On a universal photonic tunnelling time

We consider photonic tunnelling through evanescent regions and obtain general analytic expressions for the transit (phase) time $\tau$ (in the opaque barrier limit) in order to study the recently proposed ``universality'' property according to which $\tau$ is given by the reciprocal of the photon frequency. We consider different physical phenomena (corresponding to performed experiments) and show that such a property is only an approximation. In particular we find that the ``correction'' factor is a constant term for total internal reflection and quarter-wave photonic bandgap, while it is frequency-dependent in the case of undersized waveguide and distributed Bragg reflector. The comparison of our predictions with the experimental results shows quite a good agreement with observations and reveals the range of applicability of the approximated ``universality'' property.Comment: RevTeX, 8 pages, 4 figures, 1 table; subsection added with a new experiment analyzed, some other minor change

The Airline Container Loading Problem with Pickup and Delivery

This paper considers the loading optimization problem for a set of containers and pallets transported into a cargo aircraft that serves multiple airports. Because of pickup and delivery operations that occur at intermediate airports, this problem is simultaneously a Weight & Balance Problem and a Sequencing Problem. Our objective is to minimize fuel and handling operation costs. This problem is shown to be NP-hard. We resort to a mixed integer linear program. Based on real-world data from a professional partner (TNT Airways), we perform numerical experiments using a standard B&C library. This approach yields better solutions than traditional manual planning, which results in substantial cost savings.Optimization in air transpor