Lung ultrasound: a new tool for the cardiologist

For many years the lung has been considered off-limits for ultrasound. However, it has been recently shown that lung ultrasound (LUS) may represent a useful tool for the evaluation of many pulmonary conditions in cardiovascular disease. The main application of LUS for the cardiologist is the assessment of B-lines. B-lines are reverberation artifacts, originating from water-thickened pulmonary interlobular septa. Multiple B-lines are present in pulmonary congestion, and may help in the detection, semiquantification and monitoring of extravascular lung water, in the differential diagnosis of dyspnea, and in the prognostic stratification of chronic heart failure and acute coronary syndromes

Direct Time-Domain Observation of Conformational Relaxation in Gas-Phase Cold Collisions

Cooling molecules in the gas phase is important for precision spectroscopy, cold molecule physics, and physical chemistry. Measurements of conformational relaxation cross sections shed important light on potential energy surfaces and energy flow within a molecule. However, gas-phase conformational cooling has not been previously observed directly. In this work, we directly observe conformational dynamics of 1,2-propanediol in cold (6 K) collisions with atomic helium using microwave spectroscopy and buffer-gas cooling. Precise knowledge and control of the collisional environment in the buffer-gas allows us to measure the absolute collision cross-section for conformational relaxation. Several conformers of 1,2-propanediol are investigated and found to have relaxation cross-sections with He ranging from σ=4.7(3.0)×10−18 cm2 to σ>5×10−16 cm2. Our method is applicable to a broad class of molecules and could be used to provide information about the potential energy surfaces of previously uninvestigated molecules

Coherence in the presence of absorption and heating in a molecule interferometer

10.1038/ncomms8336Nature Communications6733

Erratum: Coherence in the presence of absorption and heating in a molecule interferometer (Nature Communications (2015), 6, (7336)) doi: 10.1038/ncomms8336

10.1038/ncomms10121Nature Communications6103

Matter-wave interference. Nanomechanical answer to Einstein

Quantum mechanical wave interference of massive molecules at an atomically thin grating sheds new light on an old question

Quantum interference of large organic molecules

The wave nature of matter is a key ingredient of quantum physics and yet it defies our classical intuition. First proposed by Louis de Broglie a century ago, it has since been confirmed with a variety of particles from electrons up to molecules. Here we demonstrate new high-contrast quantum experiments with large and massive tailor-made organic molecules in a near-field interferometer. Our experiments prove the quantum wave nature and delocalization of compounds composed of up to 430 atoms, with a maximal size of up to 60 angstrom, masses up to m=6,910 AMU and de Broglie wavelengths down to lambda(dB) = h/mv similar or equal to 1 pm. We show that even complex systems, with more than 1,000 internal degrees of freedom, can be prepared in quantum states that are sufficiently well isolated from their environment to avoid decoherence and to show almost perfect coherence