Evolutionary L∞ identification and model reduction for robust control

An evolutionary approach for modern robust control oriented system identification and model reduction in the frequency domain is proposed. The technique provides both an optimized nominal model and a 'worst-case' additive or multiplicative uncertainty bounding function which is compatible with robust control design methodologies. In addition, the evolutionary approach is applicable to both continuous- and discrete-time systems without the need for linear parametrization or a confined problem domain for deterministic convex optimization. The proposed method is validated against a laboratory multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) test rig and benchmark problems, which show a higher fitting accuracy and provides a tighter L�¢���� error bound than existing methods in the literature do

Exciton and biexciton energies in bilayer systems

We report calculations of the energies of excitons and biexcitons in ideal two-dimensional bilayer systems within the effective-mass approximation with isotropic electron and hole masses. The exciton energies are obtained by a simple numerical integration technique, while the biexciton energies are obtained from diffusion quantum Monte Carlo calculations. The exciton binding energy decays as the inverse of the separation of the layers, while the binding energy of the biexciton with respect to dissociation into two separate excitons decays exponentially

Detection of zeptojoule microwave pulses using electrothermal feedback in proximity-induced Josephson junctions

We experimentally investigate and utilize electrothermal feedback in a microwave nanobolometer based on a normal-metal (\mbox{Au}_{x}\mbox{Pd}_{1-x}) nanowire with proximity-induced superconductivity. The feedback couples the temperature and the electrical degrees of freedom in the nanowire, which both absorbs the incoming microwave radiation, and transduces the temperature change into a radio-frequency electrical signal. We tune the feedback in situ and access both positive and negative feedback regimes with rich nonlinear dynamics. In particular, strong positive feedback leads to the emergence of two metastable electron temperature states in the millikelvin range. We use these states for efficient threshold detection of coherent 8.4 GHz microwave pulses containing approximately 200 photons on average, corresponding to 1.1 \mbox{ zJ} \approx 7.0 \mbox{ meV} of energy

A Color Image Watermarking Scheme Resistant against Geometrical Attacks

The geometrical attacks are still a problem for many digital watermarking algorithms at present. In this paper, we propose a watermarking algorithm for color images resistant to geometrical distortions (rotation and scaling). The singular value decomposition is used for watermark embedding and extraction. The log-polar map- ping (LPM) and phase correlation method are used to register the position of geometrical distortion suffered by the watermarked image. Experiments with different kinds of color images and watermarks demonstrate that the watermarking algorithm is robust to common image processing attacks, especially geometrical attacks