251 research outputs found
Dye lasing in optically manipulated liquid aerosols
We report lasing in airborne, rhodamine B-doped glycerol-water droplets with diameters ranging between 7.7 and 11.0 mu m, which were localized using optical tweezers. While being trapped near the focal point of an infrared laser, the droplets were pumped with a Q-switched green laser. Our experiments revealed nonlinear dependence of the intensity of the droplet whispering gallery modes (WGMs) on the pump laser fluence, indicating dye lasing. The average wavelength of the lasing WGMs could be tuned between 600 and 630 nm by changing the droplet size. These results may lead to new ways of probing airborne particles, exploiting the high sensitivity of stimulated emission to small perturbations in the droplet laser cavity and the gain medium
A method for volume stabilization of single, dye-doped water microdroplets with femtoliter resolution
A self-control mechanism that stabilizes the size of Rhodamine B-doped water
microdroplets standing on a superhydrophobic surface is demonstrated. The
mechanism relies on the interplay between the condensation rate that was kept
constant and evaporation rate induced by laser excitation which critically
depends on the size of the microdroplets. The radii of individual water
microdroplets (>5 um) stayed within a few nanometers during long time periods
(up to 455 seconds). By blocking the laser excitation for 500 msec, the stable
volume of individual microdroplets was shown to change stepwise.Comment: to appear in the J. Op. Soc. Am.
Large spectral tuning of a water–glycerol microdroplet by a focused laser: characterization and modeling
Time-Kill Kinetics and In Vitro Antifungal Susceptibility of Non-fumigatus Aspergillus Species Isolated from Patients with Ocular Mycoses
Aspergillus species can cause ocular morbidity and blindness, and thus, appropriate antifungal therapy is needed. We investigated the in vitro activity of itraconazole, voriconazole, posaconazole, caspofungin, anidulafungin, and amphotericin B against 14 Aspergillus isolates obtained from patients with ocular mycoses, using the CLSI reference broth microdilution methodology. In addition, time-kill assays were performed, exposing each isolate separately to 1-, 4-, and 16-fold concentrations above the minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) of each antifungal agent. A sigmoid maximum-effect (Emax) model was used to fit the time-kill curve data. The drug effect was further evaluated by measuring an increase/decrease in the killing rate of the tested isolates. The MICs of amphotericin B, itraconazole, voriconazole, and posaconazole were 0.5–1.0, 1.0, 0.5–1.0, and 0.25 µg/ml for A. brasiliensis, A. niger, and A. tubingensis isolates, respectively, and 2.0–4.0, 0.5, 1.0 for A. flavus, and 0.12–0.25 µg/ml for A. nomius isolates, respectively. A. calidoustus had the highest MIC range for the azoles (4.0–16.0 µg/ml) among all isolates tested. The minimum effective concentrations of caspofungin and anidulafungin were ≤0.03–0.5 µg/ml and ≤0.03 µg/ml for all isolates, respectively. Posaconazole demonstrated maximal killing rates (Emax = 0.63 h−1, r2 = 0.71) against 14 ocular Aspergillus isolates, followed by amphotericin B (Emax = 0.39 h−1, r2 = 0.87), voriconazole (Emax = 0.35 h−1, r2 = 0.098), and itraconazole (Emax = 0.01 h−1, r2 = 0.98). Overall, the antifungal susceptibility of the non-fumigatusAspergillus isolates tested was species and antifungal agent dependent. Analysis of the kinetic growth assays, along with consideration of the killing rates, revealed that posaconazole was the most effective antifungal against all of the isolates
Security and Efficiency Analysis of the Hamming Distance Computation Protocol Based on Oblivious Transfer
open access articleBringer et al. proposed two cryptographic protocols for the computation of Hamming distance. Their first scheme uses Oblivious Transfer and provides security in the semi-honest model. The other scheme uses Committed Oblivious Transfer and is claimed to provide full security in the malicious case. The proposed protocols have direct implications to biometric authentication schemes between a prover and a verifier where the verifier has biometric data of the users in plain form.
