Phase control and measurement in digital microscopy

The ongoing merger of the digital and optical components of the modern microscope is creating opportunities for new measurement techniques, along with new challenges for optical modelling. This thesis investigates several such opportunities and challenges which are particularly relevant to biomedical imaging. Fourier optics is used throughout the thesis as the underlying conceptual model, with a particular emphasis on three--dimensional Fourier optics. A new challenge for optical modelling provided by digital microscopy is the relaxation of traditional symmetry constraints on optical design. An extension of optical transfer function theory to deal with arbitrary lens pupil functions is presented in this thesis. This is used to chart the 3D vectorial structure of the spatial frequency spectrum of the intensity in the focal region of a high aperture lens when illuminated by linearly polarised beam. Wavefront coding has been used successfully in paraxial imaging systems to extend the depth of field. This is achieved by controlling the pupil phase with a cubic phase mask, and thereby balancing optical behaviour with digital processing. In this thesis I present a high aperture vectorial model for focusing with a cubic phase mask, and compare it with results calculated using the paraxial approximation. The effect of a refractive index change is also explored. High aperture measurements of the point spread function are reported, along with experimental confirmation of high aperture extended depth of field imaging of a biological specimen. Differential interference contrast is a popular method for imaging phase changes in otherwise transparent biological specimens. In this thesis I report on a new isotropic algorithm for retrieving the phase from differential interference contrast images of the phase gradient, using phase shifting, two directions of shear, and non--iterative Fourier phase integration incorporating a modified spiral phase transform. This method does not assume that the specimen has a constant amplitude. A simulation is presented which demonstrates good agreement between the retrieved phase and the phase of the simulated object, with excellent immunity to imaging noise

Transverse mass and invariant mass observables for measuring the mass of a semi-invisibly decaying heavy particle

Formulae are derived for the positions of end-points in the invariant mass and transverse mass distributions obtained from the products of heavy states decaying to pairs of semi-invisibly decaying lighter states. Formulae are derived both for the special case where the two decay chains are identical and the more general case where they are different. The formulae are tested with a simple case study of heavy SUSY higgs particles decaying to gauginos at the LHC.Comment: 13 pages, 8 eps figure

略论《共产党宣言》中的马克思主义自由观

本文着眼于《共产党宣言》中若干与马克思主义自由观有关的论述,从马克思主义自由观的历史发展,信仰自由、宗教自由、政治自由等精神领域的自由、无产阶级争取自由的斗争,以及社会自由与个人自由的发展的关系等角度进行了一些探讨,并简要分析了个人自由的发展与社会自由的发展之间的关系的现实意义

The Analysis of Multijet Events Produced at High Energy Hadron Colliders

We define and discuss a set of (4N - 4) parameters that can be used to analyse events in which N jets have been produced in high energy hadron-hadron collisions. These multijet variables are the multijet mass and (4N - 5) independent dimensionless parameters. To illustrate the use of the variables QCD predictions are presented for events with up to five jets produced at the Fermilab Tevatron Proton-Antiproton Collider. These QCD predictions are compared with the predictions of a model in which multijet events uniformly populate the N-body phase-space

A Unique Tryptophan C‐Prenyltransferase from the Kawaguchipeptin Biosynthetic Pathway

Acknowledgements This work was supported by funding of the Academy of Finland (259505), Helsinki University Research grant (490085) and ESCMID grant (4720572) to D.P.F., University of Pittsburgh Central Research Development Fund to X.L., Technology Strategy Board grant (131181) to W.H., M.J. and J.H.N. National Programme of Sustainability I of the Ministry of Education of the Czech Republic I grant (LO1416) to T.G.Peer reviewedPostprin

Speaking of silence : myth and history in contemporary Irish women's poetry (1989-2004).

