Flexible surface electrodes targeting biopotential signals from forearm muscles for control of prosthetic hands: Part 1 - Characterisation of semg electrodes

This study is Part 1 of two studies which investigate the use of various flexible surface sensors as an alternative to the gold standard Ag/AgCl surface electromyography (sEMG) electrodes in identifying movement intention from a user during common hand gestures. Three conductive textiles, two commercial conductive elastomers and one E-skin elastomer produced on site were tested as biopotential electrodes to establish the efficacy of each in gathering movement intention from the human brain at the level of the muscle. Testing was performed in vivo on two participants across three hand gestures, with results demonstrating that sEMG electrodes made from a commercially sourced conductive fabric can outperform the traditional Ag/AgCl sEMG electrodes, obtaining substantially larger peak and RMS measurements. Given the disadvantages of Ag/AgCl electrodes over long usage periods, namely their tendency to dry out and significant skin preparation, resulting in variable impedances and skin irritation respectively, the incorporation of flexible surface EMG electrodes in hand prosthetic control systems would increase functionality of the prosthetic devices, consequently increasing the quality of life of prosthetic hand users

Asymmetric Fabry-Perot-type transmission in photonic-crystal gratings with one-sided corrugations at a two-way coupling

Cataloged from PDF version of article.Strongly asymmetric Fabry-Perot-type transmission arising at the two-way coupling has been studied in the case of normal incidence for slabs of two-dimensional photonic crystals (PCs) with one-sided corrugations that are made of linear isotropic materials. Comparing to the scenario of unidirectional transmission known for the structures with broken spatial inversion symmetry that requires zero order being uncoupled, in the studied mechanism zero order is either the sole order or one of the orders that may be coupled to a Floquet-Bloch mode. Contrary to the earlier studies of asymmetric transmission at the coupled zero order, structures with nondeep corrugations are considered, which allow one to combine Fabry-Perot-type total-transmission maxima with diffractions in a desired way. At a proper choice of PC lattice and corrugation parameters, higher orders can dominate in Fabry-Perot-type transmission at the noncorrugated-side illumination and also at the total-transmission maxima, whereas only zero order contributes to the transmission at the corrugated-side illumination. As a result, strong asymmetry can be obtained without uncoupling of zero order but it invokes the unidirectional contribution of higher orders. The presented results show that the entire structure can be approximately decomposed into the two independent, regular and grating (nonregular), parts whose contributions to the transmission are additive. Multiple asymmetric transmission maxima can coexist with a rather high equivalent group index of refraction. Possible applications of the studied transmission mechanism are discussed

Timestamp-based result cache invalidation for web search engines

The result cache is a vital component for efficiency of large-scale web search engines, and maintaining the freshness of cached query results is the current research challenge. As a remedy to this problem, our work proposes a new mechanism to identify queries whose cached results are stale. The basic idea behind our mechanism is to maintain and compare generation time of query results with update times of posting lists and documents to decide on staleness of query results. The proposed technique is evaluated using a Wikipedia document collection with real update information and a real-life query log. We show that our technique has good prediction accuracy, relative to a baseline based on the time-to-live mechanism. Moreover, it is easy to implement and incurs less processing overhead on the system relative to a recently proposed, more sophisticated invalidation mechanism

Adaptive time-to-live strategies for query result caching in web search engines

An important research problem that has recently started to receive attention is the freshness issue in search engine result caches. In the current techniques in literature, the cached search result pages are associated with a fixed time-to-live (TTL) value in order to bound the staleness of search results presented to the users, potentially as part of a more complex cache refresh or invalidation mechanism. In this paper, we propose techniques where the TTL values are set in an adaptive manner, on a per-query basis. Our results show that the proposed techniques reduce the fraction of stale results served by the cache and also decrease the fraction of redundant query evaluations on the search engine backend compared to a strategy using a fixed TTL value for all queries. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

