723 research outputs found
Piezospectroscopic measurement of high-frequency vibrations in a pulse-tube cryostat
Vibrations in cryocoolers are a recurrent concern to the end user. They
appear in different parts of the acoustic spectrum depending on the
refrigerator type, Gifford McMahon or pulse-tube, and with a variable coupling
strength to the physical system under interest. Here, we use the
piezospectroscopic effect in rare-earth doped crystals at low temperature as a
high resolution, contact-less probe for the vibrations. With this optical
spectroscopic technique, we obtain and analyze the vibration spectrum up to
700kHz of a 2kW pulse-tube cooler. We attempt an absolute calibration based on
known experimental parameters to make our method partially quantitative and to
provide a possible comparison with other well-established techniques
Quantum memory for light: large efficiency at telecom wavelength
We implement the ROSE protocol in an erbium doped solid, compatible with the
telecom range. The ROSE scheme is an adaptation of the standard 2-pulse photon
echo to make it suitable for a quantum memory. We observe an efficiency of 40%
in a forward direction by using specific orientations of the light
polarizations, magnetic field and crystal axes
Total Variation as a local filter
International audienceIn the Rudin-Osher-Fatemi (ROF) image denoising model, Total Variation (TV) is used as a global regularization term. However, as we observe, the local interactions induced by Total Variation do not propagate much at long distances in practice, so that the ROF model is not far from being a local filter. In this paper, we propose to build a purely local filter by considering the ROF model in a given neighborhood of each pixel. We show that appropriate weights are required to avoid aliasing-like effects, and we provide an explicit convergence criterion for an associated dual minimization algorithm based on Chambolle's work. We study theoretical properties of the obtained local filter, and show that this localization of the ROF model brings an interesting optimization of the bias-variance trade-off, and a strong reduction a ROF drawback called "staircasing effect". We finally present a new denoising algorithm, TV-means, that efficiently combines the idea of local TV-filtering with the non-local means patch-based method
A Two-Threshold Model for Scaling Laws of Non-Interacting Snow Avalanches
The sizes of snow slab failure that trigger snow avalanches are power-law
distributed. Such a power-law probability distribution function has also been
proposed to characterize different landslide types. In order to understand this
scaling for gravity driven systems, we introduce a two-threshold 2-d cellular
automaton, in which failure occurs irreversibly. Taking snow slab avalanches as
a model system, we find that the sizes of the largest avalanches just
preceeding the lattice system breakdown are power law distributed. By tuning
the maximum value of the ratio of the two failure thresholds our model
reproduces the range of power law exponents observed for land-, rock- or snow
avalanches. We suggest this control parameter represents the material cohesion
anisotropy.Comment: accepted PR
Selective optical addressing of nuclear spins through superhyperfine interaction in rare-earth doped solids
In Er:YSiO, we demonstrate the selective optical addressing of
the Y nuclear spins through their superhyperfine coupling with
the Er electronic spins possessing large Land\'e -factors. We
experimentally probe the electron-nuclear spin mixing with photon echo
techniques and validate our model. The site-selective optical addressing of the
Y nuclear spins is designed by adjusting the magnetic field strength and
orientation. This constitutes an important step towards the realization of
long-lived solid-state qubits optically addressed by telecom photons.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, supplementary material (3 pages
Optical study of the anisotropic erbium spin flip-flop dynamics
We investigate the erbium flip-flop dynamics as a limiting factor of the
electron spin lifetime and more generally as an indirect source of decoherence
in rare-earth doped insulators. Despite the random isotropic arrangement of
dopants in the host crystal, the dipolar interaction strongly depends on the
magnetic field orientation following the strong anisotropy of the -factor.
In Er:YSiO, we observe by transient optical spectroscopy a three
orders of magnitude variation of the erbium flip-flop rate (10ppm dopant
concentration). The measurements in two different samples, with 10ppm and 50ppm
concentrations, are well-supported by our analytic modeling of the dipolar
coupling between identical spins with an anisotropic -tensor. The model can
be applied to other rare-earth doped materials. We extrapolate the calculation
to Er:CaWO, Er:LiNbO and Nd:YSiO at
different concentrations
Optical memory bandwidth and multiplexing capacity in the erbium telecommunication window
We study the bandwidth and multiplexing capacity of an erbium-doped optical
memory for quantum storage purposes. We concentrate on the protocol ROSE
(Revival of a Silenced Echo) because it has the largest potential multiplexing
capacity. Our analysis is applicable to other protocols that involve strong
optical excitation. We show that the memory performance is limited by
instantaneous spectral diffusion and we describe how this effect can be
minimised to achieve optimal performance
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