Variable electrostatic transformer: controllable coupling of two charge qubits

We propose and investigate a novel method for the controlled coupling of two Josephson charge qubits by means of a variable electrostatic transformer. The value of the coupling capacitance is given by the discretized curvature of the lowest energy band of a Josephson junction, which can be positive, negative, or zero. We calculate the charging diagram of the two-qubit system that reflects the transition from positive to negative through vanishing coupling. We also discuss how to construct a phase gate making use of the controllable coupling.Comment: final version, to appear in Phys. Rev. Let

Incorporating independent component analysis and multi-temporal sar techniques to retrieve rapid postseismic deformation

This study investigates the ongoing postseismic deformation induced by two moderate mainshocks of Mw 6.1 and Mw 6.0, 2017 Hojedk earthquake in Southern Iran. Available Sentinel-1 TOPS C-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images over about one year after the earthquakes are used to analyze the postseismic activities. An adaptive method incorporating Independent Component Analysis (ICA) and multi-Temporal Small BAseline Subset (SBAS) Interferometric SAR (InSAR) techniques is proposed and implemented to recover the rapid deformation. This method is applied to the series of interferograms generated in a fully constructed SBAS network to retrieve the postseismic deformation signal. ICA algorithm uses a linear transformation to decompose the input mixed signal to its source components, which are non-Gaussian and mutually independent. This analysis allows extracting the low rate postseismic deformation signal from a mixture of interferometric phase components. The independent sources recovered from the multi-Temporal InSAR dataset are then analyzed using a group clustering test aiming to identify and enhance the undescribed deformation signal. Analysis of the processed interferograms indicates a promising performance of the proposed method in determining tectonic deformation. The proposed method works well, mainly when the tectonic signal is dominated by the undesired signals, including atmosphere or orbital/unwrapping noise that counts as temporally uncorrelated components.In contrast to the standard SBAS time series method, the ICA-based time series analysis estimates the cumulative deformation with no prior assumption about elevation dependence of the interferometric phase or temporal nature of the tectonic signal. Application of the method to 433 Sentinel-1 pairs within the dataset reports two distinct deformation patches corresponding to the postseismic deformation. Besides the performance of the ICA-based analysis, the proposed method automatically detects rapid or low rate tectonic processes in unfavorable conditions. © Authors 2020. All rights reserved

Effect of Species Horizontal Distribution on Defoliation of Ryegrass-Clover Swards Grazed by Sheep

Defoliation events on labelled white clover (Trifolium repens) growing points or ryegrass (Lolium perenne) tillers were measured during grazing tests by sheep with swards consisting of mixed ryegrass-clover (MIX) or alternate strips of clover and ryegrass (STRIP). Sward surface height was maintained at 6.4 cm by lawnmower cuts in order to obtain a similar surface height for both species. On average, during 13 grazing tests in STRIP and 11 in MIX swards, clover was the more defoliated species : 23.3% of the growing points in STRIP and 26.5% in MIX swards were defoliated compared to 16.2% and 12.5% of the tillers. No difference of clover defoliation probability occurred between STRIP and MIX swards, nor between clover growing points in different neighbourhoods in STRIP sward, indicating that the horizontal distribution of clover does not affect its pattern of defoliation by sheep

Analyse du profil de texture (tpa) et caractérisation physicochimiques des pâtes de tamarin enrichies en feuilles de moringa oleifera

Le but de cette étude était de caractériser les propriétés physicochimiques (Aw, couleur, teneur en eau) et rhéologiques (analyse du profil de texture) des pâtes de tamarin enrichies avec différentes teneurs en Moringa oleifera. Cette supplémentation permet d’accroître la teneur protéique des produits et ainsi de participer activement au programme national de Madagascar pour la nutrition. Cette étude a permis de définir la limite haute d’acceptabilité d’ajout en Moringa oleifera. Au-delà d’un ajout de 30% en Moringa oleifera dans les pâtes de tamarin, les propriétés texturales et physicochimiques sont significativement différentes. En parallèle, une étude de vieillissement des différents produits sur 30 jours a été réalisée. Cette étude démontre le potentiel d’exploitation industriel des pâtes de tamarin enrichies avec 30% de Moringa oleifera. Ainsi ce produit alimentaire contribuerai activement au plan d’action national pour la nutrition tout en valoriser les ressources naturelles de Madagascar.Mots-clés: pâtes de fruits, Moringa oleifera, tamarin, profil de texture, propriétés physicochimiques. Texture profile analysis (tpa) and physicochemical properties study of tamarins jelly enriched with moringa oléiféra leaves The purpose of this study was to characterize the physicochemical properties (Aw, color, relative humidity) and rheological properties (texture profile analysis) of tamarind pastes enriched with different quantities of Moringa oleifera. This supplement helps to increase the protein content of the products and thus actively participate in the national program for nutrition in Madagascar. This study has identified the upper acceptability limit of adding in Moringa oleifera. Beyond the addition of 30% of Moringa oleifera in fruit pastes, textural and physicochemical properties are significantly different. In parallel, a study of aging for all the above products over 30 days was carried out. This study highlights the potential for industrial exploitation of Tamarind pastes enriched with 30% Moringa oleifera. In this way this food would contribute actively in the nation action plan of nutrition of Madagascar while encouraging the natural resources of Madagascar.Keywords: fruits pastes, Moringa oleifera, tamarin, texture profile analysis, chemicophysical properties

