric amplifier. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this technique by cleaning pulses from a millijoule-level chirped-pulse amplification system to provide $>$10$^{12}$ intensity contrast relative to all pre-pulses and amplified spontaneous emission $>$5~ps prior to the main pulse. The output maintains percent-level energy stability on the time scales of a typical user experiment at our facility, highlighting the method's reliability and operational efficiency. After temporal cleansing, the pulses are stretched in time before seeding two multi-pass, Ti:sapphire-based amplifiers. After re-compression, the 1~J, 40~fs (25~TW) laser pulses maintain a $>$10$^{10}$ intensity contrast $>$30~ps prior to the main pulse. This technique is both energy-scalable and appropriate for preparing seed pulses for a TW- or PW-level chirped-pulse amplification laser system

QED in strong, finite-flux magnetic fields

Lower bounds are placed on the fermionic determinants of Euclidean quantum electrodynamics in two and four dimensions in the presence of a smooth, finite-flux, static, unidirectional magnetic field $B(r) =(0,0,B(r))$, where $B(r) \geq 0$ or $B(r) \leq 0$, and $r$ is a point in the xy-plane.Comment: 10 pages, postscript (in uuencoded compressed tar file

Noise Power Spectrum Scene-Dependency in Simulated Image Capture Systems

The Noise Power Spectrum (NPS) is a standard measure for image capture system noise. It is derived traditionally from captured uniform luminance patches that are unrepresentative of pictorial scene signals. Many contemporary capture systems apply non- linear content-aware signal processing, which renders their noise scene-dependent. For scene-dependent systems, measuring the NPS with respect to uniform patch signals fails to characterize with accuracy: i) system noise concerning a given input scene, ii) the average system noise power in real-world applications. The scene- and-process-dependent NPS (SPD-NPS) framework addresses these limitations by measuring temporally varying system noise with respect to any given input signal. In this paper, we examine the scene-dependency of simulated camera pipelines in-depth by deriving SPD-NPSs from fifty test scenes. The pipelines apply either linear or non-linear denoising and sharpening, tuned to optimize output image quality at various opacity levels and exposures. Further, we present the integrated area under the mean of SPD-NPS curves over a representative scene set as an objective system noise metric, and their relative standard deviation area (RSDA) as a metric for system noise scene-dependency. We close by discussing how these metrics can also be computed using scene-and-process- dependent Modulation Transfer Functions (SPD-MTF)