4,020 research outputs found
Scintillation detector for carbon-14
Detector consists of plastic, cylindrical double-wall scintillation cell, which is filled with gas to be analyzed. Thin, inner cell wall is isolated optically from outer (guard) scintillator wall by evaporated-aluminum coating. Bonding technique provides mechanical support to cell wall when device is exposed to high temperatures
Quantum state engineering using conditional measurement on a beam splitter
State preparation via conditional output measurement on a beam splitter is
studied, assuming the signal mode is mixed with a mode prepared in a Fock state
and photon numbers are measured in one of the output channels. It is shown that
the mode in the other output channel is prepared in either a photon-subtracted
or a photon-added Jacobi polynomial state, depending upon the difference
between the number of photons in the input Fock state and the number of photons
in the output Fock state onto which it is projected. The properties of the
conditional output states are studied for coherent and squeezed input states,
and the probabilities of generating the states are calculated. Relations to
other states, such as near-photon-number states and squeezed-state-excitations,
are given and proposals are made for generating them by combining the scheme
with others. Finally, effects of realistic photocounting and Fock-state
preparation are discussed.Comment: 8 figures using a4.st
Social Influence on Risk Perception During Adolescence.
Adolescence is a period of life in which peer relationships become increasingly important. Adolescents have a greater likelihood of taking risks when they are with peers rather than alone. In this study, we investigated the development of social influence on risk perception from late childhood through adulthood. Five hundred and sixty-three participants rated the riskiness of everyday situations and were then informed about the ratings of a social-influence group (teenagers or adults) before rating each situation again. All age groups showed a significant social-influence effect, changing their risk ratings in the direction of the provided ratings; this social-influence effect decreased with age. Most age groups adjusted their ratings more to conform to the ratings of the adult social-influence group than to the ratings of the teenager social-influence group. Only young adolescents were more strongly influenced by the teenager social-influence group than they were by the adult social-influence group, which suggests that to early adolescents, the opinions of other teenagers about risk matter more than the opinions of adults
When the hedgehog kisses the frog : A functional and structural investigation of syntactic processing in the developing brain
Partially-Latent Class Models (pLCM) for Case-Control Studies of Childhood Pneumonia Etiology
In population studies on the etiology of disease, one goal is the estimation
of the fraction of cases attributable to each of several causes. For example,
pneumonia is a clinical diagnosis of lung infection that may be caused by
viral, bacterial, fungal, or other pathogens. The study of pneumonia etiology
is challenging because directly sampling from the lung to identify the
etiologic pathogen is not standard clinical practice in most settings. Instead,
measurements from multiple peripheral specimens are made. This paper introduces
the statistical methodology designed for estimating the population etiology
distribution and the individual etiology probabilities in the Pneumonia
Etiology Research for Child Health (PERCH) study of 9; 500 children for 7 sites
around the world. We formulate the scientific problem in statistical terms as
estimating the mixing weights and latent class indicators under a
partially-latent class model (pLCM) that combines heterogeneous measurements
with different error rates obtained from a case-control study. We introduce the
pLCM as an extension of the latent class model. We also introduce graphical
displays of the population data and inferred latent-class frequencies. The
methods are tested with simulated data, and then applied to PERCH data. The
paper closes with a brief description of extensions of the pLCM to the
regression setting and to the case where conditional independence among the
measures is relaxed.Comment: 25 pages, 4 figures, 1 supplementary materia
Quantum local-field corrections and spontaneous decay
A recently developed scheme [S. Scheel, L. Knoll, and D.-G. Welsch, Phys.
Rev. A 58, 700 (1998)] for quantizing the macroscopic electromagnetic field in
linear dispersive and absorbing dielectrics satisfying the Kramers-Kronig
relations is used to derive the quantum local-field correction for the standard
virtual-sphere-cavity model. The electric and magnetic local-field operators
are shown to be consistent with QED only if the polarization noise is fully
taken into account. It is shown that the polarization fluctuations in the local
field can dramatically change the spontaneous decay rate, compared with the
familiar result obtained from the classical local-field correction. In
particular, the spontaneous emission rate strongly depends on the radius of the
local-field virtual cavity.Comment: 7 pages, using RevTeX, 4 figure
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