Complexity-based learning and teaching: a case study in higher education

This paper presents a learning and teaching strategy based on complexity science and explores its impacts on a higher education game design course. The strategy aimed at generating conditions fostering individual and collective learning in educational complex adaptive systems, and led the design of the course through an iterative and adaptive process informed by evidence emerging from course dynamics. The data collected indicate that collaboration was initially challenging for students, but collective learning emerged as the course developed, positively affecting individual and team performance. Even though challenged, students felt highly motivated and enjoyed working on course activities. Their perception of progress and expertise were always high, and the academic performance was on average very good. The strategy fostered collaboration and allowed students and tutors to deal with complex situations requiring adaptation

On the number of Mather measures of Lagrangian systems

In 1996, Ricardo Ricardo Ma\~n\'e discovered that Mather measures are in fact the minimizers of a "universal" infinite dimensional linear programming problem. This fundamental result has many applications, one of the most important is to the estimates of the generic number of Mather measures. Ma\~n\'e obtained the first estimation of that sort by using finite dimensional approximations. Recently, we were able with Gonzalo Contreras to use this method of finite dimensional approximation in order to solve a conjecture of John Mather concerning the generic number of Mather measures for families of Lagrangian systems. In the present paper we obtain finer results in that direction by applying directly some classical tools of convex analysis to the infinite dimensional problem. We use a notion of countably rectifiable sets of finite codimension in Banach (and Frechet) spaces which may deserve independent interest

Experiments on W-band extended interaction oscillator with pseudospark sourced post-accelerated electron beam

The experimental study of a pseudospark discharge sourced electron beam with post acceleration (PA) is presented. The PA circuit was used to drive a W-band extended interaction oscillator (EIO). The experiments showed a significant increase in the output power, with 200 Watts at 94 GHz measured corresponding to a 5 times increase in the output power as compared to when post acceleration is not used. The microwave device developed has the advantage of not requiring an external magnetic field making it a low cost, compact and portable sub-terahertz radiation source

Influence of the electrode gap separation on the pseudospark-sourced electron beam generation

Pseudospark-sourced electron beam is a self-focused intense electron beam which can propagate without any external focusing magnetic field. This electron beam can drive a beam-wave interaction directly or after being post-accelerated. It is especially suitable for terahertz (THz) radiation generation due to the ability of a pseudospark discharge to produce small size in the micron range and very high current density and bright electron beams. In this paper, a single-gap pseudospark discharge chamber has been built and tested with several electrode gap separations to explore the dependence of the pseudospark-sourced electron beam current on the discharge voltage and the electrode gap separation. Experimental results show that the beam pulses have similar pulse width and delay time from the distinct drop of the applied voltage for smaller electrode gap separations but longer delay time for the largest gap separation used in the experiment. It has been found that the electron beam only starts to occur when the charging voltage is above a certain value, which is defined as the starting voltage of the electron beam. The starting voltage is different for different electrode gap separations and decreases with increasing electrode gap separation in our pseudospark discharge configuration. The electron beam current increases with the increasing discharge voltage following two tendencies. Under the same discharge voltage, the configuration with the larger electrode gap separation will generate higher electron beam current. When the discharge voltage is higher than 10 kV, the beam current generated at the electrode gap separation of 17.0 mm, is much higher than that generated at smaller gap separations. The ionization of the neutral gas in the main gap is inferred to contribute more to the current increase with increasing electrode gap separation

Advanced post-acceleration methodology for pseudospark-sourced electron beam

During its conductive phase, a pseudospark discharge is able to generate a low energy electron beam with a higher combined current density and brightness compared with electron beams formed from any other known type of electron source. In this paper, a configuration is proposed to post-accelerate an electron beam extracted from a single-gap pseudospark discharge cavity in order to achieve high quality high energy intense electron beams. The major advancement is that the triggering of the pseudospark discharge, the pseudospark discharge itself, and the post-accelerating of the electron beam are all driven by a single high voltage pulse. An electron beam with a beam current of ∼20 A, beam voltage of 40 kV, and duration of ∼180 ns has been generated using this structure. The beam energy can be adjusted through adjusting the amplitude of the voltage pulse and the operating voltage of the whole structure, which can be varied from 24 to 50 kV with an efficient triggering method under fixed gas pressure below ∼10 Pa

Study of the beam profile and position instability of a post-accelerated pseudospark-sourced electron beam

A pseudospark-sourced electron beam is a promising candidate for driving a THz millimeter wave radiation source. However, the physics governing the electron beam density profile and the beam center deviation from the axis of the structure, which may be caused by the randomness in the pseudospark discharge process, remains still unclear especially for the high energy component of the pseudospark-sourced electron beam which is usually non-mono-energetic. It is essential to study the electron beam density profile and the beam center position distribution for optimizing the pseudospark discharge configuration. In this paper, images of some single-shot electron beam pulses have been captured using a 50 μm thickness stopping copper foil and a phosphor screen coated with P47 scintillator to study the electron beam density profile and the beam center position distribution of the high energy component of the electron beam. The experiments have been carried out on two pseudospark discharge configurations with two different size hollow cathode cavities. The influence of the cathode aperture of each configuration has also been studied according to the beam images. Experimental results show that the beam profile of the high energy component has a Lorentzian distribution and is much smaller than the axial aperture size with the beam centers dispersing within a certain range around the axis of the discharge structure. The pseudospark-sourced electron beam with the larger hollow cathode cavity shows smaller full width at half maximum (FWHM) radius and a more concentrated beam center distribution

