146 research outputs found
Introduction and Validation of the American Urological Association Basic Laparoscopic Urologic Surgery Skills Curriculum
Abstract Background and Purpose: The Fundamentals of Laparoscopic Surgery (FLS?) skills curriculum has validity evidence supporting use for assessing laparoscopic skills for general surgeons. As charged by the American Urological Association (AUA) Laparoscopy, Robotic, and New Surgical Technology Committee, we sought to develop and validate a urology-specific FLS, referred to as the Basic Laparoscopic Urologic Surgery (BLUS?) skills curriculum. The psychomotor component consists of three existing FLS tasks and one new clip-applying task. Materials and Methods: An animate renal artery model was designed for a clip-applying skills task. We assessed the acceptability and construct validity of using BLUS for basic laparoscopic skills assessment for urologists. A cohort of practicing urologists, fellows, residents, and medical students completed the tasks at the AUA Annual Meetings in 2010 and 2011. Results: All exercises were acceptable and demonstrated excellent face and content validity (>4.5/5 on a five-point Likert scale). Practicing clinical urologists (N=81) outperformed residents and medical students (N=35) in time to completion of circle cut (P3 laparoscopic procedures per week were faster at the peg-transfer exercise (P3 procedures (0.57) per week (P<0.01). Conclusions: All exercises including the novel clip-applying model demonstrated good acceptability and evidence of construct validity (face, content, concurrent and convergent validity) for assessment of basic laparoscopic skill for urologic surgeons.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/98447/1/end%2E2011%2E0414.pd
Cavity magnon-polaritons in cuprate parent compounds
Cavity control of quantum matter may offer new ways to study and manipulate
many-body systems. A particularly appealing idea is to use cavities to enhance
superconductivity, especially in unconventional or high- systems.
Motivated by this, we propose a scheme for coupling Terahertz resonators to the
antiferromagnetic fluctuations in a cuprate parent compound, which are believed
to provide the glue for Cooper pairs in the superconducting phase. First, we
derive the interaction between magnon excitations of the Ne\'el-order and polar
phonons associated with the planar oxygens. This mode also couples to the
cavity electric field, and in the presence of spin-orbit interactions mediates
a linear coupling between the cavity and magnons, forming hybridized
magnon-polaritons. This hybridization vanishes linearly with photon momentum,
implying the need for near-field optical methods, which we analyze within a
simple model. We then derive a higher-order coupling between the cavity and
magnons which is only present in bilayer systems, but does not rely on
spin-orbit coupling. This interaction is found to be large, but only couples to
the bimagnon operator. As a result we find a strong, but heavily damped,
bimagnon-cavity interaction which produces highly asymmetric cavity line-shapes
in the strong-coupling regime. To conclude, we outline several interesting
extensions of our theory, including applications to carrier-doped cuprates and
other strongly-correlated systems with Terahertz-scale magnetic excitations.Comment: 32 pages, 12 figure
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