Photothermal effects in ultra-precisely stabilized tunable microcavities

We study the mechanical stability of a tunable high-finesse microcavity under ambient conditions and investigate light-induced effects that can both suppress and excite mechanical fluctuations. As an enabling step, we demonstrate the ultra-precise electronic stabilization of a microcavity. We then show that photothermal mirror expansion can provide high-bandwidth feedback and improve cavity stability by almost two orders of magnitude. At high intracavity power, we observe self-oscillations of mechanical resonances of the cavity. We explain the observations by a dynamic photothermal instability, leading to parametric driving of mechanical motion. For an optimized combination of electronic and photothermal stabilization, we achieve a feedback bandwidth of $500\,$kHz and a noise level of $1.1 \times 10^{-13}\,$m rms

Entropy Production in Collisions of Relativistic Heavy Ions -- a signal for Quark-Gluon Plasma phase transition?

Entropy production in the compression stage of heavy ion collisions is discussed within three distinct macroscopic models (i.e. generalized RHTA, geometrical overlap model and three-fluid hydrodynamics). We find that within these models \sim 80% or more of the experimentally observed final-state entropy is created in the early stage. It is thus likely followed by a nearly isentropic expansion. We employ an equation of state with a first-order phase transition. For low net baryon density, the entropy density exhibits a jump at the phase boundary. However, the excitation function of the specific entropy per net baryon, S/A, does not reflect this jump. This is due to the fact that for final states (of the compression) in the mixed phase, the baryon density \rho_B increases with \sqrt{s}, but not the temperature T. Calculations within the three-fluid model show that a large fraction of the entropy is produced by nuclear shockwaves in the projectile and target. With increasing beam energy, this fraction of S/A decreases. At \sqrt{s}=20 AGeV it is on the order of the entropy of the newly produced particles around midrapidity. Hadron ratios are calculated for the entropy values produced initially at beam energies from 2 to 200 AGeV.Comment: 17 pages, 8 figures, uses epsfig.sty; Submitted to Nucl.Phys.

``Pressure Equilibration'' in Ultrarelativistic Heavy Ion Collisions

We study the time scale for pressure equilibration in heavy ion collisions at AGS energies within the three-fluid hydrodynamical model and a microscopic cascade model (UrQMD). We find that kinetic equilibrium is reached in both models after a time of 5 fm/c (center-of-mass time). Thus, observables which are sensitive to the early stage of the reaction differ considerably from the expectations within the instant thermalization scenario (one-fluid hydrodynamical model).Comment: to be published in GSI annual scientific report 1997, psfig style file neede

iPose: Instance-Aware 6D Pose Estimation of Partly Occluded Objects

We address the task of 6D pose estimation of known rigid objects from single input images in scenarios where the objects are partly occluded. Recent RGB-D-based methods are robust to moderate degrees of occlusion. For RGB inputs, no previous method works well for partly occluded objects. Our main contribution is to present the first deep learning-based system that estimates accurate poses for partly occluded objects from RGB-D and RGB input. We achieve this with a new instance-aware pipeline that decomposes 6D object pose estimation into a sequence of simpler steps, where each step removes specific aspects of the problem. The first step localizes all known objects in the image using an instance segmentation network, and hence eliminates surrounding clutter and occluders. The second step densely maps pixels to 3D object surface positions, so called object coordinates, using an encoder-decoder network, and hence eliminates object appearance. The third, and final, step predicts the 6D pose using geometric optimization. We demonstrate that we significantly outperform the state-of-the-art for pose estimation of partly occluded objects for both RGB and RGB-D input

Hydrodynamic Models for Heavy-Ion Collisions, and beyond

A generic property of a first-order phase transition in equilibrium, and in the limit of large entropy per unit of conserved charge, is the smallness of the isentropic speed of sound in the ``mixed phase''. A specific prediction is that this should lead to a non-isotropic momentum distribution of nucleons in the reaction plane (for energies around 40 AGeV in our model calculation). On the other hand, we show that from present effective theories for low-energy QCD one does not expect the thermal transition rate between various states of the effective potential to be much larger than the expansion rate, questioning the applicability of the idealized Maxwell/Gibbs construction. Experimental data could soon provide essential information on the dynamics of the phase transition.Comment: 10 Pages, 4 Figures. Presented at 241st WE-Heraeus Seminar: Symposium on Fundamental Issues in Elementary Matter: In Honor and Memory of Michael Danos, Bad Honnef, Germany, 25-29 Sep 200