23,484 research outputs found
Injection locking of optomechanical oscillators via acoustic waves
Injection locking is a powerful technique for synchronization of oscillator
networks and controlling the phase and frequency of individual oscillators
using similar or other types of oscillators. Here, we present the first
demonstration of injection locking of a radiation-pressure driven
optomechanical oscillator (OMO) via acoustic waves. As opposed to previously
reported techniques (based on pump modulation or direct application of a
modulated electrostatic force), injection locking of OMO via acoustic waves
does not require optical power modulation or physical contact with the OMO and
it can easily be implemented on various platforms. Using this approach we have
locked the phase and frequency of two distinct modes of a microtoroidal silica
OMO to a piezoelectric transducer (PZT). We have characterized the behavior of
the injection locked OMO with three acoustic excitation configurations and
showed that even without proper acoustic impedance matching the OMO can be
locked to the PZT and tuned over 17 kHz with only -30 dBm of RF power fed to
the PZT. The high efficiency, simplicity and scalability of the proposed
approach paves the road toward a new class of photonic systems that rely on
synchronization of several OMOs to a single or multiple RF oscillators with
applications in optical communication, metrology and sensing. Beyond its
practical applications, injection locking via acoustic waves can be used in
fundamental studies in quantum optomechanics where thermal and optical
isolation of the OMO are critical
Randomized Algorithms for Tracking Distributed Count, Frequencies, and Ranks
We show that randomization can lead to significant improvements for a few
fundamental problems in distributed tracking. Our basis is the {\em
count-tracking} problem, where there are players, each holding a counter
that gets incremented over time, and the goal is to track an
\eps-approximation of their sum continuously at all times,
using minimum communication. While the deterministic communication complexity
of the problem is \Theta(k/\eps \cdot \log N), where is the final value
of when the tracking finishes, we show that with randomization, the
communication cost can be reduced to \Theta(\sqrt{k}/\eps \cdot \log N). Our
algorithm is simple and uses only O(1) space at each player, while the lower
bound holds even assuming each player has infinite computing power. Then, we
extend our techniques to two related distributed tracking problems: {\em
frequency-tracking} and {\em rank-tracking}, and obtain similar improvements
over previous deterministic algorithms. Both problems are of central importance
in large data monitoring and analysis, and have been extensively studied in the
literature.Comment: 19 pages, 1 figur
A practical approach to managing patients with HCV infection.
Hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection is a major worldwide public health concern. It is a common cause of chronic liver disease and hepatocellular carcinoma. HCV antibody and HCV RNA testing are available diagnostic studies that offer high degree of accuracy. Current standard therapy includes a combination of pegylated interferon and ribavirin. Response rate is approximately 40% for genotype 1 and 80% for genotypes 2 and 3, respectively. Successful treatment can stop the progression of chronic liver disease, reduce the need for liver transplantation, and possibly decrease the risk for Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). Evaluating for potential treatment candidacy is an important initial step in the management of chronic HCV infection as not all individuals may need or qualify for the treatment. Understanding the natural history, the different diagnostic modalities, the current therapeutic options and, the treatment response and adverse effect profiles can help the practitioners better manage chronic HCV infection
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