Observation of a single atom in a magneto-optical trap

Fluorescence from Cs atoms in a magneto-optical trap is detected under conditions of very low atomic density. Discrete steps are observed in the fluorescent signal versus time and are associated with the arrival and departure of individual trapped atoms. Histograms of the frequency of occurrence of a given level of fluorescence exhibit a series of uniformly spaced peaks that are attributed to the presence of N = 0, 1, 2 atoms in the trap

Sliding mode and shaped input vibration control of flexible systems

Copyright [2008] IEEE. This material is posted here with permission of the IEEE. Such permission of the IEEE does not in any way imply IEEE endorsement of any of Brunel University's products or services. Internal or personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution must be obtained from the IEEE by writing to [email protected]. By choosing to view this document, you agree to all provisions of the copyright laws protecting it.In this paper, the vibration reduction problem is investigated for a flexible spacecraft during attitude maneuvering. A new control strategy is proposed, which integrates both the command input shaping and the sliding mode output feedback control (SMOFC) techniques. Specifically, the input shaper is designed for the reference model and implemented outside of the feedback loop in order to achieve the exact elimination of the residual vibration by modifying the existing command. The feedback controller, on the other hand, is designed based on the SMOFC such that the closed-loop system behaves like the reference model with input shaper, where the residual vibrations are eliminated in the presence of parametric uncertainties and external disturbances. An attractive feature of this SMOFC algorithm is that the parametric uncertainties or external disturbances of the system do not need to satisfy the so-called matching conditions or invariance conditions provided that certain bounds are known. In addition, a smoothed hyperbolic tangent function is introduced to eliminate the chattering phenomenon. Compared with the conventional methods, the proposed scheme guarantees not only the stability of the closed-loop system, but also the good performance as well as the robustness. Simulation results for the spacecraft model show that the precise attitudes control and vibration suppression are successfully achieved

Recent advances on recursive filtering and sliding mode design for networked nonlinear stochastic systems: A survey

Copyright © 2013 Jun Hu et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Some recent advances on the recursive filtering and sliding mode design problems for nonlinear stochastic systems with network-induced phenomena are surveyed. The network-induced phenomena under consideration mainly include missing measurements, fading measurements, signal quantization, probabilistic sensor delays, sensor saturations, randomly occurring nonlinearities, and randomly occurring uncertainties. With respect to these network-induced phenomena, the developments on filtering and sliding mode design problems are systematically reviewed. In particular, concerning the network-induced phenomena, some recent results on the recursive filtering for time-varying nonlinear stochastic systems and sliding mode design for time-invariant nonlinear stochastic systems are given, respectively. Finally, conclusions are proposed and some potential future research works are pointed out.This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant nos. 61134009, 61329301, 61333012, 61374127 and 11301118, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) of the UK under Grant no. GR/S27658/01, the Royal Society of the UK, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of Germany

Gain-constrained recursive filtering with stochastic nonlinearities and probabilistic sensor delays

This is the post-print of the Article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2013 IEEE.This paper is concerned with the gain-constrained recursive filtering problem for a class of time-varying nonlinear stochastic systems with probabilistic sensor delays and correlated noises. The stochastic nonlinearities are described by statistical means that cover the multiplicative stochastic disturbances as a special case. The phenomenon of probabilistic sensor delays is modeled by introducing a diagonal matrix composed of Bernoulli distributed random variables taking values of 1 or 0, which means that the sensors may experience randomly occurring delays with individual delay characteristics. The process noise is finite-step autocorrelated. The purpose of the addressed gain-constrained filtering problem is to design a filter such that, for all probabilistic sensor delays, stochastic nonlinearities, gain constraint as well as correlated noises, the cost function concerning the filtering error is minimized at each sampling instant, where the filter gain satisfies a certain equality constraint. A new recursive filtering algorithm is developed that ensures both the local optimality and the unbiasedness of the designed filter at each sampling instant which achieving the pre-specified filter gain constraint. A simulation example is provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed filter design approach.This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China by Grants 61273156, 61028008, 60825303, 61104125, and 11271103, National 973 Project by Grant 2009CB320600, the Fok Ying Tung Education Fund by Grant 111064, the Special Fund for the Author of National Excellent Doctoral Dissertation of China by Grant 2007B4, the State Key Laboratory of Integrated Automation for the Process Industry (Northeastern University) of China, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) of the U.K. by Grant GR/S27658/01, the Royal Society of the U.K., and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of Germany

Robust sliding mode control for discrete stochastic systems with mixed time delays, randomly occurring uncertainties, and randomly occurring nonlinearities

This is the post-print version of the paper. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2012 IEEEThis paper investigates the robust sliding mode control (SMC) problem for a class of uncertain nonlinear stochastic systems with mixed time delays. Both the sectorlike nonlinearities and the norm-bounded uncertainties enter into the system in random ways, and such randomly occurring uncertainties and randomly occurring nonlinearities obey certain mutually uncorrelated Bernoulli distributed white noise sequences. The mixed time delays consist of both the discrete and the distributed delays. The time-varying delays are allowed in state. By employing the idea of delay fractioning and constructing a new Lyapunov–Krasovskii functional, sufficient conditions are established to ensure the stability of the system dynamics in the specified sliding surface by solving a certain semidefinite programming problem. A full-state feedback SMC law is designed to guarantee the reaching condition. A simulation example is given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed SMC scheme.This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants 61028008, 60825303 and 60834003, National 973 Project under Grant 2009CB320600, the Fok Ying Tung Education Fund under Grant 111064, the Special Fund for the Author of National Excellent Doctoral Dissertation of China under Grant 2007B4, the Key Laboratory of Integrated Automation for the Process Industry Northeastern University) from the Ministry of Education of China, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) of the U.K. under Grant GR/S27658/01, the Royal Society of the U.K., and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of Germany

Tungsten fibre reinforced Zr-based bulk metallic glass composites

A Zr-based bulk metallic glass (BMG) alloy with the composition (Zr55Al10Ni5Cu30)98.5Si1.5 was used as the base material to form BMG composites. Tungsten fiber reinforced BMG composites were successfully fabricated by pressure metal infiltration technique, with the volume fraction of the tungsten fiber ranging from 10% to 70%. Microstructure and mechanical properties of the BMG composites were investigated. Tungsten reinforcement significantly increased the material’s ductility by changing the compressive failure mode from single shear band propagation to multiple shear bands propagation, and transferring stress from matrix to tungsten fibers

On the Three-dimensional Lattice Model

Using the restricted star-triangle relation, it is shown that the $N$-state spin integrable model on a three-dimensional lattice with spins interacting round each elementary cube of the lattice proposed by Mangazeev, Sergeev and Stroganov is a particular case of the Bazhanov-Baxter model.Comment: 8 pages, latex, 4 figure

Nonlinear analysis of dynamical complex networks

Copyright © 2013 Zidong Wang et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Complex networks are composed of a large number of highly interconnected dynamical units and therefore exhibit very complicated dynamics. Examples of such complex networks include the Internet, that is, a network of routers or domains, the World Wide Web (WWW), that is, a network of websites, the brain, that is, a network of neurons, and an organization, that is, a network of people. Since the introduction of the small-world network principle, a great deal of research has been focused on the dependence of the asymptotic behavior of interconnected oscillatory agents on the structural properties of complex networks. It has been found out that the general structure of the interaction network may play a crucial role in the emergence of synchronization phenomena in various fields such as physics, technology, and the life sciences