In this paper, we show that their protocol is not actually fully secure against malicious adversaries. More precisely, our attack breaks the soundness property of their protocol where a malicious user can compute a Hamming distance which is different from the actual value. For biometric authentication systems, this attack allows a malicious adversary to pass the authentication without knowledge of the honest user's input with at most complexity instead of , where is the input length. We propose an enhanced version of their protocol where this attack is eliminated. The security of our modified protocol is proven using the simulation-based paradigm. Furthermore, as for efficiency concerns, the modified protocol utilizes Verifiable Oblivious Transfer which does not require the commitments to outputs which improves its efficiency significantly
Polarization-Correlated Photon Pairs from a Single Quantum Dot
Polarization correlation in a linear basis, but not entanglement, is observed
between the biexciton and single-exciton photons emitted by a single InAs
quantum dot in a two-photon cascade. The results are well described
quantitatively by a probabilistic model that includes two decay paths for a
biexciton through a non-degenerate pair of one-exciton states, with the
polarization of the emitted photons depending on the decay path. The results
show that spin non-degeneracy due to quantum-dot asymmetry is a significant
obstacle to the realization of an entangled-photon generation device.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, revised discussio
Optical signatures of quantum phase transitions in a light-matter system
Information about quantum phase transitions in conventional condensed matter
systems, must be sought by probing the matter system itself. By contrast, we
show that mixed matter-light systems offer a distinct advantage in that the
photon field carries clear signatures of the associated quantum critical
phenomena. Having derived an accurate, size-consistent Hamiltonian for the
photonic field in the well-known Dicke model, we predict striking behavior of
the optical squeezing and photon statistics near the phase transition. The
corresponding dynamics resemble those of a degenerate parametric amplifier. Our
findings boost the motivation for exploring exotic quantum phase transition
phenomena in atom-cavity, nanostructure-cavity, and
nanostructure-photonic-band-gap systems.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure
Circuit Quantum Electrodynamics: Coherent Coupling of a Single Photon to a Cooper Pair Box
Under appropriate conditions, superconducting electronic circuits behave
quantum mechanically, with properties that can be designed and controlled at
will. We have realized an experiment in which a superconducting two-level
system, playing the role of an artificial atom, is strongly coupled to a single
photon stored in an on-chip cavity. We show that the atom-photon coupling in
this circuit can be made strong enough for coherent effects to dominate over
dissipation, even in a solid state environment. This new regime of matter light
interaction in a circuit can be exploited for quantum information processing
and quantum communication. It may also lead to new approaches for single photon
generation and detection.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures, accepted for publication in Nature, embargo does
apply, version with high resolution figures available at:
http://www.eng.yale.edu/rslab/Andreas/content/science/PubsPapers.htm
Non-resonant dot-cavity coupling and its applications in resonant quantum dot spectroscopy
We present experimental investigations on the non-resonant dot-cavity
coupling of a single quantum dot inside a micro-pillar where the dot has been
resonantly excited in the s-shell, thereby avoiding the generation of
additional charges in the QD and its surrounding. As a direct proof of the pure
single dot-cavity system, strong photon anti-bunching is consistently observed
in the autocorrelation functions of the QD and the mode emission, as well as in
the cross-correlation function between the dot and mode signals. Strong Stokes
and anti-Stokes-like emission is observed for energetic QD-mode detunings of up
to ~100 times the QD linewidth. Furthermore, we demonstrate that non-resonant
dot-cavity coupling can be utilized to directly monitor and study relevant QD
s-shell properties like fine-structure splittings, emission saturation and
power broadening, as well as photon statistics with negligible background
contributions. Our results open a new perspective on the understanding and
implementation of dot-cavity systems for single-photon sources, single and
multiple quantum dot lasers, semiconductor cavity quantum electrodynamics, and
their implementation, e.g. in quantum information technology.Comment: 17 pages, 4 figure
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