Contact Force Modeling Between Non Convex Objects Using a Nonlinear Damping Model

At Sandia National Laboratories, the authors are developing the ability to accurately predict motions for arbitrary numbers of bodies of arbitrary shapes experiencing multiple applied forces and intermittent contacts. In particular, they are concerned with the simulation of systems such as part feeders or mobile robots operating in realistic environments. Preliminary investigation of commercial dynamics software packages led us to the conclude that they could use a commercial code to provide everything they needed except for the contact model. They found that ADAMS best fit the needs for a simulation package. To simulate intermittent contacts, they need collision detection software that can efficiently compute the distances between non-convex objects and return the associated witness features. They also require a computationally efficient contact model for rapid simulation of impact, sustained contact under load, and transition to and from contact conditions. This paper provides a technical review of a custom hierarchical distance computation engine developed at Sandia, called the C-Space Toolkit (CSTk). In addition, the authors describe an efficient contact model using a non-linear damping term developed at Ohio State. Both the CSTk and the non-linear damper have been incorporated in a simplified two-body testbed code, which is used to investigate how to correctly model the contact using these two utilities. They have incorporated this model into ADAMS SOLVER using the callable function interface. An example that illustrate the capabilities of the 9.02 release of ADAMS with the extensions is provided

Analysis and Optimization of a Piezoelectric Harvester on a Car Damper

AbstractLow power levels obtained from piezoelectric conversion of ambient vibrations appear to be a promising solution to supply wireless sensors embedded inside automotive suspension. However such a solution requires overall an optimum power extraction from the piezoelectric power harvester. This leads to the use of a sufficiently accurate and flexible modelling method to find the optimal characterics and configuration of the harvester. To this end, an innovative bond graph model of the piezoelectric harvester embedded in the quarter vehicle system is proposed for providing the harvested power when a car travels a road with a speed bump at 30km/h. Results show that around of 0.5 milliwatt electrical power is harvested when varying key parameters like the location and characteristics of the piezoelectric device

Multi-scale building maps from aerial imagery

Nowadays, the extraction of buildings from aerial imagery is mainly done through deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs). Buildings are predicted as binary pixel masks and then regularized to polygons. Restricted by nearby occlusions (such as trees), building eaves, and sometimes imperfect imagery data, these results can hardly be used to generate detailed building footprints comparable to authoritative data. Therefore, most products can only be used for mapping at smaller map scale. The level of detail that should be retained is normally determined by the scale parameter in the regularization algorithm. However, this scale information has been already defined in cartography. From existing maps of different scales, neural network can be used to learn such scale information implicitly. The network can perform generalization directly on the mask output and generate multi-scale building maps at once. In this work, a pipeline method is proposed, which can generate multi-scale building maps from aerial imagery directly. We used a land cover classification model to provide the building blobs. With the models pre-trained for cartographic building generalization, blobs were generalized to three target map scales, 1:10,000, 1:15,000, and 1:25,000. After post-processing with vectorization and regularization, multi-scale building maps were generated and then compared with existing authoritative building data qualitatively and quantitatively. In addition, change detection was performed and suggestions for unmapped buildings could be provided at a desired map scale. . © 2020 International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences - ISPRS Archives

Enhanced transmission of slit arrays in an extremely thin metallic film

Horizontal resonances of slit arrays are studied. They can lead to an enhanced transmission that cannot be explained using the single-mode approximation. A new type of cavity resonance is found when the slits are narrow for a wavelength very close to the period. It can be excited for very low thicknesses. Optimization shows these structures could constitute interesting monochromatic filters

Investigations on skip-connections with an additional cosine similarity loss for land cover classification

Pixel-based land cover classification of aerial images is a standard task in remote sensing, whose goal is to identify the physical material of the earth's surface. Recently, most of the well-performing methods rely on encoder-decoder structure based convolutional neural networks (CNN). In the encoder part, many successive convolution and pooling operations are applied to obtain features at a lower spatial resolution, and in the decoder part these features are up-sampled gradually and layer by layer, in order to make predictions in the original spatial resolution. However, the loss of spatial resolution caused by pooling affects the final classification performance negatively, which is compensated by skip-connections between corresponding features in the encoder and the decoder. The most popular ways to combine features are element-wise addition of feature maps and 1x1 convolution. In this work, we investigate skip-connections. We argue that not every skip-connections are equally important. Therefore, we conducted experiments designed to find out which skip-connections are important. Moreover, we propose a new cosine similarity loss function to utilize the relationship of the features of the pixels belonging to the same category inside one mini-batch, i.e.These features should be close in feature space. Our experiments show that the new cosine similarity loss does help the classification. We evaluated our methods using the Vaihingen and Potsdam dataset of the ISPRS 2D semantic labelling challenge and achieved an overall accuracy of 91.1% for both test sites. © Authors 2020. All rights reserved