Although, Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, Eavan Boland and Medbh McGuckian avoid labelling themselves 'feminist poets', each provides a 'feminist insight' into what Catriona Clutterbuck describes as their 'marginalization from official systems of representation,.J This thesis will primarily discuss how each of these women poets, from both the North and South of Ireland, writes from the margins of Irish myth and history to question the concept of silence. The introduction interrogates the meaning of silence in relation to wider philosophic responses to the politics of silence in contemporary Irish poetry. This chapter will also briefly review some of the more monumental anthologies of Irish literature and major works of litelary criticism (1989-2004) to illustrate how women poets have emerged from their obscurity and established themselves as prominent figures within a patriarchal tradition that had previously marginalized their voices. As an example of their rise in status, Chapter II will have a comparative look at how all three poets employ the body to paradoxically speak of women's silence, while using it to maintain a level of silence. This thesis will then move on to discuss how Ni Dhomhnaill, Boland and McGuckian all write from the margins of Irish myth and history to speak of the unspeakable. In Chapter III, Ni Dhomhnaill speaks of women's silence through Irish myth and history by engaging in the oral tradition of storytelling. Whereas Ni Dhomhnaill favours myth over history, Boland's overall ambition in Chapter IV is to write woman out of her silence, thus 'out of myth [and] into history' by using her autobiography The fifth chapter will return to the mythical realms of McGuckian' s more radical approach to history in her later poems from Captain Lavender (1994) and discuss her private symbolic re-reading of Northern Ireland's political history. Since in much of their later poetry, Ni Dhomhnaill, Boland and McGuckian all adopt the ethical position of speaking while maintaining a certain silence, Chapter VI will conclude with a comparative look at some of the Irish women poets writing of silence in the twenty-first century

Jet measurements in the ALICE experiment at the LHC

Jet tomography probes provide a means to explore the properties of highly compressed and excited nuclear matter created in heavy ion collisions. The capabilities of the ALICE experiment, with its electromagnetic calorimeter (EMCal) upgrade, to trigger on and reconstruct jets in p+p and Pb+Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}$=5.5 TeV are presented.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures. Presented at the IX International Conference on Nucleus-Nucleus Collisions, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, August 28 - September 1, 200

Sqrt{shat}_{min} resurrected

We discuss the use of the variable sqrt{shat}_{min}, which has been proposed in order to measure the hard scale of a multi parton final state event using inclusive quantities only, on a SUSY data sample for a 14 TeV LHC. In its original version, where this variable was proposed on calorimeter level, the direct correlation to the hard scattering scale does not survive when effects from soft physics are taken into account. We here show that when using reconstructed objects instead of calorimeter energy and momenta as input, we manage to actually recover this correlation for the parameter point considered here. We furthermore discuss the effect of including W + jets and t tbar+jets background in our analysis and the use of sqrt{shat}_{min} for the suppression of SM induced background in new physics searches.Comment: 23 pages, 9 figures; v2: 1 figure, several subsections and references as well as new author affiliation added. Corresponds to published versio

Comparison of Three-jet Events in Proton-Antiproton Collisions at sqrt{s}=1.8 TeV to Predictions from a Next-to-leading Order QCD Calculation

The properties of three-jet events with total transverse energy greater than 320 GeV and individual jet energy greater than 20 GeV have been analyzed and compared to absolute predictions from a next-to-leading order (NLO) perturbative QCD calculation. These data, of integrated luminosity 86 pb^-1, were recorded by the CDF Experiment for proton-antiproton collisions at sqrt{s}=1.8 TeV. This study tests a model of higher order QCD processes that result in gluon emission and can be used to estimate the magnitude of the contribution of processes higher than NLO. The total cross section is measured to be 466 \pm 3(stat.)^{+207}_{-70}(syst.) pb. The differential cross section is furthermore measured for all kinematically accessible regions of the Dalitz plane, including those for which the theoretical prediction is unreliable. While the measured cross section is consistent with the theoretical prediction in magnitude, the two differ somewhat in shape in the Dalitz plane.Comment: For the CDF Collaboration. Contributed to the proceedings of the Eleventh High-Energy Physics International Conference on QCD, Montpellier, France, July 200