Optical alignment system Patent

Electro-optical/computer system for aligning large structural members and maintaining correct positio

Cardiac Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the Myocardium in Chronic Kidney Disease

Early stages of chronic kidney disease (CKD) are often underdiagnosed, while their deleterious effects on the cardiovascular (CV) system are already at work. Thus, the assessment of early CV damage is of crucial importance in preventing major CV events. Myocardial fibrosis is one of the major consequences of progressive CKD, as it may lead to reentry arrhythmias and long-term myocardial dysfunction predisposing to sudden death and/or congestive heart failure. Subclinical myocardial fibrosis, with a potential key role in the development of uraemic cardiac disease, can be measured and characterised by appropriate cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) techniques. Fibrosis detection was initially based on the contrast agent gadolinium, due to the superiority in sensitivity and accuracy of contrast-based methods in fibrosis assessment relative to native techniques. However, the severe consequences of gadolinium administration in uraemia (nephrogenic systemic fibrosis) have forced practitioners to re-evaluate the methodology. In the present overview, we review the possible contrast-based and contrast agent-free CMR techniques, including native T1 relaxation time, extracellular volume and global longitudinal strain measurement. The review also summarises their potential clinical relevance in CKD patients based on recently published studies

Measuring the Density Matrix by Local Addressing

We introduce a procedure to measure the density matrix of a material system. The density matrix is addressed locally in this scheme by applying a sequence of delayed light pulses. The procedure is based on the stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (STIRAP) technique. It is shown that a series of population measurements on the target state of the population transfer process yields unambiguous information about the populations and coherences of the addressed states, which therefore can be determined.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figur

On a generalization of the binomial distribution and its Poisson-like limit

We examine a generalization of the binomial distribution associated with a strictly increasing sequence of numbers and we prove its Poisson-like limit. Such generalizations might be found in quantum optics with imperfect detection. We discuss under which conditions this distribution can have a probabilistic interpretation.Comment: 17 pages, 6 figure

Enhanced Nonlinear Generation in a Three-Level Medium with Spatially Dependent Coherence

We consider a method for efficient parametric generation of a laser pulse. A single laser field is injected to a three-level medium which has two lower states and one excited state. The lower states are prepared initially in a position-dependent coherent superposition state. It is shown that by proper choice of the position dependence of the superposition along the direction of propagation, the incoming field can be converted completely to a new field.Comment: Revtex4 document, 3 pages, 2 figure

On the relationship between standard intersection cuts, lift-and-project cuts, and generalized intersection cuts

We examine the connections between the classes of cuts in the title. We show that lift-and-project (L&P) cuts from a given disjunction are equivalent to generalized intersection cuts from the family of polyhedra obtained by taking positive combinations of the complements of the inequalities of each term of the disjunction. While L&P cuts from split disjunctions are known to be equivalent to standard intersection cuts (SICs) from the strip obtained by complementing the terms of the split, we show that L&P cuts from more general disjunctions may not be equivalent to any SIC. In particular, we give easily verifiable necessary and sufficient conditions for a L&P cut from a given disjunction D to be equivalent to a SIC from the polyhedral counterpart of D. Irregular L&P cuts, i.e. those that violate these conditions, have interesting properties. For instance, unlike the regular ones, they may cut off part of the corner polyhedron associated with the LP solution from which they are derived. Furthermore, they are not exceptional: their frequency exceeds that of regular cuts. A numerical example illustrates some of the above properties. © 2016 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg and Mathematical Optimization Societ