Beam test results of 25 and 35 μ m thick FBK ultra-fast silicon detectors

This paper presents the measurements on first very thin Ultra-Fast Silicon Detectors (UFSDs) produced by Fondazione Bruno Kessler; the data have been collected in a beam test setup at the CERN PS, using beam with a momentum of 12 GeV/c. UFSDs with a nominal thickness of 25 and 35 mu m and an area of 1 x 1 mm(2) have been considered, together with an additional HPK 50-mu m thick sensor, taken as reference. Their timing performances have been studied as a function of the applied voltage and gain. A time resolution of about 25 ps and of 22 ps at a voltage of 120 and 240 V has been obtained for the 25 and 35 mu m thick UFSDs, respectively

INFN What Next: Ultra-relativistic Heavy-Ion Collisions

This document was prepared by the community that is active in Italy, within INFN (Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare), in the field of ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions. The experimental study of the phase diagram of strongly-interacting matter and of the Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP) deconfined state will proceed, in the next 10-15 years, along two directions: the high-energy regime at RHIC and at the LHC, and the low-energy regime at FAIR, NICA, SPS and RHIC. The Italian community is strongly involved in the present and future programme of the ALICE experiment, the upgrade of which will open, in the 2020s, a new phase of high-precision characterisation of the QGP properties at the LHC. As a complement of this main activity, there is a growing interest in a possible future experiment at the SPS, which would target the search for the onset of deconfinement using dimuon measurements. On a longer timescale, the community looks with interest at the ongoing studies and discussions on a possible fixed-target programme using the LHC ion beams and on the Future Circular Collider.Comment: 99 pages, 56 figure

Direct detection of charged particles with SiPMs

The direct response of Silicon PhotoMultipliers being traversed by a MIP charged particle have been studied in a systematic way for the first time. Using beam test data, time resolution and the crosstalk probability have been measured. A characterization of the SiPM by means of a laser beam is also reported. The results obtained for different sensors indicate a measured time resolution around 40-70 ps. Although particles are expected to traverse only one SPAD per event, crosstalk measurements on different sensors indicate an unexpected higher value with respect to the one related to the sensor noise

Two-pion Bose-Einstein correlations in central Pb-Pb collisions at sNN\sqrt{s_{\rm NN}} = 2.76 TeV

The first measurement of two-pion Bose-Einstein correlations in central Pb-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\rm NN}} = 2.76$ TeV at the Large Hadron Collider is presented. We observe a growing trend with energy now not only for the longitudinal and the outward but also for the sideward pion source radius. The pion homogeneity volume and the decoupling time are significantly larger than those measured at RHIC.Comment: 17 pages, 5 captioned figures, 1 table, authors from page 12, published version, figures at http://aliceinfo.cern.ch/ArtSubmission/node/388

Suppression of charged particle production at large transverse momentum in central Pb-Pb collisions at sNN=2.76\sqrt{s_{\rm NN}} = 2.76 TeV

Inclusive transverse momentum spectra of primary charged particles in Pb-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{_{\rm NN}}}$ = 2.76 TeV have been measured by the ALICE Collaboration at the LHC. The data are presented for central and peripheral collisions, corresponding to 0-5% and 70-80% of the hadronic Pb-Pb cross section. The measured charged particle spectra in $|\eta|<0.8$ and $0.3 < p_T < 20$ GeV/$c$ are compared to the expectation in pp collisions at the same $\sqrt{s_{\rm NN}}$, scaled by the number of underlying nucleon-nucleon collisions. The comparison is expressed in terms of the nuclear modification factor $R_{\rm AA}$. The result indicates only weak medium effects ($R_{\rm AA} \approx$ 0.7) in peripheral collisions. In central collisions, $R_{\rm AA}$ reaches a minimum of about 0.14 at $p_{\rm T}=6$-7GeV/$c$ and increases significantly at larger $p_{\rm T}$. The measured suppression of high-$p_{\rm T}$ particles is stronger than that observed at lower collision energies, indicating that a very dense medium is formed in central Pb-Pb collisions at the LHC.Comment: 15 pages, 5 captioned figures, 3 tables, authors from page 10, published version, figures at http://aliceinfo.cern.ch/ArtSubmission/node/98