865 research outputs found
Phonon-mediated vs. Coulombic Back-Action in Quantum Dot circuits
Quantum point contacts (QPCs) are commonly employed to capacitively detect
the charge state of coupled quantum dots (QD). An indirect back-action of a
biased QPC onto a double QD laterally defined in a GaAs/AlGaAs heterostructure
is observed. Energy is emitted by non-equilibrium charge carriers in the leads
of the biased QPC. Part of this energy is absorbed by the double QD where it
causes charge fluctuations that can be observed under certain conditions in its
stability diagram. By investigating the spectrum of the absorbed energy, we
identify both acoustic phonons and Coulomb interaction being involved in the
back-action, depending on the geometry and coupling constants
An electron jet pump: The Venturi effect of a Fermi liquid
A three-terminal device based on a two-dimensional electron system is
investigated in the regime of non-equilibrium transport. Excited electrons
scatter with the cold Fermi sea and transfer energy and momentum to other
electrons. A geometry analogous to a water jet pump is used to create a jet
pump for electrons. Because of its phenomenological similarity we name the
observed behavior "electronic Venturi effect".Comment: Journal of Applied Physics Special Topic: Plenary and Invited Papers
from the 30th International Conference on the Physics of Semiconductors,
Seoul, Korea, 2010; http://link.aip.org/link/?JAP/109/10241
Relaxation of hot electrons in a degenerate two-dimensional electron system: transition to one-dimensional scattering
The energy relaxation channels of hot electrons far from thermal equilibrium
in a degenerate two-dimensional electron system are investigated in transport
experiments in a mesoscopic three-terminal device. We observe a transition from
two dimensions at zero magnetic field to quasi--one-dimensional scattering of
the hot electrons in a strong magnetic field. In the two-dimensional case
electron-electron scattering is the dominant relaxation mechanism, while the
emission of optical phonons becomes more and more important as the magnetic
field is increased. The observation of up to 11 optical phonons emitted per hot
electron allows us to determine the onset energy of LO phonons in GaAs at
cryogenic temperatures with a high precision, \eph=36.0\pm0.1\,meV. Numerical
calculations of electron-electron scattering and the emission of optical
phonons underline our interpretation in terms of a transition to
one-dimensional dynamics.Comment: 15 pages, 9 figure
Longitudinal Reproducibility of Neurite Orientation Dispersion and Density Imaging (NODDI) Derived Metrics in the White Matter
Diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (DWI) is undergoing constant evolution with the ambitious goal of developing in-vivo histology of the brain. A recent methodological advancement is Neurite Orientation Dispersion and Density Imaging (NODDI), a histologically validated multi-compartment model to yield microstructural features of brain tissue such as geometric complexity and neurite packing density, which are especially useful in imaging the white matter. Since NODDI is increasingly popular in clinical research and fields such as developmental neuroscience and neuroplasticity, it is of vast importance to characterize its reproducibility (or reliability). We acquired multi-shell DWI data in 29 healthy young subjects twice over a rescan interval of 4 weeks to assess the within-subject coefficient of variation (CVWS), between-subject coefficient of variation (CVBS) and the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC), respectively. Using these metrics, we compared regional and voxel-by-voxel reproducibility of the most common image analysis approaches (tract-based spatial statistics [TBSS], voxel-based analysis with different extents of smoothing [“VBM-style”], ROI-based analysis). We observed high test–retest reproducibility for the orientation dispersion index (ODI) and slightly worse results for the neurite density index (NDI). Our findings also suggest that the choice of analysis approach might have significant consequences for the results of a study. Collectively, the voxel-based approach with Gaussian smoothing kernels of ≥4 mm FWHM and ROI-averaging yielded the highest reproducibility across NDI and ODI maps (CVWS mostly ≤3%, ICC mostly ≥0.8), respectively, whilst smaller kernels and TBSS performed consistently worse. Furthermore, we demonstrate that image quality (signal-to-noise ratio [SNR]) is an important determinant of NODDI metric reproducibility. We discuss the implications of these results for longitudinal and cross-sectional research designs commonly employed in the neuroimaging field
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