A Broadband UHF Tag Antenna For Near-Field and Far-Field RFID Communications

The paper deals with the design of passive broadband tag antenna for Ultra-High Frequency (UHF) band. The antenna is intended for both near and far fields Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) applications. The meander dipole tag antenna geometry modification is designed for frequency bandwidth increasing. The measured bandwidth of the proposed broadband Tag antenna is more than 140 MHz (820–960 MHz), which can cover the entire UHF RFID band. A comparison between chip impedance of datasheet and the measured chip impedance has been used in our simulations. The proposed progressive meandered antenna structure, with an overall size of 77 mm × 14 mm × 0.787 mm, produces strong and uniform magnetic field distribution in the near-field zone. The antenna impedance is matched to common UHF chips in market simply by tuning its capacitive and inductive values since a perfect matching is required in the antenna design in order to enhance the near and the far field communications. Measurements confirm that the designed antenna exhibits good performance of Tag identification for both near-field and far-field UHF RFID applications

Wannier-based calculation of the orbital magnetization in crystals

We present a first-principles scheme that allows the orbital magnetization of a magnetic crystal to be evaluated accurately and efficiently even in the presence of complex Fermi surfaces. Starting from an initial electronic-structure calculation with a coarse ab initio k-point mesh, maximally localized Wannier functions are constructed and used to interpolate the necessary k-space quantities on a fine mesh, in parallel to a previously-developed formalism for the anomalous Hall conductivity [X.Wang, J. Yates, I. Souza, and D. Vanderbilt, Phys. Rev. B 74, 195118 (2006)]. We formulate our new approach in a manifestly gauge-invariant manner, expressing the orbital magnetization in terms of traces over matrices in Wannier space. Since only a few (e.g., of the order of 20) Wannier functions are typically needed to describe the occupied and partially occupied bands, these Wannier matrices are small, which makes the interpolation itself very efficient. The method has been used to calculate the orbital magnetization of bcc Fe, hcp Co, and fcc Ni. Unlike an approximate calculation based on integrating orbital currents inside atomic spheres, our results nicely reproduce the experimentally measured ordering of the orbital magnetization in these three materials.Comment: 13 pages, 3 figures, 4 table

Characterization in bi-parameter space of a non-ideal oscillator

The authors thank scientific agencies CAPES, CNPq (112952/2015-1), and FAPESP (2011/ 19269-11). M. S. Baptista also thanks EPSRC (EP/I03 2606/1).Peer reviewedPostprin

Irreversibility and the arrow of time in a quenched quantum system

Irreversibility is one of the most intriguing concepts in physics. While microscopic physical laws are perfectly reversible, macroscopic average behavior has a preferred direction of time. According to the second law of thermodynamics, this arrow of time is associated with a positive mean entropy production. Using a nuclear magnetic resonance setup, we measure the nonequilibrium entropy produced in an isolated spin-1/2 system following fast quenches of an external magnetic field and experimentally demonstrate that it is equal to the entropic distance, expressed by the Kullback-Leibler divergence, between a microscopic process and its time-reverse. Our result addresses the concept of irreversibility from a microscopic quantum standpoint.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figures, RevTeX4-1; Accepted for publication Phys. Rev. Let