Generalized compactness in linear spaces and its applications

The class of subsets of locally convex spaces called $\mu$-compact sets is considered. This class contains all compact sets as well as several noncompact sets widely used in applications. It is shown that many results well known for compact sets can be generalized to $\mu$-compact sets. Several examples are considered. The main result of the paper is a generalization to $\mu$-compact convex sets of the Vesterstrom-O'Brien theorem showing equivalence of the particular properties of a compact convex set (s.t. openness of the mixture map, openness of the barycenter map and of its restriction to maximal measures, continuity of a convex hull of any continuous function, continuity of a convex hull of any concave continuous function). It is shown that the Vesterstrom-O'Brien theorem does not hold for pointwise $\mu$-compact convex sets defined by the slight relaxing of the $\mu$-compactness condition. Applications of the obtained results to quantum information theory are considered.Comment: 27 pages, the minor corrections have been mad

Axial light emission and Ar metastable densities in a parallel plate dc micro discharge in steady state and transient regimes

Axial emission profiles in a parallel plate dc micro discharge (feedgas: argon; discharge gap d=1mm; pressure p=10Torr) were studied by means of time resolved imaging with a fast ICCD camera. Additionally, volt-ampere (V-A) characteristics were recorded and Ar* metastable densities were measured by tunable diode laser absorption spectroscopy (TDLAS). Axial emission profiles in the steady state regime are similar to corresponding profiles in standard size discharges (d=1cm, p=1Torr). For some discharge conditions relaxation oscillations are present when the micro discharge switches periodically between low current Townsend-like mode and normal glow. At the same time the axial emission profile shows transient behavior, starting with peak distribution at the anode, which gradually moves towards the cathode during the normal glow. The development of argon metastable densities highly correlates with the oscillating discharge current. Gas temperatures in the low current Townsend-like mode (T= 320-400K) and the high current glow mode (T=469-526K) were determined by the broadening of the recorded spectral profiles as a function of the discharge current.Comment: submitted to Plasma Sources Sci. Techno

Herschel observations of embedded protostellar clusters in the Rosette Molecular Cloud

The Herschel OB young stellar objects survey (HOBYS) has observed the Rosette molecular cloud, providing an unprecedented view of its star formation activity. These new far-infrared data reveal a population of compact young stellar objects whose physical properties we aim to characterise. We compiled a sample of protostars and their spectral energy distributions that covers the near-infrared to submillimetre wavelength range. These were used to constrain key properties in the protostellar evolution, bolometric luminosity, and envelope mass and to build an evolutionary diagram. Several clusters are distinguished including the cloud centre, the embedded clusters in the vicinity of luminous infrared sources, and the interaction region. The analysed protostellar population in Rosette ranges from 0.1 to about 15 Msun with luminosities between 1 and 150 Lsun, which extends the evolutionary diagram from low-mass protostars into the high-mass regime. Some sources lack counterparts at near- to mid-infrared wavelengths, indicating extreme youth. The central cluster and the Phelps & Lada 7 cluster appear less evolved than the remainder of the analysed protostellar population. For the central cluster, we find indications that about 25% of the protostars classified as Class I from near- to mid-infrared data are actually candidate Class 0 objects. As a showcase for protostellar evolution, we analysed four protostars of low- to intermediate-mass in a single dense core, and they represent different evolutionary stages from Class 0 to Class I. Their mid- to far-infrared spectral slopes flatten towards the Class I stage, and the 160 to 70um flux ratio is greatest for the presumed Class 0 source. This shows that the Herschel observations characterise the earliest stages of protostellar evolution in detail.Comment: Astronomy & Astrophysics letter, 6 pages, 4 figures, accepted for publication in the Special Issue for Herschel first result

Cluster-formation in the Rosette molecular cloud at the junctions of filaments

For many years feedback processes generated by OB-stars in molecular clouds, including expanding ionization fronts, stellar winds, or UV-radiation, have been proposed to trigger subsequent star formation. However, hydrodynamic models including radiation and gravity show that UV-illumination has little or no impact on the global dynamical evolution of the cloud. The Rosette molecular cloud, irradiated by the NGC2244 cluster, is a template region for triggered star-formation, and we investigated its spatial and density structure by applying a curvelet analysis, a filament-tracing algorithm (DisPerSE), and probability density functions (PDFs) on Herschel column density maps, obtained within the HOBYS key program. The analysis reveals not only the filamentary structure of the cloud but also that all known infrared clusters except one lie at junctions of filaments, as predicted by turbulence simulations. The PDFs of sub-regions in the cloud show systematic differences. The two UV-exposed regions have a double-peaked PDF we interprete as caused by shock compression. The deviations of the PDF from the log-normal shape typically associated with low- and high-mass star-forming regions at Av~3-4m and 8-10m, respectively, are found here within the very same cloud. This shows that there is no fundamental difference in the density structure of low- and high-mass star-forming regions. We conclude that star-formation in Rosette - and probably in high-mass star-forming clouds in general - is not globally triggered by the impact of UV-radiation. Moreover, star formation takes place in filaments that arose from the primordial turbulent structure built up during the formation of the cloud. Clusters form at filament mergers, but star formation can be locally induced in the direct interaction zone between an expanding HII--region and the molecular cloud.Comment: A&A Letter, in pres