Development of an autonomous control system for a small fixed pitch helicopter

The indoor test bed of the Autonomous Systems Laboratory has been used to create a control system for a small fixed pitch helicopter. This paper outlines the challenges posed by such a vehicle and the control system designed to overcome them. The control system utilized a visual tracking system to obtain state information without onboard hardware. Matlab/Simulink environment was used to facilitate rapid prototyping control development. An autopilot consisting of multi-channel PID controllers was implemented for flight tests. Failsafe strategies and gain scheduling were both investigated and implemented with the use of a graphical user interface. A number of flight tests were conducted and the results are provided. The future work of the laboratory is also covered

Dynamics of quantum Hall stripes in double-quantum-well systems

The collective modes of stripes in double layer quantum Hall systems are computed using the time-dependent Hartree-Fock approximation. It is found that, when the system possesses spontaneous interlayer coherence, there are two gapless modes, one a phonon associated with broken translational invariance, the other a pseudospin-wave associated with a broken U(1) symmetry. For large layer separations the modes disperse weakly for wavevectors perpendicular to the stripe orientation, indicating the system becomes akin to an array of weakly coupled one-dimensional XY systems. At higher wavevectors the collective modes develop a roton minimum associated with a transition out of the coherent state with further increasing layer separation. A spin wave model of the system is developed, and it is shown that the collective modes may be described as those of a system with helimagnetic ordering.Comment: 16 pages including 7 postscript figure

Temperature Dependence of the FIR Reflectance of LaSrGaO4

The reflectance of single crystal LaSrGaO4 has been measured from approx 50 to 40000 cm^-1 along the "a" and "c" axis. The optical properties have been calculated from a Kramers-Kronig analysis of the reflectance for both polarizations. The reflectance curves have been fit using a product of Lorentzian oscillators.Comment: 12 pages including 5 figures and 2 tables. Latex file, Requires elsart.sty file and eps

Stripes in Quantum Hall Double Layer Systems

We present results of a study of double layer quantum Hall systems in which each layer has a high-index Landau level that is half-filled. Hartree-Fock calculations indicate that, above a critical layer separation, the system becomes unstable to the formation of a unidirectional coherent charge density wave (UCCDW), which is related to stripe states in single layer systems. The UCCDW state supports a quantized Hall effect when there is tunneling between layers, and is {\it always} stable against formation of an isotropic Wigner crystal for Landau indices $N \ge 1$. The state does become unstable to the formation of modulations within the stripes at large enough layer separation. The UCCDW state supports low-energy modes associated with interlayer coherence. The coherence allows the formation of charged soliton excitations, which become gapless in the limit of vanishing tunneling. We argue that this may result in a novel {\it ``critical Hall state''}, characterized by a power law $I-V$ in tunneling experiments.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures include

Spin correlations in the algebraic spin liquid - implications for high Tc superconductors

We propose that underdoped high $T_c$ superconductors are described by an algebraic spin liquid (ASL) at high energies, which undergoes a spin-charge recombination transition at low energies. The spin correlation in the ASL is calculated via its effective theory - a system of massless Dirac fermions coupled to a U(1) gauge field. We find that without fine tuning any parameters the gauge interaction strongly enhances the staggered spin correlation even in the presence of a large single particle pseudo-gap. This allows us to show that the ASL plus spin-charge recombination picture can explain many highly unusual properties of underdoped high $T_c$ superconductors.Comment: 22 pages, 18 figures, submitted to PR

Spin-squeezed Ground States in the Bilayer Quantum Hall Ferromagnet

A "squeezed-vacuum" state considered in quantum optics is shown to be realized in the ground-state wavefunction for the bilayer quantum Hall system at the total Landau level filling of $\nu=1/m$ (m: odd integer). This is derived in the boson approximation, where a particle-hole pair creation across the symmetric-antisymmetric gap, $\Delta_{SAS}$, is regarded as a boson. In terms of the pseudospin describing the layers, the state is a spin-squeezed state, where the degree of squeezing is controlled by the layer separation and $\Delta_{SAS}$. An exciton condensation, which amounts to a rotated spin-squeezed state, has a higher energy due to the degraded SU(2) symmetry for $\Delta_{SAS} \neq 0$.Comment: 4 pages, revtex, one figure, to appear in PRB Rapid Communicatio

Collective Modes of Soliton-Lattice States in Double-Quantum-Well Systems

In strong perpendicular magnetic fields double-quantum-well systems can sometimes occur in unusual broken symmetry states which have interwell phase coherence in the absence of interwell hopping. When hopping is present in such systems and the magnetic field is tilted away from the normal to the quantum well planes, a related soliton-lattice state can occur which has kinks in the dependence of the relative phase between electrons in opposite layers on the coordinate perpendicular to the in-plane component of the magnetic field. In this article we evaluate the collective modes of this soliton-lattice state in the generalized random-phase aproximation. We find that, in addition to the Goldstone modes associated with the broken translational symmetry of the soliton-lattice state, higher energy collective modes occur which are closely related to the Goldstone modes present in the spontaneously phase-coherent state. We study the evolution of these collective modes as a function of the strength of the in-plane magnetic field and comment on the possibility of using the in-plane field to generate a finite wave probe of the spontaneously phase-coherent state.Comment: REVTEX, 37 pages (text) and 15 uuencoded postscript figure

Charged vortices in superfluid systems with pairing of spatially separated carriers

It is shown that in a magnetic field the vortices in superfluid electron-hole systems carry a real electrical charge. The charge value depends on the relation between the magnetic length and the Bohr radiuses of electrons and holes. In double layer systems at equal electron and hole filling factors in the case of the electron and hole Bohr radiuses much larger than the magnetic length the vortex charge is equal to the universal value (electron charge times the filling factor).Comment: 4 page

Anisotropic Transport of Quantum Hall Meron-Pair Excitations

Double-layer quantum Hall systems at total filling factor $\nu_T=1$ can exhibit a commensurate-incommensurate phase transition driven by a magnetic field $B_{\parallel}$ oriented parallel to the layers. Within the commensurate phase, the lowest charge excitations are believed to be linearly-confined Meron pairs, which are energetically favored to align with $B_{\parallel}$. In order to investigate this interesting object, we propose a gated double-layer Hall bar experiment in which $B_{\parallel}$ can be rotated with respect to the direction of a constriction. We demonstrate the strong angle-dependent transport due to the anisotropic nature of linearly-confined Meron pairs and discuss how it would be manifested in experiment.Comment: 4 pages, RevTex, 3 postscript figure

Broken-Symmetry States in Quantum Hall Superlattices

We argue that broken-symmetry states with either spatially diagonal or spatially off-diagonal order are likely in the quantum Hall regime, for clean multiple quantum well (MQW) systems with small layer separations. We find that for MQW systems, unlike bilayers, charge order tends to be favored over spontaneous interlayer coherence. We estimate the size of the interlayer tunneling amplitude needed to stabilize superlattice Bloch minibands by comparing the variational energies of interlayer-coherent superlattice miniband states with those of states with charge order and states with no broken symmetries. We predict that when coherent miniband ground states are stable, strong interlayer electronic correlations will strongly enhance the growth-direction tunneling conductance and promote the possibility of Bloch oscillations.Comment: 9 pages LaTeX, 4 figures EPS, to be published in PR