Bottom-up retinotopic organization supports top-down mental imagery

Finding a path between locations is a routine task in daily life. Mental navigation is often used to plan a route to a destination that is not visible from the current location. We first used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and surface-based averaging methods to find high-level brain regions involved in imagined navigation between locations in a building very familiar to each participant. This revealed a mental navigation network that includes the precuneus, retrosplenial cortex (RSC), parahippocampal place area (PPA), occipital place area (OPA), supplementary motor area (SMA), premotor cortex, and areas along the medial and anterior intraparietal sulcus. We then visualized retinotopic maps in the entire cortex using wide-field, natural scene stimuli in a separate set of fMRI experiments. This revealed five distinct visual streams or ‘fingers’ that extend anteriorly into middle temporal, superior parietal, medial parietal, retrosplenial and ventral occipitotemporal cortex. By using spherical morphing to overlap these two data sets, we showed that the mental navigation network primarily occupies areas that also contain retinotopic maps. Specifically, scene-selective regions RSC, PPA and OPA have a common emphasis on the far periphery of the upper visual field. These results suggest that bottom-up retinotopic organization may help to efficiently encode scene and location information in an eye-centered reference frame for top-down, internally generated mental navigation. This study pushes the border of visual cortex further anterior than was initially expected

Electromagnetically Induced Transparency with Quantized Fields in Optocavity Mechanics

We report electromagnetically induced transparency using quantized fields in optomechanical systems. The weak probe field is a narrow band squeezed field. We present a homodyne detection of EIT in the output quantum field. We find that the EIT dip exists even though the photon number in the squeezed vacuum is at the single photon level. The EIT with quantized fields can be seen even at temperatures of the order of 100 mK paving the way for using optomechanical systems as memory elements.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figure

Supersymmetric Higgs Singlet Effects on B-Meson FCNC Observables at Large tan(beta)

Higgs singlet superfields are usually present in most extensions of the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM) that address the mu-problem, such as the Next-to-Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (NMSSM) and the Minimal Nonminimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MNSSM). Employing a gauge- and flavour-covariant effective Lagrangian formalism, we show how the singlet Higgs bosons of such theories can have significant contributions to B-meson flavour-changing neutral current (FCNC) observables for large values of $\tan\beta \stackrel{>}{{}_\sim} 50$ at the 1-loop level. Illustrative results are presented including effects on the B_s and B_d mass differences and on the rare decay $B_s\to\mu^+\mu^-$. In particular, we find that depending on the actual value of the lightest singlet pseudoscalar mass in the NMSSM, the branching ratio for $B_s\to\mu^+\mu^-$ can be enhanced or even suppressed with respect to the Standard Model prediction by more than one order of magnitude.Comment: 28 pages, 8 figures, LaTeX. Minor updates. Version to be published in PR

The Reionization of Carbon

Observations suggest that CII was more abundant than CIV in the intergalactic medium towards the end of the hydrogen reionization epoch. This transition provides a unique opportunity to study the enrichment history of intergalactic gas and the growth of the ionizing background (UVB) at early times. We study how carbon absorption evolves from z=10-5 using a cosmological hydrodynamic simulation that includes a self-consistent multifrequency UVB as well as a well-constrained model for galactic outflows to disperse metals. Our predicted UVB is within 2-4 times that of Haardt & Madau (2012), which is fair agreement given the uncertainties. Nonetheless, we use a calibration in post-processing to account for Lyman-alpha forest measurements while preserving the predicted spectral slope and inhomogeneity. The UVB fluctuates spatially in such a way that it always exceeds the volume average in regions where metals are found. This implies both that a spatially-uniform UVB is a poor approximation and that metal absorption is not sensitive to the epoch when HII regions overlap globally even at column densites of 10^{12} cm^{-2}. We find, consistent with observations, that the CII mass fraction drops to low redshift while CIV rises owing the combined effects of a growing UVB and continued addition of carbon in low-density regions. This is mimicked in absorption statistics, which broadly agree with observations at z=6-3 while predicting that the absorber column density distributions rise steeply to the lowest observable columns. Our model reproduces the large observed scatter in the number of low-ionization absorbers per sightline, implying that the scatter does not indicate a partially-neutral Universe at z=6.Comment: 16 pages, 14 figures, accepted to MNRA

Characterization Of Thermal Stresses And Plasticity In Through-Silicon Via Structures For Three-Dimensional Integration

Through-silicon via (TSV) is a critical element connecting stacked dies in three-dimensional (3D) integration. The mismatch of thermal expansion coefficients between the Cu via and Si can generate significant stresses in the TSV structure to cause reliability problems. In this study, the thermal stress in the TSV structure was measured by the wafer curvature method and its unique stress characteristics were compared to that of a Cu thin film structure. The thermo-mechanical characteristics of the Cu TSV structure were correlated to microstructure evolution during thermal cycling and the local plasticity in Cu in a triaxial stress state. These findings were confirmed by microstructure analysis of the Cu vias and finite element analysis (FEA) of the stress characteristics. In addition, the local plasticity and deformation in and around individual TSVs were measured by synchrotron x-ray microdiffraction to supplement the wafer curvature measurements. The importance and implication of the local plasticity and residual stress on TSV reliabilities are discussed for TSV extrusion and device keep-out zone (KOZ).Microelectronics Research Cente

Current-induced spin polarization in InGaAs and GaAs epilayers with varying doping densities

The current-induced spin polarization and momentum-dependent spin-orbit field were measured in In$_{x}$Ga$_{1-x}$As epilayers with varying indium concentrations and silicon doping densities. Samples with higher indium concentrations and carrier concentrations and lower mobilities were found to have larger electrical spin generation efficiencies. Furthermore, current-induced spin polarization was detected in GaAs epilayers despite the absence of measurable spin-orbit fields, indicating that the extrinsic contributions to the spin polarization mechanism must be considered. Theoretical calculations based on a model that includes extrinsic contributions to the spin dephasing and the spin Hall effect, in addition to the intrinsic Rashba and Dresselhaus spin-orbit coupling, are found to qualitatively agree with the experimental results.Comment: 16 pages, 8 figure

On Kostant's partial order on hyperbolic elements

We study Kostant's partial order on the elements of a semisimple Lie group in relations with the finite dimensional representations. In particular, we prove the converse statement of [3, Theorem 6.1] on hyperbolic elements.Comment: 7 page