Resolution-Enhanced All-Optical Analog-to-Digital Converter Employing Cascade Optical Quantization Operation

In this paper, a cascade optical quantization scheme is proposed to realize all-optical analog-to-digital converter with efficiently enhanced quantization resolution and achievable high analog bandwidth of larger than 20 GHz. Employing the cascade structure of an unbalanced Mach-zehnder modulator and a specially designed optical directional coupler, we predict the enhancement of number-of-bits can be up to 1.59-bit. Simulation results show that a 25 GHz RF signal is efficiently digitalized with the signal-tonoise ratio of 33.58 dB and effective-number-of-bits of 5.28-bit

A Triangular Personalized Recommendation Algorithm for Improving Diversity

Recommendation systems are used when searching online databases. As such they are very important tools because they provide users with predictions of the outcomes of different potential choices and help users to avoid information overload. They can be used on e-commerce websites and have attracted considerable attention in the scientific community. To date, many personalized recommendation algorithms have aimed to improve recommendation accuracy from the perspective of vertex similarities, such as collaborative filtering and mass diffusion. However, diversity is also an important evaluation index in the recommendation algorithm. In order to study both the accuracy and diversity of a recommendation algorithm at the same time, this study introduced a “third dimension” to the commonly used user/product two-dimensional recommendation, and a recommendation algorithm is proposed that is based on a triangular area (TR algorithm). The proposed algorithm combines the Markov chain and collaborative filtering method to make recommendations for users by building a triangle model, making use of the triangulated area. Additionally, recommendation algorithms based on a triangulated area are parameter-free and are more suitable for applications in real environments. Furthermore, the experimental results showed that the TR algorithm had better performance on diversity and novelty for real datasets of MovieLens-100K and MovieLens-1M than did the other benchmark methods

Intracellular DNA Damage by Lysine-Acetylene Conjugates

Previously, we reported the design and properties of alkyne C-lysine conjugates, a powerful and tunable family of DNA cleaving reagents. We also reported that, upon photoactivation, these molecules are capable of inducing cancer cells death. To prove that the cell death stems from DNA cleavage by the conjugates, we investigated intracellular DNA damage induced by these molecules in LNCap cancer cells using single cell gel electrophoresis (SCGE) assays. The observation of highly efficient DNA damage confirmed that lysine acetylene conjugate is capable of cleaving the densely compacted intracellular DNA. This result provides a key mechanistic link between efficient DNA cleavage and cytotoxicity towards cancer cells for this family of light-activated anticancer agents

Mapping 49 quantitative trait loci at high resolution through sequencing-based genotyping of rice recombinant inbred lines

Mapping chromosome regions responsible for quantitative phenotypic variation in recombinant populations provides an effective means to characterize the genetic basis of complex traits. We conducted a quantitative trait loci (QTL) analysis of 150 rice recombinant inbred lines (RILs) derived from a cross between two cultivars, Oryza sativa ssp. indica cv. 93-11 and Oryza sativa ssp. japonica cv. Nipponbare. The RILs were genotyped through next-generation sequencing, which accurately determined the recombination breakpoints and provided a new type of genetic markers, recombination bins, for QTL analysis. We detected 49 QTL with phenotypic effect ranging from 3.2 to 46.0% for 14 agronomics traits. Five QTL of relatively large effect (14.6–46.0%) were located on small genomic regions, where strong candidate genes were found. The analysis using sequencing-based genotyping thus offers a powerful solution to map QTL with high resolution. Moreover, the RILs developed in this study serve as an excellent system for mapping and studying genetic basis of agricultural and biological traits of rice. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s00122-010-1449-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users

Mid-infrared Spectral Compression of Soliton Pulse in an Adiabatically Suspended Silicon Waveguide Taper

Spectral compression (SPC) can be used for generating narrow bandwidth and wavelength-tunable light sources, which have important applications in optical communication system, spectroscopy, and nonlinear microscopy. In this paper, we numerically demonstrate the high-degree SPC of the chirp-free femtosecond pulse at wavelength 2.4 μm in a 6-cm long adiabatically suspended silicon waveguide taper. The silicon waveguide taper is designed with a dispersion-increasing profile along the propagation distance z. Simulation results show that the SPC factor can be up to 10.9, along with the brightness-enhanced factor of 8.0 and negligible sidelobe. The impacts of the higher-order dispersion, higher-order nonlinearity, losses (including linear and nonlinear loss), and variation of Kerr nonlinear coefficient along z on the SPC are also investigated. It is found that variation of Kerr nonlinear coefficient γ(z) and linear loss are the dominant perturbation to the degradation of the SPC performance

Investigation of Humidity and Temperature Response of a Silica Gel Coated Microfiber Coupler

The humidity and temperature responses of a microfiber coupler (MFC) coated with silica gel are investigated. Two MFC structures with different waist diameters of 2.5 and 3.5 μm were fabricated by fusing and tapering two single-mode fibers using a microheater brushing technique. The influences of the coating thickness and tapered waist diameter on the sensing performance are analyzed. For the proposed sensor with a waist diameter of 2.5 μm and 8-layers thick coating, the change in the relative humidity (RH) results in an exponential blueshift with a maximum sensitivity of 1.6 nm/% RH in the range from 70 to 86% RH. In response to the temperature change, the sensor's transmission spectrum redshifts in a linear fashion with an average sensitivity of 0.55 nm/°C in the range from 20 to 40 °C. The study is important for the development of the proposed fiber structure as a humidity or temperature sensor

Efficient spectral compression of wavelength-shifting soliton and its application in integratable all-optical quantization

In this paper, we numerically demonstrate efficient spectral compression (SPC) of wavelength-shifting soliton in a chalcogenide strip waveguide. It is found that the profiles of group-velocity dispersion (GVD) and Kerr nonlinearity play key roles in determining SPC. After calculating the dispersion of Kerr nonlinearity and Raman spectrum for three kinds of chalcogenide materials, Ge11.5As24Se64.5 is chosen as the material for designing the chalcogenide strip waveguide (CSW). The geometric parameters of CSW are optimized to obtain the desired GVD and Kerr nonlinearity. Simulation results show that in the designed CSW, an input spectrum width of 52.04 nm can be compressed to 7.23 nm along with wavelength shift of 17 nm when the input peak power is 25 W. With the input peak power increasing to 75 W, the SPC is slightly weakened, but wavelength shift can be up to 190 nm. The proposed CSW is applied to integrated all-optical quantization and an effective quantization number of 3.66-bit is achieved. It is expected that our research results can find important applications in on-chip integrated spectroscopy, all-optical signal processing, etc