Capture and sorting of multiple cells by polarization-controlled three-beam interference

For the capture and sorting of multiple cells, a sensitive and highly efficient polarization-controlled three-beam interference set-up has been developed. With the theory of superposition of three beams, simulations on the influence of polarization angle upon the intensity distribution and the laser gradient force change with different polarization angles have been carried out. By controlling the polarization angle of the beams, various intensity distributions and different sizes of dots are obtained. We have experimentally observed multiple optical tweezers and the sorting of cells with different polarization angles, which are in accordance with the theoretical analysis. The experimental results have shown that the polarization angle affects the shapes and feature sizes of the interference patterns and the trapping force

Coherent interaction of laser pulses in a resonant optically dense extended medium under the regime of strong field-matter coupling

Nonstationary pump-probe interaction between short laser pulses propagating in a resonant optically dense coherent medium is considered. A special attention is paid to the case, where the density of two-level particles is high enough that a considerable part of the energy of relatively weak external laser-fields can be coherently absorbed and reemitted by the medium. Thus, the field of medium reaction plays a key role in the interaction processes, which leads to the collective behavior of an atomic ensemble in the strongly coupled light-matter system. Such behavior results in the fast excitation interchanges between the field and a medium in the form of the optical ringing, which is analogous to polariton beating in the solid-state optics. This collective oscillating response, which can be treated as successive beats between light wave-packets of different group velocities, is shown to significantly affect propagation and amplification of the probe field under its nonlinear interaction with a nearly copropagating pump pulse. Depending on the probe-pump time delay, the probe transmission spectra show the appearance of either specific doublet or coherent dip. The widths of these features are determined by the density-dependent field-matter coupling coefficient and increase during the propagation. Besides that, the widths of the coherent features, which appear close to the resonance in the broadband probe-spectrum, exceed the absorption-line width, since, under the strong-coupling regime, the frequency of the optical ringing exceeds the rate of incoherent relaxation. Contrary to the stationary strong-field effects, the density- and coordinate-dependent transmission spectra of the probe manifest the importance of the collective oscillations and cannot be obtained in the framework of the single-atom model.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures, to be published in Phys. Rev.

Advanced Radiation Panel design for applications in National Security and Food Safety

We describe a new concept for a basic radiation detection panel based on conventional scintillator technology and commercially available solid-state photo-detectors. The panels are simple in construction, robust, very efficient and cost-effective and are easily scalable in size, from tens of cm$^2$ to tens of m$^2$. We describe two possible applications: flagging radioactive food coontamination and detection of illicit radio nucleides, such as those potentially used in a terrorist attack with a dirty bomb.Comment: 10 pages, 11 figure

Evaluating 35 Methods to Generate Structural Connectomes Using Pairwise Classification

There is no consensus on how to construct structural brain networks from diffusion MRI. How variations in pre-processing steps affect network reliability and its ability to distinguish subjects remains opaque. In this work, we address this issue by comparing 35 structural connectome-building pipelines. We vary diffusion reconstruction models, tractography algorithms and parcellations. Next, we classify structural connectome pairs as either belonging to the same individual or not. Connectome weights and eight topological derivative measures form our feature set. For experiments, we use three test-retest datasets from the Consortium for Reliability and Reproducibility (CoRR) comprised of a total of 105 individuals. We also compare pairwise classification results to a commonly used parametric test-retest measure, Intraclass Correlation Coefficient (ICC).Comment: Accepted for MICCAI 2017, 8 pages, 3 figure

Total Absorption Dual Readout Calorimetry R&D

Abstract This calorimetry R&D focuses on establishing a proof of concept for totally active hadron calorimetry. The research program involves evaluating the performance of the different crystal and glass samples in combination with different light collection and readout alternatives to optimize simultaneous collection of Cerenkov and scintillation light components for application of the Dual Readout technique to total absorption calorimetry. We performed initial studies in two short test beam phases in April and November 2010 at Fermilab. Here we present first measurements from these two beam tests