5,807 research outputs found
Microwave Dielectric Heating of Drops in Microfluidic Devices
We present a technique to locally and rapidly heat water drops in
microfluidic devices with microwave dielectric heating. Water absorbs microwave
power more efficiently than polymers, glass, and oils due to its permanent
molecular dipole moment that has a large dielectric loss at GHz frequencies.
The relevant heat capacity of the system is a single thermally isolated
picoliter drop of water and this enables very fast thermal cycling. We
demonstrate microwave dielectric heating in a microfluidic device that
integrates a flow-focusing drop maker, drop splitters, and metal electrodes to
locally deliver microwave power from an inexpensive, commercially available 3.0
GHz source and amplifier. The temperature of the drops is measured by observing
the temperature dependent fluorescence intensity of cadmium selenide
nanocrystals suspended in the water drops. We demonstrate characteristic
heating times as short as 15 ms to steady-state temperatures as large as 30
degrees C above the base temperature of the microfluidic device. Many common
biological and chemical applications require rapid and local control of
temperature, such as PCR amplification of DNA, and can benefit from this new
technique.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figure
Neutral gas in Lyman-alpha emitting galaxies Haro 11 and ESO 338-IG04 measured through sodium absorption
Context. The Lyman alpha emission line of galaxies is an important tool for
finding galaxies at high redshift, and thus probe the structure of the early
universe. However, the resonance nature of the line and its sensitivity to dust
and neutral gas is still not fully understood.
Aims. We present measurements of the velocity, covering fraction and optical
depth of neutral gas in front of two well known local blue compact galaxies
that show Lyman alpha in emission: ESO 338-IG 04 and Haro 11. We thus test
observationally the hypothesis that Lyman alpha can escape through neutral gas
by being Doppler shifted out of resonance.
Methods. We present integral field spectroscopy from the GIRAFFE/Argus
spectrograph at VLT/FLAMES in Paranal, Chile. The excellent wavelength
resolution allows us to accurately measure the velocity of the ionized and
neutral gas through the H-alpha emission and Na D absorption, which traces the
ionized medium and cold interstellar gas, respectively. We also present
independent measurements with the VLT/X-shooter spectrograph which confirm our
results.
Results. For ESO 338-IG04, we measure no significant shift of neutral gas.
The best fit velocity is -15 (16) km/s. For Haro 11, we see an outflow from
knot B at 44 (13) km/s and infalling gas towards knot C with 32 (12) km/s.
Based on the relative strength of the Na D absorption lines, we estimate low
covering fractions of neutral gas (down to 10%) in all three cases.
Conclusions. The Na D absorption likely occurs in dense clumps with higher
column densities than where the bulk of the Ly-alpha scattering takes place.
Still, we find no strong correlation between outflowing neutral gas and a high
Lyman alpha escape fraction. The Lyman alpha photons from these two galaxies
are therefore likely escaping due to a low column density and/or covering
fraction.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figure
Reset thresholds of automata with two cycle lengths
We present several series of synchronizing automata with multiple parameters,
generalizing previously known results. Let p and q be two arbitrary co-prime
positive integers, q > p. We describe reset thresholds of the colorings of
primitive digraphs with exactly one cycle of length p and one cycle of length
q. Also, we study reset thresholds of the colorings of primitive digraphs with
exactly one cycle of length q and two cycles of length p.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figures, submitted to CIAA 201
Etch Induced Microwave Losses in Titanium Nitride Superconducting Resonators
We have investigated the correlation between the microwave loss and
patterning method for coplanar waveguide titanium nitride resonators fabricated
on Si wafers. Three different methods were investigated: fluorine- and
chlorine-based reactive ion etches and an argon-ion mill. At high microwave
probe powers the reactive etched resonators showed low internal loss, whereas
the ion-milled samples showed dramatically higher loss. At single-photon powers
we found that the fluorine-etched resonators exhibited substantially lower loss
than the chlorine-etched ones. We interpret the results by use of numerically
calculated filling factors and find that the silicon surface exhibits a higher
loss when chlorine-etched than when fluorine-etched. We also find from
microscopy that re-deposition of silicon onto the photoresist and side walls is
the probable cause for the high loss observed for the ion-milled resonator
Synchronizing automata with random inputs
We study the problem of synchronization of automata with random inputs. We
present a series of automata such that the expected number of steps until
synchronization is exponential in the number of states. At the same time, we
show that the expected number of letters to synchronize any pair of the famous
Cerny automata is at most cubic in the number of states
Validation of the effect of cross-calibrated GOES solar proton effective energies on derived integral fluxes by comparison with STEREO observations
The derivation of integral fluxes from instrument coincidence rates requires accurate knowledge of their effective energies. Recent cross calibrations of GOES with the high-energy-resolution Interplanetary Monitoring Platform (IMP) 8 Goddard Medium Energy Experiment (GME) (Sandberg et al., Geophys. Res. Lett, 41, 4435, 2014a) gave significantly lower effective energies than those currently used by the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center to calculate solar proton integral fluxes from GOES rates. This implies systematically lower integral fluxes than currently produced. This paper quantifies the differences between the current and the cross-calibrated GOES integral fluxes and validates the latter. Care is taken to rule out the spectral resolution of the measurements or different integration algorithms as major contributors to differences in the magnitudes of the derived integral fluxes. The lower effective energies are validated by comparison with the independent, high-resolution observations by the STEREO Low-Energy Telescope (LET) and High-Energy Telescope (HET) during the December 2006 solar proton events. The current GOES product is similar to the >10 MeV integral fluxes recalculated by using the Sandberg et al. [2014a] effective energies but is substantially greater at higher energies. (The median ratios of the current to the recalculated fluxes are 1.1 at >10 MeV, 1.7 at >30 MeV, 2.1 at >60 MeV, and 2.9 at >100 MeV.) By virtue of this validation, the cross-calibrated GOES integral fluxes should be considered more accurate than the current NOAA product. The results of this study also demonstrate good consistency between the two long-term IMP 8 GME and STEREO LET and HET solar proton data sets
Theoretical Properties of Projection Based Multilayer Perceptrons with Functional Inputs
Many real world data are sampled functions. As shown by Functional Data
Analysis (FDA) methods, spectra, time series, images, gesture recognition data,
etc. can be processed more efficiently if their functional nature is taken into
account during the data analysis process. This is done by extending standard
data analysis methods so that they can apply to functional inputs. A general
way to achieve this goal is to compute projections of the functional data onto
a finite dimensional sub-space of the functional space. The coordinates of the
data on a basis of this sub-space provide standard vector representations of
the functions. The obtained vectors can be processed by any standard method. In
our previous work, this general approach has been used to define projection
based Multilayer Perceptrons (MLPs) with functional inputs. We study in this
paper important theoretical properties of the proposed model. We show in
particular that MLPs with functional inputs are universal approximators: they
can approximate to arbitrary accuracy any continuous mapping from a compact
sub-space of a functional space to R. Moreover, we provide a consistency result
that shows that any mapping from a functional space to R can be learned thanks
to examples by a projection based MLP: the generalization mean square error of
the MLP decreases to the smallest possible mean square error on the data when
the number of examples goes to infinity
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