Effects of congenital hearing loss and cochlear implantation on audiovisual speech perception in infants and children

Purpose: Cochlear implantation has recently become available as an intervention strategy for young children with profound hearing impairment. In fact, infants as young as 6 months are now receiving cochlear implants (CIs), and even younger infants are being fitted with hearing aids (HAs). Because early audiovisual experience may be important for normal development of speech perception, it is important to investigate the effects of a period of auditory deprivation and amplification type on multimodal perceptual processes of infants and children. The purpose of this study was to investigate audiovisual perception skills in normal-hearing (NH) infants and children and deaf infants and children with CIs and HAs of similar chronological ages. Methods: We used an Intermodal Preferential Looking Paradigm to present the same woman\u27s face articulating two words ( judge and back ) in temporal synchrony on two sides of a TV monitor, along with an auditory presentation of one of the words. Results: The results showed that NH infants and children spontaneously matched auditory and visual information in spoken words; deaf infants and children with HAs did not integrate the audiovisual information; and deaf infants and children with CIs initially did not initially integrate the audiovisual information but gradually matched the auditory and visual information in spoken words. Conclusions: These results suggest that a period of auditory deprivation affects multimodal perceptual processes that may begin to develop normally after several months of auditory experience

Initial state maximizing the nonexponentially decaying survival probability for unstable multilevel systems

The long-time behavior of the survival probability for unstable multilevel systems that follows the power-decay law is studied based on the N-level Friedrichs model, and is shown to depend on the initial population in unstable states. A special initial state maximizing the asymptote of the survival probability at long times is found and examined by considering the spontaneous emission process for the hydrogen atom interacting with the electromagnetic field.Comment: 5 pages, 1 table. Accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.

Development and Characterization of CdZnTe Detectors for Neutrino Physics Research

AbstractCdZnTe crystals contain 9 double beta decay isotopes and can serve simultaneously as source and detector in a search for neutrino-less double beta decay. In particular, 116Cd and 130Te are suitable isotopes in such a search due to their high Q-values. The endpoint of the beta spectra resulting from double-beta decay of these isotopes is well above natural gamma lines which constitute backgrounds to a potential signal. Detectors for neutrino-less double beta decay searches require good energy resolution and effective background rejection. Both properties can be realized with position sensitive pixilated detectors that have particle tracking capabilities. CdZnTe detectors are promising detectors to satisfy these criteria and have the additional advantage of room temperature operation. We are developing and characterizing the performance of co-planar and pixilated CdZnTe detectors, study their charged particle tracking capabilities and evaluate their use in future neutrino-less double beta decay search experiments. Results from our laboratory measurements will be presented

Outgassing measurement of the aluminum alloy UHV chamber

A large vacuum chamber (580 mm diameter) was fabricated from an aluminum alloy surface treated by a special process normally used on small chambers. The chamber was tested unbaked and baked at various temperatures, pressures, and holding periods. The chamber was filled with N2 gas, and the outgassing rate was measured after one hour. Then the ultimate pressure was measured. Outgassing rates for baked and unbaked groups were compared. It is concluded that the same surface treatment technique can be used on both large and small chambers produced by the same special extrusion process

Does GRS 1915+105 exhibit "canonical" black-hole states?

We have analysed RXTE data of the superluminal source GRS 1915+105 in order to investigate if, despite its extreme variability, it also exhibits the canonical source states that characterise other black-hole candidates. The phenomenology of GRS 1915+105 has been described in terms of three states (named A, B and C) based on their hardness ratios and position in the colour-colour diagram. We have investigated the connection between these states and the canonical behaviour and found that the shape of the power spectral continuum and the values of the best-fit model parameters to the noise components in all three states indicate that the source shows properties similar to the canonical very high state.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication in A&

Uniqueness of static spherically symmetric vacuum solutions in the IR limit of Ho\v{r}ava-Lifshitz gravity

We investigate static spherically symmetric vacuum solutions in the IR limit of projectable nonrelativistic quantum gravity, including the renormalisable quantum gravity recently proposed by Ho\v{r}ava. It is found that the projectability condition plays an important role. Without the cosmological constant, the spacetime is uniquely given by the Schwarzschild solution. With the cosmological constant, the spacetime is uniquely given by the Kottler (Schwarzschild-(anti) de Sitter) solution for the entirely vacuum spacetime. However, in addition to the Kottler solution, the static spherical and hyperbolic universes are uniquely admissible for the locally empty region, for the positive and negative cosmological constants, respectively, if its nonvanishing contribution to the global Hamiltonian constraint can be compensated by that from the nonempty or nonstatic region. This implies that static spherically symmetric entirely vacuum solutions would not admit the freedom to reproduce the observed flat rotation curves of galaxies. On the other hand, the result for locally empty regions implies that the IR limit of nonrelativistic quantum gravity theories does not simply recover general relativity but includes it.Comment: 10 pages, accepted for publication in International Journal of Modern Physics

Entanglement of orbital angular momentum states between an ensemble of cold atoms and a photon

Recently, atomic ensemble and single photons were successfully entangled by using collective enhancement [D. N. Matsukevich, \textit{et al.}, Phys. Rev. Lett. \textbf{95}, 040405(2005).], where atomic internal states and photonic polarization states were correlated in nonlocal manner. Here we experimentally clarified that in an ensemble of atoms and a photon system, there also exists an entanglement concerned with spatial degrees of freedom. Generation of higher-dimensional entanglement between remote atomic ensemble and an application to condensed matter physics are also discussed.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure