Perdeuterated cyanobiphenyl liquid crystals for infrared applications

Perdeuterated 4'-pentyl-4-cyanobiphenyl (D5CB) was synthesized and its physical properties evaluated and compared to those of 5CB. D5CB retains physical properties similar to those of 5CB, such as phase transition temperatures, dielectric constants, and refractive indices. An outstanding feature of D5CB is that it exhibits a much cleaner and reduced infrared absorption. Perdeuteration, therefore, extends the usable range of liquid crystals to the mid infrared by significantly reducing the absorption in the near infrared, which is essential for telecom applications

The Practice of Immigration Health in Complex Emergency Situations - A Case Study of Kosovo from March to July 1999

The need to rapidly transport refugees, displaced as a result of evolving complex humanitarian emergencies creates challenges for those refugee-receiving nations that require formaI immigration medical screening of these populations. Balancing the need to expediently resettle the refugees with these legislative and regulatory medical requirements can be logistically and operationally difficult. During the 1999 Kosovo crisis, the Humanitarian Evacuation Programme from the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia rapidly moved large numbers of Kosovar Albanian refugees to nations with existing formal immigration medical screening requirements. This paper describes the successful management and delivery of immigration health services during this complicated international event.La nécessité de transporter rapidement les réfugiés déplacés à cause d'urgences humanitaires complexes à évolution rapide représenteun défi pour les nations receveuses de réfugiés requérant un tamisage médical routinier de sa population immigrante. Des points de vue logistique et opérationnel, il peut s'avérer fort difficile pour ces états de concilier la nécessité de relocaliser rapidement les réfugiés avec les exigences de leurs lois et règlements en matière médicale et sanitaire. Lors de la crise du Kosovo de 1999, le Programme d'Évacuation Humanitaire de l'ancienne république yougoslave de Macédoine déplaça rapidement un grand nombre de réfugiés albanais kosovars vers des nations requérant formellement un tamisage médical de sa population immigrante. Cet article décrit la gestion et la distribution réussies de services de santé à l'immigration au cours de cet événement international complexe

Evolution of structure and local magnetic fields during crystallization of HITPERM glassy alloys studied by in situ diffraction and nuclear forward scattering of synchrotron radiation

Evolution of structure and local magnetic fields in Fe1 xCox 76Mo8Cu1B15 HITPERM metallic glass ribbons with various amounts of Co x 0, 0.25, 0.5 were studied in situ using diffraction and nuclear forward scattering of synchrotron radiation. It was found that crystallization for all three glasses proceeds in two stages. In the first stage, bcc Fe,Co nanocrystals are formed, while in the second stage additional crystalline phases evolve. For all three glasses, the crystallization temperatures at the wheel side were found to be lower than at the air side of the ribbon. The crystallization temperatures were found to decrease with increasing Co content. The lattice parameters of the bcc nanocrystals decrease up to about 550 C and then increase pointing to squeezing Mo atoms out of the nanograins or to interface effects between the nanocrystals and the glassy matrix. Nuclear forward scattering enabled separate evaluation of the contributions that stem from structurally different regions within the investigated samples including the newly formed nanocrystals and the residual amorphous matrix. Even minor Co content x 0.25 has a substantial effect not only upon the magnetic behaviour of the alloy but also upon its structure. Making use of hyperfine magnetic fields, it was possible to unveil structurally diverse positions of Fe atoms that reside in a nanocrystalline lattice with different number of Co nearest neighbour

Design of Primary Feeds for 32m KDDI Antenna System IBA-4 in Cassegrain Configuration

Physically large dimensional dish antennas in Cassegrain configuration have played an important role in satellite communications during the past several decades. Recently, however, emerging new technologies have begun to displace these elegant antennas in professional telecommunication service due to their lower operating costs. A beneficial aspect of this transitional situation is that it has created opportunities for amateur radio enthusiasts to use these soon-to-be-retired dish antenna systems for limited experimental testing. Adaptation of these professionally designed antennas to bands allocated for amateur radio service presents excellent educational opportunities in using antenna engineering skills and the use of modern electromagnetic simulation software provides a novel perspective for these antenna design and transformation tasks

Three-dimensional stability of Burgers vortices

Burgers vortices are explicit stationary solutions of the Navier-Stokes equations which are often used to describe the vortex tubes observed in numerical simulations of three-dimensional turbulence. In this model, the velocity field is a two-dimensional perturbation of a linear straining flow with axial symmetry. The only free parameter is the Reynolds number $Re = \Gamma/\nu$, where $\Gamma$ is the total circulation of the vortex and $\nu$ is the kinematic viscosity. The purpose of this paper is to show that Burgers vortex is asymptotically stable with respect to general three-dimensional perturbations, for all values of the Reynolds number. This definitive result subsumes earlier studies by various authors, which were either restricted to small Reynolds numbers or to two-dimensional perturbations. Our proof relies on the crucial observation that the linearized operator at Burgers vortex has a simple and very specific dependence upon the axial variable. This allows to reduce the full linearized equations to a vectorial two-dimensional problem, which can be treated using an extension of the techniques developped in earlier works. Although Burgers vortices are found to be stable for all Reynolds numbers, the proof indicates that perturbations may undergo an important transient amplification if $Re$ is large, a phenomenon that was indeed observed in numerical simulations.Comment: 31 pages, no figur

Evolution of central pattern generators for the control of a five-link bipedal walking mechanism

Central pattern generators (CPGs), with a basis is neurophysiological studies, are a type of neural network for the generation of rhythmic motion. While CPGs are being increasingly used in robot control, most applications are hand-tuned for a specific task and it is acknowledged in the field that generic methods and design principles for creating individual networks for a given task are lacking. This study presents an approach where the connectivity and oscillatory parameters of a CPG network are determined by an evolutionary algorithm with fitness evaluations in a realistic simulation with accurate physics. We apply this technique to a five-link planar walking mechanism to demonstrate its feasibility and performance. In addition, to see whether results from simulation can be acceptably transferred to real robot hardware, the best evolved CPG network is also tested on a real mechanism. Our results also confirm that the biologically inspired CPG model is well suited for legged locomotion, since a diverse manifestation of networks have been observed to succeed in fitness simulations during evolution.Comment: 11 pages, 9 figures; substantial revision of content, organization, and quantitative result

Detection of Voigt Spectral Line Profiles of Hydrogen Radio Recombination Lines toward Sagittarius B2(N)

We report the detection of Voigt spectral line profiles of radio recombination lines (RRLs) toward Sagittarius B2(N) with the 100-m Green Bank Telescope (GBT). At radio wavelengths, astronomical spectra are highly populated with RRLs, which serve as ideal probes of the physical conditions in molecular cloud complexes. An analysis of the Hn(alpha) lines presented herein shows that RRLs of higher principal quantum number (n>90) are generally divergent from their expected Gaussian profiles and, moreover, are well described by their respective Voigt profiles. This is in agreement with the theory that spectral lines experience pressure broadening as a result of electron collisions at lower radio frequencies. Given the inherent technical difficulties regarding the detection and profiling of true RRL wing spans and shapes, it is crucial that the observing instrumentation produce flat baselines as well as high sensitivity, high resolution data. The GBT has demonstrated its capabilities regarding all of these aspects, and we believe that future observations of RRL emission via the GBT will be crucial towards advancing our knowledge of the larger-scale extended structures of ionized gas in the interstellar medium (ISM)

Forward Physics at the LHC (Elba 2010)

The papers review the main theoretical and experimental aspects of the Forward Physics at the Large Hadron Collider